Respectable Trade (27 page)

Frances touched his bare hand with her gloved finger. “Mr. Cole, it is very fine indeed,” she said. “And it is the very height of fashion. But I think we will look a little less”—she hesitated, trying to find a word that would not hurt his feelings—“a little less new if we buy some furniture which is not at the very top of fashion but which will give us a little background.”

“Background, is it?” Josiah asked. “But not secondhand. I’m not having other people’s goods furnishing my house. I’m not a bailiff to sit on other men’s chairs.”

“My parents’ furniture was kept at Whiteleaze,” Frances offered. “They had some very fine pieces, and it is good to have things in a house which are not all new. They give a house a sense of . . . belonging.”

“Old stuff?” Josiah said, still ready to argue. “We don’t want old stuff.”

“From the Scott family,” Frances added quickly. “Heirlooms.”

“Oh, heirlooms!” Josiah cheered immediately. “I thought you meant old rubbishy stuff. Heirlooms is excellent. And with the Scott crest? Does it all have the Scott crest? Or we could put the Scott crest on anything we buy, couldn’t we?”

Frances was about to refuse, but then she saw the eagerness in his face. “Oh, well,” she said, thinking that no one who would matter would ever know. “Why not?”

“But we’ll buy some China stuff as well,” Josiah persisted. “Great vases and that.”

“Yes,” Frances said. “I shall write to Lady Scott for my father’s furniture this afternoon. When we see what we still lack, we can buy it.”

“But we will have a great vase or two,” Josiah insisted. “Whatever furniture you have. We will have a great Chinese vase or two. And porcelain dragons. I have seen them in red porcelain. We will have a pair of dragons!”

Frances giggled. “I could not live here without!” she told him. “I am depending on it.”

Josiah gave her his half-ashamed, rueful smile. “You think I am a fool. But I am assured that China stuff is the thing.”

“It is,” Frances agreed. “And as long as we do not have too much, then the house will look very lovely.”

“You will make it nice?”

For the second time that day, Frances was prompted to show him affection. She reached up and put a dry kiss on his cheek. “I will,” she promised. “I will make it lovely for us.”

He was surprised at her caress, and they stood in embarrassed silence for a moment.

“I should like to see the upstairs rooms.” Frances moved away and up the stairs, Josiah following.

Only when she had seen all over the house, from the attic bedrooms to the kitchen with the new-designed range for cooking, did Josiah agree that they could leave the Warings’ servants to take the last of their things out and close the big front door behind them.

Just as they were leaving, a carriage drew up. It was Mrs. Waring.

“Mrs. Cole.” She stepped down to shake Frances’s hand. “You must forgive my informality, but I so wanted to see you and wish you well in your new house. It has been a happy house for us. I trust it will be good for you, too.”

“You’re very kind,” Frances replied, taking the rather grimy
kid glove in her hand. “May I present my husband? Mr. Cole.”

Mrs. Waring turned to smile at him and gave him two fingers to shake. “And will you be moving in at once?” she asked. “And will you be entertaining? Shall we see Lord and Lady Scott here soon?”

Frances nodded. “We shall move in the New Year. My uncle and aunt will be constant visitors, I don’t doubt. Perhaps you would like to come to tea when we are settled?”

Mrs. Waring smiled. “I shall be delighted.”

“Thursday is our day at home,” Frances said easily. Josiah, who had not known that he had a day at home until this moment, opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again. It was apparent to him that Frances was as skilled at this, her work, as he was on the dockside.

“And Mr. Waring?” Frances inquired smoothly.

“He is very well. He will be delighted to accompany me. And your sister-in-law is well?”

“Miss Cole is in excellent health,” Frances replied. “But I must not keep you talking here in the street.” Her tone implied the slightest of reproofs.

Mrs. Waring bustled at once toward her carriage. “Oh, no! Of course! Thursdays, then!”

“I shall be so pleased to see you,” Frances said sweetly. “Good day.”

The carriage moved off, and Frances raised a hand in a very small wave. “By George,” Josiah said, impressed. “You handled her very sweetly, my dear. You handled her like a tickled trout.”

