Respectable Trade

by Gregory, Philippa

  In Mehuru’s home it was only in the brief spell of the wet season that trees glowed and dripped and oozed sweetness like this. He knew from Cook that this country was always wet. It always rained. No wonder they had fields as rich as forests and cows with pelts as glossy as lions. He glanced at Frances. In a country so ripe and rich and easy, how could a woman be taught to be sour and dry, so punitively cold to herself?

  Frances felt his eyes on her. “I am sorry. I should not have asked,” she said.

  He waved it away. “It does not matter. Do the cows always stay in these little fields? Do they not walk out to feed?”

  Frances threw him a sideways look, amused and half mocking herself. “You are more interested in the cows than in my apology?”

  He moved his horse close so that his knee was brushing her horse’s flank. She could have reached out and touched him. He answered her with a smile that was singularly sweet. “Frances,” he said gently. “How can we speak truly one to another, when I am your slave and you can order me as you wish? Anything you say can mean everything or mean nothing. If I offend you, you can beat me or sell me. If I please you, you can give me a sweetmeat or a word of praise. I am your dog, I am your horse. You do not say ‘I am sorry’ to a dog or a horse. You behave as you wish, and they suffer as you please. Nothing else between us is true.”

  “I do not wish it to be so,” Frances answered, her voice very low. “You are not a dog; you are a gentleman, a nobleman in your own country, high in the government. I do not wish you to be my slave. I should like you—” She broke off. “I should like you to be my friend.”

  There was silence for a moment. The horses pulled gently on their bits and pricked their ears forward as the country opened out before them, a little hill and the track curving upward, an avenue of trees, and from somewhere the faint salt smell of the sea.

  “Then set me free,” Mehuru said simply. “Only a freeman can give his friendship. If you wish us to be friends, I have to be free. Anything else is slavish devotion—it means nothing. You have to set me free, Frances.”

  She let her horse trot and then ease into a gentle canter. Mehuru’s horse followed, speeding up. Mehuru sat easily in the saddle and watched Frances lean forward and let her horse go faster. They breasted the hill side by side and burst out at the top of the Downs. Frances’s horse lengthened its pace from a canter into a gallop across the close-cropped green turf. The sun was bright, and the wind was light and keen, smelling of salt and the early buds of wild thyme. Mehuru let out a hunter’s yell, and his horse caught his sense of excitement and sudden feeling of freedom. Its ears came forward, and it chased after Frances’s hunter. Neck and neck they thundered on until Frances pulled her horse up and shouted, “Whoa! Whoa!” and called out, “Be careful! Be careful! The cliff edge!”

  Mehuru pulled his horse over beside hers. There was a rough wooden fence marking the edge of the cliff and then a precipitous drop of white limestone rocks hundreds of feet down to the sluggish curves of the dirty river below, winding between banks of slime. On the far side, equally high cliffs were tumbled with woodland and dramatic white outcrops, right down to the river edge. It was a staggering sight, a mighty gorge leading onward, westward, out to the distant sea.

  “Is this the way we came in?” Mehuru asked. “Our boat, up the river?”

  Frances nodded. “They have barges to tow the boats. It’s very difficult to sail up the gorge. The winds are uncertain, and the channel is very narrow.”

  He nodded, looking down the deep chasm to the river. “I am glad it was night and I was below and did not see it,” he said. “I would have thought it the entrance to a prison for life—these high walls.”

  “I cannot set you free,” she suddenly said.

  “Who is my owner?”

  “I am. But I cannot set you free.”

  He was gazing westward. The river curved out of sight; he could not see where it flowed into the sea. He wanted very much to see the waves and the clean water of the sea and know that on the other side of that ocean, miles and miles away, the waves of the same water were breaking on the beaches of his home.

  “What would you do, if you were free?” Frances asked.

  “I should go home,” he replied instantly. “I am needed there.” He thought how much he could tell them about the white men, how much he knew. He thought how much they needed his skills and now his grasp of the English language to keep them safe through these most perilous times. “And I need to be there,” he added, his voice very low.

