Respectable Trade Page 13

  Sir Charles entered the room first, his daughter behind him. He was a large, red-faced man, his broad chest and stomach bursting against his brilliantly embroidered waistcoat. Dark knee breeches encased fat thighs; his high, white stock was wrapped tightly around multiple chins; his blue coat was lined with sable, which made him even more bulky.

  “So this is the bride!” he said jovially to Frances after he had greeted Miss Cole with a kiss on her hand.

  Frances dropped a small curtsy and let him clasp her hand in his two moist palms and then kiss it.

  “Oh, Papa!” Miss Fairley exclaimed languidly in a strange, rich accent.

  “Here, Miss Cole, this is my daughter, Honoria, that you’ve heard me tell so much about, in England at last!” he said to Sarah. He turned to Frances. “I am honored to present my daughter to you, Mrs. Cole.”

  Frances curtsied to the girl. She was pale and slim, wearing a silk gown of icy white, which drained her mousy hair and pale face of what little color she had. She had a shawl of silver tissue around her shoulders and large pearls at her neck and in her ears and on her wrists. She had a second shawl of warm white wool trailing from her right shoulder, as if she feared they would not have heated the room.

  “Honored,” she said coolly. Her rich accent was oddly at variance with her strictly conventional dress.

  Josiah Cole came in behind his guests. “Sit down, Sir Charles,” he said. “What will you have to drink? Dinner will be served shortly.”

  “I’ll take a glass of rum and water if you have any of my own excellent barrels in the house.” The fat man winked at Frances. “That’s the worst of the Sugar Island life, Mrs. Cole. You get a taste for all of it. The sunshine, the drinks, the company. You should come on a visit. We’d make you very welcome, wouldn’t we, Honoria?”

  The girl gave the smallest of nods. “There’s very little society for ladies,” she said, her voice lilting with the rhythm of the Sugar Island speech.

  “But the weather!” Sir Charles took his glass from Brown. “I tell you, I have not been warm since I set sail.”

  “It has been very damp,” Miss Cole observed. “I sometimes think December is the worst month of the year, always cold and often wet.”

  “I am spoiled, Miss Cole, and that is the truth. If I came in midsummer, I should still feel a chill.”

  Frances sipped a glass of ratafia. The scullery maid hovered in the parlor doorway and whispered to Brown, who stepped forward and whispered in turn to Josiah Cole.

  “Dinner is served,” he said. “You must take us as you find us, Sir Charles. You know we are simple merchant people. We dine on the table, here in the parlor. Will you sit here, sir? And Miss Honoria here?”

  They took their places. Frances, who had dined all her life at a table that never seated fewer than twelve, tried not to feel snubbed by Honoria’s rude stare around the cramped room.

  Brown took up a position at the door and collected the dishes from the scullery maid, who could be distantly heard pounding up the stairs, carrying the hot and heavy platters. Josiah looked down the table to Frances with an uneasy glance, and she felt a sudden pity for his discomfort. He knew it was not being done correctly, but not how it should be done. Frances smiled at him, and his face lightened at once.

  “Are you well, Mrs. Cole?” he asked. “Have you had an enjoyable day?”

  “I am very comfortable,” Frances assured him. She saw Sarah’s glance of surprise at her determinedly bright tone. “I am very comfortable indeed.”

  “I am sorry not to be served by your slaves,” Sir Charles observed. “Josiah has been telling me that you have a dozen of them in training.”

  “They will not be ready for some months,” Josiah said. “My wife is teaching them to speak.”

  Honoria turned on Frances a look of pale disdain. “You are breaking slaves?”

  Frances nodded defensively. “Yes.”

  “It’s a man’s job at home,” Sir Charles said abruptly. “On my plantation the old hands train the new ones. This is a man’s job that you have given to your wife, Cole.”

  “She has the help of a driver, and besides they are no trouble. We have only two men, and the rest are women and small children.”

  Brown circled the table serving soup from a large tureen. Frances recognized the best silver brought down from the storeroom for the occasion.

