A snow flake melted as it hit his small, and yet boyish, nose, somehow having avoided the brim of his hat. It did not have enough of this just-born winter left in it to chill his nose, but melted straight away, just as Pendleton Shaw, Governor General of Port Drake, considered his embarrassing landfall, at that very moment, irritatingly under progrees.

Captain Smithers had declined to stand off for the three days Pendleton had suggested—for all of his bravado dreadfully concerned about a possible Spanish warship—claiming that better supplies could be had from the Dutch at the mouth of Hudson’s River and that this harbor was sheathed in ice besides.

A swivel gun had summoned a gang of brutes, along with what might by English soldiery and even a Spanish Friar, to drag his luggage and impedimenta on sleds over the ice. Griegs, despite his injuries, hauled him gently from the boat and placed him on an Indian sled operated by a greasy-haired heathen draped in bear hides, with blue French pantaloons and waistcoat underneath and hide-covered feet strapped into snowshoes and pulled by mongrel dogs of great size. Shaw felt for a moment like Frobisher himself, meeting the savages on the ice off of Baffin Island.

The savage spoke a greeting to Pendleton, “Welcome, Lord Shaw, frère Cabeza, is missing his tongue, taken by the chief of the Wild-Goose-River men last winter for saying mass on the matter of Ascension on our Savior’s birthday. He wishes me to welcome on his behalf. I Paul Waistcoat, lay person of this parish that King George’s deputy let stand against the Anglican opinion and will hopefully tolerated by Puritan opinion.”

Pendelton found himself, somehow, as Griegs strapped him into the sled and walked beside him and the marines disembarked to their right with curses.

“A good man you are, Paul Waistcoat. The Lord Protector wishes only that Catholic missionary efforts respect Anglican prevue and that both shall find Christian purchase on behalf of converting the bloody heathens to the cause of raising the New Isrаel in this land where the sun goes down. When Spring softens this land we will receive a mission from The Lord Protector, invested with Christian authority. Until then, I am merely empowered to bar heathen powwows and other such unholy conclaves.”

The dogs tugged gently and dragged him along easily toward the ramshackle mess in the near distance, a tumbledown, dilapidated sight that Grieg’s rude recollections had done too much justice by far. Port Drake seemed less inhabitable now, after 20 years of English possession, than it had when he saw it as Porto Soto, sacked and smoldering at heathen hands from the deck of The Prince of Orange.

He was a boy again being born along by his beasty nursemaid, Hempstead, across the frozen Thames to the Winter Fair. There were no cultivated fields within view, simply pasturage carved out of the primeval forest decades ago. Many of the giant trees which had been killed where they stood were now rotting piles and crumbling deadfalls, visible only as undulations under the deep snow. Some were hollow at the base, housing hairy pigs that snorted from their base place, looking more like a boar out of the Black Forest, than a proper pig. The land was ‘cleared’ in this crude fashion, not having been improved in fifty years or so, for a league around the walled town on the water, in which three mean pinnaces [2] were presently docked and locked in ice.

No ship worthy of the name was in sight, as the pirates that frequented this appalling den of sin and dissipation would not risk being caught by a Spanish man-of-war like a dove in the mud. He would need to deal with such pirates as Captain Smithers—a mercenary in truth—and perhaps even Spanish threats, come spring. In the meantime, he was eager to inspect his first command—a dreadful Spanish plantation, become an English pirate’s den, which he was expected to rule in the name of the most Severe head-of-state imaginable, Oliver Cromwell. In the meantime, he had a winter free of shipping and its attendant woes and boons in which to make a proper post for English mariners flying the flag of the Protectorate.

Hempstead’s voice cut under the racket of the marines blundering across the ice and dragging their trunks, a rumbling whisper that had ever calmed him, “Lord Shaw, this lot is rotten in the heart and your marines are raw-souled boys. We must sort out the faction heads—English and heathen, straight off the mark.”

Before he could nod his ascent, Paul Waistcoat, man of keen ears, spoke, “Rush the whiskey trader is evil man with rough crew. Frère Cabeza has only Paul Waistcoat and houseboy. Bawd Jamison is shrewd woman, has her unclean women, bully boys well under thumb. The Church of England is only represented by the widow of the ague-taken rector, who keeps empty house. Rawlings the hide-monger, own two of the pinnaces—hates Rush, who owns the other. The hunters—best white men—pact with Rawlings. Tidewater People, few warriors, living under your protection. There is delegation of Last Susquehanna, have waiting, hoping for guns to fight Sons of Fierce Woman—few but terrorize backlands. To say these things, in hope you form whole bundle from such thorny pile of kindling, my purpose to come—and to exercise dogs. These men about us the former governor’s men, in poor heart since their lord took his own life at last New Year’s Eve.”

Impressed with Paul’s strangely bland and yet direct English, Pendelton kept his own counsel.

Behind him cursed a marine, called a gull, and clapped the sweeps of Drake’s Revenge as she prepared to receive the returning boats.

Ahead leaned a miserable, walled hovel, massively and hastily thrown up of wrecked ship timbers and cordage, on a thick-slopped tongue of land, at a lazy river mouth, denuded of forest cover. Beyond that league of observable space loomed a towering forest of densely grown, wide-bodied trees, which might have been saplings when Edward Long Shanks was welding together England, Scotland and Wales by the might of his immense sword. And here they yet stood, the real silent lords of this domain, while Edward and his entire line lay long-moldering in their tombs.

At this thought a chill struck Pendleton between the shoulder blades. He tucked the blanket that had been draped over him more closely about his narrow shoulders, as the snow came down from the slate-grey sky that seemed to crown the heathen-haunted forests.

1. The Spanish named this body of water The Bay of the Mother of God. The Algonquin term was Chesapeake, or Shellfish-water

2. A small, single-mast, ship’s boat, some of which made transatlantic voyages, such as the Dove. Their small size, low gunwale, short keel and lack of sail made them easy prey for pirates on the open sea, but their shallow draft made them excellent for coastal exploration, river investigation and as gunboats. Cortez built a squadron of pinnaces to battle the Aztecs on their lake island city and causeways over a century before Shaw’s landfall.

The research material for Pendleton's chapters are largely contained in: