A Conspiracy of Paper

THIRTY-SIX

I BEGAN THIS NARRATIVE with the intent of recounting the adventures of my life, but so many pages later I have only told a single story. Perhaps, as Elias would have said, from these particulars some generalities may be drawn.

Some three weeks after that meeting with Wild, I read in the newspapers that the body of Virgil Cowper had been found washed up on the riverbanks, and the coroner had ruled that he had fallen in the waters while drunk. I asked some questions, but everyone believed that his death had been a mishap of indulgence, and so I concluded that the paper conspirators had taken one more life for which they would never answer.

For my own part, my condition as a guest at Broad Court had grown uncomfortable. Adelman had ceased to visit in the capacity of Miriam’s suitor, but business brought him by the house not infrequently, and I could hardly meet the eye of this man I knew so deep within a conspiracy that had so nearly destroyed me. My uncle cared little what Adelman or the South Sea Company had done, only that they had in the end acted against my father’s murderer. Perhaps I judged too harshly those who would take the life of such a villain. Whatever the circumstances of his death, Sir Owen had murdered four people that I knew of, including my own father. No, my displeasure was not with the South Sea Company’s rough justice. It was something else. It was the coldness of their justice. It mattered not to them that Sir Owen was a villain, only that he endangered their business. Their actions were not about the lives Sir Owen had taken, but about the profits he would threaten. What are the probable returns on this death? What interest will ending a man’s life yield? It was a kind of bloody speculation; it was stock-jobbery by murder.

EVERY YEAR IN LATE October Elias and I would find our way to an appropriate tavern to celebrate the anniversary of the death of Sir Owen—Martin Rochester Day, we called it. It was our private holiday, and one that would often prove to be as grim as it was drunken. We recollected our adventures as best we could, and often I wrote much of what we said down for fear I should someday forget. These sloppy scribblings served as the first notes to the memoir I have now all but completed.

By the time of our first anniversary, Elias had cast aside his dreams of the theatre, but his pen would not lie still. He wrote volumes of wretched verse, and much later in his life he wrote some well-received novels and a memoir under an assumed name. For her part, Miriam had by then moved into splendid lodgings near Leicester Fields, where she watched her Company stock yield profits. Unlike the rest of us, she sold when the stock had almost reached its pinnacle, and for a time she had all the independence she could have desired. Alas that such things cannot last, and Miriam saw her long-sought-after freedom crushed by an ill-advised marriage that I have neither the space nor the heart to detail here.

Adelman and Bloathwait both survived the upheavals of the South Sea year and continued with their schemes and rivalries for as long as they lived. Of Jonathan Wild, I hardly need mention the inauspicious conclusion of his life, but before he met justice at the end of a Tyburn rope he lived long enough to cause me far more troubles than he did in this little history. I take some comfort at the thought that the troubles I finally caused him were far more permanent and allowed no opportunity for revenge.

As for me, I find that my many exploits are too varied to recount in this volume. I can only say that my inquiry into the forged South Sea stock changed forever the way I would think of and conduct my business.

At my uncle’s urgings, I took my new lodgings in Dukes Place, just off Crosby Street. Elias complained that he should risk his foreskin every time he came to pay me a visit, but to the best of my knowledge, he died with it still attached. I continued to live in that neighborhood until this day, and while I never feel that I entirely belong, I suppose I feel less out of place here than any other neighborhood of the metropolis.

It was at an alehouse near my new home that Elias and I always met to remember Martin Rochester’s villainy. I often recall that first anniversary because in the autumn of 1720 the disaster of the South Sea Bubble, as it came to be known, was foremost in our and everyone’s thoughts, and it seemed as though Elias’s rants on the dangers of the new finance turned out to be nothing short of prophecy.

The South Sea scheme had been approved by Parliament shortly after the events of this history, and holders of funded government issues flocked to exchange their certain investments for the vague promise of Company dividends. As each investor converted his holdings, the South Sea stock rose—indeed it rose more than anyone could have imagined, until my five hundred pounds of stock was worth more than five thousand. Throughout the Kingdom, men who had held but small investments were now as rich as lords. It was an era of opulence and excess and wealth—an era in which men who had been middling shopkeepers or modest tradesmen suddenly found themselves transported to their massive town houses in gold equipages drawn by six stout beasts. We ate venison and drank fine old claret and danced to the most expensive Italian musicians we could import.

Then, in the summer of 1720, London awoke and said, “For what reason is this stock worth so much?” and as though a spell had been cast, those who had made money sought to solidify their holdings, to turn their promises into reality; that is to say, they flocked to sell, and when they sold, the stock plummeted. My five hundred pounds of stock was once more worth five hundred pounds, and men who had unimaginable wealth one day were merely comfortable the next. Countless investors who had bought in after the stock had already risen were utterly ruined.

The nation cried out for justice, for revenge, for the heads of the South Sea directors to be set upon stakes along the London road, but what the nation had not yet learned, what it would never learn, was that the spirit of stock-jobbing, once conjured up by the wizards in ’Change Alley, could never again be banished to perdition. As for justice and revenge, those lofty principles for which the South Sea victims clamored—these too are but commodities to be bought and sold upon the ’Change.