  “It’s not the wit that’s required but the whip!” Sir Charles exclaimed. He laughed, a deep, satisfied laugh. “Did you hear that? Not the wit but the whip!”

  Miss Cole tittered agreeably; Josiah smiled.

  “They’re like children,” Sir Charles explained. “They can remember nothing unless it is beaten into them. And their spirits are surly and defiant. On my plantation we have a beating in the stocks every day. In the fields they are whipped as they work, but at least once a day I have one whipped in the stocks. And I have the blacksmith brand them at the forge—oh! time after time—and sometimes slit their tongues for insolence. I wear myself out trying to devise punishments which will serve as an example to the others and yet not injure them so badly that they are spoiled for work or resale.”

  “So stupid,” Miss Honoria said languidly in her high, sweet voice. “They are so stupid.”

  “What’s your death rate now?” Josiah asked.

  Sir Charles shrugged. “I suppose of our two hundred we lose about fifty or sixty a year. They hardly breed at all. We lose women in childbirth all the time, and the babies are often born dead. When I hear of men preaching that the trade in slaves should stop, I wonder how they would have me run my plantation? How else can sugar be grown?”

  Josiah nodded and signed to Brown to pour more wine. “It’s ignorance,” he said. “And fashion. It’ll pass. It’s a few young prating clergymen and a couple of members of Parliament trying to make their career. Methodists and radicals! It will blow over. It’s nothing more than a few grubby radicals stirring up bad feelings and signing petitions. The leaders of this country know the profits that the trade brings, and they like to take sugar in their tea. We won’t be driven by the mob.

  “Look at Bristol! Before the trade it was a little town, nothing to what it is now. The fortunes made in this town are a monument to slavery. And Liverpool has been built on the back of the Atlantic trade. Every day they build another great house or another town hall. People know where their interests lie. This is a milksop agitation; it will pass.”

  “I hope so,” Sir Charles said heavily. “I cannot tell you how alarmed we get when we hear the fools agitating and complaining. What of this Wilberforce and his bill?”

  Josiah scowled and poured himself another glass of wine. “It comes before Parliament this May,” he said. “But we are all prepared. Our men will call for more evidence and adjourn the reading; it can be adjourned forever they tell me. The great men of the trade in Liverpool and London and here are all ready to act in concert, and their pockets are well lined. I don’t think that a handful of clergymen and some ignorant workingmen can stand against them. There’s not one member of the houses of Parliament that does not have an investment to protect. They will hardly vote themselves out of business.”

  “I pay two members a pension direct,” Sir Charles said. “To guard my interests. But it makes me so angry when I hear of these radicals. They know nothing about the trade. They know nothing about our difficulties. Every visitor we’ve ever had to Clearwater Plantation has gone away convinced that we are working the land in the only way possible. You can’t get white laborers, and all the Indians are dead now—not one of them lasted beyond the first few years of our arrival. How are we supposed to manage? And what would the slaves be doing in Africa? Hunting each other and burning each other alive! We have saved them from the most foul paganism and taught them work and discipline. Why, I could tell you some tales. . . .”

  “Papa!” Honoria murmured.

  “I beg your pardon,” Sir Charles said. “My daughter is delicate in her tastes,” he explained to Fra
nces. “I should not mention these things before her.”

  “I do hate niggers,” Honoria said quietly to Frances as the men talked across the table. “I wonder you can bear to teach them. I won’t have them near me.”

  “Do you have no black servants?”

  “Most of them are half-castes,” Honoria replied. “Mulattoes. We prefer to use them in the house.”

  “Half-caste?” Frances repeated the unfamiliar word.

  “Yes,” Honoria said calmly. “Papa likes to mix the stock.”

  Frances heard the genteel euphemism, but she would not examine what it might mean. “And what is it like?” she asked. “Living on the plantation?”

  Honoria glanced at her father and at Josiah and Sarah, who were listening only to him. “Dreadfully slow,” she complained. “There’s hardly any society unless we go into Jamestown, and even then there are only two balls a year. We’ve come home for me to buy some gowns and”—she gave a small smile—“make acquaintances.”