Frances tried to look at him reprovingly, but for the second time that day she could not contain a giggle. “
Not
a tickled trout,” she said. “Please don’t say that, Josiah. Not ever. Not a tickled trout.”

He grinned. “Oh, aye. Now come away, Mrs. Cole. I have something else to show you before we go home.”

Frances climbed back into the carriage, and Josiah ordered
the driver to go once again to the Hot Well. They drove up Park Street and then dropped down to the road that ran alongside the river. The tide was in, and the bright sunshine danced on the water. The air was warm and smelled salty. Seagulls wheeled over the river, the sunlight bright on their white plumage as they dived for garbage in the water. Frances let down the window of the carriage and looked out over the river to the Rownham ferry on the far side.

“In summer I should like to cross the river and go for a picnic,” she said.

“You may have work which keeps you this side of the river,” Josiah warned her portentously.

The carriage rolled up before the little colonnade of shops that led to the Hot Well pump room.

“The Merchant Venturers, who own the pump room, this row of shops, and indeed half the lodging houses, are looking for a tenant to take the whole lot off their hands,” Josiah said.

Frances gasped. “Not you?”

Josiah gave her a little conspiratorial smile. “Now, not a word to Sarah, who would rather die. But I think that I might venture it. Not the whole of the property, not by a long way. But I think I might make some money from the pump room and the spa, don’t you?”

“You have planned this for some time,” Frances observed acutely. “When we came here on my first visit, you were thinking of it then.”

“I heard rumors, but the whole property is owned by the Merchant Venturers,” Josiah said. “I cannot buy into the lease without their consent. There is no way to get into the business without their blessing.”

Frances nodded, staring out at the pretty, diminutive row of new shops and the towering square pump room building.

“If I got it, d’you think we could make it a great success?” Josiah asked. “I thought that if you advised me on the fashionable world and things that we needed to do, and if Lord Scott
could be prevailed to come, and Lady Scott . . . if we made it as grand a place as Bath?”

Frances nibbled the tip of her glove, thinking.

“It would have to be as good as Bath,” Josiah went on. “People visit here, but the season is too short, and we need to draw in more customers. It is dead in winter; we need local Bristol society to come, too. And I do not know what it lacks. Would you know?”

“Yes,” Frances said finally. “I think I know what we would need and how it could be done. And certainly I know the people that we would invite to make it fashionable. All of that I could do. But it would take a lot of money, Josiah, I don’t know how much.”

He nodded. “With the lease in my pocket, I could borrow. But I have to buy the lease from the Merchant Venturers’ association.” He gritted his teeth and then, in a sudden gesture of frustration, thumped his fist into his open palm. “Everywhere I go in this town, they confront me,” he groaned. “I cannot get insurance at their rates and on their terms. I cannot get my ship unloaded without hiring their crane. Everything I do, I need their blessing. I
have
to be in with them, Frances. I have to have it.”

“I see it,” Frances concurred. “I have seen it from the beginning. But will they not invite you? Surely now you are a big enough trader?”

“With the house in Queens Square, and with you, and with Lord Scott backing us, and with Sir Charles investing with us, surely then they will ask me?”

“Mrs. Waring.” Frances named the key to their social success.

“Her, and her friends, and their husbands,” Josiah agreed. “It is all part of a pattern which we have to make around us. We have to make ourselves one with them. We have to get in.”

Frances nodded and then smiled at him. “I can do that,” she declared. “I can do that for you, Mr. Cole. Mrs. Waring, her
friends, and their husbands can be managed. I can get us on the inside, as you wish.”

