Respectable Trade (9 page)

Frances nodded. The carriage rolled onto a wooden bridge. Looking down, she saw the water rich with waste. Litter, garbage, excrement, and all the flotsam and jetsam of a busy port bobbed around the pillars of the bridge on the rising tide. The carriage bumped along the quay on the northern side of the river, and then the road ahead opened out with sudden, surprising grace. There was an avenue of young plane trees ahead, their broad leaves still fresh. There was a smooth green lawn in the center of the square, and a proud statue of a man on a galloping horse. The stink from the river was less strong, and the noise of the Backs was left behind them.

“Queens Square,” said Josiah with satisfaction. “As good as any crescent in Bath, eh?”

He was exaggerating; it was not as good as Bath. It lacked the easy regularity of those fine terraces, their confident scale. Part of the square was built in the golden stone of Bath, but part of it was red brick, and the profile of the roofs and the detail on the houses was idiosyncratic—each house an individual. But it was a well-proportioned square lined with young trees, divided into four by long avenues running north to south and east to west. In the middle the paths crossed and the statue made a handsome centerpiece. The houses were new; some looked like London houses in smart red brick with pointings of white mortar and corners of white stone. At the east end was an elegant large building flanked by two wings in thick yellow stone: the Custom House.

The carriage drew up before the first house in the southwest corner, one of the biggest and most imposing in the square. “This is where we shall live,” Josiah announced. “This is where I have been aiming for years.”

Frances looked at him in surprise. She had never before heard of a man desiring anything more than to stay in the position
to which he had been called. She had heard men complain of the decline of manners, but never to seek change. Her father had preached that it was God’s will for a man to remain where he was born; a good Christian stayed where God had been pleased to put him. Josiah was the first man in her experience to express an ambition—to want something more than what he had been given. It was a revolutionary doctrine.

“You have been aiming for it?”

“My father was born on an earthen floor in a hovel,” Josiah said. “No more than a peasant. My sister in a collier’s cottage, a coal miner’s daughter. I was born on a stone floor in a warehouse. My son will be born in a proper bed, in a proper house. My family is on the rise, madam. Before the century is out, we will be known as gentry. We will have a country house and a carriage. This is but a step on our way, not our final destination.”

Frances flushed at his mention of a son, but Josiah had no idea that he was indelicate. He pointed to the grand house, the best house on the square, three redbrick stories high with little attic windows let into the roof. Long white stone columns ran the length of the windows on each story; above each window was a carved face. The double doorway was large and imposing, flanked by more pillars. Stone-carved gateposts and wrought-iron railings shielded the front of the house and emphasized its importance. “This is it, Mrs. Cole. This is our house-to-be. I happen to know that it is coming up for sale, and I shall bid for it, you may be sure. And I shall have it. No one will outbid me, cost what it will. It is generally known that you and I are wed. It is generally known that I am looking for a town house to establish my family.”

Frances looked around the square, trying to imagine what it would be like to live there. A curtain in a front parlor beside them twitched, and dimly she saw a woman step back from the window. It would be a little community, ingrowing and inbred. There would be small feuds and long memories. Frances did
not mind. She had lived in a country village, dependent on the goodwill of the lord, her uncle. She knew how small communities worked.

“We should drive on,” she said gently to Josiah. “We will be noticed if we stay here any longer, looking.”

“So?”

“These people will be our neighbors,” she explained. “We wish them to have an agreeable impression of us.”

He was about to argue, but she saw him hesitate, and then he nodded. “You know best, Mrs. Cole,” he agreed. “You are the one to teach me. It shall be as you wish. Now, is there anywhere else you would like to see?”

“I don’t know the city at all,” Frances said. “I have never visited here. I had some friends who drove out to a picnic and looked at the Avon Gorge. They told me it was sublime.”

Josiah leaned forward and gave the order to the driver. “We can go and look at the gorge,” he said. “You will not think it so sublime when you understand what it costs me in barge charges. We can drive to the Hot Well at the foot of the gorge. I have a particular interest in it.”

The carriage turned out of the square and bumped along yet another dockside beside another river.

