A Conspiracy of Paper

SEVEN

THE MORNING FOUND ME refreshingly calm. I was pleased to have retrieved Sir Owen’s documents, and I felt tolerably confident that the business of Jemmy’s death would pass without any serious harm. Hard upon noon, Mrs. Garrison announced that Sir Owen was below to see me, and when the baronet entered my rooms he could not have shown more pleasure in my success. He clutched his letters from my hand and pressed them to his bosom. He sat down and then immediately stood up again and paced about the room. He asked for a drink and then asked for another one, having forgotten about the first.

Sir Owen insisted upon paying me a bonus, and after some formal protests, I accepted reimbursement for the expenses I had met in my dealings with Kate and Arnold. This gesture was a generous one, for it doubled his original fee and it significantly improved my little stock of money. Sir Owen then convinced me to join him for a meal that he should pay for, so he would not have to collect the letters, as he said, without having shown some measure of the fellowship his gratitude bred within him. I attended him to a local ordinary, and ate and drank heartily, and I remained with Sir Owen until near two o’clock in the afternoon, when he said he had appointments to keep. Before we parted, however, he shocked me by asking me to join him next Tuesday evening at his club.

“It is no formal affair, I assure you,” he said, reading the astonishment on my face. “I thought it might be of some advantage to a man in your position to have occasion to introduce yourself to some gentlemen.”

“I would be delighted to attend,” I told him in earnestness. “And I would hold myself in your debt for your generosity.”

Sir Owen cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. “You, shall we say, understand that I am in no way proposing you for membership.” His voice trailed off.

“I quite understand,” I cut in quickly, wishing to defuse his embarrassment. “I am, as you have surely surmised, anxious to meet gentlemen who may someday have need of a man such as myself. And a recommendation from you is a powerful thing.”

Pleased with my understanding, Sir Owen gave me a friendly clap upon the back and thanked me again for my effort to retrieve his papers. Then, after a protracted farewell, he made his retreat.

With a satisfied stomach and a head full of good wine, I thought to myself that it was time to discharge my duties. I therefore took a hackney to Mr. Balfour’s lodgings off Bishopsgate to see what, if anything, he had learned from his inquiries into what his father’s family knew of that death. I hoped he would have learned nothing. I hoped he would have concluded the fruitlessness of his search and discharged me from this affair with an unblemished conscience.

I found Balfour in a respectable set of rooms in a respectable home, but he sat in his parlor as though it fit too snug upon him. He held himself unnaturally erect in his chair, as if afraid to recline. He wore almost precisely the same suit of clothing that I had seen upon him the previous day, though he had made some effort to clean the cloth of some lint and remove the more conspicuous stains.

I stood before him, my hat tucked under my arm. He stared at me. He crossed his legs. I expected him to offer me a chair, but he studied me with an expression that could have been either anxiety or boredom. “Next time you wish to speak to me,” he said with a slow and deliberate tone, “please inform me in advance. We shall establish a meeting place more appropriate than my own residence.”

“As you wish,” I replied with a broad smile, meant to irritate him, for I found Balfour’s penniless superiority filled me with both anger and contempt. “But as I am here, I shall make myself comfortable.” I noticed a decanter of wine on the mantel, and still warm from my luncheon with Sir Owen, I thought a bit of wine was just the thing. “Would you care for some?” I asked, as I poured for myself.

“You are insufferable,” he snapped. “This is my home, sir!” His hands clutched at a newspaper that rested in his lap.

I took a seat and slowly sipped the wine, an inferior claret. It was not undrinkable but it tasted sour in comparison with the fine drink Sir Owen had provided. I suspect that my host saw the signs of my displeasure, for he moved to open his mouth. I thought it best to avoid what I was sure would be an expression of his ungrounded pomposity, so I began rapidly. “Mr. Balfour, you have hired my services, but I am not a servant. After all, we have a mutual interest in the inquiry you wish to set me upon. Now, shall we discuss the particulars of this situation?”

Balfour glowered at me for a moment and decided that impassivity was his best option. “Very well. I am afraid you will have to do the work yourself, which is, I expect, why I am paying you. I have spoken to my father’s chief clerk, and he has informed me that my suspicions are not unfounded. He claims the estate was much poorer at my father’s death than he, the clerk, had any reason to suspect.”

“Indeed,” I noted coolly.

