A Conspiracy of Paper

THIRTEEN

THE NEXT DAY, after a hasty breakfast of coarse bread and Cheshire cheese, washed down with a mug of small beer, I rushed over to Elias’s lodgings. Though it was rather late in the morning, I found my friend still asleep. Such was often his way. Like many men who thought themselves more blessed by the gods of wit than those of money, Elias would often sleep away whole days at a time that he might avoid the consciousness of his own hunger and poverty.

I waited as his landlady, Mrs. Henry, roused him, and I considered myself honored that he rushed to dress himself in all due haste.

“Weaver,” he said, hurrying downstairs, still thrusting one arm through his deep-blue laced coat that matched perfectly a blue-and-yellow waistcoat beneath. Short of money though he was, Elias owned some handsome suits. He struggled to finish dressing himself, as he shifted from hand to hand a thick pile of papers tied together with a green ribbon. “Monstrous good to see you. You’ve been busy, yes?”

“This business with Balfour consumes my full attention. Have you time to discuss it?”

He studied me with concern. “You look tired,” he said. “You have not been getting enough sleep, I fear. Shall I take some blood to refresh you a bit, sir?”

“Someday I shall let you bleed me just for the pleasure of astonishing you.” I laughed. “That is, I shall let you bleed me should I believe you will not kill me in the process.”

Elias rolled his eyes at me. “It is a wonder you Jews ever survived at all. You are like savage Indians in your medical beliefs. When one of your tribe grows ill, do you send for the physician, or for the shaman dressed in a bearskin?”

I laughed at Elias’s retort. “I should love to hear how you Scots, who run around the Highlands naked and painted blue, are more civilized than the authors of the Scriptures, but I had hoped you would have time to discuss the Balfour matter. And I should very much like to talk with you about all this stock-jobbery and such, of which I believe you know something.”

“By all means. And I have much to tell you. But if it’s stock-jobbery you wish to discuss, I can think of no place better than Jonathan’s Coffee-house, the very heart and soul of ’Change Alley. If you should only agree to pay for a hackney to drive us there, then I shall allow you to buy me something to eat. Or better yet, why not bill our expedition to Mr. Balfour?”

There would be no expenses billed to Mr. Balfour. From what Adelman had told me, I should be lucky to receive anything of him, but I had no desire to dampen Elias’s enthusiasm. I felt the jingle of silver in my purse, owing to Sir Owen’s kindness, and I was happy to pay for my friend’s morning meal as well as his good advice.

In the hackney on the way to ’Change Alley, Elias chatted constantly but said relatively little of import. He told me of old friends he had seen, of a riot in which he had nearly been caught, and of a ribald adventure he’d had involving two whores in the back room of an apothecary’s shop. But my mind wandered as Elias prattled happily away. The day was cool and overcast, but the air was clear, and I watched out the window as we headed east on Cheapside until it turned into Poultry. I saw in the distance Grocers Hall, home of the Bank of England, and before us the enormity that was the Royal Exchange. I must say this mammoth structure always filled me with awe, for though my father had not done business within since I had been a very small child, I still associated it with sullen and mysterious paternal power. The Exchange, as it was rebuilt after the Great Fire destroyed the old building, is essentially a large rectangle, the exterior surrounding a great open-air courtyard. Though only two stories, the walls reach upward three or four times as high as any other two-story structure one might think of, and the entrance is hovered over by an enormous tower that spires into the heavens.

Many years ago, stock-jobbers like my father did their business in the Royal Exchange, and Jews even had their own “walk” or place of business in the courtyard, along with clothiers and grocers and all manner of men engaged in foreign trade. But then Parliament passed a law forbidding stock-jobbing within the Royal Exchange, so jobbers had moved to nearby Exchange Alley, taking up residence in coffehouses such as Jonathan’s and Garraway’s. Much to the anger of those who had fought against stock-jobbing, the greater share of London’s commerce moved along with them, and while the Royal Exchange stood as a monument to Britain’s financial soundness, it was but a hollow monument.

