World From Rough Stones

by Malcolm Macdonald

  He smiled ruefully. "That is going to be part of my strategy today with our Mr. Chambers. We must induce him to believe that he's gotten two clever customers with a big facility for making money but no genius at using it up at the higher levels. All this around here"—he waved his hands out at the Bank of England, which they were at that moment passing. "That's the Bank of England," he said.

  "Aye." She didn't even look at it. "He must be led to imagine he's going to play that role for us. We'll make the money, he'll handle it and take his percentage and we'll be grateful ever after."

  He laughed. "That's it. So you can suck his brains all you're worth but at the end of it, just act daft and say"—he raised his voice to a refined falsetto—"Oh I'll never understand all that!"

  She dug him in the ribs. "I don't talk like that!"

  "That's what I mean. You must try." He became serious again. "In general, though, it's going to go like this: We start with a glowing account of the works at Summit so far. You can break in anytime to say the things I can't say, about, hem hem—how clever I am! You know—do your she-wolf act."

  Her eyes opened in exaggerated surprise. "Well! We are learning things about ourselves today!"

  "I hope we are. Anyway—when we've got him picturing all that money coming his way for him to manage, we'll start talking about these new contracts, give him an idea of how it's going to swell and go on swelling. And then we'll make it clear how ignorant we are of financial management at these exalted levels. So that we get him soiling his linen thinking he's got a debenture on our lives. And then, when I see the gleam in his eye, I s'll tell him how I once 'borrowed' his name."

  Nora giggled. "He should find it easy to swallow then."

  But John was less sanguine. "He should. Aye, he should. But I'd be happier if we were bringing him over thirty thousand instead of just over half that. He's a Jew and he's a banker. On both counts he's nobody's fool. So don't let's go in there thinking we've got a new length of carpet."

  Meanwhile the coach had gone along Cheapside to St. Paul's and, doubling back down Watling Street, had now halted at the top end of Dowgate. They got out and John paid off the driver. "There!" he said as she took his arm. "I asked him to go around by the way we came last night, and we didn't even look out the window."

  "Pity," she said lightly. "Have you got all the accounts? Are you sure of everything?" Anxiety and excitement were making her edgy.

  Bolitho & Chambers, being a merchant bank, had no counters nor any facilities for direct dealing with the public. Indeed, theirs was more like a lawyer's office than anything Nora had pictured. "Nice and small," she said in whisper while the chief clerk was in the inner sanctum, telling Chambers of their arrival. "Hard to believe that seventeen hundred has ever passed this way, let alone ours."

  "Aye," John agreed. "Looks promising."

  Chambers came almost running to greet them. And his arrival in the outer office stopped Nora's heart in her breast: For the man who now presented himself was none other than Mr. Dow! Beyond all shadow of possible error it was Mr. Dow. She had seen him—virtually as close as she saw him now—through her telescope. For an irrational moment she thought that he, too, must recognize her. Especially when she quailed before that impish, mocking smile he gave as he bent to kiss her glove. But he was merely being gallant; and she hoped he would take her confusion for another of those instant conquests he must be well accustomed to by now. Indeed, she herself was none too sure, for he was certainly the handsomest man she had ever seen. Then it struck her: Nathaniel Chambers of Dowgate—Nathan Dow! How could she have missed it? The fire! The fire had misdirected her.

  John, thinking she was overplaying the vapid butterfly-girl, or playing it too early, cleared his throat.

  Chambers turned to John. "There are no diversions here to offer Mrs. Stevenson. But I have an elderly and very trustworthy maid upstairs and my carriage is at her disposal…if"—he turned to Nora—"you would care to go shopping in the West End, ma'am? While Mr. Stevenson and I talk all these tedious matters through?"

  John explained Nora's part in the business and why she would be joining them, tedium or not.

  "Then it will be no tedium—at least not for us," he said gallantly. "Though I shall talk in constant fear of burdening so pretty a head with every trifling detail."

  She could see that the idea was anathema to him, though; he barely managed to maintain his smile as he ushered her in.

  As soon as those hypnotic eyes were off her, her mind began to race. Those letters—she had put them out of her thoughts for this morning. She had to remember what they said; they guaranteed that John's forgery would be owned by Chambers. Yet something about that thought was not…not right. Why could she not blackmail Chambers? Something said no.

  John nudged her. "Mr. Chambers is asking if you'd prefer tea?"

  She pulled herself together. "To what?"

  "Sherry."

  She had to keep a clear head. "Tea," she said. "No sugar."

  She had ten minutes to recover her self-possession while she sipped her tea, and the men drank their sherry, and all three of them ate their biscuits and talked of London and the North and railways and of course the weather. And while they talked, she thought of all the ways in which she might make clear what she knew of Chambers's darker dealings. And the more she thought, the more unhappy she became with the whole idea.

  When they finally got down to the business of the day, she pushed these worries to the back of her mind and played her part exactly as John had set it out for her.

