Respectable Trade (17 page)

The others nodded. “For what?”

“To serve them,” Mehuru suggested. “If we ever had a slave from far away, we would teach him our tongue.”

The younger woman shrank back against the wall in distaste. “To serve them!” she exclaimed. “To cook their food and clean their houses and touch them, and endure their smell and the coldness of their eyes! I could not do it!”

Mehuru looked at her, and his face held a world of sorrow. “I think they will teach us to do all that, and worse,” he said.

Then he turned from the circle around the candle and squatted down with his face to the damp wall of the cave, rested his head against the cold stone and let himself long for the heat and the scents of Africa.

J
OSIAH SENT A MESSAGE
from the coffeehouse that he would be bringing guests home for dinner, a gentleman and his daughter. Brown brought the news to Frances as she was lying down on her bed, resting after her lesson with the second batch of slaves. Frances pinned on her cap and hurried down to the parlor.

“We will dine at five,” Miss Cole said. “I have already sent out to the pastry cook’s for some puddings and ordered Cook to make a special dinner. Since you were resting again, I thought I should make the preparations. I did not wish to disturb you. Are you ill again? Is it your cough this time, or your headache?”

“Neither,” Frances said. She felt well for the first time since coming to the little house by the foul-smelling river. “I feel very well.”

Sarah raised her thin eyebrows. “I am glad to hear it. You may take your tea now, in the parlor if you wish,” she offered. “I have no time for it this afternoon. I am going to see Cook again and then to my room to change.”

“I shall change, too,” Frances said obediently as she followed Miss Cole out of the parlor and up the narrow stairs to the second-floor bedrooms. “Who are our guests? Did Josiah say?”

“Sir Charles Fairley and his daughter,” Sarah said. “I met Sir Charles when he visited England before, but I do not know
Miss Fairley. He is a very important man in Jamaica and a good customer to us. We buy our sugar from him, and he pays a top price for slaves. His demand for slaves is almost beyond our ability to meet.”

“He has such large estates?” Frances asked.

“His use is very rapid,” Sarah answered carefully. “He gets through slaves quicker than any other planter.”

Frances nodded. She was starting to recognize the euphemisms of the trade.

“There is no need to wear anything too fine for dinner,” Sarah said waspishly as she reached the door of her room. “Our guests know me and they know my brother as respectable traders, not gentry. I have only one evening dress in dark silk—I shall be wearing that. If you have anything simple, it would be appropriate.”

“I have a sack dress in gray silk,” Frances said carefully.

“That sounds very suitable,” Sarah replied.

Frances nodded, went into her bedroom, and shut the door. She saw her own smile in her dressing-table mirror. She looked pretty and girlish and naughty. “I will
try
to be as ugly as a boot,” she said to the mirror. “To keep you in countenance, sister dear.”

F
RANCES AND
M
ISS
C
OLE WAITED
in the parlor for their guests, sitting on either side of a large fire. Miss Cole was resplendent in an evening dress of dark blue silk with a small half train. Frances had chosen a gown of gray watered silk with gray silk gloves. It was high-waisted, with a long, sweeping skirt and a loose panel at the back like a train. The sleeves were white silk trimmed with gray velvet, very fine. Brown had spent an hour with the hot curling tongs trying to make Frances’s hair into ringlets that were supposed to cling around her face but had settled in the end for a soft wave rather than the tight corkscrew curls dictated by fashion. Against the sheen of the silk, Frances’s skin was warm cream. Miss Cole eyed her without pleasure.

“I think we should sew while we wait for our guests,” she said.

Frances took a cambric handkerchief from her workbox and started hemming it with small, even stitches. The two women sat in silence. Then they heard Josiah open the door and the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Frances put her work away and rose to greet the visitors.

Sir Charles entered the room first, his daughter behind him. He was a large, red-faced man, his broad chest and stomach bursting against his brilliantly embroidered waistcoat. Dark knee breeches encased fat thighs; his high, white stock was wrapped tightly around multiple chins; his blue coat was lined with sable, which made him even more bulky.