“As I believe I mentioned, my father had profited somewhat from the late rivalry between the Bank of England and the South Sea Company—all that fluctuation of stock prices. He spent his time down in ’Change Alley, with the Jews and other foreigners, buying this stock and selling that.”

“And some of these stocks are missing?”

He shrugged as though I had just rudely changed the subject. “I know nothing of the details. I have no head for things such as finance, but in light of the profits he made from these dealings, his accounts are inexplicable. According to the clerk, you understand.”

“I see. Can you tell me what else you learned?”

“Is that not enough? What I have learned is that a financial person believes my father’s death suspicious. What more do you require?”

“Nothing,” I said, “to make me wish to look into this matter further.” I had spoken this before I had realized it to be true. Now, as I sat across from Balfour, sipping his poor wine, I realized the course upon which I found myself. I would certainly have to learn more of my own father’s dealings, and to do so I would need to talk with my uncle. After my years of wandering, this jackanapes Balfour would be the man to send me home.

Pushing this idea from my mind, I pressed on with Balfour. “I fear I require much more if I am to unearth anything that might help you to recover your estate. Your mother is still living, is she not? I believe you mentioned her last time we spoke.”

Balfour reddened, I thought inexplicably. “I say, sir! You ask unaccountably impertinent questions. What is my mother to you?”

“I suspect your mother may know something that could be of use. I really do not understand why you must make everything difficult. Do you wish my help or no?”

“Certainly I wish your . . . services. That is why I have put you in my employ. That does not give you license to go about asking me questions about my mother, who would be utterly horrified to learn that men such as you even exist, let alone that you speak of her. My mother, sir, knows nothing of these matters. There is no point in talking to her.”

“Did your father have any other relatives—a brother perhaps, an uncle—with whom he dealt in business?”

Balfour continued to sigh with exasperation, but he answered the question. “No. No one.”

“And you can think of nothing else that might be of use to me? Something to help me find how to begin my inquiry?”

“If I could think of anything, would I not tell you? You drive me to distraction with your endless questions.”

“Very well. Then you only need let me know the name of your father’s clerk and where I might find him.”

Balfour’s jaw went slack. He knew something that he refused to tell me. No, he knew many things that he refused to tell me. And I suspect he knew I saw through the façade of family pride and detected his screen of blustering. But he did not back down from it. “I have told you what he knows,” Balfour said stiffly. “You have no need to talk with him.”

“Mr. Balfour, you are being difficult. Where may I find this clerk?”

“You may not. You see, he is now employed in my mother’s service, and my mother and I, since you insist upon knowing, are not upon the best of terms. She would not appreciate my meddling in her business.”

“But surely she has much to gain from these inquiries.”

“No, she has not. My mother had a jointure of separate property settled upon her. She was to inherit none of my father’s wealth, and his death has not affected her at all, except to free her from a marriage that was broken in all but law. She and I had been upon poor terms for a very long time, for in the matters of my parents’ disagreements, I took my father’s side. Now I wish to arrange a . . . rapprochement with her, and I do not choose to antagonize her by looking into this business. I handled this clerk so that he would not know the nature of my inquiries. I do not believe you could do the same.”

“I assure you I can. Give me his name, sir. I shall in return promise you that I shall not approach him at your mother’s home.”

Balfour screwed up his face to launch another protest, but he soon thought better of it. “Oh, very well. His name is Reginald d’Arblay, and if you really must speak to him you will find him, sooner or later, at Jonathan’s Coffeehouse in ’Change Alley. He wishes to become a stock-jobber in his own right, so he spends his time in a stock-jobbing coffeehouse—I suppose in the hopes of having his foreskin removed. It is not all he will have removed, I should wager.”

I sat silent for a few minutes, taking all of this in. “Very well, sir.” I stood up and finished my wine in a long swallow. “I shall let you know when I have anything to report.”

“Do not forget what I told you about calling on me here,” he said. “I have a reputation to uphold, you know.”

I COULD SEE THAT Balfour’s mother would be of no use to me, but I wondered for how long I would respect Balfour’s desire for me to avoid his father’s clerk, d’Arblay. Not long, but I did not wish to call upon such a man unprepared. It was time, I knew, to do what I should have done years before, what I had so often both wished for and dreaded. This matter gave me the excuse I had long required, and the wine I had drunk gave me the courage I had long wanted. So I found myself walking briskly toward Wapping, where my uncle Miguel kept his warehouse.

