A Cog Removed from the Machine

Winter had begun to show its teeth by the last Saturday of May, the afternoon light coming thin and grey through the Crown and Anchor's grimy windows. A fire crackled in the stone hearth, drawing the regulars into a loose semicircle of warmth, and William Jeffries found Silas Croft waiting at their customary corner table with two tankards already poured.

The week had been difficult. A shipment from Sydney had arrived with half its manifest missing, the captain swearing that the discrepancy was Hartley's problem rather than his own. Blackwood had set Jeffries to examining the original orders line by line until he could prove otherwise—three hours of meticulous work assembling evidence that the captain had been selling cargo at smaller ports along the coast and pocketing the difference.

The proof, once assembled, was irrefutable. Blackwood had dismissed the captain on the spot. No references, no final payment, merely a cold statement that the man was fortunate not to be reported to the harbourmaster. The captain had a family somewhere—children, perhaps a wife waiting for wages that would never arrive. Blackwood had shown no hesitation, no recognition that he was destroying a man's livelihood and perhaps his family's welfare along with it.

What troubled Jeffries was not the dismissal itself. The captain had been a thief; that much was beyond dispute. A man who stole from his employers could not reasonably expect to retain his position once discovered. But there was something in Blackwood's manner that lingered in Jeffries's mind—the absence of any human response to the situation. No anger at the betrayal, no disappointment in a man who had proven unworthy of trust, no satisfaction at justice being served. Simply efficiency, as though he were removing a faulty component from a machine.

Croft listened to this account with the focused attention Jeffries had come to value in their conversations. When he spoke, his assessment was troubling in its precision. He described someone who had lost the ability to see others as fully real—or perhaps had never possessed it. Such men existed in Bristol as well, Croft acknowledged. His own uncle had a touch of it, that capacity to look at a person and perceive only their usefulness in some larger calculation. It made such men effective. It made them wealthy. It also made them hollow.

The conversation turned to the Blackwood family more broadly. Croft had mentioned before that they possessed connections beyond Van Diemen's Land—Sydney, London, perhaps elsewhere. Now he elaborated, though with evident caution. The Blackwoods had a reputation in certain circles, he explained. Nothing scandalous, nothing one could point to as evidence of wrongdoing. Rather a sense that they operated according to rules others did not quite perceive, that they remained perpetually three steps ahead because they were playing a different game entirely.

Ezekiel, Croft suggested, was young but had clearly been groomed for whatever role his family intended. Sent to the colonies to learn the trade, perhaps, or to establish connections that would prove useful later. His presence in Hobart Town was unlikely to be coincidental, and his interest in Hartley's enterprise—and in Jeffries himself—was probably part of something larger than either of them could see.

The warning carried weight precisely because Croft delivered it without drama. He was not suggesting conspiracy or imminent danger, merely offering information that a prudent man would want to possess. Jeffries should walk into whatever lay ahead with his eyes open rather than stumbling into it blind.

The fire crackled and the afternoon light faded toward evening as they sat together, the silence between them weighted with implications neither fully understood. Something was taking shape around William Jeffries—something that Blackwood was orchestrating and Croft was attempting to illuminate. The education he had been receiving since March was not merely practical instruction in colonial commerce. It was preparation for a role he could not yet perceive, in a design whose outlines remained hidden.

Whatever remained unbroken in him, Croft had said during an earlier meeting, he would hate to see Blackwood be the one to break it.

Jeffries was beginning to understand just how real that danger might be.