Respectable Trade Read online

  “I was not content!” Josiah exclaimed. “I married her because I was not content with the warehouse. I wanted more, and I am getting more. You will not stand against me, Sarah, I will not allow it.”

  She turned away and looked out the window. Below them a rival’s ship was safely docked, swarming with sailmakers come to collect the sails for repair, half a dozen sailors crawling over the deck caulking the planks with tar and hemp rope.

  “We used to stand together,” she said.

  “I know.”

  There was a silence. Sarah sighed. “I will not go against you. So trust me, Josiah. Don’t keep things from me. I am not a silly girl. I am not a lady of leisure. I was brought up to this business. I can help you.”

  He nodded and came across the room to her. He put his arm around her waist and held her for a brief moment. “I know,” he repeated. “I have been miserably lonely with this worry.”

  They stood still for a moment, watching the ship, as bereft parents will watch someone else’s baby in a cradle.

  “I must go,” Josiah said briskly. “I have a horse waiting.”

  “You have hired a horse again?”

  Josiah laughed. “Sarah, I have bought the Hot Well. I have to check on my business! Of course I have hired a horse, and as soon as I can find one that suits me, I shall buy one! I need to ride out and see that my business is thriving. I would not be doing my work if I were not riding out to look at it. Surely you see that!”

  She smiled unwillingly at him. “Yes. It is the expense which worries me.”

  “It would cost me more if I did not inspect it,” he said briskly. “Now let me go.”

  She watched him from the window. Mehuru held the horse’s head for him as he mounted. It seemed odd to see Josiah setting off for his work on horseback. All his life he had gone no farther than the quayside outside their house. Now he looked like a gentleman, in riding boots and with a cape on his shoulders. Sarah thought that if she saw him at a distance, she would not recognize him. The little brother she had reared was going far away from her, and she did not understand him, nor his business, anymore. The figures in the ledgers were no longer small, manageable amounts, easily understood, added and subtracted. They were dangerous sums, perilous debts. And Josiah was no longer her little brother who came to her for advice and never sent out a ship without her checking the figures. He was a man prepared to take great risks, to take a massive gamble to win the home he wanted for the wife he had chosen.

  Unseen by Josiah, she put up her hand to wave good-bye in a gesture that looked more as if she were calling him back.

  JOSIAH’S HEART LIFTED A little as he rode along the riverside to the Hot Well. The tide was coming in, and the sunshine sparkled on the water. The woods on either side of the river had lost their lush greenness, the leaves dulling in the heat and glare of the July sun. Josiah felt better for confiding in Sarah. She had been his business adviser for so long that any secret from her made him uneasy. And in reassuring her he convinced himself.

  The Merchant Venturers’ expensive avenue of trees were dusty after months of carriages going to and fro beneath their spreading branches. The waves were slapping the river wall of the Pump Room in a pretty, irregular sound. An onshore breeze had lifted the constant smoke away from the city, and the sky was blue with fleecy strips of white cloud. Josiah rode down the little avenue with his hand on his hip and felt the novel pleasure of being a proprietor of land. He inspected the building with smug care; he took in the sky above it and the circling birds as if they, too, were part of his investment and a credit to his acumen.

  At the back of the building, the tap, which had traditionally dispensed water for free, was being bolted off. The workmen looked up and pulled at their caps as Josiah rode past. Josiah responded with a small, jaunty gesture.

  He could have hitched his horse to one of the posts outside the pump room. There were others there, bearing the traditional Bristol saddle—a two-seater—for a lady to sit behind the groom. Instead Josiah chose to whistle up a loitering urchin and promise him a penny to hold the horse. It was not that the animal was too high-bred or skittish to be left unattended. The stable knew that Josiah was not a confident rider, and they always sent him a placid, slow-moving hack. But Josiah was learning the pleasure of spending money. A penny was a little enough sum, but to Josiah, hiring a child to hold a horse when there was a hitching ring for free was an extravagance. It excited him to be extravagant. He foresaw a future when he would become a liberal tipper, a spendthrift in small, enjoyable ways, a man who carried loose change in his pocket and had spent it all on trifles by the end of the day.

  He strolled into his pump room and looked around. The perennial invalids were in their usual places, drinking water or loitering under the roof of the colonnade, taking their prescribed exercise. Josiah hardly glanced at them. These were not the people whose custom would determine the success of the Well. He needed the fashionable crowd, the London pleasure seekers, the day visitors from Bath. They had come here in their hundreds in previous years, and Josiah had been at pains to advertise that the spa was under new management and offering advantageous rates for this first season. Surely, with a sky so blue and an outlook from the large windows of the rooms so beguiling, they would come in their hundreds again?

  “Ah, Mr. Cole.” The master of ceremonies, newly appointed by Josiah but chosen by Frances, came forward and bowed to him. “Mr. Cole, our proprietor! We are all prepared, as you see! All ready for the launch of the new management. I have already received several cards notifying me of the arrival of ladies of quality. I think we shall have an enjoyable year! I do indeed! We are starting a little late, a little late in our season, to be sure. But people do not go to London till October or November, and I am confident we can charm them from their country houses to here. We have the rest of this month and all of August and September, besides!”

  Josiah smiled. He could not help but be uneasy with the man who wore such tightly strapped stays under his clothes that his waistcoat fitted without a wrinkle and his coat was one smooth line from padded shoulders to stiffened hem. “Good,” he said shortly. “I see they are shutting off the free tap at the back of the building.”

  “Certainly,” the master confirmed. “It would be fatal to our atmosphere of elegance to have the back of the building crowded with dirty and sickly people. Besides—how can we charge for water inside the building if we are giving it away free outside?”

  “Yes,” Josiah agreed curtly. “The room looks well. I will take the attendance book and the cash register home with me.”

  “Certainly, certainly,” the man said sweetly. “But I think you will be happy. I am content enough with how it is going. We have our poor little invalids here as usual, but also a fair number of pleasure seekers, and it is they who give the spa the air of fashion that it needs.”

  “Yes,” Josiah said, rather at a loss.

  “There are a few little improvements I would suggest?” the master of ceremonies continued archly. “I would have put them in hand, but they do cost money, and I wanted to speak to the holder of the purse strings. I cannot have you thinking me extravagant, now!”

  “What are they?”

  The man held up his slender hand and ticked the items off on well-manicured fingers. “One: The quartet plays only in the summer season and I think it is a shame. In the winter when it is gray outside, we so badly want music and light and laughter inside, don’t you think, Mr. Cole? Don’t you agree, sir?”

  “Yes,” Josiah said, goaded. “Keep them on.”

  “And I want to hire a little woman, a pretty little woman to stand behind an urn and make tea in the afternoons. You can order tea, but I want it here, visible, so you can see it, and want it, and have it in a flash. In a flash! D’you see?”

  Josiah shook his head at the volubility of the man. “Do as you think best,” he said. “But check any expenditure with me of more than ten pounds.”

  “Now, that is a reasonable