by Jon Clinch
“I should say.”
“And it is…”
“Jacob!”
“In the affirmative?”
“Jacob!”
“Or so I take it.”
“You’re impossible!”
“Not so. I only want you to be certain.”
“You speak as if you are the uncertain one.”
“Fan,” he says. “Dearest Fan—I think only of you.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“I take that as a compliment.”
“I did not mean it as one.”
“Fan! You have changed.”
“No.”
“You have transformed in my absence.”
“If I have, it is your fault. You didn’t want me in America. You didn’t want me with you at all.”
“Now, Fan—”
“At best you were uncertain, and so you kept me on a string.”
Marley makes no answer.
“You committed nothing, Jacob, while I committed everything.”
“Oh, not everything,” he says, a lascivious gleam stealing across his eye.
She tears herself free of his arm, and without an additional word she pivots and dashes off along a different path. Whether she has seen his look or fairly interpreted the intention behind it is impossible to know, but he has at least planted the seed. There will be more intrigue to be played out before their full relationship, whatever its contours are to be, is consummated.
* * *
Marley goes directly to Mrs. McCullough’s bawdy house. The interior has the changeless quality of a diorama: the dusty furniture, the dead hearth, the drunkards. The lady in charge emerges at his knock, greeting him with a deep curtsey that very nearly permits some of her assets to spill free from her décolletage.
“We haven’t seen ye around, Inspector.”
“I have been occupied.”
“Naturally.” She nods her great head and anticipates his usual question. “Madeline’s on this afternoon. You like Madeline.”
“Madeline will do.”
“Madeline will do plenty, or so I’m told.”
“That’s quite enough of your wit, Mrs. McCullough.”
“No harm intended, sir.”
Marley turns toward the stairs but pauses at the last moment, struck by an inspiration. “Chief among the issues that have occupied me, Mrs. McCullough, is the placation of a number of individuals within the legal community—powerful and relentless men who, if left to their own devices, would have your premises locked and yourself imprisoned in Newgate.”
“I thank ye for that, Inspector.”
“You may thank me by paying the fees which I have negotiated with these men on your behalf.”
“Fees, sir?”
He names an amount calculated to give her a genuine but tolerable level of pain.
She draws breath. “I suppose I could scrape that much together, sir.”
“Weekly, of course.”
She winces.
“The alternative, sadly, is your destruction by powers beyond my control. I have done everything I can to forestall it, but matters are now in your hands.” He turns and makes for the stairs, only to stop on the landing at the sound of her voice.
“I’ll do it, sir.”
“Very well,” he says as he continues upward. “Have the funds ready when I am finished, and I shall collect them on my way out.”
Thirteen
Scrooge, like his partner, finds his spirit awakened to the delights of London in the summer. With Marley home and the American business steaming ahead and the entire operation recommitted to disentangling itself from the slave trade, his soul is lightened to such a surprising degree that the return to his usual duties seems the veriest of holidays. At least twice and sometimes three times a week, he dallies with Belle over a picnic lunch in one of the many parks within convenient walking distance. Nay! Convenient walking distance be damned! He and his beloved shall go as far as they like, take as much time as they require! They shall even hire a carriage, should the spirit move them, and never mind the outlay!
In other words, Ebenezer Scrooge seems an entirely new man.
On the rare occasions that he encounters his partner he inquires as to the progress of divestment, and Marley reassures him that his efforts—although dauntingly, damnably, frustratingly complex—will show real progress any day now. Thus is the load on his mind and spirit eased even further. The subject of slaving disappears from his daily conversation with Belle, replaced by talk of the bright future they share.
Fan, however, is a different story. She comes to her brother on the day after her aborted walk with Marley, woeful and shaken and furious all at once. “The man is a beast,” she says. “He willfully led me on before going to America, suggesting that we should be married upon his return, and now that he’s come back he pretends not to remember. Or that it meant nothing. Or that I am mad.”
“I warned you,” he says.
“He’s a monster.”
“Perhaps. He is certainly changeable. Protean would be the word, I suppose.”
“There is no adequate word for what he is, and there is no adequate word for what he has done.”
“He has wounded you, and for that I am sorry.”
“You warned me, as you said.” By her tone, the idea seems to provide scant comfort.
“He can be very persuasive, our Mr. Marley.”
“Your Mr. Marley. Not mine.”
“Fair enough.”
“I suppose you rely heavily upon his persuasive arts in this business of yours.” On her tongue, the word has an evil sound.
“Oh, I must,” says her brother. “I have very little ability in that department.”
“All the better for you.”
Scrooge smiles.
“I hope you do not trade away your soul in the process.”
“Rest assured,” says Scrooge, “I keep a careful accounting.”
* * *
June becomes July, and word arrives from America that the Betsy is to set sail directly. Given that anything traveling from the New World to the docks of London must make more or less the same long and perilous journey—whether it is this sealed envelope or that anticipated fortune in beaver pelts—Marley calculates that the ship will arrive soon.
