Respectable Trade

by Gregory, Philippa

  “Why, Frances!”

  “Do you know of a new Hot Well?” she demanded, the words tumbling over each other. “Do you know of a new Hot Well in Clifton?”

  “What?” he asked. He took in her white face and her disheveled appearance. “Frances, what is the matter? Sit down, let me ring for Elizabeth. You look ill.”

  She nearly screamed at him. “Josiah! For God’s sake answer me! Do you know that there is a new Hot Well being built in Clifton?”

  Her meaning slowly sank in. “A new Hot Well?” he asked. “A new Hot Well? In Clifton? That is not possible. There is no spring in Clifton. It is on limestone. It is dry.”

  She dropped into a chair and wrenched at the ribbons on her bonnet, stripped off her gloves. “I drove up to Clifton,” she recounted, her voice low. It struck Josiah she was like a woman who has seen a fatal accident, who has to set the scene, who has to describe the surroundings.

  “I saw a new building and beside it some winding gear. I was curious so I walked toward it.”

  “Yes,” he said. He could feel himself growing cold, as if the sun were not streaming in through the window, as if there were not a good, cheerful fire in the grate. “Yes. Go on.”

  “Mehuru spoke to the foreman and he brought me the plans of the building,” she went on. “It is to be an assembly room, a big ballroom and promenading room, and bathhouses. They are drilling down through the cliff above our Hot Well. They are going to take the water from our spring. Do you hear me? They are taking the water from our Hot Well. They are even planning to pump the water to new houses to be built in Clifton. It will be a great spa resort, with a terrace of houses each with their own hot mineral baths.” She licked her dry lips and swallowed down the lump in her throat. “He showed me the plan,” she said helplessly. “And the foundations are dug and the walls going up.”

  “This is not possible,” Josiah said weakly. “There must be some dreadful mistake. I shall go up there at once. D’you still have the carriage out? Cicero shall drive me up there at once. It is not possible, Frances. You must have made a mistake.”

  She shook her head. “I saw the winding gear. I saw the winding gear where they are drilling. The foreman told me they have gone down two hundred feet, but they know they will find hot water, because they are drilling down to the Hot Well.”

  Josiah refused to believe it. “It cannot be. How could such a thing happen without the permission of the corporation? Without the consent of the Merchant Venturers? It must be a mistake.”

  “It has the consent of the Merchant Venturers!” Frances cried out with sudden passion. “Don’t you see! Don’t you see, Josiah? It is their land! They are the landlords. That is why they are buying land in Clifton! Why they own the freehold for Clifton and all the Downs up to the very cliff edge! They own everything! And they are developing Clifton as a new spa. They have cheated you, Josiah. They have cheated you of everything, and now you own a spa with no water, and you have signed a ten-year lease!”

  He stared at her openmouthed. “Who said this?” he cried angrily. “This is a calumny! They are my friends. It is a mistake!”

  “Who advised you to buy into the Hot Well and gave you sight of the account books and sponsored you at the Merchant Venturers’ dinner?” Frances hissed at him, her teeth bared. Her hair was falling down, her face ashen and bony.

  Josiah hated her at that moment. “Waring,” he answered. “My friend Stephen Waring.”

  She sank back in the chair as if he had knifed her in the heart. “He is the landlord of the new Hot Well.” She could hardly speak through her cold lips. She could hardly breathe. “He and Mr. James, the old tenant of the Hot Well. They have sold you a pup, Josiah. They have taken your money, and now they will take your springwater, too.”

  Josiah staggered and felt behind him for his chair. His knees buckled, and he dropped into it. “It is not possible,” he whispered, his face gray. “I have borrowed and borrowed against the profits I thought to make. I paid two thousand pounds for the purchase alone. And I have to find near a thousand pounds a year for ten years for the lease, and the interest on the borrowing, and the wages and the furnishings.”

  Frances moved her head restlessly, her eyes closed.

  Josiah looked at his desk, put his hand on the papers before him, stroked the page of his ship’s accounts. “I am ruined,” he said disbelievingly. “They took me in and ruined me.”

