Turning the Stones (28 page)

If Johnny was insolvent, so was Sedge Court. The Waterlands needed cash to pay their bills. If cash did not come their way, I could see that they were likely to succumb to an economic infirmity that threatened their way of life. If there were ever a moment when Mr and Mrs Waterland needed one or both of their children to haul in a generous annuity, then here it was.

Had I been right to think that Eliza had been sent to London on covert marriage business? A shiver ran down my spine. Surely, surely, Barfield could not be a part of it.

By the time I reached Poland Street my apprehension had ballooned and I was impatient to warn Eliza that a stratagem might be in play. She had not yet come home from shopping with Johnny. I was obliged to wait another two or three hours in the apartment before she returned with her new sleeves. I barely glanced at them. When I said I must speak to her about a weighty matter, she began to conduct herself evasively. She bustled about, thrusting a needless poker in the fire. She fiddled with her neckerchief. I seized her arm to force her to attend to me, but she immediately shook me off.

I said, ‘The promissory note that Johnny gave you, the one that you could not use in Piccadilly—’

‘What about it?’

‘I tried to cash it at Hill & Vezey today, but the bank would not honour it. They
could
not honour it.’

Eliza said with an attempt at a ringing tone, ‘What on earth
were you doing with my promissory? How dare you go delving into Johnny’s business?’

‘I thought you ought to know: the note is worthless.’

‘Oh, fiddle. Johnny said as much yesterday when you made a fuss about it in the parlour. The note is old. That does not mean the bank has failed. In fact Johnny has just spent a fortune on my new sleeves, so there!’

‘I am only repeating what I was told. The coffee-houses around that part of Fleet Street are frequented by men of the stock exchange. It is their business to know about these things. I asked at one of them for news of Hill & Vezey and I was told that the bank has nearly collapsed.’

Eliza gave me one of her bulbous stares. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘All right, don’t believe me. But will you do me the favour of listening to what I have to say. You may castigate me afterwards if you decide that I am in error.’

‘Who told you this balderdash?’

‘It was a stockbroker’s lad.’

Eliza gave a snort of derision.

‘He makes his living among traders.’ I brought out from underneath my cuff the folded commodities list from the lad at Percy’s. ‘Look, you can see, here is a list of commodity prices the boy gives out for his master.’

Eliza ignored the list. She sat down and kicked off her slippers.

On I pressed. ‘He said that things started to go wrong for Hill & Vezey last autumn when one of their trading partners in Rotterdam was reported to be overstretched. The partner might have come out of the difficulty, but rivals of the bank
made a hue and cry about it. The rumours they spread created doubts about the solvency of the banking house.’

Eliza bent down to straighten the clocks of her stockings – but she was paying attention to my words, I sensed.

‘At the same time, so I was told, the bank had a problem with counterfeit notes. There was such a proliferation of them it undermined confidence in the bank and that made investors nervous. A number of them began to withdraw their funds because they feared that the bank might be compromised. Then the trickle of withdrawals turned into a flood. The boy I spoke to says that confidence in Hill & Vezey had ebbed completely by the end of February and now the bank’s bills of exchange are no longer accepted for the payment of debts.’

Eliza shook her head. She said, ‘I have no idea what you are talking about, and I do not believe that you do either.’ She looked up with an air of defiance. ‘Have you ever had more than five shillings of your own to rub together? What makes you such a know-it-all about the ins and outs of finance all of a sudden? You will be slipping on a wig and gown next and preaching the law to me.’

I said as mildly as I could – Eliza does not respond well to stridency, from me at any rate – ‘The mechanism of the breakdown is not hard to understand. People who had given Hill & Vezey their funds to hold came to fear that the bank might be unable to meet its liabilities. Once the bank became suspect, it experienced a run by its noteholders. But its reserves were not sufficient to meet the demand for withdrawals. Now it is on the verge of closing its doors.’

Eliza stood up and went to the window and said, ‘I should like some hot chocolate.’

I said sharply, ‘Eliza, don’t you see what this means? Your parents may be in a precarious situation.’

