Respectable Trade Page 10

  One of the infants became sick. They thought she was dying of the cold. Mehuru saw that as the sun sickened and grew weaker, the child sickened, too. There was nothing they could do for her. She cried a little, very pitifully, and then died while a woman held her and rocked her. When Mehuru brought the little body up on deck for burial, they took her roughly from him and tossed her over the side. Her arms and legs flew up as she went over, and Mehuru had a heart-stopping moment when he thought she cried out. But the ship plunged down into the deep gray waves, and her little black head bobbing in the water was hidden from him.

  Days stretched beyond counting, weeks, and then months. They took the flux—dysentery—and one of the men died, and another of the infants. The weather was too stormy for them to dance on deck, and besides they were all growing weaker. Mehuru wondered if they would sail on and on until they were all dead. When they were called up to empty the waste pail, two of the boys slipped through the nets hung around the rigging to keep them on board and flung themselves into the sea. Mehuru felt shame at their loss. He should have given them hope, he should have given them a reason to live. But there was no hope, and there was no reason to live.

  The bucket of food grew more and more stale, but it did not rot. Unbelievably, it was too cold for that to happen. Then in the night Mehuru felt the rhythm of the heaving ship steady and change. He heard the yell of the men dropping the sails. There was a long time of rocking gently, as if they were anchored, and then a new jerky movement as the ship was taken into tow.

  Mehuru waited in the darkness of the hold, listening for any clues that might tell him what was happening on deck. Once again he heard the urgency of the ship nearing port and the growing noise of a quayside. The others woke, the women clutching each other in fear, the children whimpering. There was a foul, sour smell of dirt, like an old midden. It penetrated even to the fetid hold of the slave ship. There was a dreadful noise of people shouting and a screech of machinery working. Mehuru gathered his blanket around his shoulders and trembled a little with cold and fear. Then the grating was lifted off, they were ordered on deck, and they climbed out unsteadily and stood, shivering in the cold, looking around them.

  They could see little, for it was not yet dawn and there were only a few lanterns lashed to the rigging and to the side of the ship. A chain was passed along their line, linking one neck collar with another, and they were ordered to walk down a ridged bridge of wood to the quayside. Mehuru, his insteps flinching from the cold, hard cobbles, touched ground for the first time in six months. He had never felt freezing stone before; he could not believe the ache of coldness in the high, arched bones of his feet. They whipped him and the others with light, biting blows on his shoulders and his back, and they shouted at him, as men shout when they herd cattle. The cold air in his face and the cold hardness beneath his feet told Mehuru that he had arrived into some dreadful exile in the land where all the men were dead men; and Snake alone knew what they wanted of him.

  Mehuru breathed deep, three, four times of the icy, dirty air and tried to hold down his panic. Before him was a high building with no lights showing and arched doorways like gaping mouths leading to storerooms. A small door at the side of the building opened at their approach, and they were ordered into a hallway, through another door into a kitchen. The warmth and the smell of cooking gave him a sharp pang of homesickness, but then a blow on his back forced him forward, and they were through the kitchen before he had time to look around.

  At the far end of the kitchen, there was a stout wooden door standing open and four steps cut downward into rock. Mehuru and the others stumbled down, their chains jerking at one another’s necks as they were pushed roughly into line around the walls of the room. It was part cellar, part cave. Mehuru saw a couple of old barrels of wine and a rack that had once held bottles. Hammered into the soft red sandstone of the walls were new iron rings to hold their neck chains and anchor points for their shackles. A new man, a stranger, whose clothes smelled of the land and not of the sea, came along the line, bolting each of them against the wall and kicking clean straw around their cold feet. He took up the lantern and surveyed them carefully, as a good groom checks a stable before he leaves it for the night, and then he walked from the cave, taking the lantern with him. They heard the door at the head of the steps slam on the light and warmth of the kitchen, and they were left alone, buried alive in the damp cave, in the dark.

  Then Snake spoke softly to Mehuru and said one word to him:

  “Despair.”

  FRANCES LEARNED THAT THE Daisy had docked at dawn when Sarah sent a message with her breakfast tray asking her to come to the parlor as soon as she was dressed. The long, anxious wait for the ship was over, and Frances’s work was about to start. She dressed in a plain gray gown and wore her plainest cap, but she did not resent the slide back into governess work. The winter days in the little house on the quayside were very long, it was dark by four o’clock and too cold to drive out. The sides of the dock were lined with ice every morning, and the smoke from the glass furnaces hung like a fog over the house. There was no birdsong, only the cry of seagulls, and only the frozen cold cobbles of the quay to watch. There were none of the amusements that Lady Scott and the Whiteleaze ladies took for granted, no walks in the winter shrubbery, no afternoons in the glasshouses.

  Frances could remember an annual competition with her father to see the first snowdrops in the hedge at the bottom of the rectory garden. She could hardly bear a winter with no prospect of flowers, nor trees coming slowly into bud. She had read more novels than she could remember, she had sketched the view from the parlor window a dozen times: the shelf of the Coles’ quay in the foreground, the gibbet profile of the Merchant Venturers’ crane on the opposite side of the dirty river, the forest of masts, and the blank, square face of the warehouse opposite. She had completed more darning and hemming than she would have believed necessary, and still there were hours to fill in every day.