In comparison, the real business of ’Change Alley took place in a few tiny and seemingly insignificant streets that one might circumnavigate in but a few minutes. On the south side of Cornhill, just across the street from the Royal Exchange, one entered Exchange Alley, and proceeded south past Jonathan’s and then Garraway’s, while the alley wound east to Birchin Lane, and a traveler passed the old Sword Blade Bank and a few other coffeehouses in which one might do business with lotteries or insurance or projects or trade abroad. Birchin Lane took one north, back to Cornhill, thus completing the simple tour of the most confusing, powerful, and mysterious streets in the world.

Our hackney encountered traffic near the Royal Exchange, so I bade the coachman stop by Pope’s Head Alley, and from there we walked the short distance, pushing our way through the crowds of men who swarmed about us. If Jonathan’s Coffeehouse was the center of commerce, it was also the purest standard of commerce, and the farther one pushed outward, the more one found strange hybrid shops, rooted in both the monetary frenzy of ’Change Alley and the more mundane business of everyday life. One could see lottery butchers, where the purchase of any chicken or coney registered a customer for a prize. A tea merchant promised that a treasure of East India Company stock was hidden in one out of every hundred boxes of his goods. An apothecary stood outside his doorway, shouting to all who passed by that he offered inexpensive advice on the funds.

It would be unfair of me to suggest that the area surrounding the Exchange was the only place in the metropolis into which the new finance had sunk its teeth. Windfall mania had swept the city with the legal reintroduction of the lottery in 1719, the year of this tale, and illegal lotteries had long been popular everywhere. I confess that I myself did business with a lottery barber who registered me for a prize each time I took a shave, though my almost daily visits, for upward of two years, had yet to yield me any bounty.

I had seen the sights of the Exchange before, but now they held a new wonder for me. I kept my eye alert, as though each man I passed might hold the key to my father’s murderer; in truth it was far more likely that any man I passed cared not a fig for my father’s death unless I could show how it might make or cost him money.

Elias and I forced our way to the Alley, and quickly reached Jonathan’s, which was quite full and bustling with the business of the day.

Jonathan’s, the stock-jobbers’ coffeehouse and the very soul of Exchange Alley, seemed to me more animated than any coffeehouse I knew. Men clustered around one another, arguing vehemently, laughing, or looking grave. Others sat at tables, hurriedly thumbing through piles of papers, gulping their coffee. And the din was not merely that of conversation. While some slapped friends upon the back with warm benevolence, others shouted out their wares: “Selling for the upcoming lottery, eight shillings a quarter ticket!” “Anyone to sell 1704 issues?” “I have an astonishing money-maker here for the man who will but lend me five minutes of his time!” “A project to drain the marshlands! Guaranteed!”

Looking about me, I could see why my Christian neighbors were so quick to associate Jews with ’Change Alley, for there was a superfluity of Israelites in the room—perhaps as many as I had ever seen together outside of Dukes Place. But Jews were hardly dominant in Jonathan’s and by no means the only aliens. Here were Germans, Frenchmen, Dutchmen—and Dutchmen aplenty, I assure you—Italians and Spaniards, Portuguese, and of course, no shortage of North Britons. There were even some Africans milling about, but I believed they were servants, and not upon the ’Change for business. The room was a cacophony of different languages, all being shouted at once. It was a dizzying array of papers changing hands, of pens signing, of envelope-stuffing, of coffee-pouring, and of coffee-drinking. I thought it the very center of the universe itself, and I admired in no small degree any man who could conduct business in a place of such distraction.

Fortune favored us, for no sooner did we step inside than a trio of men vacated a table just before us, and we moved quickly to beat out a large crowd that had been waiting longer, all the while conducting their business afoot. Shouting above the din, I asked one of the boys who passed by us with a tray full of dirtied dishes to bring us coffee and some pastries.

