The Sugar Merchant’s Wife Read online

  The Sugar Merchant’s Wife

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Also by Erica Brown

  Copyright

  The Sugar Merchant's Wife

  Erica Brown

  To my copy-editor Rachel for her unending patience.

  Chapter One

  For the rest of her life, Blanche would detest dandelions. She could cope with them in flower, glowing like bright suns in the grass, but not when they turned fluffy-white, their seeds tossed like tiny parasols on the breeze.

  Dandelions grew profusely on the common opposite the Bedminster cottage that Blanche’s husband had bought on a whim. His original idea had been to use it as extra quarters for the servants. However, Blanche and the children had fallen in love with its pretty rooms and twisted apple trees and given it a name – Little Paradise.

  ‘It is not a playground,’ Conrad had said.

  Smiling bewitchingly, Blanche had argued that the children should have exercise in the open air.

  Conrad had pointed out that they had a garden at Somerset Parade.

  Blanche had convinced him that their children burned off more energy playing in the empty rooms of the cottage and running on the common opposite where sheep still grazed and the grass grew waist-high.

  She won the argument, and for a while Little Paradise lived up to its name.

  It was after Anne went picking dandelion clocks on the common that everything changed.

  ‘They’re just weeds,’ Blanche remarked as she straightened the newly hand-painted sign that hung from the cottage gate.

  Anne held her chin high and said to her mother loftily, ‘I think them very fine and if I put them in a vase in my bedroom and leave them close to the window, they can fly away like fairies when the wind blows.’

  Blanche laughed.

  Clutching her bouquet, Anne crossed to the common to collect more.

  Blanche craned her neck and smiled at the sight of Anne’s straw bonnet bobbing up and down as she picked her dandelions.

  Her attention was drawn to the sight of an old woman struggling along the path that dissected the common into two uneven halves – a street seller on her way home judging by the tray she carried.

  ‘Lemonade, my dear,’ Blanche heard her calling to Anne. ‘Only a penny a glass. I have just enough left for a slip of a girl.’

  ‘Damn this blasted kite!’

  Blanche tore her gaze away from the woman and directed it at her son. ‘Wash your mouth out, Maximillian Heinkel!’

  Max pulled a face. ‘It’s enough to make a man swear,’ he grumbled.

  ‘You’re not a man,’ his mother said in a chastising manner, then wistfully to herself, ‘Please stay a child for a little longer.’

  Accompanied by his younger brother and sister, Max was attempting to fly a kite. The wind was less than exuberant. Like a dead bird it trailed behind them, bumping and shuddering through the grass.

  ‘I think it’s time we went home,’ called Blanche.

  ‘I bet it isn’t,’ said Max, who was always prepared to hold an opinion on anything.

  A church clock struck four.

  ‘I think I won the bet. Now let’s see how much you owe me,’ she said, holding her finger to her chin and looking as though she really was calculating a figure.

  Max groaned despairingly. ‘Already? We haven’t got it flying properly. Couldn’t we stay a little longer?’

  ‘There’s not enough breeze and there’s nothing to be done about it today,’ his mother called back as she shut the cottage gate.

  Resigned that kite-flying was over for the day, the children obeyed, though Max dragged his feet. Blanche smiled to herself. Conrad called him defiant. She preferred to think that he was more independent than the others. He didn’t get dejected as they did when given orders he had no wish to obey, but contemplative, as though he were considering how best to achieve his desire without appearing belligerent.

  Tucking the kite behind his back, he came to his mother’s side. She eyed him lovingly. She shouldn’t have favourites, but sometimes she couldn’t resist being too proud of him. She tried not to show it too much in front of Conrad. Good man that he was, he had married her knowing that she was expecting a child that wasn’t his. At the time she had thought that Nelson Strong was his father, but could not tell her new husband.

  Nelson had made love to her before she knew he was her half-brother. The truth of that still made her tremble. It was only when Max was born two months before he should have been, that the truth struck her and she remembered a night spent with another man…

  Behind his intelligent eyes, Max’s brain clearly ticked like a clock. He was already planning his next day of kite-flying. ‘I’m back at school soon and the weekends are not always the best time if the weather’s bad. But school breaks up in four weeks. There will be days then. What do you think, Mother?’

  His adamant expression struck a chord in her heart. Blanche smoothed the dark-blond hair where sun-lightened streaks fell over his brow. ‘I think that this is not the best place for flying kites. It’s too close to the river. We shall take the carriage to Durdham Down when we next go kite-flying. The wind is brisker up there.’

  Max brightened. ‘Good.’

  ‘I’m thirsty,’ said Lucy, her youngest, slipping her hand into that of her mother. Bright blue eyes shone like moons in her baby round face.

  ‘I’m sorry, but the pump at the cottage needs mending. You’ll have to wait until you get home,’ said Blanche.

  ‘I’m not thirsty,’ said Anne, addressing Lucy in a childish effort to invoke jealousy. ‘I bought some lemonade from that old woman back there.’

  ‘Can I have one, Mother?’ Lucy asked, adopting the plaintive voice that usually got her what she wanted.

