A Respectable Trade

Frances nodded. ‘I only hesitated because I do not know if I can. I have taught children, but they were human children. I wouldn’t know how to teach niggers.’

Sarah nodded grimly. ‘Then let me tell you, Sister, that you had better find a way to teach them. This will be the saving of our Cole and Sons and its key to the future. If we can train and sell slaves then we can make a fortune big enough to satisfy Josiah’s ambition, and to pay for Queens Square. If we do not, it will not be Queens Square for you, you will stay here forever, beside the filthy water of the dock – cold and damp in winter, deadly in summer.’

There was a long silence. Frances could feel herself becoming breathless and put her hand to the base of her throat to steady her pulse. ‘You are not exaggerating?’ she confirmed. Her little cough rose up and choked her for a moment.

Sarah waited until she had her breath back. ‘The bottom is slowly falling out of the Trade,’ she said. ‘If, in a few years, our Bristol partners can get a better return in land and building, or in shops, or in importing cotton to Manchester, they will no longer put their money with us. Then we will not be able to send out ships at all and our investment – in our ships, in our warehouse, in the quay – will be thrown away. We have put so much money into the Trade that we have to trade, and we have to make the Trade pay.’

‘I will try, Sarah, I will try my best to teach them.’

Sarah smiled a wintry smile. ‘You were a governess, weren’t you?’ she asked. ‘You replied to our advertisement for a governess? We planned all along that you should teach them. But now instead of working for a wage you are working for yourself. You shall be their teacher and you shall recommend them to their places and give them a character. You will make this plan work for us. You will earn the new town house. You want it, don’t you?’

Frances looked around the tiny parlour and breathed the tainted air. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course I do.’

Chapter Six (#ulink_be0691b4-544a-5366-87fb-63b2235e3150)

Josiah came in for his dinner in the mid-afternoon in thoughtful silence. Frances, new to his moods and weary herself from Sarah’s long lessons with the account books, sat at the foot of the table and said nothing. Her cough was troubling her. She sipped water, trying to choke it back. Sarah waited until the tablecloth had been taken away and a decanter of port set at Josiah’s hand before she asked:

‘Trouble?’

He raised his head and smiled. ‘Oh! Nothing. I have been all day seeking proper insurance for Rose. Ever since the Zong case it has been more and more difficult.’

‘The Zong case?’ Frances asked.

‘Business,’ Josiah said dismissively.

‘She should understand it,’ Miss Cole pointed out. ‘It is her business too now.’

‘Oh aye, you’re probably right,’ Josiah agreed. ‘The Zong case, my dear, took place half a dozen years ago and concerned the good ship Zong which is still in dispute with the insurers.’

‘Why?’ Frances asked.

‘Well, it is a long story, but basically the Zong ran short of water while sailing to Jamaica. There was much illness on board and the captain took the decision to pitch a quarter of the cargo overboard.’

‘What cargo?’ Frances asked stupidly.

‘She does not understand,’ Miss Cole said.

‘It is simple enough,’ Josiah said briskly. ‘The captain of the Zong, fearing that a large number of his four hundred and seventy slaves would die of thirst, had them thrown into the sea to drown.’

Frances looked from Josiah’s face to his sister’s. ‘To save the drinking water?’

Josiah allowed himself a small sly smile. ‘Well, that is what the captain claimed. However, while they were in the midst of these kindly killings, it came on to rain and it rained for two days.’

Miss Cole hid a little laugh behind her hand.

‘And the good ship Zong docked with full casks of drinking water in Jamaica.’

The two of them smiled at Frances, expecting her to understand the joke. She shook her head.

‘It was a fraud,’ Miss Cole said impatiently.

‘The captain was lying,’ Josiah explained. ‘See here, Frances, he had a bad batch of slaves, very sick, dying on him, dropping like sick flies. Slaves who die of illness are a cash loss – a loss to the traders; but slaves drowned at sea are paid for by the insurance. Captain Luke Collingwood had the neat idea of slinging all the sick men and women over the side and claiming for them on the insurance.’

‘He drowned them for the insurance money?’

Josiah nodded. ‘In three batches, over three days as I remember. A hundred and thirty-one altogether.’

‘And they say the big Liverpool shippers are better,’ Miss Cole crowed. ‘You never heard of a Bristol captain cheating like that.’

‘He did not cheat, Sister,’ Josiah reproved her. ‘He ran his ship at a profit. Lord Mansfield himself sat in judgement and ordered a retrial.’

‘The captain was tried for murder?’ Frances asked.

The look the two of them turned on her was of blank incomprehension. ‘Lord, no!’ Josiah shook his head. ‘It is no crime to kill slaves. This was a civil matter. The insurers refused to pay out. They argued that slaves are insured only against accident, not against deliberate drowning. They won the first round in the courts and then it went to appeal. Lord Mansfield sat on the appeal, I remember. He said that it was exactly the same as if horses had gone overboard, and that the owners should be insured against their goods going into the sea for whatever reason.’

