Horace Washington had done well for himself in the years after Swedenborg. The business contacts he’d reestablished and made along his journeys with Hettie and her crew had helped him build a new life, though it was not quite the empire he’d once had.
With a small gift from Sophie—a reward for aiding her escape from the sorcerer’s prison—he’d set up in a town called Feeney’s Elbow as a hostler, a sometime Mechanik, a tradesman who wasn’t afraid of work, and a delight to the people who came to him with all kinds of problems, from broken clocks to broken legs. He procured all sorts of items for the townspeople. His shop grew, and now it was a general store, though no one called it that in deference to Mr. MacKinnon’s more traditional dry goods store. No, Horace was just a hostler who ran a
