The First Book of Samuel - SAREJESS (chrysanthemum read aloud TXT) 📗

chipped but it was most probably the best cup she had in the house. “How are your children?” asked Samuel “Did they enjoy the gifts I sent?” “Yes Linda loved the doll and little Johnny was over the moon about the ball” she said.

Samuel had met Martha earlier in the year when the fire had burned in the city she was a widow of the civil war. Her husband, Jonathan Bradley had fallen at Gettysburg. Since then she had managed to survive scraping together an existence by doing baking and washing for others. On the morning after the fire there had been a knock at the back door of the inn, which Samuel had answered. He had been confronted by Martha and her children standing there with soot covered faces. She had asked for some bread and milk for the children. Samuel had taken pity on her and had helped where he could. The problem was Martha was a very proud woman and would only accept something in reward for having done some work to deserve it. For a while Samuel had tried to get her and the children into better accommodations but she had steadfastly refused all offers. Thus Samuel had resorted to sending her work to do and paying her for it. He always paid a little extra to help the family. Her late husband Jonathan Bradley was of Jewish extraction, however he had chosen to marry a Christian and thus he had been cut off from his family. Martha neither wanted nor sought aid from the family of her late husband. Jonathan’s father was the New York businessman Benjamin Bradley who owned a fishing fleet and a number of fisheries round the city of New York.


CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
London 1896 Samuel returns to old haunts
It had been a while since Samuel had been in London. The city was much changed and if memory served him right he should have be in the section of the city in which the old Brass bell Inn had once stood. Yet he was confronted by an unknown landscape of terrace houses with flower boxes in the windows. Could the city have changed so much in two hundred years? He tended to take a longer view of change then most people did due to his longevity. When he last lived in London his friend Samuel Pepys had been a very old man and the new Dutch King was on the throne. William the silent had been a difficult man and Pepys had not served him long before Pepys had retired and gone to live in the country. The Brass Bell had continued to get regular customers and guests but for Samuel the joy of running the inn had passed. The new reign was much different from the two previous reigns of the Stuart kings. Now the somber king who did not like much the lightheartedness of the English, enforced a sense of morals very much in line with his Protestant beliefs. It was a time when new religious groups had started to grow and the king made haste to cut the root out at its beginning, urged on by the orthodox Anglican Church leaders both in parliament and in the church.

These events were now long past, the protagonists long in their grave now approaching the twentieth century the world was changing. The advent of electricity and the telephone had done much to change the world. Maybe he should have not been surprised in the change of the city. The whole world was changing why not old London town?

The old had been swept away, replaced with the new at a much faster rate then he could possibly have imagined. He had left England at the beginning of the reign of George I, and had traveled widely, now he had a new plan that he wanted to put into practice. He had established the small hotel in Boston more then thirty years earlier and had in mind to start a chain of small hotels across the world that would bring him enough to live on independently and give him a chance to travel the world as a gentleman of leisure.

If the Brass Bell still existed he had planned to make it the head office of his empire, thus he had found himself traveling to England once more, this time by steam ship. He had taken rooms in East London while he set about trying to find if the old inn might be for sale yet as each day passed his agent, a certain Snodgrass, brought no news other than that he was making inquiries. Thus early this morning he had set out to see for himself if the old inn existed.

He had paid the cabby off and had walked the last few hundred yards to where the inn should have been; he was much surprised to see the terrace houses with small gardens in the place of the inn. The cool trees which grew in the garden seemed to be at least fifty years old. Children played in the gardens under the watchful eyes of their nannies. Samuel watched for a while before turning away. Walking down the street he thought for a while of the good times that he had spent in the old inn; times spent with good friends eating and drinking of the best bounty available, now both the friends and inn were no more.

How very old he felt, how many life times had he lived, how many good friends had he buried through the centuries it was so tiresome. “God, would the curse never be lifted? Would he never find rest for his weary soul?” He wondered. Today was not a good day for him. Even after so many centuries he could still hear the words of the man who had cursed him all those long centuries ago. “You innkeeper, a wanderer you will be. Until the end of days will you search for your salvation. You will serve humanity as an innkeeper until you have worked out your salvation.” “Why had he not given up his bed on that fateful night? Why had he not allowed the Holy couple to have their baby in a bed; but no instead he had sent them off to a stable.

