Respectable Trade Read Online Free Page A

the Avon paid them a fee; the little ferryboat and even the lighthouses paid them rent.
    “I have some news,” Josiah said. “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 toward 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 neighborhood; but with Lord Scott’s niece on his arm, he would be welcomed in the elegant, brick-faced square. Josiah would call them “neighbor,” 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.
    M EHURU ’ 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 northwest 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 dared fish and woods where no one could walk. Whole villages were desolate, hundreds, thousands of women and children abandoned and starving in fields that they could not farm alone. It was a blight spreading inland from the coast, a plague that 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 tradehas always been north to south, and now the slavers are cutting the routes.
    “The coastal forests and plains are becoming deserted. Who