I last had seen my uncle at my father’s funeral, when I had stood, with a few dozen others, representing the family and members of the Dukes Place enclave, staring mutely beside the open grave, my coat offering little protection from the unexpected cold and wind and ceaseless drizzle of rain. My uncle, my father’s only brother, had done little to make me feel welcome in my return. He acknowledged me only now and again, when he looked up from the prayer book that he hunched over to keep dry, in order to cast suspicious glances in my direction, as though I might, if given the opportunity, pick the other mourners’ pockets and disappear into the fog. I could not help but wonder if my uncle resented that I had not returned home three years earlier, upon the death of his son, my cousin Aaron. I had been at that time still riding upon the highway, as the saying goes, and had not even learned of Aaron’s death until some many months later. In all candor, I am not sure I would have returned even if I had heard; Aaron and I had not much liked each other as boys, for he had been a weak, timid, and sneaking sort, and I admit I had been little able to resist bullying him. He had always hated me for a monster while I hated him for a coward. When we grew older and I recognized that it was time to manage my rougher tendencies more carefully, I had made the effort to mend our friendship, but Aaron only walked away from me when I spoke to him in private, or mocked me for my lack of learning when we spoke in public. When I learned that he had been sent away to the East to become a trader in the Levant, I was glad to be rid of him. I could, nevertheless, feel sorrow for my uncle, who lost his only son when a trading vessel capsized in a storm and Aaron was swallowed by the ocean forever.

If my uncle treated me as an unavoidable interloper at my father’s funeral, I must confess that I did little to convince him to see me otherwise. I found myself angry then at having to spend time with these people; I resented my father for having died, as his death had placed me in an uncomfortable state. It came as no surprise to me that my father left his estate to my older brother, José, and I was not disappointed he chose to do so, yet the knowledge that everyone at the funeral believed me bitter vexed me. I cast my eyes about me nervously as the mourners prayed dutifully in Hebrew and conversed in Portuguese, both of which I pretended to have forgotten, though I was alarmed to realize how much I had forgotten indeed; these languages sounded often like alien tongues made familiar but not intelligible through frequent exposure.

Now, as I went to see my uncle, I again felt like an interloper who should be stared at with suspicion and unease. All my efforts to calm my spirits—my pronouncements to myself that I went to visit Miguel Lienzo upon business, that I, as the initiator of this exchange, held the power to terminate it at will—failed to make me forget how little I welcomed this visit.

I had not been to the warehouse in many years—not since I was a young man running errands for the family. It was a largish affair—a storing house near the river, used both for the Portuguese wine that my uncle imported and the British woolens that he exported. He also maintained a less legal trade in French cambrics and other textiles, goods that had become the victims of the mutual embargoes with our enemies across the Channel; for there has ever been a great gulf between the hatred of the French engendered by politics and the desire for French goods inspired by fashion. Let the papers and Parliamentarians decry the dangers of the French military; ladies and gentlemen still clamored to buy French attire.

When I entered my uncle’s warehouse, I was overwhelmed by the rich smell of wool, which made me feel damp and tight in the chest. This was an enormous, high-ceilinged place, alive with activity, for I had the ill fortune to arrive while a customs inspector went about his business. Brawny laborers hauled boxes or piled them up, packed or unpacked at the inspector’s pleasure. Clerks ran about with ledgers in hand, attempting to keep a record of what was moved and to where.

I tensed with a boxer’s preparedness when I saw my uncle at the other end of the room, metal bar in hand, ripping open crates for a fat, misshapen, pockmarked toady whose income depended upon finding violations and accepting bribes from violators. The look on his face told me that he had encountered neither. My uncle had always been a cautious man. Like my father, he believed that it would not take much for the Jews to be expelled from England as they had been from so many other countries—indeed, as they had been from England long ago. He therefore obeyed laws where he could and disobeyed carefully when he could not. It took no ordinary inspector to locate his contraband.

I stood watching him, admiring his poise and the respect he commanded. At my father’s funeral, Uncle Miguel had looked not much older than I remembered. His hair had begun to turn a speckled color, his closecut beard had grayed almost entirely, and the lines upon his face bespoke his near fifty years, but there was still youth in his eye and an energy in his motions. He had hardly taken his turn in the ring, but he was a fit man of sinewy muscle, and he indulged himself in well-tailored clothing that showed his shape to advantage. He shied away from the French fashions he surreptitiously imported, but his clothes were of the finest cloth, immaculately clean, and dark in color so as to recall the sober fashions of the Amsterdam business world in which he had come of age.

