A Conspiracy of Paper bw-1

by David Liss

While I attempted to make conditions bearable for our invasive search, Elias wandered about the room, examining books upon the shelves and touching Bloathwait’s artifacts.

  “Come here,” I hissed. “I don’t know how much time we have, and I want to quit this felony as quickly as we can.” I gathered some candles about Bloathwait’s great desk, and began to scan the daunting mounds of documents spread across the surface as though the wind had blown them there.

  Elias joined me at the desk and lifted up a piece of paper at random. Bloathwait’s hand was cramped and difficult to read. It would be no easy thing to scan through these writings.

  He held the page to the candle, as though threatening it with flame would force it to yield forth its secrets. “What are we looking for?” Elias asked.

  “I cannot say, but there was something he wished to hide. Seek out anything having to do with my father or the South Sea Company or Michael Balfour.”

  We both began leafing through the papers, doing our best not to misplace anything from its original order. There was so much on the desk, and its organization so chaotic, that I could not care if Bloathwait discovered his papers had been searched. So long as he could not prove it had been done by me, I was content.

  “You haven’t told me what your widow looks like,” Elias said, as he ran his finger along a line of gnarled prose.

  “Pay attention to your work,” I muttered, though in truth I took some comfort from the sound of his voice. We were engaged upon a tense business; my eyes darted to each shifting shadow upon the wall, and my body stiffened with each creak of the house.

  Elias understood my rebuke to mean nothing. “I can concentrate and discuss widows simultaneously. I do it all the time while performing surgery. So tell me, is she a charming Jewess, with olive skin and dark hair and pretty eyes?”

  “Yes, she is,” I told him, trying not to grin. “She’s quite lovely.”

  “I should not expect any less of you, Weaver. You’ve always had a good eye in your own way.” He handed me a piece of paper on which there were notes about some loan venture of the Bank, but I could not see how it might be of value.

  “Are you thinking matrimony?” he asked impishly, moving to a stack of papers bound together with a thick string. He carefully worked out the knot and began to glance at the pages. “Have you begun to consider starting a home, circumcising some young ones?”

  “I know not why my fondness for this woman so amuses you,” I said churlishly. “You fall in love three times a fortnight.”

  “Which makes me immune to mockery, then, does it not? Everyone expects me to fall in love. But you, the stony, stout, fighting Israelite—that’s another matter.”

  I held up my hand. I heard creaking from somewhere—like footsteps. We both remained motionless in the flickering candlelight for some minutes, listening only to the sound of our own breathing and the ticking of Bloathwait’s great clock. What should we do if Bloathwait were to stroll in, candle in one hand, dressing gown wrapped about his enormous form? He might laugh, send us away, mock us—or he might commit us to the magistrate and use his mighty influence to see us hang for housebreaking. Possibility after possibility ran though my mind, scorn and haughtiness and sinister laughter, or prison and suffering and the scaffold. I fingered the handle of my hangar, and then my pistol. Elias watched me do so; he knew what I was about. I would kill Bloathwait, I would go upon the road, leave London and never return. I would not face trial for this adventure of mine, nor could I think of permitting Elias to know the horrors of prison. I resolved myself to do what I believed necessary.

  The noise did not come again, and after a few moments in which I could not quite believe my own conviction that the danger had passed, I signaled that we should resume.

  “I wonder about you,” Elias said, trying once more to lighten my mood—and his own. “All this spending time among your coreligionists. Are you thinking of returning to the fold? Moving to Dukes Place and becoming an elder at the synagogue? Growing a beard and such?”

  “And what if I should?” The idea of returning to Dukes Place had crossed my mind, not as a resolution, but as a question—what should it be like to live there, to be one Jew among many rather than to be the one Jew that my acquaintances knew?

  “I can only hope that when you find the path of abstemious devotion, you do not entirely forget the friends of your debauched youth.”

  “You might consider converting to our faith,” I said. “I suppose the operation may prove painful—but I have no specific memory of being uncomfortable.”

