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Chapter One
Virginia, Summer 1708
Smoke drifted into the star-scattered sky, and across the river the acrid stench of burning wood, tar, rope and canvas trailed behind as if reluctant to leave the soot-blackened jetty. Jesamiah, three-quarters of the way between fourteen and fifteen years of age, too young to be a man, too old to be a child, stood silent, stunned and helpless, as tears trailed down his face, leaving white streaks in the smoke-grimed smudges. He had tried to save her, his beloved boat, Acorn, but the fire had taken hold too quickly. All he had of her – of anything now – were bitter memories to torment his mind and twist in tangled knots around his heart.
“Well, tha’ be tha’ then,” Alistair Smallwood, the elected mayor of the nearest town, Urbanna, remarked as he turned away from the window and sipped at his glass of wine. “A vessel goin’ up be allus a spectacle, eh, Mr Mereno?”
Ignoring the inferior burr of the man’s Cornish accent, Phillipe Mereno acknowledged the remark with a polite nod. He was Master here now; the house, the plantation, the tobacco, the slaves. The money. All his, and if his younger half-brother thought he was going to get any of it – and that included that boat – he could think again.
“A great shame,” someone else remarked. “She was a good little vessel, but Charles ain’t got no more use for her, has he? Not now he’s in his grave.”
Again, Phillipe smiled politely. “Indeed not, sir, and neither will I, for I have the two larger ships for the purpose of the tobacco trade. My father looked upon that sloop as a pleasure-thing for fishing and jaunts downriver. As I have no care for such frivolity, it was of no value to me.” He beckoned to a servant to refill glasses, and for another to bring around the silver trays of pastries and sweetmeats.
One of the ladies present remarked, “Would not young Jesamiah have made use of it? I believe he enjoyed sailing?”
Phillipe narrowed his eyes, his nostrils flared slightly. He did not wish to appear churlish, but neither had he any intention of saying anything pleasant about his wretched half-brother. “Ma’am, living alongside the river, my father insisted we learnt the ways of the water for the safety of skin and soul, but sailing was his delight, not mine.”
With the spectacle of a boat ablaze over, the men returned to their business and political matters, while the women, rustling in their silk and taffeta gowns, picked up their exchange of gossip again as if it had not been so dramatically interrupted, their fans flapping wildly against the last of the day’s summer humidity and heat. From their perspective, it had been a respectable funeral for the much-admired Captain Charles Mereno, and this burning of his boat a fitting send-off for the sailor’s departed spirit. Only, they were unaware that Acorn had not been the Captain’s. She had belonged to his wife and she had bequeathed the sloop to their son, Jesamiah. A fact that Phillipe Mereno knew very well, but had kept to himself.
“Your brother has taken the deaths of his mother and your father within a week of each other with no show of fortitude, I perceive,” the Reverend Coleman’s wife remarked to Phillipe, her countenance wrinkling in an expression of disdain. “I notice he is by the water still. Has he no intention of joining us? Of course, his mother, being of Spanish blood, was not admired in these parts although the good Captain often implied she was not of the Catholic faith.” She hissed the word Catholic as if the Devil himself would come to swallow her whole for the utterance of wicked blasphemy. “He will be much missed. She will not.”
To save his wife from making further tactless remarks, her husband interrupted. “What will you and your brother do now, Mereno? Manage the estate between you? Although Jesamiah is a little young to assist, perhaps? I often urged your father to consider sending him away to finish his education. The new College of William and Mary in Williamsburg is now completed, I believe, or there is Harvard University.”
“Indeed, sir. Unlike my own, my brother’s education was most lax on occasion,” Phillipe lied. “He wasted his time with the boats more than concentrating on his studies. He is also too young for university. But I agree, sending him to school would be a sensible option. One of the noted establishments in England, perhaps?” Phillipe offered a small bow to excuse himself, and kept silent on the fact that he was not going to spend a penny of money on his brother’s education, or that it was a great nuisance Jesamiah could not be disposed of as easily as that damned boat had been.
Irritated, Phillipe glanced out of the window at the pathetic sight of Jesamiah silhouetted against what was left of the burning sloop. Turning, with the intention of sending a servant to fetch the boy in to do his duty with guests present, Phillipe changed his mind. He stepped out through the open doorway into the night and strode down the grassed hill towards the river.
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