The Sugar Merchant’s Wife

by Erica Brown

  Questions were asked from one servant to another. Both Horatia and Tom had set off early that morning for Bristol, Horatia with more cast-offs for Edith and Tom making more enquiries about Clarence Ward in the more disreputable areas of the city.

  Rupert was away on business in London, and Nelson had made an announcement that he was staying with friends in Portland Square. It was presumed by Horatia that Rupert was with a lady friend. In the case of Nelson she knew it to be true, the services of a professional woman paid for in an up-market house frequented by the city’s élite.

  The door to the Egyptian room had only been opened and the accident discovered when a maid with a feather duster and a sweeping brush had entered to do her weekly clean.

  Messengers were despatched to find Horatia and Tom. By the time they returned, the house was in uproar.

  No one questioned that the death of Sir Emmanuel Strong was anything other than an accident. The wooden crane used to hoist the lid off the sarcophagus had been used on St Augustine’s Quay for many years before. The ropes had not been strong enough. Sea air was known to be corrosive, the wood had been rotten and Sir Emmanuel should not have got drunk and put himself to bed in a 3,ooo-year-old sarcophagus.

  * * *

  Tousle-haired and dirty faced, Molly McBean’s younger child, Gertrude, was dying.

  Blanche mopped the child’s brow with a piece of red, wet flannel, her heart breaking with every rasp of the little girl’s feeble breath.

  Dr Budd’s shadow fell over her and she felt the pain in his drawn-out sigh. ‘She’ll come to shortly and be in pain again.’

  ‘Can you do something for her?’

  ‘I could give her more opium, should she need it.’

  The heavy feeling in her stomach made Blanche almost retch, a mix of anger and pain. Should she need it… It came to her exactly what he meant.

  She looked up at him. ‘Is there nothing you can do?’

  Sad-eyed, he shook his head.

  Choking back the sobs, Blanche looked down on the grimy face, the scabbed lips and the crusted dirt around the turned-up nose. Poor little soul, like a skinny cherub beneath the dark grey blanket, a bag of bones held together by skin.

  ‘There’s a ship quarantined in the city docks,’ said Dr Budd, rubbing at his eyes, which burned with tiredness. He’d been up half the night. ‘I have to attend. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Mrs Abbot will let you out.’

  Blanche couldn’t bring herself to say that the child’s own father had absconded from that ship and likely spread the disease all over the city. The damage was already done.

  Dr Budd went on his way to visit other patients. Blanche hardly noticed him leaving. Looking down at Gertrude McBean, she was reminded of Anne and the long wait through the night when she’d slept and found her child gone. This child too, she thought, will last through the night, almost as though accustoming herself to the darkness, then drift into death as the morning light chased the night away. It would happen just before dawn.

  Mrs Abbot, one of Dr Budd’s able ladies who nursed the bed-ridden, asked her if she’d like a cup of tea.

  She shook her head. ‘No… No. I have to go home to my own children soon.’

  Blanche was sobered by the thought and very thankful. Anne had died, but she still had other children. Molly and her family had been wiped out for want of clean water. She sighed. It didn’t seem right in this age of progress and ripening empire that it was possible to die just from drinking dirty water. Surely the priorities of the great and good were all wrong.

  The shadows in the hospital lengthened as the sun set behind the grand portals of St Mary’s on the quay. Blanche sat tremulously, her gaze fixed on Gertrude, watching as her face grimaced in pain and her little legs folded up into her chest.

  Concentrating on the child, she did not at first notice the shadow that fell across both her and the bed. Until then, the shaft of sunlight that fell through the window had warmed her back. She gave an involuntary shiver before realizing that someone was there and presumed that Dr Budd had come back early.

  ‘It won’t be long,’ she said sadly without turning, her voice quivering with heartfelt pain.

  ‘Blanche.’