  The move to Queens Square would have diverted her, but Mr. Waring still had not vacated the house. To Josiah’s mounting anger, he found that he had agreed to a high price for a house in a square where other properties were now coming on the market, and he was not even in possession of it.

  Frances straightened her cap and went down the stairs to the parlor. Brother and sister were waiting for her.

  “Daisy has docked with a good cargo of sugar and rum and the first consignment of your slaves.” Josiah beamed at her. “I have a list here of them.”

  “My slaves!” Frances exclaimed.

  “They were bought with your dowry and will be trained and named by you,” Josiah said. “They should certainly be your slaves, and indeed, my dear, Sarah is right in thinking that they will command a better price if they are known to be your own.”

  “We hoped to have twenty,” Sarah said. “The losses have been very bad; I shall have words to say to Captain Lisle. He has delivered only thirteen.”

  Josiah handed her the list. Frances read:

  “Two healthy men

  Four healthy women

  Two boys, aged seven and sixteen years

  Three girls, aged between seven and fourteen years

  Two infant boys, aged two and five years.”

  “I did not expect them all to survive,” Josiah said. “Remember, Sarah, that although we lose twenty in a hundred crossing the Atlantic, another twenty-five in a hundred die in the first year on the plantations. We must prepare ourselves to lose even more during the first year here.”

  “Still, it is an excellent mix,” Sarah said. “I particularly wanted young children. They are easier to train, and the fashion is for very young black pages.” Her eyes were shining; she was smiling. Frances had never seen her look so animated.

  “How long will it take you to teach them to speak English?” Josiah asked Frances. “They know none as yet. But that is all to the good, isn’t it? They will have no rough accents; they have not learned the patois of the Islands. They will spe
ak pure English if they are so taught, won’t they?”

  Frances laughed, catching their enthusiasm. “I believe so. But I know nothing about niggers. And whether they can learn quickly or slowly, I will not know until I have seen them. Where are they now?”

  “The ship docked in the night, and I had them unloaded and stored in the cellar,” Josiah said. “I had it cleared out and some straw put down on the floor. I thought it best that they be kept there until they are trained to stay in the house without chains. It is safe; there is only one stout door that leads into the kitchen. Will you teach them here, in the parlor?”

  “Yes,” Frances said. She looked around the room. “But there are too many of them. I cannot teach them all at once. I will have just six for my first lesson and then the others in the afternoon.”

  Sarah looked displeased. “Speed is essential,” she said. “The sooner they are trained, the sooner they can be sold.”

  “I have to have some time to get used to them,” Frances said.

  “She is right,” Josiah agreed kindly. “She needs to become accustomed. I have taken on a good man, my dear, who has handled slaves on the Sugar Islands. He is an experienced driver. His name is John Bates, and he will feed them and clean them and muck them out and beat them for you.”

  “We can go and look at them now,” Sarah said eagerly. She was animated, her pale cheeks showing two spots of red.

  Josiah smiled. “I saw them when they were unloaded, so I shall leave you to inspect them on your own. I have to go to my work, but I look forward to hearing your progress this evening.” He nodded to Sarah, but he took Frances’s hand and bowed low over it. “If you can accomplish this, I will be obliged to you,” he said formally. “Our fortune depends on it.”

  Frances shifted uneasily. “I will do my best, Josiah,” she promised.

  “I ask nothing more,” he said, and left the room.

  Frances stood by the window and looked down, watching Josiah’s dark three-cornered hat moving among the laborers on the dockside unloading the Daisy.

  “What a long way they have come,” she said. “And what a terrifying voyage it must have been. All the way from Africa to the West Indies, and then all the way to England, in rough seas and sometimes becalmed, in heat and in cold weather. How frightened they must have been.”

  “Oh, I doubt it,” Sarah Cole said. “They do not feel as we feel, you know. And they do not understand things as we do. Even now they probably do not realize that they are far from home, and never going home again.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  COOK WAS STANDING BY the kitchen table in offended silence. Brown was washing the second-best china dishes at the sink. She turned when Sarah and Frances came in and dipped a curtsy. The scullery maid backed away, her head down, wiping her dirty hands on her hessian apron.

  Miss Cole nodded at them and led the way past the table to the massive door in the wall, bolted top and bottom and secured with a lock. Hanging by the door was a heavy key on a ring. Sarah lifted it down and turned it in the lock. Then she slid back the bolts.

  “Have they been fed?” she asked. It was as if she were inquiring about the welfare of carriage horses.

  “Yes, Miss Cole.” The kitchen maid bobbed. “And Bates has taken out the slop pail.”

  Miss Cole nodded and beckoned Frances to follow her. Frances went toward the doorway and then hesitated. Ahead was a narrow, passagelike cave, carved from the dark red sandstone of the cliff, illuminated by the horn lantern that Sarah hung high on a peg hammered into the soft stone.

