![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Frances and Mehuru eventually fall in love, and Josiah risks ruin in financial schemes dependent on a single ship cruelly over-packed with captured Africans. Mehuru and ten others are chained in a cellar, where they are half-starved, raped by Josiah’s house guest and whipped, while spending afternoons in the parlor learning polite English. It is Josiah and Sarah’s new plan that a handful of slaves will be brought back to England where Frances will tutor them in the ways of the gentry, selling them for an enormous profit. To both, it is an even exchange-Josiah gets connections to circles of business he could never enter, and Frances has a home. He finds Frances Scott, niece to a prominent lord, but herself a penniless orphan. He and his sister Sarah have done all they can with their three modest vessels-they kidnap Africans, trade them for sugar and rum in the West Indies, then sell the goods in England-but since much of the better trade is denied them because of their class, Josiah decides to marry up. ![]() Mehuru is captured by the English and thrown onto a slave ship owned by Josiah Cole, a small Bristol merchant with dreams of advancement. In 1787 Africa, Mehuru, an envoy for his Yoruban king, is traveling the empire to deliver the king’s edict: Yorubans will desist in all slave-trading with white slavers. 2006, etc.) is a sobering account of the English slave trade, with a bit of romance thrown in. The latest page-turner from Gregory ( The Boleyn Inheritance, Dec. ![]()
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