  Her shoulders went rigid at the sound of his voice. At first she resolved not to look. Her resolve was short-lived. The moment she did look at him, she knew immediately that something had changed. He looked smaller as though he were being crushed beneath a great burden. His eyes were sad, but seemed like sapphires in their gloomy surroundings.

  ‘How is the child?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not good, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I did everything I could as quickly as possible.’

  She looked down at Gertrude, whose life appeared to be ebbing away before her eyes. ‘Poor child. Poor Molly. None of them had much of a life. How sad it is to bring children into the world, only to have them snatched away again.’

  ‘It must be. I have as yet had no experience of such a predicament, though I think it is time I took a step in that direction.’

  A while back, Blanche might have blushed at such words. In the past she would have assumed he was asking her to marry him.

  She smiled lamely instead. ‘I’m afraid I have already taken that step so cannot oblige. You will have to find your wife elsewhere.’

  He nodded and seemed as if he were having a battle within himself to say or not say something very important. At last he seemed to pull himself together and plunge straight in, just as if he were diving into an ice-cold river.

  ‘I’m thinking about getting married.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘To Horatia.’

  Blanche nodded. ‘What can I say? You’re a bachelor.’

  He looked down at his hands. Her gaze followed his. She liked his hands. They were slightly rough, but honest and enticingly warm to the touch. She raised her gaze to his face. His lips were full and he had an odd way of lifting one eyebrow when he laughed. His face was not perfect, but it was strong and he had the respect of many.

  ‘I know what I want to say,’ he said in a voice not much more than a mumble. ‘I wish you were free.’

  The blood rushed to her cheeks. ‘I’m not.’ She looked away, not wanting to read his eyes and see that he really meant what he was saying.

  ‘That’s the problem, which is why I am going to ask Horatia.’

  She looked down into her lap at the bowl of warm water and the soggy piece of flannel. She had no reason to rebuke him. She settled instead for, ‘I hope you will be very happy.’

  She looked back at the child, the sweating skin and pained expression. The smell of bowel movements was dreadful but couldn’t be helped. The little she had eaten had gone right through her.

  ‘I want children,’ said Tom, his gaze fixed on the pale face of the child. ‘I want to raise him or her with as much love as Jeb Strong gave to me. It’s by way of payment, I think.’

  There was a hauntingly beautiful smile on Blanche’s face when she looked up at him. ‘Very commendable, though not surprising. I’m not going to rant and rave about you marrying Horatia. I understand your reasons. Strangely enough, I think it will work – though I don’t want it to, not if I was truly honest. But I can’t be selfish. It wouldn’t be fair.’

  Her laugh was tired, emotional and perhaps even a little mad. Kneeling, he embraced her and she sobbed against his shoulder.

  She looked into his eyes, and although she knew she had no right, the tears came and she knew they were for her and Tom as well as for Gertrude. ‘I’m sorry… I can’t bear it…’

  The tears were like a spring flood. Once she started she couldn’t stop.

  His cheek was firm against her hair and he made soothing noises like a father to a child lately woken from a nightmare.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, and was ashamed to find he was more sorry for himself, for their lost love, for fitting in so neatly with Horatia’s plans, than he was for the dying child.

>   Blanche breathed in the smell of him, the mix of tobacco, maleness and strength. ‘I want the child to live,’ she whispered.

  Tom sighed. ‘We can’t always have what we truly want.’

  * * *

  Conrad Heinkel slammed the desk with clenched fists as he rose to his feet, his face red with anger.

  ‘Your demands are exorbitant!’

  Sydney Cuthbert, formally Cuthbert Stoke, pimp, ostler and bare-knuckle fight fixer, now gentleman by dint of owning the most rundown properties in Bristol and bringing livestock for butchering to Bristol from Ireland, laced his thin fingers together and narrowed his eyes. He was not afraid of loud voices. Since becoming a respectable, though not entirely honest businessman, he had quickly learned that the upper classes used words freely in order to get what they wanted.

