Respectable Trade Read online

  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.

  Above this floor was the attic bedroom for the servants and the linen and storeroom. Miss Cole showed Frances the bare poverty of the rooms with quiet pride and then led the way down the stairs to the front door and hall.

  The hall was hopelessly dark, the only light seeping through a grimy fanlight over the front door. At the end of the corridor at the back of the house was the door to the kitchen. They could hear someone pounding dough on a board and singing softly. In all the shaded, somber house, it was the first happy sound.

  At the sound of Miss Cole’s footstep, the singing stopped abruptly, and the pounding of the dough became louder and faster.

  Sarah Cole opened the door to the kitchen and ushered Frances in. “This is your new mistress, Mrs. Cole,” she said abruptly, surveying the kitchen. The cook—floured to the elbows—bobbed a curtsy, and the upstairs maid, Brown, rose from the table where she had been polishing silver and glasses. A little hunchbacked girl came in from the backyard wiping her hands on a hessian apron and dipped a curtsy, staring at Frances. Frances smiled impartially at them all.

  “The cook is Mrs. Allen. The maid is Brown. Mrs. Allen discusses the menus with me every week and shows me the housekeeping books.” Sarah shot a sideways glance at Frances. “You should be there when we meet. I take it that Monday afternoon will still be convenient?”

  “Perfectly,” Frances said politely.

  The little scullery maid had not even been named to Frances.

  “You can get on with your work,” Miss Cole ordered them brusquely, and led the way from the kitchen, through the poky little hall and up the stairs to the parlor.

  She seated herself at the table and drew one of the ledgers toward her. She took up a pen. Frances, rather at a loss, seated herself on the narrow window seat and looked down on the quay.

  The tide was in, and the foul smell of the mud had lessened. The sunshine sparkled on the water of the dock, and quicksilver water lights danced on the ceiling of the parlor. The quayside was crowded with people selling, loading and unloading ships, hawking goods, mending ropes, and caulking the decks of outbound ships with steaming barrels of stinking tar. The Coles’ own ship, the Rose, was still unloading her goods, the great round barrels of rum and sugar were piled on the quayside. The intense stink of a ship of the trade wafted
up to Frances and even penetrated the house: sugar, sewage, and pain. As she watched, she saw Josiah slap one of the barrels for emphasis and then spit on his palm and shake hands on a deal with another man.

  Sarah’s pen scratched on the paper. The room was stuffy and hot, the windows closed tight against the smell and noise of the quayside.

  “I should like to go out,” Frances said after a while. “I should like to walk around and see the city.”

  Miss Cole lifted her head, her finger on the page to keep her place. “Brown will have to go with you. You cannot walk on the quayside alone.”

  Frances nodded and rose to her feet. “Very well.”

  Sarah shook her head, not taking her eyes from the book. “Brown is working in the house now. You will have to wait until afternoon. You can walk then.”

  There was a short silence.

  “I see Mr. Cole down there on the quayside,” Frances said. “May I go down to him?”

  Sarah dragged her attention from her work again. “He is engaged in business. He would have no time for you, and the men he is dealing with are not those he would wish you to meet. They are not gentlemen. You will have to be patient. You are no longer a lady of leisure,” Miss Cole volunteered spitefully. “You cannot act on whim.”

  “No,” said Frances, turning her attention back to the quayside, “I see that I cannot.”

  Most of the sailors had been paid off and had left the ship, but the captain and one other man, his hair tied back in a greasy little plait, were watching the sailmakers pulling the ragged canvas out of the lockers and spreading it on the dockside. Josiah inspected the worn sails and nodded his agreement as the sailmakers bundled it on a sledge, took up the ropes, and started to tow it away. Frances watched him from her vantage point above him, a curiously foreshortened view, as if he were not a powerful man in a man’s world but a little man struggling to cope.

  “It is strange to see your money being made,” she remarked thoughtlessly, and then flushed with embarrassment. “I beg your pardon! I spoke without thinking.”

  “It is not strange to me,” Miss Cole said. She did not take offense as Frances had feared. “I have lived in this house most of my life. I have waited for our ships to come in, and I have known what profit or loss they made on every voyage. Since I was a child of nine, I have cared for nothing else. That one you see there, the Rose, has done well for us.”

  “What a pretty name,” Frances said.

  Miss Cole showed her thin smile. “All our ships have flower names since our first one, a captured French merchant ship called Marguerite,” she said. “That means “daisy” in French, you know. We have three ships: the Rose, which you see here, the Daisy, which should be at the West Indies, and the Lily, which was in port a few months ago and should be loading off Africa, God willing.”

  “You say that they ‘should be’—do you not know where they are?”

  “How should I know? I know when they set sail and I know when they are due, but between their destination and their home port is the most vast and dangerous ocean. We have to wait. The largest part of being a merchant in the Atlantic trade is waiting—and keeping your counsel while you wait.”

  “Have you ever sailed with them?”

  “No one of any sense would sail to Africa,” Miss Cole replied. “It is a death trap.”

  “Do you sail nowhere else?”

  Miss Cole turned from the window and went back to her work. “There is nowhere else,” she said irritably. “What other trade is to be had?”

  “I don’t know,” Frances said foolishly. “I thought perhaps you might sail to India, or to China.”

  “This is Bristol,” Miss Cole explained patiently, as one might speak to a child. “This is the heart of the sugar trade. We trade to the West Indies and to the Americas. It is on this trade that my father made his fortune and on this trade that we will make ours.”

  “Only sugar?”

  “There is no more profitable business,” Miss Cole said firmly. “The trade is supreme.”

  “But so uncertain . . .”

  “We trust in our abilities,” Sarah said piously. “And we are all of us in the merciful hands of God.”