  “Young gentlemen?” Frances hazarded, and was rewarded with another small smile.

  “I have nothing to do all day except watch the sugar grow and torment the house girls,” Honoria said. “Mama spends all day in bed. She’s delicate, she’s dreadfully delicate. She has Nanny—my old black nanny—running up and down for her every half hour with one thing or another, sending dishes back to the cook, and complaining and carrying on.”

  Frances nodded, trying to imagine the large white house amid a sea of lush green forest, with three discontented whites, drinking rum or nursing hypochondria in the shade, while outside, two hundred exiles worked under the merciless sun, whipped if they went slow, mourning for their homes and their families.

  Brown removed the soup and loaded the table with dishes: cutlets, a haunch of beef, a venison pie, and sweetbreads.

  “You Bristol merchants spread a good table!” Sir Charles exclaimed. “I always enjoy a visit to your house, Miss Cole.”

  Miss Cole smiled her acid smile and asked for how long the Fairleys would be visiting Bristol. Sir Charles outlined an itinerary designed to net Miss Honoria a husband. They were to go shopping for clothes in Bath, attend the pump room, visit in the country during summer, and then stay with friends for the London Season in the winter.

  “We hope to be setting sail again by next spring,” he concluded. “Unless Honoria here surprises me with other plans!”

  Honoria turned her eyes down to the table and tried to blush. “Oh, Papa!”

  “And who runs your place while you are away?” Josiah inquired. “D’you have a manager you can trust?”

  “An overseer.” Sir Charles nodded. “He’s a man from Jamestown, working his way up. He’s a brute, but I can trust him with a shipful. He knows how to handle them, and he’ll give no quarter. I’ll come home, and there will be some sad faces in the slave quarters and some new mounds in the graveyard, but there will have been no trouble.”

  “Surely on Clearwater you never have trouble?” Miss Cole remarked.

  Sir Charles shook his head as his plate was taken away. “I never sleep without a gun at my bedside,” he said. “You never know where you are with them, Miss Cole. You have to remember the numbers you are facing; all the time you have to be wary. Remember that there are only three of us—Lady Fairley, Honoria, and myself—and there are two hundred of them, and more if you count the visitors in the slave cabins that I don’t know about and the runaways hiding in the forests around. I have to keep the upper hand night and day. They’re always waiting—waiting for their chance. Who next, eh? Where next?”

  He nodded at Frances. “If you have the management of them, you had best remember my warning, Mrs. Cole. They are killers. They are all born killers. Never let your guard down.”

  “Our slave driver watches the lessons, and he has a whip,” Miss Cole said. “And they are manacled.”

  “Keep them that way!” Sir Charles recommended. “Keep them that way until their spirit is broken, until their very will to live is under your feet. They have to long for death. If they are attached to their lives, then they want to better themselves—that’s when your trouble starts.”

  Miss Cole looked thoughtful. “We have perhaps already been too kind. . . .”

  Sir Charles shook his head. Brown put a large portion of syllabub before him and poured cream. “Break their spirit and keep them low,” he advised. “Separate the bucks from the women, keep them underfed, watch them losing weight. Keep their minds on pleasing you for little rewards, and if you see the least sign of unwillingness, beat them near to death—or beat one to death if need be. The others will note it, I assure you.”

  Miss Cole smiled at him. “You are so kind,” she said. “I will consider it very carefully.”

  He beamed back. “A sensible woman,” he proclaimed with pleasure. “Josiah, you are to be congratulated with helpers such as these. Beauty and brains. You will go far, I know it!”

  Josiah smiled and raised his glass. Frances pushed aside her untouched dessert. She had a sour taste in her mouth; the conversation was making her nauseous.

  The men talked of the trade while the fruit and sweetmeats were brought in. Honoria nibbled a sugarplum, her pale brown eyes blank with boredom. Frances sat very still, her hands in her lap, her face a mask of polite interest, willing herself to be deaf to them both.

