Quite Possibly Allies (Freeman Universe Book 2) by Patrick O'Sullivan

Author:Patrick O'Sullivan [O'Sullivan, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dunkerron Press
Published: 2022-04-29T22:00:00+00:00

33

During that brief year when his father had been declared dead and Macer had been the Gant, he’d tried to do an inventory of all the improvements on Gant land, and specifically those that weren’t leased to tenant farmers but rather his own responsibility for repair and maintenance.

Besides the working hangar where he kept his flitter and his tools—and the boat docks where they kept the boats, and the storage hangar where they kept the flyers only used for special purposes and occasions—there were a dozen barns and silos in various states of disintegration, cow sheds, and sheep sheds; garages for the ground transportation and stables for the horses; and a couple bunkhouses, one halfway between the hangars and docks, and presently vacant, and one farther upslope in the next valley over, on the far shoulder of a ridge that ran from the mountain in the heart of Clear Island. The tall spiny ridges were natural dividers, and it was a hike up to the far bunkhouse, but he’d head there if things at the house went ill.

Macer kicked a stone across the gravel drive and gazed up hill. He couldn’t see the house yet but it lurked there, behind the copse meant to hide the lower bunkhouse from the view. It was built by his grandfather’s grandmother to look out over the bay to the east and all the working guts of the place to the southeast, and downslope. The house itself stood on a promontory rock, one that limited how many wings and appendages could be added, else it would look like an old woman’s idea of a castle of old, and her son’s and her grandson’s tacked on expansions leaning against it as if they were too lazy to stand on their own.

As it was, all but the tower house itself had the hint of a slow slide down, every swaybacked ridge beam and patched slate roof losing a war with the inevitable gravity that too much pride and property and not enough cold hard cash exerted. The Gants weren’t First Families, but early adopters, and they’d farmed this valley for three hundred years, and the next valley over for nearly two hundred. That his father had nearly lost it all in less than thirty years of adventurism and get-richer-quick schemes wasn’t widely known. The wolf was no longer at the door, and Luther Gant might have learned his lesson, but if he had it would be a surprise to Macer.

Still, seen from a distance the house remained impressive, the second largest on the island, though nothing like the size of the great houses on the mainland. It hadn’t been home for going on five years, and even before, not so much home as a transient slip, one with a hot meal and his laundry done, and a shower of shiftless cronies to navigate around and over, as his father and his pals schemed their way into the state house and the poor house at the same time.

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