  John explained the circumstances in which he had gained the contract—glossing over the difference between his capital and the credit demanded by the Manchester & Leeds—and the changes he had made in the working. When he had finished, Nora butted in to point out how superior John was to most contractors. Then John explained how he couldn't have managed without Nora—how she kept the books, her skill at purchasing, and finally the tommy shop. She could see that Chambers's attitude toward her changed from one of patronage, to bewilderment, to at least a suspension of his disbelief. And finally, when John passed over the ledgers he had brought, and when the banker had spent several silent minutes looking through them, she saw something like a grudging admiration, now mixed with a decided wariness, in the glance he shot at her before he closed the book and said to John: "I don't really need to go through these in any detail now. My clerk can do that later. The proof is in the money you've been sending down here."

  "Still," John replied. "You're probably thinking one swallow doesn't make a summer…" And he went on to describe the new contracts he had taken up this last fortnight—throwing in the fact that they were due to meet Fielden at the Houses of Parliament tomorrow to discuss a fairly large contract for his firm.

  Chambers was now most impressed and made no attempt to disguise his interest. "You're into the second stage of your growth," he said. John agreed and pointed out that they had reached the point where their own money-raising skills had come to a limit.

  The banker saw the bait and took it, offering his considerable services. He began to sketch out on some jotting paper a number of alternative ways they could raise the money they needed. As she watched him suavely moving his pen from block to block in his little diagrams, she suddenly realized why it was that she could not openly challenge him with what the letters had revealed. It was his vanity. He would never forgive her; and if their business were to move in the hoped-for directions, she and he would have to work in some kind of trust and mutual regard. If he refused to support John, and then she forced him to go back on that refusal, there could never be any kind of a working relationship between them.

  So when the point came where the discussions were rounding off before lunch, and John could not long delay mentioning his forgery, she sat with leaden heart, knowing that the information she had was of little use—beyond a lastresort insurance to keep them out of jail. How could she let him know without saying anything explicit? Impossible…well, almost i
mpossible. Unaccountably, her pulse began to race. Perhaps it was not impossible. Only to fainthearts. If she kept alert…

  John was just beginning his confession.

  "As you may imagine, Mr. Chambers," he said, "these achievements we have described this morning were not gained by methods that would win the goodconduct prizes at Sunday school."

  Chambers smiled. "We're men of the world here in the City, Mr. Stevenson. I'm sure ye never thought otherwise."

  "No. To be sure. For instance, to get the contract in the first place I was obliged to forge a banker's letter of credit!"

  Chambers laughed heartily. "The devil you did! Oh, pardon, ma'am." Then, seeing Nora's beady, unsmiling gaze upon him, his face fell. Realization dawned. "Not…not this bank!"

  He's going to refuse, Nora thought. I know it. Do something!

  In desperation, she did the only thing that suggested itself.

  "Mr. Dow!" She clapped her hands and pointed both index fingers at him, her arms held straight, her face alight with the discovery.

  "I…what?" Chambers said, put out of stride more than worried.

  "Mr. Dow! You remember, dearest," she gushed, turning to John—who was looking daggers at her. "You remember I told you of the strange man nosing around our workings. The one we thought connected with the arsonists. This is Mr. Dow. That was risky!" she added as an afterthought, turning to a now very puzzled Chambers. She did not take her eyes from the banker's, afraid that John's anger would make her falter. "The fire we had at Summit was immediately after your visit. Until now we've assumed Mr. Dow had something to do with it!"

  "This is…enlightening," Chambers said guardedly.

  She rubbed her hands. "And all the time it was you! Curious about this unknown John Stevenson who kept sending his money to you! Coming up there in secret to see for yourself! Of course! How clever!"

  Her apparent admiration touched his vanity enough to let him smile faintly in modest confession. "A banker, too, has interests to protect," he said. "Information is our stock-in-trade. And you cannot better firsthand information."

  Now Nora really gushed. "That's what I thought, too," she giggled. John, now certain that she was acting a part and knowing she must have good reason, was no longer angry; he watched, tense and alert.

  "D'you know," Nora went on, in the tones of a schoolgirl telling her chums about an escapade, "I even called at the Calthorpe Arms to find out more about our Mr. Dow. I thought I might deceive Mr. Tighe into parting with some of his letters! What a laugh, eh!"

  Chambers, doodling idly with a dry nib, paused for a fraction of a second before he darted a glance at her and then at John. The contrast—Nora's stony mask, belieing her tone of voice; and John's evident bewilderment—unnerved him; they were not behaving like two confidence tricksters. The woman did not want her husband to know; she was trying to get him to understand something without also conveying it to Stevenson. But that was too improbable, surely.

  "Tighe?" he said, very convincingly.

  She laughed again. "The landlord. He thought I was a lunatic, of course."

  Chambers could not conceal the relief that passed fleetingly across his face. "It would have been a criminal act," he said. "Intercepting mails. Personation."

