A Conspiracy of Paper (25 page)

He made his way west, to where Cornhill intersects with Threadneedle and Lombard streets, and here the thickness of the crowd began to thin out a little, so I hung back, took an instant to throw a penny at a beggar, and continued to follow at a safe distance.

By now Cornhill had turned into Poultry, and Sarmento made a right upon the much more sparsely populated Grocers Alley. I waited a moment and followed him into the alley leading to Grocers Hall, which I reminded myself was the home of the Bank of England. Sarmento veered off toward the massive building, which, like the Royal Exchange, stood as an architectural testament to the excesses of the last century.

Sarmento hurried toward a coach standing before the Hall. That I might move closer, I approached a group of gentlemen nearby and, keeping one eye upon this coach, I affected a country accent and explained that I had lost my way and required the quickest route to London Bridge. Londoners may not be the most gregarious lot in the world, but there is little they love so much as to give directions, and now, while these five gentlemen vied with each other to provide me the shortest walk, the coach began to move slowly, making its way past me. Sarmento, I could see, engaged himself in deep conversation with a man with a wide face full of undersized features. The smallness of his nose and mouth and eyes was made even more absurd by an enormous black wig that piled almost to the ceiling of the coach and undulated down in thick ringlets. It was a face that I had seen but recently and one that I recognized with little difficulty. I cannot say I felt anything so much as utter confusion as I watched Sarmento drive off with Perceval Bloathwait.

EIGHTEEN

I
COULD NO LONGER
pretend to myself that my suspicions of Bloathwait were born of the vague ghost of a childhood terror. He had covered something on his desk, something he had not wanted me to see. That in itself might mean little—it might have been a reminder to himself about private finances or whores or a taste for young boys for all I knew. It would be very strange if a man like Bloathwait had nothing on his desk worthy of hiding from a potential enemy. But a connection with Sarmento, a man employed by my uncle, was an entirely different matter. Bloathwait maintained a secret connection to my family, and I felt I had to know what it was.

My youthful adventures as an outlaw had left me well prepared for this business of inquiring into murder, and I knew that it was time to call upon my skills as a housebreaker. I had long ago learned that there was no more useful tool for the illegal entering of a house than the interests of a silly maid, so I composed an enchanting little
lettre d’amour
, which I sent wrapped around a shilling. I had little doubt that Bessie the laundry lass would respond kindly to my missive, and when I received the answer I desired within the hour, I rubbed my hands together with excitement.

My next stop was Gilbert Street, where I was delighted to find that Elias had returned from his celebratory debauch, but he slept so soundly under the influence of a wine which still stained his teeth and tongue a bright purple that it took Mrs. Henry and me nearly half an hour to bring my friend to consciousness. He lay on his back, his bob-wig remaining affixed to his head, but pushed forward down his brow. His clothes were mainly still upon his body, but he had fallen asleep after removing one arm from his coat. His shoes and stockings were speckled with mud that he had smeared all over Mrs. Henry’s sheets, and his cravat, loosened but not untied, was strewn with brown meat drippings.

When he at last came to something like consciousness, Mrs. Henry left the room with performative disgust, and in the flickering of two inadequate candles I watched my friend open and close his mouth like a Bartholomew Fair puppet. “Gad, Weaver. What time is it?”

“Nearly nine o’clock, I believe.”

“If the house is not on fire, I shall have to be very angry with you,” he muttered, and pushed himself to sit upright. “What do you want? Can you not see that I am celebrating?”

“We have work to do,” I told him bluntly, hoping the force of my intent would help to awaken him. “I need to break into the house of Perceval Bloathwait, the Bank of England director.”

Elias rolled his head from side to side. “You’re mad.” He pushed himself to his feet and stumbled across the room to a basin filled with water and discreetly covered with a pretty piece of linen. He stripped himself of his coat and waistcoat and then removed the cloth from the basin and began splashing his face. Even in the dark I could not but notice what appeared to be grass stains across the rump of his breeches.

He turned to me, his face now glistening with water. “You wish to break into Bloathwait’s house? Good Lord, why?”

“Because I believe he’s hiding something.”

He shook his head. “Break into his house if you wish. I shan’t stop you. But I don’t know why you should wish me to go with you.”

“Because I’m gaining access by the good graces of a pretty little servant girl, and I shall need someone to keep her occupied while I search Bloathwait’s papers.”

I now had Elias’s attention. “How pretty?”

