Respectable Trade

by Gregory, Philippa

  “There is no doubt that you are with child,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Forgive me, Mrs. Cole. This must be a shock.” He hardly knew how to ask the question but opted for blunt honesty. “I suppose you are certain that the child is Mr. Cole’s?”

  She opened her eyes at that and then turned her head away from him to the wall. He was afraid that she was mortally offended. But when she spoke, her voice was level and clear. “There is a doubt,” she said steadily, gazing resolutely at the wall. “Mr. Cole is—” She broke off, partly through embarrassment and partly because she simply did not know the words. “I think it unlikely that Mr. Cole would make a child,” she explained very softly.

  There was a long silence. Stuart took a seat on the side of her bed without permission and took her thin hand in his. She was cold, despite the fire. He did not know if she could tolerate this shock to an already vulnerable system. “Do not be afraid,” he encouraged her. “We will find a way to manage this. Do not be afraid, Mrs. Cole.”

  She said nothing.

  “Mehuru is a friend of mine,” he said quietly. “I honor and respect him. He is a gentleman.” He smiled inwardly at hearing himself repeat the cant of their class. “A gentleman,” he said firmly.

  She shot a quick look at him. “Is it you who has taken him to radical clubs?” she demanded bitterly. “Who persuaded him that he must be free?”

  Stuart bit back an angry reply. This woman was a patient; he must care for her. “What I wanted to say,” he went on, his voice very low, “is that a child of his, even with a white-skinned mother, would be dark-skinned, would be noticeably dark.”

  She looked at him so blankly he thought that perhaps she did not understand, that the seizure of her heart had damaged her comprehension. He feared for a moment that he was making the most enormous and foolish mistake. He had assumed that Mehuru and Frances were lovers. He was assuming that the baby was Mehuru’s child.

  “Any baby of his will show its parentage,” he said carefully. “Any baby of his would be dark-skinned.”

  “Black like him?”

  “They call them mulattoes in the Sugar Islands,” he told her. “They are brown-skinned, very beautiful babies, enchanting children.”

  She blinked. She remembered, it seemed a lifetime away, Miss Honoria telling her that they always preferred mulattoes in the house as servants. She remembered Honoria’s easy gliding over unpalatable facts: “Papa likes to mix the stock.”

  She opened her mouth, her face blank as stone, and laughed, a high, shrieking laugh. Stuart recoiled, but she did not stop. She laughed and laughed as if nothing would stop her.

  “Enough,” Stuart ordered, and his voice cut through her screaming laughter.

  She looked wide-eyed at him. “What shall I do?” she asked simply. “I shall be ruined.”

  “Do you know when it is due?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “It was conceived in May.” Her face softened as she thought of the daffodils in her bed and the darkness of the May night.

  “It will be born in January, then,” he said.

  “It might die,” she said coldly, but her hand crept down to her belly, and she spread her palm over where the little head was lying.

  “Do you want it to die?”

  Her face quivered into life, and her color rose. “No,” she replied with sudden surprising conviction. “It is a love child. It is my child. It is Mehuru’s child. I want it to live. Oh!” She gave a small gasp of desire. “Oh! I want it to live very much!”

  “Then we must be very careful with your health,” Stuart said. “Avoid all excitement and disturbance, and rest as much as you can. For yourself, and also for your baby.”

  She nodded. “But if my heart is too weak . . .”

  “You must rest,” he insisted. “We may get you safely through this, and your little baby, too.”

  She was silent for a moment, and then she turned to him and faced him honestly. “I don’t care for myself,” she said quietly. “I have not been very lucky, you see, Mr. Hadley. Not in my girlhood, and not in my marriage, and not even in my love for Mehuru. Oh! It was not his fault! But the gulf between us was so great that I don’t think we could ever have bridged it. And I have not been good to him.” She paused, thinking. “So if I am ill, and if you ever have to choose . . . You will save the baby, won’t you?”

