Respectable Trade (33 page)

“Do you receive no company?” Frances asked.

“No,” Josiah said uncertainly. “We always spent Easter in the house on the quay. And no one called on us there.”

“Did you not visit your friends or your family?”

“Our family live in Wales,” Sarah explained. “And when we moved to Bristol, we lost touch with them. They were a colliery family, in the coal mines of South Wales. My father did well to leave the valley; he never wanted to go back.”

“So what shall we do today?” Frances demanded.

Brother and sister looked equally bereft of ideas. They exchanged an uncomfortable look.

“I assumed you would go to church, to take communion,” Sarah volunteered. “I shall attend chapel.” Both women looked to Josiah. Before his marriage he had always gone with Sarah to the Unitarian chapel. The cold, clean walls and the simple creed suited many of the men in the trade. There was no pretension in the chapel. A good, straight sermon and a few bawled hymns. Frances, daughter of a Church of England rector, regarded the chapels with some disdain as the haunt of enthusiasm, evangelism, and laboring people. She had tried unsuccessfully to conceal this from Sarah, while Sarah had made little secret that she saw the richness and beauty of St. Mary’s Church on the Redclift as being halfway to idolatry and papacy.

Josiah, caught between the convictions of the two women, sometimes went to church twice on a Sunday, accompanying Sarah in the morning and Frances in the evening. But he found, as Frances had shrewdly predicted, that the ambitious men in the Venturers attended the cathedral on the green, north of the river.

“Of course I will go to the cathedral,” Frances said. “But shall we take a holiday for the rest of the day? We could drive out into the country?”

“I would not drive on a Sunday,” Sarah said piously. “You must do as you please. I shall go to chapel, eat my dinner, then
read my Bible, and then eat my supper and go to bed. I see no reason for excessive expenditure on a day which is set aside for thought and prayer.”

Frances closed her lips on a retort.

“The servants take a holiday after they have served us dinner,” Josiah intervened. “We have a cold supper so that Cook can take the evening off. They have their own Easter dinner.”

“Brown and the scullery maid used to go home to see their mothers,” Sarah said. “But since they are leaving tomorrow anyway, I expect they will eat at our expense tonight.”

Frances nodded. When she had been a girl, the Whiteleaze rectory was full of company for the Easter season. Her father and mother would invite friends from London to stay for a week. They would walk in the hills around Bath and pick armfuls of wild daffodils. They would sketch the trees, just thickening and budding into leaf. If the Whiteleaze family were at home, they would ride out, far into the countryside, taking advantage of the warmer days and the lighter evenings. Even after her father’s death and the gradual, slow chilling of her happiness, Frances still found her spirits lifting when the sky was light when she woke in the morning and dinner was served in the yellow glow of sunset.

“I should have planned some treat for us,” Josiah said unhappily. “Next year I shall do it better. I am sorry, Frances, it is not a season we have paid much attention to, in the past.”

“My father did not believe in it,” Sarah stated. “He said the Lord’s ascension should be celebrated with thoughtfulness and gravity.”

“Well,
my
father was a rector, and I suppose he should know!” Frances snapped. “Next year I shall plan a party.”

Sarah raised her thin eyebrows and said nothing more.

T
HE DAY WAS AS WANTING
of joy as she had feared. Josiah attended the cathedral with Frances, and Frances wore her new
bonnet from Mrs. Waring’s milliner. The Easter Day service was longer than usual, and the worshippers, leaving the gloom of the building with relief, gathered on the green outside in the sunshine. Frances was pleased to be greeted by all the major figures of Bristol society and saw that Josiah was at ease with the important men.

That little elation did not last long, and when the goose had been cleared from the table and the puddings and sweetmeats were gone, the afternoon seemed very long and dark and dreary. The sun had vanished, and it was starting to rain, a steady, misty drizzle that created a premature twilight, as cold and dark as winter. Sarah settled herself before the parlor fire with a book of sermons and seemed well content. Josiah dozed on the sofa. Frances sat on a chair facing them both, feeling as lonely as she had ever felt in her life.

