“That is a strange question,” he said with a pause that she should have noticed with concern. “I am the only one I know. Who else would have such a mouthful of a name?”
“Well, then you are the one I am looking for.” There was a finality to her statement that brought the young physics student to silence, which he held for a long moment.
“Well, I am very much afraid that I cannot help you.”
“Are you certain of that, absolutely certain?”
“Absolutely certain,” he said, yet again gesturing around the room. “I have my job to do here.”
She allowed a long, uncomfortable silence to fall between them before she spoke. “I have prepared for this eventuality.” She opened her purse and withdrew a small envelope. “I have a reward for your troubles. This is a letter of commitment to give you one share in Cincinnati Soap and Candle Company, the company I have just invested in. The share is worth, by my reckoning, the small sum of twenty-five dollars. One share,” she repeated. “I would like you to take it and to keep track of its progress in the stock market. Do you follow the stock market?”
“I can’t say that I do. I know a good deal about the periodic tables and about Sir Isaac Newton’s basic physical principles, and I have no interest in stocks and bonds. In fact, I find the whole world of finance a bore.”
Undeterred by his brusqueness of manner, Eleanor pressed on. “Take this letter and set it aside, wait a few months, and follow this particular stock and you will watch your twenty-five dollars increase in value manyfold.”
He eyed the envelope in her hands suspiciously. “All right,” he said, “if you insist.” Thinking back on the exchange sometime later, she realized that the young man’s abrasive manner actually helped her mask her own uncertainty as to how her recent purchase was to fare, and it allowed her to continue with this unlikely recruitment she knew was required of her. “But what is the catch?” he continued without grace.
“There is no catch, I just want you to wait and watch. And then I want you to imagine how your fortunes would have changed had you received from me today a full year’s salary in this stock, which I was prepared to offer you.” She held out the envelope and kept it extended until the young man, still suspicious, took it from her. “You will contact me when you have seen enough and you are convinced.”
“Well, all right,” he said, taking the envelope. “But I doubt very much that I shall be calling you.”
“You have great strengths, I hear. Remember that Dr. James describes you as brilliant.”
Ted Honeycutt’s demeanor changed to the closest he could come to civility. “I like you, Miss Putnam. I really do. But I see atoms and molecules in my future, not stocks and bonds. You have just engaged in a complete waste of time.”
“Very well,” she said, rising. “I fully understand. But you will discover that I am a very determined woman, and that I want very much for you to join me in this effort.”
“Again, I do not wish to be offensive,” he said. “But I think perhaps that you are the one here not fully in control of your senses.”
“That may be,” Eleanor said, “but I wanted to bring your attention to bear on my project, and I hope I have done that.”
“But how are you on your side so certain that I am the one you are looking for?”
“I am also, as you will further discover, a highly intuitive person, Mr. Honeycutt. I am here on the very strongest of intuitive hunches. I am very definitively certain that you are exactly the one I am looking for, and I greatly hope that you will come around.” She pointed to the envelope now in his hand. “And with that envelope I rest my case.”
And with that envelope Eleanor had made, unknowingly, a fateful move.
7
“DISASTER AVERTED, IT APPEARS”
Sometime after her return from her adventure in Cincinnati and her initial meeting with the graduate student T. Williams Honeycutt, her fiancé, Frank Burden, ever the serious banker, oblivious to Eleanor’s having successfully completed the loan, came to her with an article he had found among his bank’s news resources. “Disaster averted, it appears,” he said with a helpful and satisfied smile. “I am exceedingly glad that your interests were only hypothetical. That soap company you were inquiring about is going bankrupt.” Frank laid an investment news sheet opened out in front of her. Eleanor could only stare in disbelief.
The article was succinct and highly unflattering. Cincinnati Soap and Candle was indeed headed for insolvency, it appeared. The company’s owner, a certain Homer Smith, was portrayed as irrational, unable and unwilling to sell the company to what he perceived as the greedy giant attempting to take it over. IRASCIBLE OWNER GOING DOWN WITH THE SHIP, the headline read, a shame, the article concluded, because Workman’s Soap was a “superior product,” one any company, large or small, would be happy to call its own, and CS & C was a proud old family company being run to the ground by a stubborn grandson of the founder.
“It is good that you have left the interpretation of the investment world to those with heads for it,” Frank said.
Eleanor managed to maintain a poised façade. “And what if someone had in fact made such an investment?” she asked with outer calm.
“Well, he would have lost practically everything,” Frank said coldly. “Bankrupt stock has no value.” Then after further thought he added, “Or some opportunist sweeps in and buys at a ridiculously low price.” Frank Burden always took on a paternal air when explaining any of the rudiments of high-level finance or the stock market or any areas of business to his, he assumed, naïve and inexperienced fiancée. “Again, you see,” he added patiently, “it is best to leave the serious decisions to the men of finance. That is what we are for.”