  Stuart grimaced. “I hope never to make that choice.”

  “But if I am dying and you can save the baby, you will do that—won’t you?”

  “If it is your wish,” he said slowly.

  “It is,” she said. “Mehuru’s baby. Think what a precious child that will be.”

  “Could you sleep now?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “The laudanum has made me drowsy.”

  He held her hand. “I will stay with you until you sleep,” he said gently.

  She opened her eyes for a moment. “Don’t tell Mehuru.”

  He hesitated. “You want to tell him yourself?”

  Her eyelids were drooping. “He has to be free to go,” she whispered, so softly that he could hardly hear her. “He has to be free. I have to set him free.” She glanced at him for a moment, in jealousy. “You want him free,” she said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And you will advise him where he could go, where they can all go, so that Josiah cannot find them and enslave them again?”

  “I will.”

  “Then he must be free to leave now,” she said simply. “He cannot stay with me.”

  When her eyelids fluttered shut, the doctor sat with her a little while, looking at her white face. The bedroom door opened quietly, and Mehuru stood there.

  “You can come in,” Stuart said quietly. “She is sleeping.”

  Mehuru came in as light-footed as a cat. He checked when he saw Frances, the slight rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed slowly and painfully, the waxy white color of her face.

  “She will need someone to watch her,” Stuart told him. “Night and day. Her heart is very weak. She needs to be kept quiet. She must have nothing to trouble her at all.”

  Mehuru remained silent, his eyes never leaving her face.

  “She will need someone to watch over her. I can find a nurse for the first few days, but they are not reliable women. Will Miss Cole care for her?”

  “I will watch her,” Mehuru decided.

  “You cannot—”

  Mehuru shook his head. “It is my right,” he said with gentle dignity. “I will watch her sleep and be here when she wakes.”

  JOSIAH DID NOT COME home that night, nor did he return the next day. Sarah, walking alone down to the old warehouse on the quay in the wintry dawn, with a shawl over her head like a trader’s daughter, found that he had spent the night in their old home and was sitting in his old office, looking out over the dock, waiting for Rose.

  In the following week, he did not come home to the expensive house in Queens Square at all. He chose to stay in his little warehouse, sleeping on a pallet on the floor wrapped in his cloak at night and sitting in his old place at the window overlooking his empty quay from the first gray light of the morning. He spent his day bargaining and dealing in tiny, pitiful amounts of cash on the quayside, while the bigger debts in the account books at Queens Square grew fat like maggots in the dark of the ledgers and the letters from Hibbard and Sons warning that they would prosecute for nonpayment collected, unopened, on his desk.

  He chose to dine in the coffee shop, sitting once again far from the top table. He might have claimed his place and been still tolerated. There were a few men who might have greeted him with sympathy, but Josiah did not try. He no longer wanted to be with them. He sat, neither with his new friends nor with his old, but at a little table on his own, near the window, where he could see his dock and the entrance to the harbor every time he lifted his eyes. He never stopped looking for Rose, and whenever he saw the shape of a travel-weary brig silhouetted against the sparkle of the incoming water, he woul
d rise a little in his seat, drop his napkin on the floor, and start forward. But it was never the Rose. Despite Josiah’s faith in her, in the short, gray days of November she never came.

  In the silent house in Queens Square, Frances lay all day in her room, with the curtains open, looking out at the rectangles of sky in the panes of her window. The thick glass made little ripples and whorls of the gray. She tried to get up once or twice, but she was so breathless and her color became so white that Stuart Hadley insisted that she lie in her bed, or at the most on a day bed in her room.

  The weather was against her. The bright autumn days had slipped away under a blanket of fog. When Elizabeth opened the windows, on Frances’s insistence, the yellow smog crept into the room like the coils of a thick snake. The rich, dirty stink of the river filtered up the backs of the houses and penetrated even the front windows of the square. Elizabeth closed the windows and burned scented candles, trying to cleanse the air. Nothing could rid the city of its choking fumes, and every draft that came into the room was as icy and as dirty as stale smoke from a burning midden.