  ‘Me too,’ added Adeline.

  Blanche sighed. After all, it was a long walk back. ‘I suppose so.’ She turned to where the old woman had been with her stone jug and tin cups, but she was gone. A cloud of dandelion clocks flew around in a sudden gust of breeze in the place where she’d been.

  Blanche sighed. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to stay thirsty.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Anne, ‘I’m not thirsty at all,’ and she laughed and danced along the edge of the common and most of the way home.

  It was the most wonderful sound to her mother’s ears, a sound she would treasure for ever. It was the last time for everything.

  * * *

  Blanche stared at the bedraggled stalks wilting in a vase on the window sill. Just days ago they’d been growing in the sleek grass in front of Little Paradise. Anne had been well. Now she was very sick and, like the flowers, was dying.

  ‘If I lose Anne, I swear to God I will never
, ever bear another child,’ Blanche murmured.

  Conrad was standing behind her, his hand on her shoulder. She felt him tense and knew he would take her bitter words to heart. It couldn’t be helped. Anne’s face was deathly white, her skin shiny with sweat and the room stunk as a result of the continual emptying of her bowels.

  Conrad was a good man and Blanche had never lacked for anything, but she’d give it all now, including her own life, for her daughter to recover.

  ‘Shall I get Mary to bring you some tea and something to eat?’ asked Conrad solicitously.

  Blanche shook her head. Although her mouth was dry and her stomach ached with hunger, suffering in such a little way seemed inconsequential and in a strange way, just. Such discomfort was trivial in comparison to what Anne was going through.

  Blanche stroked her daughter’s damp hair away from her brow. Anne had been given laudanum but she still grimaced with pain though had ceased screaming. Seeing her knees drawn up to her stomach and her body convulsing in agony had been the worse experience – so far.

  ‘It won’t be long,’ the doctor said softly. ‘Perhaps just before dawn.’

  ‘We can only pray,’ said Conrad. ‘Her life is in God’s hands now.’

  Blanche kept her gaze fixed on her child. ‘She’s going to die,’ she said, her body cold as ice. ‘God is deaf.’

  Her husband removed his hands from her shoulders and saw the doctor out. On his return he tried to convince her to take some refreshment and leave everything to the nurse.

  Blanche allowed herself to be persuaded and swallowed a cup of tea and a morsel of food. When a church clock struck midnight, she awoke to find that she’d fallen asleep on a settee in the drawing room.

  Conrad slept across from her in a chair. She didn’t wake him but swiftly refreshed herself and went back to her daughter’s room. The nurse had straightened the bedclothes and placed a bunch of lavender in a vase at the side of the bed. The dandelion stalks had been thrown away.

  Blanche sent the nurse away. ‘This is my child,’ she insisted. ‘I will take over now.’

  The room was warm and dark by virtue of the heavy green damask curtains covering the windows. The smell of lavender filled the air, bunches of it hanging before the open windows. More lavender was scattered over the floor, the bluish-purple buds releasing their heady aroma with every soft footfall. It was said that it helped keep the ‘miasma’ at bay. She’d remembered it from the Reverend Strong’s room when she’d been in service at Marstone Court, the Strong family’s mansion outside Bristol.

  The Reverend had been dying of a lung disease, the congestion building and necessitating him being turned in his bed so he could breathe. She also remembered Tom and the Reverend’s good deed. He had adopted Tom, snatching him from a life on the streets, perhaps to end up dead or destitute, hung or transported to Botany Bay. Ten years had passed, yet it came back to haunt her even now.

  She hoped the lavender would do more for her little one; anything she could do, she would do. The past had no bearing here. The present, and Anne having a future were all that mattered.

  She’d eaten little and the sleep she’d just had was not enough to make up for the days and nights of sitting beside her child’s bed. Hours of patting the fevered head with cold compresses and getting her to sip a little liquid finally took their toll. Eyelids heavy, she sank her head onto her folded arms at the side of the bed and slept deeply. Not until daybreak pierced through the curtains did she wake with a start and know immediately that death had come with the rising sun. Her child was still and terribly silent. The rasping chest and the laboured breath were gone.

  She couldn’t cry. That was the strangest thing about it. The fear and worry of the past few days seemed to have soaked up her tears and her voice. There was only a great emptiness inside where her heart used to be.

  Even when the bedroom door opened and Conrad entered, she still sat holding her child’s hand.

  He touched her shoulder, a gesture meant to convey both strength and sympathy, and that he felt exactly the same. At last he managed to say, ‘She is with God now.’

  ‘God!’ Blanche shook her head so vehemently that a few dark tresses fell from a swiftly disintegrating chignon. ‘I don’t want her to be with God. I want her to be here with me.’

  Her body shook with sobs. The world would never be the same again. The laughter was gone.

  * * *

  The smell was the first sign that death stalked the mean houses around Lewins Mead where whole families shared one room. Behind the ramshackle door of her one-roomed home in Cabot’s Yard, Edith had been battling it for days.

