The rest of the assembling part of welding ninety men into a complete crew was a breeze. Wolfe got the word out, and suddenly sailors and pirates were climbing over tables to get to Mariana and her team. She had no idea how Wolfe managed to do it. He had that gruff charm of a man who rarely spoke highly of anything; when he did say a good word about someone, people believed him.
Mariana ran into trouble, though.
The city watch was after her. She found this out from a friend of a friend who was decent enough to let her know.
Her assets had been frozen. Her savings were not enough for this venture.
Mariana suspected that Daniel could be behind this calamity. He had some dubious acquaintances in high positions and he was definitely able to pull some strings if he wanted to.
She had this one option she could use, though.
A bland suitor had been bothering her for the past year. Cor Sormath was a man in his early thirties. The wife he had married as a younger man had tragically passed away, and Samuel Sormath was not someone who could be emotionally independent. To everyone he interacted with, it was instantly clear that he loved to suck off the joy from any room and make the conversation turn towards his empty woes and worries. He was not bad-looking at all. It was simply just so that his personality had turned him into a bitter curmudgeon even before his hairline had started to ascend.
Perhaps this could have been acceptable for a committed widower, but this codependent sack of complaints had courted seventeen women after the passing of his first wife. None of these relationships had progressed past the initial stage of lovey-dovey honeyed phrases, most likely due to the fact that any sensible lady would have rather starved to death than listened to this man for a lifetime.
Still, Mariana thought that she could manage a sort of a con job with him.
She knocked on his door at the earliest possible hour, when the gilded details of his manor glimmered nicely in the morning sun.
She could not look too desperate for money, or cor Somwath would smell that and not give her a single coin.
Neither could she turn on her heels and claim that she had always loved him more than anything, since she had never cared enough to display any affection towards him.
She had to choose her third tactic, a desperate one, but she didn't want to get caught promising to hand out money that she did not have.
Surprisingly, the high cor himself came to open the door. He had not shaved his chin, and what he was wearing could be generously described as a bathrobe.
"Hello, Sam," Mariana said. "You look just as depressed as I am."
Misery and misanthropy, those were the best baits for a man who had let himself go like that.
"To be frank, I did not expect candid honesty of this sort from you," the cor said while making tea.
Strange - he had to be even more blue than he usually was. He had servants, of course, and they were entirely capable of doing their jobs and making his tea for him. However, there were no signs of anyone else being in the house with them. It was eerie, a bit alarming as well.
Had he kicked the servants out? Was he bankrupt? If it was the latter, then Mariana was doomed. He was the only person she could see as a benefactor, the only one who was not too stupid to be fooled.
"Are you all right?" she asked. "A dumb question, of course, but believe me, I will not be shocked. I wish you would just tell me what is wrong."
He sighed, and his breath was audibly raspy, making her think that he had been out drinking. But why, then, had she not noticed him anywhere downtown? Had Sam managed to become a full-time hermit, only sipping rum and wine alone in his mansion?
"Might as well share it with you," he muttered. "I have spent more than half of my fortune on a horse that should have won. It was agreed that the Lucky Clover was to lose…"
"It was an arranged bet, and it went wrong?"
"You understood everything in an instant. You are a great specimen. The only one I don't hate…my butler's pretty good, too, not horrible, but I cannot marry my butler."
Mariana cursed the fact that the betting had gone so wrong. She didn't agree with such foul play, not normally, but the situation she was in was as rare as it was extreme.
"Well, funny that you should mention marriage," she said. She didn't have to fake her desperation. It came naturally at this point.
"Have you changed your mind due to a lack of funds?"
She let out everything about Daniel and her emotional disappointment. She held back on what she actually planned to do about the pirate king, but the story threatened to stretch on forever, anyway. She said some things that would have been too hurtful to ever speak to someone she cared for, she dragged Daniel through the proverbial dirt for the duration of their morning teatime, and finally, when she had no more bad blood left in her and the tears threatened to come again, the high cor cleared his throat.
He had acted as her emotional napkin. Now, it was his turn again to say something dull and draining.
"I might have an idea for us both," he said. "Come with me. You'll feel much better after you see what I can offer to you."
Misery as a bait, it always worked with Sam. Mariana was a bit afraid as she followed the bathrobe-clad noble into his chambers. She had been seduced before, and she had been betrayed. It got harder to trust people with every passing moment.