  Sarah sat with her in the afternoons, but the women were no company for each other. Frances lay quite still, her color waxy and her breath short. Her thickening body was concealed completely by the drapes of her robe and the sheets and blankets on the bed. She had no desire to confide in Sarah, nor in anyone else, and Sarah had nothing to say to her. She had never wanted a sister-in-law; she had tolerated Frances for the sake of the business and because Josiah was determined to have her. Now that Frances lay sick and silent in her bed, Sarah could see no use for her at all. Frances’s connections with the aristocratic families had not brought visitors for the Hot Well spa, and anyway, the water was cooling and dying away to a hopeless trickle. The new Hot Well in Clifton had tapped in to the spring, and already they were pumping out gallons every day to the bright, fashionable houses high on the cliff above. The only visitors to the old Hot Well were those too poor or too weak to move anywhere else. In Josiah’s absence and without the ebullient master of ceremonies, the business was slipping from bad to worse. Every day the spa took less and less money, and still the wages and the lease had to be paid. Only the paupers still came, on their set days. The new Hot Well was too inaccessible for them, too far from the city, and besides, the Merchant Venturers had made sure that there was no agreement to provide them with a free tap in Clifton.

  Sarah brought plain darning with her when she came to sit in Frances’s room and stitched irritably, small, neat, angry stitches, while Frances lay, her eyes half closed, enduring the soft, insistent sound of Sarah’s breathing and the puncturing noise of her needle through linen, sensing her scorn.

  Frances hardly spoke to Mehuru, although he made a point of serving her. He would allow no one else to carry the jug of hot water to her room in the morning or bring her dinner tray to her room in the afternoon. He would put the tray beside her bed and ask her how she felt and if she were better. But she would not speak to him; she turned her face to the wall and would not reply. She would not tell him about the child. She remembered too clearly her desperate need to see Josiah and her panic-stricken flight for her home. She had shown him, in that moment, where her loyalty lay: with her husband. She felt that she had betrayed him, and she was ashamed.

  And she was steeling herself for his disappearance. He had said that he would go, and she had warned him that she could not protect him in the house in Queens Square. She did not want to hold him back. She did not want his child, their child, to hold him back. She had made up her mind to keep the baby a secret from him, so that he would be free to leave.

  “Are you better today, Frances?” Mehuru asked softly, setting her dinner tray on the table at her bedside.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said quietly. But when he left, Elizabeth, coming to straighten the sheets, found that Frances’s pillow was wet with tears.

  “Now what’s the matter?” she would ask kindly. “What’s he said to you to make you cry so?”

  But Frances would only shake her head and say nothing.

  Elizabeth stopped Mehuru on the stairs as she carried Frances’s dinner tray down to the kitchen. “She cries when she sees you,” she said accusingly. “What have you done to her?”

  Mehuru spread his hands. “I? I’ve done nothing! I’ve told her that I love her, and I asked her to come away with me. But ever since that day when she found that they were building the new Hot Well, she has not spoken to me. She’s Josiah’s wife, not mine. She’s telling me that in the cruelest way.”

  “Well, it’s breaking her heart, whatever she’s doing,” Elizabeth observed.

  “What can I do?” Mehuru demanded. “I can’t be her pet, Elizabeth. I am hers till death, but if she turns her face away when I speak to her, what can I do?”

  “You could ask her, instead of standing on your pride,” Elizabeth said sharply. “You could ask her what is wrong, instead of assuming you know everything. Everything! Or you could use the eyes in your head. You have the sight! I should think you could see what ails her.” She stamped down the stairs away from him, cursing the stupidity of men as she went through the door to the kitchen. Mehuru scowled at her disappearing back and then followed her. The others were seated around the kitchen table at their dinner. Mehuru took his place at the head of the table and bowed his head and took a brief moment to thank the earth for the richness of her goods and for the breath to eat them.

