to go about asking me questions about my mother, who would be utterly horrified to learn that men such as you even exist, let alone that you speak of her. My mother, sir, knows nothing of these matters. There is no point in talking to her.”
“Did your father have any other relatives—a brother perhaps, an uncle—with whom he dealt in business?”
Balfour continued to sigh with exasperation, but he answered the question. “No. No one.”
“And you can think of nothing else that might be of use to me? Something to help me find how to begin my inquiry?”
“If I could think of anything, would I not tell you? You drive me to distraction with your endless questions.”
“Very well. Then you only need let me know the name of your father’s clerk and where I might find him.”
Balfour’s jaw went slack. He knew something that he refused to tell me. No, he knew many things that he refused to tell me. And I suspect he knew I saw through the facade of family pride and detected his screen of blustering. But he did not back down from it. “I have told you what he knows,” Balfour said stiffly. “You have no need to talk with him.”
“Mr. Balfour, you are being difficult. Where may I find this clerk?”
“You may not. You see, he is now employed in my mother’s service, and my mother and I, since you insist upon knowing, are not upon the best of terms. She would not appreciate my meddling in her business.”
“But surely she has much to gain from these inquiries.”
“No, she has not. My mother had a jointure of separate property settled upon her. She was to inherit none of my father’s wealth, and his death has not affected her at all, except to free her from a marriage that was broken in all but law. She and I had been upon poor terms for a very long time, for in the matters of my parents’ disagreements, I took my father’s side. Now I wish to arrange a . . . rapprochement with her, and I do not choose to antagonize her by looking into this business. I handled this clerk so that he would not know the nature of my inquiries. I do not believe you could do the same.”
“I assure you I can. Give me his name, sir. I shall in return promise you that I shall not approach him at your mother’s home.”
Balfour screwed up his face to launch another protest, but he soon thought better of it. “Oh, very well. His name is Reginald d’Arblay, and if you really must speak to him you will find him, sooner or later, at Jonathan’s Coffeehouse in ’Change Alley. He wishes to become a stock-jobber in his own right, so he spends his time in a stock-jobbing coffeehouse—I suppose in the hopes of having his foreskin removed. It is not all he will have removed, I should wager.”
I sat silent for a few minutes, taking all of this in. “Very well, sir.” I stood up and finished my wine in a long swallow. “I shall let you know when I have anything to report.”
“Do not forget what I told you about calling on me here,” he said. “I have a reputation to uphold, you know.”
I COULD SEE THAT Balfour’s mother would be of no use to me, but I wondered for how long I would respect Balfour’s desire for me to avoid his father’s clerk, d’Arblay. Not long, but I did not wish to call upon such a man unprepared. It was time, I knew, to do what I should have done years before, what I had so often both wished for and dreaded. This matter gave me the excuse I had long required, and the wine I had drunk gave me the courage I had long wanted. So I found myself walking briskly toward Wapping, where my uncle Miguel kept his warehouse.
I last had seen my uncle at my father’s funeral, when I had stood, with a few dozen others, representing the family and members of the Dukes Place enclave, staring mutely beside the open grave, my coat offering little protection from the unexpected cold and wind and ceaseless drizzle of rain. My uncle, my father’s only brother, had done little to make me feel welcome in my return. He acknowledged me only now and again, when he looked up from the prayer book that he hunched over to keep dry, in order to cast suspicious glances in my direction, as though I might, if given the opportunity, pick the other mourners’ pockets and disappear into the fog. I could not help but wonder if my uncle resented that I had not returned home three years earlier, upon the death of his son, my cousin Aaron. I had been at that time still riding upon the highway, as the saying goes, and had not even learned of Aaron’s death until some many months later. In all candor, I am not sure I would have returned even if I had heard; Aaron and I had not much liked each other as boys, for he had been a weak, timid, and sneaking sort, and I admit I had been little able to resist bullying him. He had always hated me for a monster while I hated him for a coward. When we grew older and I recognized that it was time to manage my rougher tendencies more carefully, I had made the effort to mend our friendship, but Aaron only walked away from me when I spoke to him in private, or mocked me for my lack of learning when we spoke in public. When I learned that he had been sent away to the East to become a trader in the Levant, I was glad to be rid of him. I could, nevertheless, feel sorrow for my uncle, who lost his only son when a trading vessel capsized in a storm and Aaron was swallowed by the ocean forever.
If my uncle treated me as an unavoidable interloper at my father’s funeral, I must confess that I did little to convince him to see me otherwise. I found myself angry then at having to spend time with these people; I resented my father for having died, as his death had placed me in an uncomfortable state. It came as no surprise to me that my father left his estate to my older brother, Jose, and I was not disappointed he chose to do so, yet the knowledge that everyone at the funeral believed me bitter vexed me. I cast my eyes about me nervously as the mourners prayed dutifully in Hebrew and conversed in Portuguese, both of which I pretended to have forgotten, though I was alarmed to realize how much I had forgotten indeed; these languages sounded often like alien tongues made familiar but not intelligible through frequent exposure.
Now, as I went to see my uncle, I again felt like an interloper who should be stared at with suspicion and unease. All my efforts to calm my spirits—my pronouncements to myself that I went to visit Miguel Lienzo upon business, that I, as the initiator of this exchange, held the power to terminate it at will—failed to make me forget how little I welcomed this visit.
I had not been to the warehouse in many years—not since I was a young man running errands for the family. It was a largish affair—a storing house near the river, used both for the Portuguese wine that my uncle imported and the British woolens that he exported. He also maintained a less legal trade in French cambrics and other textiles, goods that had become the victims of the mutual embargoes with our enemies across the Channel; for there has ever been a great gulf between the hatred of the French engendered by politics and the desire for French goods inspired by fashion. Let the papers and Parliamentarians decry the dangers of the French military; ladies and gentlemen still clamored to buy French attire.
When I entered my uncle’s warehouse, I was overwhelmed by the rich smell of wool, which made me feel damp and tight in the chest. This was an enormous, high-ceilinged place, alive with activity, for I had the ill fortune to arrive while a customs inspector went about his business. Brawny laborers hauled boxes or piled them up, packed or unpacked at the inspector’s pleasure. Clerks ran about with ledgers in hand, attempting to keep a record of what was moved and to where.
I tensed with a boxer’s preparedness when I saw my uncle at the other end of the room, metal bar in hand, ripping open crates for a fat, misshapen, pockmarked toady whose income depended upon finding violations and accepting bribes from violators. The look on his face told me that he had encountered neither. My uncle had always been a cautious man. Like my father, he believed that it would not take much for the Jews to be expelled from England as they had been from so many other countries—indeed, as they had been from England long ago. He therefore obeyed laws where he could and disobeyed carefully when he could not. It took no ordinary inspector to locate his contraband.
I stood watching him, admiring his poise and the respect he commanded. At my father’s funeral, Uncle Miguel had looked not much older than I remembered. His hair had begun to turn a speckled color, his closecut beard had grayed almost entirely, and the lines upon his face bespoke his near fifty years, but there was still youth in his eye and an energy in his motions. He had hardly taken his turn in the ring, but he was a fit man of sinewy muscle, and he indulged himself in well-tailored clothing that showed his shape to advantage. He shied away from the French fashions he surreptitiously imported, but his clothes were of the finest cloth, immaculately clean, and dark in color so as to recall the sober fashions of the Amsterdam business world in which he had come of age.
As I stood there, a darkish man of some middle years approached me with an obvious caution. I could see he was a Jew, but clean-shaven and dressed much as an English tradesman might have been—boots, sturdy linen
