Stone's Fall

by Iain Pears

  “He was shot this afternoon.”

  Stone turned pale. “Oh, my God. What have you done? You killed him?”

  “I didn’t kill him. The Russians did. It was part of the deal you wanted. Part of the price. It made them trust me enough to listen to me. Why?”

  “You told me your servant had robbed you,” he said to her, ignoring me. “You didn’t say what had been taken. I assumed it was some jewellery. I asked Drennan if he could help, I’ve known him for years. It was to be a surprise, to show you…”

  He looked at me in total disbelief. “You killed him?” he repeated.

  “Just trying to make the world safe for business,” I said. “It’s what everybody wanted.”

  I left, leaving the final part unsaid, the bit about why Stone seemed almost relieved when I had tackled Rouvier. Almost as though he was glad he did not have to. I couldn’t put the pieces together. I am still not sure. Besides, it was nearly three in the morning. I was tired. Perhaps I was imagining things.

  It really was over. Rouvier concluded that a small guaranteed triumph was a better bet than a bigger prize that might be torn from his grasp. Three hours later the cables started going out to newspapers and agencies that the Bank of France and the Bank of Russia, in a spirit of international solidarity and to ensure the smooth operation of markets, had agreed to deposit extra gold at the Bank of England. It turned the tide; Barings collapsed and the family was all but ruined, but it resurfaced in a new guise soon enough, although it was only ever a shadow of its former self. The markets recovered from their nasty fright and settled down to normal business after a month or so. The City’s reputation was damaged, the prestige of France and Russia climbed, but London’s position remained unchallenged and the beginnings of a mutual understanding began to emerge. Russia and France signed a secret alliance, and French money began pouring in to build up the Russian economy and army. London banks, often enough, didn’t even compete.

  John Stone got to work. The construction of the port of Nicolaieff on the Black Sea produced only token and ineffectual protest from Britain, surprising considering that such a thing might ordinarily have been enough to start a war. It proved that Russia was not as backward as everyone had thought, considering that it was able to mobilise the resources and technology to construct such a vast enterprise without outside help.

  And in the spring of 1891, John Stone married the Countess Elizabeth Hadik-Barkoczy von Futak uns Szala at St. Oswald’s Church in Malpas, Shropshire. I was not invited to the wedding. I scarcely came across them for years although, now I have finally returned to England because of Mr. Wilkinson’s death, we inevitably meet occasionally. We are formal and polite.

  We never talk about his wife.

  PART THREE

  Venice, 1867

  CHAPTER 1

  I was not intended by family, education or natural instinct for a life of, or in, industry. I still know surprisingly little about it, even though my companies own some forty factories across Europe and the Empire. I have little real idea how the best steel is smelted and have no more notion of how a submarine works. My skill lies in comprehending the nature of people and the evolution of money. The dance of capital, the harmony of a balance sheet, and the way these abstractions interact with people, their characters and desires, either as individuals or in a mass. Understand that one is the other, that they are two separate ways of expressing the same thing, and you understand the whole nature of business.

  A few months ago I read a book by Karl Marx on capital. Elizabeth gave it to me, with a smile on her face. A strange experience, as the author’s awe exceeds even my own. He is the first to understand the complexity of capital and its subtlety. His account is that of a lover describing his beloved, but after describing her beauty and the sensuality of her power, he turns away from her embrace and insists that his love should be destroyed. He could gaze clearly into the nature of capital, but not into his own character. Desire is written in every line and paragraph of his book, but he does not see it.

  In my case, I surrendered to the excitement that came over me when I glimpsed the extraordinary process by which food turned into labour into goods into capital. It was akin to a vision, a moment of epiphany, all the more surprising because it was so unexpected. It was a strange process, this metamorphosis of a curate’s son into a businessman, and deserves some description, not least because it involved events now completely unknown.

