The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  Still wearing his buckskins and his soft, wide-brimmed hat, he hefted the chest into the revered portals of the Bank of England, dumped it on the floor and stood looking around.

  Its acolytes would not have dreamed of being rude or even verbally contemptuous to any man who entered their temple precinct, thus Alexander found himself confronted by a clerkly dumpling who smiled at him.

  “An American, sir?”

  “No, a Scot in need of a bank.”

  “Oh, I see.” Sniffing wealth, the clerkly dumpling didn’t make the mistake of palming this peculiar-looking man off on some minion; he bade Alexander be seated until a deputy manager was free to attend to him.

  A short time later an Important Personage appeared. “How may I help you, sir?”

  “My name’s Alexander Kinross, and I want your bank to hold my bullion for me.” The toe of Alexander’s scuffed boot nudged the chest. “I’ve fifty-five pounds of it.”

  Two minions picked up the chest by its handles and lugged it into Mr. Walter Maudling’s office.

  “Do you mean to say, Mr. Kinross, that you have physically carried fifty-five pounds of gold from California all the way to London?” asked Mr. Maudling, round-eyed.

  “I’ve carried a hundred pounds. My tools are atop the gold.”

  “Why not a San Francisco bank, or at least a New York one?”

  “Because the Bank of England is the only one I trust. I figure,” said Alexander, unconsciously using the forms of speech of the land he had just quit, “that if the Bank of England goes under, the world will stop spinning. I’m no’ a man who esteems banks, as I have already told you.”

  “The Bank of England is highly flattered, sir.”

  Hammers, wrenches, files and more esoteric items were strewn all over the floor; Alexander lifted the chest’s false bottom to reveal its dully gleaming contents, eleven little gold bricks.

  “I separated it from the amalgam in Coloma,” said Alexander chattily, stacking the bars on the desk and replacing the false bottom and tools. “Will you keep it for me?”

  Mr. Maudling blinked. “Keep it? Like that? Don’t you wish to cash it in and earn something on it?”

  “No, because while it’s like that it says what it is. I’ve no intention of exchanging it for numbers written on ledger paper, Mr. Maudling, no matter how many noughts follow them. But, as I don’t want to keep on dragging this with me, will you keep it?”

  “Of course, of course, Mr. Kinross!”

  And that, thought Walter Maudling as he watched the tall, rather catlike figure stride out of the Bank of England, is the oddest client I have ever encountered. Alexander Kinross! A name the Bank of England is going to hear quite often in the years to come, I’d bet the contents of his tool chest on it.

  THE FOUR HUNDRED pounds in gold sovereigns that he obtained for his American dollars were not wasted on luxurious hotels or high living, nor did Alexander buy a conforming suit. Instead he bought washable clothes of dungaree and cotton, new flannel underwear, and put up in a Kensington boarding house that offered very good home cooking and clean rooms. He visited the museums, art galleries public and private, the Tower of London and Madame Tussaud’s waxworks; in a private gallery he paid fifty of his precious pounds for a painting by someone named Dante Gabriel Rossetti because the woman in it looked like Honoria Brown. When he presented it to Mr. Maudling for storage in the Bank of England, that gentleman never batted an eyelid; if Alexander Kinross paid fifty pounds for a painting, it was sure to end in being a masterpiece. The work was, besides, quite lovely, lyrically romantic.

  Then, after criss-crossing England on trains, heading ever northward, Alexander arrived at the village of Auchterderran in Kinross County, a short distance from Kinross town.

  What had really happened and would happen to Alexander Kinross were never imparted to Elizabeth; what she learned was semi-myth. His intention in returning was to obtain the promise of a wife. That he didn’t want to marry just yet was due to his ambition to follow—literally—in the footsteps of Alexander the Great; to retrace the tortuous route the King of Macedonia had taken in his conquests. Not a journey that a young woman would relish, he was sure. So he would marry on his return and take his bride with him to New South Wales. He had her picked out already: she was Uncle James’s eldest daughter, Jean, whom he remembered as if he had last seen her yesterday. An exquisite, precocious ten-year-old who had gazed at him adoringly and told him that she loved him, that she would always love him. Well, that would make her sixteen now—the perfect age. By the time he had done with this new expedition, Jean would be eighteen and old enough to marry.

