The Triple Goddess by Ashly Graham

“100%” next to it.
    The broker had not even opened his mouth in salutation.
    Blandblind shot a glance at a framed photograph that was propped on a shelf above his head, and shivered. It was a picture of his grandmother, Etheldreda Blandblind, aged one hundred and three. She was a grim-faced, bearded, and still mentally functional woman, who walked with the aid of a shillelagh and had a stare that bored into his skull and read his every thought; which is why Etheldreda’s grandson had learned to keep his mental traffic as light as possible.
    Granny Blandblind was the largest Name on the syndicate, which her husband had founded, and every time that Clotworthy looked at her picture or was in her presence he felt as though he were still a schoolboy in short trousers.
    With a heavy heart Clotworthy turned Etheldreda’s photograph face-down, and rummaged in his drawer for a small key. Then, reaching under his seat, he unlocked a pocket drawer and retrieved a dusty stamp, which he spat on and wiped on his sleeve and banged several times on a pad to ink it up.
    The rest of the box fell silent, as the deputy and assistant underwriters (the Blandblind Syndicate was a sizeable operation) suspended their more vocal—Clotworthy’s broker had still not said a word and did not look pregnant with speech—discussions with other brokers to watch in fascination. The stamp was for a “baby” syndicate on which Clotworthy and Etheldreda Blandblind were the only Names, and it came out of its lair about once every dozen or so blue moons. Most of the staff had never seen it.
    Clotworthy stamped the slip and the broker’s sealed lips twisted with satisfaction.
    The blubber harvest, of course, was a disaster—not that the Inuits gave a fish’s tit: they had not even bothered to get their boats out, so glued had they been to their new satellite digital premium-channelled plasma HD televisions, paid for on the never-never by the future proceeds of their insurance contract—and twelve months to the day later the broker re-approached his market for the second year, or first renewal, of the contract.
    Blandblind’s horse had just lost an important race, and as he saw the broker bearing down on him he was certain not only of what he was bringing, but that the risk had tanked, and that he was nonetheless going to renew it with no increase in premium.
    It would not be the first time that Granny Etheldreda, now a hundred and four, had threatened to kill him; however Clotworthy, for all his misgiving, could not stand the thought of someone, if such a person could be found, taking over his contract and of it running clean in the second year, thereby depriving him of the opportunity to get his and the old lady’s money back.
    It was imperative that Clotworthy recoup the loss; despite her great age his ancient relative went through the accounts every year with a fine-toothed comb and berated him, literally with her shillelagh, for anything that she attributed to bad underwriting judgement. It was her syndicate, she would remind him through clenched gums, and had been for the last forty years since her husband Billy Blandblind died, and she was not going to permit her grandson to drive it into the ground. The subterranean motion of Billy spinning in his grave counter to the earth on its axis was bad enough.
    Clotworthy B. unlocked the little cupboard for the first time since the previous year, and, wincing at the thought of how much witch hazel he would need for his bruises if things went south again, soldiered on...as before without a word being exchanged between him and the broker.
    The second year was the same as the first: the whales, who were bored now that no Inuits in sealskins were chasing them with harpoons, had altered their migratory paths and the harvest was as poor as it had ever been, even unto the point of being non-existent.
    Not that the Inuits gave a squashed cock, for they had a policy from Lloyd’s that had just paid out in