by H. G. Parry
“It’s done a great deal of good,” Wilberforce told him. He forced himself to put aside the sick feeling that had risen suddenly in his stomach. It was, after all, not definitive. “You know it has. It’s all done good—Equiano’s book, Miss More’s poems, your demonstrations. People heard it all. Perhaps by next year the situation in Europe will be less fraught, and they’ll start to listen again.”
“Well,” Clarkson said heavily. “We’ll see. I have another lecture tour in Manchester next month.”
“Good,” Granville Sharp said briskly. “Perhaps you can address the Saint-Domingue issue there, Clarkson? Wilberforce is right that it’s corroding sympathy for our cause.”
“Surely it would be better not to mention it at all, then?” Hannah More suggested. “It’s not an image we want paired with abolition in the mind of the public, not with no end to it in sight.”
The talk resumed after that, with Clarkson once again animated and vehement. Perhaps rather too much so: his face in the candlelight had the hectic flush of a man in a fever.
It was past three in the morning when Wilberforce knocked on the door of Downing Street—not a polite hour to call, but the meeting had gone very late, and Pitt would be leaving to spend the day in Cambridge in the morning. This couldn’t be entrusted to a letter, and it couldn’t wait.
Fortunately, the light was burning in Pitt’s office window as Wilberforce approached, and though the butler who answered the door was sleepy and nightcapped, Pitt when he came downstairs was still fully dressed.
“I’m sorry to come so late,” Wilberforce said once the servant had been sent back to bed. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Does it look like it?” Pitt asked, quite reasonably. “I’m in the midst of going through the reports from Holland, actually. It’s when you come at a respectable time of the morning that you wake me. What’s wrong?”
Wilberforce took a deep breath. He told himself it was because he had rushed here, but it wasn’t. “I spoke to Clarkson. I didn’t exactly accuse him, but he knew what I was insinuating. He was very much annoyed.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Pitt said with a faint sigh. “Tell him it was my fault, if that would help. It was wrong for me to push you to talk to him without—”
“No, it wasn’t,” Wilberforce interrupted. “It was him.”
Pitt frowned. “Are you certain?”
“Yes. I mean, not really, I suppose… He didn’t confess. But he gave it away. Well, he didn’t exactly give that away—”
“I think,” Pitt said carefully, “we should probably sit down and talk this through from the beginning.”
The fires in Downing Street were all cold barring the one in Pitt’s office, and that was warm at best. The glowing embers gave the room an eerie cast until Pitt replaced the candle on the mantel.
“You might need to draw the chair closer to the hearth, I’m afraid,” he said. “I was continually intending to go to bed, so I didn’t order the fire kept up. Would you like something to drink?”
“Are you trying to calm me down?” Wilberforce asked with a faint smile.
“Is it working?”
“Yes.” It was true: the smile had eased some of the tension in his chest, and he could feel his heart slowing to normal speed. There was a reason Pitt was faintly notorious in the House for making things seem as if they would be perfectly all right. “It is. Thank you.”
“Good.” Pitt sat down himself. “Though both the apology for the fire and the offer of a drink were quite genuine, of course. So. Tell me about Clarkson.”
“He denied he was responsible, as I said. He denied it even though I never actually accused him, in fact, though that’s certainly in character for him lately. He was very upset about the last debate—oh.” His heart chilled a little further. “Oh… I suppose he would be, wouldn’t he?”
“Well, yes,” Pitt said wryly. “Of course he would.”
“No, but… I think now that he knows it was at least partly his fault—or the fault of the uprising—that the bill failed again. It would make sense.”
“Yet he denied that he was responsible. So why do you think he did it?”
“He denied he was responsible,” Wilberforce concurred. “He also denied having been near the factories in Paris where the alchemists create the compound. I know he went near those factories—he went inside them, in fact. He mentioned it in a pamphlet he wrote and distributed. Only in passing—talking about the alchemists at work right in the heart of what was supposed to be the Revolution—but he mentioned it. I looked it up after he left my house tonight.”
“Still,” Pitt said. “There are many reasons why he might misremember that, or even conceal it.”
“He knows how the alchemy works,” Wilberforce said. “He’s talked about that before too, to me—he did so on the day we first met. He’s an unregistered alchemist. He was in Paris at the right time, visited the factory, and then denied visiting the factory, far too vehemently. He told me that the alchemist had made a mistake and that he hoped he would do better next time.”
“It’s still circumstantial.”
“Yes. But you think it was him, don’t you?”
Pitt was silent for a long moment. “I’m sorry,” he said, with genuine regret. “But yes, I do. On that evidence, it seems not unlikely.”
“I think I always worried it was one of us.” Wilberforce had never seen Saint-Domingue, but it was burning in his head and echoing with screams. “I could too easily imagine… If you had the power to do it—to set free an entire island without all the arguing and researching and persuading—it would be so tempting. I didn’t think it would be someone I knew, even when you told me about Clarkson, but I feared it would be someone trying to achieve the same things as us.”
