Ooh, my goodness me. This does look like my sort of thing.
Name: Lucan Fairwell
Description: Lucan Fairwell is a man secure in his middle age, with a sharp, pointed set of features and a keen pair of hazel-brown eyes. A meticulously shaved and preened moustache, two wispy strands of silver-brown, curls out from the top of his lip, but otherwise his somewhat gaunt, aquiline face is cleanly shaven. Unimposing in height or in build, Lucan maintains exquisite and delicate manners as befits a gentleman-farmer, though with the odd imperfection of a life on the verges of the nobility his gentle manner would suggest.
Biography: Lucan Augustine Fairwell was born thirty-eight years ago, to Emmanuel "Praise-God" Fairwell, who had, in his old age, remarried after the death of his fourth gentle wife to his maid, Anne, for want of the company. Lucan, the old gentleman farmer's sixth son and tenth child in all, was almost entirely disregarded as Emmanuel sunk into senility, and as his brothers and sisters, all enterprising, cut-throat businessmen or women dearly in need of a dowry, dismantled the fortune of their father and made off with it, not even having the courtesy to wait for the will. Lucan, thereby, was left without any inheritance but a legal claim to have been his father's guardian at his death, and a barrel of salted herring concealed in the house's basement.
From such meagre beginnings, little could be expected of him, but he managed to turn a name and a barrel of fish into a modest fortune. He used the name, and his own skills at oratory, to sue his eldest half-brother for a large portion of the family estate, convincing the jury that he had, in fact, had the land bestowed upon him in the true wording of his father's last will and testament. With the land, he set about creating a business in the newly prospering industry of specialised farming, focusing first on flax to supply local weavers and then on rarer and more lucrative crops. At first, he tended the farm alone, with only the layabouts who could be bribed by a few day's food and shelter to help him, but within a few years of desperate, litigious enterprise he had grown to hold ownership over significant flocks and a prosperous planter farmstead. He was briefly married to the daughter of a local gentleman, and seemed poised to cast off the scourge of his relatively low birth to join the ranks of respectable society, only for his elder brother, now in possession of a sizable military commission and the hand of the local assize Judge's daughter, to counter-sue him, rightly claiming that the documents produced in his favour had been fraudulent.
In a matter of weeks, the work of a decade was repossessed, and Lucan found himself cast out again into the expanse of poverty. His wife, Rosamund, divorced him, and he fled into the city, initially working as a clerk for a shipping company, before stepping into the black-market trade in Indigo based narcotics. A few years passed with him dancing between legitimate work and the indigo trade, and in this time his mercantile instincts were honed to a sharp point, as ever advantage had to be drawn from every situation to remain afloat. Eventually, however, Lucan found himself dissatisfied, both with his decreasing profit margins, and with the routine stresses of his life, beholden unto criminals and vagabonds. He sold his last shipment of indigo, and in a fit of pique, took the profits and bribed the captain into taking him to a distant port, before spending almost all of the rest on a ship from that foreign port to the new world. He would leave his former life behind, if he could, and take up a new life, as he had always desired, as a gentleman planter, in a new world.
Skills: Skilled Agrarian, Wealthy, Silver Tongue.
It's time to farm Indigo, I suppose!
