Respectable Trade

by Gregory, Philippa

  He turned unwillingly and obeyed her, stalking from the room, prickly with anger.

  “I do apologize,” Frances said. She could hardly breathe at all. “So silly of me.”

  Miss Cole regarded her with suppressed irritation. “Shall I pour the tea, sister?”

  “Oh, please do! And, Sir Charles, do make your punch and tell us all about London. And the Scott ball in the winter! Did Miss Honoria enjoy herself?”

  The girl Ruth came in to clear up Frances’s workbox. As she entered the room and saw Sir Charles, she recoiled, and her face went a gray, sick color. Frances knew that she was taking tea with a rapist and that she was commanding the people who had witnessed his crime to serve him.

  “Hurry up, Ruth,” she ordered. “Is the punch to your liking, Sir Charles?”

  It took all her carefully learned social skills to chatter through Ruth’s slow, resentful tidying. It took all her charm to divert Sir Charles and to distract Sarah from Mary’s sullenly reluctant service at tea. She heard her voice, a little breathless, but still light and frivolous, and she despised herself for the facade she presented. She longed to tell Sir Charles that she knew him for what he was, that she loathed him, and that she would never forgive him for the abuse of a woman who had been in her charge. But her social self, which always had the upper hand, stirred the tea, passed cakes, and laughed at his jokes, as she had been trained to do. Just like a little pet dog, she thought miserably, which sits to order, and begs when told, and barks a little, and perhaps has forgotten altogether that it was ever a real dog.

  The visit was mercifully short. Sir Charles wanted to be on his way to Lord Bartlet’s country seat at Kings Weston.

  “My brother will be sorry to have missed you,” Sarah observed.

  “I shall have the pleasure of his company another time,” Sir Charles said gallantly. “This was a business visit, merely.”

  Sarah nodded, a little surprised. “I am glad that Frances can transact your business. I had thought you would want to go over the figures with my brother.”

  Sir Charles smiled. “Mrs. Cole is an excellent agent for my little fund. I need no other!”

  “As long as you are satisfied,” Sarah said doubtfully.

  “I am indeed. My only regret is that I cannot stay to dine, but I hope to be at Lord Bartlet’s in time for supper.”

  Frances rang the bell, and Sir Charles’s own slave came with his cloak, hat, and cane.

  “Will you have a hot brick for your feet in the carriage, Sir Charles?” Sarah asked. “Despite the season it can get cool at night.”

  “I hope my boy has placed one there already,” Sir Charles said. “Done hot brickee? Sammy?”

  The man glanced at him with one weary look. “Yassuh,” he said.

  Frances closed her eyes for a moment to shut out the man’s bowed head and empty eyes.

  “Here, Sammy has a collar,” Sir Charles said. “Sammy! Show chain! Show chain!”

  The man’s hand went to his neck to open the collar of his jacket. Tight around his throat was a silver chain and a plaque. In elegant, flowing script, it was engraved with the name “Sammy.” “Charming, ain’t it?” Sir Charles demanded. “You jot down the names of your slaves, and I will send you a set.”

  Frances held on to her smile as if it were a mask in a carnival ball. She took a page of paper from her writing desk and wrote down carefully the eleven names, from Cicero to little five-year-old John.

  “Charming,” Sir Charles said. “Eleven now, eh? You have eleven?”

  “From an original consignment of twenty,” Sarah said. “We have had only nine deaths. Seven in transit, but only two here. We are pleased.”

  Frances’s hand trembled, and the pen made a blot on the page. She wanted to tell him that the woman he had raped had died. She wanted to accuse him. Instead she handed him the page of names and looked at his slave, Sammy. The man would not meet her gaze. She did not know that at home in Jamaica he would be beaten for looking at a white woman. It was considered to be impertinent. Under her stare he ducked his head and gazed at his boots. On the delicate skin at the back of his neck and curving up behind his ear, Frances could see the puckering of a deep scar from an old misplaced lash.

  “I’ll bid you good-bye,” Sir Charles said, throwing his cloak around him and bowing over Sarah’s hand and then lingering his kiss on Frances’s hand with moist lips.

