Respectable Trade (18 page)

“Young gentlemen?” Frances hazarded, and was rewarded with another small smile.

“I have nothing to do all day except watch the sugar grow
and torment the house girls,” Honoria said. “Mama spends all day in bed. She’s delicate, she’s dreadfully delicate. She has Nanny—my old black nanny—running up and down for her every half hour with one thing or another, sending dishes back to the cook, and complaining and carrying on.”

Frances nodded, trying to imagine the large white house amid a sea of lush green forest, with three discontented whites, drinking rum or nursing hypochondria in the shade, while outside, two hundred exiles worked under the merciless sun, whipped if they went slow, mourning for their homes and their families.

Brown removed the soup and loaded the table with dishes: cutlets, a haunch of beef, a venison pie, and sweetbreads.

“You Bristol merchants spread a good table!” Sir Charles exclaimed. “I always enjoy a visit to your house, Miss Cole.”

Miss Cole smiled her acid smile and asked for how long the Fairleys would be visiting Bristol. Sir Charles outlined an itinerary designed to net Miss Honoria a husband. They were to go shopping for clothes in Bath, attend the pump room, visit in the country during summer, and then stay with friends for the London Season in the winter.

“We hope to be setting sail again by next spring,” he concluded. “Unless Honoria here surprises me with other plans!”

Honoria turned her eyes down to the table and tried to blush. “Oh, Papa!”

“And who runs your place while you are away?” Josiah inquired. “D’you have a manager you can trust?”

“An overseer.” Sir Charles nodded. “He’s a man from Jamestown, working his way up. He’s a brute, but I can trust him with a shipful. He knows how to handle them, and he’ll give no quarter. I’ll come home, and there will be some sad faces in the slave quarters and some new mounds in the graveyard, but there will have been no trouble.”

“Surely on Clearwater you never have trouble?” Miss Cole remarked.

Sir Charles shook his head as his plate was taken away. “I never sleep without a gun at my bedside,” he said. “You never know where you are with them, Miss Cole. You have to remember the numbers you are facing; all the time you have to be wary. Remember that there are only three of us—Lady Fairley, Honoria, and myself—and there are two hundred of them, and more if you count the visitors in the slave cabins that I don’t know about and the runaways hiding in the forests around. I have to keep the upper hand night and day. They’re always waiting—waiting for their chance. Who next, eh? Where next?”

He nodded at Frances. “If you have the management of them, you had best remember my warning, Mrs. Cole. They are killers. They are all born killers. Never let your guard down.”

“Our slave driver watches the lessons, and he has a whip,” Miss Cole said. “And they are manacled.”

“Keep them that way!” Sir Charles recommended. “Keep them that way until their spirit is broken, until their very will to live is under your feet. They have to long for death. If they are attached to their lives, then they want to better themselves—that’s when your trouble starts.”

Miss Cole looked thoughtful. “We have perhaps already been too kind. . . .”

Sir Charles shook his head. Brown put a large portion of syllabub before him and poured cream. “Break their spirit and keep them low,” he advised. “Separate the bucks from the women, keep them underfed, watch them losing weight. Keep their minds on pleasing you for little rewards, and if you see the least sign of unwillingness, beat them near to death—or beat one to death if need be. The others will note it, I assure you.”

Miss Cole smiled at him. “You are so kind,” she said. “I will consider it very carefully.”

He beamed back. “A sensible woman,” he proclaimed with pleasure. “Josiah, you are to be congratulated with helpers such as these. Beauty and brains. You will go far, I know it!”

Josiah smiled and raised his glass. Frances pushed aside her
untouched dessert. She had a sour taste in her mouth; the conversation was making her nauseous.

The men talked of the trade while the fruit and sweetmeats were brought in. Honoria nibbled a sugarplum, her pale brown eyes blank with boredom. Frances sat very still, her hands in her lap, her face a mask of polite interest, willing herself to be deaf to them both.

When Josiah nodded to her, she rose from the table and led the way for the ladies to sit at the fireside. It was a pathetic parody of the rituals of gentry life. Frances’s face revealed nothing; she conducted Honoria to a place at the fireside as if Lady Scott herself always dined and sat in the same room.

“We’ll go to my office,” Josiah announced. “We’ll take a glass there and join you later, ladies.”

