Lucius Lessard-Newton, Downtime #1

The map of the town was hopelessly out of date. Additional land Grandfather had acquired late in his life had been crudely and imprecisely penciled in, and the places where the “official” border of the town had expanded had been annotated with that information and absolutely nothing else. It was the same on survey documents, deeds, and the handful of other official documents that he’d looked over so far.

Lucius took another swallow of his now lukewarm tea and turned to the next document. Just like most of the rest, it indicated the borders of the town with a reasonable degree of precision, but it was a brand new number – not a single one of the documents agreed with any of the others as to Newton’s exact boundaries. Furthermore, Lucius had no doubt that most of the farmers on the periphery tilled and sowed on land that was technically outside the borders of the town and therefore contested. His father certainly had.

Most likely the reason for the inaccuracy lay in Newton’s extremely ad hoc origins. Nobody could agree on how big the town was at its founding, with the few sources that named it (Neither Grandfather or anyone else in his band had been much on paperwork in the early days, it seemed) saying that it was either the walls of the bandit compound Newton had formerly been, or the trickling Washington River, or the edge of the forest as it had existed then.

Whatever the reason, Lucius’ felt his hopes lift, if not exactly soar. Maybe with a full blood, first generation Newton or two on his side, especially one with land on the periphery, he might be able to convince the council that the town extended beyond his current fields, possibly all the way to Dosset Creek. That’d add almost 100 acres of unimproved land to his claim by itself, and reasonable good land too. The more people that agreed with him, the larger the expansion was likely to be – they’d all want a slice of the pie after all. Aunt Lorraine, for instance, would certainly not say no to some more of the prime grazing land watered by the creek. With 100 acres of additional land, he’d just need square inches more to edge old Gus White out of the council.

Lucius leaned back in the town hall’s uncomfortable chair. He’d need to put all this away before the meeting started – the council were the last people in town he wanted hearing of his plan.