Читать книгу A Respectable Trade - Philippa Gregory - Страница 8

Frances Scott, now Frances Scott Cole, closed the door of what was to be her bedroom and looked around her. It was a plain room bereft of any trimming or prettiness. The bed was a massive four-poster in dark heavy wood and had a small table beside it. The wash jug and ewer stood on another matching side table. There was a chest for her clothes and a mirror on the wall. It had been Josiah’s; now he would use the adjoining room, except for the nights when he might choose to sleep with her.

The room smelled. The whole house stank of the midsummer garbage of the dock. Only in a rainstorm or at high tide would the air smell clean to Frances, who had not been brought up on these fetid river banks.

Josiah still had not bought his house on Queens Square; but he had promised to find a house soon. As the date of the July wedding drew near, Frances had agreed to live for the first months of her wedded life over a warehouse on the Bristol quayside.

The room was in half-darkness. Only a little cold moonlight found its way in through the casement window, obscured by the brooding cliff which towered over the back of the house. Even at midday the room would be dark and damp. Frances put her candle down on the bedside table, went over to the mirror and unpinned her hair. Her reflected face looked impassively back at her. She had been a pretty child but that had been many years ago. She was thirty-five now and no-one would mistake her age. Her forehead was lined, around her mouth were the downward lines of discontent. Her pale skin was papery and dry, around her dark eyes were slight brown shadows. She suffered from delicate health, inherited from her mother who had died of consumption. Her great beauty was her dark hair which showed no grey. She looked what she had been only yesterday – a lady clinging on to fragile social status, of uncertain health, unmarried, impoverished, and ageing fast.

But now it was all changed. Frances smiled slightly and picked up her silver-backed hairbrush. She was a married woman now and an entirely new life was opening up before her. It seemed like a hard choice – matrimony at thirty-five – when many women were matrons already with a family around them. But anything was better than being a governess in a state of genteel servitude. Anything was better than watching her place move inexorably down the dining table until one day she would be asked to dine in the nursery with the children, and disappear from polite society altogether. It had been a hard choice, but in the end no choice at all.

Frances started to plait her hair in a thick hank, ready for bed. The wedding dinner had been better than she could have hoped. Lord Scott had been as kind as always, although his cold unfriendly wife had cast a cool shadow over the proceedings. Frances had dreaded that Josiah would be rowdy and jolly but the evening had been as dignified as a funeral. Only Sarah and Josiah represented the Cole family so Frances’s other great fear – that there would be dozens of vulgar relations emerging from the Bristol woodwork – was stilled. The dinner had been well cooked, a little lavish for just the five of them. The wines – as you would expect in Bristol – had been excellent.

Frances had sat at the foot of the table in the tiny airless parlour and smiled without flinching. Everyone at the table knew that marriage to such a man as Josiah was not her first choice. Everyone at the table knew that she had no choice. The coldness in her heart was reflected in the cool serenity of her face.

Her calm had been threatened only once. When Lord Scott took her hand on leaving he had whispered to her: ‘God bless you my dear, it’s the best thing you could have done … considering.’ This tactful acknowledgement that she was orphaned and penniless sent a shiver through her. ‘I will pray it goes well for you,’ he said.

There would be nothing he could do for her if it did not. Frances was owned by Josiah, body and soul. She had promised to obey him till death.

‘But it will go well for me,’ she whispered. She tied her nightcap under her chin and crossed the cold floorboards to the bed. She had wept the night her father died. She had wept the first night that she had slept in a strange house, far from the country vicarage, and far below the genteel status of the vicar’s only daughter. She had raged then against the unfairness of a life in which a woman is dependent completely on a man. A woman who lacks a father must find a husband. Frances had not married when she should have done, in the brief bloom of her youth. She had aimed too high and her father had been too proud. He had not understood that a man, any man at all, was better than spinster hardship. Her father’s death abandoned Frances to loneliness and to poverty and to the unending slights of the life of a governess.

