Respectable Trade (6 page)

There was a tap on the door between Josiah’s room and her own, and her husband came in, carrying his candle. He was wearing a plain linen nightshirt. He set the candle down on the bedside table and stood looking at her. He was clearly at a loss.

“I hope you enjoyed the dinner,” he said awkwardly.

Frances nodded. “Thank you,” she said in her cool, level voice.

Josiah’s feet in Moroccan leather slippers shuffled on the wooden floor. He looked intensely uncomfortable. “The wines were good,” he volunteered.

Frances nodded.

There was silence. Frances realized that Josiah was painfully embarrassed. Neither of them knew how a husband claimed his marital rights. Neither of them knew how a wife consented. Her dry little cough rose up, and she cleared her throat.

“It’s quite late now,” Josiah remarked.

Frances turned back the covers. “Will you come to bed, husband?” she asked, as coldly civil as if she were offering him a dish of tea.

Josiah flushed scarlet with relief. “Thank you,” he said. He stepped out of his slippers and slid into bed beside her. They lay side by side for a moment, taking care not to touch each other; then Josiah leaned over and blew out both candles. Under cover of the sudden darkness, he reared on top of Frances and pulled her nightdress out of his way. Frances lay still underneath him with her eyes closed and her teeth gritted. It was a duty that had to be done. Josiah fumbled awkwardly for a few moments, and then he exclaimed in a whisper and moved away.

“It’s no good,” he said shortly. “I have drunk too much wine.”

Frances opened her eyes. She could see only the silhouette of his profile. She did not know what she was supposed to do.

“It does not matter,” he said, consoling himself rather than her. “It will come right in time. There is no need for us to hurry. After all, we neither of us married for desire.”

There was a long, rather chilling silence. “No,” Frances acknowledged. “Neither of us did.”

“G
OOD MORNING, MA
’
AM,
”
A
voice said, and the curtains rattled on the brass rail as the maid drew them back and tied them to the bedposts.

Frances stirred and opened her eyes. The maid who had waited at the dinner table last night was standing before her with a small silver tray bearing a jug of hot chocolate and a warm pastry. Frances sat up and received the tray on her knees. “Thank you.”

The maid dipped a curtsy. “Master said to tell you that he is gone out early,” she said. “But Miss Cole expects you in the parlor as soon as you are dressed. She is there already.”

Frances nodded. She waited for the maid to leave the room and then bolted the food and gulped down the hot chocolate. She sprang from the bed and went over to the ewer of water to wash her face. Then she paused, remembering her new status. She was no longer the governess who had to hurry downstairs for fear of keeping the mistress waiting. Frances smiled at the thought and poured water into the bowl. She washed her face and patted it dry, enjoying the sense of leisure. Her clothes for the morning were laid out on the heavy wooden chest: a linen shift, a morning dress in white muslin, embroidered at the hem, with a frivolous silk apron to denote Frances’s intention of domestic work.

The dress was new. Lady Scott had given Frances whole bolts of fabric when the marriage contract was signed. Her entire wardrobe had been renovated and improved with gifts
from her cousins and her aunt. Frances knew it was the last thing Lady Scott would ever do for her, and she accepted the old gowns and yards of silk with nothing more than polite gratitude. Her husband would have to provide for her new clothes, and there was an allowance of pin money laid down in the marriage contract. Frances would never again darn and redarn her silk stockings.

She slipped on the shift and turned as there was a tap on the door and the maid came in again. Frances sat at the dressing table and brushed her hair in steady sweeps of the silver-backed brushes, and the maid helped her plait it into two braids and pin them up on her head with a pretty scrap of lace for a cap. The woman was slow and not very skillful. She dropped the hairbrush.

“I am sorry, Mrs. Cole,” she said awkwardly. “I don’t usually work as a lady’s maid.”

“Does Miss Cole have her own maid?”

“She dresses herself.”

