Читать книгу A Respectable Trade - Philippa Gregory - Страница 7

Whiteleaze, nr Bath, Somerset.

Thursday 25th September 1787

Dear Mr Cole,

I am Honoured and deeply conscious of the Compliment you pay me in your kind letter and your Proposal.

I was indeed Surprised at the Abrupt termination of our interview before you had explained my Duties or introduced my Pupils; but now I understand.

It gives me great Pleasure to accept your Offer. I will be your wife.

My Uncle, Lord Scott, will Write to you under a separate cover. He tells me he will Visit Bristol shortly to give himself the Pleasure of your Acquaintance, and to Determine the Marriage Contract, and date of the ceremony.

Please convey my Compliments to your Sister Miss Cole. Your obdt servant,

Frances Scott.

Josiah tapped on the door of the parlour and entered. His sister was seated at the table, the company books spread before her. A small coal fire was unlit in the grate, the room was damp and chill. Her face was pale. Only the tip of her nose showed any colour, reddened by a cold in the head. She was wearing a brown gown with a black jacket and little black mittens. She looked up, pen in hand, as he came in.

‘I have a reply from Miss Scott.’

‘She has assented?’

‘Yes. His lordship himself is coming to Bristol to draw up the marriage contract.’

‘I hope it serves its purpose,’ Sarah Cole observed coldly. ‘It will cost a great deal of money to keep a wife such as her.’

‘She will have a dowry,’ Josiah pointed out. ‘If nothing from her father then her uncle, Lord Scott, is likely to dower her with something.’

‘She will need a larger house, and a carriage and a lady’s maid.’

Josiah nodded, refusing to argue.

‘Her tastes will be aristocratic,’ Sarah said disapprovingly.

‘It is a venture,’ Josiah replied with a small smile. ‘Like our others.’

‘In the Trade we know the risks. Miss Scott is a new kind of goods altogether.’

Josiah’s quick frown warned her that she had gone too far. As his older sister, responsible for him throughout their motherless childhoods, she still retained great power over him; but Josiah could always call on the prestige of being a man. ‘We must take care not to offend her,’ he said. ‘She will find our business very strange at first.’

‘She was prepared to come here as an employee,’ Sarah reminded him.

‘Even so.’

There was a brief irritated silence. Brother and sister waited for the other to speak.

‘I’m going to the coffee house,’ Josiah said. ‘I shall see if anyone is interested in coming into partnership with us for the Lily. She is due home at the end of November; we need to buy in trade goods and refit her.’

Sarah glanced at the diary on her desk. ‘She set sail from Jamaica this month, God willing.’

Josiah tapped his large foot on the wooden floorboards for luck. The modest buckle on his shoe winked in the light. ‘You have the accounts for the Lily’s last voyage to hand?’

‘You had better seek a partner without showing them. We barely broke even.’

Josiah smiled. His large front teeth were stained with tobacco. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But she is a good ship and Captain Merrick is usually reliable.’

Sarah rose from her desk, crossed over to the window and looked down. ‘If you see Mr Peters in the coffee house we are still waiting for his money for the equipping of the Daisy,’ she said. ‘The ship sailed two weeks ago and he has not yet paid for his share. We cannot extend credit like this.’

‘I’ll tell him,’ Josiah said. ‘I will be home for dinner.’ He paused at the door. ‘You do not congratulate me on my engagement to be married?’

She did not turn from the window, and her face was hidden from him. He did not see her look of sour resentment. Sarah’s marriageable years had slipped away while she worked for her father and then for his heir, her brother, screwing tiny profits out of a risky business. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I congratulate you. I hope that it will bring you what you desire.’

Siko was unwilling to leave the city of Oyo. He was a city boy who had sold himself into slavery with Mehuru when his parents died. He had thought that with a young man whose career was centred on the court he would be safe from the discomfort of farming work and rural life. He was deeply reluctant to venture out into the countryside, which he regarded as a dangerous place inhabited by wild animals and surly peasants.

