Respectable Trade (59 page)

“I will watch her,” Mehuru decided.

“You cannot—”

Mehuru shook his head. “It is my right,” he said with gentle dignity. “I will watch her sleep and be here when she wakes.”

J
OSIAH DID NOT COME
home that night, nor did he return the next day. Sarah, walking alone down to the old warehouse on the quay in the wintry dawn, with a shawl over her head like a trader’s daughter, found that he had spent the night in their old home and was sitting in his old office, looking out over the dock, waiting for
Rose.

In the following week, he did not come home to the expensive house in Queens Square at all. He chose to stay in his little warehouse, sleeping on a pallet on the floor wrapped in his cloak at night and sitting in his old place at the window overlooking his empty quay from the first gray light of the morning. He spent his day bargaining and dealing in tiny, pitiful amounts of cash on the quayside, while the bigger debts in the account books at Queens Square grew fat like maggots in the dark of the ledgers and the letters from Hibbard and Sons warning that they would prosecute for nonpayment collected, unopened, on his desk.

He chose to dine in the coffee shop, sitting once again far from the top table. He might have claimed his place and been still tolerated. There were a few men who might have greeted him with sympathy, but Josiah did not try. He no longer wanted to be with them. He sat, neither with his new friends nor with his old, but at a little table on his own, near the window, where he could see his dock and the entrance to the harbor every time he lifted his eyes. He never stopped looking for
Rose,
and whenever he saw the shape of a travel-weary brig silhouetted against the sparkle of the incoming water, he would rise a little in his seat, drop his napkin on the floor, and start forward. But it was never the
Rose.
Despite Josiah’s faith in her, in the short, gray days of November she never came.

In the silent house in Queens Square, Frances lay all day in her room, with the curtains open, looking out at the rectangles of sky in the panes of her window. The thick glass made little ripples and whorls of the gray. She tried to get up once or twice, but she was so breathless and her color became so white that Stuart Hadley insisted that she lie in her bed, or at the most on a day bed in her room.

The weather was against her. The bright autumn days had slipped away under a blanket of fog. When Elizabeth opened the windows, on Frances’s insistence, the yellow smog crept into the room like the coils of a thick snake. The rich, dirty stink of the river filtered up the backs of the houses and penetrated even the front windows of the square. Elizabeth closed the windows and burned scented candles, trying to cleanse the air. Nothing could rid the city of its choking fumes, and every draft that came into the room was as icy and as dirty as stale smoke from a burning midden.

Sarah sat with her in the afternoons, but the women were no company for each other. Frances lay quite still, her color waxy and her breath short. Her thickening body was concealed completely by the drapes of her robe and the sheets and blankets on the bed. She had no desire to confide in Sarah, nor in anyone else, and Sarah had nothing to say to her. She had never wanted a sister-in-law; she had tolerated Frances for the sake of the business and because Josiah was determined to have her. Now that Frances lay sick and silent in her bed, Sarah could see no use for her at all. Frances’s connections with the aristocratic families had not brought visitors for the Hot Well spa, and anyway, the water was cooling and dying away to a hopeless trickle. The new Hot Well in Clifton had tapped in to the spring, and already they were pumping out gallons every day to the bright, fashionable houses high on the cliff above. The only visitors to the old Hot Well were those too poor or too weak to move anywhere else. In Josiah’s absence and without the ebullient master of ceremonies, the business was slipping from bad
to worse. Every day the spa took less and less money, and still the wages and the lease had to be paid. Only the paupers still came, on their set days. The new Hot Well was too inaccessible for them, too far from the city, and besides, the Merchant Venturers had made sure that there was no agreement to provide them with a free tap in Clifton.

Sarah brought plain darning with her when she came to sit in Frances’s room and stitched irritably, small, neat, angry stitches, while Frances lay, her eyes half closed, enduring the soft, insistent sound of Sarah’s breathing and the puncturing noise of her needle through linen, sensing her scorn.

Frances hardly spoke to Mehuru, although he made a point of serving her. He would allow no one else to carry the jug of hot water to her room in the morning or bring her dinner tray to her room in the afternoon. He would put the tray beside her bed and ask her how she felt and if she were better. But she would not speak to him; she turned her face to the wall and would not reply. She would not tell him about the child. She remembered too clearly her desperate need to see Josiah and her panic-stricken flight for her home. She had shown him, in that moment, where her loyalty lay: with her husband. She felt that she had betrayed him, and she was ashamed.

And she was steeling herself for his disappearance. He had said that he would go, and she had warned him that she could not protect him in the house in Queens Square. She did not want to hold him back. She did not want his child, their child, to hold him back. She had made up her mind to keep the baby a secret from him, so that he would be free to leave.

“Are you better today, Frances?” Mehuru asked softly, setting her dinner tray on the table at her bedside.

“Yes, thank you,” she said quietly. But when he left, Elizabeth, coming to straighten the sheets, found that Frances’s pillow was wet with tears.

“Now what’s the matter?” she would ask kindly. “What’s he said to you to make you cry so?”

But Frances would only shake her head and say nothing.

Elizabeth stopped Mehuru on the stairs as she carried Frances’s dinner tray down to the kitchen. “She cries when she sees you,” she said accusingly. “What have you done to her?”

Mehuru spread his hands. “I? I’ve done nothing! I’ve told her that I love her, and I asked her to come away with me. But ever since that day when she found that they were building the new Hot Well, she has not spoken to me. She’s Josiah’s wife, not mine. She’s telling me that in the cruelest way.”

“Well, it’s breaking her heart, whatever she’s doing,” Elizabeth observed.