‘My parents? What do they have to do with it?’ She gave a little false laugh. ‘Upon my soul, Em, you are the most awful scaremonger.’

I said, ‘Your parents have made investments on Johnny’s advice. I fear that they were funded by promissory notes that cannot now be honoured.’

It seemed to me that if a great deal of money was owed, wasn’t the master in danger of losing his estate or even of being thrown into a debtors’ prison? And what should happen to us then – not only Eliza and me, but the servants and the labourers attached to Sedge Court?

Eliza said haughtily, ‘As far as I am aware, my father has not confided his business affairs in you. I can tell you one thing that is truly observed – you are forever dinning my ears with problems and perplexities. Even if the bank is in a temporary difficulty, my parents are very far from its consequences.’

I cried, ‘But Mr and Mrs Waterland have been bound up in Johnny’s dealings for years! Think of the canal companies! Your father gave Johnny funds to invest in them – you know he did, because your mother spoke of it quite publically at Lady Broome’s. And now the canals are booming – and yet your father shows no sign of benefiting from his investment. Where has the money gone? Don’t you think it is possible that Johnny used it to make an investment of high risk elsewhere. Perhaps he hoped to turn a quick profit for himself and then return your father’s stake to its original account at Hill & Vezey.’

Except that his get-rich-quick scheme had evaporated. Was
it to do with those Irish mortgages that Mr Paine had mentioned? And then the bank had crashed. As a result, Mr Waterland no longer had the funds to pay his debts to the extent of the bills of exchange borrowed by his son. I imagined that Johnny’s creditors were already breathing down his neck.

Eliza was eyeing me with stony forbearance. I saw I would not convince her that Johnny was in error – the indestructibility of his genius was fundamental to her creed – but how could she not suspect that her father was in difficulty? His negligent appearance alone seemed to bear out the supposition. Ever since the fire at Parkgate he had given up any pretence of maintaining appearances. We glimpsed him from time to time, going about in an old sludge shooting coat. He had left off wearing his wig, so that his wispy hair blew about like a cobweb. There was nothing in his countenance that was wellseeming. It seemed clear to me that Mr Waterland’s consuming illness was connected to the despair he must be feeling as the interest on his debts mounted.

‘I do not care for your suggestion that my parents are in danger of ruin,’ Eliza said.

‘But you
must
care! If your parents are ruined, how shall we live otherwise?’

I felt faint at the thought that Sedge Court might be lost to creditors, but my panic was nothing compared to the humiliation and despair that Mrs Waterland would feel. If there ever was a woman who could meet desperate times with desperate measures, it was she. Again, a marriage contract came into my thoughts. Were we here to contract a contract so abhorrent that Eliza could not be told of it until the thing was in train?

I crept close to Eliza and took her reluctant hand in mine.
She tried to pull away but I would not let her. ‘Eliza,’ I said softly, ‘don’t you wonder why you have been sent here to press Mr Paine for a portion of his money? Johnny is much better placed to do that than you. Has it not occurred to you that there may be some scheme attached to this visit to London that was not told to us at the outset?’

She succeeded in withdrawing her hand. ‘No, it has not. Why should it?’ She placed her hands on her hips. ‘Johnny is solvent, you know. You said yourself that speculation about the bank is based on rumour. In fact, only today Johnny observed that the greatest danger to his enterprises lies in unfounded gossip.’

‘But this is not gossip. People have withdrawn their money. Hill & Vezey will go out of business and take your father’s investments along with it, I fear.’

Eliza offered me a remote smile tinged with pity. ‘Poor Em. How peevish you are of your station in life, despite everything we have done for you.’

‘What do you mean?’ I was thrown off balance by her remark.

‘You are not a Waterland. More than that, you cannot bear that Johnny is so very partial to me. I see where this maligning of him comes from. Its wellspring is your jealousy.’

I was struck dumb by the utter wrongness of this interpretation, and Eliza allowed herself a chuckle of victory. She said, ‘Will you fetch my drink or must I see to it myself?’

I went downstairs to make her damned hot chocolate. I was confounded by our exchange. How was it that we had come to be so at odds over our shared predicament?

