Respectable Trade (32 page)

Josiah opened his arms wide. “At last!” he exclaimed.

Frances rushed across the room and hugged him. His warm breath reeked of alcohol. “I am so glad!”

“I feel as if I have waited a hundred years,” he exclaimed. “At last! And now I am excused dock charges and lighthouse charges, and I can take a share of the fees and fines for others using the port. Now I can see the private plans for the new docks and know where to build a warehouse. Now I am privy to the very heartbeat of the town. At last, Frances! At last!”

Frances hugged him close, his rumpled stock under her cheek.

“And it is thanks to you,” he said in her ear. “Your name, your position, the way you played them, your training of the slaves—Frances, you have made me!”

“I’ve done nothing. . . .”

“You’ve made me!” he insisted. “I knew where I wanted to be but not how to get there. You knew how we could do it, and together we have done it. From now on, my dear, there is nothing that we cannot achieve. I shall buy you a carriage and pair, I shall buy you a riding horse. We can take a house in London for the Season; we can buy a house in the country. I can buy the lease for the Hot Well, and you can work your magic there, too. You are a ruby, my Frances. Your price is above rubies!”

“Josiah!” Frances was smiling, overwhelmed with praise.

“We shall have sons,” he announced grandly. “And leave them a fortune, a fortune apiece! We shall found a family! I shall buy a baronetcy, and we shall have a title! You will not be
humbled by marrying beneath you. I shall rise, Frances, and you will be where you belong again!”

“I did not feel humbled—”

There was no stopping Josiah. “I shall build new ships,” he predicted. “As big as the Liverpool ships, and faster. And the first ship I shall call
Frances,
and the second ship I shall call
Ruby,
and the third ship I shall call
Virtue,
and the fourth ship I shall call
Wife.
”

“Josiah,” Frances said fondly.

He dropped to the sofa. “I shall close my eyes for a moment. And then you shall make me a glass of punch, and we will drink your health.”

“I think you had far better go to bed,” Frances suggested hesitantly.

“Lemons,” Josiah ordered sleepily. “Fresh lemons and lots of my sugar . . .”

Frances moved slowly to the bell, but by the time she put her hand out to ring for Kbara, Josiah was already asleep.

E
VEN
S
ARAH WAS PLEASED
with the news when Frances met her at breakfast. But the promises from Lord Scott threw her into spinsterish anxiety again. “We should not be too hasty to spend,” Sarah fretted anxiously. “Sir Charles’s money is for safe investment, not for risks. We know the risks of the trade. What do we know of London buildings? And Liverpool docks?”

“That is why Lord Scott must advise us,” Frances said patiently. “Sir Charles has chosen us as agents and Lord Scott as his adviser. Sir Charles wants us to invest in schemes for him.”

“We know the trade,” Sarah said stubbornly. “I can find him good investments in Bristol. I can find him voyages that pay five, even ten, percent!”

It was pointless to argue that Lord Scott’s investments might pay 30 or 40 percent. The prospect of huge profits frightened Sarah almost as much as the prospect of insolvency. Frances nodded. “I shall write to Sir Charles for his instructions.”

There was a clatter from the sideboard. One of the slaves, Mary, had dropped a cup.

“Tell her to be more careful,” Sarah said.

“She understands perfectly well,” Frances replied. “You can tell her yourself if you wish.”

“Careful!” Sarah ordered loudly. “You! Be careful!”

The woman dropped a curtsy, as she had been taught to do. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry.”

Frances looked at her. For a brief moment, she did not see her as a careless slave who should be corrected but as a woman, a little younger than Frances herself, uncomfortable in a plain green dress with a white cap on her head, always too cold, always hovering between exhaustion from the constant drudgery of her work and the boredom of repeated, meaningless tasks.

She was a Fulani, one of the nomadic people of Western Africa. If she had been at home, she would have been gathering firewood and roots, beans and berries, watching the cattle, pounding millet in the big stone churn, hauling water from the well. She would have lived in a hut, set in a circle of huts, carelessly made because next year, or the year after, the family would move to new pastures and build again. But inside the humble round hut would be her bed, draped in deep-dyed cotton, gorgeous with color, and a woven palm-leaf basket carrying her clothes. At the foot of the bed would be a hand-carved cradle and a fine-boned, chocolate-colored baby blissfully asleep. It was a life that any English countryman would have recognized—a herdsman’s life. It was a life that followed a seasonal round of moving across a broad plain, as light and as free as a herd of antelope. It was a life that turned in tune with the earth, that followed the rains, that chimed with the seasons. It was as alien to slavery as a silver-winged flight of cattle egrets to a molting hen in a coop.

“Shall we keep that one or the other?” Sarah inquired.

Frances was shocked from her reverie. “We’ll sell them both,” she decided. “We’ll keep Elizabeth. She is in the kitchen now. She is Yoruban like Cicero and some of the others. I think it is easier if they can speak amongst themselves.”

“But we’ll only keep three,” Sarah said. “A lad and two women.”

“Yes,” Frances said. “They will be sold in summer. As soon as they can speak properly and follow orders.” She turned and
smiled at the woman. “Tell the others to go to the dining room,” she said, and pointed to the door. “I will come and teach them.”

The slaves were waiting for her when she entered, seated in silence around the table. Frances was alone in the room with them. John Bates had been dismissed. They no longer needed watching with a whip; they were thought to be safe. They no longer needed teaching domestic tasks; they had learned how to run a house.

Indeed they were safe. They no longer spoke of walking back to their home, they no longer tested their imprisonment. Mehuru had not even checked the strength of the bars on the skylight window. They had ceased plotting for freedom. They were too overworked and weary to think of anything more than their survival. And also, fatally, they had lost their courage. They did not plot to escape, because they feared the sprawling streets more than the drudgery of the house. They were very far from happiness, but they felt safer staying in slavery than running away into the unknown.

