A Conspiracy of Paper

reconcile with him, but it is not too late to reconcile with your family and with your people.”

I thought on this for some time—I know not how long. Perhaps my father had changed since I had last known him. Perhaps the cold tyrant I remembered was as much a product of my fancy as my experience. I could not say, but my uncle’s words stung me; they made me feel like an irresponsible wretch who had brought misery to his family. All these years I had always thought of myself as the one who suffered. I chose to separate myself from wealth and influence. Now I began to understand how my uncle saw my self-imposed exile— to him my absence had been senseless and selfish and had hurt my family more than I had ever hurt myself.

“You are much older now, yes? Maybe you regret some of the things you did in your youth. Now you have grown into a respectable man. You remind me even a little of my own son, Aaron.”

I said nothing, for I wished neither to insult my uncle nor speak ill of the dead, but I hoped most earnestly that I in no way resembled my cousin. “I shall need to know the name of the coachman who ran down Father,” I said, returning the discourse to business. “And I would like to know if there was anyone in particular you knew to be Father’s enemy. Maybe someone who had threatened him. Will you do this for me?”

“I shall do this, Benjamin. In part I shall do it for you.”

“Is there anything else that struck you as important? Any link you can see between my father’s death and Balfour’s? Balfour’s son believes there may be some connection with the dealings of Exchange Alley, and these financial matters are far beyond my understanding.”

Uncle Miguel looked around. “This is no place to discuss concerns of family. It is no place to talk of the dead, and it is no place to order affairs of so private a nature. Come to my home tonight for dinner. Come at half past five. You will dine with your family, and after we shall talk.”

“Uncle, perhaps that is not the best way.”

He leaned forward. “It is the only way,” he said. “If you want my help, you come and have dinner.”

“You would risk letting your brother’s killer go free if I refuse?”

“There is no risk,” he said. “I have told you what you need to do, and you will do it. Protests only waste our time. I shall see you at half past five.”

I left the warehouse astonished at what had happened. I was to dine with my family, and I anticipated this evening with a healthy quantity of dread.

EIGHT

I ARRIVED NEAR ENOUGH on time at my uncle’s home on Broad Court in the parish of St. James, Dukes Place. In the year 1719, foreign Jews were still not permitted to own property in London, so my uncle rented a pleasant house in the heart of the Jewish neighborhood, only a brief distance from the Bevis Marks synagogue. His house was three stories; I cannot recall how many rooms, but it was well-proportioned for a man living with a wife and a single dependent and hardly more than a handful of servants. Still, my uncle often worked at home, as my father had, and he enjoyed entertaining guests.

Unlike many Jews who moved to Dukes Place and then left when they made their fortune—relocating to the more fashionable neighborhoods to the west—my uncle chose to remain behind to share his lot with the poorer members of his nation. It is true that the eastern parts of the city are none the most pleasant, for London’s prevailing winds blow every foul stench of a foul-smelling metropolis right to his doorway, but despite the odor and the poverty and the isolation of Dukes Place, my uncle would not think of relocating. “I am a Portuguese Jew, born in Amsterdam and moved to London,” Uncle Miguel told me when I was a boy. “I have no desire to move again.”

As I walked toward the door it occurred to me that it was Friday night, the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, and that my uncle had tricked me into attending a Sabbath meal. Memories of my childhood bombarded me—the warm odor of freshly baked egg bread, the din of conversation. Sabbath meals had always been held at my uncle and aunt’s house, for the Sabbath was, by tradition, a family occasion, and where I lived was less a family than a household. Every Friday before sundown we would walk from our house on Cree Church Lane to my uncle’s place, where we would share prayers and food with his family and whatever friends he had invited. My uncle would always talk to my brother and me as though we were adults, a habit I found both confusing and gratifying. My aunt would slip us jellies or little cakes before dinner. These meals were one of the few rituals from my childhood that I thought on with any fondness, and I felt a fleeting rage toward my uncle for exposing me to these memories once more.

