by D. J. Butler
“It has a bitter taste,” Zomas told him. “And in large quantities it can kill. You put only a single drop into a drink, say, that glass of wine. If one drop doesn’t give you relief, try a second.”
Bill had enough experience with apothecaries to know they never properly accounted for a man’s size when recommending a dosage. He carefully poured three drops into the wine glass. Without looking at Zomas to see the man’s reaction, he drained the cup. Then he closed his eyes.
“Give it a minute,” he heard Zomas say.
Bill took a deep breath. The aftertaste of the laudanum on his tongue was bitter and vegetable, though there was also a pleasing touch of brandy. He inhaled again and felt the tincture’s fumes burn in his nasal cavity and the back of his throat.
He felt lightheaded, as if he were floating.
“I can still feel the ache in my legs.” His voice sounded far away. “But it is lessened. It no longer feels urgent.”
“You may be tempted to try walking without the crutches,” Zomas said. “Don’t surrender to that temptation. Precisely because you don’t feel the pain, you can do more damage to your body by pushing it too far. Try to enjoy the blessing of Paracelsus without attracting his curse.”
“If that doesn’t describe all of life in a single sentence, I don’t know what does.” Bill opened his eyes and saw Zomas smiling at him. “Thank you. Will you share a glass of watered-down wine with me, as a small expression of my gratitude?”
“It is I who am grateful to you, Captain,” Zomas said. “However, I will happily share a glass of wine as an expression of mutual respect.”
Bill raised a hand to summon the serving boy again. He determinedly ignored Chikaak, who stared from the Well’s doorway.
When the wine came, Bill put the Paracelsian Tincture away in his coat to resist the urge to add a few drops to his drink.
* * *
“You are not young,” Temple Franklin said.
The two men sat in Thomas’s carriage outside an immense stone house glittering with light.
“I’m not old,” Thomas shot back. “And if I’m old, you’re older.”
“Yes,” Temple agreed. “Which is why I’m so very concerned about generating heirs. If I do not marry and have heirs before I die, my bastard nieces and nephews with whom I am at war will inherit my vast wealth and undo my works. They will squander it on their strange Cahokian goddess rather than on feeding the poor and building highways in my name and in the name of my illustrious ancestor. My empire will not hold together, but will fall apart, to exist as separate little fiefs or be swallowed up by the New Spanish or cut to pieces by the Free Horse Peoples. I have done so much in life, and it must not be undone!”
“You bastard,” Thomas said drily. “How long is the list?”
“Seven.”
“Seven women who wish to meet the dashing Lord Thomas.”
“That’s one way to think of it. Or seven fathers who hope to trade their daughters for family advancement.”
“Cynic.”
“It won’t do to be idealistic or squeamish about this. Very few people are able to live the romance of a Hannah Penn in this world.”
“Including Hannah, at the end.” Thomas remembered for a moment the bloodied, dying face of his sister and forced it from his mind. “I’m far from squeamish, Temple.”
“Good.” Temple pushed open the carriage door and eased himself out onto the cobblestones between two waiting footmen. “Then let us go ravish some maidens.”
He must ignore the attractions of their persons, Thomas knew. Even the power of the ladies’ families was only a secondary consideration, as were many kinds of wealth—land, for instance, or illiquid shares in a joint-stock company.
What he needed was ready cash, and a steady source would be preferable to a large pile. Though best of all would be both, combined.
It was time for another payment to the cutthroat Chevalier of New Orleans. Now, of all times, Thomas did not want the circumstances of the death of Kyres Elytharias coming to light, and his own cash resources were strained by the costs of raising an Imperial army to march into Cahokia. The increased tariffs the Electors had approved would eventually defray some of the heightened expense, but they had only just begun to be collected. Any raised tax pushed some citizens at the margin into tax evasion and other forms of lawlessness.
Franklin knew all of it.