Then there was the matter of his recurring dream; century after century he would have the same dream of Ruth standing by the side of the carpenter of Nazareth beckoning him to come to her. At first he had been unable to hear her calls but he could see her hand beckoning him over the centuries, he could at first hear nothing in the dream. As the ages passed the voices began to be faintly heard like as if through a wall of water now when he had the dream the words were almost audible. When he tried to approach the figures in the dream he always hesitated and looked back, when he turned again they had disappeared and a long road lay before him. Lately he had taken a few tentative steps towards them but something held him back. When he hesitated he would find himself awake and bathed in sweat.

As he walked down the London Street back to Piccadilly Square that morning in 1896 Samuel Ben Ezra was a very unhappy man. It seemed as if the fates had contrived against him to thwart his every plan of success and as for finding salvation he had tried many religions but none had been able to save him. He had tried the faiths of ancient Egypt and been turned back none of the gods would have any thing to do with him. He had tried Islam but had found it to be a religion of contradictions and death; a wide path to destruction. He had tried serve the gods of ancient Greece but they were just as unreceptive to his overtures. He had even tried being a good Jew but that had brought him only more questions.


1901 Alberta Canada
Samuel laced up his boot. It was a cold winter morning and it had snowed in the night; it was not that he did not like snow; he just found that his level of discomfort rose the colder it got. He had been drawn to these northern climes by the fact that there was a lot of money to be made providing the comforts of life to prospectors who still believed there was gold in them thar hills, experience had taught him otherwise. He knew the only gold to be made was by providing the comforts that men so often missed and would do any thing for thus he had loaded up a wagon of whiskey, tobacco and a few other necessities which he knew he would soon sell at an inflated rate.

Alberta was known for the discovery of fossilized bones of creatures which had lived millions of years before the advent of man. For the past fifty years the territory had been explored by a growing number of enthusiasts who found interest in every little speck of fossilized stone they found. A few major finds had put Alberta on the map he found himself in one of those prospecting camps which had sprung up some hundred and fifty miles from the small town of Edmonton.

He had stopped on the outskirts of the mining camp and was making himself comfortable when a big man with a flaming red beard approached him. “Are you selling something?” he asked in a mid western accent. “Why yes I am. I am one of those people who provides the comforts of home for men like yourself who find themselves far from home” replied Samuel. “Well we don't usually buy from outsiders but we find ourselves without a drop of whiskey in the whole camp them damned temperance people have been round protesting. The sheriff had to put a hole in every barrel of beer and smashed up every bottle of whiskey he could lay his hands on. Them people from Edmonton, well they just don't like prospectors. They are hoping to drive us off but it won’t work” said the man “Tell you what, I am big Ed Mac Donald I will buy your whole stock of whiskey. If you can guarantee that you can get me another load up here by the end of the week. What do you say? I’ll give you a good deal, say $1000 a wagon load.” Samuel thought about this as he chewed on some tobacco the price was good but if one man was going to offer him so much this must mean the camp was in serious trouble. “Let me consider your proposal for a while. In the meantime share a bottle of Kentucky Bourbon with me” said Samuel pulling a bottle from a case at the rear of the wagon.

Big Ed Mac Donald sat down on a log and held out the mug for “another drop of what killed auntie.” “I tell you Sam it has been dry going here these last few weeks I had to bring out my private stock of booze from the back of my saloon. If you have considered my proposal I am sure you will see it is a good one” he said between sips of the best of Kentucky bourbon. “It would indeed seem so but I have a counter proposal for you” said Samuel. “Sell me a percentage in your saloon and I will give you the whiskey we could really do some thing here, make a lot of money and when the prospectors move on... we will have a stable business.” Big Ed looked at Samuel and swore “I ain’t planning on sticking around that long. Hell when they move there will be pretty few