Page 11 of The Indigo Heiress

10

There is nothing like tobacco. It’s the passion of the virtuous man and whoever lives without tobacco isn’t worthy of living.

Molière

Leith steered clear of the Raleigh’s public rooms and went straight up the stairs, the black patch over his bloodshot, battered eye the only visible reminder of his bruising from the York Town fight. At least his nose wasn’t broken. He’d wait here in Williamsburg till his injuries healed before venturing up the James River. But he had another, better reason to tarry.

The date for deciding tobacco prices was at hand, and he, by some stroke of fortune, had arrived one day ahead of the annual autumn meeting. The tavern was overfull, so he’d gotten the last available room, and a private one at that. Surprising what a little coin instead of tobacco credit could win.

His quarters were small, equivalent to the cabin aboard ship, but he wouldn’t share a bed with snoring, unwashed strangers, at least. He’d asked for supper to be brought to his room—and an abundance of ale. It was the best remedy he knew for his aching body and would help him bide his time till the meeting on the morrow.

Juliet stepped from the Royal Vale landing into the bateau, the mist hovering over the James River like a veil. Sunlight skewered the cool dampness and added a fiery glint to the oaks and maples clinging to shore. The autumn dawn promised a fine day.

Their Jamaican waterman greeted her, pole in hand. She returned the greeting, sitting down at the boat’s center, Lilith behind her. Father had insisted Lilith, Rilla’s daughter and a housemaid, accompany her for propriety’s sake. Juliet missed Loveday’s company, but her sister remained home as Father was still abed.

Gathering her wits, Juliet pondered the long day ahead as the bateau reached midriver, safest from snags and shallows. Other water traffic floated both upriver and down, most burdened with cargo bound for Richmond and other landings. Plantations peeked from behind tree-lined banks anchored with newly erected tobacco warehouses and bateau sheds built since the great storm two years before. How that calamity had sunk them further, wiping out thousands of hogsheads of tobacco and seedlings in the fields and deepening the abyss of credit they’d fallen into.

Facing forward, she tried to distract herself with a bit of verse by Andrew Marvell, borrowed from the Ravenals’ library. Now therefore, while the youthful hue sits on thy skin like morning dew ... let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball, and tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life. She’d memorized the poem in its entirety save a few last lines.

Reaching up a hand, she slanted her hat forward against the rising sun, glad her unpowdered hair was pinned in a cascade of waves and curls at the back, not in the high poufs seen everywhere at present. Just like Mama’s with its gloss and blackness, Loveday had said as she wielded the curling tongs. Juliet couldn’t quite recall. Charlotte Catesby’s presence, the way she’d moved across a room, and the gentle cadence of her voice were becoming increasingly hazy.

Juliet shut her eyes against the river’s glare, the watery ride gliding by. A chariot would be bumped nearly to pieces on the rocky, rutted road to Williamsburg.

Once they reached the Lower James, a coach would be waiting to take them the rest of the way to Williamsburg. If only they still had their England Street townhouse. Though small, it was charming and comfortable and had been part of her mother’s dowry years before. Thankfully, Mama had not seen it sold to settle a debt.

Instead Juliet would lodge at Christiana Campbell’s, the town’s finest, at least for ladies. Let the gentlemen frequent the Raleigh Tavern. She’d only set foot there for the meeting, though she did look forward to visiting the millinery farther down Duke of Gloucester Street and bringing Loveday a bit of lace or ribbon or some inexpensive trinket.

Juliet and Lilith reached the capital before noon and went to their lodgings, then made their way down the cobbled street on foot. Steeling herself against the Raleigh’s smoke and spirits, Juliet stepped onto the tavern’s wide front porch as Lilith left her side to wait on a bench around back near the kitchen house. Dread pooled in Juliet’s middle as she entered, seeking the spot reserved for the meeting, a thick, ink-stained daybook clutched to her bodice. Several frock-coated gentlemen standing by the Apollo Room door greeted her and stepped aside, cocked hats doffed.