I looked about in amazement. I had not been inside Jonathan’s since I was a child and my father had dragged me and my brother along to watch him conduct his affairs. We had sat in mute discomfort, half stemming from the dull terror a child feels in the presence of inexplicable adult mania, the other half from pure boredom. Now, in Jonathan’s as a grown man, and in my own way here upon business, I still felt small, towered over, and a bit awed. At least I was not yet bored.

The boy brought us our coffee and food, and Elias wasted no time stuffing one of the pastries into his mouth. “Do you know Mr. Theodore James, the bookseller upon the Strand?” he asked me, his words muffled by dough and jam.

“I have passed by his shop,” I said.

Elias bubbled with excitement as he spoke. “You might try stepping inside sometime. He’s a grand man. He printed my volume of verse, you know. Mr. James possesses no small amount of influence, which he has used to obtain for me an audience with Mr. Cibber at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, who is to consider staging my play. It is an astonishingly exciting thing really. I grow giddy at the idea of having my play acted upon the stage. It is truly marvelous, don’t you think?”

I could not help but smile. Elias was, after all, a man of many talents. “I had no idea you had a play to stage.” I shook his hand with pleasure.

He giggled foolishly. “I hadn’t. I shall tell him I have labored hard. Not too hard, for I don’t want him to believe me one of those silly playwrights who think themselves a Jonson or Fletcher. I wrote it yesterday,” he added in a whisper.

“An entire play in a day?”

“Well, I’ve seen enough comedies to know how to order these things. And yet, despite its haste, it is not without some very original turns. I call it The Unsuspecting Lover. Who could resist a play with so merry a title? Come, Weaver, I consider you a man of taste. Let me read it to you.”

“I should love to hear your work, Elias, but I admit I am a bit preoccupied. I promise to attend to it on another occasion, but now I must seek your guidance regarding this Balfour business.”

“Of course,” he said, sliding out of sight the bundle of papers he’d pulled from his pocket. “The play can certainly wait. It has but so recently hatched into the world that perhaps a rest shall do it some good.”

I could not help but find Elias a marvelously agreeable friend. “Thank you,” I said, hoping that I had not hurt his feelings by shunting aside his literary efforts, “for I very much require your assistance in this matter. I am somewhat at a loss. Here, after all, we have two men who had some sort of acquaintance, if not a friendship, who died within twenty-four hours of each other. One under mysterious circumstances, the other under scandalous circumstances. I can assure you that the talk about the town is that there is something amiss in this matter, but I have no idea how to begin to settle upon what precisely that is. I shall attempt to locate the man who ran down my father, but I cannot imagine he will allow me to find him too easily.”

Our conversation was momentarily interrupted by one of the boys, who walked past us ringing a bell. “Mr. Vredeman. Message for Mr. Vredeman.” These interruptions were but part of doing business at Jonathan’s.

Elias had no difficulty ignoring the distraction. “Yours is a complicated matter,” Elias agreed as he sipped at his coffee. I could tell he wished to talk more of his play, although there was something in this affair he found irresistible.

“It seems,” I explained, “that there are those who do not wish me to seek out the truth behind these deaths. My life was attempted two nights ago.”

I now had Elias’s full attention, to be sure. I related to him the story of my encounter with the hackney coach, giving particular emphasis to the coachman’s parting words to me.

“It can have been no random assault,” he noted, “for you say the culprit knew you to be a Jew. Those who murdered Balfour and your father clearly do not wish you to expose their doings.” I had seen such a sparkle in his eye before when he had helped me out. In truth, I was used to seeing that sparkle when he helped me in matters that concerned amiable young women. Nevertheless, this inquiry obviously awakened Elias’s voracious curiosity.

“These villains have gone to great lengths to disguise their work, and now it seems they will go to greater lengths to keep their secrets hidden. It will be difficult for you to find them out.”

“Not difficult.” I nearly sighed. “I fear impossible. I am used to following trails that men foolishly leave behind. Now I am upon men who have been careful to leave no trace of their presence—indeed, who have gone to some lengths to obfuscate their business. I do not know that there is a way for me to proceed.”