They went unsteadily from the room, having already drunk the best part of four bottles. Honoria, Sarah, and Frances made thin conversation at the fireside and ordered tea. The men did not return. The conversation dwindled and died. Honoria openly watched the hands of the clock on the mantelpiece. When it chimed nine, she asked if the maid might tell her papa that she wished to go home.

Sir Charles appeared in the doorway, woefully drunk. “So sorry, my dear,” he said, speaking with meticulous care. “I shall send you home in a chair, don’t you know. A chair. Brown has gone out to fetch you one, and she shall see you home. I’ll see you in the morning, my dear. In the morning. Josiah and I are setting the world to rights and finishing a very pretty port. A very pretty port indeed. I shall take my supper here.”

Honoria nodded and let Frances help her with her cape.

“I shall go to bed,” Frances said quietly to Josiah.

“Do,” he said pleasantly. “We will make a night of it. No need to wait up.”

The men retreated to Josiah’s study again, broached another bottle, and ordered some supper. By midnight they were thoroughly drunk.

“Let’s have one of the slave girls brought in,” Sir Charles suggested. “Have a little sport.”

Josiah peered at him owlishly. “We’re not at Clearwater now,” he observed. “There are the servants to think of, and the ladies.”

Sir Charles laughed his rich, happy laugh. “Servants be damned. And the ladies know when to look the other way. Lady Fairley knows when she’d better look aside, you can depend on it.”

“I cannot,” Josiah protested. “I don’t keep the keys, and anyway Mrs. Cole would not like it.”

“She need never know,” Sir Charles said. “Go on, Josiah. Don’t be such a damned Methodist.”

Josiah was drunk but still reluctant. “It’s not the done thing in England,” he said. “Assure you, my dear fellow. Let’s go out and get a woman if you wish—but slaves in your own home . . . not done.”

“I know what the done thing is!” Sir Charles was starting to get unpleasant. “I’m a damned baronet—a baronet! I should know the done thing, I hope. I’m good enough to buy your slaves at a handsome profit to you and good enough to sell you sugar on the quayside at knock-down prices. I know the done thing then, don’t I?”

“I just meant . . .”

“And here am I, offering to take a share in one of your ships, one thousand pounds’ worth, I remind you, Josiah! I should have thought I know the done thing!”

“No offense, no offense,” Josiah said quickly.

“Well, none taken,” Sir Charles replied, his mood swinging back into sunshine. “None taken. But let’s have a girl, Josiah! Let’s stir the stock.”

“They’re in the cellar,” Josiah said. “And my wife has charge of all the household keys.”

“Send her a message. Tell her we want to see the slaves!” Sir Charles had the characteristic stubbornness of the drunkard.
“Come on, man! You can’t be under the cat’s paw in your first year of marriage! Who rules the roost here?”

“I do!” Josiah said, stung.

“Then get us a damned woman!”

Josiah touched the bell rope, and Brown came wearily to see what he wanted now. “Tell Mrs. Cole we want to see one of the slave women,” Josiah ordered. “Ask her to send me the keys.”

Brown curtsied and went out.

Sir Charles smiled in anticipation and poured himself another glass of port. “I assure you,” he said, beaming, “once you get the taste for it, you are spoiled for anything else. At home I take them whenever I fancy.”

Josiah hid his distaste. “Do you not take African diseases, Sir Charles? African illness?”

The man nodded. “Aye, and pass them on, too! But I’m grown very reckless, you know. There is something about being master, complete master, of so many. There is something which stirs you, to know that every woman has to do your bidding and that the others can do nothing but watch.” He blew out a plume of cigar smoke with a shaky little laugh. “There is nothing like it. This empire of ours is a glorious thing, Josiah. It makes us Englishmen like gods.”

Josiah nodded, took a small sip of port, and swallowed down his distaste. There was a tap on the door, and Frances stood in the doorway, wearing a loose gown and with her cap hastily pinned on her hair. “May I speak with you, husband?” she said.

Josiah rose and went to the door, half closing it to shield their conversation from the guest. “What are you doing downstairs dressed like this?”

Frances glanced at her wrapper, the usual morning dress for ladies in their homes. “I had gone to bed,” she said reasonably.

“You come before a guest half dressed?”