And that night Eleanor, feeling cold and alone, was confronted by the reality of ruination, a despondency that stayed with her for days. She sat in her living room on Acorn Street, uncertain of the timing but fully aware that disaster loomed ahead, wondering how she should have played out her assigned hand differently. What have I done? she thought as she itemized the details of the decision. What other choice was there? There were no easy answers, no easy peace, and no one with whom to share her dejection.
She had lived her entire life in the Acorn Street house, as had her mother before her, and now that her mother and father were both gone, sole ownership had fallen to her and she was supposed to live out her whole life there. She was shocked now to think how easy it had been to sign the deed over to Mr. Lowenstein’s bank and to put the fate of the family house into the hands of an impersonal third party. That was what risk was all about, she was now learning painfully as she reviewed her decisions.
And one more troubling thought visited her on that night of despair, an old thought, one she had confronted before. Her father had been a weak man and had never gotten over the death of her mother in Eleanor’s eighth year. Because he had been a man of the cloth and a member of one of Boston’s oldest families, no one had realized just how much his life and his promise had collapsed when he lost that great strength that marriage and his wife had provided him. At one point, when Eleanor’s mother was alive and entertaining so beautifully in this very living room, her father had been considered one of the shining lights of the New England clergy, perhaps a future bishop of Massachusetts, a future Phillips Brooks, some said. But then the bottom had dropped out of his life and the decline began, and people wondered if he could keep his position as rector, let alone ascend to a bishopric. But he had taken to drink and not to financial profligacy. He had ruined family life, but not family finances. Her father had been weak, but he had never compromised that family legacy, his own or her mother’s, and when he died, during Eleanor’s junior year at Smith College, the title to the property and the other family holdings remained free and clear, as they had since her mother’s great-grandparents’ day.
As a compensation perhaps, without a strong father model inside her, she had developed a steely determination of her own, one that served he
r well in moments of crisis, but one that also stepped in when caution would have been a better course, and pushed her resolutely into action. How much better it would have been in this case to use that cautious part of herself in this moment of decision, to have thought things through the way her mother might have. Now, as many times before, too late, she asked herself, what would Mother have done? She had seen what needed to be done and pursued the solution with great inner strength, a kind of blind courage, and that courage, strong as it was, also had a dark consequence that now was going to lead to her ruination.
A more cautious person, a timid person even, would not find herself in this situation, she kept saying to herself. A more cautious person would not have put Acorn Street at risk.
“You will spend your entire life here,” her father had said to her in one of their last conversations. “This house is a fine old Boston landmark,” he said. “And now you will be its center, raising your family here, as you have been raised, making your mother and her forebears proud.”
That was Acorn Street. And now, because of her fevered devotion to the imperious mandate of the journal she had brought back from her fateful encounters in Vienna, she had risked all and had lost her beloved childhood home.
It was during that night of torment that the dream first came to Eleanor. She was alone on a cold and windswept promontory, a high cliff on the edge of a raging ocean. She was drawn to the edge by a distant figure in white, and as she approached, she was aware of the figure falling far below into what now appeared as a bottomless void. Trying to steady herself, digging her fingers into the muddy surface, Eleanor felt herself slipping as she stared into the dark abyss. It was always at this point that she would waken, in a cold sweat, fighting for breath.
She bore the news secretly and alone, waiting for the axe to fall and for the word to come from Cincinnati to her bank, when she would have to tell Frank Burden and the world that she had lost her family home. She put the decision off for days, and then finally one morning, after a sleepless night, she decided she must act. And it was that very morning that she read shocking news in a small column in the Boston Herald. At first she could not believe what she saw, that a circumstance so central in her life would appear in her Boston newspaper, but there it was: Homer Smith, prominent Cincinnati businessman, a Harvard alumnus, it turned out, was dead, felled by a heart attack in his office, and now Procter and Gamble, the greedy giant, spread its tentacles over Cincinnati Soap and Candle Company and, in the old patriarch’s view, threatened to suck out its life. In the ensuing takeover attempt, which the family had enough sense to ward off, one of Homer Smith’s nephews seemed to take control. Eleanor did not travel to Cincinnati this time, but spoke to the young man on the telephone.
“What have you planned?” she said when he asked about her holdings.
“We have contacted Colgate,” he said. “They are definitely interested.”
That action on the family’s part set up a bidding war between the two companies. Procter and Gamble acted aggressively and hastily, “before the Colgate folks could even put together an offer,” the nephew said in the second phone call. “They are offering a price that will double in value our holdings in stock. They very much want Workman’s Soap.”
“And what do you plan to do?” Eleanor asked.
“Why, we’ll sell, of course,” the nephew said in a burst, not acknowledging any humor in her question. And then he paused. “I hope that is satisfactory with you.”
“Thank you for inquiring,” she said, registering fully only much later the mature consideration in his tone. “And, yes, it is satisfactory with me.”
After the packet arrived special delivery from Cincinnati, Eleanor made the trip back to Mr. Lowenstein’s office on Boylston Street. “I trust that I can pay you in Procter and Gamble stock,” she said.
“Oh my, yes,” the kindly banker said. “That stock is like gold right now.”
