The Sugar Merchant’s Wife

by Erica Brown

  Losing a friend and losing a lover were inextricably bound together in this instance, Tom thought as he rode back to Marstone Court.

  The sooty, sulphurous air of the city, its glassworks, sugar works, rope works and new gas works, all contributed to making him feel more dirty and degraded than he’d ever felt in his life. He had meant to explain more fully about his reasons for marrying Horatia, but Conrad had arrived unexpectedly early.

  As he’d held Blanche in his arms – perhaps for the last time – he had noticed a shadow falling across the floor, thought he’d heard something but hadn’t been able to let her go. Only minutes after that, Conrad had entered. There was something about his expression that had not been there before, something colder. That was when it came to Tom that he had somehow lost a very good friend.

  He called at the shipyard on the way back to Marstone Court. The second of his steamships was nearing completion. He dismounted, passed the reins to a boy and stood admiring the great iron structure presently filling the construction shed.

  ‘She’s looking fine,’ said the engineer, a bundle of drawings beneath one arm and something wrapped in a cloth beneath the other.

  ‘She is indeed,’ said Tom, his hands on his hips. ‘I’m sorry I won’t be here to see her launch.’

  ‘Well, at least there won’t be any confusion over her name this time. We can use the plaque we should have used the first time,’ said the man, ‘though I don’t really understand why the little lady got the name wrong.’

  ‘Don’t give me your excuses, man. She couldn’t be named without you saying her name or handing over the plaque to Miss Strong,’ said Tom.

  ‘Well, I don’t know why not. I gave Miss Strong the plaque, which was wrapped up so no one else could see. I’m not calling her a liar, mark you…’

  Tom slapped the palm of his hand against his head. He should have known! Horatia had been devious all her life, always wanting her own way.

  The building that housed the offices of Charles Hillman Shipbuilders was constructed of grey pennant stone and a Welsh slate roof. The door was painted green and squealed like a scalded cat each time it opened – as it did now.

  ‘Captain Strong!’

  Tom recognized Charles Hillman himself, his pale hair streaming out behind him from beneath a blue silk topper.

  ‘There’s bad news, I’m afraid,’ he said, coming to Tom’s side. He turned to the architect. ‘Have you told him, McGregor?’

  ‘Ah, no. I’m sorry. I was so wrapped up in this ship,’ he said slapping the plans with one hand and looking embarrassed. ‘Remiss of me… sorry,’ he said again.

  ‘One of the stable lads was sent on a fast horse to find you in the city,’ Charles Hillman explained. ‘Sir Emmanuel is dead.’

  Tom was still for a moment. ‘Do you know any details?’ he asked eventually.

  Charles Hillman shook his head. ‘He seemed too flustered and in too much of a hurry to say much, just that he had to find you, Mr Nelson and Mr Rupert as soon as possible.’

  If Tom hadn’t been given the news of Sir Emmanuel’s death, he might have seethed with anger all the way back to Marstone Court. Horatia naming the ship after herself now seemed so trivial compared with the passing of a man he’d known most of his life. Emmanuel had been a selfish man, but also a big man, and he had left a large gap that someone had to fill.

  Evening was crisping the air and sending birds roosting in the trees. The last plough and pair were turning for home, leaving row upon row of sharply turned furrows behind them. He remembered this as being his favourite time of day. He used to wave to the ploughman and the cowherd turning the herd out into the field after milking. Tonight he hardly noticed their presence.

  Nelson was already there when he got back to Marstone Court and gave him the details of his father’s death.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he kept saying over and over again, shaking his head, his fingers splayed across his face and leaving red marks on his cheeks.

  Tom patted his shoulder and poured them both drinks. Nelson drank back glass after glass without bothering to add anything.

  Tom frowned. ‘I can hardly believe it myself.’

  He left Nelson blubbering in a chair, too drunk to get to his feet.

  There was no one in the Egyptian room when he got there. The lid of the sarcophagus lay in pieces on the floor. It had broken after being manhandled from the coffin. Apparently Sir Emmanuel’s coat tail had been caught beneath the lid. The maid saw the lid was closed and recognized the coat the master had been wearing the day before. McDermid, Sir Emmanuel’s valet, had been looking for him all that morning. The maid’s screams had brought the whole household to the room and the truth was discovered.

