Barlee Lemon

Barlee Lemon is an Ordinary Seaman aboard HMS Terpsichore. He is a PC belonging to Keiju. His PB is Sean Gilder.

Early life
His exact origins are impossible to know, for he grew up in a foundling home and never had any knowledge of his parents. Nor did he ever care over-much. For him, 'family' was an alien word and was one he never heard anyway. Hard work, discipline, and hunger, on the other hand, were soon words with which he became intimately familiar. The foundling home was not a comfortable or happy place but, knowing nothing else, Lemon accepted it as his world. To him, it was merely the way the whole world must be.

Being sent away from the home when he was fourteen was, to put it mildly, an eye-opening experience. He had never gone far outside the home and certainly had never travelled in a hansom cab. The journey to the riverside was not overly long but during it, Lemon was told that he was to become part of a great and vital profession, and of course serve his king in the process. He was to be apprenticed to a brass-founder at the Navy dockyard. The stern-faced artisan expressed no surprise at the boy being foisted upon him. In fact, he wasted no time beginning Lemon's education. As soon as the escort from the foundling home had gone, Mister Selverton, the brass-founder, took his new apprentice straight into the oppressive heat of the foundry.

So began Lemon's new life. He went through each day in a haze of bewildered disbelief, thoroughly out of his depth but striving to earn the approval of the hard-nosed Selverton. This was an impossible task but the boy never abandoned hope. Despite often needing to have lessons and directions repeated, sometimes multiple times, he eventually began to grasp the broader points of his trade. He showed some promise as a brass-founder and hoped to earn the privilege of becoming a journeyman under Mister Selverton's supervision. This hope was shattered when one of the other apprentices fell ill with smallpox. Within a week, all four apprentices and two of the journeymen were laid low with the disease, and were quarantined in two rooms of their boarding house. Here they remained for the better part of a month before those of them who survived were deemed on the path to recovering their health.

It was not long after this that Lemon was sent packing. Two of his fellow apprentices had succumbed to the smallpox and the third had had his health broken by a subsequent fever, but instead of taking him back on, Mister Selverton informed him that he must continue his training elsewhere. There were vacancies at the Chatham yard, the lad was told, and he might do worse than try his luck there. Thus, with a letter of introduction and a small ditty bag containing all his worldly possessions, Lemon was sent on his way. The journey to Chatham took days, such that he stopped troubling himself to keep track of them. All that mattered to him was the end of the trek, which had left him footsore and famished.

The Chatham dockyard was a bustling, noisy place. Finding the foundries, however, was not a challenge. Lemon was familiar with the sights and smells of such places and found his way to the brass-foundry, where he presented himself to the master of the foundry. Mister Selverton's letter was enough to gain him a day's trial, during which time Lemon did his best to prove his worth. His efforts must have paid off, for he was granted permission to complete his apprenticeship. From there, the only thing to do was work hard and try to earn his way to a journeyman's berth. This came, in due course, and despite a fresh set of struggles to learn, Lemon managed to acquire the necessary competency to be considered a functional brass-founder in his own right. It had taken him two years longer than his counterparts to reach this lofty height but he had done it.

Going to sea
He was able to enjoy his new position for only a couple of years, however. An evening's leisure in Red Cat Lane started out well but quickly went bad. Lemon and a journeyman-cutler friend found themselves in the same tavern as a rowdy group of Marines and seamen. Trouble was perhaps inevitable. Especially when Punchy Wright was involved. Lemon remembers little of events after the first tankard was thrown, but his being aboard a ship at anchor the next morning tells the tale plainly enough. His protests that he was a Dockyard artisan carried no weight. He and two others had been summarily pressed by the mixed group of libertymen, as retribution for the scrap in the tavern. No amount of protesting seemed to sway the ship's officers and Lemon gave up trying. It didn't help that the ship they had joined weighed anchor just two days later.

With no other recourse available, Lemon applied all his energies to learning the seaman's trade. He was a sailor now and he had better get used to the idea. His efforts eventually saw him gain a rating as an ordinary seaman, though it is unlikely he will rise higher.