  I am considered a secretive man, although I do not see myself in this fashion. I do not guard my privacy with any unusual jealousy, but feel no need for all the world to know my affairs. Only one thing have I hidden which is of any importance. This account will, I hope, explain some elements of my life and may give the information needed for fulfilling the requirements of my will. It is an aide-memoire, and I put down here all the details I can remember while I conduct my search for a definitive answer.

  I write sitting in my office in St. James’s Square, and all is quiet. Downstairs, my Elizabeth is curled up in front of the fire, reading a book, as she usually does in the evening before going to bed. I can imagine her yawning, her face illuminated by the firelight, entirely beautiful and calm. As there is no one there, she will be wearing her reading glasses. When she hears me coming down the stairs, she will whip them off and hide them; it is her vanity. I would tell her it means nothing to me, but having to use them so annoys her that I do not wish to trespass on her little secret. For the rest, she is at peace; I have given her that, and it is the best and most worthwhile thing I have ever done, worth more to me than all the factories and money I have accumulated over the years. I will not have it disturbed. But I must settle this other business once and for all; it has been gnawing at me for some time, and I am no longer young enough to afford any delay. I will find the truth, and will settle my mind. I do not fear that it will disturb Elizabeth greatly, as likely as not, the story ended long ago. I wish to know; that is all.

  I will write as my researches progress; I have begun my enquiries, they will bear fruit sooner or later. I am, I am sorry to say, unused to not getting what I want. In that lies my reputation for arrogance and I suppose it is probably deserved. It is necessary; a humble businessman is about as much use as an arrogant priest and if you are not by nature self-confident, then you must appear so, or you will fail. It is not a quality that will ever be sung about by poets, but like all the darkness within us, such characteristics—shame, guilt, despair, hypocrisy—have their uses.

  This pensiveness is foolish, I know. It began simply because of the death of William Cort; he asked me to come and see him in his wasting state and I went, travelling down to Dorset, where he had lived for the past forty years. A mournful meeting, but he was resigned to his end and not unhappy. Life had been a burden to him and he was looking forward to being rid of it. He gave me his message; it weighed on him. I made some remark, changed the subject as quickly as possible. Then I dismissed it from my mind. But it would not go. The thought came back to me, nestling in the back of my mind, ambushing me at the strangest of moments.

  And when I was sitting with Tom Baring, trying to come up with an insurance policy to safeguard my companies in case of accident, the thought came into my mind once more. It would be an appropriate denigration, I thought, to tame my unease by using it so cynically. A block on opening the books so that the great hole in the finances is not revealed to shareholders—not watertight, nothing can be, but enough to enable an ingenious solicitor to tie everything up in knots for as long as is necessary.

  My beloved shareholders would be alarmed and panic if all was open. But then shareholders are sheep, which is why they invest in little bits of paper, rather than in something real. Why they whinge and moan if something goes wrong but would never test their own mettle against the markets. Why they congratulate themselves on their acumen if their bits of paper rise in value due to the labour of others. It is the great unspoken passion of all businessmen: they may battle against their workers, criticise bu
ngling governments, try their hardest to bankrupt and ruin their competitors, but they all, invariably, have some respect—if only small—for each of these. But shareholders disgust them, and if they could find a way of ruining them all, they would do so with pleasure and satisfaction. Managers of public companies are like slaves, as much as the workers they in turn employ. They may serve their masters well, be obsequious and conscientious, but deep in their hearts there is loathing. I feel it in myself, and I see it in others. I can detect it in Theodore Xanthos, as resentment and greed take hold of him. He will test himself against me sooner or later. I have expected it for years.

  At the moment, I have committed my entire fortune to one extra ordinary operation, to build battleships which no one has ordered, for a government which has not enough courage to tell the truth, to safeguard a people which does not want to pay for them. I have calculated that they will change their minds and I am prepared to back my judgement. And if they don’t, I can ruin them all. They are corrupt, greedy, little men, and their grasping nature gives me the power to bend them to my will, should they thwart me. It is exciting, what business should be when it rises above mere production and strives for grandeur. Naturally, the shareholders would take fright if they knew what I was doing—although I have long believed that people who are not prepared to risk their money should not be allowed to keep it.

