Fortune's Whelp (Fortune's Whelp Series Book 1) by Benerson Little

Author:Benerson Little [Little, Benerson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penmore Press LLC
Published: 2015-12-06T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

[A] pox of poverty, it makes a man a slave, makes wit and honor sneak, my soul grow lean and rusty for want of credit.

—Aphra Behn, The Rover, 1677

Edward, still flush from his second escape from a French privateer while crossing St. George’s Channel, pushed through the door of the Black Swan coffeehouse on Tower Lane near the Old Bowling Green and stepped into a large room busy with the clatter of word and cup.

Before him were sea captains and merchant traders growling and grumbling as they smoked their pipes and drank their coffee, about why they could not get enough convoy protection, about how the French were damnifying English shipping, about how it was safer to sail under Swedish or Danish colors. Some quietly puffed at their pipes and read the news posted beneath stained paintings, lottery notices, and various broadsides on smoke-smudged walls.

In a tobacco-smoke darkened corner, an investor, owner, and captain signed articles of agreement on a table mottled by spilled liquids, ink, and candle wax. A notary public stood by to put his seal on the agreement and sign his name, abbreviating his title as Not’s Pub’cus.

A wily old investor who had just returned from the Tolzey—the local Exchange or stock market—kept an ear open as he listened both to supercargoes just returned from West India as they discussed goods and profits, and to several members of the West India and Chesapeake Trades as they complained of Scottish and Irish interlopers.

A sea surgeon and a captain-owner discussed sailing a slaver from Guinea to West India independently of the Royal Africa Company, and thereby illegally. The captain-owner delayed discussing wages, and instead cursed high insurance rates and bottomree, how they were keeping him from making a profit.

“Damn, a good surgeon would help me keep a few more slaves alive and so make the voyage more profitable. Are you a good surgeon?” the captain-owner asked. “I warn you, though: when the war’s over I won’t be able to interlope on the Africa Company’s territory, the goddamn navy will start protecting the Company again. An honest man can’t hardly make a living while the Company has a monopoly on slaves to the West Indies. So, are you a good surgeon?”

Nearby, a reasonably well-dressed young man—or he would never have been granted entrance—pretending to be a merchant’s son but revealed by eventual admission as a member of the strolling trade and a penniless poet, sat with a foppish old gentleman and told him he was tired of playing roles written by others and wanted, so he said, “to his own self be true.” At the old gentleman’s suggestion, the young man made his way to a tavern on the quay to meet a woman who could, so the old gentleman said, help him. A day and several bottles of wine later, he found himself trepanned, spirited, and indentured aboard a pink bound for Virginia, having learned just how mystical wine, woman, and a cudgel can be.

All had come to

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