‘For the last time,’ Mehuru said abruptly. ‘Finish packing and fetch the horses or I shall sell you to a brothel.’

Siko bowed his head at the empty threat and moved only slightly faster. He was confident that Mehuru would never ill-treat him, and indeed he was saving money to buy his freedom from his young master as they had agreed.

‘Should we not take porters and guards?’ he asked. ‘My brother said he would be willing to come with us.’

‘We will be travelling along trading routes,’ Mehuru said patiently. ‘We will be meeting porters and guards on the trading caravans all along the way. If there is any danger on the roads we can travel with them. I am on an urgent mission, we are travelling at speed. You would have us dawdling along the road and stopping at every village.’

‘I would have us stay snug in the city,’ Siko muttered into a saddlebag. Aloud he said: ‘We are packed, sir, and ready to leave.’

Mehuru nodded to him to load the bags and went into his room. In the corner were his priestly things, laid out for meditation. The divining tray made out of beautifully polished wood indented with circular cups filled with cowrie shells, the little purse filled with ash, a cube of chalk, a flask of oil. Mehuru picked them up one by one and put them into a soft leather satchel, letting his mind linger on them and calling for vision.

Nothing came. Instead he saw once more the prow of a ship, rocking gently on clear tropical waters. He could see a shoal of small fish nibbling at the copper casing of the wooden hull, something he had never seen in waking life. Again he smelled the heavy sickly smell of sugar and sepsis.

‘What does it mean?’ he whispered softly. ‘What does it mean?’

He shuddered as if the day were not pulsing with heat, as if he could feel a coldness like death. ‘What does it mean, this ship?’ He waited for an answer but he could hear nothing but Siko complaining to the cook about the prospect of a journey and the chattering of a flock of glossy starlings, gathering on the rooftop, their deep blue feathers iridescent in the morning sun.

He shrugged. No ship could endanger him; his journey lay northwards, inland. To the north were the long rolling plains of savannah country, an inland river or two, easily forded or crossed by boat, and then even further north – at the limits of the mighty Yoruba kingdom – the great desert of the Sahel. No ship could be a threat to him, he was far from the coast. Perhaps he should see the ship as a good omen, perhaps it was a vision of a slaving ship which would no longer be able to cruise casually off the coast of his country and gather in his country’s children as greedily as a marauding hyena.

Mehuru picked up his satchel of goods and slung it over his shoulders. Whatever the meaning of the vision, he had a job to do and nothing would prevent him. He bundled his travelling cape into a neat roll and went out into the brilliant midday sunshine. The horses were waiting, and the great city gates set deep into the mighty walls of the famous city of Oyo had been open since dawn.

‘So!’ he said cheerfully to Siko. ‘Off we go!’

The quayside coffee shop was on the opposite side of the river from Josiah’s dock, and so he took the little ferryboat across and tossed the lad who rowed him a ha’penny. The coffee shop was the regular meeting place for all the merchants of Bristol from the finest men to the smallest traders. When Josiah pushed open the small door his eyes smarted at the strong aromatic smell. The place was thick with tobacco smoke and the hot familiar scent of coffee, rum, and molasses. Josiah, with his hat under his arm, went slowly from table to table, seeing who was there. All of the merchants were known to him, but only a few did business with him regularly. At the best table, farthest from the damp draughts from the swinging door, were the great merchants of Bristol, in fine coats and crisp laundered linen. They did not even glance up when Josiah said ‘Good day’ to them. Josiah was not worth their attention.

He nodded politely in their direction, accepting the snub. When he was nephew by marriage to Lord Scott they would return his greeting, and he would be bidden to sit with them. Then he would see the cargo manifests which were spread on their table. Then he would have a chance at the big partnerships and the big trading ventures. Then he would command their friendship, and have access to their capital for his own ventures. They would invite him to join their association – the Merchant Venturers of Bristol – and all the profits and opportunities of the second-greatest provincial city in Britain would fall open to him.

