A Conspiracy of Paper Read Free

occur almost daily, for men of like nature and like concerns congregated inevitably at the same clubs and taverns and coffeehouses and tea gardens. I had indeed served Sir Owen Nettleton, and his concerns very much occupied my thoughts that morning, but I shall discuss more of him below.
    Balfour finished his port with a mighty gulp and looked straight into my eyes with an intensity that suggested a mustering of forces. “Mr. Weaver, I shall be direct with you. My father, sir, was murdered. I believe by the same person or persons who murdered your father.”
    I could not even think how to react. My father had been killed, certainly, but not murdered, some two months earlier—a drunken coachman had run him down as he crossed Threadneedle Street. The business had been shrouded with a kind of uncertainty. How reckless had the coachman been? Had my father stepped blindly in his way? Could it have been avoided? All answerless questions, the magistrate determined. The coachman, while negligent, had acted without malicious intention, and could have had no reason to want to do harm to my father. The same act perpetrated against an earl or a Parliamentarian might have earned the coachman, at the very least, seven years of transportation to the colonies, but the careless trampling of a Jewish stock-jobber was hardly a matter over which to unfurl the full majesty of the law. The magistrate released the coachman with a stern warning, and that had proved the legal end of the matter.
    At that time I had not spoken to my father for close to ten years. I knew nearly nothing of his affairs, and it had hardly occurred to me that his death might have been anything as horrid as murder. This thought had, however, occurred to my father’s kinsman, my Uncle Miguel, who had written to inform me of his suspicions. I blush to own I rewarded his efforts to seek my opinion with only a formal reply in which I dismissed his ideas as nonsensical. I did so in part because I did not wish to involve myself with my family and in part because I knew that my uncle, for reasons that eluded me, had loved my father and could not accept the senselessness of so random a death. Yet now, once again, I was confronted with the suggestion that my father had been the victim of a malicious crime, and once again I found that my self-imposed exile from my family made me wish to disbelieve it.
    I forced my face to conform to the rigid angles of impartiality. “My father’s death was an unfortunate accident.” Balfour knew more about my family than I knew about his, and I saw that as a disadvantage, so, already in an agitated state of mind, I proceeded at the slowest of paces. “And if I may be so indelicate, the papers reported your father’s death as something other than murder.”
    Balfour held up his hand, as though the idea of self-murder might be ordered away. “I know what the papers reported,” he snapped, spittle flying from his mouth, “and I know what the coroner said, yet I promise you something is amiss here. At the time of my father’s death, his estate was revealed to be quite broken, yet only weeks before he told me himself that he had been profiting in his speculation, taking advantage of the fluctuation in the markets caused by the rivalries between the Bank of England and the South Sea Company. I had no desire to see him meddling in the affairs of ’Change Alley, buying and selling stocks in the manner of—well, in the manner of your people, Weaver—but he believed there were ample opportunities for a man who kept his wits about him. So how can it be that his finances were so”—he paused briefly to choose his terms—“ill ordered. Do you think it any coincidence that both our fathers, very rich men of acquaintance, should have died suddenly and mysteriously within the span of a single day, and my father’s holdings reveal themselves to be in chaos?”
    As he spoke, Balfour’s face revealed no small number of passions: indignity, disgust,