  “Look at this.” He waved a piece of paper before me. “It’s Henry Upshaw. He owes me ten shillings, and he’s dealing with Bloathwait for two hundred pounds.”

  “Stop looking for gossip,” I told him. “We mustn’t stay here longer than we need to.”

  We had been there perhaps two hours, and we were both growing anxious, wondering how foolish an idea this had been, when a piece of paper caught my eye—not because of anything written upon it, but because it looked familiar. It had the same kind of torn corner that I had seen on the document Bloathwait had attempted to hide from me.

  Picking it up carefully, I saw written at the top “S. S. Co.?” My heart rate quickened. Underneath he had written “forge?” and under that “warning Lienzo.” Did he mean that he had received a warning from my father, that he had given a warning to my father, or even that he took my father’s death as a warning?

  A little farther down the page he had written “Rochester,” and then, under that, “S. S. Co. Contact—Virgil Cowper.”

  I called Elias over and showed it to him.

  “Could these be notes that he took after your meeting?” he asked.

  “I never mentioned Rochester to him,” I said. “And I have no idea who Virgil Cowper is, so even if these are notes he took later, it shows that he knows something he’s not telling me.”

  “But these could just be his speculations. They don’t prove anything.”

  “True enough, but at least we have a name we didn’t have before. Virgil Cowper. I suspect he’s someone at the South Sea Company, and he may be able to tell us something.”

  I took out a piece of paper and wrote down the name, and then continued looking through the piles. Elias by now had grown bored, and began looking through Bloathwait’s bound notes upon the bookshelves, but all he found there were incomprehensible pages of names and numbers and dates.

  We worked together in silence once more, both of us exhilarated by the find. We were not wasting our time. I do not believe, however, that Elias was capable of periods of prolonged silence.

  “You never answered my question,” he said at last. “Would you marry this widow if she would have you?”

  Although Elias sought mostly to rail at me, there was something else in his voice—a kind of sadness, and a kind of excitement, too, as though he were on the brink of something wonderful and altering.

  “She would never have me,” I said at last. “So there is no answering the question.”

  “I think you have answered it,” he said gently.

  I escaped further probing by discovering a draft of a letter, made out to a name I could not decipher. I should have overlooked it completely, but a name in the middle of the page caught my eye. “Sarmento proves himself to be an idiot, but more on that later.” It was the only mention of my uncle’s man that I could find. The reference made me smile, and for some reason it gave me a curious pleasure to know that he and I agreed on Sarmento’s character.

  My reflection was halted by the sound of footsteps coming down the hall. We both quickly rushed to replace all the papers and blow out candles. But our frenzy halted when we saw Bessie come dashing through the door, her skirt lifted to aid her running.

  “Mr. Bloathwait’s awake,” she breathed. “His gout roused him. I’m to be fixing him a dish of chocolate, and then he aims to come down. So give me my half crown, and then off with you.”

  I slipped her the coin as Elias f
inished dousing the lights. I could only hope that enough time elapsed before Bloathwait made his way in here that whoever lit them again would not notice the wax to be soft and warm.

  Bessie quietly led us through the maze of hallways to the servants’ entrance. “Don’t be coming back here,” she said to me, “unless you have something else on your mind. I’ve no time for the intrigues of you men of business. I don’t much care for such things.”

  She curtsied and closed the door, and Elias and I scrambled into the street. It was late, and I took out my pistol so that anyone passing by would think twice before setting upon us.

  “Was it a successful venture?” Elias asked.

  “I think so,” I said. “We know that Bloathwait has some knowledge of the South Sea forgeries, and that he had some kind of idea about my father in relation to it. And we have this name, this Virgil Cowper. I tell you, Elias, I have a good feeling about tonight. I think the information we’ve taken of Bloathwait will prove most useful to us.”

  I could not tell if Elias disagreed or merely wished to return to his room and sleep.