“I know you did. I have to admit, I initially didn’t think an abolitionist would do something so misguided. Clarkson’s a very clever man, to put it mildly. Even if he didn’t care about the fates of the slave owners, even if he thought the lives of the slaves killed in reprisals were their own to give, even if he didn’t care for our relations with France… he must have seen the political consequences for abolition.”
That made Wilberforce laugh, despite everything weighing on him. “Pitt, you’ve been in politics for twelve years. You must have noticed by now that even very clever people do misguided things without regard for political consequences all the time. Especially when they’re frustrated and angry.”
“I’ve noticed,” he agreed, with a rueful smile of his own. “But I keep expecting them to stop.”
“Well, I keep expecting people to stop chaining up human beings and selling them across the oceans.” Wilberforce felt the clouds settle once again on his shoulders. “So I can’t criticize. What are we going to do about Clarkson?”
Pitt was silent for a long moment.
“I think we need to have a word with him,” he said finally. “Or rather, I do. Clarkson’s your friend. I don’t see why you should need to be involved.”
“And what do you intend to say to him that a friend can’t say?”
“I intend to ask him to turn himself in to the Templars. And if he doesn’t, I’m very much afraid I might have to have a word with them too.”
Wilberforce had known that, really. He’d just wanted to hear Pitt say it. “He’ll have twenty-five years in prison for a crime like this.”
“At least. But we have no power over that. The important thing now is that we expose this before France does. There are parties in France who want nothing better than to draw us into war: this would be the excuse they need. The destruction of that colony would be seen as an act of aggression against France. And it could be worse than that. It wasn’t only an act of aggression; it was an act of powerful magic. If we don’t move very, very carefully, the French government could accuse us of breaking the Concord.”
“Good Lord.” He hadn’t thought his heart could sink lower than it had. Clearly there were new depths to plunge. �
��But… Clarkson isn’t a member of the British government. He’s a private citizen.”
“So are half the people we have currently spying for us in France—so, for that matter, are the people they probably have spying on us. War is never private. But yes, he is. That’s the only thing about this mess that might work in our favor. If we can arrest Clarkson, prosecute him, and make it as clear as we can that he was acting alone, we may yet save our relationship with France.”
“And what about Clarkson? Are you at all concerned about saving him?” He caught himself. “I’m sorry—”
“No, don’t be. I’m concerned about him. I’m very concerned about him. If I could see any way out of this, I promise you, I would take it. But I can’t.”
“Why do we need to do anything at all?” Wilberforce asked. “I understand your concerns, I truly do. But we could keep France from finding out.”
Pitt hesitated, then shook his head. “We possibly could, I know. But I can’t take that risk; I couldn’t, even under normal circumstances, and in this case there’s still too much I don’t understand. I don’t think we have the luxury of being able to stand by and let things unfold.”
“You still think this is connected, don’t you? The shadow, the undead, and now this uprising.”
“I think something is happening in France, and it’s reaching across to us. Perhaps it’s nothing more than unprecedented political and social unrest. But perhaps it isn’t. As I said, I can’t take that risk. Clarkson’s already started one war. I can’t allow him to start another.”
“He didn’t start the war in Saint-Domingue. The planters did. The slavers did. Clarkson only wants what we all want.”
“We all want an end to the trade in human souls,” Pitt corrected. “We don’t all want riots, bloodshed, and civil war. That’s a fairly important distinction.”
“Clarkson didn’t want those things either—I’m sure of that, at least. They just happened. They happened because hundreds of thousands of people have been tortured and spellbound, for hundreds of years. It’s still happening.”
“Yes, and it’s our job to stop it in a way that doesn’t lead to hundreds of thousands more on both sides tortured and dead. Do we disagree on that?”
“No!” Wilberforce said, with a touch of frustration. Arguing with Pitt could be a very frustrating business. “I don’t necessarily agree with what Clarkson did, even though I can’t condemn his principles. But we can’t change what happened. If he were an Aristocrat, it would be one thing—for all I know it would be a misdemeanor then—but he’s an unregistered Commoner magician. You’ve always kept quiet about Commoner magicians. You know how hard the courts and the church will be on him.”
“I’m not suggesting we report him for what he is. I’m saying we need to report him for what he’s done.”
“It’s the same thing, in the eyes of the law. You should know that better than anyone.”
“I do,” Pitt said, calmly, but Wilberforce saw his jaw tighten. “And for that reason, I also know better than anyone that it’s not the same thing at all. Wilberforce, I’ve just spent the last three days arguing with French diplomats; do you think I wasn’t tempted to tell them to do exactly what I need them to do, and have them do it? I could have, you know—if I was like Clarkson and thought that having an Inheritance was the same thing as using it.”
“You impose those restrictions on yourself. The law shouldn’t need to do it.”
“That’s exactly what the law needs to do. That’s what all laws should do. Impose the restrictions that, if human beings were always moral and rational, they would impose upon themselves.”
“Then this law is wrong,” Wilberforce said bluntly. He had never said it, not in so many words, but it had been hanging over all their efforts for a long time. “There is no reason moral, rational human beings should refrain from using their God-given abilities just because they were born Commoners and nobody has yet seen fit to elevate them. That’s what the Revolution in France is all about, and they’re right. You know they’re right.”