“I wonder.” Elias lifted up his head thoughtfully. “There has to be a trail, just not the type you are used to looking for. A trail of ideas and motives, if not one of witnesses. You will have to do some guessing, you understand, but that is no matter.”

“Guessing will get me nowhere.” I now wondered if Elias was not off on some flight of fancy when I needed his clarity. “When a man comes to me for help in finding a debtor, do I guess where I shall find him? Certainly not. I learn what I can of his life and his habits and then look for him where I know I shall find him.”

“You look for him where you guess you will find him, for you do not know that he will be where your reasoning directs you. You guess every day, Weaver. I only suggest that you make some bigger guesses. Locke, you know, wrote that any man who admits to nothing but that which can be plainly demonstrated may be sure of nothing but perishing quickly. In your case there may be more truth to that than Locke intended.”

“This is but wordplay, Elias. These games do not help me.”

“Not so. I believe you are more used to acting upon speculation than you realize. In this case you are going to have to make some reasonable assumptions and then proceed as though they might be true. Your task is to look at the general and conclude the particular—for generals and particulars are always related. Consider what Mr. Pascal says of Christianity—he writes that since Christianity offers rewards for adherence to its tenets and punishments for the failure to adhere to its tenets, and the absence of Christianity offers neither, a reasonable man would opt to become a Christian because by doing so he receives the maximum chance of reward and the minimum chance of punishment. Now, the Christianity business does not apply to you, and I should think Pascal was more or less pretending that Christianity was the only religion available to a reasonable man. His thinking is precisely what will allow you to resolve this matter, for you must work with probability rather than facts. If you can only go by what is probable, you will sooner or later learn the truth.”

“Are you suggesting I conduct this matter by randomly choosing paths of inquiry?”

“Not randomly,” he corrected. “If you know nothing with certainty, but you guess reasonably, acting upon those guesses offers the maximum chance of learning who did this with the minimal amount of failure. Not acting offers no chance of discovery. The great mathematical minds of the last century—Boyle, Wilkins, Glanvill, Gassendi—have set forth the rules by which you are to think if you are to find your murderer. You will act not on what your eyes and ears show you, but on what your mind thinks probable.” Elias set down his coffee and fidgeted with his hands. When he believed himself to be brilliant, he instantly turned into a great fidget. I wondered how he dared ever bleed a patient, since he believed so strongly in the curative powers of phlebotomy that I fancied his hands would grow unmanageable at the very idea of the powers of bloodletting.

I confess I did not even vaguely suspect the importance of what it was that Elias told me. I did not see that he was helping me to change the very nature of my reasoning. “And how might I know where to begin my guessing and my acting upon probability?”

“You don’t credit your own intellect sufficiently. I think you reason in this way all the time, but because you have not read in philosophy you don’t recognize the types of thinking you engage in. I shall be happy to lend you some of my books.”

“You know I have no head for your hard books, Elias. Fortunately I can depend on you to look into them for me. What does Mr. Pascal’s philosophy tell us we should guess about the matter at hand?”

“Let me consider,” he said slowly, and looked up to study the ceiling. I must say that I never grew tired of my friendship with Elias, for he was a man of so many different aspects. Were a comely whore to walk by at that moment, he would have forgotten that men such as Pascal had ever trod the earth, but for that moment I had the full powers of his intellect at my disposal, and I believe that he took the greatest pleasure in applying them to my cause.

“We have a man,” he intoned slowly, “whose death has revealed the ruin of his estate. His son thinks this self-murder a ruse and that the ruin of the estate is connected with the death—indeed, the death was brought about to accomplish the ruin of the estate. Certainly,” Elias mused, “the killer could be no ordinary thief. One cannot simply take another man’s stocks—they must be brought to the issuing institution and transferred.”

“Which institutions issue stocks?” I asked.

“The Bank of England has a monopoly on issuing government funds, but there are of course the companies—the South Sea Company, the East India Company, and so forth.”

