Respectable Trade (37 page)

“How much?” Mehuru asked.

“Ha’penny a bunch.”

Her Bristol accent was so strong that he could hardly understand
her. “Where do you come from?” he asked curiously.

She made an impertinent face at him. “Closer to home than you,” she said.

He smiled at her. “I don’t want a bunch. How much for all?”

Startled, she stared at Mehuru. “All of them?”

“Yes, quickly, I have to be home.”

“I’ve never sold all of them at once.”

“I want the tray, too, to carry them.”

She stared at him openmouthed. Mehuru had to laugh. She was as slow and as stupid as any peasant in a village in his own country. “No one has ever bought them all before,” she said.

“I see,” Mehuru said patiently. “But
I
want to buy them all. How much would they all be?”

“Are you from London?” she asked, as if only that could explain his eccentricity.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mehuru said. “Look. When you get home in the evening and you have had a good day and sold nearly all, how much do you have?”

“Half a crown,” she answered promptly. “But I never have.”

“Well, I give you three shillings for all the flowers, and you can come with me to my home, carrying the tray, and then I will take the flowers into the house,” Mehuru said patiently. “Then you get some more flowers to sell, or you take the rest of the day off.”

She blinked at the concept. “If you gave me four shillings, I could buy a good dinner,” she said hopefully.

“Why not?” Mehuru declared, generous with Josiah’s hard-won cash. “But now!”

“All right,” she suddenly decided.

Mehuru set off at a brisk pace, the flower seller trotting behind him.

“Is it for a lady?” she asked slyly. “A lady that loves flowers?”

“Yes,” Mehuru said without turning his head.

“And do you love her?” She bumped into him as he stopped at the backyard gate.

Mehuru hesitated on his denial. He thought of Frances and the contradictory feelings that were growing between them. He knew it would be easier for him if he did not love her and safer for him if the word was never mentioned between them. “I don’t love her,” he denied stoutly. “I am just getting flowers.”

He tipped Josiah’s coins into the flower seller’s hands and gathered up the armfuls of daffodils. The bunches of violets he packed carefully into the deep pockets of his coat.

“You’ll smell like spring,” the flower seller said, looking at him and noticing for the first time his broad shoulders, his lean, well-muscled body, and the deep, soft blackness of his skin. “Does she love you?”

Mehuru shook his head at her and smiled. “Good-bye,” he said firmly. “Enjoy your dinner.”

The kitchen was empty except for Cook, who was stirring a pan on the stove and did not turn around and see him, his arms full of buds, his pockets bulging with posies.

He slipped into the hall and then up the stairs to Frances’s bedroom. Her bed was made, the room was tidy. He was struck by the cold elegance of it all. The hairbrush and comb precisely positioned on the dressing table, the small pictures hung carefully on the pale silk walls, the pale blue carpet, the little blue silk chair placed at a right angle to the empty grate. He had meant to put the flowers in vases around her room, but something in the spinsterish tidiness of the bedroom made him feel anarchic and playful. He thought of the trickster god dressed in dark indigo blue studded with white cowrie shells who throws the destinies of men and women into gambling disorder. He laughed at the thought, and at the madness of flooding Frances with flowers.

He ripped back the covers of the newly made bed and flung down the daffodils pell-mell on the white linen sheets. He studded the pillows with violets, dozens and dozens of bunches, and then he stood back and surveyed the disorder with delight.

Already the room was smelling sweet as the crushed violets
poured out their essence and the opening daffodils exhaled their subtle, insidious perfume. Mehuru gave another little laugh and crept from the room, closing the door behind him with a sense of having released something troubling and dangerous and wild in the orderly house.

So it was that when Frances came upstairs at noon to change from her morning gown, she found her room filled with a heady, golden, powerful scent and her bed drenched with flowers.

She did not think, she did not hesitate for a moment. In some archaic, intuitive part of her mind, as yet unfrozen and untamed, she knew precisely who had brought her the flowers. No one else in the house would have bought them with such spendthrift abandon. No one else in the house knew that she loved daffodils and that this spring had released her wild, young, greening desire. She stripped off her dress and her shift, recklessly, like a young girl, and fell, naked, into bed with them. She buried her face in their cool, passionate greenness and bathed in the watery, pale scent of them. She rolled around on them and among them, swimming like a diver in a pool, until her body was slick with the juice and her hair was tumbled over her bare shoulders and filled with petals. Sap from the daffodils smeared on her skin and was slick on her lips, sharp and bitter to the taste, staining the white purity of her sheets—and Frances was laughing and breathless and wanton at last.

J
OSIAH WAS AT HIS
desk waiting to be called for dinner but whiling away the time in adding figures. He had half a dozen sheets of paper before him, and each displayed a different calculation.
Rose
was due home first, but Josiah had already borrowed against her cargo to buy the Queens Square house. She should bring an extra profit in gold from her smuggled slaves, but Josiah could not borrow against contraband goods; they must remain a closely guarded secret.
Daisy
should only be a month behind her. Loading and unloading with the efficiency of a Merchant Venturer vessel, she should come into Bristol at the end of December, and
Lily
would be only two months behind.

Josiah hoped to raise money against
Daisy
’s expected profits. He wanted to offer them as security for a loan on the Hot Well. On each page he calculated how much the repayment would be if he could borrow at 3 percent, and then the further calculation if
Daisy
came in late . . . a week late, two weeks late, a month. The difficulty of Josiah’s work as a long-distance shipper was its unpredictability. The voyage took, on average, fourteen months. But storms could delay a ship; a wrecked mast could mean that she put into a strange port for repairs and was delayed for months. The captain was authorized to buy repairs in such a crisis, but he could be cheated or the work expensively done, and he could come home carrying no gold at all, forced to sell cargo to cover his costs.

