Provender Gleed Read Online Free PDF Page B

her son, who remained oblivious to her presence. She saw a slender, well-proportioned nearly-twenty-five-year-old who until recently had sported a head of lustrous Cavalier curls but now wore just a down of shorn hair, like a velvety pelt. She saw a grown man. But she also saw the infant Provender had been, the chubby, babbling creature whom she had held and fed, fussed with and dandled, and watched over through many a wakeful night. She could not look at him and not think of the clear, unblinking eyes that used to gaze up at her while he was at suck and not remember the smell of his fine-downed scalp, rich and yeasty like baking bread. His gestures, his mannerisms, had all been there, ready-formed, and had changed little in adulthood. Provender was and ever would be her baby boy, and come what may, she adored him.
    But that didn't mean there weren't times when she thought he could do with a good hard smack.
    Cynthia gazed on Provender for a further minute or so, then loudly and fulsomely cleared her throat.

5
     
    The question which needs to be addressed, wrote Provender, is whether extreme wealth is incompatible with an ethical life.
    No doubt there are many people for whom this question would seem otiose, even absurd. They would love to be in a position to ask themselves such a question. They would love to have that luxury.
    But for those of us who do have that luxury, and have an ounce of self-awareness, it is the only question worth asking. It is the question.
    For an answer, one might look back to the early years of the Gleeds, in the seventeenth century, when the family was not yet a Family.
    Rufus Alexander Gleed (b.1649-d.1707) was a merchant trader, and a successful one, specialising in the import of spices, particularly nutmeg, which was then gaining currency in European cuisine.
    He did well in a cutthroat business. British spice traders were in perpetual competition with the Dutch, and Indonesia and most of the Southern Seas had become a virtual battleground. Merchantmen raced one another to secure the latest crop, and clashes between ships of either country were not uncommon as they homed in on the same harbour, each hoping to be the first into port to secure the best bargains. Since most merchantmen were accompanied by a naval escort for protection, the skirmishes were known to cost vessels and lives.
    Neither the British nor the Dutch government was any too happy to keep supplying military support in this manner. It was a huge drain on their budgets and resources. Yet they continued to do so, grudgingly, because the national economic interest demanded it.
    Rufus Gleed's stroke of genius, if one can call it that, was to decide to bypass government involvement. He began employing privateers to escort his trading fleet. He took on the defence of his own ships as a business expense. He was even able to defray the outlay against tax. He made piracy in effect a tax write-off.
    His privateers, unhindered by rules of engagement, were fiercer and more aggressive than any Dutch naval captain. They would attack without provocation. They harried Dutch ships mercilessly. With them there was never any parley. They argued with the voice of the cannonade.
    From being merely successful, Rufus became unimaginably successful. His ruthlessness (and that of his privateers) paid off to such an extent that he began to consider himself eligible for Family status. In a latter written to a nephew in 1693, and now kept at Dashlands in the Gleed archives, he states his intention thus:
    'In that I am now among the richest men of Englande, and am blest with issue in the forme of three Sonnes and lately a Grand-sonne, it seems that it should be my purpose to raise myself and my progeny to the rank of Family; and this being so, to that end I have made Supplication to the Borgia de De'Medicis of Italy, who as the very first and original of the Families are endow'd with the Responsibility of bestowing or otherwise said Privilidge, and it is my