She got into the broad bed, and rested her head on the plain linen pillow. She would not cry tonight. She was a wife and she had a dinner table of her own, even though it was only a little table and pushed to one side in a tiny parlour. The rest of her life would be spent accommodating her desires to her husband’s fortune. If Josiah rose in the world she would rise with him; if he did not she must bear it with patience and be glad to have found such a haven as this little house. She pulled the covers over her shoulders as if the coldness in her spirit had chilled her very skin, despite the sultry night air. She felt as if tears or feelings would never touch her again. She was heartbroken and exhausted by heartbreak; and she mistook it for the calmness of old age.

There was a tap on the door between Josiah’s room and her own and her husband came in, carrying his candle. He was wearing a plain linen nightshirt. He set the candle down on the bedside table and stood, looking at her. He was clearly at a loss.

‘I hope you enjoyed the dinner,’ he said awkwardly.

Frances nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she said in her cool level voice.

Josiah’s feet in Moroccan leather slippers shuffled on the wooden floor. He looked intensely uncomfortable. ‘The wines were good,’ he volunteered.

Frances nodded.

There was silence. Frances realised that Josiah was painfully embarrassed. Neither of them knew how a husband claimed his marital rights. Neither of them knew how a wife consented. Her dry little cough rose up in her throat and she cleared her throat.

‘It’s quite late now,’ Josiah remarked.

Frances turned back the covers. ‘Will you come to bed, husband?’ she asked, as coldly civil as if she were offering him a dish of tea.

Josiah flushed scarlet with relief. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He stepped out of his slippers and slid into bed beside her. They lay side by side for a moment, taking care not to touch each other, then Josiah leaned over and blew out both candles. Under cover of the sudden darkness he reared on top of Frances and pulled her nightdress out of his way. Frances lay still underneath him with her eyes closed and her teeth gritted. It was a duty which had to be done. Josiah fumbled awkwardly for a few moments and then he exclaimed in a whisper and moved away.

‘It’s no good,’ he said shortly. ‘I have drunk too much wine.’

Frances opened her eyes. She could see only the silhouette of his profile. She did not know what she was supposed to do.

‘It does not matter,’ he said, consoling himself rather than her. ‘It will come right in time. There is no need for us to hurry. After all, we neither of us married for desire.’

There was a long, rather chilling silence. ‘No,’ Frances acknowledged. ‘Neither of us did.’

‘Good morning, ma’am,’ a voice said, and the curtains rattled on the brass rail as the maid drew them back and tied them to the bed posts.

Frances stirred and opened her eyes. The maid who had waited at the dinner table last night was standing before her with a small silver tray bearing a jug of hot chocolate and a warm pastry. Frances sat up and received the tray on her knees.

‘Thank you.’

The maid dipped a curtsey.

‘Master said to tell you that he is gone out early,’ she said. ‘But Miss Cole expects you in the parlour as soon as you are dressed. She is there already.’

Frances nodded. She waited for the maid to leave the room and then bolted the food and gulped down the hot chocolate. She sprang from the bed and went over to the ewer of water to wash her face. Then she paused, remembering her new status. She was no longer the governess who had to hurry downstairs for fear of keeping the mistress waiting. Frances smiled at the thought and poured water into the bowl. She washed her face and patted it dry, enjoying the sense of leisure. Her clothes for the morning were laid out on the heavy wooden chest: a linen shift, a morning dress in white muslin, embroidered at the hem, with a frivolous silk apron to denote Frances’s intention of domestic work.

The dress was new. Lady Scott had given Frances whole bolts of fabric when the marriage contract was signed. Her entire wardrobe had been renovated and improved with gifts from her cousins and her aunt. Frances knew it was the last thing Lady Scott would ever do for her and she accepted the old gowns and yards of silk with nothing more than polite gratitude. Her husband would have to provide for her new clothes, and there was an allowance of pin money laid down in the marriage contract. Frances would never again darn and re-darn her silk stockings.

She slipped on the shift and turned as there was a tap on the door and the maid came in again. Frances sat at the dressing table and brushed her hair in steady sweeps of the silver-backed brushes, and the maid helped her plait it into two braids and pin them up on her head with a pretty scrap of lace for a cap. The woman was slow and not very skilful. She dropped the hairbrush.

‘I am sorry, Mrs Cole,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I don’t usually work as a lady’s maid.’

‘Does Miss Cole have her own maid?’

