The French Prize by James L. Nelson

the carpet. “It’s passing strange,” he said at last. “Jack and Bolingbroke have mixed it up over and again through the years, but I would not have credited Bolingbroke with being the kind would look for an affair of honor. A cove like that has damned little honor to defend.”
    At that, Tillinghast just shrugged.
    â€œSo now that you know what Bolingbroke looks like, tell me, was he at the tavern you dragged Jack out of?”
    Tillinghast shook his head. “I was too far to get a good look this morning, and things was a bit confused the other night, so I can’t say for certain.”
    Rumstick nodded. He could just picture Tillinghast and a few of his mates tearing up the Blue Goose and dragging Jack and Stiles and the rest of those young bucks out of there. Tillinghast exuded power, in the way he sat, in the way the cloth of his coat was stretched tight over the muscles in his arms. He was a tough son of a bitch, and Rumstick was one to know, because he had known plenty of tough sons of bitches in his near forty years at sea. He had seen men sit silent and unmoving as ship’s carpenters used pliers to pull rotten teeth from their mouths. He had seen men spend hours aloft, bare-handed, pounding the ice out of the double-aught canvas of frozen topsails just to make the cloth pliable enough to reef. He had seen men with dreadful wounds keep on fighting as they slipped in their own blood. He had seen men with mortal wounds refuse to leave their stations, unwilling even in the face of death to abandon their shipmates.
    Ezra had sailed with Tillinghast and he knew he was that kind of tough. His age was harder to figure. Rumstick guessed it was a little less than his own, late forties, perhaps, but with these seamen, with their lean, hard bodies and weathered faces, it was a tricky thing to gauge.
    Rumstick continued to ponder the mystery of it all. With everything that had passed between Bolingbroke and Jack Biddlecomb, why would Bolingbroke call him out now, of all times? And for so minor an affront as a tavern brawl? “It don’t answer,” he said at length. “Bolingbroke just ain’t a dueling sort of cove.”
    Not that any of this was any of Rumstick’s affair. He had no official business in Philadelphia, or anywhere, for that matter. At the end of the war he had continued on with Stanton and Biddlecomb, Merchants, taking command of a series of ships on a series of voyages to the West Indies and beyond. But for Ezra, who had been part of that group of upstart Rhode Islanders who had begun fighting the Revolution before most others even knew there was a war, the merchant service was pretty small beer. After ten years of near constant armed conflict he found he could not muster much enthusiasm for haggling with merchants over bills of lading.
    The monotony of the carrying trade pushed him from the sea, and the fact that a new nation was being built on the foundation he had fought so hard to lay kept him ashore. The War for Independency had left the former colonies a smoldering ruin, and now architects of every stripe were struggling to design what new edifice would be built in its place. After all the suffering that he had endured, witnessed, and doled out over the years of fighting, he could not spend his days worrying about the price of molasses in Barbados and take no part in this creation.
    Lofty debate over the philosophy of governance was not for Ezra Rumstick and his ilk, and he knew it. The clever coves, the Adamses and the Madisons and the Jeffersons and Hamiltons, and, on another level, the Biddlecombs and the Stantons, were the ones who would build it up, who would make their long-winded arguments based on Cicero or whatever ancient worthy they were citing that week. They were the ones who would shape the United States to be the very thing for which so many had shed so much blood.
    Creating a government was a messy thing, that was one of those truths