“Good day, Miss Catesby.”

“Standing in for your father today, I presume?”

“How is the Upper James of late?”

The large chamber’s new Prussian-blue paint was admirable, but her nerves were too taut to linger on it long. Planters and factors and agents stood cheek by jowl. A quick head count numbered nearly a hundred.

The Scottish merchants, those few tobacco lords who’d braved the Atlantic on various vessels to attend this autumnal meeting, stood in a line along the wainscoted back wall. Half a dozen in number, they were easily distinguished by their garments. Scarlet cloaks marked them, as did their ebony canes and silver wigs and cocked hats. These Scots looked proud. Entitled and imperious. Ruthless to a man.

Was Buchanan here?

A flicker of resentment kindled as Juliet moved to an open, fly-spackled window, her back to the chamber. Digging deep in her pocket, she found a vial of Loveday’s. Bending her head discreetly, she breathed in the distillation of lavender, sage, marjoram, and mint. Suddenly her sister seemed close and the tightness around her temples eased, though her hand clutching the daybook stayed damp.

These meetings were notoriously long—and long-winded. Men loved dickering over the price of their premier crop, besting each other and calling out flaws and flummoxes. Today, freight expenses and custom duties ruled the day, voices already raised in varying degrees of aggravation. When a door clicked closed and the moderator made his way through the throng, Juliet let out a sigh of relief.

Leith rather enjoyed observing these garrulous Virginians. Their American accents varied, some with a detectable Brit ish influence, others indicating they were Virginia born and bred. Most were masters of backslapping and ale sipping, false bravado and coarse jesting. He kept quiet, a habit of his that gained far more than any jaw flapping. Tall as he was, he kept to the back of the room, where he had a wide view of the proceedings despite his eye patch.

What he hadn’t expected was a woman amid so many men.

She stood by a window, her head bent, paging intently through a daybook. He couldn’t see her features or tell if she was young or old. His gaze hung on her shawl with its blue ground and embroidered white flowers. The same blossoms adorned her wide-brimmed straw hat.

The indigo plant?

As he thought it, she shut her daybook and looked up and around, turning slightly forward so he could see her clearly beneath the brim of her hat. Dark hair crept past a lace cap that framed her pale oval face made up of pleasing if not perfect features. Young. Genteel. She stood out like a wildflower among weeds. Her gaze swept the room before she began talking with the elderly gentleman beside her.

Even at a distance she wore that tight, fatigued look he’d seen on his clerks who’d kept too long at their books. It was broken only by a flash of vitality now and then when she smiled or made conversation. Something oddly familiar about her tugged at him ...

“Gentlemen—and one dear lady,” the moderator began, with a sidelong look at her as chuckling rolled through the room. “As has been said, ‘Life is a smoke! If this be true, tobacco will thy life renew; then fear not death, nor killing care whilst we have best Virginia here.’” Clearing his throat, he grew more serious. “We are gathered today to set our annual market price for tobacco this twenty-ninth day of October, the year of our Lord 1774...”

Leith had never been here to witness price setting, though his father had on occasion. When they were absent, their factors stood in for them. On either side of him were three of his own agents—McCann, Innes, and Hendry—who managed his Virginia stores.

Planters began calling out numbers, much like an auction, to furious ayes and nays from both Virginians and Scots. It was one of the Glaswegian merchants’ chief complaints that these planters established their own terms, though for tobacco growers, how could it be otherwise?

“Since those of us on the Upper James naval district surpass all others in terms of tobacco exports, we should have the first—or the most—say,” one planter cried out amid the melee. “All here know our sweet-scented leaf is far preferred to the bitter Orinoco—”

“Only in France,” another man countered. “The Danes and Northern Europe prefer the stronger, bright-leaf variety.”

“That is neither here nor there. Let us return to the matter at hand.” The moderator gestured to an assistant, who held a stack of what Leith guessed were accounts. “I shall call each planter by name, who’ll then tell me by number their outbound cargoes for the Clyde and Glasgow—”

“We shall be here for a fortnight, then,” another Virginian protested. “Surely there’s a better way to agree upon a price without splitting hairs.”

