by David Liss
“I seek only justice, Mr. d’Arblay, for your late employer. Young Mr. Balfour has come to me with the belief that his father’s death was not what it appears, and he suspects there may be some machinations in the Alley to explain the deceit.”
“I dismiss the very notion,” d’Arblay said. “Now, if you will excuse me, I believe I have business to attend to.”
He began to rise, but I stopped him with a single look. “I do not think you understand me, sir. Mr. Balfour has explained to me that his father’s estate was missing a prodigious quantity of money for which he cannot account. As the late Mr. Balfour’s clerk, you would have been the first man to notice such an absence. And yet, apparently, you did not. I wonder how you can account for that.”
“If you accuse, I would prefer you did so in plain language,” d’Arblay said haughtily. “I can assure you that I cannot account for missing money from Balfour’s estate—unless one accounts for gambling, excessive drinking, living beyond one’s means—and, I might add, three expensive mistresses, not one of them worth her upkeep, to my mind. I am surprised Mr. Balfour would send you upon so foolish a quest. He of all people despised his father for being a wastrel. Mr. Balfour—the elder, that is—was once industrious and successful, but as he grew older he felt that he had earned the right to waste all that he had accomplished, and as his son watched his estate disappear, he began to hate his father.”
I nodded, thinking about the discrepancy in Balfour’s version of the tale. “Yet you told young Mr. Balfour that you believed some issues to be missing from his father’s estate.”
“I did no such thing. Who told you this preposterous lie?” D’Arblay did not wait for me to answer. “Missing issues, indeed. My late employer was certainly capable of losing valuable pieces of paper, but fortunately I ordered those affairs, not he. It is only owing to my skills that I was able to keep his estate afloat as long as I did. In the end, however, he was quite ruined, and as you know he could not endure his shame. There really is very little to this history that should surprise you, although it is a cautionary tale from which many could learn.” D’Arblay folded his arms, pleased with the wisdom of this observation.
“Can you think of anything to suggest that Mr. Balfour’s death was not what it appears?”
“Nothing,” d’Arblay replied adamantly.
“And for whom do you work now, Mr. d’Arblay?”
“I have offered my services in putting Mrs. Balfour’s affairs in order. She is a foolish woman who has long held her money in gold plate and precious jewels. I have convinced her that the funds shall serve her more justly.”
“And can you tell me what Mrs. Balfour stood to inherit from her husband—assuming he died solvent, that is?”
D’Arblay screwed his face into a skeletal attitude of disgust. “Not a thing,” he said. “Mrs. Balfour had a separate settlement upon her. She would have inherited nothing. Balfour’s mismanagement was an embarrassment to her, but nothing more.”
That was precisely what Balfour had told me, but as their stories had several discrepancies, I wanted to see how d’Arblay characterized the financial arrangement between the spouses. “I see. Where might I reach you if I have any more questions regarding this matter?”
“Allow me to be blunt with you, sir. I have no desire to have you ever visit me in my places of business or residence. I have endured this conversation only out of courtesy to the late Mr. Balfour, who was a kind gentleman, if a foolish one. I can offer you no further information, so there is little reason for you to seek me out.”
“I shall then thank you for your help.” I rose and bowed at him before heading farther into the thick confusion of Jonathan’s. As I wandered, pushing my way through the crowds, I attempted to understand the conversation. If old Balfour’s estate had been robbed, then there could have been no one in a better position to perpetrate the robbery than d’Arblay. Elias’s suspicions of plot and scheme might go no further than this one clerk, who, for all I knew, might have had the power to rob his employer freely. On the other hand, I had only young Balfour’s belief that the estate had been robbed. Surely one of them lied, but if d’Arblay was the liar, he might still not be the thief. Such a man could obscure a crime that he might protect his own reputation.