  Conrad Heinkel and his cronies on the city council wanted him to allow the planned new sewer to cross his land, which meant a number of his properties would be blighted and have to come down – if they didn’t fall down before then; none of them was in very good repair and most dated from before the Reformation of Charles II.

  His properties were at the lowest point of the city and close to the river, the best place to site a main sewer. Smaller sewers would flow into this from the hillier parts of the city, out to a pumping station and beyond that, the sea.

  ‘I am in business to make a profit,’ Stoke said, spreading his arms in a helpless manner and shrugging.

  ‘We all are, Mr Cuthbert,’ exclaimed Josiah Benson, a man lucky enough to have married into the Strong sugar family through his wife Caroline, Horatia’s younger half-sister. ‘We are all in business to make a profit, but with wealth comes responsibility. Our city is at risk from disease caused by bad water, according to our friend Doctor Budd. It is in our power, as elders of this city, to do something.’

  Stoke shook his head and shoved the written offer they’d put to him back across the table. ‘I’m afraid this is not enough to inspire my conscience. I want double.’

  The council chamber erupted in outrage, but Stoke stayed calm. Eyeing the well-fed faces of people born into status and money only made him more determined to milk as much out of them as possible. Most of them could afford to be patronizing about the health and conditions of the city, though few had ever visited the dark alleys and sordid courtyards that he knew so well.

  Sydney Cuthbert, as Cuthbert Stoke, had been born into that squalor. It had made him the man he was today. He understood that the strong prey on weaker men in order to rise out of the gutter. What did the likes of them born on country estates and living in Clifton know about sickness and poverty? Nothing! He knew it made you hard. It made you look out for yourself and yourself alone.

  He narrowed his eyes in a contemptuous manner. Conrad Heinkel might be a rich man, the biggest sugar refiner in the city, but he was foreign. It was this that made Stoke feel superior because he was a born and bred Englishman – though without the benefit of good birth and connections. He had clawed his way up from the gutter and would do all in his power to climb further. He couldn’t expect to be the richest man in the city; that particular slot fell to the Strong family. However, he aimed to go far and when he was gone, his son Gilmour, product of a wife he’d abandoned years ago, would reap the benefits. Yes, he thought with a self-satisfied smile, a man should have a son. He was glad he’d taken the boy on when his mother had died.

  The meeting broke up, the council of landed gentry and merchants muttering among themselves that his demands could not possibly be met, and Stoke convinced that they would go some way to satisfying the sum he required. If they offered him 50 per cent of what he’d asked for, then he would take it, but in his experience it was always better to ask for more than was really required.

  Conrad was bursting with anger, but he’d get the better of that upstart Sydney Cuthbert, by God if he wouldn’t.

  He waved his carriage away. ‘I will walk back to the office,’ he said to John, his face red and his head aching.

  Having walked most of the anger out of his system, he reached his office at the refinery. The smoke from the tall chimneys tinged the air with warmth and sweetness and stained the sky yellow. In the privacy of his office, he got down on his knees and prayed to God.

  ‘Help me sway this man, oh Lord. Help me achieve this both for the people of this city and the peace of mind of my wife. Let my participation in this venture be a memorial to my daughter Anne’s memory – if it please you,’ he added before rising.

  His knees made a cracking sound as he got to his feet. The fact that he was a big man – hale and hearty as the old English used to say – put a heavy load on his joints and they were becoming painful.

  He dabbed at the sweat on his cheeks with a clean handkerchief. The starched cotton smelled fresh and sweet and reminded him of his wife. It had always been his habit to leave the premises at the same time as his factory manager and the foreman, a tough Irishman named James Flanagan, but tonight he had a yearning to get home early.

  He checked with Flanagan that everything was in order, reminding him to damp down the furnaces before leaving, so they simmered during the hours between eight in the evening and five in the morning when the stokers came in to fire them up to full temperature.

  On his way out, the gritty taste of charcoal came out to greet him from the char room. The usual bevy of beer fetchers were hunkered down outside, rubbing at eyes made red by the dust-laden air. Edith’s son, Freddie, smiled up at him and tugged his forelock.