  “Safe journey,” Frances said quietly.

  They escorted him to the front door and stood on the doorstep in the late-afternoon sunshine, waving him farewell as the carriage pulled away.

  “Isn’t he a charming man?” Sarah sighed with pleasure as the carriage rolled out of the square and disappeared.

  “Delightful,” Frances replied. Her lips were very stiff on the lie. “Quite delightful.”

  CHAPTER

  29

  NEXT MORNING SARAH WOKE early and was dressed and out of the house even before Josiah. She called Mehuru to the hall and told him to put on his green livery coat and attend her for a walk. Mehuru bowed, hiding the curiosity in his face, and followed her at a polite distance as she walked from the square toward the river.

  He called the ferry for her and held her parasol as she stepped from the greasy steps into the little boat. The dock was stinking in the heat of midsummer, but Sarah did not seem to notice it. Mehuru was first out of the boat on the other side and handed Sarah up the steps to the Redclift quay.

  The warehouse door was shut; Josiah’s clerk had not yet arrived. Sarah stood with calm patience on the doorstep of her old home. Mehuru waited beside her. She did not speak to him; she never spoke to any of the slaves except to give them orders.

  Just as the bells of St. Mary Redclift struck eight o’clock, Mehuru saw the clerk hurrying down the quayside. At once he sensed Sarah’s attention sharpen.

  “Good morning,” she said. “I am Miss Cole. I wish to see the ships’ logs and the company accounts. Please let me into the office.”

  The man hesitated, glancing at Mehuru. Mehuru’s face was impassive.

  “I don’t know . . .” the clerk began.

  “Thank you,” Sarah said magisterially. She took the key from his hand, let herself into the warehouse, and walked upstairs to Josiah’s office. As she had hoped, the books were in their usual place, on his desk. She nodded over her shoulder at Mehuru. “You can wait outside,” she told him.

  Mehuru and the clerk retreated over the threshold. Sarah shut the door on them, and then they heard the key turn firmly in the lock. The clerk looked at Mehuru as if for advice. Mehuru shrugged and waited, as Sarah had ordered him to do.

  Inside the room Sarah seated herself at Josiah’s desk and drew the company books toward her. She did not like the clerk’s handwriting, but his work was adequate. She turned to the other page, the debits, and frowned. There was a massive £5,400 outstanding to Hibbard and Sons, a small banking house, including £2,000 for the lease of the Hot Well and £1,000 for the Queens Square house. Josiah had given them a note of hand of £500 to pay for the furniture and fittings. Sarah thought of the red Chinese dragons and put her hand to her mouth. Josiah had borrowed the first year’s rent for the Hot Well of £900 in addition. He had borrowed £1,000 to equip Rose and £500 to buy cargo. Sarah’s face trembled. There had never been such amounts in the debit column of Cole and Sons in all their years of trading. She did not curse Josiah, did not feel anger. She felt icy cold and nauseous with fear. It would take a miracle voyage to clear such a debt, and profits were falling, not increasing.

  She knew that the debt was a long-term loan, negotiated and managed by Josiah. The first payment was not even due until November, when the Rose was to arrive, with Daisy close behind her; but the books had always been Sarah’s work, and she resented any entry into the debit column. To see them in a state of permanent debt made her as uncomfortable as other women would be with a dress done up wrongly at the back. And this was no small debt. Greater merchants than Cole and Sons had been ruin
ed for less. The Rose alone would not clear it. It would take four, perhaps five, voyages to clear it over at least two years.

  They would have to borrow to repair and refurbish Rose as soon as she arrived, and there was no money to hand. They would not be able to take a large share in her next voyage. “We will be sailing the ship for the benefit of the partners,” Sarah muttered miserably to herself.

  Sarah drew Rose’s account book toward her and ran her eye down the cargo list. The usual goods were listed for sale to the African slave traders—brass cooking pots and kettles; knives; necklaces of paste polished to sparkle like diamonds; special poor-quality cotton known as Negro linen; Negro looking glasses; and Negro guns. Then Sarah looked at the account again. For a moment she thought Josiah had made a mistake and entered the goods twice, for the total cash value was almost double. She checked the amounts of goods against the previous pages. The amounts were almost double, too. Josiah had sent the ship out equipped to double the African trade.

