A Respectable Trade. Philippa Gregory

jointure. We have Agreed that there is no haste for the Marriage and since you have to complete your contract with Mrs Snelling, and he hopes to Buy a house Suitable for his new Family, we have fixed it for the month of July next year. It is Not what your father would have wished, but I Agree with you that it is the best you can Anticipate.

      As to the Pupils you were to teach, he made no Mention of them, except as a Scheme he had in Mind for later. My principal concern was your Sister-in-law, Miss Sarah Cole, who does not Seem to welcome the Match. However, you will have Dealt with more Intractable domestic situations at Home and with Mrs Snelling.

      I shall be home within the Sennight, and will drive over to Mrs Snelling’s house to discuss the matter with you then.

      Yours,

      Scott.

      Mehuru regained consciousness with an aching head and flies buzzing about the blood on his temple. His arms were bound behind him and his neck was lashed into a forked wooden brace with rough hemp twine. At his side was Siko, whimpering pitifully, his neck-brace paired with Mehuru’s so that they were bound together like some misshapen yam which sprouts a twin. They were whipped to their feet and then directed down the river path to where their captors had hidden their boats. Every stumble Siko made tore Mehuru’s neck and knocked him from his stride. They fell together in a helpless embrace and were whipped until they stood again. Only when they fell into a slavish head-bowed shuffle could they move forward, and even then both their necks were rubbed through bruises into bleeding sores. ‘I am sorry, sir, I am sorry,’ Siko wept. ‘I am sorry.’

      ‘It is I who am sorry,’ Mehuru said only once as they struggled to their feet. ‘I brought you far from your home and mine, I should have taken more care. I did not know that they had come this far inland.’

      He did not finish his thought: that it was not only Siko whom he had failed. If the slavers were raiding this far inland then the whole of Africa was open to them and Mehuru could not send a warning. ‘The gods only know what will be the end of this,’ he said to himself. He was worried for the Yoruba kingdom and for its plan to boycott the slave trade. He did not yet know enough to fear for himself.

      Siko wept like a little child, but Mehuru stayed calm. He knew that while they were within the borders of the Yoruba states his authority would be recognised. The men who had captured them were ignorant violent peasants of the worst sort. Mehuru tried to speak to them in all the African languages he knew but they answered him only with a threatening wave of a cudgel. He decided to wait until they reached their base camp. As soon as they reached their master, Mehuru would explain who he was and they would be released. In his more optimistic moments Mehuru thought what an excellent anecdote this would make back at the court, and what a hero he would seem: fighting slavery and personally endangered.

      It took three days walking downriver to where the slavers’ boats were waiting, and at every halt the slavers went out and hunted down another man, another woman, another little child. Mehuru’s opposition to the slave trade had been theoretical; but when he saw the women sick with fear and the children too terrified to weep he knew that he hated the Trade and would be against it all his life. Then he longed to be back at court – not only to boast of his escape, but to add his voice to the counsels against slavery. He had heard it named as a sin but when he saw the whipping and the casual brutality, he understood for the first time in a comfortable leisured life what a mortal sin could mean.

      And he was afraid – if the slavers had penetrated this far to the north and east then how far might they yet go? Africa was a massive continent, rich with people living well on fertile soil. Slavers using the river routes could penetrate deep and deeper into the very heart of nations. Mehuru had been in the borderlands of the Yoruba kingdom but even so, he was thousands of miles from the coast. How far would the slavers go for their Trade? What would it take to stop them?

      They were twenty in all by the time they were loaded into the boats to travel downriver. They were made to kneel on the floor of rough wooden canoes, still bound neck to neck. The sun burned down on their heads, and where the lashes of the whip had cut the flies crawled and feasted. With hands lashed tightly behind him Mehuru felt the skin of his back cringe at the touch of the insects, the little minute trampling of their feet against his eyelids, the probe of their tongues into the gash on his face. The men paddled the canoes out into midstream and caught the smooth fast current, but the flies were not blown away. They followed like a haze, tempted by the smell of fearful sweat and open wounds.

      The heavily laden canoe slipped past green thickly wooded banks like a dream, rocking only slightly as the men held it in the centre of the river. Sometimes the water was so wide that you could hardly see from side to side, sometimes it narrowed and Mehuru looked longingly at the banks. The sun beat down on them, the boat rocked them like a cradle. The heat haze danced on the banks and the flies buzzed around their heads. Mehuru thought of the silent progress of his ship, his nightmare ship, and its wake of sharks and the stink which hung around it in his dream.

      On the fifth day they rounded a bend in the river and saw before them a large stone building, which could only have been built by white men with their strange desire for block shapes and their disregard for the contours of the land. It was nothing more than a cube, with little slits for windows, the roof steeply thatched. Before it, sticking out into the river, was a wooden jetty which led to a stone quay. Behind it was a cluster of huts, a poor slovenly place with no women to keep it tidy and no men to farm the land.

      Mehuru thought that here at least he would find someone who would see sense and release them. He was anxious for Siko, who had stopped weeping and was now like a man drugged. The boy sat in the boat in silence, his eyes downcast on the green water, and neither the pain of the neck-brace nor the discomfort of sitting in the heat of the midday sun prompted him to speak. His eyes had gone blank with fear, he would not eat. Mehuru wanted them both to be released promptly, before the boy fell sick. He readied himself to demand to see whoever was in charge.

      But there was no-one on the landing stage. There was a big iron gate in the massive stone wall and their boat was simply unloaded with shouted commands and whipped in through the gate. The men ignored Mehuru’s demand to see their master and pushed him into the entrance vestibule with the rest. When the outer gate clanged shut behind them, another was opened before them and they stumbled into a massive stone chamber ten times as big as the largest barn. A group of men pushed them into line and chained them, quickly and efficiently, with the chain running through their manacles, and fastened each end to rings set into the stonework of the wall. Mehuru noted the clumsy cast-iron manacles and chains, nothing like the light well-crafted metal of his own people. But it was good enough to hold him, to hold them all.

      Time passed. He tried to count the dawns with marks on the dirt in the floor but there was no space, they were packed too close, and every day another couple, another dozen of new captives were added. The food was scanty and often bad. Many people were sick, vomiting into the slop pail, or voiding uncontrollably on to the earth floor. The smell was dreadful. There was no water for washing and no change of clothes. Mehuru banked down the flickering panic at his own degradation. He refused to let the dirt and the humiliation touch him, and he spoke encouragingly to Siko.

      ‘This is a mistake,’ Mehuru said. ‘They should not have taken us. When someone in authority comes I will tell them who I am. A Yoruban envoy cannot be so treated. When they realise who I am they will let us go.’

      Siko did not reply. He would not look at Mehuru.

      When new men and women were brought in Mehuru tried to speak to the jailers. Every time one of them came within shouting distance he called out to him, first in Yoruban, then in Dahomean, then in Mandinka: ‘Tell your master that I am an obalawa of Yoruba, on the king’s business. Tell him the king will pay a high ransom for me. Tell him I demand to speak with him!’

      They did not understand, or they would not listen. Mehuru knew he must be patient and wait until he could speak to their leader. Then he would be released and he could demand that Siko be returned to him. His main fear was that they would try to keep Siko when they released him; and Mehuru’s duty to his slave, to offer complete protection in return for complete obedience, would be threatened.

      He