Respectable Trade (26 page)

Sarah at once knocked on the wooden banister, and Frances saw Josiah tap his foot involuntarily on the wooden tread of the stair.

“We had to buy the Queens Square house or throw away the deposit,” he reminded her. “And I had promised a new house to Frances in the marriage settlement.”

“This house was our father’s pride,” Sarah observed.

Josiah turned on the stair and smiled at her. “It has been a good house for us,” he agreed. “We have made our start from here. But now we must go upward in the world.” He stopped himself and laughed. “Here! I must go upward to my bedchamber and wash before dinner. I am famished. I did not stop to eat at noon, I have been so busy this day.”

“Why?” Sarah asked, following him up the stairs. “Have you found partners for
Daisy
?”

“Sir Charles is in for his share, of a thousand pounds, of course, and I have other partners to hand,” Josiah said happily. “Money breeds money. Now it is known that Sir Charles has bought a share, the others want to come in, too. And when we are living in Queens Square, it will be even easier. Have you had a good day?”

“We have done badly,” Sarah told him. “Frances has lost one of the new slaves.”

Josiah looked quickly at Frances and saw her stricken face. “One here or there does not matter,” he said kindly. “Sarah, you must not reproach her. We are bound to lose two or three from a batch. It does not matter.”

He came up the last few steps, took Frances’s hand, and led her into her room.

“I am sorry,” Frances said. “I do not think I should have the care of them. It was a woman. It was the woman . . .” She wanted to put the blame on Sir Charles, but she could not bring herself to speak of what he had done. “It was one of the women. She ate earth, and I let her be put in a bridle, and now she is dead.”

Josiah seated her gently before her looking glass and stood behind her, his hands on her shoulders. “It does not matter,” he said gently. “I promise you, my dear, do not fret. One here or there makes no difference. This is an experiment. If we do well and sell at a profit, we will repeat it on a grander scale. If they all die tomorrow, then we will have learned that it cannot be
done. Don’t fret, my dear, you are doing the best you can, and it is a difficult business, breaking slaves.”

He loosened the pins in the back of her head, and Frances’s coils of hair started to tumble down around her shoulders.

Frances felt lulled, as if she were a little girl again with her mother plaiting her hair. “I do not know that I can teach them, Josiah. It is not like teaching children. They are so different from us, and the man who understands the most, Mehuru—” She broke off. “He is not like a slave,” she said inadequately. “I cannot think of him as a slave. I keep thinking of him as a civilized man.”

Josiah took up her silver brushes and gently brushed her hair. “This is nonsense,” he said gently. “You are overtired. Just do your best, my dear; it is nothing more than an experiment. We have to try, and we have to take chances. I cannot make the life for us which we desire without taking chances. We have to learn to take risks. I am a venturer, Frances! Not a shopkeeper!”

He swept the hair back from her forehead and from her temples where her pulse throbbed. It was a soothing, gentle caress, the pressure of the soft bristles on her head and then the clean sweep.

“It makes me uneasy,” Frances confessed. “To think of them all in my charge.”

“It is the nature of the trade,” Josiah comforted her. “You must not think of them as people, or you will get distressed. They are commodities, my dear, they are goods, and English merchants have been trading in them for more than a hundred years.”

“So long? I did not know it had been so long! Why, how many slaves have we taken?”

“Oh, my dear! Who can say? English ships have grown bigger every year. The trade has doubled and quadrupled.”

Frances saw in the mirror that her face was shocked. “Hundreds of slaves? Thousands?” she asked.

Josiah shrugged. “More. Many many more. Millions. It is an enormous business—three million slaves taken by the English in this century alone, and all the other European countries are slavers, too.” He smoothed her hair away from her face. “I see you are surprised,” he said. “It is a mighty trade. It is the very backbone of Britain; there is not a port that does not deal in it. There is no family in the country that does not feel the benefit. We all profit from it. It is the greatest trade that the world has ever known. It crosses and recrosses the Atlantic, it makes massive fortunes. We
all
profit.”

“I did not know,” Frances said. She thought of the light, easy conversation at her uncle’s dining table, of her father’s gently reproachful sermons against the sin of laziness, or gluttony. No one had ever questioned the ethics of the slave trade in her hearing. No one had even thought about it. She had heard nothing but complaints of radicals and abolitionists who wanted to threaten the prosperity of Britain, ruin the colonies, and overpay idle workingmen. “But it must have destroyed Africa,” she exclaimed suddenly. “Taking so many people, and all of them young, and most of them men. It must have emptied villages, it must have ravaged whole countries.”

She tried to imagine what it would be like in England if three million young men and women had been stolen away in only a hundred years. The country would be devastated. There would be no wealth, no farms, no industries, no roads. It would be a blow to the very heart of a nation. And the absence of three million people would mean that children were not conceived, that babies were not born. In the next generation, seven million would be missing, in the next fifteen. There would be a gap, a gulf into which poverty and despair would flood. Inventions would not be made, industries would not develop, farms would lie idle, the whole fabric of society and order would collapse.

Josiah nodded. “Africa is our farm, my dear. The farm produces the stock, and we ship the stock to where it is needed.
Africa is a slave farm to serve the civilized world. It is a most elegant and efficient system.”

Frances leaned forward and let her hair hide her face from Josiah’s easy smile. She felt dizzy with the view of the world suddenly opened before her. She could not imagine how she had known none of this, how successfully it had been gilded over. And now her livelihood depended on its successful continuance. “It must be wrong,” she said. But she spoke without conviction. “It cannot be right for us to farm a whole continent for our own use. And they are not stock, Josiah. The men and women I am teaching, they are not stock. They are people, and they feel as we do—at least I think they do.”