  He rode a hired horse into Kinross on a Sunday afternoon and went to see Uncle James. Who greeted him with distaste.

  “You look as shiftless as ever, Alexander,” said James as he led his visitor into the front parlor, then hollered for tea. “I had to pay for your father’s funeral, since you’d disappeared off the face of the map.”

  “Thank you for your tact in breaking this news to me, sir,” said Alexander, poker-faced. “How much did it cost?”

  “Five pounds I could ill afford.”

  Alexander fished in the pocket of his fringed buckskin coat. “Here are six pounds—the extra pound represents interest. Is it long since he died?”

  “A year.”

  “I suppose it’s too much to hope that old man Murray has followed Duncan to hell?”

  “You’re a maggot and a blasphemer, Alexander. You always have been. I thank God that you’re no kin to me.”

  “Murray told you that, did he? Or was it Duncan?”

  “My brother died with his shame still his own business. Dr. Murray told me at his funeral, said someone had to know.”

  At which moment Jean walked into the parlor bearing a tray of tea and cake. Oh, she was beautiful! Grown up exactly as he had imagined, with Honoria Brown’s glassy lashes and aquamarine eyes. But he couldn’t delude himself that Jean even recognized him, let alone remembered that she had said she would always love him. The stare she directed at him was cursory, uninterested, then she pranced out of the room. Well, that was understandable. He had changed a great deal. Best get down to the bargaining.

  “I’ve come to ask for Jean’s hand in marriage,” he said.

  “I hope you’re joking!”

  “Not at all. I’m here in all honor to ask for Jean, though I’m aware she’s not old enough yet. I can wait.”

  “You can wait until the worms eat you!” James snapped, eyes flashing.

  “Give a Drummond to a bastard? I’d sooner give her to an Anabaptist!”

  Somehow he suppressed his anger. “No one knows that story except you, me, and old man Murray, so what does it matter? I’m on my way to being a very rich man.”

  “Tosh! Where did you go when you ran off?”

  “To Glasgow, where I was apprenticed as a boilermaker.”

  “And you think to make a fortune at that?”

  “No, I have other strings to my bow,” Alexander began, intending to tell James about the gold. That would shut him up!

  But James had had enough. He rose to his feet and stalked to the front door, threw it open dramatically and pointed to the road. “Out you go this minute, Alexander whoever-you-are! You’ll no’ get Jean or any other young Kinross woman! If you try, Dr. Murray and I will pillory you!”

  “Then I make you a promise, James Drummond,” said Alexander, biting off his words. “At some time in the future, you’ll be glad to give me one of your daughters in marriage.” He walked down the path, mounted his hired horse and rode away.

  Now where did he learn to ride so well, and where did he get his clothes? wondered James, too late.

  Elizabeth, five years old, was in the kitchen with Jean and Anne, learning how to make scones. Because Jean neglected to mention the visitor in the parlor, Elizabeth never knew that only one room had separated her from that shiftless boilermaker’s apprentice, her cousin Alexander.

  IT HAD BEEN
a foolish impulse, Alexander admitted to himself as he nudged the horse to a canter. A little serious thought would have told him what James Drummond would say to his offer, but all he could think about had been immature little Jean’s resemblance to Honoria Brown.

  I would have married Honoria Brown, except that I could tell she was wedded to her patch of Indiana earth.

  THERE DIDN’T seem any hurry now to make his next fortune; Alexander put his western saddle on a good hack, stowed his belongings in two saddlebags and set off across Europe, seeing the march of history as he rode: gothic cathedrals, half-timbered towns, immense castles, and, when he reached Greece, once-glorious temples felled by the movements of Mother Earth. Still under the sway of the disintegrating Ottomans, Macedonia held more evidence of Islam than of Alexander.

