Respectable Trade Read online

  “I don’t know,” Frances said unwillingly. “I have never learned about money before.”

  Sarah smiled in triumph. “Well, you are a merchant’s wife now,” she said. “It is right that you should know where the money comes from. When you hire the carriage or want a new silk dress, it all has to be paid for.” She smoothed the pages lovingly with the flat of her hand. “It all comes from here.”

  She turned the page. “Now, this is the record for the transactions in Africa,” she went on. “I compose the books when the captain shows me his log on his return. See here: purchased over six months on the Africa coast—three hundred and twelve—at an average of fourteen pounds each. Wastage on voyage—sixty-two. Price in Jamaica, average fifty pounds each. First profit—£12,500, minus the cost of buying—£8,132.” She waited for Frances to speak.

  “Very profitable,” Frances said.

  “Apparently so,” Sarah said sourly. “From this profit we buy sugar, tobacco, and rum to the cost of £4,830. We extend credit to the planters to the cost of £1,750, and we pay off half of the crew at a cost of £130.” She ran her finger down the columns, Frances followed it with her eyes. All she could see was the neat fingernail and the black-ink numbers spooling away.

  “Now you see,” Sarah Cole went on. “When the ship comes into port, she has to pay for a pilot up the Bristol Channel and then another pilot up the Avon. She has to pay a fee to every lighthouse, she has to pay a fee for the new bridge, she has to pay the rowing boats to tow her up the gorge, she has to pay a fee to the mayor and to the quay warden, and a docking fee.”

  “Gracious,” Frances said weakly.

  “No wonder the Liverpool merchants steal our trade,” Sarah Cole muttered to herself. “They sail straight into a deep-water dock with cheap quay rates. No wonder they build bigger and bigger ships.” She turned her attention back to Frances. “So can you see the profit which is made at the end of the voyage?”

  Frances looked wearily at the final page. “Here, £2,513.”

  “Divided among the partners—five partners including ourselves,” Sarah prompted.

  Frances looked at the final figure. “That’s £502 each.”

  Sarah Cole nodded at her, waiting for some response.

  “After all that work and worry?”

  “And we own the ship and keep the warehouse and allow credit to the planters in Jamaica and all the other costs that the partners do not see,” Sarah added.

  “It does not seem very much for us when you put it like that,” Frances said.

  Sarah got up from the table and went over to the window. “It’s a good profit on a two-year investment for the partners,” she said. “For a little man with little savings, it is good business. But the scale of it is not big enough for my brother now. He can double his money every five years on these figures, but he wants to advance in six months, by tomorrow. I do not see how we are to do it. I show you these figures because you should know our business, but you can see for yourself that we are not making the profits we need.”

  “Why not?”

  The woman shrugged. “Rising prices all around us. It costs more and more to repair and equip a ship. The price of sugar is falling as more and more planters increase their land and grow a bigger crop each season. The American war made it dangerous even for civilian shipping and increased the cost of insurance. The French can import their own sugar from their own colonies, and now they are selling in England. I heard that a man is finding a way to make sugar from vegetables called beets. When they make sugar from carrots, we are ruined indeed.”

  She stepped toward the table and shut the ledger gently, passing her hand over the ship’s name, Daisy, engraved on the front of the leather-bound book. “The Liverpool merchants have ships twice the size of the Daisy,” she said. “And they do the trip in half the time. That means they can make four times our profits. Just think of it! Twice the amount of trade in half the time!

  “The big Bristol merchants are members of the Royal Africa Company, and they do not have to wait off the coast, trading up and down at all the little stations, buying here and selling there. They anchor at a Royal Africa Company fort, and they load food and water that is waiting for them, and the trade that is ready and waiting for them. They halve the loss of life for the crew because they are away from West Africa within a month, while we delay for six months gathering cargo.

  “When they arrive in the West Indies, they have an agent waiting on the quayside to greet them. He has already bought the cargo for loading, he has already arranged the sales. He has agreed prices while they were still at sea. They deal with the best planters, and they have contracts arranged. When they give credit to the planters, they bring home bills which are honored in London at once, by the planters’ agents, as soon as they are presented. So they get their money within the quarter. But we have to give credit and then wait until our ship is in the West Indies again, sometimes as long as two years before we are paid! The people we trade with do not have a London agent. They are the smaller planters, and they demand credit from us. It is no business for the little men anymore.”