Even after I had knocked upon the door I thought of running away, of abandoning my plans and my inquiry and Mr. Balfour and the idea that my father had been murdered. Let him stay dead, I nearly muttered aloud, but despite the urge to flee, I remained fast.

Isaac, a short and stooped curmudgeon who had been my uncle’s servant since I was but a boy, met me at the door. Nearing, I suppose, sixty or more, he appeared to me in good health and as close to good spirits as he was capable. “Had you come but a few moments later,” he said by way of greeting me, whom he had not seen in a decade, “Mr. Lienzo would have had to answer the door himself.” Isaac had always been particularly nice about matters of religion, and he refused to work on the Sabbath, as Jewish law dictates. As my uncle refused to work as well, he could hardly resent the same adherence to the law in a servant.

This house brought upon me a flood of ancient memories, for I had spent untold hours here as a child. Most of the furnishings were precisely as I recalled—the blues and reds of the Persian rug, the ornate woodwork of the stairway, the austere portraits of my grandparents upon the wall. More than the appearance, the scents recalled the Sabbaths of my childhood—stewed meats and boiled raisins and the sweet aromas of cinnamon and ginger.

In the parlor I was greeted by my uncle, who sat alone with a paper. It looked to be one of the publications that specialized in the dealings of government issues and stocks in ’Change Alley. Upon my entrance he set it aside. “Benjamin,” he said as he rose from his seat, “I am so glad you came. Yes, it is a very good thing to have you here.”

“You tricked me, Uncle,” I said. “You did not tell me it was a Sabbath meal for which you invited me.”

“I tricked you?” He grinned. “Did I hide from you the day of the week? You ascribe to me more wile than I have—though I should be glad to be as clever as you say.”

My retort was cut off by the entrance of my aunt, followed by a beautiful woman of perhaps one- or two- and-twenty. Aunt Sophia was an attractive older woman, a little inclined to be fat, and a bit silly in her manner. Her social interactions were almost exclusively with other Jewish immigrants, and she had never learned to speak English very well. Like my uncle, she wore clothing that spoke of her time among the Dutch. Her dress was of a thin black woolen, high in the neck and long in the sleeve, and her hair was piled up, pointing to a small, white bonnet upon her crown, so as to remind me of women in Dutch paintings of the last century.

She clasped my shoulders with her arms and asked me questions in halting English, which I answered in equally halting Portuguese. I astonished myself at the happiness I took in seeing her. She was a kind woman, and she looked at me with no judgment—I saw only her pleasure at having me in her home. She was, in fact, just as I remembered her.

“And this,” my uncle said at last, placing his arm around the beautiful woman, “is your cousin Miriam.”

The term cousin I knew was somewhat formal, for Miriam was my late cousin Aaron’s widow. I knew little of her or their marriage, for Aaron had wedded her after I had left home, upon the return from his first voyage to the Levant, but London is not so large that one does not hear stories. She had been my uncle’s ward, her own parents having died before she was fifteen, leaving her a handsome fortune. She had married Aaron by the time she was seventeen and been widowed of him by the time she was nineteen. Now, still in the bloom of her youth, and presumably possessed of a fortune, she remained within her father-in-law’s household.

Miriam had a Jewess’s coloring—olive skin, black hair, which she let dangle down in ringlets like a fashionable London lady, and rich green eyes. Her dress, too—a gown of sea green with yellow petticoats—bespoke a particular attention to the styles of the town. I could not help but think of this lovely woman, who came complete with her own fortune, as somehow trapped in my uncle’s house, only wanting a rescuer. Though I came with no fortune of my own, I suspected hers might prove sufficient for the two of us, and I almost laughed as I considered that I, a Jew, should wish to play Lorenzo to her Jessica.

I bowed deeply. “Cousin,” I said, feeling worldly and dashing. I was the wayward cousin returned, and I