Respectable Trade Read online

  In Mehuru’s home it was only in the brief spell of the wet season that trees glowed and dripped and oozed sweetness like this. He knew from Cook that this country was always wet. It always rained. No wonder they had fields as rich as forests and cows with pelts as glossy as lions. He glanced at Frances. In a country so ripe and rich and easy, how could a woman be taught to be sour and dry, so punitively cold to herself?

  Frances felt his eyes on her. “I am sorry. I should not have asked,” she said.

  He waved it away. “It does not matter. Do the cows always stay in these little fields? Do they not walk out to feed?”

  Frances threw him a sideways look, amused and half mocking herself. “You are more interested in the cows than in my apology?”

  He moved his horse close so that his knee was brushing her horse’s flank. She could have reached out and touched him. He answered her with a smile that was singularly sweet. “Frances,” he said gently. “How can we speak truly one to another, when I am your slave and you can order me as you wish? Anything you say can mean everything or mean nothing. If I offend you, you can beat me or sell me. If I please you, you can give me a sweetmeat or a word of praise. I am your dog, I am your horse. You do not say ‘I am sorry’ to a dog or a horse. You behave as you wish, and they suffer as you please. Nothing else between us is true.”

  “I do not wish it to be so,” Frances answered, her voice very low. “You are not a dog; you are a gentleman, a nobleman in your own country, high in the government. I do not wish you to be my slave. I should like you—” She broke off. “I should like you to be my friend.”

  There was silence for a moment. The horses pulled gently on their bits and pricked their ears forward as the country opened out before them, a little hill and the track curving upward, an avenue of trees, and from somewhere the faint salt smell of the sea.

  “Then set me free,” Mehuru said simply. “Only a freeman can give his friendship. If you wish us to be friends, I have to be free. Anything else is slavish devotion—it means nothing. You have to set me free, Frances.”

  She let her horse trot and then ease into a gentle canter. Mehuru’s horse followed, speeding up. Mehuru sat easily in the saddle and watched Frances lean forward and let her horse go faster. They breasted the hill side by side and burst out at the top of the Downs. Frances’s horse lengthened its pace from a canter into a gallop across the close-cropped green turf. The sun was bright, and the wind was light and keen, smelling of salt and the early buds of wild thyme. Mehuru let out a hunter’s yell, and his horse caught his sense of excitement and sudden feeling of freedom. Its ears came forward, and it chased after Frances’s hunter. Neck and neck they thundered on until Frances pulled her horse up and shouted, “Whoa! Whoa!” and called out, “Be careful! Be careful! The cliff edge!”

  Mehuru pulled his horse over beside hers. There was a rough wooden fence marking the edge of the cliff and then a precipitous drop of white limestone rocks hundreds of feet down to the sluggish curves of the dirty river below, winding between banks of slime. On the far side, equally high cliffs were tumbled with woodland and dramatic white outcrops, right down to the river edge. It was a staggering sight, a mighty gorge leading onward, westward, out to the distant sea.

  “Is this the way we came in?” Mehuru asked. “Our boat, up the river?”

  Frances nodded. “They have barges to tow the boats. It’s very difficult to sail up the gorge. The winds are uncertain, and the channel is very narrow.”

  He nodded, looking down the deep chasm to the river. “I am glad it was night and I was below and did not see it,” he said. “I would have thought it the entrance to a prison for life—these high walls.”

  “I cannot set you free,” she suddenly said.

  “Who is my owner?”

  “I am. But I cannot set you free.”

  He was gazing westward. The river curved out of sight; he could not see where it flowed into the sea. He wanted very much to see the waves and the clean water of the sea and know that on the other side of that ocean, miles and miles away, the waves of the same water were breaking on the beaches of his home.

  “What would you do, if you were free?” Frances asked.

  “I should go home,” he replied instantly. “I am needed there.” He thought how much he could tell them about the white men, how much he knew. He thought how much they needed his skills and now his grasp of the English language to keep them safe through these most perilous times. “And I need to be there,” he added, his voice very low.

  Frances, watching the longing on his face, said nothing. He glanced across at her. “I can never be happy until I am home,” he said simply.

  “I cannot let you go,” she repeated, and for a moment he thought she sounded more like a possessive woman deeply in love than the owner of a slave. “I cannot possibly let you go.”

  JOSIAH HAD THE FIGURES of the Hot Well before him in his office, the back parlor at Queens Square. Stephen Waring had obtained them for him and told him, with a wink, to read them and return them quickly, before the May monthly meeting. Josiah understood that they had been borrowed for his benefit, that he was already gaining from Stephen’s friendship and from his membership in the Merchant Venturers.

  The figures went back to the earliest days a century before, when the spring was first discovered. It was underwater for all the day except for a brief hour at low tide when it could be seen bubbling out, hot and sparkling, showing a clean ripple of water in the brown of the river. A businessman had opened a bathhouse and later bottled the water. Josiah nodded; as soon as the site started to show a profit, the Merchant Venturers took an interest. They bought it and started to lease it out to speculative tenants.

  The last tenant, Mr. James, had seen the boom of interest in spas and mineral waters and determined on capturing the gentry trade from Bath. He had done well. The spa was now running in parallel with Bath. Convalescents were notoriously restless, and many would decamp from Bath to the Hot Well. Desperately ill people would pay anything for a cure, and the Hot Well’s reputation for curing diabetes, skin complaints, stomach troubles, and even pains in the heart and lungs gave them hope. The Methodist preacher John Wesley himself had been cured by the treatment. Endorsed by him and by other more worldly invalids, the business was thriving, and the Merchant Venturers decided to expand it yet further.

  The figures showed the spending—a two-thousand-pound investment in the pump room, making it the largest assembly room in the country. A thousand pounds on the pretty colonnade of nearby shops. A double avenue of trees leading to the rooms and a complicated system of pumps and filters to get the water away from the contaminating river, which was daily more of a threat to the health of the spring as the river water grew dirtier and dirtier with the outfall from Bristol sewage and industries. The Venturers had done everything to establish a thriving business, but they did not want the trouble of running the spa themselves. They wanted to hand it over and to see a return on their investment.

  Josiah chuckled and rang the bell. Kbara came, light-footed and smart in his livery. “Yes, sir?” he asked.

  “Rum and water,” Josiah ordered.

  He pulled a sheet of paper toward him and scribbled down some figures. He thought he could borrow two thousand pounds for the lease against the cargo of Daisy, who should be loading at the efficient Africa Company ports and due back in December. If Josiah’s captain bought well and crammed on sail, Josiah would make a small fortune on her.

  He would need it. The vagaries of the trade meant that sometimes all three of his ships were away from Bristol at the same time. There was a fallow period in which Josiah could do nothing but wait. From April to July, all his ships were loading off Africa while the debts mounted steadily at home. He could not clear a penny until they came back into port again. The Hot Well’s profits would smooth over the dramatic fluctuations of the trade in which a man could be bankrupt one day and then see his ship sail, heavy-laden, into port the next.

  Jo