Frowning, the moderator consulted a ledger. “For this last season, a total of thirty-one thousand, ninety-six hogsheads of tobacco were landed there by a total of thirty-two firms in Scotland.”

Another man’s voice overrode the moderator’s. “Yet our debt to these merchants has only increased, dependent as we are on their stores here and the goods we require. Their markup along the Chesapeake is extreme and their profit exorbitant. I cower at the costs.”

“Which must come to an end!” someone else all but shouted.

An aggrieved rumble swept the room even as several ayes crested above it from other Scots present. These colonists had a great many grievances that had to do with trade. The presence of the tobacco merchants simply put them in the midst of the storm.

As if to highlight the chasm, the planters faced the Scots, drawing a dividing line of sorts in the chamber. Would Leith’s fellow merchants and their factors, few as they were, take a verbal pummeling and not speak?

“Well over a million pounds’ sterling is owed by American planters—Virginians foremost—at the close of this season,” one Glaswegian merchant said, his gaze fixed on the knot of York River planters complaining the loudest.

A stone-faced gentleman cleared his throat. “Fueling our debts are a number of unreasonable, arbitrary charges imposed by you tobacco lords that have somehow become law over time.”

“Name them,” Leith replied.

A bewigged, stout man removed his cocked hat, a puff of powder dusting his caped shoulders. “Among these aforementioned petty marketing charges are British duties, Virginia export duties, freight, primage, cooperage, porterage, brokerage, postage of letters, and the merchants’ rising commissions, to list a few.”

“Much of the duty is recovered on reexportation to European markets,” Leith said matter-of-factly. To be less civil would earn him no allies in this simmering room.

“But in those markets, other heavy charges are again imposed.”

“Yet you remain able to set tobacco’s market price year after year,” Leith countered.

“Mayhap you can speak to the market surplus that needs addressing too,” another planter said.

An hour passed, then two. Leith consulted his watch. Half past four. Would these Virginians not come to the point? As he snapped his watch shut, a silken voice broke through the blether.

“We Virginians have set the annual price and tried our luck in all the principal tobacco markets for over a century, only to see Glasgow destroy London’s supremacy in the trade. Shipments sent to Glasgow in 1773 were triple those sent to any other port.” The young woman seemed to look straight at him. “Half the tobacco from the Upper James sailed under the Spiers and Buchanan mark. A handful of British merchants have complete control of the bulk of our tobacco exports, which is no longer tenable. I say we end Glasgow’s monopoly and their ruthless policies, so different than traditional English trade.”

Indignation turned to outright jubilation as her words fell away. Clapping reached a crescendo before she continued, her attention on the tobacco lords. Leith listened to her steady American cadence with only a hint of the mother country, a sort of linguistic independence.

“You Scots merchants have arrived at a remarkable time. No doubt you’ve heard our recent answer to your—rather, Parliament’s—Intolerable Acts.”

“Your Articles of Association,” Leith replied.

She nodded, her thoughtful, calm words reaching across the room. “These articles propose a boycott on imports and exports from Britain, a ban on the slave trade, an improve ment of American agriculture, and produce for colonists at reasonable prices.”

“So you would cut us out,” Spiers’s factor said, steel in his tone. “Ship solely to continental markets.”

“Such smacks of treason,” another Scots merchant said. “An irreversible break with Britain.”

“Perhaps, but the truth remains.” Her voice stayed steadfast. “No civilized people on earth have been so badly paid for their labor as the planters of Virginia. You merchants have done more mischief to the tobacco trade by your outright corruption than anything in recent history. Treason or no, an accounting of some sort is long overdue.”

Sweat broke across Leith’s brow as the warm chamber erupted with huzzahs.

At last the moderator’s aggressive pounding of his gavel quieted the room. “Let us return to the purpose of our meeting, one and all. Price setting for this season, I beg you.”