Respectable Trade (45 page)

“They will vote then?”

“You may think that,” the man replied scathingly. “But I wager that they chatter and chatter until the cause is lost and Wilberforce defeated, and this country as far from freedom and justice as ever, as it ever will be.”

Stuart slumped into his chair, put his head in his hands, and groaned.

The men exchanged shocked looks. Mehuru felt sick.

“We fight on,” Stuart said, muffled. “But I am going to bed now.” He looked up. “I thank you for bringing us the news, however bad. Shall you stay the night at my house?”

“I’d be grateful,” the man said. “I am as tired as a dog.”

“So what happens now?” Mehuru demanded.

Stuart gave him a crooked smile. “We fight on. Next week, ten days’ time, next month, next year. Shall I give you a lift to your door?”

“I’ll walk,” Mehuru said miserably. “I’m in no hurry to get back there.”

“See you next Monday,” Stuart said. “We’ll have more news then.”

Mehuru nodded and stepped out into the darkness of the May night.

I
N THE NEXT WEEK
, Frances did not recover. The inflammation of the lungs brought on by the chill she had caught at the Hot Well had left her feeling weak and tired, and she seemed unable to throw off her fatigue. She had been convalescing for a fortnight in her room. For the first week, she had seen no one but the maids and the doctor. Now she was a little better, and Josiah would sometimes sit with her after dinner, and he had agreed that Mehuru could come into her bedroom for reading lessons in the afternoon.

Frances wore her prettiest cap for his lesson, and her white embroidered robe. Elizabeth was ordered to sit in the window and darn table linen, acting as chaperone. Mehuru had a seat at the foot of Frances’s bed, and now and then she would lean forward and point to a passage in his book that he should read, and under cover of the book Mehuru could touch her finger with his.

It was not much of a courtship, but for Frances it was restful. She liked having Mehuru near at hand without his sudden, unpredictable flashes of temper. She loved him being close to her.

Mehuru found the intimacy deeply disturbing. When his finger brushed against her hand, he could hardly stop himself from seizing it and kissing her palm. When she leaned forward, she was close enough for him to smell the light lavender scent of her linen. When she said, “Catalogue,” that word is “catalogue”; it means a list of things,” he watched her lips and listened to the cadences of her voice and hardly heard the meaning of her words at all.

The afternoon was hazy with unfulfilled desire. Even Elizabeth, stitching slowly in the window seat, was affected by the atmosphere. She rested her hands in her lap and gazed out the window at the square, where the trees were in full green leaf and the birds were crisscrossing the sky with their beaks full of food for nestlings.

Frances leaned back against her pillows and listened to
Mehuru reading. She had set him a passage from the
London Magazine
about the prevalence of circulating libraries. Mehuru read fluently and easily, stumbling only once or twice over unknown words.

“How ever have you learned so quickly?” she interrupted.

He looked up, and their eyes met for long, wordless moments. They were drenched in desire for each other; there was nothing to say. Elizabeth, daydreaming in the window seat, was blind to their silent communication.

“I like different languages,” Mehuru explained slowly, the words forming and shaping in his mind while he watched Frances’s face, scanning her dark eyes and her soft mouth. He thought she looked quite different from the woman he had seen in the cellar of the warehouse all those months ago. She was alive now in a way she had never been before. Her pulse was more rapid, her skin as clear and light as a girl’s. He thought that she had been half dead when he first met her and that his desire for her, and her passion for him, had brought her back, back from the very brink of coldness and a death-in-life where all these Englishwomen seemed to live.

“You have learned much quicker than the others,” Frances observed.

She was fascinated at the way his eyes could smile at her while his lips spoke of ordinary things. It was a most delicious sensual game, this speaking and listening while all the time his eyes were eating her up, his desire for her showing in every line of his body. His glance over the top of his book was a caress; when his gaze lingered on the neck of her nightgown she could almost feel his touch.

“I speak four African languages and a little Portuguese,” Mehuru said. “Until I came to England, I thought that all white men spoke Portuguese. English is not very different from Portuguese. Some of the words are the same, as you must know.”

“I don’t speak Portuguese,” Frances confessed. “Just French and a little Italian.”

“You are very ignorant, then,” Mehuru said with provocative impertinence.

Frances reached forward to slap his hand and only just checked herself in time.

The flirtation in his voice could not be hidden. Elizabeth in the window seat suddenly turned her attention to the room and looked in surprise at them. Frances blushed scarlet.

“What do you think of the demands for the vote?” Mehuru asked, diplomatically changing the subject.

“I think that it is wrong,” Frances said seriously, repeating her family’s received wisdom. “It cannot be right for people who have no investment in the society to want to run it. The only people who should have power in a country are the people who own the land; they have a genuine interest.”

“In my country no one owns land at all,” Mehuru said.

“How can that be?”

He smiled at her surprised face. “Because there is so much land. More than you could imagine. More than all the families could claim. You could ride or walk for days and days and never see anyone. If you want a field for your own, you mark it out and plow it and water it, and it can be called yours. We are rich in a way you could not imagine, you in this little country where everyone has to own everything for fear that someone else takes it.”

Frances was tired; she closed her eyes. “Tell me about it,” she murmured. “Tell me all about it.”

“The capital city is a great walled town, much bigger than Bristol,” Mehuru said. “It is called Oyo—and the alafin lives in the palace at the heart of the city. He is like a king, except he takes advice from the people and acts on their wishes. He is confirmed in his place every year. It is his task to bring their wishes all together, to make an agreement. I was a diviner, I served the Ifa oracle. My patron’s task was to read the oracle for the king, and I served him.”

