Respectable Trade (53 page)

“She must come in next month,” Sarah said. “She must come in when she is due. It is not long to wait now. Only four weeks if she is on time. With so much riding on her, she
must
come home on time.”

O
N THE FIRST OF
November, Josiah’s debt to Hibbard and Sons fell due. He had planned to pay them out of the profit that
Rose
would bring home. But
Rose
had not yet returned. He wrote a brief letter to Hibbard and Sons explaining that his ship was slightly overdue and that he would be obliged if they would extend the life of his loan for another month.

Hibbard and Sons wrote an equally brief note back within the week, saying simply that they did not wish to extend the loan for another month. Josiah would oblige them by clearing his debt of £5,400 plus interest at once.

Josiah stared at the letter for a long time in silence. He did not know what he should do next. He opened the front door and looked down the street to the river. His dock was empty, and the tide was coming in. The
Rose
could sail in on this tide, or the next, or the next after that.

He called for Kbara and told him to go ’round to the stable and hire a horse. Perhaps takings at the Hot Well had increased.

He rode along the river with little pleasure. There were no large boats; the tide was too shallow and uncertain. A single trow, like Josiah’s father’s first ship, was sailing up the river, moving swiftly on the flowing tide. Josiah had an odd, fanciful notion that he would have been a happier man today if he had stuck to a single trow to sail up and down the river carrying little loads, and coming home at night to Sarah.

He hitched his horse to the ring in the wall of the Hot Well and strode into the room. The beautiful long assembly room, newly whitewashed since his purchase, was all but deserted. The string quartet played mechanically without spirit in one corner of the room; the card tables were still empty, with new, unopened packs of cards laid invitingly on the green baize. A silver urn hissed in the corner, with a smartly liveried maid beside it waiting to serve tea. The visitors’ book, prominently displayed at the doorway, was empty of any new names.

Only the invalids, sick and pale as ever, were slumped in the chairs around the room. Josiah glared at them as if he wished they would relapse and die rather than linger and give the place its depressing atmosphere of a hospital.

“Where is everyone?” he demanded of the master of ceremonies. “It may be mid-November, but the place should be busier than this. I’ve seen last year’s attendance book. It should be better than this. It’s not midsummer, but there should be people on repairing leases from the London Season. Where is everyone?”

“Most disappointing,” the man replied. “I, too, am most disappointed.”

“I am sorry for it,” Josiah said grimly. “I shall add your disappointment to my other worries. Why is no one here?”

The man shook his bewigged head. “I can’t say. I don’t know.”

“Very well,” Josiah said carefully. “What is your opinion? Do you have any opinion? Would you venture a guess?”

The man regarded him warily. “I think it is a number of things,” he offered cautiously. “A number. Shall we take tea?”

“No. What number of things?”

“Well, the charges,” the man said delicately, looking longingly at the urn and the maid and the diversion of teacups. “They are rather high now. Higher than Bath, I believe. Perhaps too high, you know, Mr. Cole. People don’t want to pay them. I think they won’t pay them, in fact. No one from Bristol
comes at all now; the spa has a reputation in the town of being too expensive, of being too fashionable.” He simpered slightly. “Perhaps we have been too successful?”

Josiah nodded. “And what other things?”

“Well, the atmosphere,” the man went on. He waved his hand exquisitely gloved in white kid at the row of desperately sick people. “Very dreary. Not quite the place you want to come for amusement.”

“It’s a spa!” Josiah exclaimed. “Of course there are sick people here. You’re supposed to come here for your health. That is rather bound to attract ill people.”

“Of course. But it’s just that they all seem so very ill indeed, don’t they? They are calling Dowry Parade ‘Death Row,’ you know.”

“What?”

“Mmm, lowering, isn’t it? You can see that it would put people off.”

Josiah clenched his teeth together. “Anything else?”

“France, I’m afraid.”

Josiah felt his teeth grind. He carefully relaxed his jaw. “France?”

“A lot of the younger, wilder, fashionable set are off to the French spas. They’re interested in France this year. The French, you know.”

“What?”

“The French, sir, the Jacobins! You know,
Liberté, Egalité . . .
”

“What the devil has this to do with my Hot Well?” Josiah bellowed. The quartet died into silence. Josiah flushed scarlet with suppressed rage and embarrassment. “Tell them to play on,” he muttered.

The MC waved an airy hand at them. The quartet bowed to Josiah and started their little rippling tune again.

“What has the fall of the Bastille to do with my Hot Well?” Josiah demanded through his teeth.

“There is a great enthusiasm for liberty and France and so on. They are all rushing off to France this year. We cannot make poor little Bristol appeal at all.”

Josiah sighed. “I can make no sense of this. Anything else?”

The man shrugged. “I don’t know. It is a shame. I
do
think it’s a shame.”

“So all we have to do,” Josiah said bitterly, “is drop our subscription, stop sick people coming here, and put an end to the revolution in France and our worries will be over.”

The master of ceremonies looked at him coyly. “Rather a task, isn’t it?” He smiled.

“It’s damnable,” Josiah said. He strode from the room. The master of ceremonies fluttered behind him.

“But don’t be disheartened, I implore you. It’s only November. Anything could happen! Once the winter is over—and I so
dread
the winter, don’t you?—once the winter is over and the spring comes, I am sure anything could happen.”

Josiah turned to face him, and the man skidded to a standstill, his high-heeled shoes slipping on the polished floor.

“Anything
is
happening!” Josiah cried sharply. “This place costs me nigh on one thousand pounds a year for the lease alone, and the running costs are near a hundred pounds a week. Anything and everything is happening, with the sole exception of this place earning a living.”

