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  Sarah was almost convinced. “But if this is so,” she asked slowly, “if it is such an excellent deal, then why are the Merchant Venturers selling it? Why is Mr. Waring not buying it himself?”

  Josiah slammed his fist into his cupped palm. “Because I have hit it right! I have! Me! This is my moment! This is my time! Waring is buying land in Clifton—but there will be no development of Clifton for fifty years; he is in too early. James—the tenant of the Hot Well—was in too soon. The company has done all the improvements and want their money repaid. I have caught this fashion on the bough—Clifton may be the very place in twenty years’ time, Park Street was tempting ten years ago, but the time for the Hot Well is now! And here I am now! I am ready to buy in now!”

  “What with?” Sarah demanded. As ever, she went to the very heart of the question.

  “I shall borrow against Daisy’s cargo and two thousand pounds against Rose.”

  She nearly moaned. “Borrow more against Rose? You have forestalled her cargo already to buy this house. If she fails, we will be ruined!”

  “I own half the cargo,” he confessed. “I could not get partners for her, and now I am glad of it. I shall borrow every penny I can against her profits, and Daisy’s, too.”

  “Two ships carrying debt?” she demanded.

  “Yes,” Josiah said defiantly. “Look around you, Sarah! No one trades with his own money anymore. All the big schemes are done with loaned money. All the coal mines, all the foundries, all the industries are launched on borrowed money. You know that is the truth.”

  “It is not our way.”

  “No, and our way has been slow and sure. But I want to go faster, Sarah. I want the Hot Well. I can show you the figures, and you will know I am right. We have to borrow to buy into the lease. I am determined that we should do it.”

  Sarah turned from his stubborn face. “Frances!” she appealed. “This is your fortune, too. Do you want to see Josiah borrow against a ship which has not even docked?”

  Frances had relaxed when Josiah had controlled his anger and they had stopped shouting. She was thinking of Mehuru and wondering when she could see him again and how she could divert him from his demand for wages. She gave a little start and used her usual excuse. “I am sorry. I know so little about business.”

  Sarah turned back to her brother. “I see you are determined,” she said. The color had drained from her face.

  “I am.”

  “You will go ahead with this scheme, whatever I say?”

  He nodded.

  Sarah paused for a moment, measuring her will against his. “You promised my father that I should share in the running of his business,” she reminded him bitterly. “You made a deathbed promise, Josiah.”

  “I did, and I have never broken it.”

  She glared at him. “You are breaking it now, when you will not listen to my advice, when you run headlong into debt and into schemes that we know nothing about.”

  “I promised you should share in the running of the business,” he said. “I never promised that you should rule the roost. I never promised that you should stand in my way and so ruin me.”

  “I!” she exclaimed. “I! Ruin you!”

  He was quick and biting. “Yes, you. You still keep the household books; you see how much money we spend every month. Where is it to come from, Sarah? We will be ruined if we do not find new ways to make money, new ventures. Not even you can wish us sold up and back at the dockside.”

  She was silenced.

  “We have to go forward,” Josiah insisted stubbornly. “To hesitate is to be wrecked.”

  They were both silent. “I have not seen the ships’ books since we moved house,” Sarah said. “I have not brought them up to date. I shall need to enter these debts you are incurring. I shall need to show that you have sold their cargoes.”

  “They are at the warehouse,” Josiah told her. He rose to his feet and went to the door. “I have opened my office down there. I have taken on a clerk. He will keep the books for me. It is more convenient so.”

  He did not dare face her. He opened the door and slipped away from her before he could see her stricken face.

  CHAPTER

  26

  THE DRIVE TO THE Hot Well was not a great success. The day had clouded over, and under the dark bellies of storm clouds the little colonnade of shops and the pump room did not look pretty and inviting but seemed overwhelmed by the lowering cliffs above. The tide was out, the river oozed between greasy banks of brown mud, and the sweet, sickly smell of sewage lingered. Every day that the sun grew hotter increased the stench. The wind ruffling the low-tide river was heavy with it.

  The pump room was built on an imposing scale, but it had the inescapable appearance of a warehouse. Frances, looking at the blank wall fronting the river and the windows set square in the three-story-high stonework without any relief or decoration, thought that in every corner the city of Bristol was dominated by trade. Even this most important building had an uneven roof, odd-numbered chimneys, and faced the river as blankly and as plainly as a tide mill for grinding corn.

  At the back of the pump room, at the free pump that dispensed the spa water without charge, there was a collection of sickly paupers. When they saw the carriage, they came forward with their hands out, begging for pennies. Josiah waved them away, and the hired coachman gestured with his whip. One of them, a young woman, raised her face, blotched livid with a skin disease. Frances shrank back into the carriage.

  “Aye, they’re off-putting,” Josiah conceded. “Get back, you!” he shouted. “You’re upsetting my wife.”

  They stepped back, but Frances heard a muffled curse as she hurried out of the road and into the assembly room. The place was busy. Josiah looked around, visibly counting the number of customers, while Frances swallowed a glass of the water. She was hoping that it would quiet the fluttering in her chest that had pained her ever since the quarrel with Mehuru in the morning. Josiah noted the white faces of the invalids with consumption, and heard the dry, racking coughs of those with chest complaints. There were fashionable people visiting for the day and taking tea or expensive hothouse strawberries with cream, but there were not enough.

  “Can we make it more fashionable?” he asked. “What would you do?”

  Frances thought. “I would rent consulting rooms cheaply to good doctors,” she said. “They will bring the patients in. And perhaps build a bathhouse, with beautiful mosaics and plants and furniture, like a winter garden.”

  Josiah nodded. “The bathhouse,” he said. “What would it be like?”

  Frances considered. “What about large windows and a terrace overlooking the river? And build it like a hothouse, like the hothouse at Whiteleaze. Oh! I forgot, you have never seen it. But it is a fine large room and very light. Very well heated, with many plants. It is a pleasant place to sit in winter. And when the fruit comes into season, it is like sitting in a garden. We could call it the Bristol Winter Garden! So that the Hot Well was popular all the year ’round.”

  “That’s it!” Josiah exclaimed. “Frances, you are a genius! Do you know who should design it for us? Who is the finest architect?”

  “We need someone who designs follies and grottoes,” she said. “Something charming and romantic and out of the ordinary.”

  Josiah shook his head. “I don’t mix with such people. There’s a grotto at Goldney House, in Clifton, I know. But I’ve heard it is very strange. Full of shells and pagan statues and a fountain.”

  “That’s the very thing,” Frances said decidedly. “A fountain and classical statues. We want a Gothic bathhouse. Lord Scott will know the best man to design it.”

  “Gothic!” Josiah exclaimed. “Will it not look very strange?”

  “A little strange.” Frances smiled at his uneasy face. “But it has to be a little strange to draw people from Bath. Bath is such an established place; everyone knows of it, everyone goes there. We need to create something very fanciful, something that will draw peo