‘She dresses herself.’

Frances hid her surprise. She had never heard of a lady dressing herself, she wondered how Sarah managed with the small covered buttons at the back of a gown. Even as a governess Frances had borrowed a maid to do her hair and help with the fastenings. For the first time Frances had a glimpse of her tumble in status. The maid shook out the morning dress and held it for Frances to put on, fastening the two dozen mother-of-pearl buttons up the back of the dress, and tied the ribbon of the apron. Lastly she set out the little insubstantial slippers of pink silk.

‘Shall I show you to the parlour, ma’am?’

‘Yes,’ Frances said.

She followed the woman down the stairs. It was a dreadfully dark poky house, she thought, sandwiched between one large warehouse and another, with its front door giving directly on to the dock and its back door into a yard overhung by the glowering red sandstone cliff. The cliff was part of the building; the warehouse carved into its overhanging walls. The storerooms extended into caves deep inside it, running back for miles in a red sandstone labyrinth.

It was no house for a lady. It was crashingly noisy with the rolling of barrels on the cobbles of the quay. Costers and hawkers shrieked their wares, screaming to make themselves heard over the bawled orders on the unloading ships. Frances did not know if Josiah had a carriage and she did not know if she would be allowed to walk along the quayside outside her front door without endangering her reputation. She had a fine line to tread as the niece of a lord but the wife of a man whose house was no larger than a shop.

Bristol was not a genteel city; it was all port and no town, quaysides and no pavements. Every other street towards the town centre was a bridge with a river running beneath it. The town centre itself was crammed on the banks of the river with masts of sailing ships overtopping the chimneys, and the prows of the boats almost knocking on the doors. When the tide was full the boats rocked and bobbed and sailors in the rigging could see into bedroom windows and shout bawdy comments at the housemaids. When the tide was out the ships were dumped on the stinking mud of the harbour bottom and the garbage from the boats and the sewage from the town gurgled sluggishly around them.

The maid paused before the dark wooden parlour door, tapped lightly and stood aside. Frances turned the door handle and went in. Sarah Cole rose from her seat at the table, her face unsmiling under a plain morning cap.

‘No need to knock,’ she said coldly. ‘You are the mistress here now.’ She put her hand on a great ring of keys on the table. ‘These are the household keys. My brother has told me to offer them to you, if you wish to take the housekeeping into your own hands.’

Frances hesitated, and Sarah Cole gestured to an ominous pile of dark-backed ledgers. ‘Also the housekeeping books,’ she went on. ‘I think you will find them in order. I present them to my brother once a month for his signature. That will now be your task.’

‘Gracious,’ said Frances weakly.

The stern face of the older woman gleamed with pride. ‘It has been my life’s work to make this house run as smoothly as our trading company. The company books are no better than the household ones. I do them both.’

‘He must be very grateful to you,’ Frances said tentatively.

Miss Cole’s face was stern. ‘There is no reason why he should be,’ she replied. ‘I was doing my duty and protecting my fortune, as I trust you will do. It was my task to run the business and the housekeeping, for both my brother and for my Papa, for all these years ever since Mama died. Now it is my duty to hand the housekeeping accounts over to you.’

Frances went to the table and opened a ledger at random. It was written in perfect copperplate script:

‘To Mr Sykes, butcher … £3. 4s. 6d.’ Beneath it was another entry, and another and another for page after page.

Frances turned the pages. They fluttered with the petty cash of many years. ‘I have never done accounts,’ she confessed. ‘In my father’s house it was done by the cook. I merely checked the totals at the end of each month. I am afraid I don’t know how to do them.’

Miss Cole raised an eyebrow. ‘You must have been badly cheated,’ she said.

‘Oh, no! Cook had been with us since I was a baby. She was devoted to my father and to me. She would not have cheated us. She was like one of the family.’

Miss Cole shrugged. ‘I do not know about grand houses,’ she said. ‘I am a trader’s sister and a trader’s daughter. I do not have servants who are one of the family. I check their work and if I see an error then I sack them.’

‘It was hardly a grand house. It was a little country vicarage on Lord Scott’s estate.’

‘I was born in a collier’s cottage,’ Miss Cole said sharply. ‘I think your country vicarage would seem very grand to me.’

