by Ashly Graham
‘I never intended to set up a company, you understand, only to encourage the foundation and expansion of a marketplace wherein everyone agreed to adhere to an unwritten code of honesty, and to be open in sharing information, and prompt in paying premiums and losses. There were many unprincipled characters amongst us, as you would expect in an unregulated offshore trade where there was so much to gain at others’ expense.
‘It was essential that we cultivate a standard of trust amongst ourselves that would enable us to do business on a handshake and not have to worry about being defrauded, or the trouble and expense of having to get formal agreements drawn up on every business deal by overcharging attorneys. Legalese about limits of coverage, scope of peril, timing of payment and reimbursement, definitions and clauses, terms of credit, letters of intent, contract wordings—all we had in those days were conversations and scraps of paper. We wanted to spit on our palms not in each other’s faces.
‘Because we all frequented Edward Lloyd’s coffee house, it was understandable that our activities started to become synonymous with the place. “I’ll see you at Lloyd’s,” was the watchword: no appointments were necessary, because we always knew where we might find each other. Although we were competitors our interests in our ships we held in common, and trade was booming. Lloyd’s was neutral ground, and provided a congenial atmosphere in which to conduct our affairs, exchange up-to-the minute intelligence received from outposts around the world, and be convivial.
‘Until, that was, Edward died in seventeen thirteen and we buried him at St Mary Woolnoth church. His legacy was secure, however, and we set up the New Lloyd’s in Popes Head Alley, where for the first time the serving of coffee was subsidiary to commerce. When we outgrew that, a number of us got together and subscribed enough to rent premises in the Royal Exchange. Things had changed a lot by then, and we were all so busy with our underwriting activities that we were out of the ship-owning business altogether.
‘For years, if you can believe it, I lived and breathed risk with the best of ’em on the underwriting floor. Sometimes I even slept underneath my box, which in those days was in prime position next to the Rostrum. I was so hungry for business that I made Bullion Bill Goldsack look like...well, like me today. Then, about a century and half ago, although I continued to come into the market every day I lost interest in anything to do with venture and gain, and stopped accepting business.’
Carew shook his head at the memory of how different things used to be, and his silver-blond curtain of hair swung about his shoulders like a bead curtain. ‘Which hasn’t stopped every new broker from coming to see me…or rather being sent here. The supplicating flow has never ceased, the young ’uns are sworn to secrecy after they’ve been blooded by Carew, and the myth of the omnivorous underwriter endures. As well as everyone’s conviction that I’m a crackpot.’
Arbella’s brain was reeling like a drunken sailor, but she wanted to do her best to reassure this amiable but delusional man. ‘I couldn’t say about that, sir. Perhaps a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, as Churchill said of Russia.’
‘Well. Changing the subject, how do you like Chandlers? Is the firm treating you well?’
‘Oh...I suppose so. It’s a prestigious outfit, of course, if very old-fashioned and stuffy, and of all the Lloyd’s brokers they have the oldest and biggest accounts. It’s supposed to be a privilege to work for Chandlers, hence the pathetic starting salaries they pay to university graduates like me, which a mouse couldn’t live on. But their management training programme is a farce: they fling young recruits into the market without proper training—on the job training, they call it. Underwriters are always complaining about being inundated with callow brokers who don’t understand what they’re supposed to be doing, and how to do it, and about their having to waste valuable time explaining things to them when it should be the other way round.’
Carew nodded sympethetically. ‘Really, I don’t mind it at all. I’ve nothing else to do except tie fishing flies. I like talking to people with different backgrounds, and learning about what they would rather be doing than working in insurance. It diverts me from my own humdrum existence.’
Arbella recalled one of her English literature subjects. ‘“Variety’s the very spice of life |That gives it all its flavour”, says William Cowper in The Timepiece.’
‘After he left London William Cowper rarely strayed from Hertfordshire, and he wrote a long poem called The Task on the subject of a sofa. Although I’m more of a timepiece and more heavily seasoned than any, there’s no variety in my life.’
‘And although I’m beyond the callow stage, as the first female placing broker in the market it’s especially difficult for me to get taken seriously by underwriters. Sometimes I wish I’d gone to work for some Hughie, Dewey, and Louie outfit—one of the small houses with out of the usual new accounts, not just renewals, that are fun to work on.’
‘Such as?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, anything…crocodile farms…malpractice for witch doctors…orchid disease protections…plagues of locusts. Most of the assignments I’m given by my boss, Oink, involve renewing the small lines on contracts that have been around for ever. I only rarely get something new, and when I do it’s very small.’ Arbella regarded with distaste her buttoned slipcase containing the Seattle purse-seining risk that she had yet to get quoted.
Carew picked up the silver spoon in the sugar bowl, which was plain with a round black button on its handle like a currant, scooped up a few grains of sugar, and dropped them back into the bowl. ‘Regarding yesterday, and the Tower...’
‘Really, you don’t have to explain.’
