Respectable Trade Read online

  One of the infants became sick. They thought she was dying of the cold. Mehuru saw that as the sun sickened and grew weaker, the child sickened, too. There was nothing they could do for her. She cried a little, very pitifully, and then died while a woman held her and rocked her. When Mehuru brought the little body up on deck for burial, they took her roughly from him and tossed her over the side. Her arms and legs flew up as she went over, and Mehuru had a heart-stopping moment when he thought she cried out. But the ship plunged down into the deep gray waves, and her little black head bobbing in the water was hidden from him.

  Days stretched beyond counting, weeks, and then months. They took the flux—dysentery—and one of the men died, and another of the infants. The weather was too stormy for them to dance on deck, and besides they were all growing weaker. Mehuru wondered if they would sail on and on until they were all dead. When they were called up to empty the waste pail, two of the boys slipped through the nets hung around the rigging to keep them on board and flung themselves into the sea. Mehuru felt shame at their loss. He should have given them hope, he should have given them a reason to live. But there was no hope, and there was no reason to live.

  The bucket of food grew more and more stale, but it did not rot. Unbelievably, it was too cold for that to happen. Then in the night Mehuru felt the rhythm of the heaving ship steady and change. He heard the yell of the men dropping the sails. There was a long time of rocking gently, as if they were anchored, and then a new jerky movement as the ship was taken into tow.

  Mehuru waited in the darkness of the hold, listening for any clues that might tell him what was happening on deck. Once again he heard the urgency of the ship nearing port and the growing noise of a quayside. The others woke, the women clutching each other in fear, the children whimpering. There was a foul, sour smell of dirt, like an old midden. It penetrated even to the fetid hold of the slave ship. There was a dreadful noise of people shouting and a screech of machinery working. Mehuru gathered his blanket around his shoulders and trembled a little with cold and fear. Then the grating was lifted off, they were ordered on deck, and they climbed out unsteadily and stood, shivering in the cold, looking around them.

  They could see little, for it was not yet dawn and there were only a few lanterns lashed to the rigging and to the side of the ship. A chain was passed along their line, linking one neck collar with another, and they were ordered to walk down a ridged bridge of wood to the quayside. Mehuru, his insteps flinching from the cold, hard cobbles, touched ground for the first time in six months. He had never felt freezing stone before; he could not believe the ache of coldness in the high, arched bones of his feet. They whipped him and the others with light, biting blows on his shoulders and his back, and they shouted at him, as men shout when they herd cattle. The cold air in his face and the cold hardness beneath his feet told Mehuru that he had arrived into some dreadful exile in the land where all the men were dead men; and Snake alone knew what they wanted of him.

  Mehuru breathed deep, three, four times of the icy, dirty air and tried to hold down his panic. Before him was a high building with no lights showing and arched doorways like gaping mouths leading to storerooms. A small door at the side of the building opened at their approach, and they were ordered into a hallway, through another door into a kitchen. The warmth and the smell of cooking gave him a sharp pang of homesickness, but then a blow on his back forced him forward, and they were through the kitchen before he had time to look around.

  At the far end of the kitchen, there was a stout wooden door standing open and four steps cut downward into rock. Mehuru and the others stumbled down, their chains jerking at one another’s necks as they were pushed roughly into line around the walls of the room. It was part cellar, part cave. Mehuru saw a couple of old barrels of wine and a rack that had once held bottles. Hammered into the soft red sandstone of the walls were new iron rings to hold their neck chains and anchor points for their shackles. A new man, a stranger, whose clothes smelled of the land and not of the sea, came along the line, bolting each of them against the wall and kicking clean straw around their cold feet. He took up the lantern and surveyed them carefully, as a good groom checks a stable before he leaves it for the night, and then he walked from the cave, taking the lantern with him. They heard the door at the head of the steps slam on the light and warmth of the kitchen, and they were left alone, buried alive in the damp cave, in the dark.

  Then Snake spoke softly to Mehuru and said one word to him:

  “Despair.”

  FRANCES LEARNED THAT THE Daisy had docked at dawn when Sarah sent a message with her breakfast tray asking her to come to the parlor as soon as she was dressed. The long, anxious wait for the ship was over, and Frances’s work was about to start. She dressed in a plain gray gown and wore her plainest cap, but she did not resent the slide back into governess work. The winter days in the little house on the quayside were very long, it was dark by four o’clock and too cold to drive out. The sides of the dock were lined with ice every morning, and the smoke from the glass furnaces hung like a fog over the house. There was no birdsong, only the cry of seagulls, and only the frozen cold cobbles of the quay to watch. There were none of the amusements that Lady Scott and the Whiteleaze ladies took for granted, no walks in the winter shrubbery, no afternoons in the glasshouses.

  Frances could remember an annual competition with her father to see the first snowdrops in the hedge at the bottom of the rectory garden. She could hardly bear a winter with no prospect of flowers, nor trees coming slowly into bud. She had read more novels than she could remember, she had sketched the view from the parlor window a dozen times: the shelf of the Coles’ quay in the foreground, the gibbet profile of the Merchant Venturers’ crane on the opposite side of the dirty river, the forest of masts, and the blank, square face of the warehouse opposite. She had completed more darning and hemming than she would have believed necessary, and still there were hours to fill in every day.

  The move to Queens Square would have diverted her, but Mr. Waring still had not vacated the house. To Josiah’s mounting anger, he found that he had agreed to a high price for a house in a square where other properties were now coming on the market, and he was not even in possession of it.

  Frances straightened her cap and went down the stairs to the parlor. Brother and sister were waiting for her.

  “Daisy has docked with a good cargo of sugar and rum and the first consignment of your slaves.” Josiah beamed at her. “I have a list here of them.”

  “My slaves!” Frances exclaimed.

  “They were bought with your dowry and will be trained and named by you,” Josiah said. “They should certainly be your slaves, and indeed, my dear, Sarah is right in thinking that they will command a better price if they are known to be your own.”

  “We hoped to have twenty,” Sarah said. “The losses have been very bad; I shall have words to say to Captain Lisle. He has delivered only thirteen.”

  Josiah handed her the list. Frances read:

  “Two healthy men

  Four healthy women

  Two boys, aged seven and sixteen years

  Three girls, aged between seven and fourteen years

  Two infant boys, aged two and five years.”

  “I did not expect them all to survive,” Josiah said. “Remember, Sarah, that although we lose twenty in a hundred crossing the Atlantic, another twenty-five in a hundred die in the first year on the plantations. We must prepare ourselves to lose even more during the first year here.”

  “Still, it is an excellent mix,” Sarah said. “I particularly wanted young children. They are easier to train, and the fashion is for very young black pages.” Her eyes were shining; she was smiling. Frances had never seen her look so animated.

  “How long will it take you to teach them to speak English?” Josiah asked Frances. “They know none as yet. But that is all to the good, isn’t it? They will have no rough accents; they have not learned the patois of the Islands. They will spe