I would not understand this crime, or this purported crime, unless I better understood the Alley itself. So I thought it a fine idea to take advantage of the library available in the coffeehouse, and made my way over to the shelves, where I began to search through the mountains of material, organized in no way I could discern. The proprietors showed little worry about insulting their patrons, for many of the pamphlets decried stock-jobbers as villainous Jews and foreigners who made Englishmen effeminate with their financial legerdemains. I dismissed titles that I thought too narrow in their focus, such as A Delineation of the Complaints of the New East India Company Lodged Against the Old. I similarly rejected the works too complex in their intent, like A Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to a Friend in the City on the Recent Legislation—I can remember no more of that title, for the very word legislation makes my brain feel as though it is covered with grease.
Even as a boy I had been shockingly inept at matters of hard books. My teachers had refused to understand why I could not master what came far more easily to other boys. More often than not, words would simply blur upon the page as I looked at them, and I found myself thinking of engaging in anything other than my studies. It was not as though I took no pleasure from reading, for I often enjoyed the illicit pleasures of romances or adventure stories—I merely wished never to read what others wished to make me learn.
Perhaps that was why I now finally settled on a slim volume of some thirty or so pages that I believed to be as approachable as it was inflammatory: ’Change Alley Laid Open; Or, the Crimes of that Sinister Race of Beings, Called Stock-Jobbers, and the Truth of Their Villainous Operations. It had been put out but recently by a publisher called Nahum Bryce, whose name I knew from some novels and romances in which I have indulged. Here, I thought, was precisely what I wished for: a history of the ’Change written as an adventure.
Clutching the little booklet, I slid myself into a chair at an open table and began to make my way through. I was disappointed to discover that the book was more full of invective than information—or adventure for that matter; it railed against the mortgaging of the future with the national debt, the corruption of the Parliament through bribes, and the unmanning of the nation from the mania of stock-jobbing. I found it shocking to discover a fleeting reference to my own father in these pages, hidden with the pretense of disguise as “S——l L——n——o, that notorious jobber of the Hebrew race, who can be seen everyday upon the ’Change, draining the purses of honest Englishmen with his promises of untold wealth.”
To discover one’s own father maligned is no easy thing. I had seen my own name in print before—many times, in fact, and there has always been something disorienting to be sure, for a man’s business is a private thing, and print is a very public affair. But here these names were not printed in transient and ultimately insignificant newspapers. This was a pamphlet, a permanent thing that a man might keep in his library. These accusations the pamphleteer made—I understood they were mere hyperbole, the rhetoric of the anti-jobbers, but the fact that my father should be so important a figure in their thinking took me by surprise. I could not say that I recognized no other names, for here were references to the schemes of N——n A——l——n, who could only be Nathan Adelman; and the pamphlet had much to say on the villainy of P——l B——th——t, whom I could not but conclude to be my father’s old enemy, Perceval Bloathwait. This scoundrel, according to the pamphlet, delighted in trickery, manipulating the markets to his own profit, caring not what ruin he brought upon others and the nation. It was odd to me that men who lived far from the metropolis, men who knew ’Change Alley only from such pamphlets as these, would think of men such as my father and Adelman and Bloathwait much as they would
of fictional characters in a novel or romance.
My musings on this subject were shattered when I noticed the short, round form of Nathan Adelman standing near me with a kind of wry smile. “Have you come to follow in your father’s footsteps?” he asked me, hovering over my table. He struck me as entirely different from the person he had been at my uncle’s or in his coach. Here he was in his element, and he fairly drew strength from the chaos around us. Despite his obvious smallness, Adelman appeared to me grander, more powerful, more confident; and why should he not have appeared so when all those around him behaved as though he was a monarch in his own little kingdom? Perhaps ten feet behind him, a crowd of jobbers had gathered. All desired a few minutes of his attention, and I must say I enjoyed being important enough to divert the great financier from his pressing concerns. I took no personal pride, mind you, but Adelman’s interest in me only confirmed that I was not wasting my time or chasing shadows.