Josiah never knew, until his ship docked, whether he had made a fortune or lost one. There was no way for a captain to get a message home unless he met another Bristol ship on the voyage and it got home before him, and that happened only rarely. There was never anything to do but wait, and try not to borrow against profits that even now might be tossing in a storm on a sinking ship.

There was a tap on the door, and Frances looked in.

“Am I disturbing you, Josiah?” She was wearing her hair in a new way, combed simply over her shoulders. Her face was radiant, and she looked pretty in a way that Josiah had never noticed before.

“New gown?” he asked.

“No.”

“Oh.”

“Is it you I must thank for my flowers?” she asked carefully.

“I sent Cicero to buy you a bunch,” Josiah said. “Did he find a pretty bunch for you?”

Surprisingly, the color rushed into Frances’s cheeks. “He bought a lot,” she said. “They are beautiful. Thank you.”

Josiah waved his hand. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Cole? It’s not dinnertime, is it?”

Frances shook her head gravely. “I wish to send for a doctor for one of the children. The smallest boy is very feverish. He has had a cough since before Easter, and he is getting worse.”

Josiah looked thoughtful. “Can we not give him a poultice or something? A few days’ rest in bed?”

“He has been resting,” Frances said. “And Cook has done all that she can. She wants him to be seen by the doctor, and I think she is right.”

“I’m very sorry for the boy,” Josiah said awkwardly. “But we are running a business here, Frances. We cannot care for him as if he were our son. The doctor charges for every visit, and then there are medicines to buy as well. I would rather we waited until we were sure it was essential.”

“The child is very ill,” Frances insisted.

“I daresay, and I wish him well. But a couple of visits from the doctor and we will start to run at a loss on him.”

Frances turned to go, the prettiness drained from her face. “But I may send for him if the child gets worse? It will be a greater loss if the little boy dies, after all, Josiah.”

“I don’t wish him to be neglected,” Josiah said. “But we have to measure our costs against our likely profits. Otherwise it is not a business venture but a mission. We are not in business to take little children from Africa and bring them up in civilized homes and spend a fortune on medicines for them. They have to earn their keep.”

“I know,” Frances conceded. “Yet I cannot help but feel for him.”

Josiah smiled at her. “You have a tender heart. Oh, send for the doctor if you insist; send if it worries you! But remember that we must keep costs down.”

“I will,” Frances said. She gave him a quick smile and slipped from the room. She went upstairs to the top floor, where the slaves slept. James, the smallest boy, was on his pallet bed, Elizabeth beside him. She was sponging his hot face with vinegar and water. He was tossing his little head from side to side, his black eyes glazed, seeing nothing.

“Very sick,” Elizabeth said as Frances came into the room.

“No better?”

“No.”

Frances bent down and put her hand against the child’s forehead. His skin burned under her touch. His little close-cropped curls were damp with sweat, his smooth black skin flushed darker with the fever.

“I will send for the doctor this evening if he is no better,” Frances said.

Elizabeth shook her head. “No better.”

“You do not understand,” Frances said, irritated. “I said: ‘I will send for a doctor if he does not get better.’”

Elizabeth shook her head again. “No better.”

“It is you who do not understand,” Mehuru said softly from the doorway. “She is saying he is no better, and he will not get better.”

Frances looked shocked. “Of course he will!” she cried. “This is just a fever. Children get fevers all the time. By later today he will have probably sweated it out and the fever will have gone. In a few days, he will be up and running around playing.”

“He did not do much playing,” Mehuru observed. “Even when he was well.”

Frances flushed. “If he had gone to the plantations, he would have been weeding in the sugarcane every day from dawn to sunset,” she pointed out. “He has an easier life here.”

Mehuru nodded. “And if he had stayed in Africa, he would have been safe on his mother’s back while she worked in the fields. And in the evening when she cooked his supper, he would have played in the dust with the other children. And at night she would have tucked him up in bed beside her.”

Frances said nothing. In the silence they could hear the hoarse sound of James’s breath, rasping through his closing throat. “I know he would have been better left at home,” Frances said very quietly.

James turned his head restlessly on the pillow, seeking a cool place. Frances leaned forward and lifted his little head. Elizabeth turned the pillow over, and Frances let him lie down again on the cool new cotton. “I’ll send for the doctor now,” she decided.

“I’ll go,” Mehuru said. “Where is his house?”

“Trenchard Lane, near the hospital. Dr. Hadley. Wait, I will give you one of my cards to take.”

Frances went downstairs to the parlor for a card from her case, Mehuru following. She scribbled a note on the back of it. “There,” she said. “Ask him to come as soon as he can.”

Mehuru took the card, went down to the kitchen to throw on his jacket and snatch up his hat, went out through the back
door, and set off at a steady jogging run along the quayside of the Frome to John’s Bridge.

The doctor was not at home. Mehuru tracked him around the city from one fashionable address to another and found him, coming from a lying-in at Culver Street. He was a young, fair-headed Scotsman, notoriously freethinking and politically radical. He was tolerated by the conservative citizens of Bristol only because of his remarkable abilities and his degree in medicine from Edinburgh University. He took Mehuru up in his phaeton and drove down to Queens Square.

“Are you a freeman?” he asked curiously.

“No,” Mehuru said. “Mrs. Cole owns me.”

“You seem to be a man of education. You speak well.”

“Mrs. Cole taught me to speak, and I have taught myself to read.”

“Read, eh? Do you read the newspapers?”

“When I can see them. I have no money to buy newspapers or books.”