Franklin stepped aside to wait as Thomas straightened his cravat and then rattled his Mars-sealed dress saber once in its scabbard for luck. Then the counselor followed Thomas through the wide front door. The building was the Philadelphia house of one of the great cattle-driving grandees of Ferdinandia and New Spain, His Excellency Felipe Albanez, Marqués de Miami. Cattle was a business that generally consumed as much cash as it generated, and in bad years more, which made the Marqués’s daughter Alejandra an unlikely candidate even if she had been pretty. Unsightly Dago clabbernapper that she was, she—
“Buenas tardes, Señor Thomas!”
Thomas leaped aside as the very lady he had been contemplating thrust herself into his view, and very nearly into his embrace.
“Lady Alejandra! I have not seen you since your quinceañera, and you are even more lovely than I remembered!” This was literally true, inasmuch as a thick plaster covered all three of the birthmarks Alejandra bore on her face. Nevertheless, they were striking enough for Thomas vividly to recall their locations, and the plaster did nothing to ameliorate a nose that resembled nothing so much as an oversized bobbin.
“And you are so vital! On behalf of all the ladies of the Empire, I must beg you to reveal your secret, Lord Thomas—you do not appear half your age!”
Thomas tried not to furrow his brow. “And how old do I appear, then, Doña Alejandra?”
“Not more than thirty!” she cried, trilling an exuberant R that would have been the pride of Madrid.
Not more than thirty? Half his age? How old did she take him for? Focus on the cash, Thomas reminded himself. There is no room here for your vanity. Felipe was powerful enough to be a fit ally and father-in-law, an Elector as well as possessor of some sort of title under Napoleon’s Spanish puppets. How much cash did he have?
“You are too kind,” Thomas said. “How fare the herds, my lady?”
Alejandra made a sour face that thrust her cylindrical nose downward. “The winter has been only ordinarily bad, of course, but this rampaging of the beastkind has interrupted the transport of beef to important markets. My father says that they shall eat cheap beefsteak in Knoxville this spring, and expensive pork in Chicago! Praise God, he always has more land he can sell!”
“Praise God!” Thomas agreed, with the biggest smile he could muster. “Would that God granted your father a herd of pigs to match the size of his wealth in beef!” He swung easily into a ninety-degree pivot, and a long step that would take him out of the hidalga’s clutches.
Franklin swooped down on him and clung to his shoulder like a sorcerer’s bat familiar. “That was one,” Temple said. “How did you find her?”
“She’s cash-poor and she’s too honest to hide it. What are you thinking?”
“That there are only so many decent choices.”
“You cannot quote one of your grandfather’s tiresome sermons at me and say ‘beggars can’t be choosers.’ I’m not a beggar, I’m the Emperor.”
“Yes, but what you have asked for is a woman who is connected with both cash and Electoral votes.”
“More importantly, the cash.”
“Still, that is a small field, and the winner may not be as impressive in her person as you would wish.”
“Let us see the other horses, Temple. But no more ambushes, I beg you. No, I command you. There is a gazing pavilion in the garden behind the house. I shall conceal myself there; if asked, say I am contemplating difficult issues of state. Bring the ladies out one at a time to meet me. Do not send one until I have sent back her predecessor.”
“I could have broug
ht them to you at Horse Hall on such terms.”
“Yes, but now the Marqués will be able to say that I attended his soirée. And others will remember having seen me. Besides, Venus is strong for me tonight, and what better place to capture the influence of Venus than at a ball?” In answer to Temple’s slight disapproving cluck, he added, “I am wearing my Town Coat, Temple. This is hardly more dangerous than attending the theater.”
The pavilion was what some were beginning to call a gazebo, though Thomas hated the new-fangled word for its macaronick Latinity. It was a wooden pavilion encircled by inward-facing benches, creating a space for lounging on a summer evening. The Marqués, anticipating guests’ expectations or perhaps hoping to show off the large magnolias of his garden, imposing even in the leafless winter, had had a brazier heaped with burning wood placed beside the pavilion.
Thomas stood in the pavilion, at the edge of the circle of light and heat, and waited. When the women began to come to him, he counted down.