“Oh! Money worries! Money worries!” the man exclaimed. “They are so wearisome, aren’t they?”

“How much do I pay you?” Josiah demanded unpleasantly.

“Why, by the Season, you pay me eighty guineas a Season, Mr. Cole.”

“At least I can save that!” Josiah said. “You are fired.”

“I?” The master of ceremonies was genuinely amazed. “You cannot fire me, sir. You are making a mistake.”

Josiah trudged to his horse, his head down. “I
have
fired you,” he said grimly. “You can pack your bags.”

“I? Pack?”

“Or leave ’em here. But you are out of this place by the end of this week, so help me God! You were hired to bring in the fashionable set. I don’t see one of them. So you are fired!”

“Well, I doubt very much that it will help you.” The master of ceremonies teetered to a halt and flung the words after Josiah’s back.

Josiah unhitched his horse from the ring and mounted it in surly silence.

“The Hot Well will not pay because you bought it at too high a price!” the master of ceremonies called up at him. “You can blame me, but it is your own fault! Blame me all you like! But everyone knows it is your own fault!”

Josiah’s face went so black that the man sprang back, half fearing him, but Josiah dragged the horse’s head ’round and cantered away, down the track to the docks where
Rose
with her cargo of gold and sugar was due this month and soon would surely arrive.

H
E DID NOT GO HOME
, though it was nearly dinnertime. He returned the horse to the stable and walked, rather uncomfortable in his riding boots, down to the quay. The lad in the ferryboat was moored on the far side, but at Josiah’s shout he rowed over.

“Been riding, Mr. Cole?” he asked.

Josiah scowled at him and made no reply.

The lad rowed in silence, slightly surprised. Josiah’s good nature was well known on the quayside. But the rumor that he was overextended had been growing lately. The boy took his ha’penny in silence and pulled his cap as Josiah went up the slimy steps to his quay.

The familiar noise and bustle comforted him. The porters’ sledges screeched on the greasy cobbles, the men swearing and cursing as they pulled heavy loads. The quay next to Cole and Sons was again busy with a ship newly in from the West Indies. As Josiah watched, they ran a gangplank up to her and the captain
came down and greeted the owner. Josiah hung back until they had spoken and the owner gone on board to see for himself the full, sweet-smelling hold, and then he called to the captain.

“Holloa! Captain Smythe?”

The man turned. “Oh! Mr. Cole, is it?”

“Good crossing?”

“Moderate.”

“How long did it take you?”

“Eight and a half weeks from quayside to quayside.”

“You will have seen my ship,
Rose
?”

“
Rose?
No, I have not seen her.”

Josiah tried to smile, but he knew that his face was strained. “Come now, you must have done. I had a letter from her writ in July. She was just off the Sugar Islands then. She will have bought sugar and set sail for England. Surely you will have passed her in the channel. I cannot think why she is not ahead of you.”

The man shook his head gravely. “I have not seen her, Mr. Cole. Not sailing home, nor in the West Indies. No one spoke of her either. I hope she has not gone astray.”

Josiah laughed mirthlessly. “Not
Rose
! She is the luckiest ship that ever was, and she is commanded by Captain Smedley. If he does not know the way home, then no man at sea knows it! She will be home within the sennight, I am certain.”

“Indeed I hope so,” the captain said. “And we had some black storms. I could have passed within inches of her and not seen her on some of the nights.”

“Exactly!” Josiah exclaimed. “No. I shall not worry. She will be home any day now.”

The owner came out of the hold, his face bright. “There’s no better sight in the world, is there, Cole?” he demanded. “A full hold and the smell of fresh sugar!”

Josiah found a weak smile. “No,” he said with difficulty.

“Here is Mr. Cole asking me after his ship
Rose,
” the captain said indiscreetly.

“Is she late?”

“No!” Josiah replied quickly. “She’s just due. I thought that they might have passed her.”

“Well, I daresay it does not matter to you now,” the owner said jealously. “With your other interests. Your fine house, and your membership of the Venturers, and your Hot Well. I daresay
Rose
late or early matters very little.”

Josiah’s smile was ghastly. “Very little.”

He went into his warehouse to avoid their stares and up into his old parlor. It was empty and dusty. Only the pieces of furniture that were too shabby to move had been left. He found his father’s old broken-seated chair and dragged it to the parlor window.

He sat, looking out over the quay, over the dock, downriver. The tide was going out, and the new ship at the quayside would have to be unloaded tomorrow. They were loosening her ropes to let her drop down on the ebbing water to settle on the mud. She would not split her sides, even with her heavy cargo; she was built “Bristol fashion,” strong enough to withstand the stress of the tidal port, which dumped all the ships on to their keels in the mud twice a day.

There was no point looking for
Rose.
She would not come into port against the tide. He would have to wait until tomorrow for her now. For a moment Josiah imagined her, riding easily in the water with her cargo of sugar stowed evenly in the hold, moored for the night safely in the Kingsroad anchorage with her lanterns lit fore and aft. He sat still, his eyes on the swiftly draining water, picturing his ship so passionately that it was almost as if he could call her into life.

“
Rose,
” he said.

W
HEN
J
OSIAH
arrived home at five o’clock, late for his dinner, he was irritated to see a traveling coach emblazoned with the Scott
arms waiting outside his door. In the morning room, Lord Scott was sitting with Frances and Sarah. Josiah came in reluctantly.

“Why, Cole!” Lord Scott exclaimed. “We thought you had gone down with one of your ships.”

Josiah flinched at the image of a sinking ship. “I was working,” he said irritably.

Frances glanced at his riding breeches and boots. “You have been to the Hot Well! Is everything as it should be?”

“No,” Josiah answered shortly.