Free Respectable Trade by Philippa Gregory Page A

fifteen months, she will be back in port again, and it should be set right.”
    “Gracious,” Frances said.
    “And I will carry the loss for the whole of that time,” he said irritably. “Just as I have to offer credit to the planters for two years at a time.” He looked at her, and his frown cleared. “This means nothing to you. Let me take you for a drive.” He handed her up the little step into the carriage. Frances unfurled her parasol against the bright summer sunshine and tipped the shade over her face.
    “Go to Queens Square first,” Josiah ordered the driver. “This is where I propose we should buy a house,” he explained to Frances. “We have to go ’round through the old town, but pay no attention to the dirt and the noise. Queens Square is very smart indeed.”
    The carriage moved forward, jolting on the cobbles, sailors and dockers grudgingly giving it room. The street sellers eyed Frances’s fine clothes, and one girl, hawking watercress from a tray, turned her head and spit on the ground.
    They drove down the Back Lane, the overhang of the houses above their heads so close that the streets were in permanent twilight, in a fog of foul air. The sun shone in a brilliant stripe down the center of the street, but the houses and the foul-smelling middens were in dank shade. Great wooden beams over their heads braced apart the houses on opposite sides of the street, which looked as if they were ready to topple together. The broad gutter in the center of the road was an open drain, thick with slops, mud, and garbage, stinking in the heat, breeding swarms of fruit flies. People swore as the carriage lurched past, splashing them with slurry. The horses scrabbled to find their footing on the greasy stones, and the carriage bumped and dipped; the road was almost impassable. Frances was afraid that the horses would founder. She gripped her parasol a little tighter and held one gloved hand to her face, trying to block out the evil stink of the lane.
    Every doorway, every archway was an entrance to a workshop. There were woodcarvers and seamstresses, there were coopers and workers of metal. There was a wigmaker who also pulled teeth; there was a small, dingy apothecary shop doing a roaring trade in laudanum and neat opium. Every other house seemed to be a gin shop; every third house was a brothel. It was a medieval city of timbered overhanging houses suddenly crowded to the bursting point with small, dangerous industries.
    Frances, who had spent all but two of her thirty-five years in the country vicarage, stared in horror from one ominously dark doorway to another. The white-faced occupants stared back at her, and someone shouted an insult at the carriage and threw a handful of mud.
    “It is rough,” Josiah conceded. “Bristol is a city of labor, my dear, not leisure.”
    “How can people bear it?”
    He gave a snort of laughter. “This is a prosperous street, my dear. If I showed you the colliers at Bedminster, then you would see something to shock you. They live like animals in their ownfilth, and no person of any wealth goes near them. They live in a world of their own, without parson or magistrates—totally outside society, totally without law.”
    Towering on the hill above them, in abrupt contrast to the clutter of roofs below it, was the ornate, highly decorated church of St. Mary Redclift at the head of a soaring flight of stone steps. But they turned away from the spire and back toward the city, passing over the bridge.
    “It would have been quicker to go across the river by the ferryboat,” Josiah explained. “Queens Square is directly opposite my dock. When we have our house, I will take a boat over every day. The lad will row me over for a ha’penny each way.”
    “I am sure these streets cannot be healthy,” Frances said. She tried to keep the dismay from her voice.
    “They are pestilential, madam!” Josiah exclaimed. “If you are not killed by some fool setting fire to your house, or