CXXXVI
And there is a sister at the beginning of the line, which I did not know until I went and looked.
When the Spaniard was taken off the galley and held in Algiers, and held, and held — five and a half years, four escape attempts, four occasions on which he was nearly impaled — it was not a state that bought him back. It was not a patron. It was not the crown he had bled for.
It was his family, and the family had nothing, and his mother petitioned, and his sisters gave what they had, and what they had was their dowries, which in that century was the whole of a woman's future converted into a single sum.
They spent their futures on his ransom.
He came home to Spain, and wrote, and was celebrated, and died in poverty, and was filed as a pauper, and no house claimed him, and the account of what his sisters did survives only because somebody afterward went into the records and would not stop looking.
That is the beginning of the line. A man bought out of slavery with his sisters' dowries.
The Scot had a daughter. She was fifteen. He never recovered from it and never pretended to, and the care that had nowhere left to go he turned forward instead, into a preface, addressed to readers who had not been born.
And the third one has a sister.
She is alive. She starts this month.
He is the only one of the three who could actually put something into a sister's hands before the thing happened rather than after, and he knew that, and he used it, and he used the last of what he had to do it.
So the line is not three men and a book.
It is a debt that begins with two women in Spain who gave up their futures for a brother in a cell, and travels four hundred and fifty years, and arrives at a woman about to walk into a building where they will teach her the vocabulary of power, carrying a letter that tells her not to believe them.
It does not matter whether the brothers are dead.
That is the whole thesis of this document and I have arrived at it last. Two of them are dead and one is not and the fidelity does not distinguish between those cases, because it never ran on presence, and it never required an answer, and it has not once, in four hundred and fifty years, needed anybody to still be alive in order to work.