Adam Runaway

Book Description

It is 1721, and the city of Lisbon - alive with the scurry of English merchants, businessmen, and traders - has become a veritable gold mine. The Britain of George 1 is glorying in its new-found hegemony, is now considered to be the world's leading commercial power, its citizens descending on the Portuguese city, setting up trading stores and bargaining with the local merchants for riches from as far away as the Brazilian and African colonies.

Regardless of its newfound trading wealth, Portugal remains staunchly Catholic with religious doctrine strictly enforced. Non-believers and anyone suspected from deviating from the faith is either imprisoned and tortured or burned at the stake by the unwavering puritanical "familiar" of the Inquisition.
The Protestant English, often considered circumspect, are branded as heretics, but they are allowed to live and work at leisure. Protected by the powerful machinations of King George and the commercial wealth of the colonial empire, they profit from the local merchant class and look down their noses at the puritanical ways of the Catholic ruling class.

Adam Runaway is not sure what to make of all this when he arrives in this turbulent city from London, ostensibly to take up a position working as a clerk for his Uncle Feliz Hathaway, but also to try to restore the family fortune that was devastated the previous year by his father.