Frances paused. This woman would be her daily companion; when they moved house she would move too. They would live together, they would meet every day for the rest of their lives. She forced herself to smile. ‘There is much I do not know about your life and your business,’ she said. ‘I hope you will teach me, Miss Cole, and help me to fulfil my side of the bargain and be a good wife to your brother.’

The woman’s face was stern. ‘I do not know what bargain you have made. I do not know why he wanted a wife, and such a wife as you.’

Frances blinked at the woman’s abrupt honesty. ‘Well, this is frank speaking indeed!’

Sarah nodded. ‘I speak as I find. I am a simple trader’s daughter.’

‘You did not wish him to marry?’ Frances ventured.

‘Why should I? We have lived together and worked side by side on the company for years. We have made it grow from one ship to a fleet of three. We have trebled our business and our profits. And now Josiah wants a town house, and a smart lady for his wife. But who is to pay for this? Are we to spend our money on houses rather than ships? What return will they make? What return will you make?’

Frances snatched a little breath. She could feel her heart pounding with embarrassment at the other’s plain speaking. ‘Really … Miss Cole …’

‘You asked and I answered you,’ the woman said stubbornly.

Frances put her hand to her throat. ‘I hope you will not be my enemy,’ she whispered.

Sarah Cole looked at Frances’s white face and shrugged. ‘What would be the sense in that?’ she said. ‘It is a business arrangement, after all. But you should not try to manage my account books if you do not understand them.’

‘Would you prefer to do them?’ Frances asked. ‘Until I have learned how things are to be done? Would you prefer to go on as you have been, and I will watch you and study your ways?’

‘I think that would be best if it is your wish.’

‘I have no desire to push you from your place,’ Frances said hastily. ‘Nor cause any quarrel in this house.’

‘You don’t look the quarrelsome type,’ Sarah said with grim humour.

Frances suddenly flushed as she smiled. ‘Indeed I am not! I cannot bear quarrels and people shouting.’

Sarah nodded. ‘I see. You suffer from sensibility.’

Frances, who had never before heard it described as a disability, gave a shaky little laugh. ‘It is how I was brought up,’ she said.

‘Well, I am not a lady, and I thank God for it,’ Sarah said. ‘But I will try to make allowances for you. You have nothing to fear from me. Now I will show you around the house,’ she continued, rising to her feet. ‘You have seen only this parlour and your bedroom so far.’

There was not much to see. The parlour was on the first floor. It ran the length of the house, overlooking the quay at the front and overshadowed by the cliff at the back. There was a small dining table and six hard chairs where Miss Cole worked during the day and where breakfast was served at mid-morning, dinner at mid-afternoon, and supper in the evening. There was a fireplace with two straight-backed chairs on either side. There was Miss Cole’s workbox. The walls were washed with lime, empty of any pictures or ornament and the floorboards were plain waxed wood, with a thin hearthrug before the fire.

Josiah’s office, the next room, was even plainer. It also overlooked the quay but it did not even have curtains at the windows, just forbidding black-painted shutters. His desk was set before the window to the left of the fireplace, a big wooden captain’s chair before it. There was a chair by the fire and a small table beside it. There were three maps hanging on the walls. One showed the south coast of England, one the west coast of Africa, little more than a wriggling coastline and a completely empty interior, and the third was a navigation chart of the shoals and currents around the islands of the West Indies. Nothing else. Frances, looking in through the door of the spartan room, wondered what the Coles did for amusement, where they entertained their friends. There was nothing in either room to indicate anything but a life dedicated to work.

Miss Cole gave a longing glance out of the window before she turned away. On the quayside immediately below, the Coles’ ship the Rose was unloading. Sarah Cole would rather have been entering profits into the ledger.

On the floor above the parlour were the bedrooms. Josiah and Miss Cole had bedrooms facing the dock; Frances’s room was quieter, at the back, sheltered by the red sandstone cliff. If she opened her window and leaned out she could look down to the cobbled backyard outside the kitchen door, hemmed in by high warehouse walls, and beyond them, the twisting little streets which ran from the dockside up to the church on the peak of the hill: St Mary Redclift. On her left was the towering height of a lead-shot tower. To her right, overtopping the church spire, was the fat kiln-shaped chimney of the glassworks. All day there was ceaseless noise: the crash of the metalworks, and the roar and rattle of the furnaces. The sour toxic smell of lead haunted the Backs.