  Frances, watching the longing on his face, said nothing. He glanced across at her. “I can never be happy until I am home,” he said simply.

  “I cannot let you go,” she repeated, and for a moment he thought she sounded more like a possessive woman deeply in love than the owner of a slave. “I cannot possibly let you go.”

  JOSIAH HAD THE FIGURES of the Hot Well before him in his office, the back parlor at Queens Square. Stephen Waring had obtained them for him and told him, with a wink, to read them and return them quickly, before the May monthly meeting. Josiah understood that they had been borrowed for his benefit, that he was already gaining from Stephen’s friendship and from his membership in the Merchant Venturers.

  The figures went back to the earliest days a century before, when the spring was first discovered. It was underwater for all the day except for a brief hour at low tide when it could be seen bubbling out, hot and sparkling, showing a clean ripple of water in the brown of the river. A businessman had opened a bathhouse and later bottled the water. Josiah nodded; as soon as the site started to show a profit, the Merchant Venturers took an interest. They bought it and started to lease it out to speculative tenants.

  The last tenant, Mr. James, had seen the boom of interest in spas and mineral waters and determined on capturing the gentry trade from Bath. He had done well. The spa was now running in parallel with Bath. Convalescents were notoriously restless, and many would decamp from Bath to the Hot Well. Desperately ill people would pay anything for a cure, and the Hot Well’s reputation for curing diabetes, skin complaints, stomach troubles, and even pains in the heart and lungs gave them hope. The Methodist preacher John Wesley himself had been cured by the treatment. Endorsed by him and by other more worldly invalids, the business was thriving, and the Merchant Venturers decided to expand it yet further.

  The figures showed the spending—a two-thousand-pound investment in the pump room, making it the largest assembly room in the country. A thousand pounds on the pretty colonnade of nearby shops. A double avenue of trees leading to the rooms and a complicated system of pumps and filters to get the water away from the contaminating river, which was daily more of a threat to the health of the spring as the river water grew dirtier and dirtier with the outfall from Bristol sewage and industries. The Venturers had done everything to establish a thriving business, but they did not want the trouble of running the spa themselves. They wanted to hand it over and to see a return on their investment.

  Josiah chuckled and rang the bell. Kbara came, light-footed and smart in his livery. “Yes, sir?” he asked.

  “Rum and water,” Josiah ordered.

  He pulled a sheet of paper toward him and scribbled down some figures. He thought he could borrow two thousand pounds for the lease against the cargo of Daisy, who should be loading at the efficient Africa Company ports and due back in December. If Josiah’s captain bought well and crammed on sail, Josiah would make a small fortune on her.

  He would need it. The vagaries of the trade meant that sometimes all three of his ships were away from Bristol at the same time. There was a fallow period in which Josiah could do nothing but wait. From April to July, all his ships were loading off Africa while the debts mounted steadily at home. He could not clear a penny until they came back into port again. The Hot Well’s profits would smooth over the dramatic fluctuations of the trade in which a man could be bankrupt one day and then see his ship sail, heavy-laden, into port the next.

  Jo
siah had a loan outstanding of a thousand pounds for the Queens Square house and five hundred for furnishing. He had borrowed a thousand pounds against the Rose herself, and he owed for half the cargo instead of splitting the risk with equal partners. By deciding to take women and children, pack them tight, and sell them to the Spanish, Josiah had made the voyage at once more risky and more profitable. Selling to the Spanish plantations was smuggling, breaking the laws that limited trade with the competing plantations of Spain. But since it was contraband cargo, it was paid for in gold. Josiah would not have to offer credit to the planters that could not be redeemed until a year or two later. Rose would come home in November and bring him sellable sugar and gold. She would reward one of the greatest risks he had taken in his commercial life—sailing without a full complement of partners and without full insurance—with the greatest profit he had ever seen. She would be followed into port by Daisy in December and two months later by Lily, and Josiah would be acclaimed as a wealthy man.

