Respectable Trade Read online

  “Would you wish to see slavery abolished?”

  “I believe the trade will be ended,” he said certainly. “And I pray to God that I will see it ended this very month in Parliament. But the cruelty we have learned will poison us forever.”

  The parlor door behind Frances opened, and she gave a guilty start. “Oh! Sister! This is Dr. Hadley. He is just leaving.”

  “Is the boy better?” Sarah asked.

  Frances shook her head. “Dr. Hadley thinks he will die.”

  Sarah nodded brusquely. “Thank you for calling anyway, Doctor.”

  Dr. Hadley bowed to them both and let himself out the front door.

  Sarah looked crossly at Frances. “Another burial,” she said pointedly. “They all cost money, you know. I shall order the undertakers to call tomorrow morning.”

  “When the undertakers come, I will see them,” Frances said.

  “It’s not necessary.” Sarah went around the parlor blowing out the candles, without asking Frances if she were ready to go to bed.

  “I know it is not necessary, but I want the little boy to be buried as he should be buried.”

  Sarah took her cup and threw the dregs of the tea on the fire to damp down the last smoldering small piece of coal, which she had been sitting over since supper. “They know their business. You can leave it to them.”

  “He is an African boy,” Frances protested. “There will be things which they will want to do for him. The woman who has been sitting with him, Elizabeth, she nursed him as if he were her own child. She will not want him taken from her and thrown into a grave. She will want to say farewell to him, in her own way.”

  Sarah straightened up, her face full of suppressed anger. “You can make a big parade of your feelings over this,” she snapped. “I heard you talking with that doctor. You can attend the funeral, you can hire a hearse. It is throwing bad money after good. The child is dying, and you knew when you started this that at least two or three would die during the first year. It is natural wastage. It is the natural loss of stock. If we have to go into mourning every time a slave dies, we might as well grieve for a broken barrel of sugar.”

  “He is a child!” Frances cried passionately. “A little boy . . .”

  “He is our trade,” Sarah said. “And if we cannot make this trade pay, then we are on the way to ruin. Wear black crepe if you like, sister. But get those slaves trained and ready for sale.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  IN THE MORNING FRANCES did not summon Mehuru to ask him how the slaves would want to say farewell to little James. She went down the corridor to the kitchen and found Elizabeth, her head in her arms, half asleep on the kitchen table.

  “May I come in, Cook? I want to speak to Elizabeth.”

  Cook bobbed a stiff, unwelcoming curtsy. “Of course, Mrs. Cole. This poor girl is worn out. I don’t think she’s slept for more than a few hours in these last two days.”

  Frances pulled up a stool and touched Elizabeth gently on the arm. Elizabeth started awake at once. Frances saw that her eyelids were swollen from lack of sleep and from weeping.

  “The men are coming to bury James,” Frances said, speaking slowly and carefully, watching Elizabeth’s face. “But I have said that you may make him ready and see it done as you wish. Would you like that?”

  Elizabeth nodded.

  “I shall tell Mehuru to spend the morning with you and the men to make sure it is done as you wish,” Frances promised. She rose up from the stool. “I am very sorry,” she said softly. Her eyes were on Elizabeth’s face as if she were asking for forgiveness. “I am very sorry that James was ill, and that we lost him in the end.”

  Elizabeth nodded, her face grave.

  Frances went to the hall to find Mehuru. He was on his hands and knees in the parlor, sweeping the grate.

  “Cicero, the men are coming to bury James. You are to stay with Elizabeth and see that they do what she wants. He is to be buried as she wishes, as far as it is possible. You can tell them that I will pay for anything extra.”

  Mehuru rose to his feet and wiped his hands on the rough apron protecting his livery. “How do you want it done?” he asked.

  Frances looked into his face for the first time. “In your way,” she stumbled. “However you wish. In the African way.”

  He shook his head, his eyes on her face. “Elizabeth is Yoruban, as am I. James was Sonke. Kbara is Mandinka. How do you wish him to be buried?”

  Frances shook her head in frustration and clapped her hands together. “I don’t know!” she cried. “I was just trying to make it better, Mehuru! I was just trying to make it right!”

  He caught her hand and held it gently. Coal dust smeared her hand as black as his. “There is no little way to make this right,” he said gently, almost tenderly. “It is as wrong as it could be. But I will see him buried with care.”

  Frances stepped back, their hands parted. “Thank you,” she whispered, and slipped from the room.

  MEHURU CHOSE NOT TO ask for permission to go out on the Monday night, a few days after the funeral. Instead he put his arm around Cook’s broad waist while she was bolting the back door and whispered in her ear. She slapped his hand away. “Impertinence!”

  “I’ll be in by midnight,” he cajoled. “And I promise to lock up safely.”

  “And what if we are all murdered in our beds between now and then?” she demanded. “With the back door left open for any passing thief?”

  “I’ll ask Kbara to sit in the kitchen and wait up for me,” he said. “You’ll be safe enough.”

  “And what if Master comes down and finds you gone and Julius out of his bed and waiting for you?”

  “He never comes down to the kitchen, Cook. You feed him too well for him to hunt for food in the night. Such a wonderful cook that you are.”

  She slapped him again. “That’ll do. Where d’you want to go anyway?”

  “Just to a coffeehouse for some talk,” Mehuru said. “You get a night off, why not me?”

  She nodded. “All right, then,” she agreed reluctantly. “But mind you don’t get press-ganged or kidnapped. The slaver captains will steal anyone away to serve on their ships, remember! And the press-gangs for the navy are not choosy! And don’t get drunk! And don’t go with a woman—half of them are diseased, and the other half will take you ’round a corner and hand you over to be beaten.”

  Mehuru threw up his hands, laughing. “I will go to the coffeehouse and come straight home. I swear it.”

  She opened the back door a crack for him to slip through. “You have no money,” she said. “Here.” She rummaged under her apron in her pocket and drew out a purse. She offered him a sixpence.

  “I cannot repay you.” Mehuru hesitated. “I have no money at all, and no chance of earning.”

  “I know,” she said. Her powerful sense of dissatisfaction with the Coles made her push the coin, and then another, into his hand. “It isn’t right. It can’t be right to work a man all day as hard as you do and then him not even have the price of a drink in the evening.”

  The coffee shop was noisy and crowded, a pall of smoke hung at head height, the windows running with condensation. When the door was opened, steam and smoke billowed out into the dark street. Mehuru paused in the doorway, uncertain. But then he saw that a number of the men inside were black-faced like him. With a surprised exclamation, he stepped over the threshold and saw Dr. Hadley seated at a table with four other men, one of them a Negro.

  “Dr. Hadley,” he called. “I have come.”

  “Cicero! Sit down,” the doctor said. He looked rumpled and informal with his jacket off and his hair tied carelessly back and unpowdered. “Here is a countryman of yours, Caesar Peters, and Edgar Long, and James Stephenson.”

  Mehuru hesitated. For a moment he could not believe the sudden joy of meeting men as an equal, of being among men who looked him in the face and nodded a casual greeting. For long months now, he had been invisible, a piece of cargo, an anim