  At its highest the roof of the tunnel was only about six feet; Frances could see the scrape marks of the picks and shovels where the cellar had been hollowed out from the cliff. The floor was bumpy, rutted in parts by the rolling of barrels of sugar and wine. A heavy, acrid smell wafted toward her. A smell of old, long-stored wine and a new smell of men and women left for months in their own dirt, a smell of degradation and despair. She recoiled, but Miss Cole took hold of her arm and drew her forward.

  “This is where the money comes from to buy your embroidered morning dresses,” she said sharply. “Money has to be earned in this world. This is how we earn ours. It’s a good trade and an honest trade.”

  “It was just the smell. . . .”

  “The ships smell worse than this, and we send our sailors out in them. The leadworks poison their workers, and yet your uncle buys their shot. You have been hidden from the real things, the dirty things, sister. But now you are the wife of a man who makes his living by the sweat of his brow, whose hands are dirty at the end of the day. And I am proud of it. I don’t want to be a lady who knows nothing of the real world. I am ready to earn my daily bread.”

  Sarah’s face was exalted in the flickering light. Frances pulled her arm away. “I am ready to play my part,” she said with simple dignity. “I have taken a share in the prosperity of this family. I am ready to work, Sarah, and I was never a lady of leisure. You need not lecture me.”

  “Good,” Sarah said briefly, and led the way, sure-footed, down the familiar passage. As Frances followed, the smell of sweat and grief and infection grew stronger.

  “There!” Sarah said avidly. “Look at them! And in good condition, too! I shall pay Captain Lisle a bonus!”

  Frances blinked, trying to accustom her eyes to the darkness. The tunnel had widened into a circular cave, lined with silent people. She could dimly make out the gleam of the candlelight on shining eyes, and there was the soft chink of a chain as someone moved. She had the sense of a mute crowd, filling the small cellar. They were chained like dogs to one another and to rings in the walls. Each man, each woman, each child had a light iron collar bolted around their necks, and above this shackle their faces were dulled with pain, weary with hopeless grief. She could see stains of pus on the collars where the blisters had gone septic and bloodstains where they had worn their necks raw.

  One ring on the neck collar held the chains for the manacles on the hands; another ring held the chain that roped them together in pairs, the links passing from behind their heads up to bolts on the walls. Their feet were in heavy leg irons locked to the floor. The place smelled of excrement and the sweet sickliness of diseased flesh. Frances clamped a hand over her mouth to hold back the nausea, and above it her face was white as a cave fish in the gloom, her eyes as black as theirs.

  None of them looked at her. None of them cared enough to look at her. Those whose eyes were open stared blankly at the space before them or looked down at their feet, skin puckered from standing barefoot in the mulchy straw. Mostly they were sitting on the stone bench cut out of the wall of the cave, leaning against the wall, their heads tipped back against the damp stone with their eyes tight shut.

  Frances found her breath and whispered, “My God!”

  Miss Cole looked at her pale face. “What is it?”

  “I did not know,” Frances said. She looked around the cellar at the thirteen black faces still as heartbroken statues in the shadows. The cruelty of the trade suddenly opened before her, like a glimpse of hell beneath her feet. “I did not know,” she said.

  Miss Cole nodded briskly, as if that confirmed her poor opinion of Frances. “Well, now you do,” she said, and turned to go up the steps again.

  Frances started to follow her, but then she froze. She had a strange feeling of being observed. She felt it so strongly it was as if someone had put a warm hand on the nape of her neck. She spun around, forgetting the roughness of the floor, and had to put her hand on the damp wall to steady herself.

  One of the slaves was looking at her. His skin was black, as dark as the skin of a ripe grape, his nose flared, his mouth a sculptured perfection. His cheeks were scarred with curious blue lines drawn in intricate patterns on his cheekbones. The same pattern was etched like a headband around his forehead. He had been standing with his head thrown back against the wall, the blank look of all the captives in his eyes. But something about her had drawn his attention, and his head had co
me up; the chain attached to the collar around his neck chinked. His eyes met hers.

  He looked at her as if he knew her. She felt a jolt—as tangible as a light slap in the face. She had a strange falling sensation, as if she were about to faint. The moment seemed to last for a long long time as she stared at him and he looked back at her.

  “Come along, Frances.” Miss Cole’s voice was spinster-sharp.

  Frances did not move. She stared at the man. He stared impassively at her.

  Miss Cole came back a few steps to see what had attracted Frances’s attention. “Oh, you are looking at his tattoos, are you?” she said. “Grotesque, isn’t it? And pagan. One of our captains told me that the ones who wear those tattoos are the wizards and priests of their pagan beliefs. He would have talked with the spirits and foretold the future.” She laughed one of her rare laughs. “He couldn’t have been a very good fortuneteller!”

  Frances looked at him. His face was still impassive.

  “Do they not understand English at all?” she asked.

  “They’ll have to learn,” Miss Cole said, holding open the door at the end of the passage. Frances turned unwillingly and walked away from the man. “The whip is all the language they know now.”