Respectable Trade (49 page)

“This one voyage will pull us clear,” he said. “When
Rose
comes home in November, I shall pay off my debts and we will have cash to spare. It is a gamble, Sarah; but they are familiar odds. Why should we lose a ship now? We have done the voyage a hundred times and never lost a ship yet.” He tapped his hand against the wooden doorframe for luck. Josiah was talking confidently, but he never forgot to touch wood.

“How much should we make?” Sarah asked. She was reluctantly tempted by the thought of a shipload of gold.

“Say he carries six hundred slaves . . .”

“Six hundred!” Sarah exclaimed. “But
Rose
has room only for three hundred!”

Josiah gleamed at her. “I told him to pack tight. He will. Say he carries six hundred and lands four hundred and fifty.”

“A hundred and fifty die during the voyage?”

“Packed so tight, they are bound to get sick,” Josiah reasoned. “And with so many he will have to ration water and food. Maybe it will not be so bad. Anyway, say he lands four hundred and fifty and sells them for fifty pounds each . . .”

“Not more?” Sarah demanded.

“Many of them will be only little children . . . that is £22,500.”

She opened the account book. “Less £8,732 paid in trade goods.”

Josiah beamed. “A profit of nearly £14,000.”

“A fortune,” she said. “It will clear your debt on the house and on the Hot Well. It will pull us clear.”

Josiah nodded. “I owe a thousand on the house, and I borrowed my deposit of £2,000 on the Hot Well. I have debts for the furniture and carpets for Queens Square, and I have borrowed to start the season at the Hot Well. I borrowed more than a thousand to equip
Rose.
Altogether I owe more than £5,000, call it £6,000 with interest. I plan to pay it off, all at once, in November when
Rose
arrives. It is only four months.”

Sarah nodded. “It all rests on the
Rose
then. If she comes in safe, we will have made a fortune worthy of a nabob. But if she fails . . .”

“It is as near a certainty as you can get in the trade,” Josiah said. “I am confident, Sarah. Be confident, too. You are a trader’s daughter and sister to a Bristol merchant. We have to take risks. And we will show such profits!”

“She is sailing without insurance,” Sarah said heavily. “In the most dangerous seas in the world, overloaded, and bound for an illegal destination. If we lose her, we are ruined, Josiah. Not even the new house is safe. We own nothing outright but our two remaining ships and this warehouse, and we would have to sell the ships.”

Josiah hammered on the wood of the doorframe again. “I know! I know this, Sarah! Why d’you think I am so desperate to see the Hot Well pay? Why d’you think I am here on the quayside every morning, selling and dealing in barrels of other ships’ cargoes? Why d’you think I draw on every ounce of credit I can get from the Merchant Venturers? I know how close to the wind I am sailing! No one knows better than me!
But if I succeed, then we are wealthy and established. It is a risk, Sarah! It is the nature of the trade!”

Her hand was at her mouth again, biting the cuticle around her fingernail. She tasted her own blood.

“Don’t, Sarah,” Josiah begged. “I hoped to spare you this.”

“It is better that I should know,” she said, her voice low. “I was fearing worse.”

“Well, you know now,” Josiah said.

“You will not deceive me again?”

“You will not stand in my way?”

“Josiah . . .”

“I will be master in my house. I will run Cole and Sons in my own way, Sarah.”

“This is all Frances’s fault!” she suddenly burst out. “If you had not married her, you would have been content!”

“I was not content!” Josiah exclaimed. “I married her because I was not content with the warehouse. I wanted more, and I am getting more. You will not stand against me, Sarah, I will not allow it.”

She turned away and looked out the window. Below them a rival’s ship was safely docked, swarming with sailmakers come to collect the sails for repair, half a dozen sailors crawling over the deck caulking the planks with tar and hemp rope.

“We used to stand together,” she said.

“I know.”

