Free Country of the Bad Wolfes by James Blake

because he had expected Samuel Thomas sooner or later to show up in search of him, and he would have to introduce him to friends. He had told them Sammy was a junior officer on a merchant ship, an elevation in rank he was certain Sammy would enjoy simulating, just as he would surely understand why his classmates mustn’t know the truth about their father—though Sammy would doubtless have chivvied him for his social fastidiousness. He had been sure, too, that his friends would enjoy the surprise of seeing that they were twins. When he sadly told his fellows, at the start of sophomore year, that his brother’s ship had gone down in a storm off Hispaniola that summer and the entire crew with it, he was accorded the special sympathy reserved for those who have lost the last of their family.
    His only confidant during his Dartmouth years was a leatherbound ledger that served as a journal in which he made random entries with no purpose but to clarify to himself his own thoughts and reflections. Whenever he was unclear about some idea or emotion, uncertain in his perception of someone or vague about a memory, he sat to his journal and wrote as precisely as he could what he thought or felt or remembered, and thereby gave those thoughts and feelings and memories the solidity and authority of words recorded on a page. And by that simple act made of them his abiding truth.

    He graduated summa cum laude but was bested by a whisker for valedictorian and so delivered the salutatory address. Then went to work as a legal assistant in the Concord office of Fletcher, McIntosh & Bartlett. He gained the position through the influence of his best friend and fencing teammate, James Davison Bartlett, son to one of the firm’s partners and himself studying toward a legal career. A rakishsort, Jimmy Bartlett had once sneaked a young prostitute into his dormitory simply to prove he could do it, then was caught as he was trying to sneak her out again. It was one of numerous pranks for which he might have been expelled but for the might of his family name. The Bartletts had landed with the Pilgrims. They were among the first families of New Hampshire—and major benefactors of Dartmouth College. In addition to the builders of the paper mills on which the Bartlett fortune was founded and had continued to expand, the bloodline included a lieutenant governor, a state Supreme Court justice, and a state’s attorney general. Jimmy’s father, Sebastian, was one of the most highly respected contract lawyers in New England, and his Uncle Elliott was an administrator in the consular service. His mother, Alexandra Davison Bartlett, belonged to a prominent New York family long acquainted with the Sullivan County Van Burens, family of the former president of the United States.
    It was the most pleasant spring John Roger had known since boyhood. He fulfilled his office duties with precision and could research and annotate a point of law with utter thoroughness and dispatch. On his own initiative he devised and proposed a simpler but more efficient accounting system for the company, an innovation that earned him a handsome bonus and the partners’ unstinting praise. He kept a rented room on boisterous Center Street and gave his weekday evenings to reviewing Coke and Blackstone and other legal texts he’d been absorbing since his freshman year. But on almost every weekend he would be Jimmy’s guest at the Bartlett estate on the Merrimack. Except for Jimmy’s sister, who was away at school in Exeter, he made the acquaintance of all the Bartletts and enjoyed their company as much as they did his.
    He and Jimmy liked to scull on the river, liked to saddle a pair of the thoroughbreds stabled on the grounds and race each other across the meadows. The Bartletts also owned a seaside cottage near Rockport, Massachusetts, and he sometimes went there with Jimmy for holiday stays. They would sail off rocky Cape Ann in the family ketch