  “Yet Josiah seems so confident,” Frances demurred.

  Sarah’s face was grim. “Yes,” she agreed. “He is very confident. He sees sugar in the storerooms of the Redclift; his bond is filled with tobacco and rum. He can see the gold coming in from one little sale after another, and he is down on the quayside doing as well as other small traders. But I spend my day with the books, and I can see that the profits are slowly falling as the costs rise. The world is changing, and we will have to change, too.”

  “My uncle thought that Josiah was a prosperous man,” Frances protested, clinging to hope.

  Sarah shrugged her shoulders. “What would he know?” she said disrespectfully. “I imagine he has never seen a set of accounts in his life. He would see his rent rolls and nothing more. But I have spent my life with these books, and I can read them as you would read a novel. And I can see that each voyage out, and each voyage back, is less and less successful. It costs more every day; the risks are greater all the time.”

  “What can we do?” Frances asked. “Can’t we build a bigger ship? Or take up a different trade?”

  Sarah Cole measured Frances. “No,” she said with a little smile. “We can never leave the trade. It is the only thing we know. It is the foundation of our fortunes, and it is our inheritance. Whatever anyone says, I will never countenance that we leave the trade. We must stay with it—but do it in a new way.”

  “What way?”

  “We import slaves direct,” Sarah said very softly. “We bring black slaves into England. We put a black slave in every household in England. We call them Scott slaves—named in honor of you—and we make our fortune.”

  There was a loud crash from the quayside as something was dropped, followed by half a dozen shouts. Neither woman heard them.

  “What?”

  “We ship slaves already,” Sarah said sharply. “You saw the accounts with me. You saw the figures. You saw that we bought three hundred and twelve on Daisy’s last voyage; you read it yourself. You saw wastage on voyage—sixty-two; you knew that meant that sixty-two of them had died during the passage. You saw how they sold in Jamaica—they went for fifty pounds each. My idea is to bring a sample of them on to England. To train them here to be house servants, to sell them for households in England. Isn’t it the fashion?”

  “Yes,” Frances said slowly. Lady Scott had a little black boy to carry her fan and run her messages, and every lady in London had a black maid or a handsome black footman to ride behind the carriage and a little black girl to play with the children. But all the slaves that Frances knew had been imported singly from the West Indies, brought over by returning planters, sold by slaving captains. “Can you train them in large numbers and sell them in large numbers?”

  “Why not?” Sarah demanded. “It was done in the past. In the last century, people imported slaves direct from Africa. I have heard of a
Liverpool merchant who has imported a dozen this year. They take up little space on the ship coming home from the Sugar Islands, and they will sell in England for eighty or ninety pounds each. But if our slaves could become known for their manners and their training, we could command an even greater price.

  “You shall teach them. They are the pupils you would have had, if you had come to us as a governess. Now you will take a profit rather than a wage, but they will still be your work. They will be famous for their smartness and their training, and that will be your job.”

  “I’m not sure. . . .” Frances said.

  “You can have no objection,” Sarah said coldly. “You knew we were Bristol merchants. You accepted the trade well enough when it took place at a distance. You came for a job with us.”

  “I did not know I was to be governess to slaves. . . . Josiah never said—”

  “You can have no objection, though. You knew where our wealth was earned.”

  “I have no objection,” Frances said. “Of course I have none. I know that it is a good thing to take the Africans away from their paganism and to teach them godly work and religion.”

  “And they are not humans, not as we understand humans,” Sarah reminded her. “They are animals. They cannot speak unless we teach them; otherwise they just grunt and moan. They are not fully human.”

  “Oh,” Frances said. “I had not realized. I have never had much to do with them. Lady Scott has a nigger page boy, but I have never seen one fully grown.”

  “So you will teach them?”

  Frances nodded. “I only hesitated because I do not know if I can. I have taught children, but they were human children. I wouldn’t know how to teach niggers.”