There was a silence. Sarah sighed. “I will not go against you. So trust me, Josiah. Don’t keep things from me. I am not a silly girl. I am not a lady of leisure. I was brought up to this business. I can help you.”

He nodded and came across the room to her. He put his arm around her waist and held her for a brief moment. “I know,” he repeated. “I have been miserably lonely with this worry.”

They stood still for a moment, watching the ship, as bereft parents will watch someone else’s baby in a cradle.

“I must go,” Josiah said briskly. “I have a horse waiting.”

“You have hired a horse again?”

Josiah laughed. “Sarah, I have bought the Hot Well. I have to check on my business! Of course I have hired a horse, and as soon as I can find one that suits me, I shall buy one! I need to ride out and see that my business is thriving. I would not be doing my work if I were
not
riding out to look at it. Surely you see that!”

She smiled unwillingly at him. “Yes. It is the expense which worries me.”

“It would cost me more if I did not inspect it,” he said briskly. “Now let me go.”

She watched him from the window. Mehuru held the horse’s head for him as he mounted. It seemed odd to see Josiah setting off for his work on horseback. All his life he had gone no farther than the quayside outside their house. Now he looked like a gentleman, in riding boots and with a cape on his shoulders. Sarah thought that if she saw him at a distance, she would not recognize him. The little brother she had reared was going far away from her, and she did not understand him, nor his business, anymore. The figures in the ledgers were no longer small, manageable amounts, easily understood, added and subtracted. They were dangerous sums, perilous debts. And Josiah was no longer her little brother who came to her for advice and never sent out a ship without her checking the figures. He was a man prepared to take great risks, to take a massive gamble to win the home he wanted for the wife he had chosen.

Unseen by Josiah, she put up her hand to wave good-bye in a gesture that looked more as if she were calling him back.

J
OSIAH
’
S HEART LIFTED A
little as he rode along the riverside to the Hot Well. The tide was coming in, and the sunshine sparkled on the water. The woods on either side of the river had lost their lush greenness, the leaves dulling in the heat and glare of the July sun. Josiah felt better for confiding in Sarah. She
had been his business adviser for so long that any secret from her made him uneasy. And in reassuring her he convinced himself.

The Merchant Venturers’ expensive avenue of trees were dusty after months of carriages going to and fro beneath their spreading branches. The waves were slapping the river wall of the Pump Room in a pretty, irregular sound. An onshore breeze had lifted the constant smoke away from the city, and the sky was blue with fleecy strips of white cloud. Josiah rode down the little avenue with his hand on his hip and felt the novel pleasure of being a proprietor of land. He inspected the building with smug care; he took in the sky above it and the circling birds as if they, too, were part of his investment and a credit to his acumen.

At the back of the building, the tap, which had traditionally dispensed water for free, was being bolted off. The workmen looked up and pulled at their caps as Josiah rode past. Josiah responded with a small, jaunty gesture.

He could have hitched his horse to one of the posts outside the pump room. There were others there, bearing the traditional Bristol saddle—a two-seater—for a lady to sit behind the groom. Instead Josiah chose to whistle up a loitering urchin and promise him a penny to hold the horse. It was not that the animal was too high-bred or skittish to be left unattended. The stable knew that Josiah was not a confident rider, and they always sent him a placid, slow-moving hack. But Josiah was learning the pleasure of spending money. A penny was a little enough sum, but to Josiah, hiring a child to hold a horse when there was a hitching ring for free was an extravagance. It excited him to be extravagant. He foresaw a future when he would become a liberal tipper, a spendthrift in small, enjoyable ways, a man who carried loose change in his pocket and had spent it all on trifles by the end of the day.

He strolled into his pump room and looked around. The perennial invalids were in their usual places, drinking water or
loitering under the roof of the colonnade, taking their prescribed exercise. Josiah hardly glanced at them. These were not the people whose custom would determine the success of the Well. He needed the fashionable crowd, the London pleasure seekers, the day visitors from Bath. They had come here in their hundreds in previous years, and Josiah had been at pains to advertise that the spa was under new management and offering advantageous rates for this first season. Surely, with a sky so blue and an outlook from the large windows of the rooms so beguiling, they would come in their hundreds again?