An hour later Elias had cleaned himself up, changed his clothes, fixed his wig, and demanded that I buy him a few dishes of coffee. We thus made our way to Kent’s, a favorite coffeehouse of Elias’s; it was filled with wits and poets and playwrights—none of whom had a farthing about them. I should think the serving girls must have had the very devil of a time getting this band of self-inflated rogues to pay their reckonings, but the coffeehouse, for all the poverty of its patrons, appeared to thrive. On this particular night, nearly every table was full, and conversations buzzed all about us. The new theatrical season was upon every man’s lips, and I heard critiques of this play and that author and praises of the beauty of half-a-dozen actresses.

“Tell me again what you hope to gain from breaking into this man’s house.” Elias hesitantly raised his dish of coffee to his lips like a servant presenting a platter.

“He’s hiding something. He has more information than he’s willing to share, and I’ll wager that we can find what we need in his office, and probably upon his desk.”

“Even if there was something there when you went to see him, would he not have locked it away by now?”

I shook my head. “Bloathwait doesn’t strike me as the sort of man who would believe anyone might dare to violate his home.”

“I wish he were right,” Elias sighed. “You do realize that housebreaking is a hanging offense?”

“Only if we are there as thieves. If we are there to prey upon the virtue of a young girl, there’s not a man in England who would stand to see us charged, let alone convicted.”

Elias grinned at my ingenuity. “True enough.”

My friend began to look more alert, and though it was perhaps not the best time to seek his advice, I could not subdue the urge to ask of him what I hoped he would know. “What,” I began, “can you tell me of insurance?”

He raised but one eyebrow.

I pressed on. “Would a merchant ever send a ship upon a trading mission uninsured?”

“Not unless the merchant was a dunce,” he said. He left the
why
unasked.

“My cousin’s widow,” I explained hesitantly. “She had a fortune—not an insignificant one—when she was married, and my cousin invested in my uncle’s business. His ship, which represented much of the investment, was lost, and so, she presumes, was her portion. But if the ship was insured, then surely someone has that money.”

“An intrigue with a pretty widow!” Elias nearly shouted. He was now fully awake indeed. “Gad, Weaver, I should kill you for holding back this information. I must know all about her.”

“She lives in my uncle’s house,” I said, careful of how much ammunition I wished to provide for his raillery. “I believe she wishes to set forth on her own, but she has not much money.”

“A widow,” he mused. “I love a widow, Weaver. None of that niggardliness with their favors. No, widows are a generous race, and I applaud them.” He saw my displeasure and reined himself in. “It is a sad matter,” he observed.

“I would like to help her somehow.”

“If she’s pretty, I’ll help her soundly!” he exclaimed, but then soon recovered himself. “Yes, well, do you suspect your uncle of withholding what is rightly hers?”

“I do not think he has taken anything not his by contract,” I said. “But it pains me to think that he keeps her a near-prisoner in his house by taking advantage of the laws of property.”

“Do you believe your uncle to be entirely trustworthy?” he asked.

I had no answer, not even for myself. Instead I checked my watch and announced that it was time for us to go. I paid our reckoning and procured a hackney, which took us a few blocks from Bloathwait’s house. From there we walked to Cavendish Square, which in the thick of night was dark and quiet and tomblike. Elias and I quietly slipped around to the servants’ entrance and, according to plan, met Bessie at eleven o’clock. She stared at Elias with some confusion (while he stared at her with some delight), but let us in just the same.

“All’s asleep,” she said quietly. “What’s this gentleman for?”

“Bessie,” I whispered, “you’re a charming lass, and your beauty is not lost on me, but I am here to look at Mr. Bloathwait’s study. I don’t want to take anything, just to look about. If you’d like, you can follow us and raise the alarm if we do anything you don’t like.”

“Mr. Bloathwait’s study?” Her voice became unnervingly shrill.

“Here’s a half crown for you,” I said, slipping a coin into her hand. “There will be another when we’re done if you agree to look the other way.”

She eyed the coin in her hand, her hurt feelings squeezed out by the money’s heft. “All right,” she said slowly. “But I don’t want nothing to do with you. You go on your way, and if they catch you, I won’t say I ever saw you here.”

It wasn’t quite what I had wanted, but it would have to do. So I told her that if we had to depart in a hurry, I’d send her the other half crown in the morning. The bargain thus struck, we made our way to the study.

This room, which had been dark even during the daytime, took upon itself a new feeling of evil now, as we cast shadows within the narrow space of the chamber, which seemed to wrap about us like an enormous coffin. I moved toward the desk, lighting a few candles along the way, but the dim light of too-few flames created a feeling of more rather than less menace.

While I attempted to make conditions bearable for our invasive search, Elias wandered about the room, examining books upon the shelves and touching Bloathwait’s artifacts.