  So I would protect myself from my shareholders with my niggling concern. Turn it to my advantage. Show it who was the master. I visited Henderson, had a sentence put into my will: “£250,000 to my child, whom I have never acknowledged…” The sum had to be big, so that it would affect all the other legacies, make it impossible to wind up the estate. Unacknowledged because nonexistent.

  I did not even mention it to Elizabeth, whom I tell most things, because I never considered it would be necessary. Dying has never been something which has struck me as even a remote possibility. That is for others. Even visiting Cort at his last did not make me think that, sooner or later, I would become like him. All I felt when I looked at him on his bed, so thin and weak, hardly able even to speak, was a distant interest. Concern, a little sadness for him, but no identification with his plight. No; in due course the provision would become redundant, the will would be recast. That would be the end of the matter.

  Writing down the words did not make me the master of the thought, though. Instead, I found I had given it life. It preyed on me even more. Old memories came back, jumbled and confused, some all too real, some no doubt imaginary. It distracted me, and I hate distractions. I have never sat and waited for a problem to resolve itself on its own. I issued my instructions, began enquiries, and started to jot down these notes, to order the past, sort out what was real and what was not.

  The source of my concern lay in Venice—then and now, the city in Europe which has the least interest in anything industrial or commercial, despite the fact that its wealth was built on trade every bit as much as its buildings rest on wooden piles driven deep into the mud of the lagoons. Like a grand English family fallen on hard times, it has turned its back on commerce, preferring genteel decay to a vigorous restoration of its fortunes. At the time I visited it, I almost admired the old lady (if ever a city could be so described, Venice in the late 1860s merited such a title) for her refusal to compromise with the modern world.

  I was there on a tour, my first and only holiday until Elizabeth began her futile attempts to convert me to the pleasures of idleness. I had had a certain good fortune a year or so before; my uncle had died, childless and unmarried and, rather than leave his small fortune to my father, whom he utterly despised, he left it to me. Certainly this showed a desire on his part to sow dissent in our family, as my father lived only on a small stipend, and my sisters he pretended did not exist. Not a penny to them, and the entire amount of £4,426 to me, with strict instructions that I was in no way to distribute, give or otherwise alienate any part of the said sum to any other member of my family. Nasty of him, and had my father been less gentle than he was, Uncle Tobias might have had his way and begun a family feud. Possession in this fashion gave me no pleasure, so I resolved to dispose of the money in a way which would have the old man rolling in his grave, gnashing his teeth in rage.

  Why did he despise my father so much? That story, like that of so many family disputes, went back a long way. My father had married poorly. Scandalously poorly, in fact, for he had married a woman of no family or wealth. She was, even worse, the daughter of people who had arrived on these shores from somewhere in Spain only a few decades before, and had even been born in Argentina herself. She was (to my eyes) fabulously exotic and (to Uncle Tobias’s) totally unacceptable. How he knew this I do not know, as they never met. He refused ever to come anywhere near her. A pity as (old rogue that he was) he could not have failed to be charmed by her.

  But she was not English; of that there was no doubt, and to the end of her life spoke with a noticeably foreign accent—although of such a mixture it was impossible to discern what it was. This made her all the more charming to those who liked her, all the more repugnant to those who did not. I am quite well aware that the memory of her predisposed me to Elizabeth when we met.

  She also communicated to me a tendency to be different. Because of her, I have never fitted in quite comfortably to this country of mine, much as I love it. I could, I suppose, have become totally conventional in response, but some of the fiery defiance of the mother transferred itself to the child, and I instead did the opposite. I have, in my life, followed my own course, wherever it might lead. And thus have been able to grasp opportunities others have not even noticed.