‘Josiah!’ a voice called. ‘Over here!’

Josiah turned and saw a table crowded with men of his own class, small traders who shared and shared again the risks of a voyage, men who scrambled over each other for the great prizes of the Trade and yet who would be wiped out by the loss of one ship. Josiah could not reject their company. His own father had been an even lesser man – trading with a fleet of flat-bottomed trows up and down the Severn: coal from Wales, wheat from Somerset, cattle from Cornwall. Only at the very end of his life had George Cole owned an ocean-going ship and she had been a broken-down privateer which had managed one voyage for him before she sank. But on that one voyage she had taken a French trading ship, and claimed all her cargo. She had shown a profit of thousands of pounds and the Cole fortune had been made, and the Cole shipping line founded. George Cole had put up his sign ‘Cole and Sons’, and bequeathed the business to his son and daughter. They had made it their life’s work to expand yet further.

Two men seated on a bench moved closer to make space for Josiah. Their damp clothes steamed slightly in the warmth and there was a prevailing smell of stale sweat and wet wool.

‘Good day,’ Josiah said. He nodded at the waiter for coffee and the boy brought him a pot with a cup and a big bowl of moist brown lump sugar.

‘You did well on the Daisy then,’ the man who had called him commented. ‘Prices are holding up for sugar. But you get no tobacco worth the shipping.’

Josiah nodded. ‘It was a good voyage,’ he said. ‘I won’t buy tobacco out of season. I’ll only take sugar. I did well on the Daisy and we turned her around quickly.’

‘Do you have a partner for your next voyage?’ the man opposite him asked. He spoke with a thick Somerset accent.

‘I am seeking a partner for the Lily. She will be in port within two months.’

‘And who commands her?’

‘Captain Merrick. There is no more experienced master in Bristol,’ Josiah said.

The man nodded. ‘D’you have the accounts for her last voyage?’

Josiah shook his head, lying with easy fluency. ‘They are with the Excise men,’ he explained. ‘Some trouble over the bond last time. But the Daisy is a better example in any case. She was fresh into port and showed a profit of three hundred pounds for each shareholder. You won’t find a better breeding-ground for your money than that!’

The man nodded. ‘Could be,’ he said uncertainly.

Josiah dropped two crumbling lumps of thick brown sugar into his coffee, savouring the sweetness, the very scent of the Trade, and signalled for a glass of rich dark rum. ‘As you wish,’ he said casually. ‘I have other men that should have the offer first, perhaps. I only mentioned it because of your interest. Think no more about it.’

‘Oh no,’ the man said quickly. ‘What share would you be looking for?’

‘A quarter,’ Josiah replied coolly. He looked away from the table and nodded a greeting at another man.

‘And how much would that be?’

Josiah seemed to be barely listening. ‘Oh, I couldn’t say …’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Perhaps a thousand pounds each, perhaps nine hundred. Say no more than nine hundred.’

The man looked rather dashed. ‘I had not thought it would be so much …’

Josiah turned his brown-stained smile on him. ‘You will not regret it being so much when it shows a profit of twenty or thirty per cent. Eh?’

‘And who will be the ship’s husband? You? You will do all the fitting and the orders?’

‘Myself,’ Josiah said. ‘I always do. I would trust it to no other man. But I should not have troubled you with this. There is Mr Wheeler now, I promised him a share in the Lily.’

‘No, stay,’ the man protested. ‘I will take a share, Josiah. I will have my share in her.’

Josiah nodded easily. ‘As you wish, Samuel.’ He held out his hand and the other grasped it quickly. ‘Come to my warehouse this afternoon, and bring your bond. I will have the contract for you.’

The man nodded, half-excited and half-fearful. He rose from the table and went out. He would be busy from now until the afternoon scouring the city for credit to raise his share.

‘I had not thought he had nine hundred pounds to outlay,’ one of the others remarked. ‘You had best see your money before you sign, Josiah.’