  He needed that public success. Even with Merchant Venturer friends, Josiah found that his ships were not attracting investors. The returns on the slave trade were too risky compared with the guaranteed profits of land. The three markets where a profit or a loss might be made—in Africa, in the West Indies, and in England—no longer fired men’s imaginations. The men who used to gamble on the slave trade to give them a triple profit now preferred to buy and sell sugar direct—trading to and from the West Indies. Prices were easier to calculate, and profits came quicker. By cutting out two legs of the three-way journey, they diminished the risk by two-thirds; they sped the return of the ship—and thus the profits. Only the traditionalists, who had always dealt in the Atlantic trade, and the little savers who were welcome nowhere else were still investing in slavery and Josiah’s ships.

  But Josiah was confident. His membership in the Merchant Venturers was already showing him benefits. Through the company he would obtain full insurance on all future voyages, even including the loss of slaves except by death through illness. He could reassure future investors that their money was safe, completely insured.

  Best of all, as a member of the Merchant Venturers he was also a member of the Royal Africa Company. For the first time ever, Cole and Sons ships would not have to trade up and down the fever-sodden coast, searching for individual slaves, bartering with coastal chiefs, haggling for one man here, for another there, exposed to illness, threats from the shore, and mutiny on board. From now onward, a Cole and Sons ship would moor at a company fort, where she would take on supplies of food and clean water. Slaves would be waiting for purchase in the huge dungeons. The captain could take his pick of the prisoners, and if he wanted more, he could send a message to the company warehouses farther upriver to send down as many as he wished. The turnaround of the ship could be as swift as if she were in the dock at Bristol. The gathering of the slaves was as efficient as an industry. At last Josiah would leave the uncertain, chancy old days behind. As long as the seas were kind, he could guarantee a profit on each and every voyage. When the investors saw the account books of his ships under these new circumstances, Josiah was certain they would put their money with him again.

  Against all these fair omens were only Josiah’s debts on the house and on Rose—three thousand pounds altogether—and his soaring living costs. Neither of them troubled him yet. The value of the house justified his debt, the loan on Rose was investment capital, and living costs were bound to increase. He thought that a man aspiring to the status of a gentleman had to be generous about his housekeeping bills.

  He drew a sheet of paper toward him and wrote to Stephen Waring.

  Dear Waring,

  I return these papers to you at Speed, as you requested, and with my Thanks. I shall certainly bid for the Hot Well lease Provided that I can have an Undertaking that the Rent for the lease will be Agreed for a Minimum of Ten years and not be increased During that time. I thank you for your support in this Matter. I shall see you at the Dinner, when I will Make this offer to the Honorable company.

  Yours etc.,

  Cole.

  Josiah dripped sealing wax onto the fold of the letter and pressed his ring into the hot liquid, rang the bell and told Mehuru to send one of the boys ’round to Mr. Waring’s accounting house with the letter and the parcel of papers.

  Mehuru hesitated.

  “What is it?”

  “I shall go myself.”

  “Very well, very well,” Josiah said impatiently. “As long as one of you goes and comes straight home.”

  Still the man hesitated. “If I see a seller of flowers, shall I buy some for Mrs. Cole?”

  Josiah turned in his chair. “What?”

  “The flowers in the hall are dead. Mrs. Cole loves flowers. There are flower sellers outside the house every day. Shall I buy some flowers for her?”

  “Oh!” Josiah was genuinely surprised. He heard the cries of flower sellers as he heard the cries of knife grinders or muffin men. He had never thought that they might be selling a commodity he would want. “She likes flowers, does she?”

  Mehuru thought of Frances’s dreamy, sensual delight over the daffodils and kept his eyes down so that her husband would not see his amusement. “Yes, she does.”

  “I’ll give you a penny. Get her a bunch.”

  Mehuru took the coin. “She would prefer many,” he said carefully. “For the big bowl in the hall.”

