Respectable Trade (35 page)

And there she stopped—she could not think what she could say to him. She could not acknowledge to herself what need, what absorbing need could take her, a married woman, in the middle of the night to the bedroom of a servant—lower than a servant, a slave.

Frances stared, as blank as a corpse, at the ceiling. There could be no reason that could take her looking for Mehuru. Not the moonlight, not the coldness of the night, not her growing awareness of his own tragedy—of the urbane, cultivated society he had exchanged for this drudgery in her house—not her own loneliness, not her own inexplicable desire to hear his drumming, to hear his laugh, to see his smile. Frances lay in her own bed, imprisoned by her code of behavior, by the powerful habit of denying her own desires, still and sleepless, and waited for the morning, when she might see him again.

29 Queens Square.
2nd May 1789

Dear Uncle,

Thank you for your daffodils. We enjoyed them very much. Of all the things I miss most, living here in the Town, it is the trees and the Flowers of Whiteleaze. I hardly notice One season change to Another. Now it is Spring, and soon it will be Summer, and only One little Plane tree to show me! Josiah and Miss Cole are well and send their compliments.

The Weather here has been very gray and cold, and the society here is very Quiet. Neither Josiah nor Miss Cole Dances, and apart from the Assemblies there is little Society. For some reason I am not as Satisfied as I should be with my Situation. Since Easter I have felt Restless and Unsettled.

I am sure you will wish to remind me of my Duty of Obedience to my husband and Loyalty to his Life and his Business. I do not forget my Duty. Ours was a Marriage of convenience, and I do not Regret it. I have promised myself that I will never Regret it. In the Trade a man’s word is his bond—and I gave my word to Josiah. Fancies may come and go, but Duty and Loyalty Remain Forever.

I remain your devoted niece,

Frances Cole.

Frances reread the letter, crumpled it up, and added it to the others in the wastepaper bin beside her little writing desk, one of Josiah’s Chinese purchases, elaborately carved with dragons breathing fire and little drawers hidden by sampans, bridges, and sinuous rivers. Frances leaned forward and put her head on her hands.

“You warned me,” she whispered. “But I did not listen. Anyway . . .” Her voice trailed away as she thought of what her life would have been if she had refused Josiah’s proposal.

She sat down and drew a piece of the hot-pressed notepaper toward her again, dipped her pen in the ink, and wrote in plain, spiky letters, quite unlike her usual elegant hand.

Dear Uncle,

I have made the Dreadful mistake of falling in love with a man who is, in all probability, quite indifferent to Me. He is worse than a Servant, he is a Slave. He is in my Employ, and I am bound to sell him for a profit to Another owner. Everything I have ever been taught about the Behavior and natural Feelings of a lady tells me that this Cannot Happen. It cannot happen. It Cannot happen to me.

She crumpled the letter and took it, with the others, to the fireplace, which was laid with kindling and small pieces of coal. Frances scattered the letters on the top and then latched the sealing-wax candle from her desk. She put the flame to the half dozen pieces of paper and watched the pages darken, crinkle, and then burst into flame. She stayed on her knees on the hearthrug, watching them crumple into fragile ribbons of ash, watching the words drift up the chimney in harmless smoke to gather with the smog that hung always in the skies above Bristol.

“I can never tell anyone,” she said softly. “I shall never again acknowledge it even to myself. This is where it ends. It is over. It must be over.”

She got up from the hearthrug wearily, as if she were very,
very tired. She went back to her desk, blew out the candle, and closed up the drawers. She turned the little key in the lock as if she were shutting away forever her youth, her new desire, and her hopes.

“Over,” she said with finality. And then she sat down in the chair, before the dirty, cold grate, and took up some handkerchiefs to hem, and worked as if she could see her stitches through her blurred eyes.

J
OSIAH FOUND HER THERE
when he came in for his breakfast. Something in her frigid composure aroused his notice. “Are you well, Mrs. Cole?” he asked.