  He heard footsteps behind him, but did not look round.

  ‘It’s so cold in here,’ said Rupert.

  Tom peered into the sarcophagus, noting its hand-hewn interior and the pillow at the bottom.

  ‘Where is he now?’ he asked, remembering his pledge to see that Sir Emmanuel was interred where he wished.

  ‘He’s been taken by the funeral directors. Arrangements have been made for him to lie in the nave of Bristol Cathedral for a few days. Horatia insisted. She says there will be many who will want to pay their last respects to him before he is finally interred in the family tomb.’

  ‘He wanted to be buried in this,’ said Tom, knowing it was useless to try to change the family’s mind, but feeling duty-bound to make the old man’s wishes known. ‘He didn’t want to be interred with the rest of the family, not with two wives already there,’ he added with a wry smile.

  Unlike Nelson, Rupert was dry-eyed and empathized with Tom’s humour. ‘I can well understand that,’ he said. ‘And no doubt my brother and sister will regret flouting his request when they see some of the other females in his life traipsing down the aisle of Bristol Cathedral.’

  Circumstances being as they were, Tom had no intention of talking to Horatia about Barbados or matrimony. She would be too upset over her father’s death, he told himself, and was grateful that Sir Emmanuel had given him time to ponder the problem.

  There were so many reasons why he should marry her. Love had nothing to do with it. Perhaps lust did. Horatia was attractive. Many men had sought to marry her. He never had, which had only made her more determined. There was also the prospect of a successful steamship line tied in with the sugar trade. There was also the fact, though he hated to admit it, that he had no other option. He needed to live abroad, it was time he settled down and there was nothing to be gained by being in love with Blanche. She was unattainable. Horatia was readily available and came complete with a fortune. Added to which, Horatia as a woman scorned, could be dangerous. Blanche would be blamed and Horatia would seek revenge. Blanche, perhaps even her son, could get hurt in the process.

  Needing to calm his soul and raise his spirits, he made his way into the rose garden. At the end of the pebble path, which ran through rose-covered arches, was an ornate arbour constructed from decorative iron and painted green. Here and there patches of paint had fallen off, revealing the rust beneath.

  Making himself comfortable on the iron bench, he lit a cigarillo and inhaled deeply. He would have preferred to sit there alone for an hour or so, admiring the salmon brightness of sunset slowly turning to purple. Before the shadow of her voluminous skirt fell over his feet, he heard its swish, swish, swish, as Horatia walked along the path.

  The first thing he noticed about her was the absence of redness around her eyes. Horatia had not been crying over the death of her father.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Her voice was strident, almost hostile as he made room for her to sit down beside him.

  A few more petals fell from the rose bush, fluttering to the ground like broken wings.

  He sensed Horatia stiffening beside him, her perfumed aura, meant to attract, now permeated with the stench of long-harboured jealousy.

  ‘I was thinking of your father,’ he lied, though it seemed
only reasonable given the current circumstances. ‘He wanted to be interred in his Egyptian room.’

  ‘A tomb! In the middle of the house!’ She shook her head. ‘Unthinkable. It was the drink. A few years and I really would have had to think of putting him away. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head with greater emphasis than before, ‘he’ll be interred in the family vault with everyone else.’

  Tom drew more deeply on his cigarillo. She took it from his fingers and drew on it too. They were silent, both thinking their own thoughts and not necessarily about Sir Emmanuel’s passing.

  Tom looked at Horatia; the pearl-like skin, the classically beautiful features, the ripe lips and the blue eyes presently gazing into the distance. He wasn’t sure, but he thought she was smiling.

  After a while, she said, ‘I take back some of what I have said about my father in the past. At times I thought him ruthless, at other times a fool, a man who used women for his own pleasure, but never admitted that occasionally they could be as clever, or cleverer than he was. In these latter days I discovered a new respect for him.’ She turned abruptly to Tom. ‘That’s why I chose Bristol Cathedral. He’ll be lying there for two days before being taken to the family vault.’