“Come here,” I hissed. “I don’t know how much time we have, and I want to quit this felony as quickly as we can.” I gathered some candles about Bloathwait’s great desk, and began to scan the daunting mounds of documents spread across the surface as though the wind had blown them there.

Elias joined me at the desk and lifted up a piece of paper at random. Bloathwait’s hand was cramped and difficult to read. It would be no easy thing to scan through these writings.

He held the page to the candle, as though threatening it with flame would force it to yield forth its secrets. “What are we looking for?” Elias asked.

“I cannot say, but there was something he wished to hide. Seek out anything having to do with my father or the South Sea Company or Michael Balfour.”

We both began leafing through the papers, doing our best not to misplace anything from its original order. There was so much on the desk, and its organization so chaotic, that I could not care if Bloathwait discovered his papers had been searched. So long as he could not prove it had been done by me, I was content.

“You haven’t told me what your widow looks like,” Elias said, as he ran his finger along a line of gnarled prose.

“Pay attention to your work,” I muttered, though in truth I took some comfort from the sound of his voice. We were engaged upon a tense business; my eyes darted to each shifting shadow upon the wall, and my body stiffened with each creak of the house.

Elias understood my rebuke to mean nothing. “I can concentrate and discuss widows simultaneously. I do it all the time while performing surgery. So tell me, is she a charming Jewess, with olive skin and dark hair and pretty eyes?”

“Yes, she is,” I told him, trying not to grin. “She’s quite lovely.”

“I should not expect any less of you, Weaver. You’ve always had a good eye in your own way.” He handed me a piece of paper on which there were notes about some loan venture of the Bank, but I could not see how it might be of value.

“Are you thinking matrimony?” he asked impishly, moving to a stack of papers bound together with a thick string. He carefully worked out the knot and began to glance at the pages. “Have you begun to consider starting a home, circumcising some young ones?”

“I know not why my fondness for this woman so amuses you,” I said churlishly. “You fall in love three times a fortnight.”

“Which makes me immune to mockery, then, does it not? Everyone expects me to fall in love. But you, the stony, stout, fighting Israelite—that’s another matter.”

I held up my hand. I heard creaking from somewhere—like footsteps. We both remained motionless in the flickering candlelight for some minutes, listening only to the sound of our own breathing and the ticking of Bloathwait’s great clock. What should we do if Bloathwait were to stroll in, candle in one hand, dressing gown wrapped about his enormous form? He might laugh, send us away, mock us—or he might commit us to the magistrate and use his mighty influence to see us hang for housebreaking. Possibility after possibility ran though my mind, scorn and haughtiness and sinister laughter, or prison and suffering and the scaffold. I fingered the handle of my hangar, and then my pistol. Elias watched me do so; he knew what I was about. I would kill Bloathwait, I would go upon the road, leave London and never return. I would not face trial for this adventure of mine, nor could I think of permitting Elias to know the horrors of prison. I resolved myself to do what I believed necessary.

The noise did not come again, and after a few moments in which I could not quite believe my own conviction that the danger had passed, I signaled that we should resume.

“I wonder about you,” Elias said, trying once more to lighten my mood—and his own. “All this spending time among your coreligionists. Are you thinking of returning to the fold? Moving to Dukes Place and becoming an elder at the synagogue? Growing a beard and such?”

“And what if I should?” The idea of returning to Dukes Place had crossed my mind, not as a resolution, but as a question—what should it be like to live there, to be one Jew among many rather than to be the one Jew that my acquaintances knew?

“I can only hope that when you find the path of abstemious devotion, you do not entirely forget the friends of your debauched youth.”

“You might consider converting to our faith,” I said. “I suppose the operation may prove painful—but I have no specific memory of being uncomfortable.”

“Look at this.” He waved a piece of paper before me. “It’s Henry Upshaw. He owes me ten shillings, and he’s dealing with Bloathwait for two hundred pounds.”

“Stop looking for gossip,” I told him. “We mustn’t stay here longer than we need to.”

We had been there perhaps two hours, and we were both growing anxious, wondering how foolish an idea this had been, when a piece of paper caught my eye—not because of anything written upon it, but because it looked familiar. It had the same kind of torn corner that I had seen on the document Bloathwait had attempted to hide from me.

Picking it up carefully, I saw written at the top “S. S. Co.?” My heart rate quickened. Underneath he had written “forge?” and under that “warning Lienzo.” Did he mean that he had received a warning from my father, that he had given a warning to my father, or even that he took my father’s death as a warning?