He scours the papers for any sign of her, and after a week has passed without news he takes to haunting the docks himself. He is widely known there, although each of his various associates tends to greet him with a look that caroms rapidly in some other direction. There has never been a percentage in advertising your connections to Mr. Marley, or Mr. Radford, or Colonel Diver, or whoever else this individual may be.
Before he sets out each morning he ensures that firmly tucked within his waistcoat is a letter signed by one Mr. Elijah Peleg of Nantucket, introducing him as Mr. Wilkins Micawber of Boston, said Peleg’s legal representative in all matters pertaining to the acceptance of such goods as have been loaded upon the Betsy by the firm operated by Sr. Valentino Monteverdi. It is this precious forgery that he touches briefly, even talismanically, when word circulates that the Betsy has been spotted at the mouth of the Thames, where she now awaits a favorable tide. He checks the hour and runs a rapid mental calculation, and then he slips a handful of coins to a pair of idle longshoremen along with instructions to report back here in the company of a dozen able men at the stroke of noon.
He takes shelter from his own overwhelming anticipation within the confines of a grogshop, whose stools and tables are heavily occupied even at this time of the morning. He tosses off an uncharacteristic tot of gin to quiet his nerves, and then one more for good measure. Thus soothed, he experiences a moment’s warm sentiment toward his absent partner—a feeling he acts upon by stepping outside, locating an eager boy, and pressing upon him a note to be delivered to Scrooge in exchange for a farthing.
She arrives, the note says. Just that and nothing more.
And surely enough she does, nosing into
her berth as the last stroke of twelve rings out from every church bell in the city. Marley sizes up his crew of longshoremen and finds them tolerable if less than ideal, and then strides off amid the hubbub of tying up and making fast to introduce himself to the Betsy’s captain. He is called Crag, and he is known to be a hard master, both difficult to please and sharp in his dealings. Thus he has certainly proven himself in the management of that lost half load of slaves, and Marley is confident that they will get along like the oldest of comrades. He shall see to it.
The difficulty is that no one aboard seems acquainted with this Crag. Every crewman he consults gives back little more than a puzzled look and a tentative finger pointed at some other ship moored close by. “This here is the Betsy,” they say, as if he is an idiot. “Perhaps you’ll find your captain Crag aboard a different vessel.”
“No,” Marley reassures them until he is blue in the face. “I assure you that the Betsy is under the command of this selfsame Crag. She left Fort Albany seven weeks ago, laden with rum and molasses and beaver pelts. I care nothing for the rum or the molasses. They are no affair of mine. I offer them only as proof of my familiarity with this ship and her master. The pelts are my concern. The pelts only.” On one or two occasions he comes near to presenting the letter from Peleg as evidence of a reality that is rapidly becoming questionable.
By and by he finds his way belowdecks, where Crag is nowhere to be found. The real captain, who goes by the name of Squelch, is a great ruin of a man, an avalanche of loose fat collapsed at the moment upon an unfortunate horsehair divan. He says that he has captained the Betsy for twenty-one years, before which time he served in antichronological order as her first mate, her carpenter, her caulker, and her cabin boy. Work aboard the Betsy, in other words, has been his entire life. Begging Mr. Micawber’s pardon, he has never heard of any Captain Crag. Perhaps, he suggests, his visitor has been misinformed.
Marley names his various contacts in America. Squelch claims ignorance of them.
Marley invokes the respected Sr. Monteverdi. Squelch purports to know him not.
Marley describes the quantity of beaver pelts now occupying space in the hold. Squelch assures him that the Betsy carries only cotton, molasses, tobacco, and rats. He proves it by giving Marley complete license to inspect the hold, accompanied by his cabin boy, a child obviously too slow-witted to be duplicitous.
As they climb back into the sunlight of the main deck, Marley contemplates the fortune in pounds that he distributed in America—he sowed that precious seed with careless extravagance, now that he thinks of it—and something within his brain goes black. Enough with the Betsy. Enough with Squelch. Monteverdi is the man he must see, and he must see him now.
The longshoremen awaiting him on the quay seem tough enough, but they make no dispute when he sends them off without payment or explanation. They may not be sages, but they can see that Marley is not a man to be crossed.
Monteverdi’s office lies in a district he knows well enough, a down-at-the-heels commercial area that has recently been reviving and revising itself courtesy of new money from elsewhere. Thus in both history and style it would seem to suit Monteverdi entirely. Marley hopes that he will find the moneyed little individual at his desk when he arrives, although the hour suggests otherwise. These Italians enjoy their food and drink, after all. So be it, then. He will wait if he must. He has waited this long.
He turns from a narrow boulevard onto a narrower street and then he turns again down the even narrower lane where Monteverdi has his business, and up ahead he spies a crew of day laborers. Masons and carpenters they are, just now returning from their own lunches, each picking up his tools and preparing to resume work. If Marley knows anything about laboring men he knows that the better part of the working day is behind them, and that whatever they accomplish this afternoon will be tainted by the strong drink they’ve just taken. Foundations will be tilted, walls will be askew, doors will refuse to latch. This is always the nature of work and the world. Small misjudgments ramify into networks of larger ones. He pities whoever is doomed to occupy the space upon which they are even now about to work their worst.