Frances smiled. “I am perfectly well, thank you. Were you looking for me?”

“I have booked a little treat for you, my dear,” Josiah said. “I remembered you telling me that you used to ride at Whiteleaze, and the stables have a lady’s horse to hire. I have booked it for you this afternoon. One of the servants can go with you. One of the men can ride, can he not?”

“I think Cicero can ride.” Frances’s voice was level. “But I will ask Julius.”

“And you would enjoy it?” Josiah asked. “You are looking a little pale today.”

Frances nodded. “I thank you for a kind thought,” she said calmly. “I should enjoy riding again very much. I will ask Julius if he can ride now.”

She went out into the hall. Kbara was coming downstairs with a heavy tray in his hands.

“Julius, can you ride a horse?” Frances asked.

He frowned. “A horse?” he repeated. “No, Mrs. Cole. I never do.”

“Oh.” Frances turned. Mehuru was behind her. He had a scuttle full of coal in one hand, and his livery was shielded from the dirt with a coarse hessian apron.

“Can you ride, Cicero?”

“Yes,” he said shortly.

“You should say, ‘Yes, Mrs. Cole,’” Frances corrected him.

Mehuru nodded at the information but did not repeat the sentence.

“I am going riding this afternoon,” she said. “You will accompany me. You must go to the stables and pick out a riding horse for yourself and borrow some riding clothes. You will need boots also.”

He did not look grateful. He stood leaning against the weight of the heavy bucket of coal, waiting for her to dismiss him.

“We will ride out on the Downs,” she said. “In the sunshine. It will be like a holiday.”

Still he said nothing.

“Do you not want to ride with me?” she asked, suddenly impatient of his silence. “I should have thought you would welcome a change from your work, from the continual drudgery here?”

Mehuru inclined his head only slightly. “Yes, Mrs. Cole,” he said.

T
HE STABLE SENT TWO
fine hunters around to Queens Square. Frances, coming out the front door in her old gray riding habit, saw Mehuru standing at the animals’ heads, talking to the groom. She had to shield her eyes from the sunlight; the profile of his tall, slim body was like a black cameo. It was just after noon, and the square was bright and warm. The branches of the little trees were nodding with the bursting weight of new shoots. The grass of the gardens was springing green and ripe and was starred with white daisies in pink-tipped buds. One of the houses had a cherry tree in a tub at the doorway, and the blossom was like a pink gauze scarf flung across the golden sandstone. The birds on the rooftops and in the saplings were
singing and singing at the sunshine, a long ripple of sound. Frances bit her lip against the sudden welling of joy.

The stable had loaned Mehuru a pair of breeches and boots. He looked very tall and English in the handsome high boots and fawn breeches, the white shirt and stock, and the dark brown hacking jacket. Against the high white stock at his throat, his face was very black. When he saw Frances at the door, he turned and smiled, and he held her horse as the stable lad cupped his hands to help her mount and threw her up into the sidesaddle.

Mehuru mounted and moved with the horse as it sidestepped and curvetted. “He is . . . dancing,” he said. “I do not know the word.”

“Dancing is a good word,” Frances agreed, watching Mehuru seated easily on the animal. “We would say he is fresh—meaning that he is eager.”

“I thought fresh was food?” Mehuru brought the horse under control and rode alongside her as she moved off, out of the square toward Park Street.

Frances found she could not think straight with him so close at her side. “Sometimes,” she said unhelpfully. She gathered her thoughts and explained, “Fresh food is new, prime food. A fresh horse is new out of the stable and in prime condition.”

“I see,” he said. “It is an interesting language.”

Frances, who knew only conversational French and a ladylike smattering of Italian, had thought English the only language in all the world—not an option. “How is it different from your language?”

A wagon went past them, and Mehuru’s horse threw up its head and sidled. He held it firmly and stroked its neck, murmuring softly until the wagon had passed. “You have some words we do not know. And we have shades of meaning you do not have.”

