Respectable Trade

by Gregory, Philippa

  Josiah looked aghast. “So much?”

  “It’s an expensive purchase. And a handsome profit. But I would not advise it, Josiah, unless you have substantial sums to hand.”

  “I do have,” Josiah said stubbornly. “I do have substantial sums. If the terms are right.”

  Stephen speared a forkful of ham and ate. “Your judgment is sound. Shall I get the figures for you to look at?”

  “Yes,” Josiah said. “I would be interested if the terms were right.”

  “Of course.” He smiled pleasantly. “I only wish I had the skill to take it on myself.”

  THE COOK HAD MELLOWED toward the slaves since their Easter party. The kitchen seemed very empty after Brown and the scullery maid had left, and Cook had only the slaves for company. In the evenings they all sat together in the kitchen, and Mehuru, Kbara, and the three women dined at the kitchen table with the children seated at a smaller table by the fire. Since John Bates had left, Cook ordered all the work in the kitchen; now that Brown had gone, Elizabeth ordered the work that needed to be done in the house, and Mehuru took overall responsibility for the security of the house and backyard.

  Slowly, the division between enslaved and free was melting, and the kitchen was a home and a workplace to them all. The warmth of the kitchen range made it more comfortable than the cold attic bedrooms, and after supper the boys would clear the plates, the girls would wash them, and the children would put them away while Kbara, the three women, and Cook drew up their stools to the fire and talked. Mehuru stayed at the kitchen table, reading. Frances had joined the circulating library at the Hot Well, and once a week she sent Mehuru to change her books. He brought back the novels she wanted, and for himself he brought back histories and studies in geography and long, difficult books on political economy. He was desperate to learn more about the world than Frances could tell him, and he suspected the glib simplicity of Frances’s explanations.

  The little boy who had been named James coughed constantly, and Elizabeth called him from his work to sit at her feet at the fireside. He had been only two when he was taken from Africa. He could not remember the warmth. He thought now that he had been cold forever, and he had forgotten his mother’s face.

  “You should tell Mrs. Cole about his cough,” Cook said to Martha. “Tell Mrs.—boy sick.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “Both boys,” she said. “I will tell.”

  “Could be nasty,” Cook said. She looked thoughtfully at the child, whose eyelids were heavy. “Course, you can’t tell if he’s pale or not under the black.”

  “I can tell.” Mehuru looked up with a half smile. “He is pale, and he is very hot in the evenings, and he coughs often.”

  “Better tell Mrs. Cole,” Cook repeated. “She won’t want to lose him. Not when he’s learning to talk and waiting on her in the morning so prettily.”

  “Yes. He has to be fit for sale,” Mehuru said coldly.

  Cook looked down at the boy. He was sitting on the floor staring into the range, leaning back against Elizabeth’s knees. The door of the firebox was open, and the embers made a dream landscape, as intricate and lovely as the winding path of a river at home.

  “Doesn’t seem right,” Cook said, suddenly dissatisfied. “I wager his mother misses him.”

  “It will be as if he is dead for her,” Elizabeth said suddenly. Her English was slow and stilted, but they could understand her. “He was her only child, he told me.”

  The little boy was not listening to them, far away in a dream of a place where it was always warm, where he could remember a taste, a haunting taste: the sweet, bland, softness of mango. His eyelids drooped, his head nodded. Elizabeth bent down and lifted him into her lap. His body lolled in the sweet collapse of childhood.

  “Doesn’t seem right,” Cook repeated. “Shall you all be sold?”

  “I don’t know,” Mehuru replied. “They will need some of us to work in the house. She has not said which she will keep.”

  “I don’t want a new set,” Cook grumbled, getting to her feet. She shut the fire door and untied her apron. “I’m for my bed,” she said.

  Elizabeth gathered the little boy closer. He was half asleep, limp with his fever, his forehead hot and dry. Mary picked up the other little boy, and they walked together to the kitchen door, each one with a child on her hip. Mehuru watched them go, walking as easily and as steadily as if they were in their own country, on their own earth, with their own babies held close.

  “It’s not right,” Cook said. She looked at Mehuru and saw his face set with bitterness. “Aye,” she said. “It’s not right.”