“This is the Avon again?” Frances asked.

“The river Frome,” Josiah corrected her.

“It is as if we live on an island,” Frances said. “Surrounded by water.” She nearly said “foul water.”

“The old city was a defensive site ringed by the two rivers, the Avon and the Frome—like a moat,” Josiah told her. “Now it is all docks.”

They waited for the drawbridge ahead of them to be dropped, and then the carriage bowled over the wooden planks and turned left, away from the docks.

Frances looked ahead as for the first time the city seemed something more than a dockside slum. The pretty triangle of College Green was before them, with two churches on their
left. The college church was an imposing building with the Bishop’s Palace behind it. Frances heard birdsong—not the irritable squawk of seagulls but the summery ripple of a blackbird’s call. Looking up, she saw swallows and house martins swooping and wheeling around the cathedral.

The thick foliage of the elms threw dark green shadows over the road, and as they drove up the steep hill, the air grew fresher and cleaner and the sun shone brightly on the new buildings.

“Oh, if we could only live up here!” Frances exclaimed. Set back from the track were occasional terraces of houses in soft yellow stone, built in the style that Frances liked—plain, regular, and square.

Josiah shook his head. “It’s a whim. One or two people are building here, but no true merchant will ever move away from the city. The river is our lifeblood. Clifton is too far to go. It is country living—not city dwelling at all. There are people buying land and putting up houses, but it will never be the heart of the city. We will always live along the riverbanks; that is where the city always has been. That is where it always will be.”

At the top of the hill, they forked to the left, skirting a high hill and dropping down toward the river again.

“But if we had a carriage, you could drive down to your work,” Frances observed, her voice carefully neutral. “And these are handsome houses, and very clean air. I love to breathe clean air, and my health needs it.”

Josiah shook his head. “It is a whim,” he repeated. “It will pass, and those men who have bought land and built will have bankrupted themselves. Take my word for it, my dear, Park Street is beyond the limit of the city, and Clifton will never be more than a little out-of-the-way village.” He craned his head to see a ship in the dry dock. “The
Traveler,
” he said with quiet satisfaction. “I heard she was badly holed. That will put Thomas Williams’s nose out of joint.”

Ahead of them the river widened out and started to form
sinuous curves between banks of thick mud. Dark woodland reared up from either side of the banks and then broke up around the lower reaches of white cliffs of limestone that loomed above them. The little road clung to the side of the river, following the curve of the bank overhung by the cliffs. It was spectacular scenery. Above, seagulls wheeled and cried and dropped down to dive for fish. A small fishing smack slipped downriver, moving fast on the ebbing tide, her sails filled with wind. The air was salty and clean, damp with the smell of the sea. A flat-bottomed trow crossed from one side to another and passed a ferryboat rowed by a man bright as a pirate in a blue jacket with a red handkerchief tied on his head.

“Sublime,” Frances said. It was Lady Scott’s favorite word of praise. “This is wonderful scenery, Mr. Cole. So romantic! So wild!”

Josiah tapped the driver on the back with his stick, and the man stopped the carriage. “Will you walk, my dear?”

The driver let down the step, and Frances alit from the carriage and took Josiah’s arm. “Above is the St. Vincent’s Rock,” he said. “It’s quite an attraction for people who love scenery.”

Frances craned her neck to look upward at the high white cliffs with wild woodland tumbling down. “I never saw anything more lovely. You would think yourself in Italy at least!”

Slowly, they walked along the little promenade that clung to the side of the river, tucked in beneath the cliff. An avenue of young trees had been planted in a double row to shade the road and form an attractive riverside walk. Ahead of them to their right was a pretty colonnade of shops set back from the river in a curving half circle, lined with small pillars so that the customers could stroll under cover, admiring the goods on sale, on their way to and from the Hot Well pump room. It was as pretty as a set of dollhouses, a dozen little redbrick shops in miniature under a colonnade of white pillars.

Frances and Josiah walked along the flagstones, looking in the shop windows at the fancy goods and the gloves and hats,
and the crowded apothecary shop. There was a small circulating library, which also sold stationery and haberdashery goods.