  In fact, he realized as he wandered through Turkey, poked about in Issus, followed the line of his namesake’s march south to Egypt, little physically remained of Alexander the Great. Whatever of the world’s ancient history had visibly endured was constructed of massive stone, be it pyramid, ziggurat, sanctuary, or a red sandstone gorge whose very walls had been carved into majestic temples. Babylon was a city of mud brick, its hanging gardens evaporated into the mists of time, giving nothing of Alexander’s death away, or of the life he had lived there.

  Slowly the pilgrimage became something else, an insatiable curiosity about Asia rather than an attempt to turn back the clock of the centuries. So he went wherever he fancied, whether Alexander the Great had been there or not. Because he had been told that it couldn’t be done, he rode over the mighty peaks of eastern Turkey to see that, yes, the snow on the mountain flanks was indeed a rich pinkish-red from sand blown all the way from the Sahara desert. What awed him now was the power of Nature’s world, and how humanity had coped with it.

  Though the war had been over now for ten years, he deemed it imprudent to visit the Crimea, so he turned eastward over the Caucasus instead, and came down to the Caspian Sea in a Russian outpost named Baku. This was the northern branch of the ancient silk route from China, a bleak and almost rainless place whose tiny capital, also Baku, was a jumble of disintegrating houses stepped on top of each other up a hill. And there he found two wonders. The first was caviar. The second was how the local people ran their Caspian paddle wheelers, their locomotives, their fixed steam engines. For neither trees nor coal were to be found anywhere near Baku.

  The entire area was littered with soak-wells of what some called naphtha, others bitumen, and chemists petroleum. Many of these wells burned brilliantly, great gouts of flame leaping skyward—not the petroleum itself, he was able to ascertain, but the gases it gave off. On his return from Egypt he had ridden down the Arabian coast of the Red Sea intending to visit Mecca, when a seasoned English traveler advised him against it; infidels were not welcome there. But here in Baku was a different religious sect’s equivalent of Mecca, or Rome, or Jerusalem: adherents of Mazda, the fire god, came from all over Persia to worship the burning gases, lending an already exotic little place additional nuances of sound, color, ritual.

  Unfortunately Alexander couldn’t speak Russian, French, Farsi or any of the languages understood in Baku, nor could he find one other English-speaker who did. All he could do was make what assumptions he could about the fact that somehow these unsophisticated people, deprived of wood or coal, had learned to use the petroleum as fuel to heat their boilers. Going on the evidence of the burning wells, Alexander thought that what burned to turn water into superheated steam were the gases emitted by the petroleum, not the substance itself. That meant that once the gases in the boiler chamber above the tray of petroleum started to burn, the petroleum must keep on giving off gas. What was more, he noted, fascinated, this oil—for so it looked—produced far less smoke than either coal or wood.

  FROM BAKU he went south into Persia, through more mountains quite as rugged as the Rockies. Where they became a range known as the Elburz—lower, less craggy—he saw, amazed, evidence of this petroleum again. The ruins around Persepolis were highly satisfying, but a personal need drove him north again to Tehran; his buckskins had reached the end of their useful life, and in Tehran, a big city, he would find someone able to make him new clothes out of chamois. This exquisitely fine, soft leather was so comfortable to wear that he paid the delighted tailor to make more and send them to Mr. Walter Maudling at the Bank of England to keep until he collected them. This was typical Alexander; he trusted the tailor and saw nothing inappropriate in having his banker act as his depot. So accustomed was he by now to communicating in a mixture of sign language and drawn pictures that, he thought whimsically, were he to be marooned in a colony of bears, he would be able to make the bears understand him. Probably because he was alone, looked ordinary if utterly foreign, he was never threatened by the people he encountered on his travels; as had been his way since he was fifteen, he tried to earn what he ate by performing some kind of helpful manual work. People respected that, and respected him.

  Other items than chamois suits were shipped to Mr. Maudling from time to time: two icons that he bought in Baku, a perfect marble statue from Persepolis, a huge silk rug from Van, and, in an Alexandrian bazaar, a painting that the vendor said originally came from an officer in Napoleon’s army, loot from Italy. It cost Alexander five pounds, but his instinct said it was worth far more, for it was old, had a little the look of his icons.