  Frances put her hand to her throat, pulling at her collar, gasping for breath. Her face was even whiter than before. “Josiah,” she gasped. She could hardly catch her breath to say his name.

  “I am ruined,” he said again. “They have ruined me.”

  “Josiah . . .” she began, and then she gave a sharp cry of pain.

  Mehuru, who had been loitering in the hall, could not stop himself. He burst into the room in time to see Frances pitch forward out of her chair. He caught her up, but her head had hit the fender, and she was bleeding from her temple. Her lips were blue; she was not breathing.

  “Fetch the doctor!” Mehuru shouted. “Fetch Stuart Hadley!” He gathered her to him, trying to warm her. Her neck lolled as limp as a broken doll. Not knowing what to do, Mehuru rocked her, holding her tight. “Frances!” he cried urgently. “Frances!”

  She was not breathing. Mehuru sprang to his feet.

  “I am ruined,” Josiah repeated quietly. He had not moved from his desk.

  Mehuru threw a quick, contemptuous look at him and then ran for the hall. “Kbara!” he yelled.

  Kbara came running up from the kitchen. “Take a horse from the carriage shafts and ride and find Stuart Hadley the doctor!” Mehuru commanded. “Tell him Frances is ill, she is like a dead woman. Go at once!”

  Kbara nodded and dashed out of the front door.

  Mehuru turned with Frances still in his arms and strode toward the stairs. Sarah Cole appeared in the parlor door. “What on earth is happening?” she demanded.

  “Fetch the women,” Mehuru threw over his shoulder. “Frances is ill.”

  Sarah looked incredulously at him, carrying Frances in his arms, and then ran up the stairs behind him. “Put her down!” she ordered. “At once.”

  Mehuru strode up the stairs without even hearing her. He kicked open the door to Frances’s bedroom and laid her gently down on the bed. He took the high, neat-buttoned neck of her driving gown and ripped it open, sending buttons spinning across the room.

  “How dare you!” Sarah exclaimed.

  He caught Frances up and shook her gently. “Breathe!” he urged her, passionately low-voiced in his own language. “Breathe! What is there to stop breathing for? Breathe, you little fool!”

  Sarah recoiled from his passion. Elizabeth dodged around her and came into the room with a tumbler of brandy in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. She dashed the water in Frances’s blue face, and then Mehuru held Frances’s limp shoulders while Elizabeth dribbled brandy into her mouth.

  Frances choked, then struggled against their hold and sat up whooping and gasping for air.

  Mehuru nodded and ripped her dress further, pulling the wet cloth away from her skin. Elizabeth snatched up a warm comforter from the foot of the bed, and Mehuru put it around Frances’s naked shoulders and held her tight.

  “Don’t try to speak,” he said urgently. “Stuart will be here in a moment. Just breathe, Frances. Breathe!”

  The dreadful blue was fading from her lips though her skin was still waxy white.

  “Get a warming pan,” Mehuru directed Elizabeth. “She is too cold.”

  Elizabeth pushed past Sarah in the doorway and shouted down the stairs in a string of incomprehensible Yoruban. There was an answering shout from the kitchen, and one of the boys came running upstairs with a tinderbox. He dodged under Sarah’s elbow and knelt to light the fire. Elizabeth came back into the room and started to remove Frances’s skirt.

  “Cicero, leave the room,” Sarah demanded, coming forward, trying to reclaim some order.


  He gave her a look that threw her back on her heels, and he raised Frances as if she were a little girl. He picked up a pair of scissors from her dressing table and cut the laces of her stays. Elizabeth pulled the skirt away and turned back the covers of the bed. Mehuru lifted Frances, wrapped in the comforter and wearing only her shift, into the bed as Martha came into the room, pushing around Sarah’s back to thrust the warming pan under the covers at the foot of the bed and take the chill off the sheets.

  The fire blazed into life as the kindling caught and then the little pieces of coal. Frances opened her eyes and managed a weak smile at Mehuru. He grasped her hand and crushed it to his mouth. “Little fool,” he said. “Lie still. And don’t speak.”

