He hesitated before stating his business, taking a moment to study my features—I should say gawk at my features, for he regarded me as more spectacle than man. His eye roamed with clear disapproval at my face and clothing (though both were cleaner and neater than his own), and squinted at my hair; for, unlike a proper gentleman, I wore no peruke, and instead pulled my locks back in the style of a tie-periwig.
“You, I presume, are Benjamin Weaver,” he began at last in a voice that cracked with uncertainty. He hardly noticed my nod of acknowledgment. “I come on a serious matter. I am not pleased to be forced to seek your peculiar skills, but I require the assistance that only a man such as yourself can provide.” He shifted uneasily in his chair, and I wondered if Mr. Balfour was not what he claimed—if he were perhaps a man of a much lower order than he affected, masquerading as a gentleman. There was, after all, the
“I hope I am able to be of some assistance to you,” I said, with practiced civility. I laid down my pen and cocked my head slightly to show him that I put my full attention at his disposal.
His hands shook distractingly while he studied his fingernails with unconvincing indifference. “Yes, it is an unpleasant business, so I am sure you are quite equal to the task.”
I offered him a brief bow from my chair and told him he was too kind or some other like platitude, but he hardly noticed what I said. Despite his attempts to perform a sort of fashionable lassitude, he appeared for all the world like a man on the brink of choking, as though his collar tightened about his throat. He bit his lip. He looked about the room, eyes darting here and there.
“Sir,” I said, “you will forgive me if I note that you appear a little discomposed. Can I offer you a glass of port?”
My words all but slapped him in the face, and he collected himself once again to the posture of an insouciant buck. “I must imagine that there are less presumptuous ways for you to inquire into a gentleman’s distresses. Nevertheless, I shall take a drink of whatever quality you have upon you.”
It was not out of deference that I allowed Balfour to insult me freely. Once I had established myself in my trade, it took no great amount of time to learn that men of birth or standing had a profound need to demonstrate their superiority—not to the man they hired to meddle in their private business, but to the business itself. I could not take Balfour’s freedoms personally, for they were not directed at me. I also knew that once I had effectively served such a man, the memory of his discourteous behavior often inspired him to pay promptly and to recommend my skills to his acquaintances. I therefore tossed off Mr. Balfour’s insults as a bear tosses off the dogs sent to bait it in Hockley-in-the-Hole. I poured his wine and returned to my desk.
He took a sip. “I am not discomposed,” he assured me. If the quality of my drink pleasantly surprised my guest, as I expected it should, he thought this fact not worth mentioning. “I am certainly tired from a poor night’s rest, and indeed”—he paused to look at me pointedly—“I am in mourning for my father, who died not two months ago.”
I offered my apologies and then startled myself by telling him that I too had recently lost a father.
Balfour astonished me in return by telling me that he knew of my father’s death. “Your father, sir, and my own were acquaintances. They did business together, you know, at times when my father had the need to call on a man of your father’s . . . sort.”
I would like to believe that I showed no surprise, but I doubt it was so. My given name is not Weaver, but Lienzo. Few men were familiar with my true name, so I could not have anticipated that this man would know the identity of my father. I could not guess what else Balfour knew of me, but I asked no questions. I only nodded slowly.
I was now thoroughly confused as to what this man wanted, for it was perfectly plain that he had not come regarding my unfortunate affair of the previous night. As I mulled over my many uncertainties, it occurred to me that I vaguely recalled Balfour’s father. I remembered hearing my father speak of him—he had said only good things of the man, for they had been closer, I think, than simple acquaintances, though to call them friends would have been exaggerating the possibilities of their interaction. I remembered Balfour’s father, where I might have forgotten the numerous other men with whom my own father did business, for it was unusual for him to have been on such familiar terms with a Christian gentleman. I had not recalled, however, my father’s association with this man when I read in the papers of Michael Balfour’s self-murder. He had been a wealthy merchant, and, like many men of business who took risks, he had suffered drastic financial reversals. His particular reversals had been severe; he had lost more than everything on a series of bad ventures, and unable to face his creditors with his insolvency, or his family with the shame of his ruin, he had hanged himself in his stables. This act he had committed not twenty-four hours before my father’s own death.
“Is it then through your father that you learned of my services?” I asked Balfour. It was an irrelevant question—at least to Mr. Balfour’s concerns. I wished to know if my father had spoken of me—indeed if he had spoken approvingly of me—to his colleagues and business associates. Much to my own astonishment, I felt myself hoping that Balfour had knowledge that my father had, in some way, respected the life I had made for myself.
Balfour quickly disabused me of these fictions. “The recommendation comes not so directly. I had certainly heard your name in the past—in the same connotation, you understand, as one hears of ropedancers and raree- shows and that sort of thing—but recently I found myself in a coffeehouse, when I heard a gentleman mention your name. A friend of his, a Sir Owen Nettleton, had engaged you in a matter of business and believed you to be competent—a rating of sufficient merit in this age. I then conceived of the idea that your services might be of some use to me.”
I often marveled that London, for so enormous a city, is sometimes astonishingly small. Among countless thousands, these kinds of interactions 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