  Sarah nodded grimly. “Then let me tell you, sister, that you had better find a way to teach them. This will be the saving of our Cole and Sons and its key to the future. If we can train and sell slaves, then we can make a fortune big enough to satisfy Josiah’s ambition and to pay for Queens Square. If we do not, it will not be Queens Square for you. You will stay here forever, beside the filthy water of the dock—cold and damp in winter, deadly in summer.”

  There was a long silence. Frances could feel herself becoming breathless and put her hand to the base of her throat to steady her pulse. “You are not exaggerating?” she confirmed. Her little cough rose up and choked her for a moment.

  Sarah waited until she had her breath back. “The bottom is slowly falling out of the trade,” she said. “If, in a few years, our Bristol partners can get a better return in land and building, or in shops, or in importing cotton to Manchester, they will no longer put their money with us. Then we will not be able to send out ships at all, and our investment—in our ships, in our warehouse, in the quay—will be thrown away. We have put so much money into the trade that we have to trade, and we have to make the trade pay.”

  “I will try, Sarah. I will try my best to teach them.”

  Sarah smiled a wintry smile. “You were a governess, weren’t you?” she asked. “You replied to our advertisement for a governess? We planned all along that you should teach them. But now instead of working for a wage, you are working for yourself. You shall be their teacher, and you shall recommend them to their places and give them a character. You will make this plan work for us. You will earn the new town house. You want it, don’t you?”

  Frances looked around the tiny parlor and breathed the tainted air. “Yes,” she said. “Of course I do.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  JOSIAH CAME IN FOR his dinner in the midafternoon in thoughtful silence. Frances, new to his moods and weary herself from Sarah’s long lessons with the account books, sat at the foot of the table and said nothing. Her cough was troubling her. She sipped water, trying to choke it back. Sarah waited until the tablecloth had been taken away and a decanter of port set at Josiah’s hand before she asked:

  “Trouble?”

  He raised his head and smiled. “Oh! Nothing. I have been all day seeking proper insurance for Rose. Ever since the Zong case, it has been more and more difficult.”

  “The Zong case?” Frances asked.

  “Business,” Josiah said dismissively.

  “She should understand it,” Miss Cole pointed out. “It is her business, too, now.”

  “Oh, aye, you’re probably right,” Josiah agreed. “The Zong case, my dear, took place half a dozen years ago and concerned the good ship Zong, which is still in dispute with the insurers.”

  “Why?” Frances asked.

  “Well, it is a long story, but basically the Zong ran short of water while sailing to Jamaica. There was much illness on board, and the captain took the decision to pitch a quarter of the cargo overboard.”

  “What cargo?” Frances asked stupidly.

  “She does not understand,” Miss Cole said.

  “It is simple enough,” Josiah said briskly. “The captain of the Zong, fearing that a large number of his four hundred and seventy slaves would die of thirst, had them thrown into the sea to drown.”

  Frances looked from Josiah’s face to his sister’s. “To save the drinking water?”

  Josiah allowed himself a small, sly smile. “Well, that is what the captain claimed. However, while they were in the midst of these kindly killings, it came on to rain, and it rained for two days.”

  Miss Cole hid a little laugh behind her hand.

  “And the good ship Zong docked with full casks of drinking water in Jamaica.”

  The two of them smiled at Frances, expecting her to understand the joke. She shook her head.

  “It was a fraud,” Miss Cole said impatiently.

  “The captain was lying,” Josiah explained. “See here, Frances, he had a bad batch of slaves, very sick, dying on him, dropping like sick flies. Slaves who die of illness are a cash loss—a loss to the traders—but slaves drowned at sea are paid for by the insurance. Captain Luke Collingwood had the neat idea of slinging all the sick men and women over the side and claiming for them on the insurance.”

  “He drowned them for the insurance money?”

  Josiah nodded. “In three batches, over three days as I remember. A hundred and thirty-one altogether.”

  “And they say the big Liverpool shippers are better,” Miss Cole crowed. “You never heard of a Bristol captain cheating like that.”

