To be born the son and heir to a heritage you don’t want is more than just unfortunate. It’s really a bit of a bind.
Who would be a mercer?
A merchant devoted to trading à bric et à brac as long as you make money. It’s a life of ledgers and warehouses, cut-throat deals on bales of cloth and barrels of pins.
Not the life for Danny Bristow.
He went to London to learn his father’s trade and instead learned the trade of warcraft and swordsmanship. But even that couldn’t hold his busy, mercurial, mind. He learned a love of mathematics, the power and beauty of its patterns: equations, algebra, geometry.
Nothing beats seeing the magic of calculations on the page spring into vivid life when applied in the real world, building revetments at an angle to deflect artillery bombardment or predicting the path of a cannonball or aligning a mortar.
Or counting the fall of the cards in a game of Piquet…
F l a n k e r, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
But with these things go people and they are the hardest puzzle of all. And who has time for that? A puzzle Danny learned can be solved with humour faster than with a clever mind or sharp sword. But you miss much when you’re laughing your way along and thinking yourself so damned clever. You can trip over your own feet.
We all make mistakes.
But not all mistakes can be scrubbed out and recalculated.
Some are written in blood and etched in stone.
Others might forgive you, those who unbelievably trust you still, but you can’t forgive yourself.
Be careful what you teach and who you teach it too.
Never let them get too close or they’ll rip your heart out.
Make them laugh, Danny, then they won’t see how badly it hurts living with the ghosts inside…
Eleanor Swift-Hook 
