30

Your family manages to dredge up a living year after year on this plot of hilly earth a few hours' walk from Billingsley. The soil is not much for food crops (which is just as well, because given your mother's culinary handicap, your family is not much for eating).

However, your father discovered that some quirk of moisture, minerals, and sunlight makes your acreage suited to bumper crops of deadly nightshade, crab's eye, foxglove, and more of nature's fatal foliage. Ever enterprising, he established your farm as the premier supplier of thoroughly toxic vegetation to all the nobly minded souls in the region with interest in such things: physicians, game hunters, and natural philosophers.

When pressed on whether or not he was also likely supporting Brenton's assassins, murderers, horse-thieves, and suicides, he was wont to answer, "Don't mind who they are, long as their coins clink." The clinking of coins being notably connected, of course, to salvation in the hereafter.

Onward