Frances hid her surprise. She had never heard of a lady dressing herself; she wondered how Sarah managed with the small covered buttons at the back of a gown. Even as a governess, Frances had borrowed a maid to do her hair and help with the fastenings. For the first time, Frances had a glimpse of her tumble in status. The maid shook out the morning dress and held it for Frances to put on, fastening the two dozen mother-of-pearl buttons up the back of the dress, and tied the ribbon of the apron. Lastly she set out the little insubstantial slippers of pink silk.

“Shall I show you to the parlor, ma’am?”

“Yes,” Frances said.

She followed the woman down the stairs. It was a dreadfully dark, poky house, she thought, sandwiched between one large warehouse and another, with its front door giving directly onto the dock and its back door into a yard overhung by the glowering red sandstone cliff. The cliff was part of the building; the
warehouse carved into its overhanging walls. The storerooms extended into caves deep inside it, running back for miles in a red sandstone labyrinth.

It was no house for a lady. It was crashingly noisy with the rolling of barrels on the cobbles of the quay. Costers and hawkers shrieked their wares, screaming to make themselves heard over the bawled orders on the unloading ships. Frances did not know if Josiah had a carriage, and she did not know if she would be allowed to walk along the quayside outside her front door without endangering her reputation. She had a fine line to tread as the niece of a lord but the wife of a man whose house was no larger than a shop.

Bristol was not a genteel city; it was all port and no town, quaysides and no pavements. Every other street toward the town center was a bridge with a river running beneath it. The town center itself was crammed on the banks of the river, with masts of sailing ships overtopping the chimneys and the prows of the boats almost knocking on the doors. When the tide was full, the boats rocked and bobbed, and sailors in the rigging could see into bedroom windows and shout bawdy comments at the housemaids. When the tide was out, the ships were dumped on the stinking mud of the harbor bottom, and the garbage from the boats and the sewage from the town gurgled sluggishly around them.

The maid paused before the dark wooden parlor door, tapped lightly, and stood aside. Frances turned the door handle and went in. Sarah Cole rose from her seat at the table, her face unsmiling under a plain morning cap.

“No need to knock,” she said coldly. “You are the mistress here now.” She put her hand on a great ring of keys on the table. “These are the household keys. My brother has told me to offer them to you, if you wish to take the housekeeping into your own hands.”

Frances hesitated, and Sarah Cole gestured to an ominous pile of dark-backed ledgers. “Also the housekeeping books,”
she went on. “I think you will find them in order. I present them to my brother once a month for his signature. That will now be your task.”

“Gracious,” said Frances weakly.

The stern face of the older woman gleamed with pride. “It has been my life’s work to make this house run as smoothly as our trading company. The company books are no better than the household ones. I do them both.”

“He must be very grateful to you,” Frances said tentatively.

Miss Cole’s face was stern. “There is no reason why he should be,” she replied. “I was doing my duty and protecting my fortune, as I trust you will do. It was my task to run the business and the housekeeping, for both my brother and for my papa, for all these years ever since Mama died. Now it is my duty to hand the housekeeping accounts over to you.”

Frances went to the table and opened a ledger at random. It was written in perfect copperplate script:

“To Mr. Sykes, butcher . . . £3.4s.6d.” Beneath it was another entry, and another and another for page after page.

Frances turned the pages. They fluttered with the petty cash of many years. “I have never done accounts,” she confessed. “In my father’s house, it was done by the cook. I merely checked the totals at the end of each month. I am afraid I don’t know how to do them.”

Miss Cole raised an eyebrow. “You must have been badly cheated,” she said.

“Oh, no! Cook had been with us since I was a baby. She was devoted to my father and to me. She would not have cheated us. She was like one of the family.”

Miss Cole shrugged. “I do not know about grand houses,” she said. “I am a trader’s sister and a trader’s daughter. I do not have servants who are one of the family. I check their work, and if I see an error, then I sack them.”

“It was hardly a grand house. It was a little country vicarage on Lord Scott’s estate.”

“I was born in a collier’s cottage,” Miss Cole said sharply. “I think your country vicarage would seem very grand to me.”

Frances paused. This woman would be her daily companion; when they moved house, she would move, too. They would live together; they would meet every day for the rest of their lives. She forced herself to smile. “There is much I do not know about your life and your business,” she said. “I hope you will teach me, Miss Cole, and help me to fulfill my side of the bargain and be a good wife to your brother.”

