Respectable Trade (43 page)

The pump room was built on an imposing scale, but it had the inescapable appearance of a warehouse. Frances, looking at the blank wall fronting the river and the windows set square in the three-story-high stonework without any relief or decoration, thought that in every corner the city of Bristol was dominated by trade. Even this most important building had an uneven roof, odd-numbered chimneys, and faced the river as blankly and as plainly as a tide mill for grinding corn.

At the back of the pump room, at the free pump that dispensed the spa water without charge, there was a collection of sickly paupers. When they saw the carriage, they came forward with their hands out, begging for pennies. Josiah waved them away, and the hired coachman gestured with his whip. One of them, a young woman, raised her face, blotched livid with a skin disease. Frances shrank back into the carriage.

“Aye, they’re off-putting,” Josiah conceded. “Get back, you!” he shouted. “You’re upsetting my wife.”

They stepped back, but Frances heard a muffled curse as she hurried out of the road and into the assembly room. The place was busy. Josiah looked around, visibly counting the number of customers, while Frances swallowed a glass of the water. She was hoping that it would quiet the fluttering in her chest that had pained her ever since the quarrel with Mehuru in the morning. Josiah noted the white faces of the invalids with consumption, and heard the dry, racking coughs of those with chest complaints. There were fashionable people visiting for the day and taking tea or expensive hothouse strawberries with cream, but there were not enough.

“Can we make it more fashionable?” he asked. “What would you do?”

Frances thought. “I would rent consulting rooms cheaply to good doctors,” she said. “They will bring the patients in. And perhaps build a bathhouse, with beautiful mosaics and plants and furniture, like a winter garden.”

Josiah nodded. “The bathhouse,” he said. “What would it be like?”

Frances considered. “What about large windows and a terrace overlooking the river? And build it like a hothouse, like the hothouse at Whiteleaze. Oh! I forgot, you have never seen it. But it is a fine large room and very light. Very well heated, with many plants. It is a pleasant place to sit in winter. And when the fruit comes into season, it is like sitting in a garden. We could call it the Bristol Winter Garden! So that the Hot Well was popular all the year ’round.”

“That’s it!” Josiah exclaimed. “Frances, you are a genius! Do you know who should design it for us? Who is the finest architect?”

“We need someone who designs follies and grottoes,” she said. “Something charming and romantic and out of the ordinary.”

Josiah shook his head. “I don’t mix with such people. There’s a grotto at Goldney House, in Clifton, I know. But I’ve heard it is very strange. Full of shells and pagan statues and a fountain.”

“That’s the very thing,” Frances said decidedly. “A fountain and classical statues. We want a Gothic bathhouse. Lord Scott will know the best man to design it.”

“Gothic!” Josiah exclaimed. “Will it not look very strange?”

“A little strange.” Frances smiled at his uneasy face. “But it has to be a little strange to draw people from Bath. Bath is such an established place; everyone knows of it, everyone goes there. We need to create something very fanciful, something that will draw people who love a novelty.”

“You know best,” Josiah said firmly, reassuring himself. “Will you write to his lordship and ask him?”

“Yes,” Frances agreed. “I was writing to him this morning; I have not yet sealed and posted it. I was telling him that Sir Charles Fairley wishes to buy Shelby Manor. He will come to us to sign the papers, and he wishes us to hold his capital for his house and deal with his land agent.”

Josiah grimaced. “Will it not take a lot of letter writing and bother?” he asked.

“Josiah!” Frances exclaimed. “We are to hold his capital! We can invest it as we wish! I should have thought that it was worth a good deal of letter writing and bother!”

“I have always done my business face-to-face,” he excused himself. “I hate writing letters.”

“It is very little effort,” Frances said. “I can do it, and my uncle advises on investments for Sir Charles. All I have to do is to keep a note and render him an account.”

“Will you do it? Or ask Sarah?”

“I can do it,” Frances said easily. “Sarah prefers ships.”