  When Josiah nodded to her, she rose from the table and led the way for the ladies to sit at the fireside. It was a pathetic parody of the rituals of gentry life. Frances’s face revealed nothing; she conducted Honoria to a place at the fireside as if Lady Scott herself always dined and sat in the same room.

  “We’ll go to my office,” Josiah announced. “We’ll take a glass there and join you later, ladies.”

  They went unsteadily from the room, having already drunk the best part of four bottles. Honoria, Sarah, and Frances made thin conversation at the fireside and ordered tea. The men did not return. The conversation dwindled and died. Honoria openly watched the hands of the clock on the mantelpiece. When it chimed nine, she asked if the maid might tell her papa that she wished to go home.

  Sir Charles appeared in the doorway, woefully drunk. “So sorry, my dear,” he said, speaking with meticulous care. “I shall send you home in a chair, don’t you know. A chair. Brown has gone out to fetch you one, and she shall see you home. I’ll see you in the morning, my dear. In the morning. Josiah and I are setting the world to rights and finishing a very pretty port. A very pretty port indeed. I shall take my supper here.”

  Honoria nodded and let Frances help her with her cape.

  “I shall go to bed,” Frances said quietly to Josiah.

  “Do,” he said pleasantly. “We will make a night of it. No need to wait up.”

  The men retreated to Josiah’s study again, broached another bottle, and ordered some supper. By midnight they were thoroughly drunk.

  “Let’s have one of the slave girls brought in,” Sir Charles suggested. “Have a little sport.”

  Josiah peered at him owlishly. “We’re not at Clearwater now,” he observed. “There are the servants to think of, and the ladies.”

  Sir Charles laughed his rich, happy laugh. “Servants be damned. And the ladies know when to look the other way. Lady Fairley knows when she’d better look aside, you can depend on it.”

  “I cannot,” Josiah protested. “I don’t keep the keys, and anyway Mrs. Cole would not like it.”

  “She need never know,” Sir Charles said. “Go on, Josiah. Don’t be such a damned Methodist.”

  Josiah was drunk but still reluctant. “It’s not the done thing in England,” he said. “Assure you, my dear fellow. Let’s go out and get a woman if you wish—but slaves in your own home . . . not done.”

  “I know what the done thing is!” Sir Charles was starting to get unpleasant. “I’m a damned baronet—a baronet! I should know the done thing, I hope. I’m good enough to buy your slaves at a handsome profit to you and good enough to sell you sugar on the q
uayside at knock-down prices. I know the done thing then, don’t I?”

  “I just meant . . .”

  “And here am I, offering to take a share in one of your ships, one thousand pounds’ worth, I remind you, Josiah! I should have thought I know the done thing!”

  “No offense, no offense,” Josiah said quickly.

  “Well, none taken,” Sir Charles replied, his mood swinging back into sunshine. “None taken. But let’s have a girl, Josiah! Let’s stir the stock.”

  “They’re in the cellar,” Josiah said. “And my wife has charge of all the household keys.”

  “Send her a message. Tell her we want to see the slaves!” Sir Charles had the characteristic stubbornness of the drunkard. “Come on, man! You can’t be under the cat’s paw in your first year of marriage! Who rules the roost here?”

  “I do!” Josiah said, stung.

  “Then get us a damned woman!”

  Josiah touched the bell rope, and Brown came wearily to see what he wanted now. “Tell Mrs. Cole we want to see one of the slave women,” Josiah ordered. “Ask her to send me the keys.”

  Brown curtsied and went out.

  Sir Charles smiled in anticipation and poured himself another glass of port. “I assure you,” he said, beaming, “once you get the taste for it, you are spoiled for anything else. At home I take them whenever I fancy.”

  Josiah hid his distaste. “Do you not take African diseases, Sir Charles? African illness?”

  The man nodded. “Aye, and pass them on, too! But I’m grown very reckless, you know. There is something about being master, complete master, of so many. There is something which stirs you, to know that every woman has to do your bidding and that the others can do nothing but watch.” He blew out a plume of cigar smoke with a shaky little laugh. “There is nothing like it. This empire of ours is a glorious thing, Josiah. It makes us Englishmen like gods.”