I greeted him, and he casually asked me with what pamphlet I passed the time. “Ah,” he said, looking it over. “I fear the author thought little of me. Or of your father, for that matter.”
“And do you believe what the author writes? Do you believe in the corrupting power of greedy jobbers?”
“I believe the issue here is not the greed of jobbers but the greed of the booksellers,” Adelman said. He casually placed his hands behind his back and balanced on the balls of his feet.
“These are lies you say that the author has written of you and my father. What do you know of Perceval Bloathwait?”
“Bloathwait.” Adelman’s good cheer dripped away like the fat from a roasting hare. “Yes, he rather deserves the abuse he receives. He’s a tricky rascal, and he gives the rest of us a bad name.”
“I do not suppose you say that because he is a member of the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, and thus the enemy of your South Sea Company.”
“The Company is hardly mine, but I do, as you say, take an interest in it. I look to the Company because its practices are laudable; I do not defend the practices because of my association.”
“Your loyalty is commendable, but I wonder how far it extends. This pamphlet I’ve been reading makes some convincing points. I do not believe its assertion that jobbery is itself evil, but I cannot but be swayed by the argument that greed—in any form, I suppose, but in this case stock-jobbing—can shift villainy from one venue to another. It is, perhaps, only a short step from trickery in what one buys or sells to, perhaps, murder.”
Adelman stiffened considerably. “I see you have not taken my advice to heart, Mr. Weaver. Do you have any idea how much one Jew crying murder will injure us all?”
Our conversation was then interrupted by a ruddy-faced gentleman who looked to be about five-and-twenty, who rushed into the center of the coffeehouse. His wig was askew, and his chest heaved as he struggled for air. Yet he managed a deafening bellow. “I have just come from the Guildhall,” he cried to all who would listen. “No one does business within the lottery ticket office. The drawing is grossly undersubscribed. It shall all be a disaster!”
A swarm of men jumped from their seats and all shouted at once. Yet I could hear one name repeated again and again. D’Arblay.
I looked over to where he sat and observed that his table was now surrounded by a host of men who would sell their holdings: “Do you still wish to buy tickets, sir? Take these. I shall give you a very fair rate.” D’Arblay dealt with each man calmly, looking at what he had to sell and negotiating a price.
Adelman laughed softly. “I cannot believe that ruse still works. Note that the men buying from Mr. d’Arblay are all younger. They have not been long upon the ’Change.”
“Do you mean to say that the man who made the announcement is in league with d’Arblay?”
Adelman nodded. “Of course. He creates a panic, makes the gullible believe the lottery is undersubscribed. These men sell at a loss, and d’Arblay makes a handsome profit. It is but a primitive stock-jobber’s trick, yet it clearly continues to earn a profit for those who dare to do the unthinkably silly.”
I looked at the frantic scene with a kind of distant amusement.
“Are you prepared to involve yourself in such matters?” Adelman asked, distracting me from the mayhem of frantic selling. “All this stock-jobbing that you see—you do not understand it, and there is no reason you should trouble yourself with it. Why not think on my offer to do business with gentlemen I know?”
“I am thinking about it, Mr. Adelman, and I appreciate your attention, please make no mistake. In the meantime, I think you will understand that I am interested to uncover the truth about what happened to my father. Could a son do less? Especially,” I added by way of cutting off any stinging retorts, “a son who has much to make up for. And now that we have sorted out why we do the things we do, can you tell me, sir, what you know of a man called Martin Rochester?” I could not think why I asked if he knew the man who had taken into employ my father’s killer, but the idea to do so entered my head and found expression in my mouth before I had time to consider of it.
I should like to say the expression of Adelman’s face betrayed something, but it did not change at all. So frozen was his face in the blank amusement of our conversation, so much did he not twitch or narrow his eyes, that I could not but suspect that this lack of movement was a practiced impenetrability. Adelman made every effort to hide what he was thinking.
“I’ve never heard the name,” he said. “Who is he, and what is it to me?”