“They’re right about a good many things. So are you. But I’m not saying Clarkson should have refrained because he was a Commoner. I’m saying he should have refrained because it was dangerous.”
“He made a mistake.”
“Europe is on the brink of war. Nobody can afford to make those kinds of mistakes. And yes, before you say it; yes, especially me.”
That effectively silenced Wilberforce’s protests, and he felt his frustration wither and die. He could never quite understand Pitt’s feelings about unregistered magic—how he could fight for change to the laws, even agree that the laws themselves were fundamentally unjust, and yet still hold to them firmly at the most unexpected times—but he knew that they had to do with his Inheritance. In most cases, Wilberforce thought this prevented Pitt from seeing things as clearly as he usually would; sometimes, though, perhaps it let him see things Wilberforce couldn’t.
Pitt must have seen Wilberforce relent, because he relaxed himself.
“I’m not saying he should be reported because he needs to be punished.” He sounded unusually weary. It was very late at night, but it wasn’t that kind of weariness. “I know he’ll be punished for what he is, not what he did, and I know that’s deeply unfair. For what it may be worth, I don’t blame him for what he did. I know he meant well. We can’t see all the consequences of Saint-Domingue—for all I can tell, his actions may work out for the best as far as that colony is concerned. But this has gone beyond unregistered magic. This is a matter of war, here and abroad.”
Wilberforce said nothing.
“Besides,” Pitt added. “I do think he needs to be stopped. If he is indeed behind this, Wilberforce, do you think he’ll stop on his own?”
“No.” He said it reluctantly, but he didn’t need to think about it. “He’s sorry for how it turned out. But he’s not sorry he did it.”
“And that means that sooner or later he’ll try again, and he’ll try to do it better. It can’t be done better.”
“I know.” And he did know. Thousands of people were dead. There was no way that could ever be made better. He had known that when he had come, or he would have perhaps thought twice before telling the prime minister of Great Britain—although he couldn’t quite imagine not telling Pitt anything. He only wished, as he so often did lately, that the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do were always clear and uncomplicated, as they had been that night in Paris when a shadow had dissolved into vapor before his eyes and left the world at peace.
Thomas Clarkson was arrested by the Templars a few days later, and the incident became one of the most high-profile cases of unregistered magic in recent decades. Apart from the sensationalism of the crime itself, interest swarmed around the question of just what Clarkson would have been charged with were he not unregistered. Surely it would be illegal for even an Aristocrat to break a slave spell and unleash a riot in the French colonies, but it was difficult to see how, when there were no rogue shadows involved and the alchemy was not technically dark magic. There was talk of handing him over to the French authorities to let them deal with it, given that the crime had taken place on French soil, but given the state of the courts over there, nobody was quite sure what the outcome would be. Instead, he was charged with illegal magic, failure to report, and destruction of property.
Wilberforce went to the Old Bailey to see Clarkson sentenced, along with Macaulay and Thornton. Macaulay was fuming with anger at the Temple Church; Thornton, at Clarkson. They argued furiously about who was the most at fault—Clarkson for his unwise action, the Knights Templar for their harsh prosecution—until the court came into session, and Wilberforce had an excuse to tell both of them to please keep it down. He had been tempted to snap at them earlier but had managed to remember that they were just upset. They all were.
Clarkson seemed to have shrunk during his time in prison, in a way that reminded Wilberforce with a painful tug of visiting John Terrell in th
e Tower of London. He had been looking unwell before; now he looked gaunt and exhausted. His clothes were clean and his hair was neat, at least, and his eyes were blazing with defiance, but he couldn’t hold back a wince as the guards shoved him roughly into the dock. He was blinking rapidly and tears were on his cheeks, though whether that was the effect of strong emotion or the blinding light after his time in a cell, Wilberforce was unsure. Possibly both.
Wilberforce had not spoken to him since that final meeting. He had tried, after his arrest, but even his Templar friends could not grant him access to the prison. The Knights Templar had been somewhat frosty with him after he had taken up the cause of magical reform. And the tide of public opinion had turned against abolitionists.
The judge, Wilberforce more than suspected, was not sympathetic to abolitionists himself. He could tell by the nod he gave the jeering members of the gallery, and by the particular relish with which he sentenced Clarkson not only to fifty years for illegal magic (at which Wilberforce caught his breath) and ten years for failure to report, but also to a further seven years for damages to be paid for destruction of property—namely, some four hundred thousand slaves belonging to French colonists or their next of kin. Clarkson’s face lost all its color—it became not white, but translucent—and he might have collapsed had not the sides of the dock been there to break his fall. The gallery went wild with mixed cheers and protests.
“Fifty years,” Wilberforce breathed as Clarkson was dragged away. He was shouting something that was lost in the tumult of the crowd. “That’s meant for dark magic causing death.”
“Destruction of property,” Thornton said bleakly. “They didn’t need that charge to inflate the sentence. He’ll die in there. They were only making a point.”