  He was thoroughly enjoying himself, the more so because he had never enjoyed his childhood, or those years in Glasgow. After all, he was still in his middle twenties; he had time on his side, and his common sense said that every new thing he experienced contributed to his education—that, between all of this travel, his Latin and his Greek, one day men would defer to him for other reasons than mere wealth.

  HOWEVER, ALL things must end. For five years he wandered around the Islamic world, central Asia, India and China, then took ship for London out of Bombay. A quick and easy voyage now that the Suez Canal was open.

  As he sent word to Mr. Walter Maudling that he was coming to the Bank of England at two in the afternoon, that gentleman had time to prepare a homily upon the etiquette of dumping all his acquisitions at Threadneedle Street. It also gave him time to have one of those acquisitions removed from the attic in his own house and couriered to his office, where it sat, a big and bulky package sewn up in canvas, by the side of his desk.

  The skin-clad Alexander strode in and slapped a draft for fifty thousand pounds in front of his banker, then sat in the visitor’s chair, eyes laughing.

  “No bullion?” asked Mr. Maudling.

  “Not where I’ve been.”

  Mr. Maudling took in the weather-beaten face, the neat black goatee, the hair curling over Alexander’s shoulders. “You look astonishingly well, sir, considering the places you have been.”

  “Never had a day’s sickness. I see that my chamois suits have arrived. Did my other things reach you?”

  “Your ‘things,’ Mr. Kinross, have caused this bank no small inconvenience. It is not a poste restante! However, I took the liberty of calling in a valuator to see whether I should put your ‘things’ in some external storage facility, or send them to our vaults. The statue is second century B.C. Greek, the icons Byzantine, the rug has six hundred double knots of silk per square inch, the painting is a Giotto, the vases are mint-condition Ming, and the table screens—also in mint condition—are some dynasty of fifteen hundred years ago. Therefore they went into our vaults. The parcel you see here I stored in my own attic, having ascertained that it is new, if peculiar, clothing,” said Mr. Maudling, trying to look severe. He picked up the draft and flicked it. “What does this represent, sir?”

  “Diamonds. I sold them to a Dutchman this morning. He’s made a nice profit on the deal, but I’m happy with the price. I had the pleasure of finding them,” Alexander said, smiling.

  “Diamonds. Don’t you have to mine for them?”

  “You can, but that’s very recent. I found mine where most have
been found since Adam was a boy—in the gravelly beds of sparkling little rivers that flow down from the Hindu Kush, the Pamirs, the Himalayas. Tibet had very good pickings. Rough diamonds look just like pebbles or gravel, especially when they are crusted with a layer of some iron-rich mineral. If they sat there glittering, all of them would already have been found, but some of the places I went were pretty remote.”

  “Mr. Kinross,” said Walter Maudling slowly, “you are a phenomenon. You have the Midas touch.”

  “I used to think that myself, but I’ve changed my mind. A man finds the treasures of the world because he looks at what he sees,” said Alexander Kinross. “That’s the secret. Look at what you see. Most men don’t. Opportunity doesn’t knock once—it beats a perpetual tattoo.”

  “And does opportunity now drum out the financial realms of London?”

  “Good lord, no!” said Alexander, shocked. “I’m off to New South Wales. This time for gold. I’ll need a letter of credit to some Sydney bank—try to find me a decent one! Though my gold will come here.”

  “Banks,” said Mr. Maudling with dignity, “are mostly above reproach, sir.”

  “Rubbish!” said Alexander scornfully. “Sydney banks will be no different from those in Glasgow or San Francisco—susceptible to theft from the top.” He rose to his feet and effortlessly hoisted the parcel into his arms. “Will you keep my treasures until I decide what to do with them?”

  “For a modest fee.”

  “That, I expected. Now I’m off to the Times.”

  “If you tell me whereabouts you’re staying, Mr. Kinross, I will have your clothing sent.”

  “No, I’ve a hackney waiting outside.”

  Curiosity piqued, Mr. Maudling couldn’t resist asking. “The Times? Are you planning to write an article on your travels?”

  “I should think not! No, I want to place an advertisement. If I have to spend two months on a ship to New South Wales, I refuse to be idle. So I’m going to find a man who can teach me French and Italian.”