Respectable Trade Read online

  “Oh!” he sighed, and turned back to her. “Sit down, breathe slowly.” He pressed her into a seat. “Come, Frances, breathe properly. I will not be angry with you. Breathe!”

  With his hand on her back, she took three shaky breaths, and he watched as the color came back into her face.

  “I am very sorry,” she said as soon as she could speak. “Please don’t be angry, Mehuru.”

  “It is I who am sorry,” he said. “I should have remembered your health.” He glanced around at all the windows facing the square, longing to take her into his arms but knowing he did not dare. He waited until her breathing steadied. “Now,” he said. “Frances, I must tell you that these are good men and friends of mine. Anything you have heard against the societies is not true.”

  She nodded, anxious to avoid a quarrel. “Perhaps.”

  “And they tell me that Englishwomen often marry men of my color,” he continued. “And they live happily with them.”

  She nodded. “I have heard of that.” She did not tell him that she had heard of it because of an article in a newspaper deploring the tendency of white women to marry freed slaves and accusing them of the grossest immorality.

  “These would be our friends,” he said. “Our neighbors. We would make a new life for the two of us.”

  Frances drew a breath and tried to speak calmly. “Mehuru, I know that you mean well, but it could not happen,” she said quietly. “These are workingwomen, they are not ladies. Wapping is a poor part of London; it is not like Queens Square. It is even worse than the Redclift quay. It is dirty and unhealthy, and all the people there are poor people, laboring men and women. They would despise me. I would hardly understand their speech. I could not possibly live there. I would be miserable living in poverty, and so would you.”

  He gave her a swift, unhappy look and straightened up.

  “Josiah might pursue us,” Frances said. “He could have you arrested as a runaway, and then I would be there on my own.” Her voice trembled. “There is a pit of poverty underneath me. You never saw me before my marriage. I had to work or tumble downward into charity, and I was never very good at my work. I dare not leave Josiah, I dare not leave my family. It is their name and their wealth that feed me and house me and clothe me. Without them I would be ruined.”

  Mehuru said nothing. He stood behind her, as a slave should stand, alert for her command but detached from her. He looked over her head, over the bonnet with the small bobbing flowers, and he felt his heart ache for her, and for the unlikely romantic future he had dreamed for them. She turned her head and looked up at him. She looked very small and vulnerable, like a scolded child. Her eyes, as dark as his own, were huge, shadowed with blue bruises from her illness.

  “What are we to do then?” he asked tenderly. “What do you want to do?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  JOSIAH WAS ON THE quayside, watching his rival’s ship preparing to set sail, his own berth achingly empty. The sailmakers dragged heavily laden sledges across the cobbles, and the runners screamed in protest. When one of the sailmakers saw him, he hesitated and then came over.

  “Your bill, Mr. Cole,” the sailmaker said. “From Lily, in March. I would appreciate it if you could settle it now.”

  Josiah put his hand to his pocket and then checked. “I am sorry, George,” he said. “I have left my purse at my house.”

  George looked uncomfortable. “Do you have nothing at your office, Mr. Cole?”

  “No,” Josiah said. “I keep no gold here. It is not safe with no one living here anymore. I shall send one of my slaves to your loft this evening to pay what I owe.”

  The man made a little bow and shouted to his lad to unload the sails. Josiah went down the steps to the ferry over to the Bristol side of the river. He sat in the bow and looked back at the ship. She was sailing direct to and from the West Indies. Josiah’s neighbor and rival had given up the trade of slaving. Josiah hawked and spit in the filthy water—he knew better. When Rose came home in November, when Daisy followed her into port, with Lily not far behind, they would all know that Josiah had been right to cleave to his own trade—the only trade he knew. The ferry nudged against the steps of the quay, and Josiah tossed a ha’penny to the lad and stepped ashore, heading for the traders’ coffee shop.

  Stephen Waring was at the top table taking breakfast when Josiah came in. He raised his head and nodded an invitation. As Josiah came over Stephen regarded him rather grimly, without his usual smile.

  Josiah ordered a plate of meat and bread and a pint of porter.

  “I have heard some news which I hope you will not take amiss,” Stephen began. He finished the last of his meat and took a piece of bread to wipe around his plate, sopping up the juices of the rare beef and the remains of the mustard.

  Josiah cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “The company has been told that you have shut off the tap for free water at the Hot Well.”

  Josiah nodded. “I have.”

  “Why is that?”

  Josiah smiled. “I should have thought it would be obvious. I have leased that Hot Well from the company, and it has cost me two thousand pounds’ deposit and nine hundred pounds a year. I have staff to pay, and I have this very day spent two hundred pounds on an architect’s drawing for a winter garden. I am hardly likely to give water away. At your colliery, Waring, do you give away coal to anyone who calls?”

  Stephen nodded at the jest but still did not smile. “I do not have a lease,” he said slowly. “I own my colliery outright.”

  “So?”

  “I do not have a lease which says that I am bound to give away my coal to anyone who calls for it.”

  Josiah looked a little flustered. His breakfast came, but he pushed it to one side. “You are not telling me that my lease says I have to give away the water?”

  “I am afraid that it makes clear that the poor and sick of Bristol have a right to draw water from the Hot Well,” Stephen said smoothly. “That was the agreement when the spring was first walled in and enclosed in the building. There is a general feeling that you have to abide by it.”

  Josiah took a long draft from his drink. “That is the letter of the lease,” he expostulated. “But surely no one seriously expects me to give water away! After all that has been spent on the well? After all the work we have done to make it more fashionable, to make it more exclusive?”

  Waring pushed back his chair from the table and shrugged slightly. “That is the lease,” he said easily. “I wanted to warn you—as a friend—that the company would wish to see the conditions of the lease fulfilled, including this one.”

  “But this is preposterous!” Josiah exclaimed, still disbelieving. “We cannot have the riffraff of Bristol turning up night and day and queuing at the tap with their kettles and their pots, wanting the water! There is no place for them! There is no provision! They will be in the way of the carriages, they will spit and soil in the gardens! The company cannot want that!”

  Stephen Waring shrugged again. “You signed the lease, Josiah,” he said. “It makes it clear that water shall be provided free to the needy poor of Bristol. I think you will have to obey.” He rose from his seat. “I must go. I am expecting a ship in port any day now. It is a worrying time waiting, isn’t it? Where are your ships now?”

  “God knows!” Josiah snapped irritably. “Lily may be loading off Africa, Daisy should be in the middle passage and the Rose in the West Indies by now. And I would be a richer man today if I had stayed in shipping. At least with my ships I know my rights. No one has yet told me that I have to give away half my cargo. I must tell you, Waring, I cannot see my way clear to opening the tap. There is no room for the needy poor at the Hot Well!”

  Stephen Waring nodded. “As you wish, Cole,” he said equably, and walked out of the coffee shop. Outside, he put his hat on his head and strolled toward the quay. “I think you will find that you are wrong,” he said thoughtfully to the wheeling gulls in the clear sky. “I