  Sarah frowned slightly and pulled toward her the account book of the Lily, which was their last ship out. No, Lily had sailed as usual. It was just Rose that Josiah had laden with goods and sent out to trade. Sarah scanned through the other totals for the voyage. The accounts had been made up in Josiah’s neat hand; they were easy to read. She had wondered at the time why he had insisted on doing them himself; usually he was very ready to hand over a fistful of cargo manifests to her and let her copy out the totals into the ledger. But this time Josiah had done them, and this time they were different.

  She could see nothing untoward elsewhere in the ledger until she came to the cost of insurance. It was unusually low. Sarah’s finger traced the row across the page to Josiah’s clearly written entry.

  4th September 1788

  For insurance, the ship Rose and her cargo outbound to Africa, and homebound from West Indies to England . . .

  Sarah sat very still, her mind reeling. Josiah had not insured the ship or the cargo for the perilous middle passage, the transport of slaves on the long, stormy, sickly, mutinous journey from Africa across the vast, dangerous sweep of the Atlantic Ocean to the shelter of the West Indies. He had not insured the precious cargo of slaves on their single hazardous voyage.

  She nodded, piecing it all together: Josiah’s difficulty in getting insurance; his complaints about the ruling on the ship Zong, which had made all insurers suspect that slavers simply tipped slaves over the side to claim on their policy; his acceptance of too few partners. Josiah had taken on his new wife and a massive gamble together. He had been so determined to rise in the world, he had been so determined to make a fortune for his family, that he had doubled the number of slaves he was carrying, and he had gone out without insurance. He had not even shared his potential loss among a full complement of partners. He wanted to keep the risk, and the profits, all to himself.

  Sarah pinched her lips together; her face looked gaunt and old. She hated risk, she hated expenditure. The lesson of her childhood had been the amassing of a small fortune by steady, laborious work. She had watched her father make one little voyage after another, ferrying goods up and down the Severn. It was Josiah’s childhood that had been fired by the prospect of great wealth. It had been Josiah’s formative moment when their da brought the French brig the Marguerite into port. Ever since then Josiah had loved the grand risk, the great gamble. Sarah, ten years older, scarred by early poverty and always more conservative, preferred the security of steady earnings.

  A noise from downstairs distracted her. She took her hand from her mouth. She had been biting her fingernails while reading the account books, and her index finger was nibbled bloody and raw.

  “What the devil is going on?” came Josiah’s voice on the stairs.

  “It’s Miss Cole,” the clerk replied. “And she has locked herself into your office.”

  Sarah crossed to the door, turned the key, and opened up. “Come in, Josiah,” she said.

  Josiah was prepared to bluster, but one look at her face silenced him. She closed the door on the waiting clerk and took her seat at Josiah’s desk once more, leaving him standing, looking like the little brother that she used to smack and scold for naughtiness.

  Josiah glanced from her face to the account book emblazoned with the name Rose.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Yes,” Sarah said bleakly. “You have no insurance for the middle passage.”

  “I could not get it, Sarah. Before God, I tried. It was impossible.”

  “You have insured the others?”

  “Sarah, once I was inside the Merchant Venturers, it was easy. We all insure each other, we all take a little of the risk. But Rose sailed before I was invited to join. I went all around Bristol. No one would take me for the middle passage. She was covered from here to Africa, and she is covered for the voyage home.”

  Sarah took a little shuddering breath. “But the risk . . .”

  He shrugged. “What could I do? She had to sail. She was costing me money sitting on the quayside. I thought when she was at sea I might be able to get insurance for her then. But I could not.”

  “Have you heard from her captain?” Sarah asked. The longing in her voice was like a woman asking for her lover. “Is Rose safe?”

  “I have heard nothing since he was off the coast of Africa, loading. But I would expect to hear nothing until he is in Jamaica. He would only send to me if he happened to meet a Bristol ship homeward bound. Compose yourself, Sarah. It may all be very well with him and we hear nothing until he docks.”