The woman’s face was stern. “I do not know what bargain you have made. I do not know why he wanted a wife, and such a wife as you.”

Frances blinked at the woman’s abrupt honesty. “Well, this is frank speaking indeed!”

Sarah nodded. “I speak as I find. I am a simple trader’s daughter.”

“You did not wish him to marry?” Frances ventured.

“Why should I? We have lived together and worked side by side on the company for years. We have made it grow from one ship to a fleet of three. We have trebled our business and our profits. And now Josiah wants a town house and a smart lady for his wife. But who is to pay for this? Are we to spend our money on houses rather than ships? What return will they make? What return will
you
make?”

Frances snatched a little breath. She could feel her heart pounding with embarrassment at the other’s plain speaking. “Really . . . Miss Cole . . .”

“You asked, and I answered you,” the woman said stubbornly.

Frances put her hand to her throat. “I hope you will not be my enemy,” she whispered.

Sarah Cole looked at Frances’s white face and shrugged. “What would be the sense in that?” she said. “It is a business arrangement, after all. But you should not try to manage my account books if you do not understand them.”

“Would you prefer to do them?” Frances asked. “Until I have learned how things are to be done? Would you prefer to go on as you have been, and I will watch you and study your ways?”

“I think that would be best, if it is your wish.”

“I have no desire to push you from your place,” Frances said hastily. “Nor cause any quarrel in this house.”

“You don’t look the quarrelsome type,” Sarah said with grim humor.

Frances suddenly flushed as she smiled. “Indeed I am not! I cannot bear quarrels and people shouting.”

Sarah nodded. “I see. You suffer from sensibility.”

Frances, who had never before heard it described as a disability, gave a shaky little laugh. “It is how I was brought up,” she said.

“Well, I am not a lady, and I thank God for it,” Sarah said. “But I will try to make allowances for you. You have nothing to fear from me. Now I will show you around the house,” she continued, rising to her feet. “You have seen only this parlor and your bedroom so far.”

There was not much to see. The parlor was on the first floor. It ran the length of the house, overlooking the quay at the front and overshadowed by the cliff at the back. There was a small dining table and six hard chairs, where Miss Cole worked during the day and where breakfast was served at midmorning, dinner at midafternoon, and supper in the evening. There was a fireplace with two straight-backed chairs on either side. There was Miss Cole’s workbox. The walls were washed with lime, empty of any pictures or ornament, and the floorboards were plain waxed wood, with a thin hearthrug before the fire.

Josiah’s office, the next room, was even plainer. It also overlooked the quay, but it did not even have curtains at the windows, just forbidding black-painted shutters. His desk was set before the window to the left of the fireplace, a big wooden captain’s chair before it. There was a chair by the fire and a small
table beside it. There were three maps hanging on the walls. One showed the south coast of England, one the west coast of Africa, little more than a wriggling coastline and a completely empty interior, and the third was a navigation chart of the shoals and currents around the islands of the West Indies. Nothing else. Frances, looking in through the door of the spartan room, wondered what the Coles did for amusement, where they entertained their friends. There was nothing in either room to indicate anything but a life dedicated to work.

Miss Cole gave a longing glance out the window before she turned away. On the quayside immediately below, the Coles’ ship the
Rose
was unloading. Sarah Cole would rather have been entering profits into the ledger.

On the floor above the parlor were the bedrooms. Josiah and Miss Cole had bedrooms facing the dock; Frances’s room was quieter, at the back, sheltered by the red sandstone cliff. If she opened her window and leaned out, she could look down to the cobbled backyard outside the kitchen door, hemmed in by high warehouse walls and beyond them the twisting little streets that ran from the dockside up to the church on the peak of the hill: St. Mary Redclift. On her left was the prodigious height of a lead-shot tower. To her right, overtopping the church spire, was the fat, kiln-shaped chimney of the glassworks. All day there was ceaseless noise: the crash of the metalworks and the roar and rattle of the furnaces. The sour, toxic smell of lead haunted the Backs.