Respectable Trade Read online

  He could not tell how long they had been sailing, but when they came on deck to dance, there were more limp bodies thrown overboard and there were fewer who could dance each time. Mehuru looked around idly for the children, the little ones who had been loaded on the ship as round as berries and as dark and shiny as the sacred wood of the iroko tree. They were thinner, and many of them were sick, but worst of all was the way the bright life was draining from them. They no longer cried like desperate fledglings for their mothers; they were lost children. Whether they lived or died, there would be a gap in their spirits that nothing would ever replace. How would they respect their fathers and how love children of their own, if their most powerful memory was being abandoned to despair?

  He thought that about forty had died, and two crewmen as well, when the sound of the ship changed one night. Then came urgent noises of running on the deck overhead, and abrupt commands and anxious shouts, and then the great rolling yaw of the ship ceased, ceased at last, and he heard the roar as the anchor chain sped out through the housing and the ship thrust a claw into the ocean bed and dragged herself to a standstill. They were brought up on deck as if to be ready for dancing, but then they were manacled, arms to legs, and chained from one neck to another. The captain, even whiter than before and thinner from the voyage, looked at each shivering black man or woman or little child before he waved them into the line and had them locked onto the chain. A few, a very few, he waved to one side under guard of a sailor who held a musket easily at their heads. Mehuru thought of the unreliability of the muskets on sale in Africa and thought it might be worth taking the chance and rushing the man. But when he looked around to see where he might run, he felt sicker than he had felt in the whole long voyage. For they were not off the coast of Africa anymore. Wherever they had come to, it was a land he had never seen before.

  The last of his courage went out of him then, and when the captain waved him to the little group, he went as weakly as the children who were already chosen. The last time he saw Siko was when the boy hobbled obediently to the long chain and bowed his neck to the collar. Mehuru tried to find a voice to call to him, to wish him well, to promise to return to find him if he possibly could. He was dumb. Siko looked at him, a long look of reproach and despair, and Mehuru could find no words at all. He dropped his gaze and turned away, and when they were ordered back down into the hold, he went without looking back. When they chained him back on a strangely empty shelf, he held his hands out for the manacles on his wrists like a foolish, trusting child.

  A great longing for his home, so painful that he thought he would die of it, sickened him to his very core. He lay in the darkness, refusing to open his eyes, refusing to take food. The little group was kept together in the hold, twenty of them. Two other men were manacled with leg irons like himself chained on the shelf, and five women with neck irons and long chains so that they could move more freely but not reach the men. The smallest children were allowed to go free; two of them could barely walk. The other children aged from four years to adolescence wore light chains from wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle.

  One of the women called to Mehuru to eat, but he turned his head from her and closed his eyes. The smallest toddler struggled through the slurry that washed around the floor to bring him a bowl. Mehuru saw fresh fruit—the first he had seen in the long two months of the voyage—but he did not allow himself desire. He would not eat. He had been robbed of his home, he had been robbed of his people. He had been robbed of his servant and robbed of his duty to provide for him. He had been robbed of his life. He would live no more.

  Days passed, and still the ship did not sail. They were ordered on deck and made to build a little shelter against the sun. They were kept there like hens in a pen, lying on straw. They labored below to clean out the mess of two hundred men, stalled like animals for nearly sixty days. They baled out the excrement and the filth, and then the master of the ship went below with his handkerchief over his face and lit pastilles of camphor, which smoked all day and all night and still could not drown the stench.

  Mehuru would not speak. He ate a little rice every day and drank some of the fresh, sweet water. When the women asked his name or the men touched his hand in companionship and shared mourning, he turned his head away. Nothing should tie him to life.

  The sailors lived on board and worked during the day, loading the ship and making it ready for another voyage. They had long idle periods when they came and took the women away. The women came back bruised and sometimes bloodstained, with their heads in their hands. Mehuru, chained hand and foot, turned his head from the horror in their faces.

  One woman did not come back at all, and after that the sailors were forbidden to touch them. The small children missed her; she had played with them and fed them and sung them songs. Without her they were a bit more lost. One little girl sat beside Mehuru for the greater part of every day and banged her head gently against the deck. Mehuru lay with his eyes shut, the deck echoing beneath his head like a drum to the steady thud of the girl’s head against the planks.

  The master came back on board, and the ship was ready to sail, only half loaded with large kegs of sugar and rum. The little girl disappeared; they took her away one day, but still Mehuru could hear the thud thud thud of her head on wood. It beat like a heart, it drummed like an accusation.

  He closed his eyes and refused to eat rice. He drank only water. He felt himself floating away. There was none of the right things that an obalawa should have around him, and he could not warn his fathers that he would need their help in crossing over. He thought his tree that held his spirit had bent in some storm and was perhaps breaking, and he prayed for it to fall so that his spirit might flow out of it and he might die.

  Mehuru readied himself to join the ones who had to die sitting down with their eyes staring out into the darkness. He feared he would not find his fathers, dying thus. Only the god Snake had seen him, with his huge, shiny eyes, and would know where his son had been stolen far away across the great seas.

