Respectable Trade (58 page)

Sarah closed her eyes, briefly repelled by the large capital sums. “But you saw the books. It will pay,” she said. “We knew this, we knew we could manage it. When the
Rose
comes in . . .”

Josiah nodded. “It looked like safe investment. And I borrowed money to buy it.”

“But it
is
a good investment,” Sarah repeated. “You saw the books. It will run at a profit. You would not take a risk. Not with those sums!”

Josiah cleared his throat. “It would have done,” he said. “And I was out daily to inspect the business. You know how often I have been down there, Sarah. You know I hired an architect to draw up plans—I was not careless. I was not careless with our business.”

Sarah nodded. “I know, brother. I know.”

“Then they sued me, to make me keep the tap open,” he continued softly. “I could not think why they did that. . . . But now it seems . . . It seems to me—” He broke off. “If I complain of them, there will be no one on my side. The people of the city, the corporation, the company—everyone thinks that I am in the wrong. The Merchant Venturers have the interests of the city at heart and I am—what did they call me?—an upstart.”

Sarah nodded silently.

“They have destroyed my reputation,” Josiah went on in a thin little voice. “No one will defend me now. They made me look like a mountebank. No one will speak up for me now.”

“But the Hot Well will still earn money—” Sarah started.

“I did not think to look up,” Josiah said inconsequently. “On the cliff top high above my Hot Well . . .”

“Why?” Sarah prompted urgently. “Why should you have looked up?”

“Because they are drilling down,” he said simply. His face was ghastly. “They are drilling down into my spring. They are building new assembly rooms, new bathhouses. They are piping the water away from my spa. And they are calling it the
new
Hot Well. They have not even chosen another name. They are advertising to everyone that my Hot Well is the old one. Soon it will be dry. They are calling theirs the new Hot Well.”

Sarah hissed like a snake through her gritted teeth. “The new Hot Well? Are you sure?”

He nodded. “Frances has seen the building. The foreman showed her the plans.”

Sarah strode over to the window and gazed out into the backyard, seeing nothing. She turned back to him. “Can we do
nothing?” she demanded. “Have you looked at your lease? Do you not own the rights to the water? Surely one cannot buy a spa without buying the water?”

He shook his head, still numb with shock. “I bought the buildings and the furnishings,” he said. “I did not know. I did not think. I was too foolish to foresee this. I did not think to buy the water. I am a trader, I sail my ships on the sea—I do not buy the sea. Water is always there.”

“Who has done this?” Sarah cried passionately. “Who has done this to you? Who owns the new buildings?”

He could not meet her eyes. “Stephen Waring,” he answered dully. “He will have done well from us, first and last. He has plucked me like a little pigeon.”

She did not reproach him. Her shoulders went back as if to strain against a weight. “We still have the ships,” she said. “We still have the ships, and we still have the slaves and the warehouse. We are not ruined yet, brother.”

He riffled lightly through the pages of the account book. “We will have to see,” he said idly. “But I do not know what will be left when all the debts on this are paid. If I shut down the Hot Well and sack all the staff and sell the furnishings . . . I do not know, Sarah. I used to know to a penny, didn’t I? When you kept the books and the trade was good. But I have such interest charges to meet, and they will not defer payment. . . . I have quite lost track, Sarah.”

He rose on unsteady legs. “I think I’ll go now.” He looked at her vaguely. “
Rose
could come in any day, you know. Come in full of gold and smelling of rum. I like to be on the quayside when my ship comes in. She is late already; perhaps she will come in today. On the next tide. Or the tide after that.”

Sarah put a hand out to stop him, but he went past her quietly, as if he had not seen her, as if he did not know she was there. He took up his hat from the table in the hall. He did not wear a coat; he went out like a laboring man in his shirtsleeves into the gray twilight and the sharp evening air.

“When
Rose
comes in, we will be laughing about this,” he said uncertainly. “We will be rich.”

Only when he was gone and the front door shut behind him did Sarah sink into the chair, gaze blankly at the empty hearth, and let herself wonder if they were ruined indeed.

S
ARAH HEARD THE HAMMERING
on the front door, but she did not turn her head. The noise of it came from a long way away. She heard Stuart Hadley’s pleasant voice, but she did not go out to greet him. She let Elizabeth show him upstairs.

He went into Frances’s bedroom and sent Mehuru outside while he examined her. She had regained a little color, but she was hunched with pain. The cut on her forehead had dried, and a small bluish bruise was spreading over her temple.

She answered his questions in a strained little voice, hardly able to catch her breath, and she could not move readily for the pain. He thought that her weak heart had taken a seizure from the shock and her damaged lungs were in spasm also. He gave her a large dose of laudanum and watched the color slowly come back into her cheeks as the drug worked its way into her body.

Stuart Hadley had never before seen her without her tightly laced stays. For the first time, he was able to see the outlines of her body, only half hidden by the sheet and blankets. He asked her permission and pressed gently on the round of her belly. It was solid and hard. For a moment he feared a growth of some sort, and then a smile came to his face.

“How long have you been with child?”

The look she gave him was shocked. “Child?” she repeated in her thin, rasping voice.

“I think so,” he said. He pressed her belly again. The firmness was unmistakable. “Yes.”

Her face gave her away, the burning flush of color rising from her neck to her forehead. She closed her eyes and turned her head on the pillow away from his gaze. “Oh, my God,” she murmured softly.

“Did you not realize?”

Numbly, she shook her head. “I have not been unwell for these past six months,” she said. “But I thought . . . I thought . . . I have never been regular . . .”