“Yes, I have recently come to hear much of these companies. Particularly of the Bank and the South Sea. But how came you to know so much of these matters?”

“You know I am a bit of a dabbler in the funds.” He puffed himself up, looking about Jonathan’s as though he owned the place. “And as I am something of a coffeehouse denizen, I cannot but learn a thing or two of the business. I have held some issues that have yielded a pleasing return, although my interests lie predominantly in projects.”

I believe that when Elias was born the projectors and schemers of the world drank a bumper to his health and another to honor his parents. Since I began my friendship with Elias, he had invested in, and lost money on, projects to fish for herring, to grow tobacco in India, to build a ship that sailed underwater, to make salt water fresh, to produce an armor for soldiers that would resist musket fire, to create an engine that runs on steam, to make a kind of pliable wood, and to raise a species of edible dogs. Once I had mocked him mercilessly for investing fifty pounds (which he borrowed of a group of unsuspecting gulls, myself included) in a project “to produce enormous sums of money through means that, once revealed, will utterly astonish.”

So, while I did not believe Elias to be the most cautious investor in the world, I believed he understood something of the financial marketplace. “If a mere thief could not rob a man of his funds,” I continued with my querying, “who could, and for what purpose would he do so?”

“Well”—Elias bit his lip—“we might consider the lending institution itself.”

I guffawed as though I found the idea preposterous. But I could not forget my father’s old enemy, Perceval Bloathwait, the Bank of England director. “You mean you think the Bank of England, for example, could kill two men for some purpose—that the Bank of England was responsible for the attempt upon my life as well?”

“Mr. Adelman!” the coffee boy shouted as he walked past our table. “A hackney awaits Mr. Adelman!”

I watched from afar as my uncle’s friend made his way across the coffeehouse, trailed by a cluster of sycophants who hounded him even as he tried to pass through the doorway. For a moment I felt startled, as though it were a strange coincidence that he should be in the very place I chose to drink a dish of coffee. I then recalled that I chose to drink a dish of coffee in his place of business. It was not he who haunted me, but much the other way around.

I turned back to Elias, who had, while I had been lost in my thoughts, speculated on the murderous intent of the nation’s most powerful financial institution.

“Perhaps the Bank realized it could not afford to pay the interest and had to dispense with all the investors,” he proposed. “What better way to order the books than to make some of the issues disappear? Perhaps your father and Balfour had large holdings from a particular institution.”

I felt something of a chill. Elias raised a specter that my uncle had dismissed as preposterous. “I am told such a thing is unlikely. I do not believe the Bank of England goes about murdering its investors. If it needed to renege on a loan, I am sure there are more effective ways of handling it.”

Elias gesticulated. “Good Lord, Weaver. What do you think the Bank is about?”

“Not murder, surely.”

“Such is not its function, but there is no reason to believe that murder is not among its tools.”

“Why so?” I asked. “Is it not more probable that these murders are the work of a man or perhaps a group of men rather than the program of a company?”

“But if this man or men is acting to serve a company, then I am not certain I see the distinction. The company remains the villain. And what is the life of a man or two in the eyes of an enormous institution such as the Bank of England? If the death of a man suggests a strong probability of a good financial return, what is to stop the Bank or one of the other companies from making such a bloody investment? You see, the very devil of it is that this kind of probability theory, which will help you learn the truth behind these atrocities, has allowed for the rise of the institutions most likely involved in your father’s murder. The Bank and the companies but engage in large-scale and organized stock-jobbery, and what is stockjobbery but an exercise in probability?”

“Between you and my uncle, Elias, I feel as though I have enrolled in one of the universities. I know not that I can fathom all of this probability and government issue and heaven knows what else.” I paused for a moment and considered that I perhaps rejected what Elias said too quickly. “How does your probability relate to these companies?”

