Last sleep before the flight. No post next week.
In the days before Army and Navy pensions were instituted there was no fixed and national provision for wounded and mutilated soldiers and sailors who were discharged after serving their country in the wars.
The substitute in the Navy was a chest kept at Chatham. The idea is said to have originated with Drake after the Armada in 1588. Our seamen eventually agreed to have certain sums docked from their wages to make a pension fund for poor and disabled ex-Service men.
The money collected soon reached a considerable sum, and the Keeper of the Chest was often, not without cause, suspected of dipping his own fingers into the savings ... [the original chest] is believed to have been captured in one of the vessels of the Spanish Armada and to have been presented by Sir Francis Drake for the purpose to which it was afterwards used until as late as 1802. As much as three hundred thousand pounds in Consols was in the possession of the chest in 1817 ... London Cameos A.H.Blake
A Consul, as far as I can work out, is a Government security and they were issuing those as far back as the 1750s.
According to London Cameos the chest found its way to Greenwich, where Blake took a picture of it in 1930. As far as I can make out from that picture the chest Blake saw is not this one though it is similar, and probably of similar vintage.
Blake doesn't specify but I presume when he mentions Greenwich he means the Naval College which, in the 1930s, would still have been training the British Navy. These days the buildings are open to the public but that wouldn't have been so when Blake was writing about them. If you didn't have an invitation or know someone on the inside, you'd have to sneak in. Not impossible, but tricky.
All of which brings me to:
The Last Resort
The Hounds are suffering hard times. Bills and debt notices are flying like a blizzard, and Rough Lads are staking out the Hounds' home and shop pressing them for payment. Without an influx of cash it may be time to padlock the place for good.
If only they knew a way to make money quick ... but there is someone who claims to know the secret. An old sailor who remembers the days of sail and now lives in a shack in the East End supposedly knows how to raid Drake's old pension fund; it's how he keeps himself in drink money. A number of people have tried to get him to spill the secret but he's always held firm ... until now.
The sailor, former Lieutenant Dalton RN, is old, frail, and an opium addict who's seen all the world and every nation in it. He frequents the Grapes in Limehouse and if the Hounds can't find him anywhere else they may find him there.
He knows how to get a handful of cash through Rough Magick, but if the Hounds can get hold of any document written by former Navy clerk Samuel Pepys (or plausibly forged to seem as if it came from Pepys) he says he can raid the box for thousands of pounds. Can the Hounds organize a burglary of the Naval College armed with Pepys' papers to raid Drake's pension fund?
Option One: Bad Lieutenant. Dalton does know how to raid the Chest but up till now his magical ability only netted him a few pounds at a time. He intends to keep all the cash for himself and has hired a few Rough Lads - those same Lads who are on the Hounds' heels - to delay the Hounds while he gets away with the loot.
Option Two: Good and Faithful Servant. Dalton is telling the truth. What he doesn't appreciate is that the chest has a guardian. Up till now that guardian hasn't been active because Dalton only ever stole a few pounds at a time, and after centuries of people dipping their fingers in the till a few pounds' theft isn't worth the guardian's effort. However, attempting to nick the entire pension fund will rouse the Spanish Don whose chest this was, and the dead man isn't at all happy about it.
Option Three: College Japes. Whether or not the chest can be raided isn't the issue. The issue is that there's a small branch of the Cthulhu Cult at the Royal Naval College, loosely affiliated with the Brotherhood. This Cult, made up largely of officers and men who served in Egypt, isn't going to be pleased about a bunch of outsiders breaking into their premises and casting spells. Direct action is called for ...
That's it for this week. See you soon!
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