Mehuru was tired and drawn. He woke at five every morning, and by six he had emptied the great bathtubs, brought coal for the fires and the kitchen range, cleaned the grates and emptied out the ashes, laid the fires afresh, and taken out garbage for the cook. He was given no breakfast until the cook was ready, and she made a policy of feeding the slaves last, with the leavings of the family food. He was cold when he woke in the morning and cold while he worked all the day. Not even the heavy labor of house and yard warmed him through. He was losing weight, though his muscles were leaner and harder than they had ever been before. The women were overworked, too, and even the little children were set to sweep the floors and tidy the rooms. One of the children had a dry, nagging cough that kept them all awake.

“Very soon,” Frances said clearly and slowly, “we will have the feast of Easter. This is the day when we celebrate the death and the rising from death of Our Lord. He is our god.”

She looked around the table. The slaves looked blankly back at her. She directed her speech to Mehuru. “We worship the Lord Jesus,” she said. “He was born on earth to save us from our sins.”

“A man?”

“He was a man. He lived many years ago. He died for our sins, and after he died, he went to heaven. He lives now and cares for us all.”

There was a silence as Mehuru took in the words and tested them against his own certainties. “Where is heaven?”

Frances glowed with pleasure at his interest. “Heaven is not a place on earth,” she explained. “It is the best of everything. The best of places. If you are good,” she said carefully, “you go to heaven when you die.”

“Another place?”

She nodded. “Far away.”

“How is this?” Mehuru asked. He searched for the simple words to express the complexity of his concept. “The best is home.”

Frances shook her head. “Your home is not important. Not compared to the love of God. Your home, your family, nothing matters as much as obeying Jesus and going to heaven.”

Mehuru paused, thinking. If Frances thought that the love of your home and the company of your family mattered less than a man who had died long ago, then she was more of a fool than he had imagined. If she thought that the best of all places was exile, then no wonder she could take slaves from the heart of their country and expect them to sing and dance on the voyage. “Do you all think this?” he asked incredulously. “All white people?”

Frances nodded. “And I hope you will come to think it, too. Then you will be free from the burden of sin and death.”

“I will be free?” Mehuru asked, tasting the word.

Frances saw her mistake. “You will still be a slave,” she corrected him. “But you will be free of sin.”

“A free slave?”

“Yes, I mean . . . in a way . . . yes.”

Mehuru looked at her, and she saw a sudden springing laughter in his eyes. Despite himself he smiled, and then he laughed. “Oh, Frances!”

Frances found she was smiling in return. In the face of his pagan wrongheadedness, it was almost impossible to explain as she should explain. “I am serious,” she protested. “This is serious.”

Mehuru’s rich chuckle was infectious. The others, not understanding all that was being said but hearing the triumph of Mehuru’s common sense over Frances’s garbled theology, smiled, too. Mehuru reached forward and put his hand over Frances’s hand as it lay on the table.

“First make me free,” he said, still smiling.

L
ORD
S
COTT SENT A BOX
of daffodils from the woods at Whiteleaze as an Easter gift for Frances. She arranged them in a large crystal bowl in the hall, and they scented the stairs and the whole of the house with their clean, green fragrance. Mehuru brought the water in a large enamel jug.

“These smell sweet,” he said.

Frances hung over the bowl, inhaling the perfume. “They smell of spring,” she said dreamily. “When I was a little girl, we always had a big bowl of these flowers on the breakfast table on Easter morning. I used to get up early and pick them for my mother. They smell like hope, like being young and hopeful.”

“They are free flowers?”

Frances hesitated. “You mean wildflowers? Yes. That’s the great beauty of them. They grow in floods along riverbanks and under the trees, and every year there are always more.”

He smiled a little, watching her face. It was the first time he had seen her enjoying a sensual experience. He was oddly touched to see how rapt she was in the scent of the flowers. Her face above them was golden with their reflected color. She had
a smudge of yellow pollen on her cheek. He had a sudden insight into her joy at the free richness of the flowers: that every year there were always more. The flowers were a complete contradiction to the house, to the company, to the trade itself, which depended on scarcity and hunger. The earth was a generous giver of wealth, of this river of gold. It was the trade that was mistaken, the trade that was unnatural.

“Always more?” he asked, and had the reward of seeing her dark, dreamy eyes turned toward him.

“Yes,” she replied. “Isn’t that wonderful? When they grow from the ground, they are just leaves, and then slowly you see the thicker leaves, fat little buds, and then suddenly the flowers have burst through and the ground is alive and bobbing with gold. And the wild cherry trees have thick white blossoms that bob in the wind and rain down white petals, and the birds start singing and singing, and the cuckoo calls.”

“Mmm,” he said. Many of the words she used were unfamiliar, but he could understand her tone of delight. Suddenly she looked years younger. The grayness had gone from her face; the daffodil glow was all around her. He put his hand to her cheek to brush away the pollen.

At his touch she froze, almost as if she were afraid, her face still turned toward him. His black finger lightly touched the smudge of yellow, and he showed her the dust on his fingertip. Her color rose. He thought she looked young and desirable, and he wondered if she knew it.

Frances stepped back. “You may go, Cicero,” she said.

E
ASTER
D
AY ITSELF WAS
a disappointment. Josiah and Sarah had no plans other than to eat goose instead of mutton at four o’clock and leave the company account books closed for the one day. There was no tradition in the Cole family of foolish sports like rolling colored boiled eggs down hills, or egg hunts, or even a walk in the country.