  She closed her eyes again. “I hurt,” she whispered in a small voice. She put her hand between the swell of her breasts. “In here,” she said. “My heart.”

  “Shall I open the window?” Elizabeth asked Mehuru.

  He glanced at Frances’s pinched face. “No,” he said, fearful of the cold English air. “Let us keep her warm until Stuart comes.”

  He turned around. “Now, go,” he said to the boy. “Martha—out.” He was suddenly aware of Sarah, standing like a stone in the middle of the room, taking in everything, his easy air of command, the instinctive obedience of the others, and his loving intimacy with Frances. He did not hesitate for a moment. “Please leave, Miss Cole,” he said. “Frances needs to rest.”

  “What do you think you are doing?” she demanded, and her voice was like a blade.

  He stepped forward and swept her, physically swept her, from the room. “I said she needs to rest,” he repeated as soon as the door was shut behind them both and Frances could not hear. “Her health is the most important thing. You can speak with me later.”

  “I shall have you whipped,” she promised. “What do you think—”

  “Your brother is sick, too,” he interrupted her. “You should go to him.”

  She checked, half disbelieving, half alarmed, but he turned from her and went back into Frances’s bedroom. “I have noted this,” she said threateningly to the closing door. “My brother shall know of this!” She stood irresolute for a moment, but then her anxiety for Josiah overcame her and she ran down the stairs to his room.

  He was sitting at his desk, flicking the pages of the big account book forward, then flicking them back again. Something in that careless, almost childlike movement arrested Sarah on the threshold.

  “Josiah?”

  When he turned to look at her, the years had fallen away from his face and he had the open innocent gaze of a child. “They have gulled me, Sarah,” he said. His voice was small, like that of a little boy shocked by some hurt. “They took me in and played me along, and they have gulled me for all of our money.”

  She could feel herself chilled all through. “How so?” she asked very steadily. “How so, Josiah? What have they done to you?”

  “They sold me the Hot Well and a ten-year lease, nine thousand pounds over ten years and two thousand pounds down,” Josiah said.

  Sarah closed her eyes, briefly repelled by the large capital sums. “But you saw the books. It will pay,” she said. “We knew this, we knew we could manage it. When the Rose comes in . . .”

  Josiah nodded. “It looked like safe investment. And I borrowed money to buy it.”

  “But it is a good investment,” Sarah repeated. “You saw the books. It will run at a profit. You would not take a risk. Not with those sums!”

  Josiah cleared his throat. “It would have done,” he said. “And I was out daily to inspect the business. You know how often I have been down there, Sarah. You know I hired an architect to draw up plans—I was not careless. I was not careless with our business.”

  Sarah nodded. “I know, brother. I know.”

  “Then they sued me, to make me keep the tap open,” he continued softly. “I could not think why they did that. . . . But now it seems . . . It seems to me—” He broke off. “If I complain of them, there will be no one on my side. The people of the city, the corporation, the company—everyone thinks that I am in the wrong. The Merchant Venturers have the interests of the city at heart and I am—what did they call me?—an upstart.”

  Sarah nodded silently.

  “They have destroyed my reputation,” Josiah went on in a thin little voice. “No one will defend me now. They made me look like a mountebank. No one will speak up for me now.”

  “But the Hot Well will still earn money—” Sarah started.

  “I did not think to look up,” Josiah said inconsequently. “On the cliff top high above my Hot Well . . .”

  “Why?” Sarah prompted urgently. “Why should you have looked up?”

  “Because they are drilling down,” he said simply. His face was ghastly. “They are drilling down into my spring. They are building new assembly rooms, new bathhouses. They are piping the water away from my spa. And they are calling it the new Hot Well. They have not even chosen another name. They are advertising to everyone that my Hot Well is the old one. Soon it will be dry. They are calling theirs the new Hot Well.”

  Sarah hissed like a snake through her gritted teeth. “The new Hot Well? Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “Frances has seen the building. The foreman showed her the plans.”

