A Conspiracy of Paper

matter at hand, and I’m not sure I shall ever know. I wonder if this inquiry will yield anything at all.”

“You discourage too easily,” he said. “And while you get discouraged, I make progress. Benjamin,” he said, tapping the bundle of papers on the table beside him. “I now know why your father was killed.”

FIFTEEN

I STARED AT MY uncle in astonishment.

“Yes,” he repeated as he tapped the envelope with satisfaction. “I believe I now know why your father was killed. We are now closer to learning who is responsible.”

I set down my wineglass and leaned forward, but I said nothing.

“Our conversation the other day,” he continued, “inspired me to return to my brother’s papers and look for anything that might suggest what manner of investment had made him so secretive in his last days. I thought perhaps he had inadvertently become entangled in some kind of scandalous project whose architects had killed him to conceal their treachery. But as I looked and discovered nothing, I became convinced that an investment of this kind was unlikely. Your father was far too canny to involve himself with something not founded upon a solid bottom. As I searched, I wondered if what I sought was not an investment he had made, but rather an investment he had not made, and when I began to look through other kinds of papers, I discovered this.”

He opened the envelope and removed a pile of manuscript pages—perhaps forty or fifty of them—covered with the wide, looping handwriting of my father. “What have you found?”

“It is called A Conspiracy of Paper; or, the South Sea Company Expos’d. It appears to be a pamphlet your father sought to publish.”

“My father publish?” I asked incredulously.

My uncle laughed softly. “Oh, yes. He authored perhaps four or five short works—all on financial matters, and all published anonymously, as is the custom. Two or three of his pamphlets were received with great enthusiasm. He wrote several on behalf of the Bank of England, you know, for it was an institution he saw as vital to the nation’s economy.”

My confusion was now complete. “The Bank of England,” I repeated, hardly above a whisper. “He was a defender of the Bank? I cannot understand it.”

“But why?” my uncle asked. “Your father was a clever man, and he studied the banks of the other great nations, especially those of Holland. He became firmly convinced that the Bank offered the greatest security for the nation’s finances.”

That my father could take the time to write something for the benefit of others shocked me. “Why should he bother to undertake such a project? What had he to gain?”

My uncle shook his head. “Your father loved nothing so much as convincing others that he was right.”

I nodded. I had seen him do so a hundred times at dinners and gatherings. That he should try to convince the world of something made more sense than I had first credited. But if this explained why he should publish his views, it did not tell me why he should publish these views. “Is not his enemy, is not Perceval Bloathwait, a Bank director?” I asked cautiously.

“Bloathwait,” my uncle repeated as though I had uttered something nonsensical. “What do you know of him?”

The blankness of my uncle’s face chilled me. If he could so effectively act as though there had been nothing between my father and Bloathwait, what else might he be concealing? I remembered that when I was a boy my uncle and my father had sometimes argued over these matters of prevarication. Indeed, taking pride in his importation of contraband commodities, my uncle often played the wily Jacob to my father’s stoical Esau. “You fear the worst,” my uncle once told my father, “because you are such a poor deceiver. In matters of finance it is easy enough to confuse—all those hard terms and such—and men are often blinded by their own greed. But to deceive a customs inspector, a man whose very livelihood depends upon his ability to find you out—now that is an art.”

It was no difficult thing for me to imagine how my uncle could deceive customs inspectors. He had an ingenuous quality that made it hard not to do aught but like him. For the first time, however, I could not but wonder if he practiced his deceptive arts upon me for some purpose. I was not so suspicious as to assume the necessity of villainy where I found concealment. Perhaps, I considered, my uncle sought to protect some secret that had no connection to the inquiry.

“How can I not know of Bloathwait?” I demanded in a voice with which I hoped to impress upon him that I would not be distracted. “He tormented my father, he tormented me when I was but a boy. Since I have begun this inquiry I have wondered if he might not be in some way involved with what happened to Father.”

“I am surprised you knew of Samuel’s problems with Mr. Bloathwait. He rarely discussed matters in which he appeared at a disadvantage. You say you had some contact with Bloathwait?”

“I did—enough to show me that Bloathwait is a madman, I would put nothing past him. And that is why I am shocked to learn my father defended the Bank.”

“The difficulties with Mr. Bloathwait happened long ago. And your father’s troubles were with the man,” my uncle explained, “not the Bank. Samuel did not change how he felt about something like the Bank simply because one of its directors wished him ill.”

“And is this pamphlet in support of the Bank of England?” I asked.

“Oh, it does indeed support the Bank, but, more important, it exposes the South Sea Company. You will read it for yourself, but your father makes three major points in this pamphlet. First, he argues that for several years now the South Sea Company has been growing in power, despite the fact that its patent to trade in the South Seas has yielded very little real wealth.”

I thought on all of this. “But you have told me as much yourself. I can hardly believe that any organization would propose to kill all men who uttered common knowledge.”

“You are quite right,” my uncle said, “but there is more.” He began to leaf through the papers, looking for nothing at all, I suspect, but drawing some comfort from the sight of the handwriting. “Your father believed that the security of the South Sea Company has been compromised—that someone has been circulating fictitious South Sea stock, and that these activities could be possible only with the aid of men working within the Company itself.”

I own I did not fully understand the implications of such a forgery. “If this were true, would not the Company want the forgery of its stock put to an end?”

“Of course, but it would want to do so quietly. Your father wrote that this counterfeit stock represents a complete failure on the Company’s part to regulate its own business and that the Company should not be trusted with millions of the nation’s pounds.”

I could not but think of what Elias had said, of how his ideas of probability had led him to suspect the involvement of a company. Now it appeared that my father had indeed involved himself in something dangerous, something worthy of the kind of plot Elias had envisioned. “Is it your belief that my father was killed by the South Sea Company in order to keep him from exposing the counterfeit stock?”

“I am not certain I would put it so bluntly.” He spread out his hands. “But I do believe that there may be a relationship between his death and this information.”

I picked up the manuscript and began to leaf through it. “I suppose,” I said absently, “I shall have to pay a visit to the South Sea Company.”

My uncle laughed. “Will you march in there, manuscript in hand, and demand what information they have of your father’s death? This is one of the most powerful institutions in the Kingdom, and it grows more powerful all the time. You must not take it lightly.”

“You sound like my friend Elias. He believes these companies capable of anything.”

“Never underestimate the power and the villainy of stock-jobbers.” His voice held something ominous that I misliked.

“Your brother was a stock-jobber,” I pointed out hesitantly.

“I do not mean to suggest that to work in the funds is to be corrupt, but it is a course that can lead to corruption, and there is power enough to make that corruption dangerous indeed. Your friend is right to advise caution.”

“What of your friend Mr. Adelman?” I asked pointedly. “Can he not help us? If he is connected to the South Sea Company, then perhaps he can offer some insight.”