“Ah, Lizzy. She’s a treasure. Poor girl hasn’t been paid in months, but she won’t give up on us. Don’t know what we’d do without her.”
Sebastian said, “Why didn’t you tell me your niece tangled with Rothschild over a shipment of smuggled gold?”
“Been talking to Ambrose, have you?”
“Yes.”
Sheridan reached down to pet a gray tabby rubbing against his legs. “It all happened so many weeks ago, I frankly wasn’t even thinking about it when you were here before. I was focused on the last time I’d seen her. It wasn’t until after you’d gone I started wondering if Rothschild might have had a hand in what happened to the poor girl.”
“I take it she overheard something in his house she wasn’t meant to hear?”
The old man nodded. “It’s frightening, isn’t it? The simple, seemingly inconsequential decisions we make that can shift the entire course of our lives. She went to use the water closet after her lesson with the child and was coming down the stairs when she heard Rothschild consulting with one of his men. I suppose he thought she had gone. There was little in Jane’s world beyond music—and her boys, of course, when they were alive—so she didn’t know the background of what she was hearing. I suspect if Rothschild had simply smiled at her and let her go on her way, she probably wouldn’t have given it another thought.”
“What did he do instead?”
“He came the ugly—threatened her with all sorts of dire repercussions if she told anyone and then ordered her never to come near his house again.” Sheridan shook his head. “The man might be a wonder when it comes to manipulating markets and turning this nasty war to his advantage, but he’s a poor judge of people. He thought he was frightening her—and he did frighten her. But he also put up her back. She went home, thought about it all for a while, then came to ask me to explain it to her.”
“So Rothschild knew about the gold guineas hidden aboard the Viking?”
The old man gave a rude snort. “Of course he knew. He’s been smuggling gold out of England for years. Last December alone he shipped something like four hundred thousand guineas’ worth.”
“Good God,” said Sebastian.
The exportation of gold from Britain had been illegal for almost twenty years, ever since a disastrous run on gold stocks that took place shortly before the turn of the century. At the same time Parliament outlawed gold exports, they’d also made it illegal for the Bank of England to issue gold coins, forcing them to use only nonconvertible paper notes.
“The problem is,” Sheridan was saying, “thanks to this blasted war, the value of the pound has been going down at the same time the price of gold has skyrocketed. It’s a situation ripe for gold speculators, and the most successful speculator of them all is Nathan Rothschild. He buys gold in London with devalued British banknotes and then sells it on the Continent at a profit of twenty percent or more.”
“How . . . patriotic.”
Sheridan huffed a scornful laugh. “Oh, he’s that all right. And he’s not the only one, not by a long shot. Look at the Hopes’ bank! They helped arrange the bloody loans that enabled the United States to buy Louisiana from France, thus injecting millions of pounds into Napoléon’s war effort against us. How is that not treason? How? If there were any justice in this world, the lot of them would be tried and hanged. Instead, their descendants will be wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, while the poor women and children of this land starve in the streets and their menfolk are used for cannon fodder.”
“Speculators always manage to profit from war.”
“Yes, but this goes beyond mere speculation. What’s most disturbing about that gold shipment on the Viking is where it was headed. Rothschild used to send most of his gold to Amsterdam, Vienna, and Frankfurt. Now it’s all going to France, and the shipment on the Viking was only one of many he’s sent there this month. He has agents stationed at Gravelines to collect it and quickly send it directly to his brother in Paris.”
“You told this to Jane?”
The old man let out his breath in a pained sigh. “Some of it. I didn’t know it all at the time. I had to look into it a bit.”
“Do you think Jane might have told someone else about what she heard?”
“I did warn her not to.”
“So why do you blame yourself for what happened to her?”
Sheridan squinted over at him. “How do you know I do?”
“Ambrose said he heard you mumbling to yourself as you walked away.”
“Ah.” The old man rasped one hand across his beard-roughened chin. “I warned her not to tell anyone about what she’d heard, but it occurs to me that in the process of looking into it I may have accidently betrayed her. I mean, Rothschild knows I’m her uncle. What if someone told him I was poking around, asking questions? The man could easily have put two and two together.”
“And had her killed?”
Sheridan shook his head, although it was in uncertainty and confusion rather than in denial. “I don’t know. Would he do that, you think?”
“You said he threatened her. Threatened her with what?”
“He said if she breathed a word about what she’d heard, he’d break every bone in her body.”
“That sounds pretty specific to me.”
Sheridan looked up at him with troubled bloodshot eyes. “Yes, it does, doesn’t it?”
Chapter 33
The brightness of the sun bouncing off the snow-covered pavement hurt Sebastian’s eyes as he drove toward the City, guiding his horses through treacherously icy streets, past silent shops draped with glistening icicles and half-buried behind piles of shoveled snow. The sun might be out, but there was no warmth in it, and the few people he saw were bundled up and walking briskly. The air was cold and still, the smoke from the city’s chimneys rising straight up to smudge the blue sky. He could hear
