Franco Karsyn Cremaschi
Basics
- Gender: Male
- Type: Young Adult
- Nationality: Italian
- Location: Emilia-Romagna, Italy
- Language: Italian, German, English
Life & Times
- Age: 28
- Birth date: January 24, 1877 (3:23 AM)
Physical
Height: 185 cm / 6 ft 1 in Weight: 53 kg / 116 lbs Handedness: Right Blood type: A+
Biography
Franco Karsyn Cremaschi came over from a sunburnt provincial town in Italy with nothing but a satchel of books and a stubborn idea that the law could be bought with learning and sweat. He learned proper English from books and the mouths of dockworkers, his consonants rounding like pebbles in a river, and paid his way through night classes and bar shifts, translating contracts by daylight and polishing glasses by midnight. Admission to the study of law felt like a hard-won ticket: he took in lodgers, ran errands for barristers, and once pawned his father's pocket watch to cover tuition. In court his accent makes him an easy foil; judges sigh at his Italian cadences, juries look for posture as much as argument, and opposing counsel use every slur about foreignness they can find. He endures it because he remembers how the city's poorest were hustled out of their rights, and because his hunger for a better life has taught him a certain ruthlessness in persistence.
Practice steered him where clients could pay: pickpockets with quick hands and faster stories, women of easy virtue whose lives the law treated as stains, and the occasional petty fence. He defends them with the delicacy of someone who knows both how to read a statute and how to read a pocket. As he learns the alleyways that lead to the courts, his sympathies bend; the cleverness that gets a thief acquitted is the same cleverness that smooths a lie into a plausible truth, and the compassion that saves a woman from a harsh sentence sometimes asks for debts to be repaid in kinds of favors he had never imagined accepting. All the while he courts a woman of higher standing—her world of small dinners, measured laughter, and linen cuffs threatens to civilize him even as it exposes the gulf between respectability and survival. He finds, with a mix of shame and relief, that his moral center shifts with the needs of those he defends, and he wonders which version of Franco Cremaschi will arrive first at the pivot of his life.