  ‘It’s the stink that makes people sick,’ she said, and took another sip of the dark, brown beer they called porter. Beer helped her forget that she was poor and hungry, that Lizzie, her youngest child was crying with pain and that her husband was away at sea and only returned to fill her belly with another baby.

  Molly from downstairs poked her head round the door. ‘Mrs Carter’s youngest is gone. Died in the night. Not even a year old, bless ’im.’

  Edith sighed. ‘Not surprising in this bloody place. I lost four of mine before they were five. How many ’ave you lost?’

  Molly shrugged. ‘Can’t remember.’

  ‘How’s the little ’un?’

  Edith had heard Molly’s newborn crying in the night, in terrible pain by the sound of it.

  Molly shrugged again. ‘I gave the mite some water to cool her down. Ain’t got no milk left,’ she said, and patted the flatness where her breasts should be. ‘What you doin’ with them flowers, Edith?’ She nodded at the mean bunch of lavender hanging at the window.

  ‘Helps keep the cholera at bay. It’s good for sickness. Used to do this out at Marstone Court when I was in service for the Strong family and looking after the old Reverend Strong. Nice man he was.’

  ‘Could afford to be nice with all that money,’ Molly remarked.

  ‘No, he was really nice. Even adopted a street urchin and treated him like a son. Tom, his name was. Tom Strong.’

  Molly simpered. ‘Sounds as though you were sweet on him.’

  Edith felt herself blushing. ‘He was ’andsome and brave. But there was nothing between us. He liked my friend Blanche best.’ She sighed. ‘She married someone else.’

  ‘Do you ever see her?’

  Edith paused. She’d been about to lie, but changed her mind. ‘I’ve seen her a few times with her children and her husband. She was dressed beautiful and got out of a carriage.’

  Molly picked at her teeth. ‘Did yer make yerself known?’

  Edith was dismissive. ‘Course not! Look at me…’ She indicated her patched skirt and the sack on which she’d sewed strings to make it an apron. ‘What would she think? The last time she saw me I was wearing the livery of the Strong family. I looked grand as could be, just as I should for service in the household of sugar merchants. Now I looks more like I climbed out of a coal hole or a rag and bone yard.’

  Molly swiped at the flies, stragglers of those that buzzed in a black cloud around the privy.

  ‘This place stinks,’ said Freddie, Edith’s eldest, wrinkling his nose so that his freckles seemed to bump into each other.

  Edith made a wry face and Freddie made one back.

  Cocky little sod, she thought and smiled.

  ‘Should ’ave got more of that stuff,’ Freddie added.

  ‘I knows that,’ she muttered, reached up and crushed the lavender in her palm. Crushing the blooms released the perfume, she remembered.

  ‘You ain’t got enough,’ Molly remarked.

  ‘Ain’t never got enough,’ Edith grumbled.

  Over on the bed, Lizzie was still groaning, her knees drawn up with pain towards her stomach.

  Molly disappeared and most of the flies went with her.

  Edith tried to quell her fear as she mopped her daughter’s brow. Lizzie lay on a trestle bed made from tea chests in the corner. Her eyes were closed, her face was
hot and she muttered deliriously as she heaved her thin little body from side to side.

  Edith reached for the empty water pail in which she’d been dipping the cloth and swung it towards Freddie. ‘Yer sister needs more water, Fred.’

  For once, he didn’t bother to argue. Edith guessed he was as worried as she, but they weren’t the sort of family that shared emotions. Only tough people survived in their world.

  Freddie bolted off to the cast-iron pump that was set in a stone arch just across the alley. When he got back, the bucket was only half full.

  ‘Well, that ain’t much,’ she said, her red knuckles resting on her hips.

  ‘It’s them,’ he exclaimed, water sloshing from the bucket as he slammed it down on the floor. ‘Beannie and ’is mates. They’re looking for a roller. Wanted me to come along with ’em.’

  Edith eyed him accusingly. ‘Freddie Beasley, you ain’t mixing with bad company again, are you?’

  Freddie wiped the snot from his nose. ‘Course not. Said I ’ad more important things to do, so they pushed me about and called me a sissy.’

  ‘Little sods! Don’t they know yer sister’s ill?’

  Freddie picked up a stick of firewood, bent down and prodded it into a mouse hole causing plaster the size of a dinner plate to fall to the floor. ‘Said ’is little brother died last week, and Ernie said, “So what? My father died yesterday.” And Tim said that he’d lost three sisters and that was more than anybody!’

  Edith barely stopped mopping Lizzie’s brow. ‘Comes to something when kids are counting up their dead as though it was a bloody game. So who are they going to roll?’ She hoped it was the landlord. She didn’t like him at all. He’d told every woman in the lane that they could work off their rent if they wanted to. One or two had, then found he still charged them the same rent anyway. But she was disappointed.

  ‘The doctor,’ Freddie said, as half his stick disappeared into the mouse hole and another piece of plaster crashed to the floor.

  Edith left what she was doing and grabbed his shoulder. ‘There’s a doctor round ’ere? You never told me that before.’