  "There's a bit of the old Adam in all of us," Nora said. "Even those of us descended from Eve—for she was Adam's rib."

  The extraordinary thing is that Nora was so glad to have worked in so natural-sounding a reference to the name "Adam" that she had quite forgotten her conjecture that the name "Eve" might have been concealed in the closing dedication of the billet-doux; and she had intended her mention of Eve here to correct, as it were, Adam's sex in referring to herself. But the effect on Chambers was unambiguous. Even John, who had no idea of the reference intended, could see that Nora's words had struck a home in the banker and exercised some kind of power over him. He watched with wary interest.

  Nora was now in a quandary. Should she assume she had said enough to alert Chambers to the danger of any course other than the one that served the Stevenson interest? Or should she drop one more hint to confirm the fears she must already have stirred? The second course, she decided.

  She turned to Chambers, all smiling apology. "I'm sorry, Mr. Chambers. You were about to tell us…"

  "I was about to ask you," Chambers said to John, "exactly what you did. What did you put in this forgery?"

  John drew a silk packet from his inner pocket and unwrapped it with care. From it, he pulled and unfolded a single sheet of paper. "There's a copy," he said. "The original was on your notepaper." He was cool and businesslike, not the least shamefaced.

  Chambers kept his eye on John. "Our paper," he repeated. "May I ask…?"

  "I bought it," John said. "There are places where you can buy anyone's paper. And autograph signature."

  Chambers was now quite cold, giving nothing away. He looked down at the copy and read it in an absorbed and chilling silence. "But by this date Bolitho had been dead for months!" he said.

  John pulled out another sheet of paper. "That is a copy of the letter I substituted for it."

  Chambers read that in the same dour silence. At length he said: "It's well drafted, I'll allow that. What happened to the first one?"

  "That's the problem," said John. "There's a clerical gentleman, probably known to you, who spotted the error in the first letter and caused me to substitute the second. Of course, he kept the other and is now hoping for a donation of thirty-three per cent of all our future profits."

  "Thirty-three and a third," Nora corrected him.

  "The old…" Chambers said, halting as he remembered Nora's presence. He sighed. "You must have come here with some kind of solution in mind?"

  John extracted a third sheet from the silk bundle and, unfolding it, passed it over. It read:

  Dear Mr. Stevenson:

  On going through the office effects of my late partner, Mr. Bolitho, I came across a copy of the letter of credit you asked us to prepare in December 1838 but never used. Recently, you asked us to send you a further such letter and upon inquiry I find that my clerk, noticing that the earlier letter had not yet been dated, put the date of 8th August 1839 upon it and dispatched it to you. The fact that it is now ostensibly signed by Mr. Bolitho, some months after his demise, is, to say the least, highly irregular and may give rise to some very proper inquiry. I take this occasion therefore to enclose a properly drawn up letter of credit, signed by myself alone and bearing that same date. I trust that and this letter will clear up any misunderstanding which may in the meantime have arisen. Meanwhile I hear that you are to be congratulated upon your marriage and I hasten to add that I very much…

  Chambers's gaze fell rapidly over the closing pleasantries.

  He pursed his lips, folded the letter, tapped it once or twice on his thumbnail, and said: "It might work at that. It…might…work. Did you reply?"

  John smiled and pulled a fourth sheet from the bundle. It read:

  Dear Chambers,

  Thank you for your new letter of credit and covering letter of explanation. I showed both to one of the Manchester & Leeds directors, Reverend Prendergast, who, I think, claims some slight acquaintance with you, and have his assurance that his company's files will be properly revised. He promises that your mistaken first letter will be destroyed.

  For the first time since John's confession, Chambers actually smiled at him. "Neat" he said. "Neatly done." But then he sighed again. "However, I do wish I could first inspect your forgery."

  "Prendergast called it excellent. He said that had it not been for the misfortune of Bolitho's death, he'd never have suspected it other than copper bottomed."

  "Well—that's praise indeed." He looked at both of them. "You're an odd pair, if I may be quite candid. I've never met your like. And I've always said that my ten years in banking have brought me more experience of people than others would get in a score of lifetimes."

  Nora laughed. "I wish you could have seen us that nigh
t, Mr. Chambers. By the light of four candles. Myself fretting over bricks and timber and wages and the price of iron, and Mr. Stevenson practising your signature again and again. And we had no notion of the trouble we were laying down. What's the saying? We sowed a wind and almost"—she repeated the word with a stress meant only for the banker—"almost reaped a Tempest!"

  For what seemed an age he stared at her with his lips pursed as if he were about to whistle. And whistle he very nearly did as he let out his pent-up breath and, once more, gave a rueful smile.

  Meanwhile John was saying: "Whirlwind. 'Sow a wind and reap a whirlwind.' That's the catch phrase."

  Nora accepted the correction and said directly to him, "Tempest and whirlwind could be very similar I think." She avoided looking at Chambers, but she heard his unstinted laughter.