“Ah, Mr. Cole.” The master of ceremonies, newly appointed by Josiah but chosen by Frances, came forward and bowed to him. “Mr. Cole, our proprietor! We are all prepared, as you see! All ready for the launch of the new management. I have already received several cards notifying me of the arrival of ladies of quality. I think we shall have an enjoyable year! I do indeed! We are starting a little late, a little late in our season, to be sure. But people do not go to London till October or November, and I am confident we can charm them from their country houses to here. We have the rest of this month and all of August and September, besides!”

Josiah smiled. He could not help but be uneasy with the man who wore such tightly strapped stays under his clothes that his waistcoat fitted without a wrinkle and his coat was one smooth line from padded shoulders to stiffened hem. “Good,” he said shortly. “I see they are shutting off the free tap at the back of the building.”

“Certainly,” the master confirmed. “It would be fatal to our atmosphere of elegance to have the back of the building crowded with dirty and sickly people. Besides—how can we charge for water inside the building if we are giving it away free outside?”

“Yes,” Josiah agreed curtly. “The room looks well. I will take the attendance book and the cash register home with me.”

“Certainly, certainly,” the man said sweetly. “But I think you
will be happy.
I
am content enough with how it is going. We have our poor little invalids here as usual, but also a fair number of pleasure seekers, and it is they who give the spa the air of fashion that it needs.”

“Yes,” Josiah said, rather at a loss.

“There are a few little improvements I would suggest?” the master of ceremonies continued archly. “I would have put them in hand, but they
do
cost money, and I wanted to speak to the holder of the purse strings. I cannot have you thinking me extravagant, now!”

“What are they?”

The man held up his slender hand and ticked the items off on well-manicured fingers. “One: The quartet plays only in the summer season and I think it is a shame. In the winter when it is gray outside, we so badly want music and light and laughter inside, don’t you think, Mr. Cole? Don’t you agree, sir?”

“Yes,” Josiah said, goaded. “Keep them on.”

“And I want to hire a little woman, a pretty little woman to stand behind an urn and make tea in the afternoons. You can
order
tea, but I want it here, visible, so you can see it, and want it, and have it in a flash. In a flash! D’you see?”

Josiah shook his head at the volubility of the man. “Do as you think best,” he said. “But check any expenditure with me of more than ten pounds.”

“Now, that is a reasonable way to do business!” the man cried. “But how silly of me, you are a businessman first and foremost, aren’t you, Mr. Cole? Now, is there anything else I wanted to ask you?” He put his head on one side. His wig released a little puff of scented powder. “No! Not a single thing! Now, can I tempt you to a glass of your own water?”

Josiah recoiled hastily. “No, no. No need. The men bring bottles for my wife to drink when they deliver in town. She likes it. I . . . er . . . I do not take it. I am in perfect health, thank God.”

The man laid a gloved hand on Josiah’s sleeve. A faint but
unmistakable scent of geraniums blew sweetly and powerfully into Josiah’s rigid face. “Are you sure I can’t tempt you?” he cooed.

“No, no.” Josiah nearly choked in discomfort. “I have to go! Business, you know, business.”

He got himself out of the room at speed, mounted his horse, and threw a penny at the boy. But once he was safely out of reach, he turned his head and looked back. He chuckled. He could not help but wonder what his da—the son of a collier—would have made of the family’s meteoric rise and this new fanciful trade.

I
HAVE BEEN THINKING WHAT
we can do,” Mehuru said to Frances. She was sitting on the bench in the central garden of Queens Square, with him standing beside her. Frances had just walked around the square, obeying Stuart Hadley’s instructions to take light exercise in the open air.