Brierly's First Settlers

Brierly's first settlers arrived some weeks after the Guardians who had made their crossing possible. The five who founded the settlement had stepped onto barren, nameless ground and spent the early weeks securing a foothold on it; only once that work had begun did they open their Portal Keys again and draw through the men and women who would actually build and inhabit the place. With their arrival, the colony stopped being five people on empty country and became a community.

The distinction between the Guardians and the people they brought was absolute, and the settlers understood it before they stepped through. A Guardian's Portal Key opened both ways, and could be used again and again to carry others across. For everyone else the passage ran one way only. A settler who crossed into Clivilius crossed for good — no return, no visit home, no changing of mind once the doorway had closed behind them.

What the settlers gave up, therefore, they gave up entirely. They left behind the country of their birth, whatever family they did not bring with them, and every life they might otherwise have led, in exchange for arable land, a clean beginning, and the word of five people that a world worth living in could be made out of the one they were crossing into. It was an act of trust as much as ambition, and it could not be undone.

They had not come as strangers answering an advertisement. Jonathan Blackwood had found the five Guardians; the Guardians, in turn, found the settlers among the people they already knew and trusted. The colony was assembled outward along lines of friendship, trade, and old acquaintance, each Guardian vouching for the hands the venture could not do without, until some twenty had agreed to make the crossing.

Robert Aldridge, the builder, brought through men whose trades matched his own: James Harper, a master carpenter and his friend of long standing, and John Lawson, a mason, to raise the settlement's first stone. With them came Samuel Thornton, a Somerset blacksmith carrying generations of metalwork to forge the colony's tools, and Thomas Cooper, a cobbler and a friend of Harper's, to keep the settlers shod.

George Whitmore drew through his own circle: Henry Davies, a baker and his childhood friend, to keep the settlement in bread; Charles Bennett, a brewer; and, on Whitmore's recommendation, Richard Moore, a hunter, to bring in meat and fur. Thomas Ainsworth, the leader, brought the harder trades of the land — Edward Clark, a Yorkshire fisherman and an old friend; Frederick Wright, a shepherd; and William Turner, a farmer — the men who would wring food from open country and the lifeless river both.

The women who crossed carried trades no less essential to a settlement that was starting from nothing. Margaret Harper was a seamstress and tailor, Catherine Lawson a weaver, and Mary Wright a spinner, so that between them the colony could spin, weave, and sew its own cloth. Hannah Clark was a dairymaid, Lucy Thornton a cook and household manager, and Elizabeth Moore a candle-maker. Sarah Bennett, a gardener acquainted with Elizabeth Carrington, came to the soil; and the settlement's medicine was strengthened at a stroke by Alice Turner, a herbalist, and the midwives Emma Davies and Martha Cooper, who had come to work alongside the healer Mary Fairchild.

With the settlers came the means of survival — the tools, seed, and livestock a working colony required, driven and carried through the same doorways. What waited on the other side was less welcoming. A stretch of barren crust that gave nothing without labour, a river that as yet held no life, and the rough beginnings of shelter the Guardians had managed in the weeks before were the whole of it. The settlers had crossed into a land that would have to be made before it could properly be lived in.

Yet it was their arrival, more than the Guardians' own, that began the settlement in earnest. Five people with Portal Keys did not make a settlement; twenty-five people with trades, families, and nowhere else to go did. The men and women who came through in that first body were the whole of Brierly's founding stock — its builders and farmers, its households and its trades, the people out of whom the community would now be made. Whatever Brierly was to become, it became possible the day its first settlers stepped through and could not step back.