“What can I do?” Mehuru demanded. “I can’t be her pet, Elizabeth. I am hers till death, but if she turns her face away when I speak to her, what can I do?”

“You could ask her, instead of standing on your pride,” Elizabeth said sharply. “You could ask her what is wrong, instead of assuming you know everything. Everything! Or you could use the eyes in your head. You have the sight! I should think you could see what ails her.” She stamped down the stairs away from him, cursing the stupidity of men as she went through the door to the kitchen. Mehuru scowled at her disappearing back and then followed her. The others were seated around the kitchen table at their dinner. Mehuru took his place at the head of the table and bowed his head and took a brief moment to thank the earth for the richness of her goods and for the breath to eat them.

Kbara nodded to him when he raised his head. “We have been thinking,” he said in the liquid, warm accents of their home. “We have been thinking we should go soon. We have delayed for Frances’s illness, but we dare not wait much longer.”

Mehuru took a piece of bread and broke it. One of the girls set a bowl of soup before him. He nodded. “I have spoken to Stuart, and he knows where you should go,” he said. “He will give you money for the journey, and he has friends who will greet you. Of course, now is the time for you to go—”

“For ‘us’ to go?” Kbara interrupted quickly. “We do not want to be parted.”

“We are a family now,” Mary said. “We cannot go and leave you behind, Mehuru.”

He shook his head. “I am sorry. But I cannot leave Frances like this.”

There was an instant murmur of dissent. “You must come,” Martha insisted, and the others nodded. “We have agreed that we should all stay together. You
must
want to be with us, Mehuru.”

“I love her,” he said simply. “And she is very sick. She could die. I can’t leave her to die alone with that sister of hers. Who will hold her with love? Who will wash her face and body when she is cold? You must see that I cannot go until I know what she wants.”

“But she will not speak to you,” Elizabeth argued. “You say yourself she loves her husband and not you.”

Mehuru shook his head. “It does not matter. It is not easy for us to love each other. It never could be easy. It does not matter that she will not speak to me, nor that she is his wife. What matters is that in spite of all these things—all these things which have stood like walls between us—she has loved me, and I love her still. I will not leave her until I have said good-bye.”

“What if she gets better and sells you?” Kbara demanded unkindly. “She has already agreed a price for you and for John. What if she sells you and John tomorrow? They need the money. They are in debt.”

Mehuru nodded. “You must go. For the safety of little John, and for all of your sakes. I will wait until she sends me away. When she tells me to leave, I will come and find you. I love you. I love the children as if they were my own, and I love you, my brother, and you, my sisters. But I love Frances as if she were my wife. I cannot run away from her. When she sends me away, I will come and find you. But I will not leave her until she herself tells me to go.”

“What if we get separated and can never find each other again?” Mary asked.

“I have to take that risk,” Mehuru replied. “But Stuart knows a safe place for us all. You can go now, and I will follow you later. We have been through too much; we have survived this far. Surely we will find somewhere to live and some way of living together!”

Kbara looked unhappy. “I had thought you would come with us. I thought you would put your own people first.”

“I am torn two ways,” Mehuru admitted. “You are my people. But look at Frances—she is almost certain to die. How can I leave her?”

“And I’ll stay, too,” Elizabeth said suddenly.

Mary turned on her in amazement. “You as well?”

Elizabeth made a small gesture to Mary, under cover of the table. “I have work to do here,” she said with simple dignity. She faced the disapproving faces of the two men. “You would not understand. There is work for me here, woman’s work. I have to stay and see Frances through to the end of her illness.”

“I don’t think—” Mehuru started.

“I know,” Elizabeth said with finality.

Both of the men looked defeated by her certainty. Mehuru was reminded of the small village councils at home, where the men might talk all day, but if one of the senior women came in and said that a thing
must
be done, then that was the end of the discussion.

“I should be glad for Frances’s sake,” he said. “I am not allowed to nurse her, and Miss Cole is cold and hard.”

“I shall care for her until she dies,” Elizabeth declared. “And the moment she is dead and washed and ready for their burial, I shall come after you.” She nodded around the table. “And I will bring Mehuru with me. They will not catch us and keep us just because we stay now.”

“Very well, then,” Kbara said. He looked at Mehuru, who in the old days would have known with his priest’s sight how long
a sick woman might live. “It will not be very long, I don’t think? The doctor said it will not be long. You must be able to see?”

“I don’t know,” Mehuru said, deliberately choosing blindness rather than foreseeing Frances’s death. “How should I know? I don’t know.”

J
OSIAH SAT IN HIS OLD
chair, at his old desk, in the window of his office overlooking the quay. He had forgotten the house in Queens Square that he had struggled so hard to win and that had cost him so much to buy. He had forgotten his Hot Well and his ambitions and his plans. He sat at his desk as if the years had never been, as if at any moment Sarah, or even his father, might call him to eat his dinner in the parlor next door.

At a casual glance, it looked as if he were working. He had the ledgers of all his ships spread before him, and he was carefully going down the profits column, adding them up and then adding one to another. On another piece of paper, he had a note of the debts he had to service, and every now and then he would transfer the total from his profits and subtract it from the money he owed. It was a nonsensical task: a piece of fairy-tale arithmetic. Every time he did it, the amount of the debt was hardly diminished at all. Josiah was looking at ruin, and he was too shocked to see it.

Only the sale of his ships themselves, his warehouse, and his lease of the quay would settle his debts. Over and over again, Josiah added up the value of the tobacco in his bond, the value of the rum in his cellar and the sugar in his store. Again and again he subtracted it from the debt on the
Rose,
on the Hot Well lease, and on his house in Queens Square and saw that thousands and thousands of pounds were still owing.