  Sarah strode over to the window and gazed out into the backyard, seeing nothing. She turned back to him. “Can we do nothing?” she demanded. “Have you looked at your lease? Do you not own the rights to the water? Surely one cannot buy a spa without buying the water?”

  He shook his head, still numb with shock. “I bought the buildings and the furnishings,” he said. “I did not know. I did not think. I was too foolish to foresee this. I did not think to buy the water. I am a trader, I sail my ships on the sea—I do not buy the sea. Water is always there.”

  “Who has done this?” Sarah cried passionately. “Who has done this to you? Who owns the new buildings?”

  He could not meet her eyes. “Stephen Waring,” he answered dully. “He will have done well from us, first and last. He has plucked me like a little pigeon.”

  She did not reproach him. Her shoulders went back as if to strain against a weight. “We still have the ships,” she said. “We still have the ships, and we still have the slaves and the warehouse. We are not ruined yet, brother.”

  He riffled lightly through the pages of the account book. “We will have to see,” he said idly. “But I do not know what will be left when all the debts on this are paid. If I shut down the Hot Well and sack all the staff and sell the furnishings . . . I do not know, Sarah. I used to know to a penny, didn’t I? When you kept the books and the trade was good. But I have such interest charges to meet, and they will not defer payment. . . . I have quite lost track, Sarah.”

  He rose on unsteady legs. “I think I’ll go now.” He looked at her vaguely. “Rose could come in any day, you know. Come in full of gold and smelling of rum. I like to be on the quayside when my ship comes in. She is late already; perhaps she will come in today. On the next tide. Or the tide after that.”

  Sarah put a hand out to stop him, but he went past her quietly, as if he had not seen her, as if he did not know she was there. He took up his hat from the table in the hall. He did not wear a coat; he went out like a laboring man in his shirtsleeves into the gray twilight and the sharp evening air.

  “When Rose comes in, we will be laughing about this,” he said uncertainly. “We will be rich.”

  Only when he was gone and the front door shut behind him did Sarah sink into the chair, gaze blankly at the empty hearth, and let herself wonder if they were ruined indeed.

  CHAPTER

  35

  SARAH HEARD THE HAMMERING on the front door, but she did not turn her head. The noise of it came from a long way away. She heard Stuart Hadley’s pleasant voice, but she did not go out to greet him. She let Elizabeth show him upstairs.

  He went into Frances’s bedroom and sent Mehuru outside while he exami
ned her. She had regained a little color, but she was hunched with pain. The cut on her forehead had dried, and a small bluish bruise was spreading over her temple.

  She answered his questions in a strained little voice, hardly able to catch her breath, and she could not move readily for the pain. He thought that her weak heart had taken a seizure from the shock and her damaged lungs were in spasm also. He gave her a large dose of laudanum and watched the color slowly come back into her cheeks as the drug worked its way into her body.

  Stuart Hadley had never before seen her without her tightly laced stays. For the first time, he was able to see the outlines of her body, only half hidden by the sheet and blankets. He asked her permission and pressed gently on the round of her belly. It was solid and hard. For a moment he feared a growth of some sort, and then a smile came to his face.

  “How long have you been with child?”

  The look she gave him was shocked. “Child?” she repeated in her thin, rasping voice.

  “I think so,” he said. He pressed her belly again. The firmness was unmistakable. “Yes.”

  Her face gave her away, the burning flush of color rising from her neck to her forehead. She closed her eyes and turned her head on the pillow away from his gaze. “Oh, my God,” she murmured softly.

  “Did you not realize?”

  Numbly, she shook her head. “I have not been unwell for these past six months,” she said. “But I thought . . . I thought . . . I have never been regular . . .”

  He nodded. Few ladies of her class understood about conception. Virgins on marriage, they were rarely told either by mothers or husbands about pregnancy or childbirth. Even if they lived in the country, they were shielded from the cycle of birth and death of farm animals, and Frances had seen the countryside only through the rectory windows. She was not the first lady he had attended who had been advanced in a pregnancy and not known.

  “I had been so ill,” she said. “With that cold. I thought that it had just stopped. And I am not grown much fatter.”