“She should have been a captain,” Josiah agreed. “Did you hear her at lunch today? She cannot tolerate the thought of spending money on anything which does not float.”

“She has your interests at heart,” Frances said pacifically.
“And it has been a big change for her, moving house, and my arrival.”

Josiah nodded and glanced once more around the room. “Does it get busier later on?” he asked the woman serving the water. “What is the trade like in winter?”

“On a weekday in winter, it is like the death house,” she said cheerfully. “Sometimes no one is here at all, and sometimes the only visitors are the incurables. Very gloomy, sir. If you want a jolly place, you had better go to Bath.”

“Why, I thank you,” Josiah snapped, instantly irritated. “We were going anyway.” He offered his arm to Frances and swept her from the room. “As soon as we purchase the lease, that woman is sacked,” he said. “Telling paying customers that the place is like a death house!”

The skies outside were darker than ever. As they got into the carriage, there was a low warning rumble of thunder, and a few drops of rain started to fall. The horses were restless. “Here!” Josiah said to the coachman. “Put the hood up, please.”

The man called to a lad and ordered him to hold the horses. He got down from the driving box and came to the back of the carriage to try to lift the folding roof, which was made of canvas, folded back on wooden hoops. It should have unfolded easily from both the back and front of the carriage and stretched over the seats to lock together in the middle. But the joints were rusted and would not shift. The coachman pulled at them. The rain started to fall more heavily. Frances seated herself in the carriage and pulled a rug over her knees.

A cold wind blew down the gorge. The tide was on the turn, and little waves slapped against the mud, the wind whipping them into white-crested ripples. The thunder was blown in with the incoming tide; there was a loud roar immediately overhead, and the rain fell harder and faster. Frances shrank back into the carriage and tried to wrap the rug tighter around her knees. She was wearing only a light coat and a silk gown underneath. Her bonnet flapped dangerously in the wind.

“My wife is getting soaked!” Josiah exclaimed. “Can you not get the hood up?”

“I am sorry, sir, it is stuck,” the man apologized. “I am trying.” His words were drowned out by a tremendous thunderclap. Frances screamed as the whole world went brilliantly white for a moment and then black.

Josiah leaped down from the carriage and pulled at the other side, trying to free the rusty catches. The horses moved uneasily, and Frances called, “Hold the horses, Josiah! They will bolt!”

There was a sudden scud of bitterly cold rain. “This is hopeless!” Josiah shouted. “Get down, Frances, and we will wait for it to pass.”

“I’m so wet!” she cried. “Let us just drive home as quick as we can.”

“Drive, then!” Josiah shouted at the coachman. “But I shall not pay for this hire!”

The coachman swung himself onto the box and let the frightened horses go forward. They sprang into a trot, and he had to steady them. The speed of the coach whipped rain into Frances’s face, tumbled her hair, blew her bonnet. She had the driving rug clutched around her legs, but it was quickly soaked through. Rain collected on the brim of her bonnet and then poured down her neck. She was shivering and chilled.

The rain pelted down on them. There was no shelter at all. The rug around Frances’s legs was sodden in moments, and she could feel the damp seeping through her skirt and through the thin soles of her shoes.

By the time they drew up outside the house, she was wet through to the skin and her teeth were chattering from the cold. Martha, who had been on the watch for them, threw open the door, and Mehuru came running down the steps, opened the carriage door, and pulled the folding steps out so that Frances could step down and he could rush her into the warmth of the house.

Elizabeth swept her upstairs, and within moments Frances
was stripped of her wet clothes, wrapped in warm blankets, and seated by the fire. But still she shivered, and the color was drained from her face, and her lips were pale.

“You cold, Mrs. Cole?” Elizabeth asked, looking anxiously at her. “You sick?”

“Just chilled,” Frances said, trying to smile and hold her chattering teeth still. “Fetch me some hot tea. I am quite well.”

