that was when she told me it had been at your suggestion that she had made over the legacy to me. And you had asked her to conceal your part in the matter. I ask you again: why did you do that?'
'My answer is the same: I did not wish to put you under an obligation.'
'I am under a much greater obligation to my cousin Flora.'
'I do not doubt it.'
'She has made over what amounts to an income of nearly two hundred and fifty pounds a year.' Sophie looked up at me. 'So – tell me then: why should I not be grateful to you, as well as to her?'
'I had no intention of deceiving you. I wished to help you secure an independence, nothing more. If you had felt beholden to me, if you had known that I was concerned in any way – I – I feared it might cloud your judgement.'
'With regard to what?'
I did not answer. As if by common consent, we walked on, towards St James's Park, and it seemed to me that she walked a little closer to me than she had before. I could not see her face because of her bonnet, only the plumes nodding and swaying above her head. She murmured something. I was obliged to ask her to repeat it.
She stopped again and looked up at me. 'I said thank you. You showed true delicacy. I would have expected no less of you. Yet there are occasions when delicacy outlives its purpose. It is a virtue, undoubtedly, but it is not always appropriate to exercise it.'
I said, 'In that respect, it sounds strangely like prudence.'
We stood for a moment watching three magpies squabbling over a piece of bread and emitting their raucous, grating cry, like beans rattling in a gourd.
'How I detest magpies,' Sophie said.
'Yes – scavengers, thieves and bullies.'
'But do you know the rhyme that country people have about magpies? One for sorrow, two for mirth-'
'Three for a girl and four-'
'Three for a girl?' she interrupted. 'That was not what they said when I was a child. Besides four must be boy and it would not rhyme with mirth. No, when I was a child it was always three for a marriage.'
The magpies took fright and flew away.
'And four for a birth,' she added in a very low voice.
'Sophie?' I said, and held out my hand to her. 'Are you sure?'
'Yes,' she replied, and laid her hand in mine. 'Yes.'
APPENDIX
I
The foregoing account came into my hands after the death of my sister-in-law, Flora, the Dowager Lady Ruispidge, on the 21st of October last year. She had deposited a number of items in the strong-room of the lawyers who had served both her and her father.
'I do not trust banks,' she told me once. 'But lawyers go on for ever.'
The items included a small wooden box, bound with iron hoops and secured with two locks. It was brought to my house at Cavendish-square to await the services of the locksmith. But there was no need, for the keys were found in a writing chest my sister-in-law kept by her, and which she had by her bed when she died. The box held a thick, closely written manuscript, divided into numbered sections. At the bottom was a five-pound note enclosed in a sheet of paper inscribed with the name 'Miss Carswall'.
As I sat by the library fire after dinner, I skimmed through the manuscript's pages, by turns amazed, fascinated, distressed and disturbed. Time does not heal all wounds and there are some indeed which fester and grow worse as the years slip by.
The identity of the author was evident to me from the beginning. When I met him, in the last weeks of the reign of George III, Thomas Shield was a schoolmaster. He records that meeting, in the churchyard at Flaxern Parva, and also our last encounter a few months later, when we passed each other at the door of the Carswalls' house in Margaret-street. (Until now I had no idea of the significance of his visit. How I regret that I allowed myself to speak so intemperately.)
It was not long before I realised that Shield's narrative threw a new and often shocking light on the Wavenhoe scandal and, in particular, on the American associations of this dark affair. Few remember it now but it was one of the precursors of the great banking crisis of the winter of 1825-6; over forty years ago, it set London by the ears and brought ruin to a number of families. The manuscript also tells us something of the unhappy sequels in Gloucestershire and later in London, though these episodes attracted little attention at the time.
Many questions have, perforce, remained unanswered until now; and questions that should have been asked have never been posed. There is small wonder in this, for much information was never put before the public. For example, the role of the little American boy was never mentioned, then or later, despite the mingled fame and obloquy his career subsequently attracted. Contemporaneous accounts also ignored the parts played by other North Americans, among them Mr Noak of Boston, Massachusetts, and the Negro Salutation Harmwell from Upper Canada. Yet, without them, events could not have unfolded as they did. Until now, I believe, not a whisper has emerged of the connection between the failure of a London bank in 1819 and that sad and unnecessary conflict which had divided the two great English-speaking nations, Great Britain and the United States of America, a few years earlier.
In other words, the Wavenhoe scandal was like the Breguet watch that Stephen Carswall cherished as he never did a child: simple enough on the surface, but its apparent simplicity concealing a complex arrangement of hidden springs, wheels, checks and balances; organised according to rational principles, to be sure, but too delicate and complicated a piece of machinery to yield its secrets to the profane. Carswall's watch lies before me as I write, still keeping perfect time, its inner workings as mysterious to me now as on the day it came into my possession.
Tom Shield was right, in one way at least, and so was that hardened reprobate Voltaire. We owe respect to the living, but to the dead we owe only truth.
II
How did Thomas Shield's narrative come into the hands of my sister-in-law? We may safely assert that he would not have given it to Flora of his own free will. I questioned her servants as discreetly as I could, but none of them could shed light on the matter. There was no hint in her letters or other papers. She did not keep a diary. Her lawyers knew nothing.
The little writing chest by her bed also contained her account book. Throughout her life, my sister-in-law recorded how her money ebbed and flowed, for she knew the value of money; she was her father's daughter in this and much else. I found in a drawer of her bureau a set of account books stretching back to her schooldays in Bath. It occurred to me that perhaps her accounts might hold a clue to the manuscript's provenance.
I believe I was right, though it took me many hours to find the trace of it. (But what else have I to do, now I am old? After all, this is a story of old men's obsessions, and what is one more obsession among the others?) In the June of 1820, there began a series of small irregular payments, never more than five guineas. These were identified only by the initials QA. In May 1821 there was a much larger payment of ?80. After that date, QA continued to