The smile upon my friend’s face told me that he had been hoping I would ask this question. “It is the theory of probability that has allowed for the rise of the funds. To invest, you must think of what is probable, not what is known, and act accordingly. Consider the business of insurance. A man pays out insurance because he knows something might happen to his goods. The insurance company, in turn, accepts the money, knowing that in each individual case, it is probable that nothing will happen, so when it is forced to pay out, the bulk of its money is secure. Now it is possible that every ship a company insures might sink to the bottom of the ocean, and the insurance company would then go bankrupt, but so monstrous an event is not probable, and so our wealthy friends at the insurance companies sleep well at night, indeed.”

I felt as though Elias was on the cusp of something that I still could not understand. “None of this explains why the Bank of England should involve itself in murder.”

Elias’s eyes lit up like twin candles as he returned to the topic of the Bank’s villainy. “Again, you must think in terms of probability. What could, in all probability, explain these two murders? Old Balfour died under mysterious circumstances, and his estate proved to be missing a great deal of money. We do not know how much, but if it is an amount that could be the difference between his very large estate being ruined or no, we must assume at least ten thousand pounds. Perhaps more. Do you agree?”

I told him that I did.

“Now, funds of this value would either be stock of one of the trading companies, or government shares issued by the Bank of England. In either case, those shares would be nontransferable, meaning that in order for someone other than the holder to own those stocks, he would have to officially transfer ownership in the company or the Bank during designated transfer hours. I cannot simply pick up old Balfour’s holdings and claim them as my own. He or his heirs must sign them over to me.”

“I believe I begin to understand you. No common thief would gain anything from these stocks, so the murderer must be someone involved with the company—for only such a person could turn the stocks to gain.”

“Exactly,” Elias said.

“But that does not tell me why an institution itself must be involved. Could not the murderer be a company clerk—someone who could transfer the stolen issues to himself or a partner?”

“A solid conclusion.” Elias smiled somewhat patronizingly. “But you told me that old Balfour and your father had some mysterious business together before their deaths. Your father’s estate does not seem to be missing any issues. To my mind, it is therefore probable that these murders are about more than a theft. Old Balfour and your father knew something or they were planning a venture or involved themselves in a scheme that made them dangerous to some very powerful men. You see, you keep considering old Balfour’s death and then your father’s death—not both of them together. And if these deaths are related, then the motive is more than money—and that to me suggests a plot, and plots suggest power.”

I remained silent for a moment as I considered Elias’s dexterous hops from conclusion to conclusion. I did not fully believe what he said, but I could not deny the power of his ability to draw possible answers from what I had seen as a jumble of facts. “What sort of plot do you envision?”

Elias sucked on his lower lip. “Give me a shilling,” he said at last. He waved his hand impatiently at my quizzical look. “Come now, play along, Weaver. Put a shilling on the table.”

I reached into my purse and felt around for a shilling, which I slapped down.

Elias picked it up before returning it to the table. “That’s a sorry shilling,” he observed. “What’s happened to it?”

It was indeed a sorry shilling. Most of the edges had been filed away until it was a shapeless hunk of metal and only a fraction of its original weight.

“It’s been clipped,” I told him. “The same as every other shilling in the Kingdom. Are you suggesting that the companies are involved in coinclipping?”

“No, not as such. I merely wish to demonstrate the idea of what these companies are doing. Our shillings are clipped and filed, and the excess silver melted down and sold abroad. Now you have a shilling that contains perhaps three-fourths of its original metal. Is it still worth a shilling? Well, it is, more or less, because we need a medium of exchange for the nation to function smoothly.” He held up the coin between his thumb and index finger. “This clipped shilling is but a metaphor, if you will, of the fiction that the idea of value has become in this Kingdom.”

I pretended not to see him slip the coin into his pocket. “Thus the rise of the banknote,” I observed. “At least in part, from what little I understand. If the silver does not circulate, but stays safely where it cannot be harmed, the representation of the silver provides a secure measure of value. The fiction is thus replaced by reality, and your anxiety over these new financial mechanisms undoes itself.”

