Respectable Trade Read online

  The white man turned his head to one side, coughed, and spit a gob of infected yellow phlegm. He nodded to a second white man, who stepped forward. Mehuru forced himself not to flinch; the man was rancid with the stink of drink and a sharp, acrid smell of old sweat. Mehuru breathed in through his mouth and repeated the speech again in Portuguese.

  The white man did not even reply. He put his filthy hands in Mehuru’s face and pulled back his lips to see his teeth. Mehuru jerked back and staggered over the chains at his ankles.

  “How dare you!” he cried. At once two of the African slavers seized him from behind and held him in an unrelenting grip.

  “Let me go!” Mehuru shouted. He bit off his panic and spoke clearly in Portuguese. “You are making a serious mistake,” he said urgently. “I am an envoy for the Yoruba federation.”

  The white man nodded to the guard to hold him firmly, leaned down, and pulled aside Mehuru’s loincloth. He pulled back the foreskin of his penis to see if he were infected and then nodded at the guard to make him bend over, to see if the flux had left blood on his anus.

  Mehuru’s outraged shout was stifled in his throat. When he felt the dirty hands on him, he choked with shame. Siko was watching him, his eyes wide with horror. “It’s all right,” Mehuru called in hollow reassurance. “We will get to their leaders and explain.”

  It was bravado, not courage. That night when Siko had wept himself to sleep and was lying with his limbs twitching with dreams of freedom, Mehuru sat quietly, dry-eyed and horrified. The fingerprints of the white men burned on his skin; the recollection of their washed-out stares scorched his memory. They had looked at him with their pale eyes as if he were nothing, as if he were a piece of meat, a piece of trade. They looked at him as if he were a nobody, and Mehuru thought that in their horrible, transparent eyes he had seen the death of his individuality. He thought that if he lost his sense of who he was, of his culture, of his religion, of his magic power, then he would be a slave indeed.

  Only the god Snake was with him in that long, desolate night. Mehuru called on him to save him from the men who were as white as ghosts, and Snake laughed quietly in his long throat and said, “All men are dead men, all men are ghosts.” Mehuru did not sleep that night, though he was weary through to his very bones.

  The next day the chosen hundred were herded into canoes and taken down the river. Mehuru no longer depended on his powerful status as a representative of the alafin of Yoruba. He kept a sharp lookout instead for a chance to escape and run, run like a slave, for freedom.

  But even that could not be done. Not on the river journey, not when they were unloaded on the beach at the coast. The slavers had done this too often. Mehuru saw that they were practiced in the handling of many angry, frightened people. They never came within reach; they whipped them into line with long whips from a distance. Mehuru kept watching for a chance to order the whole line of them to run—run in a great line toward the marketplace of the town—and in the confusion find hammers to shear the chains and spears to kill and then scatter. But there were too many too lame to run fast enough and too many little children crying for their mothers, chained in the line.

  He waited, pretending obedience and waiting for his chance. They were herded through the little village at the mouth of the river and down to the wide, white-sand beach, where boats, white men’s boats, were drawn up with the waves washing around their keels.

  When he saw the ship, the great ship, bobbing at anchor beyond the white breakers, his heart sank. It was the ship of his dreams come for him at last. The hot, humid wind that blew steadily on shore brought the smell of death as clearly as if he could already hear the widows crying. Mehuru stared at the water around the ship and saw the swift movement of a shark’s fin—just as he had seen it in his dream. He looked at the prow, which he had dreamed slicing so easily through the water, and knew that it would cut through miles of seas. Even the rope of his dream was stretched out tight as the ship bobbed on her mooring. It was all as he had known it.

  Mehuru embraced despair then. The ship had been coming for him for months; he had seen it set sail, he had seen it arrive off his own coast, and now here it was at last, waiting for him. He closed his eyes as a man will close his eyes in death and let them herd him, like a sacrificial goat, on board.

  CHAPTER

  3

  FRANCES SCOTT, NOW FRANCES SCOTT COLE, closed the door of what was to be her bedroom and looked around her. It was a plain room bereft of any trimming or prettiness. The bed was a massive four-poster in dark, heavy wood and had a small table beside it. The wash jug and ewer stood on another matching side table. There was a chest for her clothes and a mirror on the wall. It had been Josiah’s; now he would use the adjoining room, except for the nights when he might choose to sleep with her.