Josiah shrugged. Despite himself, his eyes strayed to the table at the top of the room. The men had called for a pie, a ham and some bread and cheese for their breakfasts. They were drinking port. They were joking loudly, and their faces were flushed. They did not have to haggle over some small man’s life savings to finance a voyage. They carved up the profitable voyages among themselves, they shared the profits from the docks – even the barges that plied up and down the Avon paid them a fee, the little ferryboat and even the lighthouses paid them rent.

‘I have some news,’ Josiah said abruptly. ‘I am to be married.’

There was a stunned silence at the little table.

‘To the niece of Lord Scott of Whiteleaze,’ Josiah went on. ‘His lordship will be calling on me soon and we will settle the marriage contract.’

‘My God! Josiah!’ one exclaimed.

‘Wherever did you meet the lady?’ one of the others asked. The rest simply gaped.

‘She called on us,’ Josiah lied convincingly. ‘She knows a friend of my sister’s. They were at school together.’

The men could hardly find words. ‘I had thought you would be a bachelor forever!’ one of them said.

‘And with Sarah to keep house for you! I never thought you would marry.’

‘I was waiting for the right lady,’ Josiah said precisely. ‘And for my fortunes to be on such a rise that I could offer her a proper position in life.’

The men nodded. The news was too staggering to be taken in all at once. ‘I had not thought he was doing that well,’ one of the men muttered.

‘I shall move from the warehouse,’ Josiah said. ‘I shall take a new house for my wife.’

‘Where will you live?’

‘I shall buy a house in Queens Square,’ Josiah said. Again he glanced towards the top table. The men there owned Queens Square outright; it had been built by the Corporation, to their design. They could choose whether or not to sell to him. Money alone could not buy him into their neighbourhood; but with Lord Scott’s niece on his arm he would be welcomed in the elegant brick-faced square. Josiah would call them ‘neighbour’ and his new wife would visit their wives.

The men at the table nodded. ‘And the lady …’

‘Shall we return to business?’ Josiah asked with a small triumphant smile. ‘I think that is enough about the lady who is to be Mrs Cole.’

They nodded, as impressed by the triumph of his marriage as by his quiet dignity.

‘About this voyage of the Lily,’ one of them said. ‘I think I’ll take a share after all. Will his lordship be coming in with us?’

Josiah smiled slightly. ‘Oh, I should think so,’ he said.

Mehuru’s mission was going well. He went from town to town and even stopped at the councils of the larger villages as he worked his way north-west across the great rolling plains of the Yoruba nation. The villagers knew that he was talking nothing more than sense. For all the profits that could be made from the slave trade – and they were beyond the dreams of most farming communities – there were terrible stories, garbled in the telling, of rivers where no-one dare fish and woods where no-one could walk. Whole villages were desolate, hundreds, thousands of women and children abandoned and starving in fields which they could not farm alone. It was a blight spreading inland from the coast, a plague which took the young men and women, the fittest and the strongest, and left behind the ill, the old, and the babies.

This plague of slavery worked unlike any other. It took the healthy, it took the adventurous, it took the very men and women who should command the future. The guns and gold and fine cloth could not repay Africa for the loss of her brightest children. It was the future leaders who were bled away, along the rivers, down the trade routes.

‘This is where it stops,’ Mehuru said firmly in one town council after another. ‘One nation has to refuse. One nation has to throw up a wall and say that it must end here. Otherwise what will become of us? Already the trade routes running north are unsafe, and the wealth of this nation depends on our trade. We send our leather goods, we send our brassware, we send our rich luxuries north, across the Sahel Desert to the Arab nations, and we buy our spices and silk from them. All our trade has always been north to south, and now the slavers are cutting the routes.

‘The coastal forests and plains are becoming deserted. Who will fish if the coast is abandoned? Where shall we get salt if the women cannot dry it in the salt pans? Where shall we get food if we cannot farm? How can a country be strong and safe and wealthy if every day a hundred, two hundred men are stolen?’

