Jack Rackham in “Unfinished Business”

Jack Rackham

[to Rogers] My father was a tailor in Leeds. As was his father, and his father's father. Time was, if a man on the Avondale Road asked where he might find the finest clothes in northern England, he was pointed toward the shop of a man named Rackham. Then the men who sell wool decided they'd prefer not to compete with the men who imported fine cotton. And as the men who sell wool have the ears of the men who make laws, an embargo is enacted to increase profits, and calico disappears. And my father's business that he inherited from his father and his father's father begins to wither and die. And my father suffers the compound shame of financial failure seen through the eyes of his son, and descended into drink. I'd sit beside him as a boy at the Sunday service as he shouted at the pastor, at the altar--at anyone who'd listen, really--at the injustice of it all. And I'd put his arm over my shoulder as the insults began, help carry him out of the church. God, the insults. At his funeral, our neighbors were kind enough to whisper them rather than call them out loud. So, I set to work, determined to rebuild what had been taken away. I was thirteen years old, but I was determined... until a man arrived at my door claiming to hold debts belonging to my father. Debts accumulated as my father drank. Debts he claimed that now belonged to me. Debts I could not possibly have hoped to repay. Debts over which this man would have seen me imprisoned--imprisoned in a place where the debts would have been discharged only through hard labor. Hard labor with no wages, working at--wait for it--the production of textiles. 'You people, incapable of accepting the world as it is,' says the man to whom the world handed everything. If no Anne, if no rescue, if this is defeat for me, then know this: you and I were neck and neck in the race right till the end. But Jesus, did I make up a lot of ground to catch you.