Six was plain, but scholarly. Her Cavalier father in Henricia—or as some called it, pining for England’s last Stuart king, Carolina—had trained her in the Classics and left her utterly without preference as to gods. She launched a rapid series of apothegms at godar and bishops alike, in which Thomas joined with great amusement until she inadvertently reminded him that her father’s vast fields were planted with tobacco, cotton, and maize. She lauded the fertility of the river-bottom soil, the size of the cotton bolls and the natural juiciness of the tobacco leaves, but Thomas’s answering smile was completely formal.
No cash.
Five was an Ottawa princess. At least, she was a princess in Thomas’s imagination, and when she told him of her love of dancing and swimming, her lithe physique informed his imagination vividly. Her people’s wealth was in furs: beaver, hare, marten, and fisher. Thomas knew well that a shipload of New World furs brought to market in London, or even in Philadelphia, could make a man’s fortune.
He also knew that the business was risky, both on the supply side—which could be physically dangerous as well as subject to the vagaries of climate—and on the demand side, which was enslaved to the whims of fashion. His own Imperial Ohio Company was already driving down the price of furs with the huge volume of beaver pelts it was currently bringing to market.
The best reason to marry Five would be to induce her people to stop selling their furs. While that would help Thomas by driving up the price of Company fur, it would impoverish the Ottawas. With visions of divorce and war against a confederation of cheated Algonks, he sent her back.
Four was a younger sister of the King of Oranbega. Her Firstborn features were softened with an obvious strain of hearty blonde German, and she brought with her a queer three-stringed guitar no longer than her forearm, flat, and fretted diatonically. When she had finished singing a lilting ballad about the love of some queen who died as her realm was flooded by the sea, she reminded Thomas of her land’s wealth in coal and salt deposits, as well as its famously fertile soil.
But it was no good. Thomas would have the wealth of Oranbega in any case, by the relentless working of the Pacification. And the shade of William Penn had insisted he show no mercy to the Firstborn. Could Thomas hope for success in ruling his grandfather’s empire if he began by traducing his grandfather’s will?
When Thomas shook his head and invited her to go back into the house, the Firstborn princess boldly pressed her body against his and lifted her lips in the most elemental of pleas for grace.
But Thomas was fixed of purpose. He was gentle as he steered the young woman back toward the ball.
Three was an Igbo woman from Birmingham. She disavowed that she had any connection with the Lord Mayor there, who was the Elector, though that was a vote that was often cast by proxy. While lovely, she was the oldest of the seven, and also the calmest. She smiled, recited a lengthy poem in Igbo when asked, and talked about how much she missed the weather on the Gulf coast. When Thomas grew tired of equivocation and directly asked her about her family’s wealth, she would only admit to owning a fishing boat.
By this time, Thomas had grown short-tempered. “Very well, then!” he snapped. “Enjoy the remainder of the ball!”
She smiled as she left.
At the door, Thomas met Temple Franklin. “What were you thinking?” he demanded. “She says she doesn’t even know the Elector!”
“You said cash was more important!” The spectacles quivering on the tip of Franklin’s nose made him look as if he were about to fall over under the force of Thomas’s irritation.
“What cash?” Thomas snorted. “The woman owns a boat!”
“A boat?” Temple guffawed. “That’s what she said to you?”
Thomas waited for Temple’s rolling belly-laugh to end.
“That woman,” Franklin finally explained, “is John Hancock’s sole trading partner in Birmingham.”
“She’s a smuggler?”
“A very wealthy one.”
“Who either didn’t want to admit it, or isn’t interested in an alliance with me.”
Temple arched his eyebrows. “Shall I bring her back?”
“No,” Thomas said quickly. “I was impolite, and she is uninterested. Bringing her back will only compound the offense by making me look stupid as well. Bring out the next lady.”