  FRANCES LAY ON HER back in bed and watched the cold light of the moon walk slowly from one side of the room to the other as the hours slid away. There were no clouds to shield the sharp sickle of the spring moon. The fire in the grate had died into soft white ash. The house was still and silent.

  She could not sleep. She lay without moving, listening to the steady thud of her heartbeat. She thought that she would never sleep again. She knew that on the floor above, in the attic, Mehuru was asleep. If she called out, he might wake. If she crept from her bed and went softly up the stairs and opened his door, she would see him. For a moment she let herself imagine that she could go to him—imagined her feet on the cold floorboards, on the creaking attic stairs, imagined the door swinging wide and him sitting up in bed, his dark eyes opening and saying to her, “Frances?”

  And there she stopped—she could not think what she could say to him. She could not acknowledge to herself what need, what absorbing need could take her, a married woman, in the middle of the night to the bedroom of a servant—lower than a servant, a slave.

  Frances stared, as blank as a corpse, at the ceiling. There could be no reason that could take her looking for Mehuru. Not the moonlight, not the coldness of the night, not her growing awareness of his own tragedy—of the urbane, cultivated society he had exchanged for this drudgery in her house—not her own loneliness, not her own inexplicable desire to hear his drumming, to hear his laugh, to see his smile. Frances lay in her own bed, imprisoned by her code of behavior, by the powerful habit of denying her own desires, still and sleepless, and waited for the morning, when she might see him again.

  CHAPTER

  21

  29 Queens Square.

  2nd May 1789

  Dear Uncle,

  Thank you for your daffodils. We enjoyed them very much. Of all the things I miss most, living here in the Town, it is the trees and the Flowers of Whiteleaze. I hardly notice One season change to Another. Now it is Spring, and soon it will be Summer, and only One little Plane tree to show me! Josiah and Miss Cole are well and send their compliments.

  The Weather here has been very gray and cold, and the society here is very Quiet. Neither Josiah nor Miss Cole Dances, and apart from the Assemblies there is little Society. For some reason I am not as Satisfied as I should be with my Situation. Since Easter I have felt Restless and Unsettled.

  I am sure you will wish to remind me of my Duty of Obedience to my husband and Loyalty to his Life and his Business. I do not forget my Duty. Ours was a Marriage of convenience, and I do not Regret it. I have promised myself that I will never Regret it. In the Trade a man’s word is his bond—and I gave my word to Josiah. Fancies may come and go, but Duty and Loyalty Remain Forever.

  I remain your devoted niece,

  Frances Cole.

  Frances reread the letter, crumpled it up, and added it to the others in the wastepaper bin beside her little writing desk, one of Josiah’s Chinese purchases, elaborately carved with dragons breathing fire and little drawers hidden by sampans, bridges, and sinuous rivers. Frances leaned forward and put her head on her hands.

  “You warned me,” she whispered. “But I did not listen. Anyway . . .” Her voice trailed away as she thought of what her life would have been if she had refused Josiah’s proposal.

  She sat down and drew a piece of the hot-pressed notepaper toward her again, dipped her pen in
the ink, and wrote in plain, spiky letters, quite unlike her usual elegant hand.

  Dear Uncle,

  I have made the Dreadful mistake of falling in love with a man who is, in all probability, quite indifferent to Me. He is worse than a Servant, he is a Slave. He is in my Employ, and I am bound to sell him for a profit to Another owner. Everything I have ever been taught about the Behavior and natural Feelings of a lady tells me that this Cannot Happen. It cannot happen. It Cannot happen to me.

  She crumpled the letter and took it, with the others, to the fireplace, which was laid with kindling and small pieces of coal. Frances scattered the letters on the top and then latched the sealing-wax candle from her desk. She put the flame to the half dozen pieces of paper and watched the pages darken, crinkle, and then burst into flame. She stayed on her knees on the hearthrug, watching them crumple into fragile ribbons of ash, watching the words drift up the chimney in harmless smoke to gather with the smog that hung always in the skies above Bristol.

