Free Respectable Trade by Philippa Gregory Page B

felled by someone dropping something on you, or poisoned by some manufactory, you will be destroyed by cholera or typhoid or both. The foul water and the summer sun are a fatal combination.”
    “I wonder that your family chose to live here,” Frances said faintly.
    Josiah laughed shortly. “We did not choose! We were not in a position to choose! We bought what we could, where we could. My father bought the warehouse and dockside from his profits as a privateer, and that was where we lived. We were glad enough to have a business to run and premises to call our own.”
    “He was a privateer?”
    Josiah nodded and then laughed abruptly at her shocked face. “Don’t look so aghast, Mrs. Cole—he was a privateer, not a pirate! He had a letter from the Crown licensing him to attack French shipping. He took out his one leaky old boat and captured a French brig. That was our first chance. She was called the Marguerite. We paid our dues to the Crown and kept her andtraded with her. It was the founding of our fortunes, the founding of our trading line. When she sank, we called our next boat Daisy after her.”
    Frances nodded. The carriage rolled onto a wooden bridge. Looking down, she saw the water rich with waste. Litter, garbage, excrement, and all the flotsam and jetsam of a busy port bobbed around the pillars of the bridge on the rising tide. The carriage bumped along the quay on the northern side of the river, and then the road ahead opened out with sudden, surprising grace. There was an avenue of young plane trees ahead, their broad leaves still fresh. There was a smooth green lawn in the center of the square, and a proud statue of a man on a galloping horse. The stink from the river was less strong, and the noise of the Backs was left behind them.
    “Queens Square,” said Josiah with satisfaction. “As good as any crescent in Bath, eh?”
    He was exaggerating; it was not as good as Bath. It lacked the easy regularity of those fine terraces, their confident scale. Part of the square was built in the golden stone of Bath, but part of it was red brick, and the profile of the roofs and the detail on the houses was idiosyncratic—each house an individual. But it was a well-proportioned square lined with young trees, divided into four by long avenues running north to south and east to west. In the middle the paths crossed and the statue made a handsome centerpiece. The houses were new; some looked like London houses in smart red brick with pointings of white mortar and corners of white stone. At the east end was an elegant large building flanked by two wings in thick yellow stone: the Custom House.
    The carriage drew up before the first house in the southwest corner, one of the biggest and most imposing in the square. “This is where we shall live,” Josiah announced. “This is where I have been aiming for years.”
    Frances looked at him in surprise. She had never before heard of a man desiring anything more than to stay in the positionto which he had been called. She had heard men complain of the decline of manners, but never to seek change. Her father had preached that it was God’s will for a man to remain where he was born; a good Christian stayed where God had been pleased to put him. Josiah was the first man in her experience to express an ambition—to want something more than what he had been given. It was a revolutionary doctrine.
    “You have been aiming for it?”
    “My father was born on an earthen floor in a hovel,” Josiah said. “No more than a peasant. My sister in a collier’s cottage, a coal miner’s daughter. I was born on a stone floor in a warehouse. My son will be born in a proper bed, in a proper house. My family is on the rise, madam. Before the century is out, we will be known as gentry. We will have a country house and a carriage. This is but a step on our way, not our final destination.”
    Frances flushed at his mention of a son, but Josiah had no idea that he was indelicate. He