Very faintly, from the very floorboards beneath her feet, came a soft, insistent thudding and then the half-heard snatch of song. Frances glanced across at her husband. He was fast asleep. Behind her book of sermons, Sarah’s head was nodding. Frances got to her feet and went to the door.

With the parlor door open a crack, she could hear better. There was a patter of drumming, like rain, coming from the kitchen. Frances went into the hall and then pushed the green baize door that led down the corridor to the kitchen. As soon as she stepped through, the sound hit her like a dark, fast-moving wave.

It was a
thud-thud-thud
of drumming, and above the deeper rhythm a patter, an exciting patter, of a contrapuntal rhythm. The two sounds chased each other, like laughter, like play, and Frances felt her feet tapping to the insistent, dancy rhythm of the noise. A voice started a song, a deep, confident voice—Mehuru—singing in Yoruban, a song about love, a song about the wantonness of young women and the pleasure there is in satisfying them. It was a song about magic—the magic of a woman’s hair and the dark, sideways glance of her smile. And
at every verse break, at every line break, there was a chorus of assent, in half a dozen tuned voices.

Frances crept slowly down the corridor and peeped around the half-open door, like a little child trying to watch a party.

Mehuru was seated at the kitchen table with an upturned wooden washtub and a couple of wooden spoons before him, a hastily improvised bass drum. He had thrown the spoons aside—their hardness gave no resonance—and he was drumming barehanded, using his strong fingers to call out a deep, echoing rhythm, almost a tune, from the hollow bell of the wood. Kbara, beside him, standing barefoot on the stone floor and swaying in time, was pounding on a brass saucepan, sometimes using a metal fork, sometimes the flat of his hand. Mehuru was singing, his head thrown back, his eyes half shut to hear the music, his wide, sensual lips smiling, and his whole face happy, in a way that Frances had never seen before.

It was a transformation. He was changed from a powerful, brooding, unhappy man into a man at ease with himself, singing from the depths of his belly, smiling at the joy of the rhythm and the excitement of the pounding noise.

And the women! Frances craned forward. The women were like the chorus in a Greek play. They were grouped together, swaying and singing, drawn by Mehuru, entranced by him. Every now and then, one of them would step forward and dance toward him, for herself alone and also completely at his bidding and for him. When one of them stepped forward, Kbara’s treble drum would pound invitingly, the tone sharper and sharper as the fork rattled on the brass, piercing notes raining around her. Mehuru would speed his drumming, faster and faster, as if he were calling to her to dance and dance and dance for him. And the woman—Mary or Martha or Elizabeth—bunched up her skirt in her hand to show her bare feet and lovely black legs and pounded the floor with feet moving so fast that they were a blur to Frances, peeping around the door. Bent over, haunches moving, the women hammered into the floor,
their feet making a new beat, a new quick, erotic rhythm of their own, and then they would drop the hem of their skirts and sway back to the others, laughing and disclaiming praise, and Mehuru and Kbara would shout applause and resume the slower pace of their song.

Frances stared disbelievingly at this explosion of strangeness into her English kitchen. She looked around for the other servants and then saw that the heady potency of the drumming had caught them, too. As she watched, Cook, who had waged a campaign of bullying against the slaves since their arrival, was dragged forward by two of the little children, and she, too, held her skirt from her feet and jiggled from one foot to another. And for her, too, Kbara and Mehuru sped the music, called encouragement, pounded the rhythm.

Cook flushed rosily with a sudden sense of her own desirability. “No, no!” she said, pulling her hands from the grasp of the two little boys. “My dancing days are over!”

Mehuru shook his head and pounded his drum. “You are a fine woman!” he called. “A fine woman!”

Cook beamed at him. “You ask Brown to dance a jig for you!” she said. “She had an Irish mother!”

