William Stronnar
The Third Trust Novels
In 1780 Benjamin Franklin raises a million pounds sterling and places it in a trust that is to run for 250 years. He gives it not to princes or bankers but to a bankrupt Maryland merchant called James Cheston, and to the ordinary men and women who will come after him.
The Trust is bound by five prohibitions:
Capital without direct control.
Governance without spectacle.
Force without visibility.
Innovation without recklessness.
Land without exploitation.
Franklin believed the Republic he had helped to make would be lost to greed within 250 years. He also believed that honest people who kept faith with a few plain rules could tilt the world.
We know what happens if they fail. We are living in it.
In 2030 the Trust comes to an end. This is what happens when they succeed.
The books
Each book stands alone, so you can begin anywhere. Beginning at the beginning is best. The opening chapter of every book is free to read here.
one, unaccounted
Maryland, 1780. James Cheston is a bankrupt tobacco merchant who wants three things: to pay his debts, to see his father, and to get home to his wife and children.
He crosses an ocean at war to put things right, and in Paris Benjamin Franklin finds a use for an honest man with nothing left to lose. Four days after Cheston says yes, he is taken off a Paris street.
a court of one
Taken, and held without charge in a private house of detention outside Paris, Cheston has ninety-three days and a kitchen table.
With beans and peas for counters he designs the thing Franklin has asked him to hold, while men on both sides of the Channel decide what is to be done with him.
render to nobody
Free, and in England, Cheston has sixty days to render the Trust’s first account to people he may never meet.
It is a race across Europe against a calendar, and against a gentleman in London who keeps a calendar of his own.
the road goes through me
The Trust has enemies now, and they know his name. By the autumn of 1781 Cheston is in Newgate, in irons, charged with treason.
Getting out is only the beginning. Every road home runs through the people he loves, and somebody is watching all of them.
at sea
The winter Atlantic, a Flemish ship with an Irish master who keeps hens, and a deadline: unless he is home by the first of March 1782, Maryland will count Cheston a British subject and take everything he has.
He runs for home.
the lord’s bath
A young clerk at the Navy Office notices that the best masts in the Navy have stopped coming from Courland.
Nobody wants him to find out why. The road leads to a forest on the Baltic, to eleven hundred people who went with the land, and to a breakfast table in Passy.
how many souls
Home at last, on his father-in-law’s plantation on the West River, Cheston finds that the house he longed for runs on people who are owned, and that his wife knows there is a book he will not let her read.
In Paris, Franklin is making a peace, and learning what his own money stands on in a forest in Courland. Both men are counting souls they had stopped seeing.
whose
New York, the winter after the peace. Darby, sixty-two years old and the best oarsman on the West River, comes ashore off a prize schooner at the Fly Market with a fish basket on his shoulder, and walks into the town the British still hold.
The peace Franklin signed in Paris has a clause about men like him. Whether the hour he came in makes him free, or somebody’s property, is the question the whole year turns on, and Darby means to answer it himself.
whoever comes
Annapolis, Christmas 1783. Rose is cooking for two hundred on the night the General gives back his commission, and the stranger plucking turkeys in her kitchen tells her about a law in Pennsylvania: six months, and on the day after, free.
That year the Trust begins to buy the paper the Republic paid its soldiers with, from the soldiers themselves, one name at a time, at a price nobody else will give. Somebody in London notices.
nobody’s
London, January 1785. The Gentleman tells the man in the grey coat that he is glad of him. It is the worst thing anybody has said to him in twelve years, and he goes to a tap-room in Bishopsgate Street to do something about it.
The soldiers’ book must cross the ocean, and Anne will trust nobody else to carry it. Franklin comes home to see what he has made. And in London the Gentleman sets out to close every door at once.
About the author
William Stronnar has made a living cooking, building and turning his hand to whatever came next. Much of his writing takes shape on long walks with his dog.
He is drawn to the people history overlooks, the decisions that outlive their makers and the uncomfortable possibility that the official version of events is rarely the whole story.