A Mercy Read Online Free PDF

probably fight some natives for the rights. Tobacco needs nurture, harvest, drying, packing, toting, but mostly time and ever-fresh soil. Sugar? Rum? Cane grows. You can’t stop it; its soil never dies out. You just cut it, cook it, ship it.” Downes slapped his palms together.
    “That simple, eh?”
    “More or less. But the point is this. No loss of investment. None. Ever. No crop failure. No wiped-out beaver or fox. No war to interfere. Crop plentiful, eternal. Slave workers, same. Buyers, eager. Product, heavenly. In a month, the time of the journey from mill to Boston, a man can turn fifty pounds into five times as much. Think of it. Each and every month five times the investment. For certain.”
    Jacob had to laugh. He recognized the manner: hawker turned middle man eliminating all hesitations and closing all arguments with promises of profit quickly. From Downes’ clothes and his apparent unwillingnessso far to stand the drinks, Jacob suspected he had not reaped the easy profit he described.
    Nevertheless, Jacob decided he would look into it.
    After a leisurely meal of oysters, veal, pigeon, parsnips and suet pudding restored his taste buds, he reserved bed space with just one man in it and, strolling outside, thought about the disappointing day and the humiliation of having accepted the girl as part payment. He knew he would never see another farthing from D’Ortega. One day—soon, maybe—to everyone’s relief the Stuarts would lose the throne, and a Protestant rule. Then, he thought, a case against D’Ortega would succeed and he would not be forced to settle for a child as a percentage of what was due him. He knew he had excused the bargain by thinking Rebekka would be eager to have her, but what was truer than that was another thing. From his own childhood he knew there was no good place in the world for waifs and whelps other than the generosity of strangers. Even if bartered, given away, apprenticed, sold, swapped, seduced, tricked for food, labored for shelter or stolen, they were less doomed under adult control. Even if they mattered less than a milch cow to a parent or master, without an adult they were more likely to freeze to death on stone steps, float facedown in canals, or wash up on banks and shoals. He refused to be sentimental about his own orphan status, the years spent with children of all shades, stealing food and cadging gratuities for errands. His mother, he was told, was a girl of no consequence who died in childbirth. His father, who hailed from Amsterdam, left him with a name easily punned and acause of deep suspicion. The shame the Dutch had visited on the English was everywhere, especially during his stint in a poorhouse before the luck of being taken on as a runner for a law firm. The job required literacy and led to his being signed up by the Company. Inheriting land softened the chagrin of being both misborn and disowned. Yet he continued to feel a disturbing pulse of pity for orphans and strays, remembering well their and his own sad teeming in the markets, lanes, alleyways and ports of every region he traveled. Once before he found it hard to refuse when called on to rescue an unmoored, unwanted child. A decade ago now, a sawyer asked him to take off his hands a sullen, curly-headed girl he had found half dead on a riverbank. Jacob agreed to do it, provided the sawyer forgive the cost of the lumber he was buying. Unlike now, at that time his farm really did need more help. Rebekka was pregnant then, but no previous sons had lived. His farm was sixty cultivated acres out of one hundred and twenty of woodland that was located some seven miles from a hamlet founded by Separatists. The patroonship had lain dormant for years when so many Dutch (except for the powerful and wealthy ones) left or were expelled from the region. The land was still isolated except for the Separatists. Jacob soon learned that they had bolted from their brethren over the question of the Chosen versus the