D’Arblay flattened out his lips into a condescending smile. “You are not tempting fate by protecting your investment. Your tickets cost you three pounds each, and if you draw blanks, the amount will be repaid over a period of thirty-two years. This is a very small investment indeed. I simply offer you the chance to insure your lottery tickets for an additional 2 percent for ten years.”
“But it is a chance?” the man inquired. “It is not guaranteed?”
D’arblay nodded. “Like you, we wish to keep intact the spirit of the lottery. You may insure your lottery tickets with a kind of lottery insurance—each losing ticket places you in the drawing for the additional revenue, and at only one shilling per ticket I think you will agree that it dramatically increases your chances of winning without to any great extent increasing your risk.”
His associate bobbed his head. “Well, you make a compelling case, sir, and I think of myself as a sporting man.” He slid some coins across the table. “I should like five tickets insured.”
The men made an appointment to meet again for the purpose of recording the ticket numbers, and, shaking d’Arblay’s hand, the other man made his way out of Jonathan’s.
I had, during this exchange, been standing behind d’Arblay, who now, alone at his table, looked straight ahead and said, “As you have been attending my conversation so nearly, may I presume that you have business of me?”
I stepped forward to where he could see me. “You may.” I gave him my name and reminded him that I had inquired of him earlier in the day.
D’Arblay rose just enough to offer me a bow. “In what capacity may I serve you, sir? Do you wish to buy or sell?”
“If I wished to buy,” I said slowly, wishing to know more of the man before I pressed him, “what would you have to offer me?” I sat at the table and faced him, attempting to imitate the ingenuous appearance of the man who had just left.
“Why, anything that one may sell, of course. Name what issue you seek, and I shall provide it for you within two days.”
“So you will sell me what you do not have?”
“Of course, Mr. Weaver. Have you never done business upon the ’Change? Why, you are very fortunate to have found me as you have, for I can promise you that not every man you come across will serve you as honestly as I. Nor can you easily expect to find a man as well situated as I. You need but name your interest, sir, and I can promise you that I shall procure it within an acceptable time, or I shall return your money with my good wishes. No man has yet had cause to call me a lame duck,” he boasted, using the language of the Exchange to signify a man who sold what he could not provide. “I think you will further find that, once we complete our business, my fees are competitive. May I ask how you learned my name?”
“I learned your name of William Balfour,” I explained, “and what I seek is information, not government issues.”
D’Arblay sucked upon his already hollow cheeks, took a bit of snuff, and folded his hands neatly upon the table. “I fear you must misunderstand me. I do not trade in information of any kind—there is so little to be gained and so much to be lost.”
“I seek only justice, Mr. d’Arblay, for your late employer. Young Mr. Balfour has come to me with the belief that his father’s death was not what it appears, and he suspects there may be some machinations in the Alley to explain the deceit.”
“I dismiss the very notion,” d’Arblay said. “Now, if you will excuse me, I believe I have business to attend to.”
He began to rise, but I stopped him with a single look. “I do not think you understand me, sir. Mr. Balfour has explained to me that his father’s estate was missing a prodigious quantity of money for which he cannot account. As the late Mr. Balfour’s clerk, you would have been the first man to notice such an absence. And yet, apparently, you did not. I wonder how you can account for that.”
“If you accuse, I would prefer you did so in plain language,” d’Arblay said haughtily. “I can assure you that I cannot account for missing money from Balfour’s estate—unless one accounts for gambling, excessive drinking, living beyond one’s means—and, I might add, three expensive mistresses, not one of them worth her upkeep, to my mind. I am surprised Mr. Balfour would send you upon so foolish a quest. He of all people despised his father for being a wastrel. Mr. Balfour—the elder, that is—was once industrious and successful, but as he grew older he felt that he had earned the right to waste all that he had accomplished, and as his son watched his estate disappear, he began to hate his father.”
I nodded, thinking about the discrepancy in Balfour’s version of the tale. “Yet you told young Mr. Balfour that you believed some issues to be missing from his father’s estate.”
“I did no such thing. Who told you this preposterous lie?” D’Arblay did not wait for me to answer. “Missing issues, indeed. My late employer was certainly capable of losing valuable pieces of paper, but fortunately I ordered those affairs, not he. It is only owing to my skills that I was able to keep his estate afloat as long as I did. In the end, however, he was quite ruined, and as you know he could not endure his shame. There really is very little to this history that should surprise you, although it is a cautionary tale from which many could learn.” D’Arblay folded his arms, pleased with the wisdom of this observation.
“Can you think of anything to suggest that Mr. Balfour’s death was not what it appears?”
“Nothing,” d’Arblay replied adamantly.
“And for whom do you work now, Mr. d’Arblay?”
“I have offered my services in putting Mrs. Balfour’s affairs in order. She is a foolish woman who has long held her money in gold plate and precious jewels. I have convinced her that the funds shall serve her more justly.”
“And can you tell me what Mrs. Balfour stood to inherit from her husband—assuming he died solvent, that is?”
D’Arblay screwed his face into a skeletal attitude of disgust. “Not a thing,” he said. “Mrs. Balfour had a separate settlement upon her. She would have inherited nothing. Balfour’s mismanagement was an embarrassment to her, but nothing more.”
That was precisely what Balfour had told me, but as their stories had several discrepancies, I wanted to see how d’Arblay characterized the financial arrangement between the spouses. “I see. Where might I reach you if I have any more questions regarding this matter?”
“Allow me to be blunt with you, sir. I have no desire to have you ever visit me in my places of business or residence. I have endured this conversation only out of courtesy to the late Mr. Balfour, who was a kind gentleman, if a foolish one. I can offer you no further information, so there is little reason for you to seek me out.”
“I shall then thank you for your help.” I rose and bowed at him before heading farther into the thick confusion of Jonathan’s. As I wandered, pushing my way through the crowds, I attempted to understand the conversation. If old Balfour’s estate had been robbed, then there could have been no one in a better position to perpetrate the robbery than d’Arblay. Elias’s suspicions of plot and scheme might go no further than this one clerk, who, for all I knew, might have had the power to rob his employer freely. On the other hand, I had only young Balfour’s belief that the estate had been robbed. Surely one of them lied, but if d’Arblay was the liar, he might still not be the thief. Such a man could obscure a crime that he might protect his own reputation.
I would not understand this crime, or this purported crime, unless I better understood the Alley itself. So I thought it a fine idea to take advantage of the library available in the coffeehouse, and made my way over to the shelves, where I began to search through the mountains of material, organized in no way I could discern. The proprietors showed little worry about insulting their patrons, for many of the pamphlets decried stock-jobbers as villainous Jews and foreigners who made Englishmen effeminate with their financial legerdemains. I dismissed titles that I thought too narrow in their focus, such as
Even as a boy I had been shockingly inept at matters of hard books. My teachers had refused to understand why I could not master what came far more easily to other boys. More often than not, words would simply blur upon the page as I looked at them, and I found myself thinking of engaging in anything other than my studies. It
