Sold to a Marseille Don, So He Knelt at My Father's Grave novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: The Quay
On the first Sunday of the year the Quai du Port market ran from the fish stalls to the fort, and Antone Orsini stood in front of the sea-urchin stall in a black overcoat and did not move.
I watched him from the pastry stand across the cobbles with a paper cup of chocolate going cold in my hand.
He had been there half an hour.
The old man sat behind his basket on an upturned crate, cutting urchins open with a short knife, and he had not looked up once.
Customers went round Antone, and some of them stopped to stare.
A boatman I knew from the Joliette took off his cap to him, slowly, and put it back on.
Antone did not seem to notice.
He stood in the cold wind off the water with his hands in his pockets and waited, and he waited.
At last the old man set down his knife.
"You are blocking the light," he said.
"Yes."
"Buy or go."
"I will buy," Antone said. "But I think you will not sell to me."
"I will not."
"Then tell me what I can do for you."
The old man looked up then, for the first time, with small black eyes.
He looked at Antone's good shoes and his good coat, and the fine gold watch on his wrist.
"There are forty crates on the boat at the end of the quay," he said. "My back is finished. The boy who carries for me has a cold."
"Where do they go?"
"My stall. Then the ice."
Antone took off his coat.
He folded it and laid it over the old man's crate, and he rolled his sleeves to the elbow.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Sold to a Marseille Don, So He Knelt at My Father's Grave are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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