Above this floor was the attic bedroom for the servants and the linen and storeroom. Miss Cole showed Frances the bare poverty of the rooms with quiet pride and then led the way down the stairs to the front door and hall.

The hall was hopelessly dark, the only light seeping through a grimy fanlight over the front door. At the end of the corridor at the back of the house was the door to the kitchen. They could hear someone pounding dough on a board and singing softly. In all the shaded, sombre house, it was the first happy sound.

At the sound of Miss Cole’s footstep the singing stopped abruptly, and the pounding of the dough became louder and faster.

Sarah Cole opened the door to the kitchen and ushered Frances in. ‘This is your new mistress, Mrs Cole,’ she said abruptly, surveying the kitchen. The cook – floured to the elbows – bobbed a curtsey, and the upstairs maid, Brown, rose from the table where she had been polishing silver and glasses. A little hunchbacked girl came in from the backyard wiping her hands on a hessian apron and dipped a curtsey, staring at Frances. Frances smiled impartially at them all.

‘The cook is Mrs Allen. The maid is Brown. Mrs Allen discusses the menus with me every week and shows me the housekeeping books.’ Sarah shot a sideways glance at Frances. ‘You should be there when we meet. I take it that Monday afternoon will still be convenient?’

‘Perfectly,’ Frances said politely.

The little scullery maid had not even been named to Frances.

‘You can get on with your work,’ Miss Cole ordered them brusquely and led the way from the kitchen, through the poky little hall and up the stairs to the parlour.

She seated herself at the table and drew one of the ledgers towards her. She took up a pen. Frances, rather at a loss, seated herself on the narrow windowseat and looked down on the quay.

The tide was in and the foul smell of the mud had lessened. The sunshine sparkled on the water of the dock and quicksilver water lights danced on the ceiling of the parlour. The quayside was crowded with people selling, loading and unloading ships, hawking goods, mending ropes, and caulking the decks of outbound ships with great steaming barrels of stinking tar. The Coles’ own ship, the Rose, was still unloading her goods, the great round barrels of rum and sugar were piled on the quayside. The intense stink of a ship of the Trade wafted up to Frances and even penetrated the house: sugar, sewage, and pain. As she watched, she saw Josiah slap one of the barrels for emphasis and then spit on his palm and shake hands on a deal with another man.

Sarah’s pen scratched on the paper. The room was stuffy and hot, the windows closed tight against the smell and noise of the quayside.

‘I should like to go out,’ Frances said after a while. ‘I should like to walk around and see the city.’

Miss Cole lifted her head, her finger on the page to keep her place. ‘Brown will have to go with you. You cannot walk on the quayside alone.’

Frances nodded and rose to her feet. ‘Very well.’

Sarah shook her head, not taking her eyes from the book. ‘Brown is working in the house now. You will have to wait until afternoon. You can walk then.’

There was a short silence.

‘I see Mr Cole down there on the quayside,’ Frances said. ‘May I go down to him?’

Sarah dragged her attention from her work again. ‘He is engaged in business. He would have no time for you, and the men he is dealing with are not those he would wish you to meet. They are not gentlemen. You will have to be patient. You are no longer a lady of leisure,’ Miss Cole volunteered spitefully. ‘You cannot act on whim.’

‘No,’ said Frances, turning her attention back to the quayside, ‘I see that I cannot.’

Most of the sailors had been paid off and had left the ship but the captain and one other man, his hair tied back in a greasy little plait, were watching the sailmakers pulling the ragged canvas out of the lockers and spreading it on the dockside. Josiah inspected the worn sails and nodded his agreement as the sailmakers bundled it on a sledge, took up the ropes and started to tow it away. Frances watched him from her vantage point above him, a curiously foreshortened view as if he were not a powerful man in a man’s world, but a little man, struggling to cope.

‘It is strange to see your money being made,’ she remarked thoughtlessly and then flushed with embarrassment. ‘I beg your pardon! I spoke without thinking.’

