Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [193]
‘Very well.’ Templeton assumed an air of fatigue. ‘Bindman, you can go. I will dress myself this morning.’
‘Dress yourself, sir?’ The valet’s attentive bearing was ruffled by solicitude and surprise.
‘Yes, yes, yes. Dress myself. ’Sblood, man, do you think me a puppet with no independent powers of locomotion? Go, sir. And tell Biggs to send away all those who are waiting. I will have no time for anyone this morning.’
Kemp waited till the servant had withdrawn before resuming. He was telling Templeton what for the most part the latter knew already. The local assembly in Kingston, elected by popular vote in the colony and controlling the purse-strings, was bringing pressure to bear on the Governor, whose salary they also controlled, to authorize policies hostile to the interests of the absentee landlords whom Kemp represented. They were seeking to confiscate tracts of land and to redistribute them among small farmers on the island. These measures, of course, were opposed by His Majesty’s Government …
‘Or they should be, sir,’ Kemp said. ‘If they are not, we are abandoning one of the most sacred duties of government, which is the preservation of property. The great end of men’s entering into society in the first place is the enjoyment of their properties in peace and safety.’
‘That is most certainly true, sir. And this present administration of my Lord Rockingham, in which I have the honour to serve, has ever been dedicated to ensuring it.’
Kemp’s air of nonchalance fell away and he sat forward abruptly. ‘Then why is this policy allowed to continue unchecked?’ he demanded. ‘The legislation is there. Why is it not enforced? Why, above all, are you not more active on our behalf, in view of the sums, the very considerable sums, that you have received? Why am I thus obliged to come in person here and wait on your pleasure and consume my time away? Do you think I find it agreeable, sir? Do you think I find it congenial? Do you?’
‘Good God!’ Templeton was shocked at the blaze of antagonism that had come to the other’s eyes. ‘How can I answer you?’ he said. He had an impulse to get up and put the dressing-table between them. It was almost as if the fellow were gathering for a spring, as he said later that day to a crony at White’s: ‘I tell you, I feared for my person,’ he said, ‘and there was nothing there but the stick with my wigs on, which that wretch Bindman had left behind.’
It had seemed inexplicable, this spasm of fury, quite out of keeping with their conversation, which had been progressing on accustomed lines. Templeton was astute enough, but we never fully succeed in understanding what we cannot feel and so he did not suspect the sense of outrage that had come to Kemp to find himself using the same language, exchanging similar phrases with a man he so despised, as if they were both of the same kidney, as if he had waded through the years only to make an embrace of minds with this depraved fop. If he had suspected anything of this, Templeton would have found it grotesque, in a man who was so strenuously engaged in protecting his own interest. That he did not suspect it was a mark of virtue in a nature not otherwise richly endowed with this commodity. He was venal and corrupt but he did not dignify his motives to himself – only to others.
‘It is not so simple,’ he said now, in a tone he strove to make conciliatory. ‘Let me play the adversary for a while and point out to you the arguments on the other side. The plantations you speak of are owned by landlords who do not set foot on the island once in ten years. Their estates are mismanaged by overseers regrettably subject to the corruption of the climate, in other words liquor and whores, sir, and milked by dishonest attorneys, with consequent loss of duty to the Crown at a time when the demand for sugar is rising. Then there is the disproportion in population, with dangers of a slave revolt. There must be found some way of encouraging more Englishmen to settle in the colony – there