  NINETEEN

  I AIMED TO MAKE my way to South Sea House the next afternoon, but I first wished to visit my uncle and report to him of my adventures with Bloathwait. I was not yet certain that I wanted to tell him what I had seen of Sarmento, but I grew tired of playing these cat-and-mouse games. For the nonce I would inform him that the Bank of England director had made it clear that he had some interest in the inquiry.

  I confess that my desire to meet with my uncle was in some way augmented by a desire to see Miriam once again. I wondered how the matter of the twenty-five pounds she borrowed of me would sit between us. A loan of necessity such as this could produce a discomfort, and I was determined to do all in power to keep such a thing from happening.

  The irony of my interest in Miriam amused me; had I known more of Aaron’s pretty widow, perhaps I would have contemplated a reconciliation long before. And yet, even as I sang a little drinking ditty to myself as I walked, I wondered about my intentions. Despite the world’s opinion of widows, I could not think myself such a cad as to attempt to encroach upon the virtue of a woman who was very nearly a relation, and living under the protection of my uncle, too. Yet what could a man such as myself offer? I who scraped together, at the very most, a few hundred pounds each year, had nothing for Miriam.

  As I approached my uncle’s house, coming on to Berry Street from Grey Hound Alley, I was shocked out of my reverie by an ungainly beggar man, who materialized with jarring suddenness. He was a Tudesco Jew—as we Iberian Jews called our coreligionists from Eastern Europe—perhaps of middle years, though he looked ageless in that way of men who are undernourished and oppressed with labors and hardships. My readers may not even realize that there are different categories of Jews, but we separate ourselves based on our culture of origin. Here in England, those of us of Iberian descent were the first to return in the last century and until recently outnumbered our Tudesco cousins. Because of the opportunities our exiled forebears found among the Dutch, most Jewish businessmen and brokers in England are Iberian. The Tudescos are frequently persecuted and harassed in their native lands, and when they come here they find themselves without skills or trades, and thus the largest number of beggars and old-clothes men about the streets are of Eastern European origin. These distinctions are not etched in stone, though, for there are rich Tudescos, such as Adelman, and there is no shortage of poor among the Iberian Jews.

  I should like to say that I formed no prejudice against the Tudescos simply because I thought their appearance and language strange, but the truth is that I found such men as this peddler an embarrassment—I believed them to cast our people in a shockingly bad light, and I felt ashamed of their poverty and ignorance and helplessness. This man’s bones jutted out of his parchmentlike skin, and his black, foreign garments hung upon him as though he had simply draped bedclothes across his body. He wore his beard long, in the fashion of his countrymen, and a conspicuous skullcap spread over his head, with stringy locks creeping from beneath. As he stood there, a foolish smile upon his face, asking me in poor English if I wished to purchase a penknife or a pencil or a shoelace, I was overcome with a desire, intense and surprising, to strike him down, to destroy him, to make him disappear. I believed at that moment that it was these men, whose looks and manners were repulsive to Englishmen, who were responsible for the difficulties other Jews suffered in England. Were it not for this buffoon, who gave the English something to gawk at, I would not have been so humiliated in Sir Owen’s club. Indeed, I should not find so many obstacles in my path that block me from learning what had happened to my father. But even this was a lie, I told myself, for I knew that the truth was that this peddler did not make the English hate us—he merely gave their hatred a focus. He was an outcast, he was strange to look at, his speech abused the language, and he could never blend into London society—not even as a foreigner blends in. This man made me hate myself for what I was, and made me wish to strike out at him. I understood this passion for what it was; I knew that I hated him for reasons that related not at all to him, so I hurried off, hoping to make him and the feelings he engendered in me fade away.

  Yet as I rushed, I heard him call to me. “Mister!” he shouted. “I know who you are.”

  This claim only fueled my anger, for what could I, the son of one of London’s prominent Jewish families—and this was a title that I rarely claimed—have to do with a beggar such as he? I clenched my fists and turned to face him.