“Who knows?” Josiah asked comfortably. “When you have taught them to speak and civilized them, perhaps you will teach them Christian feelings, too, Frances. That would be a fine thing to do. I am sure you are doing well, far better than most ladies could.”

Josiah brushed softly and steadily, and then his hand came under her hair and caressed the back of her neck. Frances sat still and let him do what he wished. She thought of the thousands of deaths he must have caused and the heartbreak in those hundred, thousand, million homes. She looked up and met his kind face in the mirror.

“I fear it is not right, Josiah,” she said.

He smiled at her. “You’re looking very pretty,” he said gently. “I love your hair let down.”

J
OSIAH AWOKE
F
RANCES EARLY
. He came into her room himself and drew back the window curtain and the half curtain at the head of her bed. The fire had been lit in skillful silence by the scullery maid before dawn, and the room was warm.

“Up and awake, Mrs. Cole!” Josiah cried joyfully. “I have a carriage ordered for us at eight. I am taking you to see your new house today!”

Frances sat up in bed and laughed at his eagerness. “But the Warings will still be packing their goods!”

“I shall throw them out the back door when you enter the front!” Josiah exclaimed.

There was a tap on the door, and Brown stood hesitantly in the doorway with Frances’s tray in her hands.

“I’ll take that!” Josiah said, bustling forward. He put the tray on Frances’s knees. “Now, eat up, wife, and meet me downstairs in an hour. No later, mind!”

Frances smiled at him. “I shall be prompt,” she promised.

Josiah bent to kiss her forehead. Obeying an impulse, Frances lifted her face, and their lips met. Josiah’s kiss was very gentle. Frances felt tender toward him; he was so exuberant, like a little boy about to open a gift. In Lady Scott’s eyes, he might be nothing more than a vulgar trader, but Frances acknowledged that he was her husband and that her future wealth and happiness
depended on him. And besides, she was coming to like him.

“An hour,” Josiah said ebulliently, and went from her room.

T
HE CARRIAGE WAS WAITING
on the cobbled quay outside. Frances was dressed in her best dark blue velvet gown and pelisse with matching blue hat and muff.

“You look very fine,” Josiah said. He did not know that it was an old gown, carefully unpicked and resewn with the bald patches of the velvet folded inside where they would not show. “You look very grand. You look like a proper lady.”

Frances winced at that. “I should hope so indeed.”

Josiah heard the slight reproof in her voice. “Of course, of course,” he said hastily. “Shall we go?”

Sarah was at the top of the stairs. Frances hesitated. “Are you not coming, Sarah?”

“There are things that have to be done to ensure that the
Daisy
sails on time. Cargo to be ordered and checked, papers to be made ready. All the permits have to be entered. I shall spend this morning at work.”

Frances wavered a little at the reproach, but Josiah was cheery. “Excellent!” he exclaimed. “And do not think that we are gallivanting, sister. There are many ways to make money in this town, and one of them is to be seen to be prosperous. This move will be the making of us, I swear it!”

“And will she teach the slaves this afternoon?” Sarah asked rudely.

“Yes, yes,” Josiah said. He opened the door, led Frances to the coach, and handed her in. “And tell Brown that the slaves can start to help packing. I want us to move in as soon as possible. They can start today.”

Frances settled herself in the carriage and smiled half apologetically at the dark house and Sarah’s irritable glare. Josiah swung himself into the seat beside her as the carriage jolted on the
cobbles and lurched forward. “Sour as lemons,” Josiah said cheerfully under his breath. “Now, Mrs. Cole, you shall see something!”

T
HE HOUSE WAS INDEED
furnished in Chinese fashion. Frances had to close her eyes when she first saw the best parlor, which was gloriously ornamented with plasterwork that sprawled magnificently from the top third of the walls to the central rose in the middle of the ceiling, rich with dragons, cherubs, swirling leaves, wild vines, and the ultimate vulgarity of long-beaked ho-ho birds. The walls were lined with plush red silk—an eccentric choice given that the carpet, all twining vine leaves and fruit, was blue, and the curtains were green.

“Very grand,” Josiah said with satisfaction. “Very fashionable. Colorful! I doubt there is another house like it in Bristol!”

“I doubt it, too,” Frances said. She stepped from the room and peeped into the second parlor opposite, which was slightly smaller and plainer. “And this is a very pretty room.”

“You won’t sit here,” Josiah ruled. “The best room is surely the morning room at the front of the house? This back room will be my office, and tradesmen can come and see me and enter from the back door. We shall have two doors now, Mrs. Cole! No more workingmen tapping at your front door! No more tradesmen marching through your hall.”

Frances smiled. Despite the excesses of the plasterwork and the exuberant color schemes, it was a fine house, built in simple rectangle shapes: four rooms on the ground floor, four above, four above them, and then the attic rooms fitted into the roof. The kitchen and domestic rooms were crammed into the rear courtyard; the cellar stored wine and goods. As they stood in the hall, they heard a crash and muffled oath from above as one of the Warings’ servants dropped something.

“We will need to take on more staff,” Frances thought aloud. “There is too much to be done for Brown and the scullery maid in a big house like this.”

“Aye,” Josiah said with satisfaction. “We will use the slaves for now. And we will have to buy furniture to fill the place up a bit. Shall we buy all Chinese goods, my dear? I have a man in mind who imports very good copies from India. I swear you would not tell the difference.”

Frances managed to smile. “I think I would prefer some simple English furniture.”

“But Chinoiserie is all the rage!” Josiah expostulated. “It is the very thing! And with the house already so designed!”

Frances gave him a small sideways glance.

“Is it a little ornate for your taste?” he asked. He was immediately unsure. “I thought it very fine. Is it not any good?”