  She nodded. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

  “I am sorry,” Josiah apologized awkwardly. “The insurers left me no choice.”

  “And the trade goods? You are carrying so much?”

  Josiah glanced at the door, as if a spy might be hidden outside. “You will not like this, Sarah, but I had to earn capital quickly.”

  She understood him at once. “Oh, God! You are smuggling.”

  “One load,” he said. “One load only. I have ordered them to be packed as tight as they can go, and Captain Smedley is under orders to sell them to the Spanish plantations. He will take no notes of credit; he will take only gold or sugar at the best prices. No one will know, and I will make a small fortune.”

  “You have spent a small fortune,” she answered bitterly. “And that is why we are in this strait.”

  “This one voyage will pull us clear,” he said. “When Rose comes home in November, I shall pay off my debts and we will have cash to spare. It is a gamble, Sarah; but they are familiar odds. Why should we lose a ship now? We have done the voyage a hundred times and never lost a ship yet.” He tapped his hand against the wooden doorframe for luck. Josiah was talking confidently, but he never forgot to touch wood.

  “How much should we make?” Sarah asked. She was reluctantly tempted by the thought of a shipload of gold.

  “Say he carries six hundred slaves . . .”

  “Six hundred!” Sarah exclaimed. “But Rose has room only for three hundred!”

  Josiah gleamed at her. “I told him to pack tight. He will. Say he carries six hundred and lands four hundred and fifty.”

  “A hundred and fifty die during the voyage?”

  “Packed so tight, they are bound to get sick,” Josiah reasoned. “And with so many he will have to ration water and food. Maybe it will not be so bad. Anyway, say he lands four hundred and fifty and sells them for fifty pounds each . . .”

  “Not more?” Sarah demanded.

  “Many of them will be only little children . . . that is £22,500.”

  She opened the account book. “Less £8,732 paid in trade goods.”

  Josiah beamed. “A profit of nearly £14,000.”

  “A fortune,” she said. “It will clear your debt on the house and on the Hot Well. It will pull us clear.”

  Josiah nodded. “I owe a thousand on the house, and I borrowed my deposit of £2,000 on the Hot Well. I have debts for the furniture and carpets for Queens Squa
re, and I have borrowed to start the season at the Hot Well. I borrowed more than a thousand to equip Rose. Altogether I owe more than £5,000, call it £6,000 with interest. I plan to pay it off, all at once, in November when Rose arrives. It is only four months.”

  Sarah nodded. “It all rests on the Rose then. If she comes in safe, we will have made a fortune worthy of a nabob. But if she fails . . .”

  “It is as near a certainty as you can get in the trade,” Josiah said. “I am confident, Sarah. Be confident, too. You are a trader’s daughter and sister to a Bristol merchant. We have to take risks. And we will show such profits!”

  “She is sailing without insurance,” Sarah said heavily. “In the most dangerous seas in the world, overloaded, and bound for an illegal destination. If we lose her, we are ruined, Josiah. Not even the new house is safe. We own nothing outright but our two remaining ships and this warehouse, and we would have to sell the ships.”

  Josiah hammered on the wood of the doorframe again. “I know! I know this, Sarah! Why d’you think I am so desperate to see the Hot Well pay? Why d’you think I am here on the quayside every morning, selling and dealing in barrels of other ships’ cargoes? Why d’you think I draw on every ounce of credit I can get from the Merchant Venturers? I know how close to the wind I am sailing! No one knows better than me! But if I succeed, then we are wealthy and established. It is a risk, Sarah! It is the nature of the trade!”

  Her hand was at her mouth again, biting the cuticle around her fingernail. She tasted her own blood.

  “Don’t, Sarah,” Josiah begged. “I hoped to spare you this.”

  “It is better that I should know,” she said, her voice low. “I was fearing worse.”

  “Well, you know now,” Josiah said.

  “You will not deceive me again?”

  “You will not stand in my way?”

  “Josiah . . .”

  “I will be master in my house. I will run Cole and Sons in my own way, Sarah.”

  “This is all Frances’s fault!” she suddenly burst out. “If you had not married her, you would have been content!”