'I have not. I did call on Wray at his house, but he was not at home and in any event that was about another matter entirely.' A spasm of pain crossed his usually impassive face and for a moment he hung his head. 'No. From the first I had no intention of going to the Admiralty until I had seen you unofficially and had asked your advice: now I am doubly glad of it.'
'Is it indeed a very great sum?'
'You shall see.' Stephen stood up, took off his coat and waistcoat, tucked up his shirt and unwound the bandage. Once again the brass box fell unexpectedly; once again it burst open; and once again the amount astonished those who picked it up.
'No, no,' said Sir Joseph. 'This is nothing to do with us. This is nothing to do with naval intelligence. This exceeds the whole department's budget. This is something on quite another scale. This represents the subversion of a realm.'
'I had not remembered it as so much,' said Stephen.
'I doubt I made the addition at the time: my mind was much taken up by my patients.' He waved a sheaf of bills and said 'In vain may heroes fight and patriots rave, If secret gold sap on from knave to knave, at least in this amount.'
'Heavens,' said Sir Joseph, still busily creeping about the floor, 'were I as good at the mathematics as your friend Aubrey - and I remember the paper he read to the Royal Society on a new way of calculating the occultation of stars made my head ache - I could reckon the number of men required to carry this sum in gold. And a small brass box will hold it all! Oh the convenience of paper money and the draft on a discreet banking house, made out to bearer! Do you remember how your couplet goes on?' he asked, getting up with creaking knees.
'Pray remind me,' said Stephen, who was very fond of Blain.
'Blest paper credit,' said Sir Joseph, emphasizing the paper and raising one finger,
'Blest paper credit! last and best supply!
That lends corruption lighter wings to fly!
A single leaf shall waft an army o'er
Or ship off senates to a distant shore.
Pregnant with thousands flits the scrap unseen
And silent sells a king, or buys a queen.'
'Pregnant with thousands, yes indeed,' said Stephen. 'The question is, what am I to do with my pregnant scraps?'
'It appears to me that the first thing to do is to make an inventory,' said Sir Joseph. 'Let us put them into some kind of order, and then if you will read out the bare names, dates and figures I will write them down.'
The inventory took some time and at the end of each page they paused for a glass of port. During one of these pauses Sir Joseph remarked 'To begin with, Barrow was
positively obsequious to mc; then he learnt that I too was the son of a labouring man and he despised me straight away. Wray is well-connected, and I believe it is that, quite as much as his cleverness, which makes Barrow value him.'
'Will I seal it again?' asked Stephen, when the list was finished and the box was full.
'You might as well,' said Sir Joseph. 'I do not believe there is a piece of string in the house; I tried to put up a parcel not long since, but with no success.'
'And is it Barrow I will give it to, or Wray? And will I desire them to give me a receipt?' asked Stephen: a great mental and spiritual fatigue had come over him and all he wanted was to be told what to do.
'You should say you wish to see me, and when they tell you I am not there you should ask for Wray, since it was with him that you were last in contact. As for a receipt-No. I think a certain sancta simplicitas is in order here - a placid handing-over of this enormous fortune without any question of quittance or formal acknowledgement. In any event a receipt would be pointless, since if there is bad faith they can always say there was more in the box in the first place, before the seal was broke. It would be as pointless as this inventory, which has no legal force or validity whatsoever. But I do not have to tell you, Maturin, that in intelligence we do not always regard the law very closely.' He passed the wax and held the candle while Stephen sealed the box and went on, 'This war has caused the most enormous pouring-out of public funds, and peculation has kept pace. A great deal of money passes through various hands in the Admiralty and some of them are tolerably retentive. When Mr Croker took over as First Secretary - I believe you were abroad at the time: oh yes, you were a great way off - he instantly looked into the affairs of Roger Horehound, Jolly Roger as we used to call him, and found that he had taken no less than two hundred thousand pounds. Not that that was in our department however: as you know the First Secretary has virtually nothing to do with intelligence -until recently it was entirely my concern. Jolly Roger's goose was cooked, but there are people cleverer and more cautious than Roger, and it has sometimes appeared to me that this taking-over of our department may well have greed as its motive, or one of its motives; it is a department in which expenditure cannot be closely controlled and in which large sums pass from hand to hand. If that is the case, and I am more and more persuaded of it, then the people concerned will surely cling to some of this superabundance,' - nodding towards the brass box. 'Not Barrow, for although I find him singularly unlovable I am perfectly certain that he is honest, rigidly honest: but he is a fool. The people concerned, I say, will cling... the temptation is very great... But it so happens that I am very well with the Nathans and their cousins - they have supported us nobly in this war - and as soon as any one of these bills is negotiated I shall know of it and what is more important I shall know just who my enemies are.' He made some remarks about the money-market to which Stephen paid little attention and then observed, with a chuckle, 'Such an elegant little trap; if it had not existed I should have had to invent it. But should I ever have had such a happy thought? I doubt it. Tell me, my dear Maturin, does anyone know that you were coming to see me?'
'No one. Except conceivably the porter at my club, who saw to the delivery of my note.'
'What is your club?'
'Black's.'
'It is mine too. I did not know you were a member?