“But what would happen, Weaver, if there was no silver? If silver was replaced by banknotes—by promises? Today you are used to substituting a banknote for a large sum of money. Perhaps tomorrow you may forget that you ever dealt in money proper. We shall exchange promises for promises, and none of these promises shall ever be fulfilled.”

“Even if such a preposterous thing were to happen, what would be the harm? After all, silver only has value because everyone agrees it has value. It is not like food, which has a use unto itself. If we all agree that banknotes have value, how are they less valuable than silver?”

“But silver is silver. Coins are clipped because you can take your silver to Spain or India or China and exchange it for something that you desire. You cannot do that with a banknote, because there is nothing to support the promise outside of its point of origin. Don’t you see, Weaver, these financial institutions are committed to divesting our money of value and replacing it with promises of value. For when they control the promise of value, they control all wealth itself.”

“Is this the plot you are talking of? Do you mean to say that you believe that one of the companies is scheming to control all of the wealth in the Kingdom?”

Elias leaned forward. “Not one of the companies,” he said in a low voice. “All of them. Separately, together—it makes no difference. They have seen the power of paper, and they wish to exploit it.”

“And you believe that my father and old Balfour somehow thwarted such a scheme?”

“More likely some small part of a greater scheme. A system of credit is like a great spiderweb—you cannot see it until you are trapped within it, and you cannot see the spider until she dangles above you, poised to devour. I do not know who the spider is, Weaver. But I assure you, it is the spider that killed your father. It is money that killed your father. Money inspires action, and money creates power. Somewhere in this Kingdom are the men who create money, and they, for reasons we do not yet understand—perhaps even for reasons they do not understand—have killed your father.”

“I say, Elias, I cannot think why, if you view the funds as so very wicked to the core, you invest in them yourself.”

“That’s the very devil of it,” he breathed. “One must invest in the funds these days. Look about you in this coffeehouse. Do you think these men are here out of a love of stock-jobbery? There is no other thing to do with one’s money. Money breeds money, and we are all caught within the spiderweb, even those of us who see it for what it is. We cannot help it.”

“None of which tells us in what plot my father and old Balfour found themselves entangled.”

“We can’t weave facts out of the air, Weaver. I only wish you to see that these companies have much to gain, and they may have good reason to harm someone who stands in their way.”

“As you are so well versed in these matters,” I said, mustering the courage to bring up a topic I wished heartily to avoid, “can you perhaps tell me what you know of a gentleman called Perceval Bloathwait? He is a man deep within the funds, and therefore, no doubt, one of the nation’s great enemies.”

To my astonishment, Elias suddenly lit up. “Bloathwait, the Bank of England director? A devilish good man for one of your English Dissenters. Knows how to show his gratitude at any rate. I had the good fortune to be close at hand during a production of Addison’s Cato when Bloathwait was overcome with an attack of stomach gout. He nearly fell into the pit. Fortunately, I was there to bleed him on the spot—neatly turning a near-fatal accident into a lucky bit of business indeed. He rewarded me with no less than twenty guineas.”

“Your suspicions of moneyed men,” I observed, “are considerably tempered when they do you a good turn.”

“I should say so!” Elias responded with exuberance. “Many’s the man of greater birth who would think himself above paying the surgeon whom providence has placed in his way. Bloathwait is a good man, I say. If,” he added after a brief pause, “vested with too much power and probably corrupt and villainous.”

“It is clear that I shall have to pay a visit to this devilish good, corrupt, and villainous fainter,” I muttered, “for he has long been an enemy of my father.”

“You will forgive me if I don’t accompany you. I do not wish to have so powerful a man speak ill of me in the best circles.”

“I understand,” I said. “Perhaps you can use the time to polish The Unsuspecting Lover.”

“A splendid idea. Would you care to hear a few particularly effective scenes?”

I finished my coffee and rose. “I would like nothing better, but I must make this business my first priority.” I paid our reckoning, and left Elias at the table, scribbling busily upon his play.