Respectable Trade Read online

  Frances flushed at his mention of a son, but Josiah had no idea that he was indelicate. He pointed to the grand house, the best house on the square, three redbrick stories high with little attic windows let into the roof. Long white stone columns ran the length of the windows on each story; above each window was a carved face. The double doorway was large and imposing, flanked by more pillars. Stone-carved gateposts and wrought-iron railings shielded the front of the house and emphasized its importance. “This is it, Mrs. Cole. This is our house-to-be. I happen to know that it is coming up for sale, and I shall bid for it, you may be sure. And I shall have it. No one will outbid me, cost what it will. It is generally known that you and I are wed. It is generally known that I am looking for a town house to establish my family.”

  Frances looked around the square, trying to imagine what it would be like to live there. A curtain in a front parlor beside them twitched, and dimly she saw a woman step back from the window. It would be a little community, ingrowing and inbred. There would be small feuds and long memories. Frances did not mind. She had lived in a country village, dependent on the goodwill of the lord, her uncle. She knew how small communities worked.

  “We should drive on,” she said gently to Josiah. “We will be noticed if we stay here any longer, looking.”

  “So?”

  “These people will be our neighbors,” she explained. “We wish them to have an agreeable impression of us.”

  He was about to argue, but she saw him hesitate, and then he nodded. “You know best, Mrs. Cole,” he agreed. “You are the one to teach me. It shall be as you wish. Now, is there anywhere else you would like to see?”

  “I don’t know the city at all,” Frances said. “I have never visited here. I had some friends who drove out to a picnic and looked at the Avon Gorge. They told me it was sublime.”

  Josiah leaned forward and gave the order to the driver. “We can go and look at the gorge,” he said. “You will not think it so sublime when you understand what it costs me in barge charges. We can drive to the Hot Well at the foot of the gorge. I have a particular interest in it.”

  The carriage turned out of the square and bumped along yet another dockside beside another river.

  “This is the Avon again?” Frances asked.

  “The river Frome,” Josiah corrected her.

  “It is as if we live on an island,” Frances said. “Surrounded by water.” She nearly said “foul water.”

  “The old city was a defensive site ringed by the two rivers, the Avon and the Frome—like a moat,” Josiah told her. “Now it is all docks.”

  They waited for the drawbridge ahead of them to be dropped, and then the carriage bowled over the wooden planks and turned left, away from the docks.

  Frances looked ahead as for the first time the city seemed something more than a dockside slum. The pretty triangle of College Green was before them, with two churches on their left. The college church was an imposing building with the Bishop’s Palace behind it. Frances heard birdsong—not the irritable squawk of seagulls but the summery ripple of a blackbird’s call. Looking up, she saw swallows and house martins swooping and wheeling around the cathedral.

  The thick foliage of the elms threw dark green shadows over the road, and as they drove up the steep hill, the air grew fresher and cleaner and the sun shone brightly on the new buildings.

  “Oh, if we could only live up here!” Frances exclaimed. Set back from the track were occasional terraces of houses in soft yellow stone, built in the style that Frances liked—plain, regular, and square.

  Josiah shook his head. “It’s a whim. One or two people are building here, but no true merchant will ever move away from the city. The river is our lifeblood. Clifton is too far to go. It is country living—not city dwelling at all. There are people buying land and putting up houses, but it will never be the heart of the city. We will always live along the riverbanks; that is where the city always has been. That is where it always will be.”

  At the top of the hill, they forked to the left, skirting a high hill and dropping down toward the river again.

  “But if we had a carriage, you could drive down to your work,” Frances observed, her voice carefully neutral. “And these are handsome houses, and very clean air. I love to breathe clean air, and my health needs it.”

  Josiah shook his head. “It is a whim,” he repeated. “It will pass, and those men who have bought land and built will have bankrupted themselves. Take my word for it, my dear, Park Street is beyond the limit of the city, and Clifton will never be more than a little out-of-the-way village.” He craned his head to see a ship in the dry dock. “The Traveler,” he said with quiet satisfaction. “I heard she was badly holed. That will put Thomas Williams’s nose out of joint.”

  Ahead of them the river widened out and started to form sinuous curves between banks of thick mud. Dark woodland reared up from either side of the banks and then broke up around the lower reaches of white cliffs of limestone that loomed above them. The little road clung to the side of the river, following the curve of the bank overhung by the cliffs. It was spectacular scenery. Above, seagulls wheeled and cried and dropped down to dive for fish. A small fishing smack slipped downriver, moving fast on the ebbing tide, her sails filled with wind. The air was salty and clean, damp with the smell of the sea. A flat-bottomed trow crossed from one side to another and passed a ferryboat rowed by a man bright as a pirate in a blue jacket with a red handkerchief tied on his head.

  “Sublime,” Frances said. It was Lady Scott’s favorite word of praise. “This is wonderful scenery, Mr. Cole. So romantic! So wild!”

  Josiah tapped the driver on the back with his stick, and the man stopped the carriage. “Will you walk, my dear?”

  The driver let down the step, and Frances alit from the carriage and took Josiah’s arm. “Above is the St. Vincent’s Rock,” he said. “It’s quite an attraction for people who love scenery.”

  Frances craned her neck to look upward at the high white cliffs with wild woodland tumbling down. “I never saw anything more lovely. You would think yourself in Italy at least!”

  Slowly, they walked along the little promenade that clung to the side of the river, tucked in beneath the cliff. An avenue of young trees had been planted in a double row to shade the road and form an attractive riverside walk. Ahead of them to their right was a pretty colonnade of shops set back from the river in a curving half circle, lined with small pillars so that the customers could stroll under cover, admiring the goods on sale, on their way to and from the Hot Well pump room. It was as pretty as a set of dollhouses, a dozen little redbrick shops in miniature under a colonnade of white pillars.

  Frances and Josiah walked along the flagstones, looking in the shop windows at the fancy goods and the gloves and hats, and the crowded apothecary shop. There was a small circulating library, which also sold stationery and haberdashery goods.

  “This is Miss Yearsley’s library!” Frances exclaimed.

  “Who is she?”

  “Why, Anna Yearsley, the poetess, the milkmaid poet! Such a natural, unforced talent!”

  Josiah nodded at the information. “I have not had much to do with poetesses,” he confessed. “Or milkmaids. But I know about her library. This is a new building, all brand-new, and she will be paying a pretty sum in rent. The Merchant Venturers have spent a fortune to make this the most fashionable place in Bristol.”

  “I believe my uncle stayed at the Hot Well when he visited you,” Frances said. “In Dowry Parade. He spoke very highly of the lodging house, but he said it was dear.”

  Josiah nodded. “Whoever takes it on will have to charge a fortune to recoup his investment. Not just these shops but the spa itself has recently been improved. These trees are new planted. For years the place has been open to anyone—you can take a cart from the city for sixpence to come here and drink the water for free. Any tenant who takes it on will have to charge more and exclude the common people. A successful spa must be for the fa