The House of Kitty Conneely, Connemara
April, 1766

Nora, friend of my heart, are you there? It is a few long days since I sensed anything of you and I’m talking to myself, so it seems. A freezing wind came down from the mountain in a great swagger today and I kicked up against going out into the coldness. I should have gone to the stones, but a storm might be about to rise, I think. Nothing would do me today but to stay put at the hearth, blankets and all, with a smoke of the pipe to my hand. Soon I will lie down on my mat. Doubtless you can see the tired look on me. I am weak in myself and I find I cannot do the work of the house. The effort of my powers takes it out of me. The dreams I have bring me away at night and it’s not a sker-rick of rest I have.

But you will want to know that the penalised daughter is coming under my sway. On the waves she is now, I see that. There are some people it is unlucky to meet and that is true of the fellow she is travelling with. A bad one he is, but bring him on to my turf, I say. The monster may come flying in with a monster’s face on him, but I will be pleased to catch him in my trap.

They have a boat and they pursue their quarry. That was two days ago. In a fearful rush they are. The penalised
girl is on a wild goose chase, but she does not know it. Oh, it may be that she feels some heavy thing come on her and she will wonder what it is, but she will not know. That is my curse. No one is able to take it off her but me – and that I will not do.

This is how it will be, Nora: that penalised girl will come here and she’ll be after falling in a hole and she’ll be after disappearing, never to be seen again. The woman of the hat will hear a cry in the air over her head, and she will think it is a gull or some other bird, but it will be the cry of the daughter being carried away from her.

And do you know what I am going to tell you? This is it: our girl is forceful in her mind and she is become hard to bend to my will. She and Connla McDonagh are a very strong article when they are together and they will try to do as they wish and not as I want. He has no right to captivate her, Nora. She is
my
darling. I will try to throw the McDonagh off. It is a difficult enough task as it is to draw our girl home without his interference. He has got into her mind, Nora, and made it cloudy and sometimes now the picture is not clear to me. And the devil of it is, he does not know himself that he is in love with her.

By the blood of Brigid, I wish a hand might come and seize our child right now and let her down into my arms. Why can I not make that happen in a hurry, instead of being in the grip of this long waiting? Still and all, when she comes to live with me I will never be troubled after that.

The
Seal
, South of Galway Bay
April, 1766

We are bumping over the ridges of a hard sea now and there is an air about the crew of reaching a journey’s end. The faces of massive cliffs stare out at us from a bold coast on our starboard side. They do not look at all welcoming, but soon I will be landed at their rocky feet. Captain McDonagh is about to send out a signal for a boat that will bring me away to the shore. We are somewhere near the mouth of Galway Bay, apparently. The only thing I know about the town of Galway is that it is supposed to be a grim kind of citadel and the last outpost of the western world.

When I made this mournful remark to Captain McDonagh he said, ‘The afternoon men of London and Paris might run from the rigours of Galway town, but it will suit you well enough, Miss Smith.’

I dare say it would suit him, too. You only have to look at him planted firmly on the deck, vigilant of eye and granite of jaw, to know he is very far from being an afternoon man. He is always performing a task or anticipating an incident. Not a quarter of an hour must pass on deck without his scrutinising the sky or raising his spy-glass to scan the sea and then he prowls from stern to fo’c’sle attending every nuance of his vessel’s behaviour.

I am strained at the thought of my impending departure from the
Seal
. In spite of its discomforts, this voyage has lulled me into a false security. It has released me from the terror that clawed at me on my flight to Bristol, but Galway is a military outpost and I foresee many opportunities to be stopped and questioned by constables and militiamen. I cannot bear the thought of returning to that everyday fearfulness, the looking over my shoulder, the constant wondering about what will happen to me.

I worry about English news sheets. Are they sold in Galway’s print shops? Will my likeness turn up on a pamphlet advertising wanted felons? If I am arrested for murder, I doubt there will be any trial at all. They will haul me through the streets tied to a sledge and hang me in a public place. Then my body will be given to the anatomists to tear apart. I ought not to stay in the town, only I fear I may not know how to survive in the countryside outside its walls.