A Respectable Trade. Philippa Gregory

he possibly could. He was dumb. Siko looked at him, a long look of reproach and despair, and Mehuru could find no words at all. He dropped his gaze and turned away and when they were ordered back down into the hold he went without looking back. When they chained him back on a strangely empty shelf he held his hands out for the manacles on his wrists like a foolish trusting child.

      A great longing for his home, so painful that he thought he would die of it, sickened him to his very core. He lay in the darkness, refusing to open his eyes, refusing to take food. The little group was kept together in the hold, twenty of them. Two other men manacled with leg-irons like himself chained on the shelf, and five women with neck-irons and long chains so that they could move more freely, but not reach the men. The smallest children were allowed to go free; two of them could barely walk. The other children aged from four years to adolescence wore light chains from wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle.

      One of the women called to Mehuru to eat, but he turned his head from her and closed his eyes. The smallest toddler struggled through the slurry which washed around the floor to bring him a bowl. Mehuru saw fresh fruit – the first he had seen in the long two months of the voyage – but he did not allow himself desire. He would not eat. He had been robbed of his home, he had been robbed of his people. He had been robbed of his servant and robbed of his duty to provide for him. He had been robbed of his life. He would live no more.

      Days passed, and still the ship did not sail. They were ordered on deck and made to build a little shelter against the sun. They were kept there like hens in a pen, lying on straw. They laboured below to clean out the mess of two hundred men, stalled like animals for nearly sixty days. They baled out the excrement and the filth and then the master of the ship went below with his handkerchief over his face and lit pastilles of camphor which smoked all day and all night and still could not drown the stench.

      Mehuru would not speak. He ate a little rice every day and drank some of the fresh sweet water. When the women asked his name or the men touched his hand in companionship and shared mourning he turned his head away. Nothing should tie him to life.

      The sailors lived on board and worked during the day, loading the ship and making it ready for another voyage. They had long idle periods when they came and took the women away. The women came back bruised and sometimes bloodstained, with their heads in their hands. Mehuru, chained hand and foot, turned his head away from the horror in their faces.

      One woman did not come back at all, and after that the sailors were forbidden to touch them. The little children missed her, she had played with them and fed them and sung them songs. Without her they were a little more lost. One little girl sat beside Mehuru for the greater part of every day and banged her head gently against the deck. Mehuru lay with his eyes shut, the deck echoing beneath his head like a drum to the steady thud of the little girl’s head against the planks.

      The master came back on board and the ship was ready to sail, only half-loaded with large kegs of sugar and rum. The little girl disappeared, they took her away one day, but still Mehuru could hear the thud thud thud of her head on wood. It beat like a heart, it drummed like an accusation.

      He closed his eyes and refused to eat rice. He drank only water. He felt himself floating away. There was none of the right things that an obalawa should have around him, and he could not warn his fathers that he would need their help in crossing over. He thought his tree that held his spirit had bent in some storm and was perhaps breaking, and he prayed for it to fall so that his spirit might flow out of it and he might die.

      Mehuru readied himself to join the ones who had to die sitting down with their eyes staring out into the darkness. He feared he would not find his fathers, dying thus. Only the Snake god had seen him with his huge shiny eyes and would know where his son had been stolen far away across the great seas.

       Chapter Four

      Josiah came into his house for a pint of porter and a slice of pie at midday and Frances was waiting for him at the top of the stairs.

      ‘I should like to go out for a walk,’ she said. ‘But Brown cannot escort me in the mornings.’

      Josiah was absorbed in business, a missing hogshead of tobacco – a great round barrel packed with whole sweet-smelling dried leaves – and he looked at her as if she were an interruption, a nuisance. ‘I meant to get you a carriage,’ he said absently. ‘You cannot walk along the dockside.’

      ‘So I understand,’ Frances said. ‘But I wish to go out.’

      He sighed, his mind still on the Rose and the question of missing cargo. ‘Perhaps we can hire a carriage.’

      ‘Today?’

      ‘I am very busy,’ he replied. ‘And troubled over this ship. There is an entire hogshead of tobacco unaccounted for, and the captain can give me no satisfactory explanation. I shall have to pay Excise tax on it as if I had it safe in my bond, as well as carrying the loss.’

      ‘I am sorry to hear that,’ Frances said politely. ‘Where would I hire a carriage?’

      Josiah broke off with a sudden short bark of laughter. ‘You are persistent, Mrs Cole!’

      Frances flushed at his use of her new name. ‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘At home I always walked in the gardens in the morning. My health is not very strong, as you know, and the day is fine and I wanted to go out.’

      ‘No, it is I who am at fault. I have not provided for you as I should have done,’ Josiah apologised. ‘I will hire a carriage for you myself and I will drive with you this afternoon and show you the sights you should see.’

      ‘If it is no trouble …’

      ‘It is an interruption to my work,’ he said frankly. ‘But I should have provided you with some amusement. Can you not do sewing or painting or something of that nature?’

      ‘Not all day.’

      ‘No, I suppose not.’ Josiah thought for a moment, and then nodded at her and headed towards his office.

      ‘At what time shall I be ready for the carriage?’ Frances called after him.

      ‘At two,’ he said. ‘Tell Brown to go around to the coachyard and hire a coach, a landau or something open.’ He nodded to her again and shut the door firmly in her face. Frances waited a moment and then went back to the parlour.

      Miss Cole’s place was empty, her ledger open at the accounts of the Rose. Frances leaned over the chair and saw the meticulous march of figures down the page, showing the purchase of petty goods for small sums. Sixpence for gold lace, threepence each for small knives, fourpence each for brass pots. She shrugged. She could not imagine how Miss Cole could bear to spend the day on these trifling sums, nor what difference they made to an enterprise of any size. She did not know what a trading ship sailing to the Sugar Islands would want with gold lace or small knives. Frances returned to her seat in the window and waited for two o’clock.

      The coach was prompt; it was standing at the door as Frances came down the stairs wearing a large picture hat crowned with two fat feathers. She had changed into a walking dress: a greatcoat dress with a wide collar and caped sleeves. Mindful of the plainness of Sarah’s attire, Frances was rather relieved to find only Josiah waiting for her at the door, and Sarah shut up in the parlour.

      ‘I was afraid you would have forgotten,’ she said. ‘Did you find your tobacco?’

      ‘The planter in Jamaica cheated us, or made a mistake,’ Josiah answered. ‘And the captain had it wrong on the cargo manifest. They were loading in a hurry. I had ordered him to make haste, it was the last of the new crop, and this is what comes of it.’

      ‘I am sorry to hear it,’ Frances said uncertainly. She felt she should condole with him, as one would to a man who has suffered a loss. But her training to avoid the vulgar topic of money was too powerful.

      ‘I shall write to the planter and send the letter by Rose when she sails,’ Josiah decided.