“So this is the bride!” he said jovially to Frances after he had greeted Miss Cole with a kiss on her hand.

Frances dropped a small curtsy and let him clasp her hand in his two moist palms and then kiss it.

“Oh, Papa!” Miss Fairley exclaimed languidly in a strange, rich accent.

“Here, Miss Cole, this is my daughter, Honoria, that you’ve heard me tell so much about, in England at last!” he said to Sarah. He turned to Frances. “I am honored to present my daughter to you, Mrs. Cole.”

Frances curtsied to the girl. She was pale and slim, wearing a silk gown of icy white, which drained her mousy hair and pale face of what little color she had. She had a shawl of silver tissue around her shoulders and large pearls at her neck and in her ears and on her wrists. She had a second shawl of warm white wool trailing from her right shoulder, as if she feared they would not have heated the room.

“Honored,” she said coolly. Her rich accent was oddly at variance with her strictly conventional dress.

Josiah Cole came in behind his guests. “Sit down, Sir Charles,” he said. “What will you have to drink? Dinner will be served shortly.”

“I’ll take a glass of rum and water if you have any of my own
excellent barrels in the house.” The fat man winked at Frances. “That’s the worst of the Sugar Island life, Mrs. Cole. You get a taste for all of it. The sunshine, the drinks, the company. You should come on a visit. We’d make you very welcome, wouldn’t we, Honoria?”

The girl gave the smallest of nods. “There’s very little society for ladies,” she said, her voice lilting with the rhythm of the Sugar Island speech.

“But the weather!” Sir Charles took his glass from Brown. “I tell you, I have not been warm since I set sail.”

“It has been very damp,” Miss Cole observed. “I sometimes think December is the worst month of the year, always cold and often wet.”

“I am spoiled, Miss Cole, and that is the truth. If I came in midsummer, I should still feel a chill.”

Frances sipped a glass of ratafia. The scullery maid hovered in the parlor doorway and whispered to Brown, who stepped forward and whispered in turn to Josiah Cole.

“Dinner is served,” he said. “You must take us as you find us, Sir Charles. You know we are simple merchant people. We dine on the table, here in the parlor. Will you sit here, sir? And Miss Honoria here?”

They took their places. Frances, who had dined all her life at a table that never seated fewer than twelve, tried not to feel snubbed by Honoria’s rude stare around the cramped room.

Brown took up a position at the door and collected the dishes from the scullery maid, who could be distantly heard pounding up the stairs, carrying the hot and heavy platters. Josiah looked down the table to Frances with an uneasy glance, and she felt a sudden pity for his discomfort. He knew it was not being done correctly, but not how it should be done. Frances smiled at him, and his face lightened at once.

“Are you well, Mrs. Cole?” he asked. “Have you had an enjoyable day?”

“I am very comfortable,” Frances assured him. She saw
Sarah’s glance of surprise at her determinedly bright tone. “I am very comfortable indeed.”

“I am sorry not to be served by your slaves,” Sir Charles observed. “Josiah has been telling me that you have a dozen of them in training.”

“They will not be ready for some months,” Josiah said. “My wife is teaching them to speak.”

Honoria turned on Frances a look of pale disdain. “
You
are breaking slaves?”

Frances nodded defensively. “Yes.”

“It’s a man’s job at home,” Sir Charles said abruptly. “On my plantation the old hands train the new ones. This is a man’s job that you have given to your wife, Cole.”

“She has the help of a driver, and besides they are no trouble. We have only two men, and the rest are women and small children.”

Brown circled the table serving soup from a large tureen. Frances recognized the best silver brought down from the storeroom for the occasion.

“It’s not the wit that’s required but the whip!” Sir Charles exclaimed. He laughed, a deep, satisfied laugh. “Did you hear that? Not the wit but the whip!”