‘It is not strange to me,’ Miss Cole said. She did not take offence as Frances had feared. ‘I have lived in this house most of my life. I have waited for our ships to come in and I have known what profit or loss they made on every voyage. Since I was a child of nine I have cared for nothing else. That one you see there, the Rose, has done well for us.’

‘What a pretty name,’ Frances said.

Miss Cole showed her thin smile. ‘All our ships have flower names since our first one, a captured French merchant ship called Marguerite,’ she said. ‘That means Daisy in French, you know. We have three ships: the Rose which you see here, the Daisy which should be at the West Indies, and the Lily which was in port a few months ago and should be loading off Africa, God willing.’

‘You say that they “should be” … do you not know where they are?’

‘How should I know? I know when they set sail and I know when they are due, but between their destination and their home port is the most vast and dangerous ocean. We have to wait. The largest part of being a merchant in the Atlantic Trade is waiting, and keeping your counsel while you wait.’

‘Have you ever sailed with them?’

‘No-one of any sense would sail to Africa,’ Miss Cole replied. ‘It is a death-trap.’

‘Do you sail nowhere else?’

Miss Cole turned from the window and went back to her work. ‘There is nowhere else,’ she said irritably. ‘What other trade is to be had?’

‘I don’t know,’ Frances said foolishly. ‘I thought perhaps you might sail to India, or to China.’

‘This is Bristol,’ Miss Cole explained patiently, as one might speak to a child. ‘This is the heart of the sugar trade. We trade to the West Indies and to the Americas. It is on this Trade that my father made his fortune and on this Trade that we will make ours.’

‘Only sugar?’

‘There is no more profitable business,’ Miss Cole said firmly. ‘The Trade is supreme.’

‘But so uncertain …’

‘We trust in our abilities,’ Sarah said piously. ‘And we are all of us in the merciful hands of God.’

They did not know themselves to be in the merciful hands of God. They seemed very far from any god. They lay very close together, stacked side by side like logs in a woodpile. When the ship rolled they rolled hard one way, bumping and bruising, and then when it pitched back, they rolled again. When the ship reared up over a massive wave and crashed down it was as if they had been packed on their naked backs in a rough wooden case and dropped, over and over again. Within a day they were bruised from the planking, within a week the skin was rubbed away. When the sea was heavy the water poured in through the gratings on the deck into the hold where they lay, and the slop buckets overturned and sewage washed around them. They were not fed during bad weather and those that were not vomiting from seasickness or already dying from typhus went hungry. When the sea was calm they were ordered up on deck, staggering under the bright uncaring sky, and made to wash and dry themselves, sharing a soiled piece of cloth. A man watched them rinse out their mouths with vinegar and water and spit through the netting into the huge waves which rolled unstoppably towards the little ship, coming from the far horizon, as high as hills. It was a nightmare, a long unbelievable nightmare, which got worse and worse every day.

At first Mehuru had thought that the crew were ghosts, that he had died at sight of the ship and that this was some long punitive afterlife. The crew’s skin was so pallid and their eyes were empty of colour or warmth. He could not at first accept their dreadful ugliness. They did not look like men and they did not act like men. They behaved as if they were a different species from Mehuru, from Siko, from the two hundred men they had on board. They prodded at them with sticks, they whipped them with casual cruelty. They never looked in their faces, they never met their eyes. There was something so cold and unnatural in their indifference that Mehuru felt his very soul wither and shrink from them. These could not be men. No man could treat another man with such chilling indifference.

The Snake god’s counsel was bleak on the voyage and the farther he went from his home, the fainter and fainter grew the voice until Mehuru had to face the dreadful prospect of losing his guide. He had no magic to bring him back, the gods go where they will, and Mehuru could make no offering. He had no pet snake to feed, he had no smoke to please the god, or bones for it to play with. All he could do was dream that he was making pleasures for the god and give him the thoughts of his mind. So he lay in the pitching blackness with his back rubbed raw against the sweating planks of the hold, the filth of the bilges washing around him, and made in his mind a perfect flower, a flower from the hibiscus bush, bright scarlet, frilled as silk. Then he pictured a jewelled snake and brought the flower to the snake in a bowl of white clay studded with tiny blue stones.