He clocks the numbers painted above each lintel as he goes along, counting down to Monteverdi’s door, and he is astonished to discover that the laborers appear to be working inside the Italian’s very place of business. Weren’t these premises to be redone months ago? Wasn’t everything to have been refurbished in gold leaf and marble? Absolutely. He is certain of it. He has seen workingmen drag their feet to extend a project before, but could these villains possibly still be at it? Poor, credulous Monteverdi! Surely they are doing their best to bleed him dry—an enterprise that Marley had thought until now was his and his exclusively.
He thrusts his head inside the door, and he despairs. The place is a shambles, and not a very large one. Even cleared of the workmen and their disarray, it would be less spacious than the tiny pair of chambers that he and Scrooge share. Further, there is neither a flake of gold leaf nor a chip of marble in sight. Quite the contrary, the carpenters are doing their best with crooked boards and straightened nails, and the masons are cursing their luck as they sort through secondhand bricks salvaged from some other ruin.
“Where is Monteverdi?” he asks, and for all the answer he gets he may as well be some disembodied spirit moaning into the ether.
“Monteverdi,” he demands of the nearest workman, grasping him by the shirt collar and drawing him perilously near.
“No such figger here, guv’nor.”
“But this is his office.”
“Afraid not,” says the workman, squirming within his grip and pointing to a dusty sign that hangs just inside the door. CARSTAIRS & SON, PROVISIONERS, it reads, EST. 1775.
Marley gawps.
“Old Mr. Carstairs is the one pays the bills,” says the workman. “I should know, since I’m the son. Not the son went into the family business, though—the other one. The poor one. Although I do manage to make ends meet.” With this last he smiles and raises a bent nail, demonstrating a happy willingness to shortchange even his own blood.
Marley releases him. “But what of Monteverdi?”
“Sorry, but like I said—I’ve never heard of the gentleman.”
Fourteen
Blast and damn. Had he not weakened under the dual influences of gin and human kindness, he would never have sent that note to Scrooge, and he would now owe the man nothing in the way of explanation. He could make a show of awaiting the Betsy for a few more weeks, and then produce official-looking documentation of her tragic loss at sea. Later he could explain why Monteverdi, angered over the loss and perhaps a trifle superstitious (as foreigners so often are, especially papists from the warmer climes), had written off the notion of any further dealings with Scrooge & Marley. But no. He had to take a couple of drinks, and he had to get a little sentimental, and he had to go and tip his hand. Blast and damn.
How is he to suffer the indignity? He is ashamed enough of his gullibility and weakness without having to confess it all to his partner. And then there’s the money. Fully one-third of all their capital, enough to yield a lifetime of comfort for both of them if invested properly, has vanished into the hands of those conspiratorial Americans. Were they employees of Monteverdi? Were they independent confidence men hired just for the moment? Were they merely clever opportunists?
Did they even exist at all?
Did Monteverdi himself?
Oh, wretched, wronged Marley!
He has never trusted banks and he has even less reason to trust them now, given the thoroughness and ease with which those duplicitous American financiers, with their fine stationery and their falsified imbecility, managed to swindle him clean. Yet if he is to recover his losses—the discarded riches, the ruined self-respect—he must make some adjustments to his methods. Those false fronts of his, arrayed one after another on the second and third floors of the house, can no longer be just depositories for appropriated cash and clearinghouses fo
r phony paper. Krook & Flite and Squeers & Trotter and all the rest shall from this day forward possess actual accounts at actual institutions of finance. Scrooge, of course, does not need to know about them. With the three months that he’s already had to rummage around in Marley’s deepest secrets, he has seen more than his share.
Oh, wretched, wide-eyed Marley!
Scrooge knows where the treasure is and where the keys are kept. To move anything now would only raise suspicion. So he shall keep an eye fixed upon the future, and begin siphoning off forthcoming percentages into accounts to which he alone shall have access. It is his right, after all. He is the one doing the work and taking the risk. Scrooge is but a factotum, one step above a clerk. Good God, if he were any more than that, he would be able to detect malfeasance on Marley’s part—particularly on the grand scale to which it is about to rise.
His new work will start, Marley decides, with recovering his share of the American investment. Painstakingly, methodically, one shilling at a time if necessary, he shall take it out of Scrooge’s hide.
* * *
“So how did we fare?” asks Scrooge, roused by his partner’s entry from a waking dream of endless wealth.
“Not half so well as expected,” says Marley.
Scrooge sets down his pen.
“The Americans chose to tell neither Monteverdi nor myself,” Marley says, papering over one lie with another, “that the trapping has been poor this season.”
“Then prices shall be higher.”
“They shall.”
“So it will all come out in the end.”
“It would, had our arrangements not been conditioned upon a fixed price.”
“A fixed price? How unwise, Marley. How unlike you.”
“So it would seem. But the markets have been stable for many years, and by acceding to a fixed value I assuaged Monteverdi’s reservations regarding other, more complex, elements of our arrangement. It cost us nothing—or it should have.”
“But now Monteverdi has come out on top.”