The men in the village councils nodded. Many of them showed the profits of the slave trade with ragged shirts of cotton woven in Manchester, and guns forged in Birmingham. But they were quick to notice that the vivid dyes of the cottons bled out after a few washings, and the guns were deadly to the users as well as to the victims when they misfired. No-one could deny that the slave trade was an unequal deal in which Africa was losing her brightest sons in exchange for tatty goods and shoddy wares.

Mehuru worked his way north, persuading, cajoling. He and Siko became accustomed to riding all day and camping out at night. Siko grew deft at building small campfires for cooking when they were out in the open savannah. The young man and the boy ate together, sharing the same bowl, and then rolled themselves up in their cloaks and slept side by side. They were fit and hardened by exercise and quietly companionable. Every time they stopped for Mehuru to tell the village elders of the new laws they heard more news, and all of it bad. The trade goods were faulty, the muskets blew to pieces the first time they were fired, maiming and killing. The rum was poisonous, the gold lace and smart hats were tawdry rubbish. Worse than that, the white men were establishing gangs of African brigands who belonged to no nation and followed no laws but their own whim, who cruised the rivers and seized a solitary man, a child playing hide and seek with his mother, a girl on her way to a lovers’ meeting. There could be no rule of law where kidnappers and thieves were licensed and paid in munitions.

Some of the coastal nations now dealt in nothing but slaves. They had turned from a rich tradition of fishing, agriculture, hunting and trading, to being slaving nations, with only men to sell, and gold to buy everything they might need. Nations of brigands, terrible nations of outlaws.

And the white men no longer kneeled to the kings of the coastal nations. They had built their own stone castles, they had placed their own cannon in their own forts. Up and down the rivers they had built great warehouses, huge stone barns where slaves could be collected, collected in hundreds, even thousands, and then shipped on, downriver, to the forts at the river mouth. There was no longer any pretence that the African kings were permitting the trade. It was a white man’s business and the African armies were their servants. The balance of power had shifted totally and completely. The white men commanded all along the coast by the power of the gun and the power of their gold.

The more Mehuru heard, the more certain he became that the Yoruba states were right to stand against slavery. The wickedness of slavery, its random cruelty, no longer disturbed him as much as the threat to the whole future of the continent which was opening before him like a vision of hell: a country ruled by the gun for the convenience of strangers, where no-one could be safe.

‘If slavery is such a bad thing,’ Siko said one night as they lay together under the dark sky, ‘I suppose you’ll be setting me free as soon as we get back to Oyo.’

Mehuru reached out a foot and kicked him gently. ‘You buy yourself out as we agreed,’ he said. ‘You’ve been robbing me blind for years anyway.’

He smiled as he slept; but in the night, under the innocent arch of the sky, he dreamed of the ship again. He dreamed of it cruising in warm shallow water, its deck misshapen by a thatched shelter, the sides shuttered with nets. In its wake were occasional dark, triangular fins. There were sharks following the ship, drawn through the seas by the garbage thrown overboard, and by the promising smell of sickness and despair. They could scent blood and the likelihood of death. The prow sliced through the clean water like a knife into flesh, and its wake was like a wound. Mehuru started awake and found that he was sweating as if he had been running in terror. It was the ship again, his nightmare ship.

He woke Siko. It was nearly dawn, he wanted the company of the boy. ‘Let’s go and swim,’ he said. ‘Let’s go down to the river.’

The boy was reluctant to get up, warning of crocodiles and hippos in the river, and poisonous snakes on the path. Mehuru caught the edge of the boy’s cloak and rolled him out.

‘Come on,’ he said impatiently. He wanted to wash the dream away, he wanted to play like a child in the water and then run back and eat porridge for breakfast. They had camped in the bend of a river and slept on the dry bank. Mehuru left his things by the embers of last night’s fire and jogged, half-naked, to the river. Siko trotted behind him, still complaining. The coolness of the morning air cleared his head, he could feel his breath coming faster and the dark ominous shadow of the ship receding.

