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  He ripped back the covers of the newly made bed and flung down the daffodils pell-mell on the white linen sheets. He studded the pillows with violets, dozens and dozens of bunches, and then he stood back and surveyed the disorder with delight.

  Already the room was smelling sweet as the crushed violets poured out their essence and the opening daffodils exhaled their subtle, insidious perfume. Mehuru gave another little laugh and crept from the room, closing the door behind him with a sense of having released something troubling and dangerous and wild in the orderly house.

  So it was that when Frances came upstairs at noon to change from her morning gown, she found her room filled with a heady, golden, powerful scent and her bed drenched with flowers.

  She did not think, she did not hesitate for a moment. In some archaic, intuitive part of her mind, as yet unfrozen and untamed, she knew precisely who had brought her the flowers. No one else in the house would have bought them with such spendthrift abandon. No one else in the house knew that she loved daffodils and that this spring had released her wild, young, greening desire. She stripped off her dress and her shift, recklessly, like a young girl, and fell, naked, into bed with them. She buried her face in their cool, passionate greenness and bathed in the watery, pale scent of them. She rolled around on them and among them, swimming like a diver in a pool, until her body was slick with the juice and her hair was tumbled over her bare shoulders and filled with petals. Sap from the daffodils smeared on her skin and was slick on her lips, sharp and bitter to the taste, staining the white purity of her sheets—and Frances was laughing and breathless and wanton at last.

  CHAPTER

  22

  JOSIAH WAS AT HIS desk waiting to be called for dinner but whiling away the time in adding figures. He had half a dozen sheets of paper before him, and each displayed a different calculation. Rose was due home first, but Josiah had already borrowed against her cargo to buy the Queens Square house. She should bring an extra profit in gold from her smuggled slaves, but Josiah could not borrow against contraband goods; they must remain a closely guarded secret. Daisy should only be a month behind her. Loading and unloading with the efficiency of a Merchant Venturer vessel, she should come into Bristol at the end of December, and Lily would be only two months behind.

  Josiah hoped to raise money against Daisy’s expected profits. He wanted to offer them as security for a loan on the Hot Well. On each page he calculated how much the repayment would be if he could borrow at 3 percent, and then the further calculation if Daisy came in late . . . a week late, two weeks late, a month. The difficulty of Josiah’s work as a long-distance shipper was its unpredictability. The voyage took, on average, fourteen months. But storms could delay a ship; a wrecked mast could mean that she put into a strange port for repairs and was delayed for months. The captain was authorized to buy repairs in such a crisis, but he could be cheated or the work expensively done, and he could come home carrying no gold at all, forced to sell cargo to cover his costs.

  Josiah never knew, until his ship docked, whether he had made a fortune or lost one. There was no way for a captain to get a message home unless he met another Bristol ship on the voyage and it got home before him, and that happened only rarely. There was never anything to do but wait, and try not to borrow against profits that even now might be tossing in a storm on a sinking ship.

  There was a tap on the door, and Frances looked in.

  “Am I disturbing you, Josiah?” She was wearing her hair in a new way, combed simply over her shoulders. Her face was radiant, and she looked pretty in a way that Josiah had never noticed before.

  “New gown?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is it you I must thank for my flowers?” she asked carefully.

  “I sent Cicero to buy you a bunch,” Josiah said. “Did he find a pretty bunch for you?”

  Surprisingly, the color rushed into Frances’s cheeks. “He bought a lot,” she said. “They are beautiful. Thank you.”

  Josiah waved his hand. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Cole? It’s not dinnertime, is it?”

  Frances shook her head gravely. “I wish to send for a doctor for one of the children. The smallest boy is very feverish. He has had a cough since before Easter, and he is getting worse.”

  Josiah looked thoughtful. “Can we not give him a poultice or something? A few days’ rest in bed?”

  “He has been resting,” Frances said. “And Cook has done all that she can. She wants him to be seen by the doctor, and I think she is right.”

  “I’m very sorry for the boy,” Josiah said awkwardly. “But we are running a business here, Frances. We cannot care for him as if he were our son. The doctor charges for every visit, and then there are medicines to buy as well. I would rather we waited until we were sure it was essential.”

  “The child is very ill,” Frances insisted.

  “I daresay, and I wish him well. But a couple of visits from the doctor and we will start to run at a loss on him.”

  Frances turned to go, the prettiness drained from her face. “But I may send for him if the child gets worse? It will be a greater loss if the little boy dies, after all, Josiah.”

  “I don’t wish him to be neglected,” Josiah said. “But we have to measure our costs against our likely profits. Otherwise it is not a business venture but a mission. We are not in business to take little children from Africa and bring them up in civilized homes and spend a fortune on medicines for them. They have to earn their keep.”

  “I know,” Frances conceded. “Yet I cannot help but feel for him.”

  Josiah smiled at her. “You have a tender heart. Oh, send for the doctor if you insist; send if it worries you! But remember that we must keep costs down.”

  “I will,” Frances said. She gave him a quick smile and slipped from the room. She went upstairs to the top floor, where the slaves slept. James, the smallest boy, was on his pallet bed, Elizabeth beside him. She was sponging his hot face with vinegar and water. He was tossing his little head from side to side, his black eyes glazed, seeing nothing.

  “Very sick,” Elizabeth said as Frances came into the room.

  “No better?”

  “No.”

  Frances bent down and put her hand against the child’s forehead. His skin burned under her touch. His little close-cropped curls were damp with sweat, his smooth black skin flushed darker with the fever.

  “I will send for the doctor this evening if he is no better,” Frances said.

  Elizabeth shook her head. “No better.”

  “You do not understand,” Frances said, irritated. “I said: ‘I will send for a doctor if he does not get better.’”

  Elizabeth shook her head again. “No better.”

  “It is you who do not understand,” Mehuru said softly from the doorway. “She is saying he is no better, and he will not get better.”

  Frances looked shocked. “Of course he will!” she cried. “This is just a fever. Children get fevers all the time. By later today he will have probably sweated it out and the fever will have gone. In a few days, he will be up and running around playing.”

  “He did not do much playing,” Mehuru observed. “Even when he was well.”

  Frances flushed. “If he had gone to the plantations, he would have been weeding in the sugarcane every day from dawn to sunset,” she pointed out. “He has an easier life here.”

  Mehuru nodded. “And if he had stayed in Africa, he would have been safe on his mother’s back while she worked in the fields. And in the evening when she cooked his supper, he would have played in the dust with the other children. And at night she would have tucked him up in bed beside her.”

  Frances said nothing. In the silence they could hear the hoarse sound of James’s breath, rasping through his closing throat. “I know he would have been better left at home,” Frances said very quietly.

  James turned his head restlessly on the pillow, seeking a cool place. Frances leaned forward and