The three images were almost too much for him: the brilliant snake, the perfect flower, and the white bowl with the blue pattern. In the sodden sweaty torture of the black hold with people dying around him, Mehuru shut his eyes and summoned three perfect forms: god in a flower, god in an animal, and god in a man, guiding his hands to work with clay and with little blue stones.

There was no way to measure time in the darkness. Mehuru woke sometimes and thought perhaps he had died and that the Yoruban belief that you stay near to the people you loved, watching over them, was all wrong. The afterlife was a perpetual rolling and pitching, heat and smell, and the horror of being pushed against sickly men, unable to help them, and no emotion but hatred for their rough bumping against you, and hunger for their share of food.

Sometimes the sailors opened the hatches and bawled down into the darkness for the captives to come out. The sunlight hurt their eyes but they had to stand on deck and one of the sailors would beat a drum while another cracked a whip. Mehuru looked at them in utter wonder. The sailors wanted them to dance. As obedient as idiot children, with the guns all around them and the whips cracking out the time, they shuffled and hopped while others were ordered to clean out the hold and throw the dead and dying over the side. Mehuru sank deep inside his mind while his body hopped and pranced.

If the dancing were to keep them healthy Mehuru could not think why they were fed so poorly. If their jailers wanted them fit, Mehuru could not think why they let so many sicken for lack of water in the unbearable heat of the hold. They lowered buckets filled with stale warm water and bad yams which crawled with insects. Never enough water, never enough food. They had loaded about two hundred men and elsewhere in the ship they were keeping women and little children, perhaps another hundred of them. On Mehuru’s shelf alone, five had already died. One had flung himself over the side, two had sickened, one had been whipped too hard and never came back to the hold and the last one had sealed his lips from food and water and had watched the others eat every day while he starved himself to death. Mehuru’s imagination could not stretch to the scale of it. It never occurred to him that more than three hundred of them had been shipped but that only two hundred and forty or so were expected to survive. It was not necessary that they should all survive. It was a process so large as to be industrial. Mehuru had no concept that his life could be written off as wastage.

He started to dread the arrival of the bucket of food for only then, when they were ordered to gather around and share ten to a bucket, eating with their dirty hands, could he see how many of them were sickening to death. They were the ones who did not struggle and claw at each other to get to the food. Mehuru set himself the task of fighting for his share and then giving half of it to the neighbour on his right. He did it as an exercise, a discipline, not an act of love. He thought he would never love anyone, ever again.

When he had eaten, and the slowly dying man beside him had mumbled on his slabber porridge, Mehuru would shut his eyes and try to build a picture of a perfect tiny snake as an offering for the god.

He knew that his mind was going when the snake became very bright and easy to find. The snake became more important than the ship, more vivid than the clammy touch of the dying man beside him. The snake opened his mouth and sang to him as Mehuru felt his skin grow wet with sweat and his mind shift and slide away from the darkness. He knew he should stay in his waking mind and guard Siko; but he had not seen Siko, except for a glimpse on deck, since they had set sail. He knew he had failed in his duty to him. He knew he was guilty of a mortal sin in taking the boy into danger. But he could not keep himself alert, he could not stay on guard. As they went farther and farther west Mehuru sank into a deep deathly indifference.

He could not tell how long they had been sailing, but when they came on deck to dance there were more limp bodies thrown overboard, and there were fewer who could dance each time. Mehuru looked around idly for the children, the little ones who had been loaded on the ship as round as berries and as dark and shiny as the sacred wood of the iroko tree. They were thinner and many of them were sick, but worst of all was the way the bright life was draining from them. They no longer cried like desperate fledglings for their mothers, they were lost children. Whether they lived or died there would be a gap in their spirits which nothing would ever replace. How would they respect their fathers, and how love children of their own, if their most powerful memory was being abandoned to despair?

