Philippa Gregory - A Respectable Trade

‘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.