S
ARAH REMAINED SILENT AND
sulky for the rest of the month of December. The festival of Christmas came and went in the little house on the quay with no greater acknowledgment than an extra visit to church, a day off for Cook and Brown—so a cold collation was laid at midday for them to eat at dinnertime—and an early night. Frances, eating cold dried-up ham for her Christmas dinner, with cold boiled potatoes and a cold chicken pie, consoled herself with the thought that next month they would be in the house on the square and she would have the ordering of dinner. She tried not to think of the noisy, jolly dinners at Whiteleaze and at the little parsonage when her mother and father had been alive. She went to bed with a shawl wrapped tight around her and found in the morning that she had been clinging to her pillow for comfort. There were stars and flowers of frost on her window on the morning of Boxing Day, and they did not melt until long after breakfast. At Whiteleaze they would be hunting, the hounds meeting on the lawn before the house and Lord Scott resplendent in his pink coat. Or the family might be in London, and there would be a continual parade of morning callers showing off their winter furs and smart boots.

Frances wore her warmest gown and sat as close as she could to the parlor fire. Inside her boots her toes stung and burned with scarlet chilblains. In the stuffy room, she felt her breath come short and labored. On the other side of the fire, Sarah sat straight-backed, wreathed in woolen shawls, nursing a cold. She sniffed. Frances estimated that she sniffed three times every minute. They spent the long winter evening sewing, reading sermons, and waiting for the clock to show nine so that the tea tray could come in, and then they could go to bed.

T
HE MOVE TO THE NEW
house in January was not as smooth as Josiah had confidently predicted. The house on the quayside was turned upside down with the confusion of packing, and then unpacking things that were needed at once. The plan was to move everything—furniture, goods, wine, food, and all the stored letters and papers of years—over the bridge to the square on the other side of the river. But even with the slaves working under the command of John Bates and his lad, it took several days before the furniture and the goods were shifted, and in the two nights of confusion Frances slept in a bedroom bare of anything but her bed and took her breakfast off kitchen china.

Frances selected only the very best pieces of furniture from the warehouse to send across the river. The Coles’ furniture was old and shabby, most of it badly made. Frances left almost all of Josiah’s office furniture; his worn desk and the captain’s chair were riddled with woodworm. Sarah took pride in insisting that all the bedroom furniture should be moved, and the parlor table and chairs. “I chose it myself,” she told Frances, smoothing the cheap walnut wood. “In the year that we bought the
Lily.
”

“Lovely,” Frances said.

The carters came from Whiteleaze with Frances’s stored furniture and a note from Lord Scott wishing her every happiness in her new house. Lady Scott sent her card, and Frances, who expected little affection from her ladyship, blessed her for that chill courtesy and put the card on the silver tray in the hall so that other visitors leaving their cards would be sure to see it.

In all the business and confusion, Frances remembered to order a livery and shoes for the slaves. “They cannot go barefoot up and down the road to Queens Square,” she insisted when Sarah complained of the expense. “They will get sick if they are too cold, and their feet are already bad with chilblains.
It will do us no good if they are ill, but it will help us a great deal if they are seen smartly dressed and looking the part.”

The slaves were to have two attic rooms at the top of the house, one for the women and girls and young children and one for the men and boys. They were to have straw pallets and blankets. They were to have jugs and ewers for washing, and proper chamber pots for their use. They were to be treated as servants and to be freed from their manacles and chains.

“But locked in at night,” Miss Cole specified. “And stout bars on the windows.”

Frances nodded. The move to their new quarters had conferred on her, at last, the status of the senior woman in the house. She took the decisions for the new place and conferred with Sarah only out of courtesy. “We would have to release them sooner or later,” she pointed out. “We would have to trust them not to run away. Besides, where would they run to?”

“There are many people who would be only too pleased to kidnap them for sale,” Miss Cole said. “Captains on their way back to the West Indies, visitors to England. Or English families who see the chance of getting a servant for free. Or they might simply escape and live free.”

“Are they freemen—those black men who work on the quayside?” Frances asked.

“Most of them,” Sarah replied. “Their masters may have died and freed them in their wills, or they may have earned enough to buy their freedom. Or they may have escaped. There are many free blacks now; in London there are tens of thousands. And every port has more and more of them.”

“So our slaves could be free one day.” Frances spoke her thoughts aloud. She was thinking of what Mehuru would do with his freedom if he were one day to be released. She did not know what he wanted; his dark face was inscrutable now when he turned it to her. In the hurry of moving, there had been only short lessons most days, and some not at all.