He thought that about forty had died, and two crewmen as well, when the sound of the ship changed one night. Then came urgent noises of running on the deck overhead, and abrupt commands and anxious shouts and then the great rolling yaw of the ship ceased, ceased at last, and he heard the roar as the anchor chain sped out through the housing and the ship thrust a claw into the ocean bed and dragged herself to a standstill. They were brought up on deck as if to be ready for dancing, but then they were manacled, arms to legs, and chained from one neck to another. The captain, even whiter than before and thinner from the voyage, looked at each shivering black man or woman or little child before he waved them into the line and had them locked on to the chain. A few, a very few, he waved to one side under guard of a sailor who held a musket easily at their heads. Mehuru thought of the unreliability of the muskets on sale in Africa and thought it might be worth taking the chance and rushing the man. But when he looked around to see where he might run he felt sicker than he had felt in the whole long voyage. For they were not off the coast of Africa any more. Wherever they had come to, it was a land he had never seen before.

The last of his courage went out of him then and when the captain waved him to the little group he went as weakly as the children who were already chosen. The last time he saw Siko was when the boy hobbled obediently to the long chain and bowed his neck to the collar. Mehuru tried to find a voice to call to him, to wish him well, to promise to return to find him if he possibly could. He was dumb. Siko looked at him, a long look of reproach and despair, and Mehuru could find no words at all. He dropped his gaze and turned away and when they were ordered back down into the hold he went without looking back. When they chained him back on a strangely empty shelf he held his hands out for the manacles on his wrists like a foolish trusting child.

A great longing for his home, so painful that he thought he would die of it, sickened him to his very core. He lay in the darkness, refusing to open his eyes, refusing to take food. The little group was kept together in the hold, twenty of them. Two other men manacled with leg-irons like himself chained on the shelf, and five women with neck-irons and long chains so that they could move more freely, but not reach the men. The smallest children were allowed to go free; two of them could barely walk. The other children aged from four years to adolescence wore light chains from wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle.

One of the women called to Mehuru to eat, but he turned his head from her and closed his eyes. The smallest toddler struggled through the slurry which washed around the floor to bring him a bowl. Mehuru saw fresh fruit – the first he had seen in the long two months of the voyage – but he did not allow himself desire. He would not eat. He had been robbed of his home, he had been robbed of his people. He had been robbed of his servant and robbed of his duty to provide for him. He had been robbed of his life. He would live no more.

Days passed, and still the ship did not sail. They were ordered on deck and made to build a little shelter against the sun. They were kept there like hens in a pen, lying on straw. They laboured below to clean out the mess of two hundred men, stalled like animals for nearly sixty days. They baled out the excrement and the filth and then the master of the ship went below with his handkerchief over his face and lit pastilles of camphor which smoked all day and all night and still could not drown the stench.

Mehuru would not speak. He ate a little rice every day and drank some of the fresh sweet water. When the women asked his name or the men touched his hand in companionship and shared mourning he turned his head away. Nothing should tie him to life.

The sailors lived on board and worked during the day, loading the ship and making it ready for another voyage. They had long idle periods when they came and took the women away. The women came back bruised and sometimes bloodstained, with their heads in their hands. Mehuru, chained hand and foot, turned his head away from the horror in their faces.

One woman did not come back at all, and after that the sailors were forbidden to touch them. The little children missed her, she had played with them and fed them and sung them songs. Without her they were a little more lost. One little girl sat beside Mehuru for the greater part of every day and banged her head gently against the deck. Mehuru lay with his eyes shut, the deck echoing beneath his head like a drum to the steady thud of the little girl’s head against the planks.

The master came back on board and the ship was ready to sail, only half-loaded with large kegs of sugar and rum. The little girl disappeared, they took her away one day, but still Mehuru could hear the thud thud thud of her head on wood. It beat like a heart, it drummed like an accusation.

He closed his eyes and refused to eat rice. He drank only water. He felt himself floating away. There was none of the right things that an obalawa should have around him, and he could not warn his fathers that he would need their help in crossing over. He thought his tree that held his spirit had bent in some storm and was perhaps breaking, and he prayed for it to fall so that his spirit might flow out of it and he might die.

Mehuru readied himself to join the ones who had to die sitting down with their eyes staring out into the darkness. He feared he would not find his fathers, dying thus. Only the Snake god had seen him with his huge shiny eyes and would know where his son had been stolen far away across the great seas.