hirteen Anaxas winters, and Benton’s Bastian body could still barely withstand the cold under the multitude of thick, dark layers he wore. He was thankful for the lack of wind to blow the snow around, thankful that the barely-freezing weather made snowflakes that were soft and lazy, not painful and belligerent, thankful that the thickly feathered moa below him was warm under the saddle and blanket she was protected in. Pigeon, the scraggly, pre-owned moa, crunched loyally through the thin layer of snow blanketing and silencing the Viendan streets. She pulled behind her the small wooden cart Mordecai and Benton had spent autumn making, and it was a surprisingly a decently handy little thing. The wheels rode straight, the cover of the selling window stayed closed, and the roof stayed secure. That was all he could ask for.
Benton was entirely not Benton. It was a confusing thing to think altogether, but, truly, Benton was in disguise. He had let his signature stubble lengthen into a beard, then created a hideous monster on his face- a mustache alone without a beard or sideburns. He had cut his hair to thin it, trained his part to flip, and trained his hair to lay flat which he happily disguised under a brown top hat. He had erased a good few years away from his age with the coloring of his hair to dark brown. Too, he wore a pair of thin, wiry spectacles perched on his nose. Though covered by the thick wool winter coat, he wore an outfit of chocolate brown- a milk chocolate coat, a dark chocolate, double-breasted waist coat, hot chocolate button fly pants, and a powdered-cocoa ascot. Godfrey’s Celebrated Medicines read the golden letters pasted onto the cart.
Benton was a man of alter-egos, and today he was debuting his latest to Vienda as Doctor Roswell Godfrey, a brilliant young medicine man of Gior, who had come to Vienda with a cart of miraculous medicines and cures to ailments like melancholy, sore throats, and arthritis ready to be tried and used and loved by any and all customers. Benton, however, knew what he could potentially be selling in those bottles. Benton could be selling addictions, and addictions to his opium-based “medicines” meant business.
Roswell Godfrey pulled at Pigeon’s reins, and the moa slowed as they entered a quiet market. He slid off of her back, pulling her to an empty market lot and coaxing her to lay down on her long legs. He unhooked the cart from her and locked its wheels, allowing it to stand freely in place as he opened the wooden shutter on the side of the cart. Here, a glass display window waited, bottles labelled as his products but filled safely and disappointingly to a thief with water advertising remedies and cures for anything. The interior of the cart, barely big enough for Benton to stand hunched over, was lined with the real deal. Laudanum droppers for aid with sleep and fussy babies, cocaine toothache drops, morphine cough syrup, and chew tobacco asthma solutions were all present on his shelf, and all, he knew, present in the shelves of many other apothecaries. Though he understood the dangers of such drugs, the public could easily ignore it, especially when he named and marketed them well. Besides, they truly worked as they were supposed to. They just could come with an extra price.
The drug business had slowed every so noticeably in the last month. Perhaps it was fear. The Seventen was pressing closer and closer, and Silas Hawke was good at keeping loyalty. With the slowing of business came the lowering of temperatures, which discouraged travel even more. Yet, it also encouraged disease to fester and brew, and enough disease would bring people looking for any kind of cure.
Godfrey pulled the wooden sign out of the cart and set it on its own legs slightly away from the cart where it could advertise the very first sales of his time in Vienda.
Doctor Roswell Godfrey had arrived in Vienda, and he was ready for business.