Elizabeth nodded and went from the room. Mehuru was lingering outside. “Is she all right?” he asked in Yoruban. “Can I go in and see her? Is she all right?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “You cannot go in; she is undressed. She says she is well. She does not look well to me. You are the healer—what can you see?”

Mehuru hesitated. It had been so long since he had used his priestly gifts that they were like a tool he had mislaid. He had watched Frances as a lover, not as a healer. He paused for a moment and brought her face into his imagination, noted the heavy sweep of dark hair and the shadows that were always there under her eyes, the transparent skin and the frequent rosy blushes. He sensed a pain in his chest that he knew was her pain, a permanent squirm of discomfort like a murmur in the heart. He felt a tightness across the lungs and thought of Frances’s continual gesture of putting her hand to her throat when she was breathless. “She is a white woman,” he said, trying to reassure himself, discounting his insight. “They all look sick to me.”

J
OSIAH TREATED HIMSELF TO
a bowl of steaming punch and called Kbara to light a fire in his study. As he warmed the seat of his dressing gown, there was a tap at the door, and Sarah came in.

“I heard that you and Frances were caught in the storm,” she said. “The slave Elizabeth thinks we should send for Dr. Hadley for Frances. Should you see him, brother?”

He noted her controlled tone. “No, I am well. What’s amiss with Frances?”

Sarah did not hide her lack of concern. “She’s always ill with something.”

“What do you want, Sarah?” he asked.

She took a deep breath and faced him. “I want sight of the books,” she said. “The ships’ accounts. I have done them all my life, brother. Even if you have a clerk, he will still need to be overseen. Let me check his work for you. Let me see the ships’ books.”

Josiah turned his back to her to warm his hands at the fire. He could not let her see them.
Rose
had gone out uninsured for the middle passage, and Sarah would spot the discrepancy at once. Sarah had no idea of the household debts, nor the interest Josiah was paying on his borrowings. He could not face her distress if she saw the full figures.

“Certainly,” he said. “I will bring them home for you to see. At the moment the clerk is studying them, to make sure he does things your way.”

“I could teach him—” Sarah volunteered hastily.

“In a week or two,” Josiah interrupted. “You shall see him and go through the books with him.”

“It is not just the work,” Sarah said hesitantly. “Though it is hard for me to do nothing, to do worse than nothing, when I have been so busy for all my life.”

Josiah glanced at her over his shoulder. Her mouth was working; she was biting back rare tears.

“I do not feel at home here,” she said pitifully. “It is not what I am used to.”

“You cannot miss the noise and the stink of the quayside, Sarah!”

She nodded. “Even the smell of the dock at low tide,” she confessed. “I have nothing to do here. And I am of no use to you. Frances runs the house, and you talk to her about your schemes.”

He almost turned and held out his arms to her, almost showed his deep, abiding love for her, the sister who had mothered him through a harsh, loveless childhood. But the habits of coldness were too strong for them both. He gave an awkward shrug and cleared his throat. He could think of nothing to say.

She stood for a few moments, waiting to see if he would reply. Then, when he said nothing, she turned and went to the door. “I shall send for the doctor if you insist,” she said unpleasantly. “I imagine Frances will want to linger in bed for weeks.”

F
RANCES WAS SERIOUSLY ILL
after her soaking at the Hot Well, and Mehuru could not see her for several days. He had to hand over the coal scuttle for her bedroom fire at the door to Elizabeth or to one of the other women, and the hot water for her washbasin was taken from him by Martha, Mary, or Elizabeth. One of the women carried her meals up to her on a tray, and Elizabeth was ordered to sleep at the foot of her bed on a little truckle bed in case she was ill in the night.

With Josiah absorbed in his plans for the Hot Well and Frances sick, the slaves were freer than they had ever been. In the afternoons the women would take the children to play in the gardens of the square. No one complained; people soon became used to seeing little John and eight-year-old Susan and Matthew on the grass beneath the young trees, playing the tiny intricate children’s games of Africa, which Elizabeth taught them.