‘I’m always there under the same circumstances, as a prison visitor. I had hoped that going with you would help me see the place in a different light.’
‘Well that’s what it is, a prison. Neither of us are tourists. You certainly seem to know the place well. I was a little put out, actually: there was I, wanting to impress you with my historical knowledge, and you made it clear in the nicest possible way that you were already up on everything and knew everyone who works there. Nonetheless I got the impression that you don’t like the Tower of London very much. If so you should have said, and we could have gone somewhere else.’
‘I have…complicated feelings about the place. I know it too well. And I have no choice but to go there, often.’
‘You weren’t imprisoned there once yourself, were you? After all that talk of how well you were acquainted with Edward Lloyd, you must be a lot older than you look.’ Arbella attempted what on anyone else would have been a grin, but which made her look as if she had come over queasy.
Carew answered slowly, ‘It is my father who is the prisoner at the Tower of London, Arbella. As for me, I was born there and baptized in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. With the exception of my father and a couple of others, from the aggregate amount of time I’ve spent within the Tower’s walls over the years one might say that I have spent more time there than anyone in history.’
Arbella now felt genuinely queasy. She was finding the eccentricities of this non-practising underwriter disturbing, especially so soon after her encounter with the so-called Sir Walter Ralegh. She wished that Mr Carew’s box was still near the rostrum, if indeed it ever had been, where there were people around to help her keep her sense of reality, and make it easier to get away. It was as if this man was a weird but harmless interloper who for some reason was tolerated by the authorities, if they even knew he was here, and humoured by the brokers because of his entertainment value.
Anxious not to let a look of open-mouthed surprise betray her disbelief, Arbella listened to herself gabbling, ‘One of your ancestors was in the Tower? How fascinating. Who was he? George the Marrow-, I mean, Beefeater, who is prone to exaggeration, tells me there are lots of ghosts, so many that he has difficulty in remembering their names when they greet him. At night the place is filled with screams and wailing, and rattling chains, and visions of head
less bodies walking through walls. The ghosts love an audience and they follow poor George about trying to distract him from doing his job by hamming it up and doing impressions of the Lieutenant. He finds it very annoying, especially as they have such a small repertoire.’
‘My father is not one of those poor lost spirits, and won’t have anything to do with them. In fact, they are afraid of him.’
Enough was enough. ‘Come on, Mr Carew, pull the other one. You can’t expect me to believe that your father is a prisoner, at least not in the Tower of London…sorry, I don’t mean to.... The last state prisoner was Rudolf Hess in nineteen forty-one, but he was there for less than a week, and the Kray twins spent a few days after they were rounded up from going AWOL on National Service. I’ve got it! this is a riddle, isn’t it? Your father must be the Lieutenant himself who lives in the Lieutenant’s Lodging on Tower Green where we sat on the bench. Or he might be one of the Yeoman Warders, though I thought I knew all of them.
‘Am I right? If so it would explain the red carpet treatment you got from George yesterday. Or perhaps your father is the truly odd gentleman [madness runs in the family, she thought] whom I met in the Lieutenant’s garden yesterday after you scarper…hobbled off. A person came into the garden-house where George suggested I take shelter during the storm, and was very put out to find me there. He was in Elizabethan costume and said he was Sir Walter Ralegh, would you believe.’
Carew knocked over his coffee cup—he seemed unlucky with beverages, though this time the cup was empty, and the porcelain did not break—, shot to his feet and stood rigid, staring ashen-faced at Arbella.
‘What?’
Here we go again, thought Arbella. ‘He carried it off very well, I must say, much better than you would expect from the sort of actor who is hired to participate in Tower pageants. He stayed in character until the weather cleared, though I told him it was unlikely he would be needed again, everything would be too wet and the event would be cancelled. But maybe they’ll reschedule and I’ll have a chance to see him again. You could come too if you like.’
Carew looked over his shoulder, sat down, and lowered his voice. ‘That was no actor. You met the real Sir Walter Ralegh. My father was...is…Sir Walter Ralegh. And I see quite enough of him as it is.’
‘But your name is…not that it means anything, they change down the centuries.’
‘Carew is my Christian name, not my surname. The acronym for my syndicate, C.A.R., stands for Carew A. Ralegh. The A. is for Arthur.’
‘Sir, this mock Tudor gentleman and I were playing a game to pass the time, and we seem to be doing the same today. The only similarity you bear to the person I mentioned is, from what I gathered from him, a shared love of practical jokes.’
‘My father doesn’t play games unless there’s money involved, and these days only cards. Sir Francis Drake took many a crown off him at bowls, but cards became his only option at the Tower after the Lieutenant caught him playing bowls on Tower Green with faces painted on the woods as if they were heads. As a family we’re poor dissemblers. Queen Elizabeth, who was not unsusceptible to flattery, didn’t fall for a word of his Cynthia poems. After she cracked her makeup with laughter reading them aloud to William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, the floor looked like it was covered with broken eggshells.’