  Josiah tutted, thrust his hand into his pocket, and threw a handful of coins at Mehuru. “Here! Take half a crown, take a crown and bring me the change! Make sure you bring me the change, mind!”

  Mehuru bowed swiftly, took the letter, and vanished from the room before Josiah’s innate caution with money could defeat his grand gesture.

  He put on his hat and coat and slipped out the back door, walked briskly to Mr. Waring’s warehouse on the northern, Bristol side of the dock, delivered the letter, and then found a flower seller shouting her wares on the quayside near the bridge over to Redclift.

  She had a tray hung from her neck, filled with flowers. She had fat bunches of wood violets, picked in Rownham Woods that morning, with their leaves still damp and their scent potent. And she had late-flowering daffodils by the hundred, with their fat buds bursting into pale yellow petals and the trumpets opening in the morning sunshine.

  “How much?” Mehuru asked.

  “Ha’penny a bunch.”

  Her Bristol accent was so strong that he could hardly understand her. “Where do you come from?” he asked curiously.

  She made an impertinent face at him. “Closer to home than you,” she said.

  He smiled at her. “I don’t want a bunch. How much for all?”

  Startled, she stared at Mehuru. “All of them?”

  “Yes, quickly, I have to be home.”

  “I’ve never sold all of them at once.”

  “I want the tray, too, to carry them.”

  She stared at him openmouthed. Mehuru had to laugh. She was as slow and as stupid as any peasant in a village in his own country. “No one has ever bought them all before,” she said.

  “I see,” Mehuru said patiently. “But I want to buy them all. How much would they all be?”

  “Are you from London?” she asked, as if only that could explain his eccentricity.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mehuru said. “Look. When you get home in the evening and you have had a good day and sold nearly all, how much do you have?”

  “Half a crown,” she answered promptly. “But I never have.”

  “Well, I give you three shillings for all the flowers, and you can come with me to my home, carrying the tray, and then I will take the flowers into the house,” Mehuru said patiently. “Then you get some more flowers to sell, or you take the rest of the day off.”

  She blinked at the concept. “If you gave me four shillings, I could buy a good dinner,” she said hopefully.

  “Why not?” Mehuru declared, generous with Josiah’s hard-won cash. “But now!”

/>   “All right,” she suddenly decided.

  Mehuru set off at a brisk pace, the flower seller trotting behind him.

  “Is it for a lady?” she asked slyly. “A lady that loves flowers?”

  “Yes,” Mehuru said without turning his head.

  “And do you love her?” She bumped into him as he stopped at the backyard gate.

  Mehuru hesitated on his denial. He thought of Frances and the contradictory feelings that were growing between them. He knew it would be easier for him if he did not love her and safer for him if the word was never mentioned between them. “I don’t love her,” he denied stoutly. “I am just getting flowers.”

  He tipped Josiah’s coins into the flower seller’s hands and gathered up the armfuls of daffodils. The bunches of violets he packed carefully into the deep pockets of his coat.

  “You’ll smell like spring,” the flower seller said, looking at him and noticing for the first time his broad shoulders, his lean, well-muscled body, and the deep, soft blackness of his skin. “Does she love you?”

  Mehuru shook his head at her and smiled. “Good-bye,” he said firmly. “Enjoy your dinner.”

  The kitchen was empty except for Cook, who was stirring a pan on the stove and did not turn around and see him, his arms full of buds, his pockets bulging with posies.

  He slipped into the hall and then up the stairs to Frances’s bedroom. Her bed was made, the room was tidy. He was struck by the cold elegance of it all. The hairbrush and comb precisely positioned on the dressing table, the small pictures hung carefully on the pale silk walls, the pale blue carpet, the little blue silk chair placed at a right angle to the empty grate. He had meant to put the flowers in vases around her room, but something in the spinsterish tidiness of the bedroom made him feel anarchic and playful. He thought of the trickster god dressed in dark indigo blue studded with white cowrie shells who throws the destinies of men and women into gambling disorder. He laughed at the thought, and at the madness of flooding Frances with flowers.