"When I was a boy, Croydon folk would have thrown you in the stocks for a jape like that," Cawthorne said. "They might do it yet, were the fellow so exercising his wit some abandoned vagabond rather than the hero of Atlantis' liberation."
"People here are touchy about God," Blaise agreed. "Even touchier than they are most places, I mean."
"They are certain they are right. Being thus certain, they are equally sure they have the right-nay, more: the duty-to impose their views on everyone they can," Cawthorne said.
A crack like that might have won him time in the stocks were he less prominent and less notorious. His breakfast, and Isaac Fenner's, interrupted perusal of the treaty. After a while, Fenner said, "This is good." Again, he sounded surprised.
"A full belly strengthens the spirit." Custis Cawthorne seemed to listen to himself. "Not bad. Not bad at all. I must remember that one."
Fenner was still eyeing the draft of the treaty. "It will be some time before we can pay our debts at par with sterling," he said sadly.
Victor also knew the parlous state of the Atlantean Assembly's paper-who didn't? But he answered, "Would you rather I had told the English commissioners we intend to repudiate those debts? They lodge down the street. I will introduce them to you later this morning. If you intend to convey that message, you may do so yourself."
"No, no," Fenner said. "Now that we are a nation, we must be able to hold up our heads amongst our fellow nations. Even so, putting our house in order will prove more difficult than many of us would wish."
"Never fear. We can always find some cozening trick or another to befool our creditors," Cawthorne said. "France has proved that year after year."
"How was France?" Victor asked him. "Most enjoyable, at the level where I traveled," Cawthorne said. "If you have the means to live well-or have friends with the means to let you live well-you can live better in and around Paris than anywhere else on earth. But the peasantry? Dear God in heaven! Upon my oath, the grievances the French peasants have against their king and nobles make ours against England seem light as a feather drifting on the breeze by comparison."
"Then let them rise, too," Fenner said. "Freedom is no less contagious than smallpox, and no inoculation wards against it."
"Would you say the same, Mr. Fenner, to a Negro slave picking indigo or growing rice in the south of Atlantis?" Blaise asked.
Custis Cawthorne chuckled softly to himself. Fenner sent him an irritated look. "Speaking for myself, I have no great use for slavery," he replied. "I hope one day to see it vanish from the United States of Atlantis, as it has already vanished or grown weak in so much of the north here. For the time being, however, it-"
"Makes the slaveholders piles of filthy lucre," Cawthorne broke in.
"Not how I should have phrased it," Fenner said.
Why not? Victor wondered. His son could be sold at any time, for no better reason than to line Marcel Freycinet's pockets. That made him look at holding Negroes and copperskins in perpetual servitude in a whole new light.
But Fenner hadn't finished: "One day before too many years have passed, I expect property in slaves to grow hopelessly uneconomic when measured against property in, say, machinery. And when that day comes, slave holding in Atlantis will be at an end."
"How many years?" Blaise pressed, as if wondering how patient he should-or could-be.
"I should be surprised if it came to pass in fewer than twenty years," Isaac Fenner answered. "I should also be surprised if slavery still persisted a lifetime from now."
Blaise made a noise down deep in his throat. That did not please him. No-it did not satisfy him. Isaac minks my son Nicholas will grow to manhood a slave, Victor thought. He minks my son may live out his whole life as a chattel. Put in those terms, Fenner's reasoned and reasonable estimate didn't satisfy him, either. But what could he do about it? Freeing slaves was far more explosive than compensating loyalists.
"Can I bring you anything else, gents?" the serving girl asked.
Custis Cawthorne shoved his mug across the table toward her. "If you fill this up again, I shall thank you sweetly for it"
"And you'll pay for it, too," she said, and walked off swinging her hips.
"One way or another, we always end up paying for it," Cawthorne said with a sigh.
Fenner wasn't watching the girl; he was still methodically going through the treaty. When at last he looked up, Victor asked, "Does it suit you?"
"We might have squeezed better terms from them here and there." Fenner tapped the document with the nail on his right index finger. "But, if you have already made the bargain…"
"I have," Victor said. "They may possibly reconsider: I daresay there are certain small advantages they still hope to wring from us. If you reckon the game worth the candle, I do not object-too much-to your proposing further negotiation to them."
Isaac Fenner tapped the treaty again. By his expression, up till Victor's reply he'd thought only of what the United States of Atlantis might get from England, not of what England might still want from the new nation. "If the agreement as it stands suits you and suits them, we might be wiser to leave it unchanged," he said.
"So we might," Cawthorne said, "not that that necessarily stops anyone."
Chapter 25
Victor hadn't thought it would stop Fenner. If it did, he wasn't about to complain. If he did complain, after all, wouldn't he fall into the common error himself?
Victor had wondered whether the English commissioners would want anything to do with Isaac Fenner and Custis Cawthorne. After all, he'd already reached agreement with King George's officials. And, had he brought Fenner alone, the Englishmen might well not have cared to treat with him.
But Cawthorne made all the difference. Richard Oswald and David Hartley were as delighted to meet him as if he were a young, beautiful, loose-living actress. Oswald used a pair of spectacles of Cawthorne's design, so that he could read with the lower halves of the lenses while still seeing clearly at a distance through the uppers.
"Ingenious! Most extraordinarily ingenious!" the Scot exclaimed. "How ever did you come to think of it?"
"What gave me the idea, actually, was a badly ground set of reading glasses, in which part of the lenses were of improper curvature," Cawthorne answered. "I thought, if what had chanced by accident were to be done better, and on purpose- Once the notion was in place, bringing it to fruition proved easy enough."
"Remarkable," Oswald said. "It takes an uncommon mind to recognize the importance of the commonplace and obvious."
Curtis Cawthorne preened. The only thing he enjoyed more than hearing himself praised was hearing himself praised by someone with the discernment to understand and to state exactly why he deserved all those accolades.
Because the commissioners so admired Cawthorne, they even put up with Fenner's urge to fiddle with the treaty. As far as Victor could see, none of the changes from either side made a halfpenny's worth of difference. A few commas went in; a few others disappeared. Several adjectives and a sprinkling of adverbs were exchanged for others of almost identical import. Fenner seemed happier. The Englishmen didn't seem dismayed or, more important, irate.
The one phrase David Hartley declined to change was "earnestly recommend" in the fifth article. Fenner proposed several alternatives. Hartley rejected each in turn. "I do not believe that has quite the meaning his Majesty's government wishes to convey," he would say, and the Atlantean would try again.
Finally, Victor took Fenner aside. "He likes the wording of that article as it is," Radcliff said. "He is particularly pleased with it because he created the formula himself."