Eleanor flashed him a look of concern. “For a moment, it looked as if my investment was going to fail, and I was going to lose my family home.”
Mr. Lowenstein gave her a long appraising look, then smiled. “Oh my, no. We would have found a way. This bank would never have allowed you to lose your family home.”
“That is comforting to know.”
“We would have thought of some solution. Our bank was glad to be of service in your enterprise.”
So, all the borrowed monies paid back, her holdings now increased not the tenfold caused by the loan, but twentyfold, it became clear that Eleanor, barely knowing what she was doing, had made the purchase of a lifetime and was able to set up the Hyperion Fund as a more-than-significant financial entity.
What she did not realize fully at the time was that she had just discovered, quite by accident, the explosive power—and the risk—of buying on margin.
Of course, she was able to tell none of this to her fiancé, Frank Burden, nor was she able to convey in any way to him her very satisfactory last conversation with the moneylender.
She had accomplished, with the infusion of a good deal of luck, her first two assignments, the selling of Prince Rudolf’s ring and the purchase of stock in Cincinnati Soap and Candle Company, at an extraordinary moment in the company’s history. The deep satisfaction from this mostly accidental transaction would revisit her, along with the apprehension, from time to time for the rest of her life. What if I had not acted? she would think. At one moment, she seemed a puppet, being pulled this way and that by fate and expectations, and the next she seemed to be acting totally on her own initiative, living by her wits, the mistress of her own drama. Was it all predetermined, some massive fate controlling all the details, or did she bear the heavy responsibility of causing events, or having to save the day? Was it, after all, completely up to her? One thing was for certain: She wished never again to make the journey alone.
The assurance that she would not have to came shortly after her return from Cincinnati after the Procter and Gamble buyout, and from a very unlikely quarter. It came in the form of Harvard physics student Ted Honeycutt, whom she judged from the start, in spite of the very specific instructions, an unlikely savior. It was he who arranged to meet with her again.
“You followed the fate of that Cincinnati Soap and Candle stock?” she said to Ted Honeycutt back in Boston.
“I did,” he said. “It captured my attention. I observed from my distance that it doubled in value.” There seemed to be a new curiosity in him, but his manner remained brusque.
“Are you sorry that you did not accept a year’s salary in that stock when it was offered?”
“I am a scientist, but even I deduced that I would have made a bundle,” he said. “I have come to hear more about what you are offering.”
“What we will say here must be highly confidential.”
“Of course,” he said. “I am very good with secrets, Miss Putnam. I don’t talk to people.”
“So I have heard. That is one of the qualities I discovered in seeking you out.”
“I want to know what you are looking for.”
“I believe that I told you in our first meeting. With the purchase of this stock, in significant number, I need to add, I have created a fund. I will be making other purchases over the years, and the fund will grow in importance and value. I will need someone intelligent and discreet and efficient to manage it. I wish for you to be that person.”
“And after our first disagreeable meeting you still wish that?”
“I didn’t find our first meeting disagreeable,” she said. She was not being completely honest. “I like honesty.”
For a second time, he asked, “What makes you so certain that I am the man you want?”
Unable to explain the real reason for her certainty, Eleanor said this time, “Mr. Honeycutt, I am, as I have explained, highly intuitive, a good judge of character.”
“Well, I am leaning toward coming on board,” he said quickly.
“I do not want leaning, Mr. Honeycutt.
I wish to have a decision.”
Ted Honeycutt paused for a moment, looking away, and then his eyes came to hers. “You are very persistent, Miss Putnam.”
“I know what I want,” she said, “and I try very hard to get it.”
“And…,” he said with his head down. “There is something I need to make perfectly clear.”
“And what would that be?”
He paused for a moment, then burst forth. “You are a very attractive woman, Miss Putnam, and I know that you are accustomed to getting your way. But I need to make it clear that attractiveness has no effect on me. I am considering joining you because of the offer, nothing else. I wish to have what you would call a business relationship, nothing more.”
At first Eleanor said nothing. Thinking back on it, if there was one moment in which she thought she could not go on, this was it. Later she would admit that she found his brashness refreshing and a departure from Boston propriety, but for now she was aware simply that she had no choice. She took a deep breath. “A business relationship is what I am looking for, Mr. Honeycutt. Nothing more. But, my, you are very direct.”
“I think you will find that will always be the case.” He looked her in the eye. “I think you will find me a rather blunt fellow,” he said. “I am not exactly like others in that regard.”
“My goodness,” Eleanor said, both stunned and attracted by the frankness. “We must be cautious here to keep things honest, Mr. Honeycutt, even if they seem blunt. We must be clearheaded, dedicated, discreet, efficient. But we must be able to trust each other.” She paused to be sure that he was taking her seriously.
For a moment, he looked as if he might wish to explain. “You will find me very trustworthy,” he said blankly. “Trustworthiness is one of my strongest attributes.”
“You understand that I will be asking you to pursue certain very specific investments, and that your job will be to do exactly what I say.”
“I understand that.”
The Lost Prince Page 6