Son of Fortune (15 page)

“Come on,” Aiden said to Christopher. “We're past late.”

“We can't both leave losers!” Christopher waved at the table. “One more hand. Raise the stakes—let's go out grand!”

“Yes, one more hand,” Newgate said softly. He had to stop and clear his throat. It was the first time he had spoken in the game. “I have no more cash, but I will wager my ship.”

“Your ship?” the dealer said.

“She's wholly mine, free of debt.” He pulled tattered papers from his coat pocket and laid them on the table gently, like an unsure offering to a doubtful god. “She is sound, with all sails and rigging. She is the
Raven.
We are arrived in the harbor this very afternoon.”

“You would do better selling her anywhere else, sir,” the dealer said. “The pot won't go near your value.” He waved toward the piles of chips in front of each man. The total of everything on the table might make five hundred dollars. “A hulk is worth more for scrap.”

“She is no hulk.”

“Then you could sell her outright.”

“I leave the city this night and have no wish for negotiations,” Newgate said, his voice sharper.

“So what will you do, then, if you win?” one of the players asked, thinking it a joke. “You will have money and still a ship. What will you do if you win this hand?”

“Burn her.”

The table fell silent. It was clearly no joke.

“Is she cursed, then?” the man asked.

“A ship is a thing. There is nothing to curse in a thing, only in a man.”

The dealer caught the eye of the floor manager, who swooped in to examine the papers. Meanwhile, all the other men at the table shifted and murmured. No one knew quite what to make of this.

“Are you known to anyone here?” the floor manager asked.

“To the harbormaster,” Newgate said softly. “And Addington's chandlers.”

“Gentlemen,” the floor manager said. “If you all wish to play, I will recess the game for fifteen minutes. If the hand commences, to be fair, this will be a high-stakes game. There will be a fifty-dollar ante. As you are all known here, you may speak to the house manager if you desire a house credit. Please stretch your legs and accept a complimentary drink.”

“We're in,” Christopher announced. “Well, Aiden here is.”

“No.” Aiden held up his hands. “Thank you—I get seasick,” he said lightly.

“He's in!” Christopher said, dragging Aiden away from the table before he had a chance to object any more. “You have to play, Aiden. Don't you see? This is a chance to make our fortunes! You win the ship, I'll finance the business—we'll be partners!”

“What business?”

“The shipping business, of course! We will ship things—pineapples! From Hawaii!”

“You're crazy. And you already have a fortune.”

“I have my father's money,” Christopher said. “But for that I am eternally bound to him and his business. This is my chance to break free! And your chance to make your own fortune.”

“I have a fortune right now on that table!” Aiden said. “Two hundred dollars is more money than has passed through the hands of my whole family in all of our lives combined.” It was exaggeration, but not by much.

“All the more reason to risk it!” Christopher declared. “For where did it get them?”

Aiden stiffened.

“I'm sorry,” Christopher apologized. “That was a cruel thing to say. But true.”

“Can you be more awful?”

“Oh God, yes, unfortunately. But I'm trying to help you here. This is our time for daring!”

“Dare with your own money, then,” Aiden said.

“You know I can't draw any more tonight. My father has seen to that. And I've no luck at all anyway. Win this ship and with it your way to real fortune, or lose the money you never had two hours ago. I will even repay you if you lose.”

“Your father won't allow that.”

“Exactly why we need to escape his infernal thumb on our lives!” Christopher said desperately.

“The papers appear genuine,” the floor manager announced as he returned. “The house has agreed to hold all monies and deeds in trust for verification. Whoever wishes to play may be seated.”

“You like this life, don't you?” Christopher said quietly. “I know you do. You pretend not to care, but you do. You will never have this life working as a tutor or a clerk for my father.”

The truth of that stung.

“Come on.” Christopher pushed him back toward the table. “Fortune favors the brave!”

The five men sat down. Aiden counted out fifty dollars' worth of chips and pushed them to the center of the table. It was two months' pay for a logger. But he wasn't a logger anymore, nor a dirt farmer nor a refugee. He was a son of fortune.

The seal was cut from a new package of cards. The cards were dealt. Aiden fanned his out to see a very good starting hand: two jacks, a two, a three and a seven. The pot grew quickly. The table felt like it was vibrating. The chips, of wood, bone and ivory, made a slippery pile in the center. At the draw, Aiden drew three cards. One man drew two. Two other players each drew three. Newgate drew only one. Aiden looked at his new cards—he felt heat creep up the sides of his neck. Another jack—now an exceptional hand. Except there was a chance one player had a full house, or that Newgate, drawing only one card, now had a full house, a straight or a flush.

The first bet was twenty dollars. Aiden raised twenty. Newgate also raised. What was the man's real intention? If he really wanted to lose the ship, all he had to do was fold. Was it really a ruse just to get a high-stakes game going? Was the story of haunting and burning the ship just to tantalize them into losing all their money? It didn't matter at this point. Aiden was in the game. Whoever won the hand owned the ship. When it was Aiden's turn, he needed sixty dollars to call. Then he raised a hundred.