Ahead of them was the river, fringed with trees, the tall nodding heads of the rhun palm making a continual comforting clatter as the dried leaves pattered against each other. He ran between an avenue of locust bean trees, the broad gnarled trunks on either side of him, the fluttering feathery leaves brushing the top of his head. He could see the river, the green water gleaming through the thick undergrowth. A flock of plantain eaters swooped overhead, pied birds calling coop-coop-coop in a melodic chatter, and brightly coloured parrots flew up as Mehuru and Siko ran easily side by side. Mehuru’s feet scrunched on white sand and he was pausing to catch his breath and to check the water for crocodile or hippo when he saw, from the corner of his eye, a shadow launch forward and in the same moment he was buffeted by a blow which flung him to the ground.

He struggled to get his arms free but he was winded and helpless under the weight of his attacker. He heard another man running forwards and saw a club rising above him and he cried out in terror, ‘Siko! Run! Run!’ as the blow crushed his head and flung him into fragments of darkness.

His last thought, as the dark shape of the nightmare ship rose up in his mind to blot out the sunlight and the gleam of the green water, was that he, of all people, should have known how far inland the slavers might have come.

At Mrs Daley’s house, Dowry Parade, the Hot Well, Bristol.

11th November 1787

Dear Frances,

I am Writing this before I leave for London as I Know you would want to Know at once my thoughts on Mr Josiah Cole.

I find him a Plain and simple Man, on whose Word I think we can Rely. I have had sight of his Company books and he seems to be well-established, tho’ he is not a member of the Merchant Adventurers nor of the Africa Company, which is a regret to him. However, the Friends you can bring may Rectify the Omission.

He was Not demanding as to your Dowry and we have settled matters to our Satisfaction. I have taken a Share, on your behalf, in the cargo of one of his ships, the Daisy, which is loading off Africa in this Month. Another of his ships, the Lily, came into port while I was there and I watched the unloading of his Wealth in the Form of Sugar and Rum. It is a Risky business, but highly profitable. I have no Hesitation in believing that you will be well Provided for during your Marriage; and if Widowed, you will Enjoy an adequate 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 let himself worry about Siko, he let his concern for Siko be the principal, the only thing in his mind. While he could think of himself as a master, as a man of property with obligations, he could pretend that he did not belong in the nightmare storehouse, soiled with his own mess, with dirty hands and matted hair. He thought his sanity depended on him remembering that he did not belong there, that he was not a slave, he was a Yoruban envoy on a mission for the Alafin himself.

After about a month in which conditions in the storehouse grew worse and worse, there was a gathering, like some nightmare market. A new boat, a white man’s boat, had come upriver from the coast, bringing two white men. Mehuru readied himself to explain to the men that he must be released. All of the captives were dragged one at a time from their prison and brought out to a white man, who lolled on a chair under a tree.

It was Mehuru’s first sight of a white man, the race that was destroying his country. He had expected a towering demon or an impressive god – not this dirty weakling. His skin was pale, his clothes were grey and foul and the stink of him as he sweated in the sunshine was so bad that he could even be smelled above the stench from the storehouse. The man was wet all the time. He lounged on a chair in the shade but he did not sit still and consider his purchases. He shifted all the time in his seat, getting hotter and hotter and his terrifying pallor went an even more frightening flushed red colour and all his face grew shiny and wet with sweat.

When they pulled Mehuru forward by a twitch on the rope around his neck he was so shocked by the corpse face of the man, and the disgusting thick clumps of stubble hair on his chin and at the open neck of the dirty shirt, that for a moment he could barely speak. But then he drew himself up to his full height and looked the man in the eye.

‘I am an envoy of the Yoruban federation,’ he said clearly. ‘I must be released at once or there will be severe reprisals.’ He repeated the sentence first in Portuguese, the language of the slavers, and then in all the African languages he knew. ‘I demand the release of my personal servant and my own freedom,’ he said.