Miss Cole tittered agreeably; Josiah smiled.

“They’re like children,” Sir Charles explained. “They can remember nothing unless it is beaten into them. And their spirits are surly and defiant. On my plantation we have a beating in the stocks every day. In the fields they are whipped as they work, but at least once a day I have one whipped in the stocks. And I have the blacksmith brand them at the forge—oh! time after time—and sometimes slit their tongues for insolence. I wear myself out trying to devise punishments which will serve as an example to the others and yet not injure them so badly that they are spoiled for work or resale.”

“So stupid,” Miss Honoria said languidly in her high, sweet voice. “They are so stupid.”

“What’s your death rate now?” Josiah asked.

Sir Charles shrugged. “I suppose of our two hundred we lose about fifty or sixty a year. They hardly breed at all. We lose women in childbirth all the time, and the babies are often born dead. When I hear of men preaching that the trade in slaves should stop, I wonder how they would have me run my plantation? How else can sugar be grown?”

Josiah nodded and signed to Brown to pour more wine. “It’s ignorance,” he said. “And fashion. It’ll pass. It’s a few young prating clergymen and a couple of members of Parliament trying to make their career. Methodists and radicals! It will blow over. It’s nothing more than a few grubby radicals stirring up bad feelings and signing petitions. The leaders of this country know the profits that the trade brings, and they like to take sugar in their tea. We won’t be driven by the mob.

“Look at Bristol! Before the trade it was a little town, nothing to what it is now. The fortunes made in this town are a monument to slavery. And Liverpool has been built on the back of the Atlantic trade. Every day they build another great house or another town hall. People know where their interests lie. This is a milksop agitation; it will pass.”

“I hope so,” Sir Charles said heavily. “I cannot tell you how alarmed we get when we hear the fools agitating and complaining. What of this Wilberforce and his bill?”

Josiah scowled and poured himself another glass of wine. “It comes before Parliament this May,” he said. “But we are all prepared. Our men will call for more evidence and adjourn the reading; it can be adjourned forever they tell me. The great men of the trade in Liverpool and London and here are all ready to act in concert, and their pockets are well lined. I don’t think that a handful of clergymen and some ignorant workingmen can stand against them. There’s not one member of the houses of Parliament that does not have an investment to protect. They will hardly vote themselves out of business.”

“I pay two members a pension direct,” Sir Charles said. “To
guard my interests. But it makes me so angry when I hear of these radicals. They know nothing about the trade. They know nothing about our difficulties. Every visitor we’ve ever had to Clearwater Plantation has gone away convinced that we are working the land in the only way possible. You can’t get white laborers, and all the Indians are dead now—not one of them lasted beyond the first few years of our arrival. How are we supposed to manage? And what would the slaves be doing in Africa? Hunting each other and burning each other alive! We have saved them from the most foul paganism and taught them work and discipline. Why, I could tell you some tales. . . .”

“Papa!” Honoria murmured.

“I beg your pardon,” Sir Charles said. “My daughter is delicate in her tastes,” he explained to Frances. “I should not mention these things before her.”

“I do hate niggers,” Honoria said quietly to Frances as the men talked across the table. “I wonder you can bear to teach them. I won’t have them near me.”

“Do you have no black servants?”

“Most of them are half-castes,” Honoria replied. “Mulattoes. We prefer to use them in the house.”

“Half-caste?” Frances repeated the unfamiliar word.

“Yes,” Honoria said calmly. “Papa likes to mix the stock.”

Frances heard the genteel euphemism, but she would not examine what it might mean. “And what is it like?” she asked. “Living on the plantation?”

Honoria glanced at her father and at Josiah and Sarah, who were listening only to him. “Dreadfully slow,” she complained. “There’s hardly any society unless we go into Jamestown, and even then there are only two balls a year. We’ve come home for me to buy some gowns and”—she gave a small smile—“make acquaintances.”