“This is Miss Yearsley’s library!” Frances exclaimed.

“Who is she?”

“Why, Anna Yearsley, the poetess, the milkmaid poet! Such a natural, unforced talent!”

Josiah nodded at the information. “I have not had much to do with poetesses,” he confessed. “Or milkmaids. But I know about her library. This is a new building, all brand-new, and she will be paying a pretty sum in rent. The Merchant Venturers have spent a fortune to make this the most fashionable place in Bristol.”

“I believe my uncle stayed at the Hot Well when he visited you,” Frances said. “In Dowry Parade. He spoke very highly of the lodging house, but he said it was dear.”

Josiah nodded. “Whoever takes it on will have to charge a fortune to recoup his investment. Not just these shops but the spa itself has recently been improved. These trees are new planted. For years the place has been open to anyone—you can take a cart from the city for sixpence to come here and drink the water for free. Any tenant who takes it on will have to charge more and exclude the common people. A successful spa must be for the fashionable people only, don’t you think? Will you take a glass of the water? I am sure you do not need it for your health, but you might enjoy the experience.”

They walked toward the pump room, which stood on the very edge of the river, its windows overlooking the water and the Rownham Woods on the far side of the bank. Josiah paid an entrance fee, and they went in. The place was busy. A string quartet positioned in a corner of the room played country dances. Invalids advertised their ill health with yards of shawls and rugs across their knees, but there were others, whose visit was purely social, flirting and laughing in the corners. A few people promenaded self-consciously up and down the length of the rooms, stopping to greet friends, and staring at the new arrivals.

Frances straightened her collar where it fell elegantly at the neck of her walking gown, and held Josiah’s arm. He seemed to know no one. No one stopped to speak to them, no one hailed him.

“Do you have no friends here?” she asked after they had walked the length of the room. They paused before the fountain of the spa. Josiah paid for a glass of water, and the woman pocketed the coin and poured a small glass for Frances. It was light-colored and cloudy, sparkling with little bubbles.

“My friends are working traders, not pleasure seekers,” Josiah said. “They will be at their warehouses at this time in the afternoon, not dancing and walking and drinking water. How does it taste?”

Frances took an experimental sip. “Quite nice,” she said cautiously. “Bland, a little like milk. And quite hot!”

“Very strengthening!” the woman at the fountain asserted. “Especially for ladies. Very effective for skin complaints, stomach complaints, and the lungs.”

Frances blushed at the frankness of the woman’s language and forced the rest of the glass down. “I would not care to drink it every day.”

“Many people do,” Josiah replied. “Some of them are prescribed a glass every couple of hours. Think of the profit for the tenant in that! Many come and stay for weeks at a time to drink it. And it is cried all around the city and sold like milk at the back doors. And bottled and sent all around the country. A very good business if one could afford to buy in.” He took her arm and walked her back down the length of the pump room. “How does it compare to the pump room at Bath, in your opinion?” he asked. “I have a reason for my interest.”

Frances thought for a way to tell him that would not seem offensive. “Of course it is smaller,” she began carefully. “And very much prettier. The scenery is wonderful, much better than Bath. But Bath has more . . . Bath is more . . . established.”

“Only a little place, but I think it will grow,” Josiah said as
they left the room. “But I am glad you like it. I am glad you like the rocks of the Avon Gorge even if you do not like the taste of the water.”

“One could not help but admire it,” Frances said. The carriage had followed them down to the pump room; she took the driver’s hand and stepped in. “I am a great admirer of fine landscape.”

“Do you draw or paint?” Josiah asked her.

“A little,” Frances said. “I should like to come to try my hand at drawing this scene.”

“So you shall,” Josiah said. “You shall hire the carriage whenever you wish, and my sister will drive with you. You shall teach us how to enjoy leisure, Mrs. Cole. And we will teach you about business!”

“I shall be happy to learn,” Frances said. The carriage turned back toward the city and to the dark little house by the noisy quay filled with the stink of the harbor. “I shall be happy,” she repeated firmly.