The white man turned his head to one side, coughed and spat a gob of infected yellow phlegm. He nodded to a second white man who stepped forward. Mehuru forced himself not to flinch; the man was rancid with the stink of drink and a sharp acrid smell of old sweat. Mehuru breathed in through his mouth and repeated the speech again in Portuguese.

The white man did not even reply. He put his filthy hands in Mehuru’s face and pulled back his lips to see his teeth. Mehuru jerked back, and staggered over the chains at his ankles.

‘How dare you!’ he cried. At once two of the African slavers seized him from behind and held him in an unrelenting grip.

‘Let me go!’ Mehuru shouted. He bit off his panic and spoke clearly in Portuguese. ‘You are making a serious mistake,’ he said urgently. ‘I am an envoy for the Yoruba federation.’

The white man nodded to the guard to hold him firmly, leaned down and pulled aside Mehuru’s loincloth. He pulled back the foreskin of his penis to see if he were infected, and then nodded at the guard to make him bend over, to see if the flux had left blood on his anus.

Mehuru’s outraged shout was stifled in his throat. When he felt the dirty hands on him he choked with shame. Siko was watching him, his eyes wide with horror. ‘It’s all right,’ Mehuru called in hollow reassurance. ‘We will get to their leaders and explain.’

It was bravado, not courage. That night when Siko had wept himself to sleep and was lying with his limbs twitching with dreams of freedom, Mehuru sat quietly, dry-eyed and horrified. The fingerprints of the white men burned on his skin, the recollection of their washed-out stares scorched his memory. They had looked at him with their pale eyes as if he were nothing, as if he were a piece of meat, a piece of Trade. They looked at him as if he were a nobody, and Mehuru thought that in their horrible transparent eyes he had seen the death of his individuality. He thought that if he lost his sense of who he was, of his culture, of his religion, of his magic power, then he would be a slave indeed.

Only the god, Snake, was with him in that long desolate night. Mehuru called on him to save him from the men who were as white as ghosts, and the Snake god laughed quietly in his long throat and said, ‘All men are dead men, all men are ghosts.’ Mehuru did not sleep that night, though he was weary through to his very bones.

The next day the chosen hundred were herded into canoes and taken down the river. Mehuru no longer depended on his powerful status as a representative of the Alafin of Yoruba. He kept a sharp lookout instead for a chance to escape and run, run like a slave, for freedom.

But even that could not be done. Not on the river journey, not when they were unloaded on the beach at the coast. The slavers had done this too often. Mehuru saw that they were practised in the handling of many angry, frightened people. They never came within reach, they whipped them into line with long whips from a distance. Mehuru kept watching for a chance to order the whole line of them to run – run in a great line towards the market place of the town – and in the confusion find hammers to shear the chains, and spears to kill and then scatter. But there were too many too lame to run fast enough, and too many little children crying for their mothers, chained in the line.

He waited, pretending obedience and waiting for his chance. They were herded through the little village at the mouth of the river and down to the wide white-sand beach where boats, white men’s boats, were drawn up with the waves washing around their keels.

When he saw the ship, the great ship, bobbing at anchor beyond the white breakers, his heart sank. It was the ship of his dreams come for him at last. The hot humid wind which blew steadily on shore brought the smell of death as clearly as if he could already hear the widows crying. Mehuru stared at the water around the ship and saw the swift movement of a shark’s fin – just as he had seen it in his dream. He looked at the prow which he had dreamed slicing so easily through the water and knew that it would cut through miles of seas. Even the rope of his dream was stretched out tight, as the ship bobbed on her mooring. It was all as he had known it.

Mehuru embraced despair then. The ship had been coming for him for months, he had seen it set sail, he had seen it arrive off his own coast, and now here it was at last, waiting for him. He closed his eyes as a man will close his eyes in death and let them herd him, like a sacrificial goat, on board.