As I stood there, a darkish man of some middle years approached me with an obvious caution. I could see he was a Jew, but clean-shaven and dressed much as an English tradesman might have been—boots, sturdy linen pants and shirt, a protective but not decorative topcoat. He wore no peruke, and his real hair, like my own, was pulled back to resemble a tieperiwig. As I looked at this man, English in dress and manner, but Jewish in face—at least recognizably so to other Jews—I wondered if this was how I appeared to the Englishmen around me: unassumingly dressed, properly groomed, and for all that, quite alien.

“Can I be of some service?” this man asked me with a practiced smile. He paused and looked at me again. “Good Lord. Strike me dead if it is not Benjamin Lienzo.”

I recognized the man then as Joseph Delgato, a longtime assistant to my uncle. He had been employed in my uncle’s trade since I was but a boy. “I did not at first know you, Joseph.” I held myself nervously as a long moment of uncomfortable silence passed between us. There was much that we both thought, but I think we separately concluded that there was little to be said. I grabbed his hand warmly. “You look well.”

“And you too. I am glad you are come home. It is a terrible thing about your father, sir. A terrible thing.”

“Yes. Thank you.” I wondered if he thought that I had been reconciled with my family since the funeral. He appeared confused, but I suspected he merely considered himself to be excluded from private family matters.

“Mr. Lienzo will be done soon. The customs man has grown weary of trying to catch your uncle in an infraction of the law, so he now settles for the performance of an inspection, to be followed, naturally, with a polite acceptance of a bribe.”

“Why must he be bribed if he has found no violation?”

Joseph smiled. “There is as much feigning and dodging in the world of trade as there is in the world of fighting,” he told me, pleased with himself for having honored me with a pugilistic reference. “Were we not to offer him a token of our respect, shall we say, he would surely invent an infraction, and that would be far more troublesome and costly for us than a simple bribe. For then we would need to involve lawyers and judges and Parliamentarians and the Common Council, and all other manner of bodies you can think of. It is prudent to pay him. This way he becomes our employee rather than our persecutor.”

I nodded and watched my uncle hand the inspector a small purse. The inspector bowed and walked off with a contented look upon his face. And well he should have been content. My uncle, I later learned, gave him twenty pounds, far more than he could have received of any native-born businessman in my uncle’s trade—at least one who had not been caught with contraband. Their fear of prosecution made Jews useful to such men.

When finished with the inspector, my uncle turned in my direction and recognized me with what I took to be agreeable surprise—as though a visit to the warehouse was a recreation I engaged in regularly. He strolled over to me and shook my hand warmly, in the manner he would a friend with whom he was on regular terms.

“Uncle,” I said simply, for I wished this encounter to be upon business alone.

My uncle was not an easily startled man, so I considered it something of an accomplishment that he arched one eyebrow as he turned to me. “Benjamin,” he said, nodding, quickly regaining his composure. It was more a look of satisfaction, as though I had proved him right by appearing before him. I saw he wished to measure me, to determine what I did there before he chose how to react to my presence. I smiled briefly, hoping to put him at his ease, but his expression changed not at all.

“If I trouble you at an awkward time, I can call on another occasion.”

“I think that no time can be less awkward than another for such a meeting,” he answered after a moment. “Let us retire to my closet that we may talk in private.”

My uncle led us to a comfortable room with an impressive oaken desk and a few hard wooden chairs, softened with pillows upon the seat. There was a bookshelf lined not with poetry, or works of antiquity, or religious books, but with ledgers, atlases, price guides, and records. This was the room in which my uncle conducted the greatest share of his official business, a business that had served him well since he and my father had come to the country some thirty years earlier.

After ordering his servant to prepare us tea, he settled into his desk chair. “I can only assume you have not come out of family feeling, and there is some crisis that brings you here. No matter, I suppose. Your father once said to me that, should you return for any reason, he would listen to you and weigh your words carefully and fairly.”