  “I can never tell anyone,” she said softly. “I shall never again acknowledge it even to myself. This is where it ends. It is over. It must be over.”

  She got up from the hearthrug wearily, as if she were very, very tired. She went back to her desk, blew out the candle, and closed up the drawers. She turned the little key in the lock as if she were shutting away forever her youth, her new desire, and her hopes.

  “Over,” she said with finality. And then she sat down in the chair, before the dirty, cold grate, and took up some handkerchiefs to hem, and worked as if she could see her stitches through her blurred eyes.

  JOSIAH FOUND HER THERE when he came in for his breakfast. Something in her frigid composure aroused his notice. “Are you well, Mrs. Cole?” he asked.

  Frances smiled. “I am perfectly well, thank you. Were you looking for me?”

  “I have booked a little treat for you, my dear,” Josiah said. “I remembered you telling me that you used to ride at Whiteleaze, and the stables have a lady’s horse to hire. I have booked it for you this afternoon. One of the servants can go with you. One of the men can ride, can he not?”

  “I think Cicero can ride.” Frances’s voice was level. “But I will ask Julius.”

  “And you would enjoy it?” Josiah asked. “You are looking a little pale today.”

  Frances nodded. “I thank you for a kind thought,” she said calmly. “I should enjoy riding again very much. I will ask Julius if he can ride now.”

  She went out into the hall. Kbara was coming downstairs with a heavy tray in his hands.

  “Julius, can you ride a horse?” Frances asked.

  He frowned. “A horse?” he repeated. “No, Mrs. Cole. I never do.”

  “Oh.” Frances turned. Mehuru was behind her. He had a scuttle full of coal in one hand, and his livery was shielded from the dirt with a coarse hessian apron.

  “Can you ride, Cicero?”

  “Yes,” he said shortly.

  “You should say, ‘Yes, Mrs. Cole,’” Frances corrected him.

  Mehuru nodded at the information but did not repeat the sentence.

  “I am going riding this afternoon,” she said. “You will accompany me. You must go to the stables and pick out a riding horse for yourself and borrow some riding clothes. You will need boots also.”

  He did not look grateful. He stood leaning against the weight of the heavy bucket of coal, waiting for her to dismiss him.

  “We will ride out on the Downs,” she said. “In the sunshine. It will be like a holiday.”

  Still he said nothing.

  “Do you not want to ride with me?” she asked, suddenly impatient of his silence. “I should have thought you would welcome a change from your work, from the continual drudgery here?”

  Mehuru inclined his head only slightly. “Yes, Mrs. Cole,” he said.

  THE STABLE SENT TWO fine hunters around to Queens Square. Frances, coming out the front door in her old gray riding habit, saw Mehuru standing at the animals’ heads, talking to the groom. She had to shield her eyes from the sunlight; the profile of his tall, slim body was like a black cameo. It was just after noon, and the square was bright and warm. The branches of the little trees were nodding with the bursting weight of new shoots. The grass of the gardens was springing green and ripe and was starred with white daisies in pink-tipped buds. One of the houses had a cherry tree in a tub at the doorway, and the blossom was like a pink gauze scarf flung across the golden sandstone. The birds on the rooftops and in the saplings were singing and singing at the sunshine, a long ripple of sound. Frances bit her lip against the sudden welling of joy.

  The stable had loaned Mehuru a pair of breeches and boots. He looked very tall and English in the handsome high boots and fawn breeches, the white shirt and stock, and the dark brown hacking jacket. Against the high white stock at his throat, his face was very black. When he saw Frances at the door, he turned and smiled, and he held her horse as the stable lad cupped his hands to help her mount and threw her up into the sidesaddle.

  Mehuru mounted and moved with the horse as it sidestepped and curvetted. “He is . . . dancing,” he said. “I do not know the word.”

  “Dancing is a good word,” Frances agreed, watching Mehuru seated easily on the animal. “We would say he is fresh—meaning that he is eager.”

  “I thought fresh was food?” Mehuru brought the horse under control and rode alongside her as she moved off, out of the square toward Park Street.

  Frances found she could not think straight with him so close at her side. “Sometimes,” she said unhelpfully. She gathered her thoughts and explained, “Fresh food is new, prime food. A fresh horse is new out of the stable and in prime condition.”