“Oh, can you tell fortunes?” Frances asked, not opening her eyes.

Mehuru looked at her pale face with tenderness. “I can,” he said. “I tell fortunes for silly girls like you who want to know who will love them.”

Elizabeth could follow most of the words. She put her hand over her mouth to smother a giggle. Mehuru glanced at her and winked.

“And who will love me?” Frances demanded recklessly, her eyes still tight shut.

“I shall,” he breathed.

“And how will we be together?”

“I have to see the palm of your hand.”

Frances blindly stretched out her hand to him, and he uncurled her fingers and stroked the soft, white skin of her wrist and her palm. “What does it say?” she whispered.

“It says that we will go together to my home and you shall live in my house,” he said. Frances smiled and snuggled down in the bed like a child listening to a bedtime story.

“And what else?”

“You shall wear gowns of indigo silk and a deep blue headdress pinned with gold. You will be my wife, and you will bear me many beautiful children.”

Frances gave a scandalized chuckle. “Hush!”

“You will grow well in the sunshine and the hot winds from the plains,” he promised. “You will like the countryside. The trees on the plains are so broad and strong; their shade is sweet. When the wind is high in the palm trees, they rattle and roar like a rainstorm. When it is calm, you can hear a hundred, a thousand birds singing. The rivers are deep and very green; they carry the reflection of the forest so clearly that it is like two forests—one above the water growing to the sky, one below the water growing down. I shall take you to swim in the river where the sand is white and clear, and when you lie in the water, the little fish will swim around you and nibble at your white skin. There are white and pink lilies that float on the water like little boats, and their roots are sweet and good to eat.

“I shall take you into the forests, and you can eat all sorts of sweet fruits that are just growing for free, Frances. No one owns them. You can eat them all; you can eat all day if you want. You will see the monkeys in the treetops, you will hear the roar of the lions at night, you will see the elephants moving in great herds across the plain, and antelope and deer like a sea of tawny brown hides and sharp, pretty horns.” His voice fell silent.

“She is asleep,” Elizabeth said softly in their own language.

He nodded.

“You are in love with her.” It was a statement, not a question.

He nodded again.

“And she loves you?”

“I think so.”

Elizabeth rose from the window seat and put her hand on his shoulder. “You poor, foolish man,” she said, and there was a world of pity in her voice. “Mehuru, it was bad for you already. You have made it a hundred times worse.”

House of Lords,
Westminster.

29th May 1789

Dear Josiah,

Just a Note written in Haste from the House to tell you that We—the owners, the Masters, the landlords—have Won, as I promised. The bill for the abolition of Trading in Slaves is Talked to Death. There will be a committee which can run forever. There will be much Hand-wringing and Agitation, which will change nothing. You can Ship all of Africa into Slavery if you wish, and No one in England can prevent you. This is a great Day for men of property. Wilberforce is Sick with grief, There are some who say his Health cannot stand the Disappointment. My Regards to Miss Cole and to my niece,

Scott.

Mehuru read the letter left open on Josiah’s desk, his face grim. He turned to the door and felt himself shrug, philosophically, slavishly—a man who expects little and receives less. He knew that Stuart would despair and would then launch into a frenzy of pamphleting and writing and secret agitation. But Mehuru thought that his own anger had been sapped. You had
to be a freeman to feel spontaneous anger, he thought. You had to have power in your own life to feel rage. When you were a household drudge, you thought no farther than the next floor to wash, the next grate to clean. When the messenger from London had told Stuart that Wilberforce had not even reached a vote, Mehuru had known then that the white men would not let him go. They would not throw away their investments, would not give away their profits. Why should they?

Mehuru heaved the heavy coal scuttle and dumped it on the marble grate. If he wanted his freedom, he thought, he would have to run.

T
HE
M
ERCHANT
V
ENTURERS WERE
at their June supper. The cloth had been taken away, and the port and rum were being passed around. Josiah was seated in the middle of a long dinner table, taking a little rum and water and smoking a pipe. His fresh, aromatic tobacco leaf was passed around for others to sniff.

“Your tobacco, Cole?” someone asked him, and he nodded.

“Can you send me ’round a hogshead?” the man asked, and then dropped his voice as the man at the head of the table tapped the heel of his knife on the wood.

“Shall we get to business?” asked Sir Henry Lord. “Before the evening begins in earnest?”

There was a roar of appreciation. Sir Henry nodded at the clerk, who quickly ran through a list of decisions the company had to make. All of them went through on the nod. The Bristol merchants moved with one accord, knowing their own interests and working as a team. When they came to the issue of the Hot Well lease, Stephen Waring spoke up for Josiah’s bid.

“May I say, Sir Henry, that I support this bid for the lease by my friend Josiah Cole—a new member of the company and a merchant of enterprise whose business is well known to us all. He has asked for an assurance that the present rent for the Hot Well lease of nine hundred pounds per annum should remain
the same for ten years, to enable him to plan his investment.”

Sir Henry peered down the table to where Josiah was sitting. “Are you planning new buildings at the site?” he asked.

“I plan a winter garden,” Josiah said. “A bathhouse designed on romantic lines, with a view over the river and plants. Like a conservatory, Sir Henry.”

“You had best take your profits first,” Sir Henry observed.

“I want to see the Hot Well as the best spa in Britain,” Josiah declared.

Sir Henry nodded like a man prepared to keep his opinion to himself and said nothing.

“M’friend Cole is prepared to pay two thousand pounds entry to the lease, payable at once, and the rent for the first year at once,” Stephen Waring reminded him.