One man turned his cards down. “I'm out.”

There were only four of them left now. The other players hesitated. One looked hard at Aiden, searching for any clue. Aiden held steady. The man called. The next man called. It was up to Newgate now. He had no chips—he was playing on house credit.

“I raise,” he said, his voice raspy, “five hundred dollars.”

A buzz erupted throughout the room. Aiden didn't flinch but his mind was spinning. If he lost, he was out nearly half his year's salary as Peter's tutor. Christopher might or might not actually cover a loss this big. What was Newgate's game? Aiden was pretty sure at least one of the other players would fold. Aiden looked up at the floor manager and nodded.

“House credit for five hundred,” the manager said.

Another of the players threw down his cards in anger and pushed back from the table. That left just the three of them. The whole room was silent, everyone now watching the game. The other player called the bet. Newgate laid out his cards. A three, a four, a five, a six…The crowd murmured in excitement as the sequence appeared, then gasped to see the last card: an ace of spades.

It was Aiden's turn next. He put down his three jacks. The final player's hand shook slightly. He held two pair. Kings and tens. A very good hand. But not good enough. Noise came rushing back through the room. The piano started up a gay tune, and flocks of pretty waiter girls began to swarm around the table. Christopher whooped and flung his arms around Aiden. Aiden blinked and stood up.

“A bottle of champagne for the table!” Christopher waved at the waiter, then turned to Newgate. “We assure you, sir, we will take most excellent care of your ship. Will your captain stay on?”

“I was the captain,” the man replied. “Now I am done.” His face looked transformed, peaceful, almost radiant, though his whole body was trembling. “I will have no more of it.”

“All right, then,” Christopher said, blithely undaunted. “So we have a ship—now we just need a captain, crew and some place to sail it!”

“She has a place to sail,” Newgate said quietly. “She has a license for guano.”

“What's guano?” Christopher and Aiden asked together.

“Precious stuff,” the man said. “More precious than gold.”

t's bird crap!” Christopher moaned. It was bright afternoon, and they hunched woozily over the library table with a dozen weekly shipping and mercantile reports spread out before them.

“It's fertilizer!” Aiden said.

“That comes out the back end of a seagull!”

“Well, yes, but farmers need fertilizer.”

“That doesn't mean we have to haul it around in our own dear ship! It's so…farm-ish.”

“Where does your food come from if not a farm?” Aiden laughed, then winced. After the triumph at the Elysium, they had gone on to the house party, where they had drunk far too much more, and they now suffered extremely.

“Pineapples!” Christopher said. “Last year Mrs. Larson paid twenty dollars apiece for nine pineapples for her cotillion party. She was the talk of society for months.”

“The fastest ship in the world still takes three weeks from Hawaii,” Aiden reminded him. “The whole cargo could rot on the way and lose us every penny. Guano is already rotten! And look at the prices!” He thrust a commodities report at Christopher. “See what they're paying in Baltimore? Or Liverpool!”

“We are not sailing to Baltimore or Liverpool. I'm not going to sea for months and months, beating round the Horn, eating hardtack with worms in it and losing my teeth from scurvy. No. I need my teeth. We stay on our side of the world.”

“Exactly,” Aiden said. “Look—half the food in San Francisco now comes from the Salinas Valley, and the city is getting bigger every day. They've been farming there for decades now, and the best soil is dead in three or four years unless you fertilize it. They need guano. Cow poop and burned bones are not going to do it.”

“Why not?”

“Well, cattle take up space, for one thing, and pastureland isn't close to growing land. And cow dung is heavy. You can't just train them to go marching through the crop rows and drop it fresh on command. You have to go out to their pastures and shovel it up and haul it to the barn and pile it up with straw for a season and then haul it out to the fields in a cart and shovel it off again. If this guano is as good as they say, one man could probably fertilize in one day what it would take ten men a whole year to accomplish!”

“But why is bird shit from Peru better than any other bird shit?” Christopher pressed, still hating the idea.

“I don't know. But if farmers are paying fifty dollars a ton for it in Baltimore, there must be something to it. And think,” Aiden said, getting up, a little too fast for his aching head, and crossing to the map of the United States that hung on the wall. “If it does well in the Salinas Valley, well, we could sell guano to half the country!”

“You might have a bit of the businessman in your tender heart after all,” Christopher said appreciatively. “But you haven't even considered the real possibilities here, have you?”

“Well, we need to figure out the freight costs—”

“I don't mean that.” Christopher went over and stood beside him, staring at the map like Napoleon designing the conquest of Europe. “What have you learned about business thus far? How does it work?”

“You buy something at a low price that people need or want and you sell it for more.”

“That's not business, that's shopkeeping. Look”—Christopher traced his finger along the little black line of tracks—“in two or three years, the railroad will connect the whole country. It's got to be cheaper to sail the stuff up here and ship it by rail than to sail it all the way around the Horn to Baltimore. Newgate said something about a license. If there are licenses involved, there are monopolies to be had. That's business!”