  ‘I thought we’d seen the last of you since your move to Little Paradise,’ Conrad said.

  ‘Me father’s ’ome,’ said the boy.

  Conrad raised his eyebrows questioningly. ‘And that makes a difference?’

  A look of resignation crossed Freddie’s freckled face. ‘Best not to be ’ome when he is.’ His face brightened suddenly. ‘Though we ain’t seen much of ’im lately since Mrs Heinkel had words with ’im.’

  Conrad chuckled to himself at the thought of Blanche giving Freddie’s father his marching orders. He remembered Blanche telling him that Edith’s husband had escaped the quarantined Lizzie Brady and that cholera had broken out in the area where Edith used to live. That would make her very mad indeed, he thought, still chuckling.

  Today she had gone to the hospital, and although he feared her going there, Conrad trusted she’d be sensible and adhere strictly to Dr Budd’s instructions on disease hygiene. Conrad would be travelling home alone.

  Summer heat rose in waves off the shiny black coachwork and the glistening backs of the matching bays who were dozing, haloes of flies buzzing around their heads.

  John was fast asleep inside the carriage, his jacket folded into an impromptu cushion beneath his head.

  Conrad raised his walking cane and tapped him gently. John started.

  ‘We are going to collect my wife from St Peter’s,’ he said, and waited patiently as the surprised coachman gathered his coat and hat and scrambled out.

  The high ceilings of the hospital echoed with the everyday sounds of occupation. Nurses in white aprons and white caps flitted along narrow corridors where the only light fell in bright oblongs from open doors.

  Conrad made his way to the children’s ward, the oldest part of the building yet surprisingly in the best condition. Dark oak panelling covered the walls and divided larger rooms into smaller ones. The floors were of bare stone and the fluttering of wall-mounted oil lamps did little to alleviate the gloom.

  He didn’t quite know why he ached to see his wife so much. It wasn’t just because of the fresh-smelling handkerchief or the fact that the council meeting had not gone to plan, thanks to Stanley Cuthbert. The truth of the matter was he’d wanted to hit the man’s weasel-like face. He was furious with his intransigence over selling his land for the sewerage project. It was an affront to good citizenship, to himself, his wife and their dead child.

  Conrad found himself walking on tiptoe, mindful that he was in a place where th
e sick deserved respect.

  Later, he wished he had been heavier footed. Perhaps then he wouldn’t have seen his wife in the arms of another man.

  It felt as though a knife had been plunged into his heart. He loved her so well, thought to give her everything she wanted, even to making her happy again after the death of their child. Following Anne’s death, he had pretended to be asleep in those hours just before dawn when Blanche had left the warmth of the bed and gone to Anne’s room with only her grief for company. He had hoped that beating the disease would heal her hurt.

  Not for the first time, he felt unworthy of her love despite everything. He was not a handsome man. He was big, bluff and red-faced, and his corn-coloured hair was turning grey.

  Tom had always been the presence in the background, the shadow that passed across her features when they were alone. He was jealous of his good looks, his brave heart and his adventurous image. He could never be any of those things. He was just a hard-working man who praised God and enjoyed the technicalities of turning raw cane and beet into sugar.

  Not wishing to lose his wife, he decided to avoid confrontation. Slowly, he retraced his steps then walked forward again, his footsteps echoing along the corridor and heavy upon the stone-flagged floors.

  Blanche was bending over the bed on which lay a clearly ill child. It would have made sense for Tom to be looking on, but he wasn’t. He was looking straight at Conrad, as though he’d fully expected to see him there.

  ‘Conrad,’ he said, extending his hand.

  Conrad took it and smiled too and couldn’t help suspecting that Tom had seen him before he retraced his steps.

  ‘Not the best of times,’ Tom added.

  At first Conrad wasn’t quite sure what he meant, until he looked at his wife, her shoulders convulsing with sobs as she brought the sheet up over the child’s pale face.

  * * *