  “I know you,” he said again, pointing at me. “You.” He shook his head, unable to summon the words. “You this, yes?” He balled his hands into fists and brought them up level to his nose before he pantomimed some quick jabs. “You the great man, the Lion of Judah, yes?” He took a few steps forward and nodded vigorously, his beard swinging back and forth like a crazed and hairy pendulum. He barked a little laugh, as though his ignorance of the English tongue suddenly amused him. Then, placing one of his hands upon his heart, he reached down to his tray of trinkets and held something forth. “Please,” he said. “From me.”

  As he held out an hourglass in the palm of his bony hand, I understood that, while I saw him as what I hated about myself, he saw me as something in which he could take pride. It is a terrible thing to come to so humbling a realization, for in an instant a man sees himself as petty and illiberal and weak. And so I took the hourglass from him and dropped a shilling upon his tray, rushing away as I did so. I knew a shilling to be an enormous amount of money to the Tudesco, but he chased after me, holding the coin. “No, no, no,” he repeated nearly endlessly. “You take from me. Please.”

  I turned to face him. I saw that one hand was once again pressed to his heart, the other held out the coin. “Please,” he said again.

  I took the coin from his hand and then dropped it in his tray. Before he could react I put a hand to my own heart. “Please.”

  We exchanged brief nods, expressing a communion I did not entirely understand, and then I hurried off in the direction of King Street.

  I walked quickly, hoping to remove the encounter with the peddler from my mind, and when my uncle’s house came in sight, I nearly trotted. The servant Isaac opened the door only after I had knocked several times, and even then he attempted to block my entrance by maneuvering his withered frame before me. “Mr. Lienzo is not in,” he said sharply. “He is at the warehouse. You can see him there.”

  He sounded clipped, perhaps a bit frightened. “Is something wrong, Isaac?”

  “No,” he said rapidly. “But your uncle is not here.”

  He attempted to close the door, but I pushed against it. “Is Mrs. Miriam about?”

  Isaac’s face changed dramatically upon the mention of her name, and on an impulse I forced my way past him and into the foyer, from where I could hear voices, raised as if shouting. One of them was clearly Miriam’s.

  “What happens in there?”

  “Mrs. Miriam, s
he is having an argument,” he said, as though offering precisely the information I needed to ease my confusion.

  “With whom?” I demanded. But at that very moment the withdrawing-room door opened and Noah Sarmento emerged, his face bearing a scowl something grimmer than his usual. He paused for a moment, visibly astonished to see the two of us standing in close proximity to their quarrel.

  “What do you want, Weaver?” he asked me, as if I had just barged into his own home.

  “This is where my family lives,” I said with what I admit was a bellicose inflection.

  “And for a sufficient quantity of silver, you now care about your family,” he snapped. He grabbed his hat from Isaac, who had produced it without my notice, and stepped out of the already open door. Isaac closed it as Miriam emerged from the withdrawing room. She opened her mouth to speak to Isaac, but stopped upon seeing me.

  I can only presume that she found some irony in my presence there, for she smiled slightly to herself. “Good afternoon, Cousin,” she said. “Would you care for some tea?”

  I told her I would enjoy it very much, and we retreated into the withdrawing room, where we waited for the maid to bring us the tea things.

  Miriam was still heated from her argument with Sarmento, and her olive skin had enough of the red mixed in to make her eyes glow like emeralds. On this day she wore a particularly striking shade of royal blue, which I speculated was a favorite color with her.

  She was disordered, I could see that quite clearly, but she tried hard to mask her mood with smiles and pleasantries. After a few moments of asking me about the weather and how I had entertained myself since last we met, she produced a dazzling Chinese fan and began to wave it at herself somewhat violently.

  “Well,” I breathed. At least, I thought, the difficulties with Sarmento made the matter of the money I’d lent seem less pressing. I had thought to engage her in idle chatter for a while, but I soon decided I should get nowhere with a woman like Miriam if I pretended to a frivolousness I surely did not possess. “Is Mr. Sarmento causing you any difficulties with which I can assist you?”