Miss Cole nodded in mild triumph. ‘He said that slaves are property, Lord Mansfield himself said they were the same as horses.’

‘But it has left us with great difficulties,’ Josiah went on. He rubbed his hand across his face and his boyish exuberance suddenly drained away. ‘Because his lordship ruled that all slaves lost at sea are to be paid for by the insurance, there is a fear that all captains running at a loss will simply drown their slaves and claim for them. The insurers do not trust us. I have spent all day trying to find someone to insure a cargo of slaves for me, and they put in so many requirements and conditions that it is hardly worth insuring at all.’

Sarah looked anxious. ‘We dare not sail without insurance,’ she said. ‘What if the ship were to go down and we were to lose all? Or a slave revolt? Josiah, we must insure.’

‘I know! I know!’ he snapped. ‘But now they will only insure against rebellions. They will not compensate for sickness, or for slaves who suicide. If a slave is whipped to death they will not compensate. If a slave starves himself to death they will not compensate. If they kill themselves what can I do? I cannot carry such losses.’

Sarah was grave. ‘Someone must insure us.’

Josiah shrugged his shoulders crossly. ‘They are all in a ring. If I could break into the Merchant Venturers then I could share my insurance with them. On the inside they all insure each other. It is the little fish left on the outside which bob about trying to snap at trifles. If I could get inside the Company then I would be safe.’

He broke off and looked at Frances, his mood lightening. ‘We can do it, I know we can do it. With the house at Queens Square and with you, Mrs Cole, to give me some presence in the world, we will get there. We have been trading for two generations, we are respectable Bristol merchants. They will invite me to join, they must invite me to join soon.’

‘It is an old trade,’ Frances said. ‘Respectable.’ She was thinking of the ship in the drizzling rain. The one hundred and thirty-one men and women thrown over the side into the heaving water, clinging to the ropes and screaming as they went overboard, bobbing in the wake of the ship as it ploughed on without them, trying to swim after it in the buffeting waves, and then seeing, on the edge of their vision, a dark scythe-like fin as it came straight towards them, slicing through the water.

‘Rose is nearly ready to sail,’ Sarah said. ‘We have to have insurance within the week. And we are still two partners short.’

‘I will get it,’ Josiah promised. ‘I will get it in time, and partners for the voyage as well. I cannot have her sitting on the dock eating up my money doing nothing. I will get insurance for her and partners too. Trust me, Sarah, I have never failed before.’

Josiah was trying, but the mood of the city, as sensitive as a flock of little wading birds which scavenge at the edge of the sea, was against him. There was a whisper around Bristol that Josiah was losing his sure touch. He was spending too much time with his new wife, he was seen driving in a hired carriage to the Hot Well, to the Clifton Down. He was negotiating to buy a house on Queens Square. They said he wanted to be a man of leisure, soon he would be too grand to drive a hard bargain. The small traders who haunted the quayside coffee shops with their savings to invest wanted to place their gold with a man who knew the value of money as they did. They wanted a man who admired the chink of a hundred hard-won guineas in a little purse. They suspected Josiah of soaring too high for them. They did not know that he was trapped in the gulf between the two worlds of the hardest city in Britain. The great men, the Merchant Venturers, had no place for him. Their wives might murmur that the new Mrs Cole had been Miss Scott and niece to Lord Scott and long to be her friend; but the new Mrs Cole was seen only at church and she attended St Mary Redclift, not the more fashionable cathedral on the north side of the river, on College Green.

They could not call on her in that dreadful little house on the dockside. The drive to the front door alone was more than most of the ladies could stomach. They sent their footmen to leave their cards, but they did not call in person, and Frances, reading the signs quite correctly, knew that she must wait until they moved into the big house in Queens Square.

At the end of the week Josiah decided to take a gamble. He would send Rose out with insurance only for goods. No insurer would cover him for shipping slaves. Josiah was too desperate for profits to wait. He threw down his hat, took Captain Smedley by the arm as they walked along the quayside and thrust him towards the ship.

‘Go!’ he exclaimed. ‘And sail her as if she were your own. I tell you honestly, Captain Smedley, we have to see a mighty profit on this sailing, and we are taking a mighty risk.’

The captain nodded. ‘I am ready. I will join her at the Kingsroad, when the pilot has brought her down the channel. I will do my best for you, Mr Cole, as I always have done.’

‘There will be a note for you in your cabin.’ Josiah’s face was hungry. ‘We may need to bend the law a little on this voyage, Captain Smedley. You would have no difficulty with that, I take it.’

‘As long as the ship and my crew are safe …’