  When I received Uncle Tobias’s money, I realised that the usual options available to a young man of small fortune were not open to me. Wine, women and gambling would not do, because Uncle Tobias had dissipated a far greater fortune on such things in his youth, and would have thoroughly approved of my recklessness. It would have meant the triumph of his side of the family. Donating the money to a worthy cause was also out because, although he loathed my father’s gentle brand of Christianity, he was a resolute high Tory himself and would have held that, at least, the money was helping to keep the lower classes in their place.

  Then, one day in London, lunching with a friend, I hit on the perfect solution. If there was one thing Uncle Tobias hated more than the common people, it was the commercial ones. The traders, the industrialists, the factory owners, the bankers, the upstart new orders, the Jews, with their crassness and breathtaking wealth. Ruining the country with their gaudy vulgarity, their contempt for everything that was proper and decent and ordered. And now taking over the country in politics as in money. It was his defeat at the 1862 election by a Liberal factory owner (if only of gloves) that finished him off. England was ruined, all that was good in the country had been destroyed; there was no point in continuing.

  Six months later he expired in the midst of sexual congress with the parlourmaid on a billiard table at the age of seventy-nine, at which point it was discovered that his fortune, net of debts, was very much less than anyone anticipated, and that I was the sole beneficiary.

  After a certain amount of thought, I gave all the money to precisely one of these upstarts so they could continue the labour of reducing Uncle Tobias’s England to rack and ruin. In brief, a highly speculative and utterly hopeless early venture in imperial mining that was being run by an associate of my mother’s family who was not only Jewish but had a reputation for highly doubtful honesty. In this, popular report was only part accurate. Joseph Cardano (whom I knew ever better for a quarter of a century until his death in 1894) was indeed Jewish, but he was also perhaps the most honest person I have ever met. Had I known this about him at the time, of course, I would never have entrusted Uncle Tobias’s money to him.

  At this point I thought the matter was taken care of and resumed my life as it had been before. Then, at the beginning of 1867, I received a letter from Mr. Cardano, informing me of certain important developments conc
erning my investment. It had, quite literally, struck gold, and Uncle Tobias’s legacy was now worth many times what it had been. I was, in fact, tolerably wealthy and, as most of my money was earned (in a fashion) by myself, I felt quite free to give a sum equivalent to the legacy to my parents and to my sisters, thus causing, I hope, Uncle Tobias’s mortal remains to give a few more spins in their coffin.

  In the meantime I had turned my thoughts to dissipation, but found it did not suit me overmuch. My parents had brought me up too well and, besides, my head was ill-suited to it. I found the life of pleasure-seeking frivolity too dull to endure. I visited Joseph Cardano once more, this time to place my money in the most advantageous but safe fashion, and prepared to leave England for a tour of the Continent, in the hope that this would provide inspiration for some suitable way of filling in my days.

  By that stage I had spent considerable time, with his assistance and often enough in his offices, studying money and its infinite variety. I had started with The Times, but found the daily reports of stock prices and interest rates of insufficient interest. So I became something of an apprentice to Mr. Cardano, in whose company I discovered the great secret that multiplying money is remarkably easy, once you have some to begin with. The first five thousand is the most difficult, the second less so, and so on. As Uncle Tobias had got me over the difficult stage, there was little to stop me. The only thing I have never understood is how others are blind to this obvious fact. Although, I suppose, I must be grateful that they are.

  On the whole, I stick firm to the conclusions I formed then. The Stock Exchange is merely an elaborate means for the wealthy to extract money from the less well off. It is not those who buy and sell shares who prosper; it is those who insert themselves in between the two sides who grow rich. Once I realised this, and (tutored by Mr. Cardano) grasped the poetry of capital formation, of share issuance and flotation, of how to make capital be in two, three or four places simultaneously so that all profit accrues to you, and the losses to someone else—only then did my interest begin to be aroused. Even so, I found this all too abstract. It has never been my desire to amass money; I find possession a dull business. Rather, I had the desire to do something with it. In England, commerce is divided strictly into three parts: the world of money, the world of industry and the world of trade. While I was at Mr. Cardano’s side, I began to ponder how vast fortunes might be made by blending those three worlds into one.