  CHAPTER

  4

  JOSIAH CAME INTO HIS house for a pint of porter and a slice of pie at midday, and Frances was waiting for him at the top of the stairs.

  “I should like to go out for a walk,” she said. “But Brown cannot escort me in the mornings.”

  Josiah was absorbed in business, a missing hogshead of tobacco—a great round barrel packed with whole, sweet-smelling, dried leaves—and he looked at her as if she were an interruption, a nuisance. “I meant to get you a carriage,” he said absently. “You cannot walk along the dockside.”

  “So I understand,” Frances said. “But I wish to go out.”

  He sighed, his mind still on the Rose and the question of missing cargo. “Perhaps we can hire a carriage.”

  “Today?”

  “I am very busy,” he replied. “And troubled over this ship. There is an entire hogshead of tobacco unaccounted for, and the captain can give me no satisfactory explanation. I shall have to pay excise tax on it as if I had it safe in my bond, as well as carrying the loss.”

  “I am sorry to hear that,” Frances said politely. “Where would I hire a carriage?”

  Josiah broke off with a sudden, short bark of laughter. “You are persistent, Mrs. Cole!”

  Frances flushed at his use of her new name. “I am sorry,” she said. “At home I always walked in the gardens in the morning. My health is not very strong, as you know, and the day is fine, and I wanted to go out.”

  “No, it is I who am at fault. I have not provided for you as I should have done,” Josiah apologized. “I will hire a carriage for you myself, and I will drive with you this afternoon and show you the sights you should see.”

  “If it is no trouble . . .”

  “It is an interruption to my work,” he said frankly. “But I should have provided you with some amusement. Can you not do sewing or painting or something of that nature?”

  “Not all day.”

  “No, I suppose n
ot.” Josiah thought for a moment and then nodded at her and headed toward his office.

  “At what time shall I be ready for the carriage?” Frances called after him.

  “At two,” he said. “Tell Brown to go around to the coach yard and hire a coach, a landau or something open.” He nodded to her again and shut the door firmly in her face. Frances waited a moment and then went back to the parlor.

  Miss Cole’s place was empty, her ledger open at the accounts of the Rose. Frances leaned over the chair and saw the meticulous march of figures down the page, showing the purchase of petty goods for small sums. Sixpence for gold lace, threepence each for small knives, fourpence each for brass pots. She shrugged. She could not imagine how Miss Cole could bear to spend the day on these trifling sums, nor what difference they made to an enterprise of any size. She did not know what a trading ship sailing to the Sugar Islands would want with gold lace or small knives. Frances returned to her seat in the window and waited for two o’clock.

  THE COACH WAS PROMPT; it was standing at the door as Frances came down the stairs wearing a large picture hat crowned with two fat feathers. She had changed into a walking dress: a great-coat dress with a wide collar and caped sleeves. Mindful of the plainness of Sarah’s attire, Frances was rather relieved to find only Josiah waiting for her at the door and Sarah shut up in the parlor.

  “I was afraid you would have forgotten,” she said. “Did you find your tobacco?”

  “The planter in Jamaica cheated us, or made a mistake,” Josiah answered. “And the captain had it wrong on the cargo manifest. They were loading in a hurry. I had ordered him to make haste—it was the last of the new crop—and this is what comes of it.”

  “I am sorry to hear it,” Frances said uncertainly. She felt she should condole with him, as one would to a man who has suffered a loss. But her training to avoid the vulgar topic of money was too powerful.

  “I shall write to the planter and send the letter by Rose when she sails,” Josiah decided. “Within fourteen or fifteen months, she will be back in port again, and it should be set right.”

  “Gracious,” Frances said.

  “And I will carry the loss for the whole of that time,” he said irritably. “Just as I have to offer credit to the planters for two years at a time.” He looked at her, and his frown cleared. “This means nothing to you. Let me take you for a drive.” He handed her up the little step into the carriage. Frances unfurled her parasol against the bright summer sunshine and tipped the shade over her face.

  “Go to Queens Square first,” Josiah ordered the driver. “This is where I propose we should buy a house,” he explained to Frances. “We have to go ’round through the old town, but pay no attention to the dirt and the noise. Queens Square is very smart indeed.”

  The carriage moved forward, jolting on the cobbles, sailors and dockers grudgingly giving it room. The street sellers eyed Frances’s fine clothes, and one girl, hawking watercress from a tray, turned her head and spit on the ground.

  They drove down the Back Lane, the overhang of the houses above their heads so close that the streets were in permanent twilight, in a fog of foul air. The sun shone in a brilliant stripe down the center of the street, but the houses and the foul-smelling middens were in dank shade. Great wooden beams over their heads braced apart the houses on opposite sides of the street, which looked as if they were ready to topple together. The broad gutter in the center of the road was an open drain, thick with slops, mud, and garbage, stinking in the heat, breeding swarms of fruit flies. People swore as the carriage lurched past, splashing them with slurry. The horses scrabbled to find their footing on the greasy stones, and the carriage bumped and dipped; the road was almost impassable. Frances was afraid that the horses would founder. She gripped her parasol a little tighter and held one gloved hand to her face, trying to block out the evil stink of the lane.