Mehuru rose to his feet and hefted the washtub under his arm. He snatched up a wooden spoon and walked toward Brown, smiling, drumming as he advanced. Frances thought that there was not a woman in the world who could have resisted him.

“I can’t dance,” Brown protested, but she looked up at Mehuru as if he were a god, and she could not stop her color rising.

He said nothing; he let his music call her. Brown’s feet were tapping. “I can’t,” she repeated. “I can’t dance like you do.”

Mehuru stepped back, his long, slim feet drumming on the floor in time to the music, his body swaying. Brown rose to her feet, stood before him, and followed his movements like a thin, white mirror of his potent image. He shuffled and stamped, and
she followed him, he drifted to the right, and she moved as he did. He turned and strode forward, and she was behind him. Then he whirled and hammered on the drum and called out to her, and Brown hitched her skirts up in both hands and let her feet pound into the rhythm of an Irish jig, as wild a dance as could ever be—the deep, irresistible drumming of Africa with the lightning, heel-tapping, toe-stamping dance of a Celt.

Mehuru laughed aloud at Brown’s sudden abandon and pounded the drum in her praise as he turned to the other women. Cook rose up from her seat again, the scullery maid danced behind her, the slaves clapped rhythmically, swayed and sang in a compelling, unending melody, in an incomprehensible promising language.

And Frances, watching this sudden explosion of joy and sensuality and passion on the stone floor of her cold, empty house, sprang from her hiding place and whirled away from them, from the rich, seductive drumming and song. She dashed to the hall and then up the stairs to her chilly bedroom, with loud, unladylike sobs choked back until she could slam her door and fling herself facedown on her bed and cry out against her coldness and her loneliness. As she pushed her face into her pillow to weep without restraint for the first time in her life, she acknowledged at last her vision of Mehuru as the only man in the world who could save her from the icy death-in-life of ladylike English behavior, and she knew that for the first time in her life she had fallen, irretrievably and completely, in love.

N
EXT MORNING
M
EHURU TAPPED
on the parlor door. Frances was sitting at the round walnut table, another chair placed opposite her. A bowl of hyacinths stood in the center of the table, their waxy white flowers scenting the room. Mehuru saw in one quick glance that this was not a lesson, when the table was swept bare, but he could not read Frances’s set face. She was very pale, and there was a bluish shade under her eyes, as if she had lain sleepless. He wondered if she were ill. A second child had taken the nagging cough; they were all finding the slow turn to warm weather arduous and long. Maybe even white people, whose skin was suited to sodden days of mist and endless gray afternoons, dreaded the long darkness and the pale, disappointing coolness of the midday sun?

“Please sit down,” Frances said. Her voice quavered slightly.

Mehuru drew back the chair and sat before her, his hands clasped lightly on the table before him.

“I realize . . . I realize . . .” Frances started, and then broke off. “I have taught you for months, and I hardly know you at all,” she faltered. “I have taught you to speak and never asked you anything about yourself, about your life before you came here.”

Mehuru’s face was an ebony mask, carefully held from expression. He could not follow Frances’s train of thought. He did not know she had heard his drumming. He did not know
that for the first time and painfully, Frances was feeling emotions stir and warm into life.

“You want to know about me?”

“Will you tell me about your home, Cicero?”

He flashed a look at her at once. “Cicero is an English slave,” he said precisely. “Cicero was born here, in this room. You named him then.”

She bit at her upper lip, sucking it down so that her face was momentarily distorted and ugly. “Very well. Just for now I will call you Mehuru. Where were you born, Mehuru? And where did you live? And what did you do?”

He hesitated, thinking to refuse this sudden, surprising curiosity. Then he relented. He could not resist the pleasure of talking of his home, even to Frances. “I was born in the city of Oyo,” he said. “My mother was a companion to the mother of the king, my father was one of the
eso
—” He broke off, searching for the English word. “I don’t know what you call it.”