“Like what?” Her voice was cool. She had herself under control.

“Oh, you have a word ‘beauty’—we do not have that.”

“You don’t believe in beauty?”

“We believe in it. Anyone can see it. But we don’t have a word for it as you do. We have words which mean that something is good, or the rightness of things, the right thing for the right place, the right colors. We have a word that you do not have—it means that it lacks nothing. But we don’t call a thing beautiful, we call it complete.”

Frances shot a small, flirtatious smile at him. “So if you loved a lady, would you not tell her she was beautiful?”

He looked away from her, refusing to see the line of her cheek or the downward sweep of her eyelashes. “No,” he said shortly.

They were riding abreast up Park Street. On either side of the street, wooden scaffolding had sprung up; pale yellow stone houses were growing from foundations that marched like ascending steps up the hill. Gaps in terraces where a site had not been bought or where a builder had stopped work, short of cash, gaped like missing teeth. The city was being built piecemeal, all planning and order thrown aside in the rush for profit.

“So what would you say?” Frances persisted. “If you wanted to tell a lady that you loved her, that you thought she was beautiful?”

“A man would tell her that he wanted her as his wife,” Mehuru said simply. “He would not tell her that she looked as well as another woman. What would that mean? He would not tell her that she was enjoyable—like a statue or a picture. He would tell her that he longed to lie with her. He would tell her that he would have no peace until she was in his arms, until she was beneath him, beside him, on top of him, until her mouth was his lake for drinking and her body was his garden. Desire is not about ‘beauty,’ as if a woman is a work of art. Desire is about having a woman, because she can be as plain as an earthenware pot and still make you sick with longing for her.”

Frances choked on a cry of outrage. She kicked her horse
forward and rode ahead of him in shocked silence, looking straight ahead, her cheeks burning, her color high.

Mehuru came up alongside. “What now?” he demanded, exasperated. “What’s the matter now?”

“You should not speak to me like that,” Frances said, muffled. She would not turn her head to look at him.

“You asked!” Mehuru exclaimed. “You asked me how I feel desire. And so I told you.”

“You should not speak like that,” Frances repeated in a small voice, her face still turned away.

“And how should I feel?” he demanded. “You order everything. How should I feel, Mrs. Cole?” He reined his horse back and rode a little behind her, like a servant.

They rode up the length of Park Street in single file, in silence. Frances held her head high; she could feel her heart pounding with anger and desire: a breathless mixture of passions. Mehuru raged on his horse, watching her slim, straight back leading the way. At the top of the hill, the road petered out into a cart track, and on either side there were builders’ sheds and storeyards of stone and piping and wood. There were stonecutters working under temporary wooden shelters, shaping stones to size and carving ornamental friezes and decorative heads and pillars. For long, sprawling acres at the top of the hill, it was nothing but a series of builders’ yards for a city gripped with building fever. The sense of the city growing and remaking itself was almost tangible.

Frances and Mehuru rode on, Frances holding a handkerchief to her mouth to keep out the pervasive dust from the stonecutters, until they left the yards behind and the track became lined with little market gardens, and then fields with dairy cattle. Mehuru gazed around him as he rode, looking at the thick, glossy coats of the cows, the incredible lush greenness of the grass. Even the hedges in this warm springing month of May seemed to glow with the sweetness of the constant rainfall. Bushes trembled with catkins as yellow as the primroses at the
foot of the hedge. Whitebeam, hornbeam, and hawthorn flowered in a white mist. The beech trees were hazy with the greenness of their buds, and the silver birch coppice at the edge of one field was a brilliant, luminous, budding green.

In Mehuru’s home it was only in the brief spell of the wet season that trees glowed and dripped and oozed sweetness like this. He knew from Cook that this country was always wet. It always rained. No wonder they had fields as rich as forests and cows with pelts as glossy as lions. He glanced at Frances. In a country so ripe and rich and easy, how could a woman be taught to be sour and dry, so punitively cold to herself?