  Kbara nodded to him when he raised his head. “We have been thinking,” he said in the liquid, warm accents of their home. “We have been thinking we should go soon. We have delayed for Frances’s illness, but we dare not wait much longer.”

  Mehuru took a piece of bread and broke it. One of the girls set a bowl of soup before him. He nodded. “I have spoken to Stuart, and he knows where you should go,” he said. “He will give you money for the journey, and he has friends who will greet you. Of course, now is the time for you to go—”

  “For ‘us’ to go?” Kbara interrupted quickly. “We do not want to be parted.”

  “We are a family now,” Mary said. “We cannot go and leave you behind, Mehuru.”

  He shook his head. “I am sorry. But I cannot leave Frances like this.”

  There was an instant murmur of dissent. “You must come,” Martha insisted, and the others nodded. “We have agreed that we should all stay together. You must want to be with us, Mehuru.”

  “I love her,” he said simply. “And she is very sick. She could die. I can’t leave her to die alone with that sister of hers. Who will hold her with love? Who will wash her face and body when she is cold? You must see that I cannot go until I know what she wants.”

  “But she will not speak to you,” Elizabeth argued. “You say yourself she loves her husband and not you.”

  Mehuru shook his head. “It does not matter. It is not easy for us to love each other. It never could be easy. It does not matter that she will not speak to me, nor that she is his wife. What matters is that in spite of all these things—all these things which have stood like walls between us—she has loved me, and I love her still. I will not leave her until I have said good-bye.”

  “What if she gets better and sells you?” Kbara demanded unkindly. “She has already agreed a price for you and for John. What if she sells you and John tomorrow? They need the money. They are in debt.”

  Mehuru nodded. “You must go. For the safety of little John, and for all of your sakes. I will wait until she sends me away. When she tells me to leave, I will come and find you. I love you. I love the children as if they were my own, and I love you, my brother, and you, my sisters. But I love Frances as if she were my wife. I cannot run away from her. When she sends me away, I will come and find you. But I will not leave her until she herself tells me to go.”

  “What if we get separated and can never find each other again?” Mary asked.

  “I have to take that risk,” Mehuru replied. “But Stuart knows a safe place for us all. You can go now,
and I will follow you later. We have been through too much; we have survived this far. Surely we will find somewhere to live and some way of living together!”

  Kbara looked unhappy. “I had thought you would come with us. I thought you would put your own people first.”

  “I am torn two ways,” Mehuru admitted. “You are my people. But look at Frances—she is almost certain to die. How can I leave her?”

  “And I’ll stay, too,” Elizabeth said suddenly.

  Mary turned on her in amazement. “You as well?”

  Elizabeth made a small gesture to Mary, under cover of the table. “I have work to do here,” she said with simple dignity. She faced the disapproving faces of the two men. “You would not understand. There is work for me here, woman’s work. I have to stay and see Frances through to the end of her illness.”

  “I don’t think—” Mehuru started.

  “I know,” Elizabeth said with finality.

  Both of the men looked defeated by her certainty. Mehuru was reminded of the small village councils at home, where the men might talk all day, but if one of the senior women came in and said that a thing must be done, then that was the end of the discussion.

  “I should be glad for Frances’s sake,” he said. “I am not allowed to nurse her, and Miss Cole is cold and hard.”

  “I shall care for her until she dies,” Elizabeth declared. “And the moment she is dead and washed and ready for their burial, I shall come after you.” She nodded around the table. “And I will bring Mehuru with me. They will not catch us and keep us just because we stay now.”

  “Very well, then,” Kbara said. He looked at Mehuru, who in the old days would have known with his priest’s sight how long a sick woman might live. “It will not be very long, I don’t think? The doctor said it will not be long. You must be able to see?”

  “I don’t know,” Mehuru said, deliberately choosing blindness rather than foreseeing Frances’s death. “How should I know? I don’t know.”

  CHAPTER

  36