  There was a shine in her eyes that Tom couldn’t quite comprehend, a luminescent glow as if for the first time ever, Horatia had what she’d always wanted and was where she’d always wanted to be.

  The look unnerved him and he decided to change the subject.

  ‘Nelson is very unhappy. I wonder if he might return to Barbados. He was always happier there.’

  ‘Pah!’ Horatia spat. ‘Nelson is like a child with a toy that’s lost its wheels.’

  Tom grinned at her analogy. ‘Is that what his wife is? A toy without wheels?’

  Horatia’s sigh was full of exasperation. ‘Don’t be facetious. You know very well what I mean.’

  Tom’s face was hard, his lips seeming to split over his teeth. ‘You’re sounding like a shrew even before you’ve become a wife.’

  Aware of his threatening tone, Horatia forced a smile. ‘We can’t worry about Nelson, or Rupert or Caroline. It’s you we have to worry about,’ she said, her finger stroking his cheek. ‘Once father is buried and the will is read, we have to go to Barbados – or would you prefer to hang?’

  Checkmate, he thought, and did not respond but drew the last flavour from the cigarillo and, as the final rose petals fell to earth, flicked the burnt stub into their midst.

  Later he went back to the Egyptian room. He didn’t often pray, but on this occasion he felt a great urge to beg forgiveness that he had failed to carry out Emmanuel’s wishes. Resting his clasped hands on the side of the stone coffin, he bent his head. Out of the corner of his eye, something glittered close to his right foot. He picked it up. A pearl drop earring set in gold entangled within the frayed rope. He’d seen Horatia wearing a pair just like it. Thoughtfully he tossed it from palm to palm. The ropes had been hanging directly above the coffin. The hook of the earring had been embedded directly into the twist, which could not have happened unless she’d been leaning very close, directly below the crane and above the sarcophagus.

  Too many questions rose in his mind and for now he had no answers. Best to sleep on it, he decided, tipped the earring into his pocket and left the room.

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Death, where is thy sting? Tom thought. He was gazing out of one of the library windows across the sweeping parkland of Marstone Court and contemplating the unfairness of life – and death.

  There was less of a sting to the death of Emmanuel Strong than that of Gertrude McBean. Emmanuel had lived in a grand house with plenty of servants, money and mistresses. Gertrude McBean had not even lived long enough to be a mother worn down with the burden of too many mouths to feed.

  The man sitting behind the mahogany desk coughed before raising his voice and calling to order those attending the reading of the last will and testament of Sir Emmanuel Strong.

  Horatia’s dress rustled like dry leaves as she took her seat. She looked triumphant, mistress of all she surveyed. Tom sat next to her and had the most urgent need to prick her bubble, to see a look of dismay on those proud features. More in keeping with the occasion, he reasoned.

  He felt in his pocket then smiled as he took hold of her hand. She smiled back, misinterpreting his reason for doing so.

  ‘I think this is yours,’ he said, and passed the pearl earring into her hand.

  Still smiling, Horatia opened her palm. Her features froze. Dots of colour sullied her high cheekbones.

  He noted her breasts rising and falling more rapidly, and, as though she had suddenly remembered where she was, she began to dab at her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief – just as she was expected to.

  Tom adopted a bemused expression. ‘I went to pay my last respects to your father at the cathedral. The funeral directors did a very good job. I presume he died in his sleep and did not wake up to find himself in a coffin – at least I hope so. I saw no blood beneath his fingernails,’ he added so only she could hear.

  ‘Are you insinuating…?’ Her voice was hushed. Her face was white. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head.

  Tom let his gaze wander around the great library at Marstone Court where first editions of all the great books of the nineteenth, eighteenth and even the seventeenth century, sat behind glass doors, their gilded spines gleaming. Above the fireplace hung a painting of a pair of red and white setters, three brace of pheasant and partridge arranged around their paws.