Thomas instantly knew Two was Acadian from her growled Rs and pure vowel sounds. She was a cousin of La Fayette and her father was a banker. She claimed a talent for language, and without further provocation launched into a monolog that would have been at home among the workmen of Babel, shifting language every three sentences as she recounted her travels to London, Paris, and elsewhere with her father. Thomas followed her through English, French, and German with satisfaction, and then endured five minutes of gibberish that nearly left him unconscious.
He had finally convinced himself that he could tolerate this woman as a wife, especially if she would agree to stay in Quebec most of the year, when she concluded her oration on the delighted note that her father would be so pleased to see her make an alliance with the Penns, especially with the capitalization problems his banks had had in the last few years.
Thomas wished her and her father good luck, concealing the white knuckles of his clenched fists behind his back.
He recognized the last young woman with a shock, though he could not remember her name; she was the oldest daughter of Kimoni Machogu, Prince of Shreveport. She had her father’s fierce stare and the curve of his lip that hinted at his piratical ancestry. Thomas listened to her genealogical recitation along with a surprisingly detailed inventory of facts about the cotton wealth of Shreveport and several songs. Finally, he wrapped both her hands in his and looked into her eyes.
“Please tell your mother and your father that I am trying very hard to marry a wealthy woman, so that I can bring as much help as I can to Shreveport, as quickly as possible. Are you going back home?”
The girl’s hands trembled as she shook her head. “No, I am staying here, with my sisters.”
“Good,” Thomas said. “For now, that’s wise.”
Temple Franklin found him a few minutes later, leaning his forehead against the cool trunk of a magnolia tree and sinking his nails slowly into its bark.
“I take it none of them was a match,” Temple said.
“You do so many things well,” Thomas said slowly. “It turns out that finding a suitable bride for me is not one of them. Did you try the Lord of Potosí?”
“He’s so wealthy, he’s not interested in you.”
“What about the silver miners in Georgia?”
“Ben Yehuda said he’d be willing to talk. How do you feel about wearing a little round cap and giving up pork?”
“I suppose I’d be willing to wear a cap.”
“I rather think it’s the other requirement that is non-negotiable.”
“Next, he’ll be wanting to discuss circumcision.” Thomas sighed. “Well then, Temple, I think our course of action
is obvious.” He straightened, stretching the muscles of his back and looking up into the night sky for guidance. Obscured by winter clouds and the lights of Philadelphia, the stars gave him nothing. His burdens felt, if anything, heavier.
“I haven’t yet consulted with the Anakim,” Temple pointed out.
“The wealthiest of them will be the one with the largest pile of lake fish and otter’s bones,” Thomas said. “Not a help, however interesting it might be to make love to an eight-foot-tall red-headed woman with hands like coal scuttles and a bed perched atop a pole. No, our solution is rather nearer to hand, in New Amsterdam.”
“You have someone in mind?”
Thomas nodded. “It’s time to settle a lawsuit.”
The Marqués’s city house blazed with light, and Thomas couldn’t bring himself to go back inside. Crossing abruptly to the edge of the garden and ignoring sudden yelps from Temple Franklin, he climbed the tall iron fence and vaulted over into the alley beyond.
He stalked across Philadelphia alone, with his Town Coat and his dress saber to protect him.
Three streets from Horse Hall, he collided with a staggering drunk. The man vomited on Thomas’s shoes, then emitted an odor like that of a charnel house and something that might have been an apology, rolled into a single belch.
Thomas beat the man until he stopped moving.
He would marry, by damn. He would pay his bills. He would pacify the Ohio. He would hold the Empire together.
He would live up to the hopes of William Penn.
* * *
Ahmed Abd al-Wahid rose from prayer in the mamelukes’ simple chamber, adorned only with mats for sleeping and prayer. Omar and al-Muhasib rose with him.
In the hall, Ravi sat with his face in a book. When Abd al-Wahid emerged, the Jew stood.
“The poet says, ‘I have been a seeker and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started listening to the teaching of my soul.’” Abd al-Wahid smiled. “What are you reading?”
Ravi showed him the cover, with the English title embossed in silver: POOR RICHARD’S SERMONS.