A Conspiracy of Paper Read Free Page A

discomfort, even, I believe, shame. I thought it passing strange that a man out to expose so terrible a crime displayed no attitudes of outrage.
    The claims he made, however, sparked within me an agitation, which I sought to contain by setting my mind to the facts before me. “What you present does not offer any kind of evidence of murder,” I said after a moment. “I cannot see how you have reached this conclusion.”
    “My father’s death was made to look like self-murder so that a villain or villains could take his money with impunity,” he pronounced, as though he unveiled a discovery of natural philosophy.
    “You believe his estate to have been robbed, and your father to have been murdered to hide this robbery?”
    “In a word, sir, yes. That is what I believe.” Balfour’s features settled, for a brief moment, into a look of languid contentment. Then he eyed his empty wineglass with nervous longing. I obliged him by refilling.
    I paced about the room, despite the distracting ache of an old wound in my leg—a wound that had ended my days as a pugilist. “What is the connection between these deaths, then, sir? My father’s estate is solvent.”
    “But is anything missing? Do you even know, sir?”
    I did not, so I ignored what I considered a presumptuous question. “It is in your best interest that I be blunt. Your father has died recently, under terrible conditions, and unable to leave a legacy. You have grown up with the expectation of wealth and privilege, with every reason to believe you would live a gentleman’s life of ease. Now you find your dreams dashed, and you look for ways to believe it is not so.”
    Balfour reddened dramatically. I suspect he was unused to challenges, particularly challenges from men such as myself. “I resent your words, Weaver. My family may be under disabilities at this moment, but you would do well to remember that I am a gentleman born.”
    “As I am,” I said, looking directly into his reddish eyes. It was a harsh blow. His family was an upstart, and he knew it. He had earned that most ambiguous title of gentleman through his father’s aggressive dealings as a tobacco merchant, not through the majesty of his bloodlines. Indeed, I recalled that old Balfour had made a bit of a stir among the more established tobacco merchants by angering the men he hired to unload his vessels. Dock laborers have, by custom, always been given scant wages, and they have evened out their earnings through a kind of quiet redistribution of the goods they handle. For vessels carrying tobacco, the process is known as “socking”; the laborers merely plunge their hands into the bales of tobacco, sock away as much as they can hold and then resell it on their own. True enough it was a kind of sanctioned theft, but years ago tobacco merchants had realized that their porters were helping themselves to the cargo despite any measures meant to prevent them, so they simply cut the wages and looked the other way.
    Old Balfour, however, had taken the unhappy step of hiring men to inspect the workers and make sure no one socked his goods, but he refused to raise wages proportionately. The laborers had grown violent—smashing open several bales of sot weed and boldly liberating their contents. Old Balfour only relented once his brother merchants convinced him that to pursue this mad course was to risk riot and destruction of all their trades.
    That this merchant’s son should assert that his was an old family was patently absurd—it was not even an old trading family. And while in those days there was, as there is now, something decidedly English about a wealthy merchant, it was a relatively new and uncertain assertion that the son of such a man could claim the status of gentleman . My declaration that our families were of a piece sent him into a kind of fit. He blinked as though trying to dispel a vision, and twitched irritably until he regained himself.
    “I think it no coincidence that my