We were both silent. My father had never said any such thing to me. Of course, I had never given him a chance, yet it did not sound like the father I remembered, the man who always demanded to know why I was not as studious or dedicated or clever as my brother José. I recalled that once when I was eleven years old I ran home, fairly trembling with excitement, my stockings torn and my face smeared with mud. It was a Sunday—a market day for the Jews at Petticoat Lane—and my father vaguely supervised while the servants put away the goods they had purchased, for my father was a man who wished every servant in the house to know that they might, at any time, be subject to scrutiny. I ran into the kitchen of the house we rented on Cree Church Lane, and I all but collided with my father, who stopped my progress by placing a hand upon each shoulder. But this was no gentle gesture; he looked down upon me with his most unflinching gaze. He appeared something comical, I was beginning to realize, beneath his absurdly large, fleece-white, full-bottom wig, which only emphasized the growth of black beard that began to sprout within three hours of his taking a shave from his barber. “What has happened to you?” he demanded.

It occurred to me, with a certain amount of indignation, that as I looked rather ruffled, he might inquire if I was hurt or no, but pride squelched indignation as I recalled the victory still fresh in my mind.

I had been wandering from stall to stall in the crowded market, for Sunday was the busiest shopping day for the Jewish community, and the best merchants were out to peddle their foods and clothes and all manner of goods. The air was thick with the smells of roasted meats and freshly baked pastries and the stench of London that drifted east to our neighborhood. I had no particular needs at the market, but I had a few pence in my pocket, and a quick hand beside, and I only sought an opportunity to spend my coin or grab something tasty and disappear into the crowd.

I’d been eyeing a pile of jellies that were too deep within the stall to filch, and I had not yet decided if they looked delicious enough for me to surrender my precious coins. I had all but determined to buy a dozen of the sweetmeats when I heard the raucous cry of boys forcing their way through the crowd. I had seen their kind before—little rogues who liked to push the Jews about because they knew the Jews dared not push them back. They were not a villainous lot, these boys of perhaps thirteen years, sons of shopkeepers or tradesmen by their look—they took no delight in torturing their victims, only in creating mayhem and avoiding punishment. They barreled through the crowd, pushing down this man here, or knocking over that table of wares there. Such antics filled me with rage, not because of the mischief itself, for I had been guilty of much the same and far worse in my day, but because no one dared give these fellows the whipping they deserved and, though I should not have known how to express this notion then, because they made me yearn to be an Englishman and a Jew no longer.

They moved in my general direction, and I stared hard, hoping to catch their attention even as everyone about me continued with their purchases, attempting to make the boys disappear by ignoring them. They grew close to me, shouting and laughing, and plucking sweetmeats from stalls and daring anyone to stop them. They stood perhaps fifteen feet away from me, when, backing off from a stall where he had knocked over a display of pewter candlesticks, the tallest of the boys slammed hard into Mrs. Cantas, a neighbor and the mother of a friend of mine. This lady, a stout woman of late-middle years, her arms full of cabbages and carrots, fell to the ground, her vegetables scattering like dice. The fair-haired boy who had slammed into her spun around, already in mid-laugh, but stopped in something like shame when he saw the spectacle before him. He might have been a troublesome fellow, but he had not yet reached the stage of maliciousness wherein he could attack women and feel no remorse. He paused for an instant, some sort of regret creeping along his face, which, streaked though it was with dirt, still revealed a base coloring of milky whiteness.

He might have apologized; he might even have recruited his fellows to help collect the scattered purchases, but Mrs. Cantas, red-faced with rage, let out a spew of the most insulting epithets I’ve ever heard escape from the mouth of any female but the most callous of jades. She formed these insults in our Portuguese dialect, so the boy and his companions merely stared, not knowing how to respond while their victim shouted in what to them was an incomprehensible gibberish. I, for one, silently praised Mrs. Cantas for at least having the courage to say her piece, if only in a language these fellows could not understand. And her piece was most colorful, and I listened with only vague amusement until she called the boy a “whoreson of one-legged poxy slut, a stinking rascal who needs to push about women because his own uncircumcised manhood might be taken for the shriveled parts of a female monkey.”

Without even meaning to, I burst out in a laugh, and I saw I was not the only one. Around me men, and women too, stood laughing, stunned into amusement at the hyperbole of this lady’s rage. The fair-haired boy’s milky face had become crimson with anger and humiliation, for he stood laughed at by a crowd of Jews for an insult he had not even understood.

“I damn you for a bitch,” he shouted at Mrs. Cantas in the tremulous voice of an agitated boy who wishes to be taken for a man, “and I spit upon your gypsy curse.” And, indeed, he did spit upon her, directly into her face.