Arbella tried to keep the exasperation out of her voice. ‘All I’m saying, Mr Carew, is that this very belligerent man was stubborn about sticking to his part, almost to the point of being convincing.’
‘To call Sir Walter Ralegh belligerent and stubborn is the understatement of the millennium. I’m sorry, I know how implausible this is. How can I explain? You’re obviously aware that Ralegh spent a good many years in the Tower of London.’
‘Of course. Thirteen.’
‘That was just for starters. As the result of certain unforeseen and unfortunate circumstances, Sir Walter Ralegh has proved impossible to dislodge from the place, despite his own best efforts and those of others. The Ralegh you met is the real Ralegh...the ur-Ralegh. It is Himself.’
Arbella said automatically, ‘Well I never.’ But when the thought occurred to her that possibly Carew was sane and telling the truth, and she was wrong not to be sceptical but wrong not to accept his assurance, she knocked over her own coffee cup, which also was empty and unbroken.
Carew watched as Arbella righted both cups. ‘It’s more than odd. My father is extremely withdrawn and not at all the self-promoting figure of yore who wallowed in publicity, and loved nothing better than to talk about and listen to himself at the same time. The man who was in company when alone, is now alone in company.’
‘I caught him very off his guard. The unexpected storm had shaken both of us up rather.’
‘These days he has nothing and nobody to be on guard against. What I don’t understand is how you were able to see him. Nobody else can, except for me and…’
‘Yeoman Warder George sees the ghosts.’
‘He doesn’t see Sir Walter Ralegh, or know that he is there. I beg your pardon, but I can assure you that my father, while invisible to the world, is still as much flesh and blood as you and I are. Anomalous as that may seem, it is a proven fact.’
‘Proven to whom?’
‘That’s a long story and one I’m not ready to get into.’
‘Well, he saw me all right and persisted in calling me a boy. Finally after I kept on that I was a girl, a woman, and told him my name, he came over very strange—rather like you did—but he took me at my word.’
Carew smacked his forehead with both hands. ‘Of course, that’s it!’ he said hoarsely. ‘It’s because he knew Arbella Stuart! There was a…sympathy between them. When Arbella was presented at Court at the age of twelve, my father said that he “wished she were fifteen”. In his poem that begins “As you came from the holy land”, it was her that he was describing:
‘
As you came from the holy land
Of Walsinghame
Mett you not with my true love
By the way as you came.
…
She is neyther whyte nor browne
Butt as the heavens fayre
There is none hathe a forme so divine
In the earth or the ayre.’
Such an one did I meet, good Sir,
Suche an Angelyke face,
Who lyke a queene, lyke a nymph, did appere
By her gait, by her grace.
She hath lefte me here all alone,
All allone as unknowne,
Who somtymes did me lead with her selfe,
And me lovde as her owne.
…
I have lovde her all my youth,
Butt now ould, as you see,
Love lykes not the fallyng frute
From the wythered tree.
…
Butt true Love is a durable fyre
In the mynde ever burnynge;
Never sycke, never ould, never dead,
From itt selfe never turnynge.
‘Arbella was in the gallery at my father’s trial to lend him moral support, when he was being prosecuted by that fatuous fool Sir Edward Coke for “compassing or imagining” the King’s death. Her presence there was due to her love for our family, and had nothing to do with politics. Every time Papa’s quicksilver wit and intelligence scored a point against Coke’s pompous rhetoric, Arbella smiled and sent him a message of encouragement. And there was more than sympathy…an empathy one might call it, deeper than love, betwixt her and my brother.’
‘Your brother?’
‘My elder brother, also named Walter, whom we called Wat. He was besotted with Arbella. She was his Stella, which was the name Sir Philip Sidney gave to Penelope Devereux in his sonnets, and he was constantly writing verses to her and about her. Papa approved and was greatly disappointed when Arbella agreed to marry a man much cleverer and wealthier than Wat, William Seymour.
‘It was not a love match. Arbella had been very fond of Wat when they were youn
g, and for a time they were soul-mates and on the brink of romance. But inevitably, given her translucent beauty and charm, and because she was Mary Queen of Scots’ cousin, she was swept away to Court...where her aversion to politics and religious causes did not preclude her from becoming the focus of much intriguing by those, including my father, who wanted to adopt her as their candidate to replace James on the throne.’
‘All I’m aware of is that Lady Arbella’s time in the Tower overlapped with Sir Walter’s, and that she died there. So I suppose they would have been able to meet, all three of them. The rules about visiting, as well as the living arrangements, were very lax in those days.’
Something about the subject of Wat and her namesake made Arbella feel reluctant to continue on the subject. ‘This Ralegh, the one I met yesterday, also talked about his friend the Earl of Northumberland, Lord Henry Percy. And he let me help him take down and stack the tobacco leaves that were curing on washing lines in the room.’
‘He calls Lord Henry “The Wizard Earl” because he is, literally, a whizz at all things scientific.’ Carew looked gloomy. ‘It sounds as though my father said more to you in an afternoon than he has to me in ages.’