Respectable Trade Read online

  Josiah looked aghast. “So much?”

  “It’s an expensive purchase. And a handsome profit. But I would not advise it, Josiah, unless you have substantial sums to hand.”

  “I do have,” Josiah said stubbornly. “I do have substantial sums. If the terms are right.”

  Stephen speared a forkful of ham and ate. “Your judgment is sound. Shall I get the figures for you to look at?”

  “Yes,” Josiah said. “I would be interested if the terms were right.”

  “Of course.” He smiled pleasantly. “I only wish I had the skill to take it on myself.”

  THE COOK HAD MELLOWED toward the slaves since their Easter party. The kitchen seemed very empty after Brown and the scullery maid had left, and Cook had only the slaves for company. In the evenings they all sat together in the kitchen, and Mehuru, Kbara, and the three women dined at the kitchen table with the children seated at a smaller table by the fire. Since John Bates had left, Cook ordered all the work in the kitchen; now that Brown had gone, Elizabeth ordered the work that needed to be done in the house, and Mehuru took overall responsibility for the security of the house and backyard.

  Slowly, the division between enslaved and free was melting, and the kitchen was a home and a workplace to them all. The warmth of the kitchen range made it more comfortable than the cold attic bedrooms, and after supper the boys would clear the plates, the girls would wash them, and the children would put them away while Kbara, the three women, and Cook drew up their stools to the fire and talked. Mehuru stayed at the kitchen table, reading. Frances had joined the circulating library at the Hot Well, and once a week she sent Mehuru to change her books. He brought back the novels she wanted, and for himself he brought back histories and studies in geography and long, difficult books on political economy. He was desperate to learn more about the world than Frances could tell him, and he suspected the glib simplicity of Frances’s explanations.

  The little boy who had been named James coughed constantly, and Elizabeth called him from his work to sit at her feet at the fireside. He had been only two when he was taken from Africa. He could not remember the warmth. He thought now that he had been cold forever, and he had forgotten his mother’s face.

  “You should tell Mrs. Cole about his cough,” Cook said to Martha. “Tell Mrs.—boy sick.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “Both boys,” she said. “I will tell.”

  “Could be nasty,” Cook said. She looked thoughtfully at the child, whose eyelids were heavy. “Course, you can’t tell if he’s pale or not under the black.”

  “I can tell.” Mehuru looked up with a half smile. “He is pale, and he is very hot in the evenings, and he coughs often.”

  “Better tell Mrs. Cole,” Cook repeated. “She won’t want to lose him. Not when he’s learning to talk and waiting on her in the morning so prettily.”

  “Yes. He has to be fit for sale,” Mehuru said coldly.

  Cook looked down at the boy. He was sitting on the floor staring into the range, leaning back against Elizabeth’s knees. The door of the firebox was open, and the embers made a dream landscape, as intricate and lovely as the winding path of a river at home.

  “Doesn’t seem right,” Cook said, suddenly dissatisfied. “I wager his mother misses him.”

  “It will be as if he is dead for her,” Elizabeth said suddenly. Her English was slow and stilted, but they could understand her. “He was her only child, he told me.”

  The little boy was not listening to them, far away in a dream of a place where it was always warm, where he could remember a taste, a haunting taste: the sweet, bland, softness of mango. His eyelids drooped, his head nodded. Elizabeth bent down and lifted him into her lap. His body lolled in the sweet collapse of childhood.

  “Doesn’t seem right,” Cook repeated. “Shall you all be sold?”

  “I don’t know,” Mehuru replied. “They will need some of us to work in the house. She has not said which she will keep.”

  “I don’t want a new set,” Cook grumbled, getting to her feet. She shut the fire door and untied her apron. “I’m for my bed,” she said.

  Elizabeth gathered the little boy closer. He was half asleep, limp with his fever, his forehead hot and dry. Mary picked up the other little boy, and they walked together to the kitchen door, each one with a child on her hip. Mehuru watched them go, walking as easily and as steadily as if they were in their own country, on their own earth, with their own babies held close.

  “It’s not right,” Cook said. She looked at Mehuru and saw his face set with bitterness. “Aye,” she said. “It’s not right.”

  FRANCES LAY ON HER back in bed and watched the cold light of the moon walk slowly from one side of the room to the other as the hours slid away. There were no clouds to shield the sharp sickle of the spring moon. The fire in the grate had died into soft white ash. The house was still and silent.

  She could not sleep. She lay without moving, listening to the steady thud of her heartbeat. She thought that she would never sleep again. She knew that on the floor above, in the attic, Mehuru was asleep. If she called out, he might wake. If she crept from her bed and went softly up the stairs and opened his door, she would see him. For a moment she let herself imagine that she could go to him—imagined her feet on the cold floorboards, on the creaking attic stairs, imagined the door swinging wide and him sitting up in bed, his dark eyes opening and saying to her, “Frances?”

  And there she stopped—she could not think what she could say to him. She could not acknowledge to herself what need, what absorbing need could take her, a married woman, in the middle of the night to the bedroom of a servant—lower than a servant, a slave.

  Frances stared, as blank as a corpse, at the ceiling. There could be no reason that could take her looking for Mehuru. Not the moonlight, not the coldness of the night, not her growing awareness of his own tragedy—of the urbane, cultivated society he had exchanged for this drudgery in her house—not her own loneliness, not her own inexplicable desire to hear his drumming, to hear his laugh, to see his smile. Frances lay in her own bed, imprisoned by her code of behavior, by the powerful habit of denying her own desires, still and sleepless, and waited for the morning, when she might see him again.

  CHAPTER

  21

  29 Queens Square.

  2nd May 1789

  Dear Uncle,

  Thank you for your daffodils. We enjoyed them very much. Of all the things I miss most, living here in the Town, it is the trees and the Flowers of Whiteleaze. I hardly notice One season change to Another. Now it is Spring, and soon it will be Summer, and only One little Plane tree to show me! Josiah and Miss Cole are well and send their compliments.

  The Weather here has been very gray and cold, and the society here is very Quiet. Neither Josiah nor Miss Cole Dances, and apart from the Assemblies there is little Society. For some reason I am not as Satisfied as I should be with my Situation. Since Easter I have felt Restless and Unsettled.

  I am sure you will wish to remind me of my Duty of Obedience to my husband and Loyalty to his Life and his Business. I do not forget my Duty. Ours was a Marriage of convenience, and I do not Regret it. I have promised myself that I will never Regret it. In the Trade a man’s word is his bond—and I gave my word to Josiah. Fancies may come and go, but Duty and Loyalty Remain Forever.

  I remain your devoted niece,

  Frances Cole.

  Frances reread the letter, crumpled it up, and added it to the others in the wastepaper bin beside her little writing desk, one of Josiah’s Chinese purchases, elaborately carved with dragons breathing fire and little drawers hidden by sampans, bridges, and sinuous rivers. Frances leaned forward and put her head on her hands.

  “You warned me,” she whispered. “But I did not listen. Anyway . . .” Her voice trailed away as she thought of what her life would have been if she had refused Josiah’s proposal.

  She sat down and drew a piece of the hot-pressed notepaper toward her again, dipped her pen in