He nodded. Few ladies of her class understood about conception. Virgins on marriage, they were rarely told either by mothers or husbands about pregnancy or childbirth. Even if they lived in the country, they were shielded from the cycle of birth and death of farm animals, and Frances had seen the countryside only through the rectory windows. She was not the first lady he had attended who had been advanced in a pregnancy and not known.

“I had been so ill,” she said. “With that cold. I thought that it had just stopped. And I am not grown much fatter.”

“There is no doubt that you are with child,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Forgive me, Mrs. Cole. This must be a shock.” He hardly knew how to ask the question but opted for blunt honesty. “I suppose you are certain that the child is Mr. Cole’s?”

She opened her eyes at that and then turned her head away from him to the wall. He was afraid that she was mortally offended. But when she spoke, her voice was level and clear. “There
is
a doubt,” she said steadily, gazing resolutely at the wall. “Mr. Cole is—” She broke off, partly through embarrassment and partly because she simply did not know the words. “I think it unlikely that Mr. Cole would make a child,” she explained very softly.

There was a long silence. Stuart took a seat on the side of her bed without permission and took her thin hand in his. She
was cold, despite the fire. He did not know if she could tolerate this shock to an already vulnerable system. “Do not be afraid,” he encouraged her. “We will find a way to manage this. Do not be afraid, Mrs. Cole.”

She said nothing.

“Mehuru is a friend of mine,” he said quietly. “I honor and respect him. He is a gentleman.” He smiled inwardly at hearing himself repeat the cant of their class. “A gentleman,” he said firmly.

She shot a quick look at him. “Is it you who has taken him to radical clubs?” she demanded bitterly. “Who persuaded him that he must be free?”

Stuart bit back an angry reply. This woman was a patient; he must care for her. “What I wanted to say,” he went on, his voice very low, “is that a child of his, even with a white-skinned mother, would be dark-skinned, would be noticeably dark.”

She looked at him so blankly he thought that perhaps she did not understand, that the seizure of her heart had damaged her comprehension. He feared for a moment that he was making the most enormous and foolish mistake. He had assumed that Mehuru and Frances were lovers. He was assuming that the baby was Mehuru’s child.

“Any baby of his will show its parentage,” he said carefully. “Any baby of his would be dark-skinned.”

“Black like him?”

“They call them mulattoes in the Sugar Islands,” he told her. “They are brown-skinned, very beautiful babies, enchanting children.”

She blinked. She remembered, it seemed a lifetime away, Miss Honoria telling her that they always preferred mulattoes in the house as servants. She remembered Honoria’s easy gliding over unpalatable facts: “Papa likes to mix the stock.”

She opened her mouth, her face blank as stone, and laughed, a high, shrieking laugh. Stuart recoiled, but she did not stop. She laughed and laughed as if nothing would stop her.

“Enough,” Stuart ordered, and his voice cut through her screaming laughter.

She looked wide-eyed at him. “What shall I do?” she asked simply. “I shall be ruined.”

“Do you know when it is due?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “It was conceived in May.” Her face softened as she thought of the daffodils in her bed and the darkness of the May night.

“It will be born in January, then,” he said.

“It might die,” she said coldly, but her hand crept down to her belly, and she spread her palm over where the little head was lying.

“Do you want it to die?”

Her face quivered into life, and her color rose. “No,” she replied with sudden surprising conviction. “It is a love child. It is my child. It is Mehuru’s child. I want it to live. Oh!” She gave a small gasp of desire. “Oh! I want it to live very much!”

“Then we must be very careful with your health,” Stuart said. “Avoid all excitement and disturbance, and rest as much as you can. For yourself, and also for your baby.”

She nodded. “But if my heart is too weak . . .”

“You
must
rest,” he insisted. “We may get you safely through this, and your little baby, too.”

She was silent for a moment, and then she turned to him and faced him honestly. “I don’t care for myself,” she said quietly. “I have not been very lucky, you see, Mr. Hadley. Not in my girlhood, and not in my marriage, and not even in my love for Mehuru. Oh! It was not his fault! But the gulf between us was so great that I don’t think we could ever have bridged it. And I have not been good to him.” She paused, thinking. “So if I am ill, and if you ever have to choose . . . You will save the baby, won’t you?”

Stuart grimaced. “I hope never to make that choice.”

“But if I am dying and you can save the baby, you will do that—won’t you?”

“If it is your wish,” he said slowly.

“It is,” she said. “Mehuru’s baby. Think what a precious child that will be.”

“Could you sleep now?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “The laudanum has made me drowsy.”

He held her hand. “I will stay with you until you sleep,” he said gently.

She opened her eyes for a moment. “Don’t tell Mehuru.”

He hesitated. “You want to tell him yourself?”

Her eyelids were drooping. “He has to be free to go,” she whispered, so softly that he could hardly hear her. “He has to be free. I have to set him free.” She glanced at him for a moment, in jealousy. “You want him free,” she said.

“Yes, I do.”

“And you will advise him where he could go, where they can all go, so that Josiah cannot find them and enslave them again?”

“I will.”

“Then he must be free to leave now,” she said simply. “He cannot stay with me.”

When her eyelids fluttered shut, the doctor sat with her a little while, looking at her white face. The bedroom door opened quietly, and Mehuru stood there.

“You can come in,” Stuart said quietly. “She is sleeping.”

Mehuru came in as light-footed as a cat. He checked when he saw Frances, the slight rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed slowly and painfully, the waxy white color of her face.

“She will need someone to watch her,” Stuart told him. “Night and day. Her heart is very weak. She needs to be kept quiet. She must have nothing to trouble her at all.”

Mehuru remained silent, his eyes never leaving her face.

“She will need someone to watch over her. I can find a nurse for the first few days, but they are not reliable women. Will Miss Cole care for her?”