  This, he thought to himself, would all be Horatia’s. But although she deserved to inherit, he could not disregard his suspicions. Neither could he marry her now. It wasn’t until Joseph Compton-Morgan, a relative of their notary in Barbados, began to read the will that he looked at her profile and knew he was wrong. Her bottom lip was trembling and her eyes were filled with tears. She was angry, but she was also upset. The two never mixed in Horatia unless she was feeling beaten and wrongly so. He studied the other family members.

  Nelson looked contained, no doubt because he had taken a little opium to calm his nerves, which needed a lot of calming nowadays. He blamed his wife, of course. She didn’t understand him, besides which she was getting fatter and older. He didn’t see himself that way. When he looked at her he saw only flaws. When he looked at his reflection in a mirror, he still saw the golden-haired Adonis he used to be. He failed to notice the dark shadows beneath his eyes, the nervous tic fluttering at the side of his mouth or the beginnings of a tremor in his hands.

  Rupert was daydreaming, his thoughts elsewhere judging by the expression on his face. He still wanted to go to sea. Now his father was gone, there was nothing to stop him doing that.

  Caroline, who was now Lady Josiah Benson, sat next to him. She had greeted Tom with all the old warmth of her youth, then had taken her seat as far away from her half-sister, Horatia, as possible.

  Everyone had presumed that the reading of the will was a formality; trust funds and varied properties in Bristol, London, Scotland and Ireland would be apportioned with generous allowances to each of the children. The bulk of the inheritance, including Marstone Court, the sugar plantations on which the family wealth had been founded, the refineries, the shipping and banking interests, would go to Nelson, the eldest son. Regardless of whether he was capable of running such vast interests, it was surely his by right of birth.

  The old Tom would have felt he had no right to be there. The new Tom, fired up with dreams of a shipping fleet, had resigned himself to the fact that he belonged. It had taken a long time in coming, but he knew he would always be part of them. He frowned as he attempted to reconcile his suspicions about Emmanuel’s death and Horatia’s reaction to his veiled accusation that he now regretted. It wouldn’t be easy, but he had to make amends. He touched her hand. She looked at him. He mouthed, ‘I’m sorry.’ She blinked then looked away, but did not move her hand from beneath his.

  Once coughs and clearing of throats
and rustling of dresses had fallen away, the solicitor cleared his own throat and began.

  ‘I, Emmanuel Gordon Ludovic Strong, being of sound mind…’

  There were the usual legacies to long-term servants. Compton-Morgan reddened with embarrassment as he read out a larger one to a lady named Dolores Delaney of Park Row, Clifton.

  Tom smiled.

  ‘A man reaps as he sows,’ said Rupert, who wouldn’t have said a word if he hadn’t been drinking.

  ‘And Father certainly did a lot of sowing,’ Nelson added, which resulted in disapproving titters from the older relatives gathered.

  As Joseph Compton-Morgan repeated the most important paragraph of the last will and testament of Sir Emmanuel Gordon Ludovic Strong, mouths dropped open and eyes almost popped out of heads.

  ‘…Over the years I have seen fortunes made by one generation only to be squandered by the next. The Strong family have so far bred sons that have increased its wealth. It is my dearest wish that this tradition of the new generation outperforming the last is continued. In my opinion, neither of my two surviving sons is capable of this. However, it has come to my notice that my daughter’s business acumen far outshines that of my sons. Therefore, the management and overall responsibility for the varied business interests, including that of the sugar industry on which the family fortune is based, I bequeath to my daughter, Horatia Georgiana Adelaide Strong, but only on the proviso that she marries my nephew by adoption, Thomas Jebediah Strong. After much serious thought, I deem such partnership to be advantageous to everyone in the family. I know the family fortune will be safe in her hands. However, I do realize that her shrewd business sense needs to be tempered by integrity. Regretfully, she has less of this precious commodity, which is why I stipulate her marriage to Thomas Strong, a man of the greatest integrity, thanks in part to my brother, the Reverend Jebediah Strong.’

  There was a united gasp from those assembled, like a noisy draught rushing down a chimney.

  The lawyer looked up at those gathered. ‘I am instructed by the deceased that the next part of the will is for close family members only – including Mr Thomas Strong. I have to ask everyone else to leave the room.’