  Every doorway, every archway was an entrance to a workshop. There were woodcarvers and seamstresses, there were coopers and workers of metal. There was a wigmaker who also pulled teeth; there was a small, dingy apothecary shop doing a roaring trade in laudanum and neat opium. Every other house seemed to be a gin shop; every third house was a brothel. It was a medieval city of timbered overhanging houses suddenly crowded to the bursting point with small, dangerous industries.

  Frances, who had spent all but two of her thirty-five years in the country vicarage, stared in horror from one ominously dark doorway to another. The white-faced occupants stared back at her, and someone shouted an insult at the carriage and threw a handful of mud.

  “It is rough,” Josiah conceded. “Bristol is a city of labor, my dear, not leisure.”

  “How can people bear it?”

  He gave a snort of laughter. “This is a prosperous street, my dear. If I showed you the colliers at Bedminster, then you would see something to shock you. They live like animals in their own filth, and no person of any wealth goes near them. They live in a world of their own, without parson or magistrates—totally outside society, totally without law.”

  Towering on the hill above them, in abrupt contrast to the clutter of roofs below it, was the ornate, highly decorated church of St. Mary Redclift at the head of a soaring flight of stone steps. But they turned away from the spire and back toward the city, passing over the bridge.

  “It would have been quicker to go across the river by the ferryboat,” Josiah explained. “Queens Square is directly opposite my dock. When we have our house, I will take a boat over every day. The lad will row me over for a ha’penny each way.”

  “I am sure these streets cannot be healthy,” Frances said. She tried to keep the dismay from her voice.

  “They are pestilential, madam!” Josiah exclaimed. “If you are not killed by some fool setting fire to your house, or felled by someone dropping something on you, or poisoned by some manufactory, you will be destroyed by cholera or typhoid or both. The foul water and the summer sun are a fatal combination.”

  “I wonder that your family chose to live here,” Frances said faintly.

  Josiah laughed shortly. “We did not choose! We were not in a position to choose! We bought what we could, where we could. My father bought the warehouse and dockside from his profits as a privateer, and that was where we lived. We were glad enough to have a business to run and premises to call our own.”

  “He was a privateer?”

  Josiah nodded and then laughed abruptly at her shocked face. “Don’t look so aghast, Mrs. Cole—he was a privateer, not a pirate! He had a letter from the Crown licensing him to attack French shipping. He took out his one leaky old boat and captured a French brig. That was our first chance. She was called the Marguerite. We paid our dues to the Crown and kept her and traded with her. It was the founding of our fortunes, the founding of our trading line. When she sank, we called our next boat Daisy after her.”

  Frances nodded. The carriage rolled onto a wooden bridge. Looking down, she saw the water rich with waste. Litter, garbage, excrement, and all the flotsam and jetsam of a busy port bobbed around the pillars of the bridge on the rising tide. The carriage bumped along the quay on the northern side of the river, and then the road ahead opened out with sudden, surprising grace. There was an avenue of young plane trees ahead, their broad leaves still fresh. There was a smooth green lawn in the center of the square, and a proud statue of a man on a galloping horse. The stink from the river was less strong, and the noise of the Backs was left behind them.

  “Queens Square,” said Josiah with satisfaction. “As good as any crescent in Bath, eh?”

  He was exaggerating; it was not as good as Bath. It lacked the easy regularity of those fine terraces, their confident scale. Part of the square was built in the golden stone of Bath, but part of it was red brick, and the profile of the roofs and the detail on the houses was idiosyncratic—each house an individual. But it was a well-proportioned square lined with young trees, divided into four by long avenues running north to south and east to west. In the middl
e the paths crossed and the statue made a handsome centerpiece. The houses were new; some looked like London houses in smart red brick with pointings of white mortar and corners of white stone. At the east end was an elegant large building flanked by two wings in thick yellow stone: the Custom House.

  The carriage drew up before the first house in the southwest corner, one of the biggest and most imposing in the square. “This is where we shall live,” Josiah announced. “This is where I have been aiming for years.”

  Frances looked at him in surprise. She had never before heard of a man desiring anything more than to stay in the position to which he had been called. She had heard men complain of the decline of manners, but never to seek change. Her father had preached that it was God’s will for a man to remain where he was born; a good Christian stayed where God had been pleased to put him. Josiah was the first man in her experience to express an ambition—to want something more than what he had been given. It was a revolutionary doctrine.

  “You have been aiming for it?”

  “My father was born on an earthen floor in a hovel,” Josiah said. “No more than a peasant. My sister in a collier’s cottage, a coal miner’s daughter. I was born on a stone floor in a warehouse. My son will be born in a proper bed, in a proper house. My family is on the rise, madam. Before the century is out, we will be known as gentry. We will have a country house and a carriage. This is but a step on our way, not our final destination.”