  “He did not cheat, sister,” Josiah reproved her. “He ran his ship at a profit. Lord Mansfield himself sat in judgment and ordered a retrial.”

  “The captain was tried for murder?” Frances asked.

  The look the two of them turned on her was of blank incomprehension. “Lord, no!” Josiah shook his head. “It is no crime to kill slaves. This was a civil matter. The insurers refused to pay out. They argued that slaves are insured only against accident, not against deliberate drowning. They won the first round in the courts, and then it went to appeal. Lord Mansfield sat on the appeal, I remember. He said that it was exactly the same as if horses had gone overboard, and that the owners should be insured against their goods going into the sea for whatever reason.”

  Miss Cole nodded in mild triumph. “He said that slaves are property; Lord Mansfield himself said they were the same as horses.”

  “But it has left us with great difficulties,” Josiah went on. He rubbed his hand across his face, and his boyish exuberance suddenly drained away. “Because his lordship ruled that all slaves lost at sea are to be paid for by the insurance, there is a fear that all captains running at a loss will simply drown their slaves and claim for them. The insurers do not trust us. I have spent all day trying to find someone to insure a cargo of slaves for me, and they put in so many requirements and conditions that it is hardly worth insuring at all.”

  Sarah looked anxious. “We dare not sail without insurance,” she said. “What if the ship were to go down and we were to lose all? Or a slave revolt? Josiah, we must insure.”

  “I know! I know!” he snapped. “But now they will only insure against rebellions. They will not
compensate for sickness or for slaves who suicide. If a slave is whipped to death, they will not compensate. If a slave starves himself to death, they will not compensate. If they kill themselves, what can I do? I cannot carry such losses.”

  Sarah was grave. “Someone must insure us.”

  Josiah shrugged his shoulders crossly. “They are all in a ring. If I could break into the Merchant Venturers, then I could share my insurance with them. On the inside they all insure each other. It is the little fish left on the outside that bob about trying to snap at trifles. If I could get inside the company, then I would be safe.”

  He broke off and looked at Frances, his mood lightening. “We can do it, I know we can do it. With the house at Queens Square and with you, Mrs. Cole, to give me some presence in the world, we will get there. We have been trading for two generations; we are respectable Bristol merchants. They will invite me to join—they must invite me to join soon.”

  “It is an old trade,” Frances said. “Respectable.” She was thinking of the ship in the drizzling rain. The one hundred and thirty-one men and women thrown over the side into the heaving water, clinging to the ropes and screaming as they went overboard, bobbing in the wake of the ship as it plowed on without them, trying to swim after it in the buffeting waves, and then seeing, on the edge of their vision, a dark, scythelike fin as it came straight toward them, slicing through the water.

  “Rose is nearly ready to sail,” Sarah said. “We have to have insurance within the week. And we are still two partners short.”

  “I will get it,” Josiah promised. “I will get it in time, and partners for the voyage as well. I cannot have her sitting on the dock eating up my money doing nothing. I will get insurance for her, and partners, too. Trust me, Sarah, I have never failed before.”

  JOSIAH WAS TRYING, BUT the mood of the city, as sensitive as a flock of little wading birds that scavenge at the edge of the sea, was against him. There was a whisper around Bristol that Josiah was losing his sure touch. He was spending too much time with his new wife; he was seen driving in a hired carriage to the Hot Well, to the Clifton Down. He was negotiating to buy a house on Queens Square. They said he wanted to be a man of leisure; soon he would be too grand to drive a hard bargain. The small traders who haunted the quayside coffee shops with their savings to invest wanted to place their gold with a man who knew the value of money as they did. They wanted a man who admired the chink of a hundred hard-won guineas in a little purse. They suspected Josiah of soaring too high for them. They did not know that he was trapped in the gulf between the two worlds of the hardest city in Britain. The great men, the Merchant Venturers, had no place for him. Their wives might murmur that the new Mrs. Cole had been Miss Scott and niece to Lord Scott and might long to be her friend, but the new Mrs. Cole was seen only at church, and she attended St. Mary Redclift, not the more fashionable cathedral on the north side of the river, on College Green.