I am ashamed that no one but myself moved to give this urchin the pummeling he deserved, but the crowd only looked on in shock, and Mrs. Cantas, who had invigorated herself with her insults, now appeared to me on the precipice of tears. For my part, I had been raised to show a much greater deference to women, and for whatever reason, this lesson was one that I had taken to heart while so many others had received only my contempt—perhaps because my own mother had died when I was but an infant, so other folks’ mothers held a special place in my heart.

I cannot even now explain my reasoning, only describe my actions: I struck this boy. It was a clumsy, poorly planned blow. My hand clenched into a fist, I raised it above my head and pounded downward, pummeling his face as though with a hammer. They boy fell to the ground, only for an instant, and then picked himself up and ran off, his friends following closely in tow.

I expected the crowd to cheer for me, Mrs. Cantas to proclaim me her savior, but I saw only that I had caused embarrassment and confusion. My actions had not been those of a protector, but of a troublemaker. Mrs. Cantas nervously pushed herself to her feet, but avoided my gaze. Around me I confronted the backs of those I had known all my life—shopkeepers crept back into their stalls, their patrons moved hurriedly away. All tried to forget what they had seen and to hope that their forgetfulness would make others forget as well and that my violence would not bring upon us an Inquisition here in England.

I would not have my joy so easily sabotaged, however. I ran home, hoping that someone in our house would hear the story and praise me as I thought I deserved. As my father was the first person I saw, he was the first to hear the tale, though the version I gave him showed a certain lack of narrative imagination.

“I was down at the market,” I said in a panting voice, “and a nasty, ugly boy spat upon Mrs. Cantas. So I beat him,” I proclaimed. I broke away from my father’s grip and swung my fist through the air by way of illustration. “I felled him with one blow!”

My father hit me hard in the face.

He made no habit of hitting me, and I fully admit I was the sort of boy who wanted hitting from time to time. This was the hardest he had ever stuck me—indeed, it was, at that time, the hardest I had ever been struck; he hit me with the back of his hand, curled almost into a fist, aiming, I believed, to hit bone with the bulky ring he wore upon his third finger. The blow had come unexpectedly, lashing out like a serpent, and the force of it reverberated through my jaw and down my spine, until my limbs felt light and tingly.

I suppose he was scared; my father hated trouble and hated anything that might draw attention to our community in Dukes Place. Sometimes, in the hopes of making me more of a man, or rather more of his sort of man, he invited me to join with him and his guests for their after-dinner bottle; there he always talked of remaining invisible, of avoiding trouble, of angering no one. This blow of his—I knew what it was about. My father saw everything in patterns, everything as woven together—one act always engendered a hundred others. He feared I should make a habit of beating upon Christian boys. He feared my rashness should bring the plague of hatred down upon the Jews. He feared a gathering momentum that began with my violence against this one boy—a momentum that would lead to persecution and torment and destruction.

His expression changed not at all. He stood there, his features twisted into a mask of unease and fear, and perhaps disappointment that I had not dropped to the ground. His eyes fixed suspiciously upon the red welt he had left upon my face—as though I had somehow falsified the evidence of his violence. “That is what it is to be hit,” he said. “It is a feeling you would be wise to avoid.”

My pride had fled, but my indignation remained—and I remembered thinking, It’s not so very terrible.

It was a moment that I think anticipated my career in the ring, for it was in fact more than simply not that bad—there was a strange kind of pleasure in it. It was the pleasure of endurance, of knowing that I had been able to take the pain without dropping, without flinching, without weeping. It was the pleasure of knowing I could endure another blow, and another after that—perhaps enough blows to make my father too weary to strike again. It was on that day that I first began to think of my father as weak.

But my uncle was a different sort of man—his smuggling trade had taught him more subtlety than my father ever understood. He had advised patience to my father; he always argued that I should find my own path, that my father should not demand that I be like my brother. As I sat in my uncle’s warehouse, it occurred to me that I owed him something for the understanding he had always advocated on my behalf, even if the well of understanding had now run dry.

It seemed like a quarter of an hour that we sat there, saying nothing, but I suppose the time was only a few seconds. At last my uncle spoke, softening his tone, hoping, perhaps, to spare me embarrassment. “Do you need money?”

“No, Uncle.” I was anxious to disabuse him of the idea that I had come a-begging. “I am here, in a way, upon business of the family. You told me once that you believed my father had been murdered. I want to know why you think so.”

I now had his attention. He was no longer contorting himself, attempting to find the correct attitude with which to face the wayward nephew returned. He now stared at me hard, trying to determine for himself why I had come to him with this question. “Have you learned something, Benjamin?”