Frances gave a little laugh and then, looking into Josiah’s
face, saw that he was serious. “Excuse me, husband,” she said carefully. “I had no idea that you would object.”

The gulf between his world and hers suddenly opened before them. Josiah knew that on all matters of etiquette she was bound to be in the right, but he was an ambitious man, anxious about his respectability. “I do object,” he said, knowing himself to be in the wrong, knowing himself to sound foolish. “I do.”

Frances bowed her head, wary of his drunken irritability. “Shall I go and change my dress?” she asked.

“No. Tell me now what it is that you wanted.”

“Brown brought me a message.” Frances had been distracted by his disapproval; she tried to regain the initiative. “I came to ask you . . . It seems so strange at this time of night . . . May I ask what you want to see a woman for?”

“No, you may not, madam! Sir Charles wishes to inspect the slaves. I sent for the keys, which should be in your safekeeping. There was no need for you to come downstairs at all and no call for you to question me.”

“It is just for him to see a woman?” Frances broke off. “To look at her? It is not to . . . er . . . to trouble her?”

Josiah flushed dark red. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Cole! You amaze me with your boldness! Please give me the keys and go to your chamber. I do not want Sir Charles to see you like this nor hear such slander spoken against him!”

Frances stood her ground, scarlet with embarrassment. “I cannot give you the keys,” she maintained, her voice shaking slightly. “I beg of you, sir, not to ask me. I am supposed to be teaching them; they are in my care. You are speaking of my pupils. I cannot permit it. I have to have an undertaking from you.”

Josiah came out into the hall and shut the door behind him. He was trembling with drunken anger; his spittle flew as he hissed at her. “You are shameless! Your insinuations are shameless! This is an honored guest! A man who has done many years of very profitable business with me and my house. If he
wishes to look at one of our slaves, then of course we will allow it. Why not? Why on earth not? Go and fetch one of the women, Mrs. Cole!”

Frances backed away from him until she reached the newel post at the foot of the stairs. She had the keys in her hand behind her back. “I must ask for your assurance . . .” she insisted weakly.

“My assurance?” he repeated, ready to explode with anger.

She collapsed before his bluster, her breath coming short, her hand to her thudding heart. “Very well. But you will just look at her, won’t you?”

“Fetch one of the slave women, Mrs. Cole,” he said angrily. “You should have stayed where you were and sent the keys to me by Brown. I am much displeased. Since you insist on coming down, you can fetch the woman yourself, and then go to bed!”

Frances’s face was white as she turned from him and went slowly, very slowly, down the stairs to the kitchen.

Brown and John Bates were sitting on either side of the kitchen range, waiting for the family to go to their beds so that they could lock up. At her step they rose to their feet.

“I am sorry to trouble you,” she said. Her lips were cold and stiff; she found it hard to speak. “Bates, could you come with me to the cellar? Your master wishes to see one of the women slaves.”

Bates thrust his hands into the armholes of his jacket and straightened his stock. Frances went to the cellar door and turned her key in the lock.

The cellar below her was shadowy. As she went down the steps, she heard the chink of the chains. One or two of the slaves had been sleeping, but as they heard the door open, they stirred nervously and woke. Mehuru rose slowly to his feet, looking from John Bates to Frances, trying to read their faces.

She did not meet his eyes. She looked around the cellar in the shadowy, unreliable light of the lantern and then pointed to
the biggest woman, the one who seemed the most robust. “Her,” she said.

John stepped forward and unchained the woman from her handcuffs. She flinched away from him as he came toward her and shot a look at Frances—a look that was both a question and an appeal. Frances’s face gave nothing away; she was like a cold stone statue.

“What does she want of me?” the woman demanded of Mehuru.

He shook his head, his eyes on Frances. He could sense her powerlessness. He could feel her sense of defeat and something more—a deep sense of shame.

“I don’t know,” he said softly. “Have courage, sister.”

The woman trembled and would have fallen, but John Bates grabbed her around the waist and pushed her toward the steps. Her knees buckled beneath her, and she crouched at the foot of the steps. “They will eat me,” she whispered. “Look at her face. She has come for me, and she will eat me.”

Mehuru glanced swiftly toward Frances and saw her horrid narrow lips bitten even thinner. “No,” he said certainly. “It’s not her choice.”