“You’ve never heard the name?” I asked incredulously. I had considered what Elias had explained of probability, and it occurred to me that if I was to believe that my father had been murdered, then I must act as though the events surrounding his murder were connected. Rochester had hired away the man who had run my father down, and here was Adelman, who wished me to discontinue my inquiry of that event. Was it not probable, I wondered, that Adelman should at least know of Rochester? “You, sir, perhaps the best-known and best-informed man upon the Exchange,” I pressed on, “can it be that you have never heard of him?”
“Well, I have heard of him,” Adelman said, a slight smile upon his lips. “I simply meant that he was not worth hearing of,” he continued. “My use of Court language has confused you—I quite apologize. I should have realized you are not used to this bombastic method of talking. But as for this Rochester, one hears so little of small men that the names are not long retained in one’s mind.”
“And what little have you heard of him? Who is he?”
He shrugged. “A small man upon the Exchange. No more. A jobber.”
A jobber. This Martin Rochester was a jobber, and the man who killed my father was in his employ. The man at the Anchor Brewery had likened Rochester to Jonathan Wild—not a jobber, but a master thief. Perhaps Elias was right about the corruption of ’Change Alley, for now it seemed that in the person of Martin Rochester, finance and theft found a single voice.
“I have heard,” I said, pushing as far as I might, “that he is a great man.”
“From whom have you heard this arrant nonsense?”
I spoke without pause. “From the man who killed my father.”
Adelman pursed his lips into an ugly and twisted shape. I could only presume he wished to display this disgust, for he was quite clearly a man who knew how to disguise his feelings. “I shall not linger long,” he said, “for if you keep the company of such men, I do not wish to be numbered among them. Let me only say this, Mr. Weaver: you sail your ship upon treacherous waters.”
“Perhaps I require insurance.” I grinned at him.
Adelman responded to my gibe with characteristic seriousness. “No company will insure you. You are in danger of foundering.”
I thought to make another quip, but changed my mind and considered his words. The man I spoke to was no street filth whose threats could be laughed off. He was one of the wealthiest men in the Kingdom and one of the most powerful, too. Yet he took the time to
speak with me, to attempt to frighten me off my course. I could not take this matter lightly, nor could I dismiss it with clever phrases. I had not the slightest idea of what Adelman’s interest was in my inquiry nor what his involvement might be in the deaths of my father and Balfour, but I could not ignore the fact that a man of his position hovered above me in a public place, speaking of my doom.
I stood up very slowly, until I dwarfed him at my full height. We stared at one another, each like a fighter sizing up his opponent in the ring. “Do you threaten me, sir?” I asked after a moment.
He impressed me greatly, for he showed no sign of intimidation. He did not merely pretend to disregard my greater size and the anger upon my face. He truly cared nothing for it. “Mr. Weaver, the difference between us in family, fortune, and education is so great that your question, asked in so bellicose a manner, truly does you little credit. You must recognize that I condescend to speak to you as an equal, and you have now taken advantage of my generosity. No, I do not threaten you. I merely wish to advise you, for you neither see nor care to see the path upon which you embark. Exchange Alley, sir, is no game of fists within a ring, in which might prevails. It is not even a chess game, in which all pieces are laid upon the board and each player sees all and the most accomplished man sees best. It is a labyrinth, sir, in which you will see only a few feet before you; you can never know what it is that lies ahead, and you can never be sure from which direction you came. There are men who stand above the labyrinth, and while you try to learn what is beyond the next turn, there are those who see you and the path you seek with perfect clarity, and it is but a small thing to block you. Please make no more of what I say. I do not suggest that your life or your safety are in danger. Nothing so dramatic. But to learn the things you wish to know—even if none of your suspicions are true—you may have to cross men who share no direct guilt in your father’s death, yet believe that your inquiries will expose them in ways they have no wish to be exposed. These men can and will block your passage. You will never see their hands or suspect how they move the pieces. You cannot succeed.”