A Respectable Trade by Philippa Gregory

Author:Philippa Gregory
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780061094330
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 1992-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

20

NEXT MORNING MEHURU TAPPED on the parlor door. Frances was sitting at the round walnut table, another chair placed opposite her. A bowl of hyacinths stood in the center of the table, their waxy white flowers scenting the room. Mehuru saw in one quick glance that this was not a lesson, when the table was swept bare, but he could not read Frances’s set face. She was very pale, and there was a bluish shade under her eyes, as if she had lain sleepless. He wondered if she were ill. A second child had taken the nagging cough; they were all finding the slow turn to warm weather arduous and long. Maybe even white people, whose skin was suited to sodden days of mist and endless gray afternoons, dreaded the long darkness and the pale, disappointing coolness of the midday sun?

“Please sit down,” Frances said. Her voice quavered slightly.

Mehuru drew back the chair and sat before her, his hands clasped lightly on the table before him.

“I realize . . . I realize . . .” Frances started, and then broke off. “I have taught you for months, and I hardly know you at all,” she faltered. “I have taught you to speak and never asked you anything about yourself, about your life before you came here.”

Mehuru’s face was an ebony mask, carefully held from expression. He could not follow Frances’s train of thought. He did not know she had heard his drumming. He did not know that for the first time and painfully, Frances was feeling emotions stir and warm into life.

“You want to know about me?”

“Will you tell me about your home, Cicero?”

He flashed a look at her at once. “Cicero is an English slave,” he said precisely. “Cicero was born here, in this room. You named him then.”

She bit at her upper lip, sucking it down so that her face was momentarily distorted and ugly. “Very well. Just for now I will call you Mehuru. Where were you born, Mehuru? And where did you live? And what did you do?”

He hesitated, thinking to refuse this sudden, surprising curiosity. Then he relented. He could not resist the pleasure of talking of his home, even to Frances. “I was born in the city of Oyo,” he said. “My mother was a companion to the mother of the king, my father was one of the eso—” He broke off, searching for the English word. “I don’t know what you call it.”

“What did he do?” Frances was smiling, thinking that the eso might be a little band of singers, or farmers, or some primitive group.

“He leads fighting men,” Mehuru replied. “Those on horses.”

“Cavalry?” Frances asked, surprised. “You had horses?”

“Yes. An army of horses.” Mehuru hesitated, gathering the words. “A hundred horses to a lord; each lord obeys a higher. At the top a commander, and he reports to the alafin—the king.”

Frances blinked. It all sounded rather complicated for a tribe of naked cannibals. “Who else reported to the alafin?”

“The prime minister and the council of nobles.

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