  The room smelled. The whole house stank of the midsummer garbage of the dock. Only in a rainstorm or at high tide would the air smell clean to Frances, who had not been brought up on these fetid riverbanks.

  Josiah still had not bought his house on Queens Square, but he had promised to find a house soon. As the date of the July wedding had drawn near, Frances had agreed to live for the first months of her wedded life over a warehouse on the Bristol quayside.

  The room was in half darkness. Only a little cold moonlight found its way in through the casement window, obscured by the brooding cliff that towered over the back of the house. Even at midday the room would be dark and damp. Frances put her candle down on the bedside table, went over to the mirror, and unpinned her hair. Her reflected face looked impassively back at her. She had been a pretty child, but that had been many years ago. She was thirty-five now, and no one would mistake her age. Her forehead was lined; around her mouth were the downward lines of discontent. Her pale skin was papery and dry; around her dark eyes were slight brown shadows. She suffered from delicate health, inherited from her mother, who had died of consumption. Her great beauty was her dark hair, which showed no gray. She looked what she had been only yesterday—a lady clinging on to fragile social status, of uncertain health, unmarried, impoverished, and aging fast.

  But now it was all changed. Frances smiled slightly and picked up her silver-backed hairbrush. She was a married woman now, and an entirely new life was opening up before her. It seemed like a hard choice—matrimony at thirty-five—when many women were matrons already with a family around them. But anything was better than being a governess in a state of genteel servitude. Anything was better than watching her place move inexorably down the dining table until one day she would be asked to dine in the nursery with the children and disappear from polite society altogether. It had been a hard choice, but in the end no choice at all.

  Frances started to plait her hair in a thick hank, ready for bed. The wedding dinner had been better than she could have hoped. Lord Scott had been as kind as always, although his cold, unfriendly wife had cast a cool shadow over the proceedings. Frances had dreaded that Josiah would be rowdy and jolly, but the evening had been as dignified as a funeral. Only Sarah and Josiah represented the Cole family, so Frances’s other great fear—that there would be dozens of vulgar relations emerging from the Bristol woodwork—was stilled. The dinner had been well cooked, a little lavish for just the five of them. The wines—as you would expect in Bristol—had been excellent.

  Frances had sat at the foot of the table in the tiny, airless parlor and smiled without flinching. Everyone at the table knew that marriage to such a man as Josiah was not her first choice. Everyone at the table knew that she had no choice. The coldness in her heart was reflected in the cool serenity of her face.

  Her calm had been threatened only once. When Lord Scott took her hand on leaving, he had whispered to her, “God bless you, my dear. It’s the best thing you could have done . . . considering.” This tactful acknowledgment that she was orphaned and penniless sent a shiver through her. “I will pray it goes well for you,” he said.

  There would be nothing he could do for her if it di
d not. Frances was owned by Josiah, body and soul. She had promised to obey him till death.

  “But it will go well for me,” she whispered. She tied her nightcap under her chin and crossed the cold floorboards to the bed. She had wept the night her father died. She had wept the first night that she had slept in a strange house, far from the country vicarage and far below the genteel status of the vicar’s only daughter. She had raged then against the unfairness of a life in which a woman is dependent completely on a man. A woman who lacks a father must find a husband. Frances had not married when she should have done, in the brief bloom of her youth. She had aimed too high, and her father had been too proud. He had not understood that a man, any man at all, was better than spinster hardship. Her father’s death abandoned Frances to loneliness and to poverty and to the unending slights of the life of a governess.

  She got into the broad bed and rested her head on the plain linen pillow. She would not cry tonight. She was a wife, and she had a dinner table of her own, even though it was only a small table and pushed to one side in a tiny parlor. The rest of her life would be spent accommodating her desires to her husband’s fortune. If Josiah rose in the world, she would rise with him; if he did not, she must bear it with patience and be glad to have found such a haven as this little house. She pulled the covers over her shoulders as if the coldness in her spirit had chilled her very skin, despite the sultry night air. She felt as if tears or feelings would never touch her again. She was heartbroken and exhausted by heartbreak; and she mistook it for the calmness of old age.

  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.”

  “GOOD 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 p
aused 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.”