  “I see,” he said. “It is an interesting language.”

  Frances, who knew only conversational French and a ladylike smattering of Italian, had thought English the only language in all the world—not an option. “How is it different from your language?”

  A wagon went past them, and Mehuru’s horse threw up its head and sidled. He held it firmly and stroked its neck, murmuring softly until the wagon had passed. “You have some words we do not know. And we have shades of meaning you do not have.”

  “Like what?” Her voice was cool. She had herself under control.

  “Oh, you have a word ‘beauty’—we do not have that.”

  “You don’t believe in beauty?”

  “We believe in it. Anyone can see it. But we don’t have a word for it as you do. We have words which mean that something is good, or the rightness of things, the right thing for the right place, the right colors. We have a word that you do not have—it means that it lacks nothing. But we don’t call a thing beautiful, we call it complete.”

  Frances shot a small, flirtatious smile at him. “So if you loved a lady, would you not tell her she was beautiful?”

  He looked away from her, refusing to see the line of her cheek or the downward sweep of her eyelashes. “No,” he said shortly.

  They were riding abreast up Park Street. On either side of the street, wooden scaffolding had sprung up; pale yellow stone houses were growing from foundations that marched like ascending steps up the hill. Gaps in terraces where a site had not been bought or where a builder had stopped work, short of cash, gaped like missing teeth. The city was being built piecemeal, all planning and order thrown aside in the rush for profit.

  “So what would you say?” Frances persisted. “If you wanted to tell a lady that you loved her, that you thought she was beautiful?”

  “A man would tell her that he wanted her as his wife,” Mehuru said simply. “He would not tell her that she looked as well as another woman. What would that mean? He would not tell her that she was enjoyable—like a statue or a picture. He would tell her that he longed to lie with her. He would tell her that he would have no peace until she was in his arms, until she was beneath him, beside him, on top of him, until her mouth was his lake for drinking and her body was his garden. Desire is not about �
�beauty,’ as if a woman is a work of art. Desire is about having a woman, because she can be as plain as an earthenware pot and still make you sick with longing for her.”

  Frances choked on a cry of outrage. She kicked her horse forward and rode ahead of him in shocked silence, looking straight ahead, her cheeks burning, her color high.

  Mehuru came up alongside. “What now?” he demanded, exasperated. “What’s the matter now?”

  “You should not speak to me like that,” Frances said, muffled. She would not turn her head to look at him.

  “You asked!” Mehuru exclaimed. “You asked me how I feel desire. And so I told you.”

  “You should not speak like that,” Frances repeated in a small voice, her face still turned away.

  “And how should I feel?” he demanded. “You order everything. How should I feel, Mrs. Cole?” He reined his horse back and rode a little behind her, like a servant.

  They rode up the length of Park Street in single file, in silence. Frances held her head high; she could feel her heart pounding with anger and desire: a breathless mixture of passions. Mehuru raged on his horse, watching her slim, straight back leading the way. At the top of the hill, the road petered out into a cart track, and on either side there were builders’ sheds and storeyards of stone and piping and wood. There were stonecutters working under temporary wooden shelters, shaping stones to size and carving ornamental friezes and decorative heads and pillars. For long, sprawling acres at the top of the hill, it was nothing but a series of builders’ yards for a city gripped with building fever. The sense of the city growing and remaking itself was almost tangible.

  Frances and Mehuru rode on, Frances holding a handkerchief to her mouth to keep out the pervasive dust from the stonecutters, until they left the yards behind and the track became lined with little market gardens, and then fields with dairy cattle. Mehuru gazed around him as he rode, looking at the thick, glossy coats of the cows, the incredible lush greenness of the grass. Even the hedges in this warm springing month of May seemed to glow with the sweetness of the constant rainfall. Bushes trembled with catkins as yellow as the primroses at the foot of the hedge. Whitebeam, hornbeam, and hawthorn flowered in a white mist. The beech trees were hazy with the greenness of their buds, and the silver birch coppice at the edge of one field was a brilliant, luminous, budding green.