“No, nothing of that sort.” Skipping over any superfluous details, I told him about Balfour and his suspicions.

He shook his head. “Your uncle tells you your father has been murdered, and you ignore him. A complete stranger tells you the same thing and now you believe it?” In his agitation, my uncle’s Portuguese accent grew more pronounced.

“Please, Uncle. I have come for information. To find out if my father was murdered. Does it matter why?”

“Of course it matters. This is your family. I have not seen you since Samuel’s funeral, and not for ten years before that.” I sighed and began to speak, but my uncle saw that I grew impatient and anxious, and he censured himself. “But,” he said, “that is the past and this is now. And if you want to do something good for our family, that is the important thing. So, yes, Benjamin, I suspect your father was murdered. I told the constable as much, and I also told the magistrate. I also wrote many letters—to men I know in Parliament, men who owe me money, I might add. All say the same—that the man who killed your father is a wretch, but there is no law to punish an accidental death, even if we can prove that the accident was due to carelessness or drunkenness. Samuel’s death is but an unfortunate mishap to them. And I, for thinking otherwise, am an excitable Jew.”

“What is it that makes you believe he was murdered?”

“I am not certain that he was murdered, but it is something that I suspect. Samuel was a man who made many enemies simply because of his trade. He bought and sold stocks—and as many people lost money of him as made it. I don’t have to tell you how much the English hate stockjobbers. They depend on them to make their money, but they hate them. Is it just a coincidence that someone runs him down in the street? And that Balfour, with whom he had dealings, should die as he did? Perhaps, but I would like to know for certain.”

I hesitated before asking my next question. “What does José say to this?”

“If you want to know what your brother has to say,” my uncle replied tartly, “maybe you should write to him. You know he came to London shortly after Samuel’s funeral—he dropped everything and sailed for England as soon as he heard. You knew he would, and you did nothing to seek him out.”

“Uncle,” I began. I wished to say that José had not sought me either, but the words sounded childish to me—and also disingenuous, for I had made a point of not being home when he had been in town so if he had called on me I could have avoided him.

“Why do you hide from your own family, Benjamin? What happened with you and Samuel is long past. He would have forgiven you if you but gave him the chance.”

I misbelieved that, but I said nothing.

“This distance you have is about nothing, it stems from nothing. Now your father is dead, and you can never reconcile with him, but it is not too late to reconcile with your family and with your people.”

I thought on this for some time—I know not how long. Perhaps my father had changed since I had last known him. Perhaps the cold tyrant I remembered was as much a product of my fancy as my experience. I could not say, but my uncle’s words stung me; they made me feel like an irresponsible wretch who had brought misery to his family. All these years I had always thought of myself as the one who suffered. I chose to separate myself from wealth and influence. Now I began to understand how my uncle saw my self-imposed exile—to him my absence had been senseless and selfish and had hurt my family more than I had ever hurt myself.

“You are much older now, yes? Maybe you regret some of the things you did in your youth. Now you have grown into a respectable man. You remind me even a little of my own son, Aaron.”

I said nothing, for I wished neither to insult my uncle nor speak ill of the dead, but I hoped most earnestly that I in no way resembled my cousin. “I shall need to know the name of the coachman who ran down Father,” I said, returning the discourse to business. “And I would like to know if there was anyone in particular you knew to be Father’s enemy. Maybe someone who had threatened him. Will you do this for me?”

“I shall do this, Benjamin. In part I shall do it for you.”

“Is there anything else that struck you as important? Any link you can see between my father’s death and Balfour’s? Balfour’s son believes there may be some connection with the dealings of Exchange Alley, and these financial matters are far beyond my understanding.”

Uncle Miguel looked around. “This is no place to discuss concerns of family. It is no place to talk of the dead, and it is no place to order affairs of so private a nature. Come to my home tonight for dinner. Come at half past five. You will dine with your family, and after we shall talk.”

“Uncle, perhaps that is not the best way.”

He leaned forward. “It is the only way,” he said. “If you want my help, you come and have dinner.”

“You would risk letting your brother’s killer go free if I refuse?”

“There is no risk,” he said. “I have told you what you need to do, and you will do it. Protests only waste our time. I shall see you at half past five.”

I left the warehouse astonished at what had happened. I was to dine with my family, and I anticipated this evening with a healthy quantity of dread.