  THEY DID NOT KNOW themselves to be in the merciful hands of God. They seemed very far from any god. They lay very close together, stacked side by side like logs in a woodpile. When the ship rolled, they rolled hard one way, bumping and bruising, and then when it pitched back, they rolled again. When the ship reared up over a massive wave and crashed down, it was as if they had been packed on their naked backs in a rough wooden case and dropped, over and over again. Within a day they were bruised from the planking; within a week the skin was rubbed away. When the sea was heavy, the water poured in through the gratings on the deck into the hold where they lay, and the slop buckets overturned and sewage washed around them. They were not fed during bad weather, and those that were not vomiting from seasickness or already dying from typhus went hungry. When the sea was calm, they were ordered up on deck, staggering under the bright, uncaring sky, and made to wash and dry themselves, sharing a soiled piece of cloth. A man watched them rinse out their mouths with vinegar and water and spit through the netting into the huge waves that rolled unstoppably toward the little ship, coming from the far horizon, as high as hills. It was a nightmare, a long, unbelievable nightmare, which got worse and worse every day.

  At first Mehuru had thought that the crewmen were ghosts, that he had died at sight of the ship and that this was some punitive afterlife. The crew’s skin was so pallid, and their eyes were empty of color or warmth. He could not at first accept their dreadful ugliness. They did not look like men, and they did not act like men. They behaved as if they were a different species from Mehuru, from Siko, from the two hundred men they had on board. They prodded at them with sticks, whipped them with casual cruelty. They never looked in their faces, never met their eyes. There was something so cold and unnatural in their indifference that Mehuru felt his very soul wither and shrink from them. These could not be men. No man could treat another man with such chilling indifference.

  The god Snake’s counsel was bleak on the voyage, and the farther he went from his home, the fainter and fainter grew the voice, until Mehuru had to face the dreadful prospect of losing his guide. He had no magic to bring him back—the gods go where they will—and Mehuru could make no offering. He had no pet snake to feed; he had no smoke to please the god or bones for it to play with. All he could do was dream that he was making pleasures for the god and give him the thoughts of his mind. So he lay in the pitching blackness with his back rubbed raw against the sweating planks of the hold, the filth of the bilges washing around him, and made in his mind a perfect flower, a flower from the hibiscus bush, bright scarlet, frilled as silk. Then he pictured a jeweled snake and brought the flower to the snake in a bowl of white clay studded with tiny blue stones.

  The three images were almost too much for him: the brilliant snake, the perfect flower, and the white bowl with the blue pattern. In the sodden, sweaty torture of the black hold, with people dying around him, Mehuru shut his eyes and summoned three perfect forms: god in a flower, god in an animal, and god in a man, guiding his hands to work with clay and with little blue stones.

  There was no way to measure time in the darkness. Mehuru woke sometimes and thought perhaps he had died and that the Yoruban belief that you stay near to the people you loved, watching over them, was all wrong. The afterlife was a perpetual rolling and pitching, heat and smell, and the horror of being pushed against sickly men, unable to help them, and no emotion but hatred for their rough bumping against you, and hunger for their share of food.

  Sometimes the sailors opened the hatches and bawled down into the darkness for the captives to come out. The sunlight hurt their eyes, but they had to stand on deck, and one of the sailors would beat a drum while another cracked a whip. Mehuru looked at them in utter wonder. The sailors wanted them to dance. As obedient as idiot children, with the guns all ar
ound them and the whips cracking out the time, they shuffled and hopped while others were ordered to clean out the hold and throw the dead and dying over the side. Mehuru sank deep inside his mind while his body hopped and pranced.

  If the dancing were to keep them healthy Mehuru could not think why they were fed so poorly. If their jailers wanted them fit, Mehuru could not think why they let so many sicken for lack of water in the unbearable heat of the hold. They lowered buckets filled with stale, warm water and bad yams that crawled with insects. Never enough water, never enough food. They had loaded about two hundred men, and elsewhere in the ship they were keeping women and little children, perhaps another hundred of them. On Mehuru’s shelf alone, five had already died. One had flung himself over the side, two had sickened, one had been whipped too hard and never came back to the hold, and the last one had sealed his lips from food and water and had watched the others eat every day while he starved himself to death. Mehuru’s imagination could not stretch to the scale of it. It never occurred to him that more than three hundred of them had been shipped but that only two hundred and forty or so were expected to survive. It was not necessary that they should all survive. It was a process so large as to be industrial. Mehuru had no concept that his life could be written off as wastage.

  He started to dread the arrival of the bucket of food, for only then, when they were ordered to gather around and share ten to a bucket, eating with their dirty hands, could he see how many of them were sickening to death. They were the ones who did not struggle and claw at each other to get to the food. Mehuru set himself the task of fighting for his share and then giving half of it to the neighbor on his right. He did it as an exercise, a discipline, not an act of love. He thought he would never love anyone, ever again.

  When he had eaten, and the slowly dying man beside him had mumbled on his slabber porridge, Mehuru would shut his eyes and try to build a picture of a perfect tiny snake as an offering for the god.

  He knew that his mind was going when the snake became very bright and easy to find. The snake became more important than the ship, more vivid than the clammy touch of the dying man beside him. The snake opened his mouth and sang to him as Mehuru felt his skin grow wet with sweat and his mind shift and slide away from the darkness. He knew he should stay in his waking mind and guard Siko, but he had not seen Siko, except for a glimpse on deck, since they had set sail. He knew he had failed in his duty to him. He knew he was guilty of a mortal sin in taking the boy into danger. But he could not keep himself alert, could not stay on guard. As they went farther and farther west, Mehuru sank into a deep, deathly indifference.