A Conspiracy of Paper (52 page)

The stratagems that had so long eluded me were now made clear. “It is for the same reason, then,” I speculated, “that Sir Owen conducted his business with me in St. James’s Park—in order to make a public showing of our dealings. He wished for word to reach you that he had formed some kind of agreement with your principal rival—in the hopes, I suppose, of making you see that he was not to be trifled with.”

Wild nodded. “Both Sir Owen and I were compelled to draw you in for more or less the same reasons. Naturally, he made more mistakes than I did, and as you grew too close, he was forced to attempt to remove you from his path.”

“And when you learned from Mr. Mendes that I grew despondent, you sent a false Sarah Decker to put me on Sir Owen’s trail.”

“And how do you know I did such a thing?”

“Who but Jonathan Wild has at the ready a stable of actress whores?”

“Who indeed?” He laughed.

I was silent for some time after this narrative. “It is astonishing,” I said at last. “But you have certainly emerged victorious.”

“Of course,” he added, “there was another possibility, and that was that in your inquiry you would be destroyed by Sir Owen, and while I would not have lost my current enemy, I should have eliminated a future one.”

“I wonder if it was you who had Sir Owen killed,” I said. “Perhaps you set him up to appear the mastermind behind the forgeries and then had him killed so he could not deny it.”

“Surely you have seen too much to believe that I alone could orchestrate that particular villainy. Sir Owen’s death looks to me like the style of these companies, who strike boldly yet secretively. Hardly my way at all. I prefer quietly and secretly.”

“As you have tried to deal with me,” I noted.

“Precisely. You see, Mr. Weaver, to my mind I owe you nothing. And when I said that I believed we could coexist, I was saying that only to lay down your guard. I do not believe we can coexist, and we must come to blows sooner or later. I should like to add one thing, however, because I sense you are overly nice in your notions of justice. The three men of Sir Owen’s employ—the ones who killed Michael Balfour—are even as we speak awaiting trial at Newgate. Not for murder, but for other hanging offenses such as I could muster. These men are a danger to our city, I think you’ll agree, and while I profit from their destruction, all of London profits as well.”

He paused to chuckle lightly. “In the end, I suppose, the South Sea Company and I did work together—if not intentionally so. But we shared the same goals, and each, in our own way, strove for the same ends. I arranged for the exposure of Sir Owen, with you as my instrument. They, in turn, arranged for his destruction. Indeed, I to some degree depended upon their desire to remove him, for neither I nor the Company could risk his revealing the things he knew.”

Wild stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Yet I may give the Company too much credit when I say we worked toward the same goal, for I believe I did lead them along rather effectively. Indeed, I manipulated the Company no less skillfully than I manipulated you.”

I knew what he said to be true, but I realized that I had, against all evidence, wanted to believe that Wild had done it—to believe that I had misunderstood Adelman’s winks and nods. Wild was powerful, but he was only one man, and he could be destroyed in a moment. The South Sea Company was an abstraction—it could kill, but it could not be killed. In its rapacious desire to circulate paper wealth, it was all that Elias had said: merciless, murderous, invisible, and as ubiquitous as banknotes themselves.

I found I did not like to think on this abstract villain, and I had need to concentrate on the flesh-and-blood villain before me. “I think,” I said after a moment’s reflection, “I shall rejoice upon your hanging day.”

I could see that I had shocked Wild. Perhaps he had grown to believe he could predict my every act, my every word. “You are bold, sir. I should think you would have learned not to think so lightly of me. You believe you can somehow outmatch me, Weaver? You are but one man,” he said, “and my forces are legion.”

“It is true,” I said as I left the room, “but they hate you, and they will be your undoing.”

THIRTY-SIX

I
BEGAN THIS NARRATIVE
with the intent of recounting the adventures of my life, but so many pages later I have only told a single story. Perhaps, as Elias would have said, from these particulars some generalities may be drawn.

Some three weeks after that meeting with Wild, I read in the newspapers that the body of Virgil Cowper had been found washed up on the riverbanks, and the coroner had ruled that he had fallen in the waters while drunk. I asked some questions, but everyone believed that his death had been a mishap of indulgence, and so I concluded that the paper conspirators had taken one more life for which they would never answer.

For my own part, my condition as a guest at Broad Court had grown uncomfortable. Adelman had ceased to visit in the capacity of Miriam’s suitor, but business brought him by the house not infrequently, and I could hardly meet the eye of this man I knew so deep within a conspiracy that had so nearly destroyed me. My uncle cared little what Adelman or the South Sea Company had done, only that they had in the end acted against my father’s murderer. Perhaps I judged too harshly those who would take the life of such a villain. Whatever the circumstances of his death, Sir Owen had murdered four people that I knew of, including my own father. No, my displeasure was not with the South Sea Company’s rough justice. It was something else. It was the coldness of their justice. It mattered not to them that Sir Owen was a villain, only that he endangered their business. Their actions were not about the lives Sir Owen had taken, but about the profits he would threaten. What are the probable returns on this death? What interest will ending a man’s life yield? It was a kind of bloody speculation; it was stock-jobbery by murder.

E
VERY YEAR IN LATE
October Elias and I would find our way to an appropriate tavern to celebrate the anniversary of the death of Sir Owen—Martin Rochester Day, we called it. It was our private holiday, and one that would often prove to be as grim as it was drunken. We recollected our adventures as best we could, and often I wrote much of what we said down for fear I should someday forget. These sloppy scribblings served as the first notes to the memoir I have now all but completed.

By the time of our first anniversary, Elias had cast aside his dreams of the theatre, but his pen would not lie still. He wrote volumes of wretched verse, and much later in his life he wrote some well-received novels and a memoir under an assumed name. For her part, Miriam had by then moved into splendid lodgings near Leicester Fields, where she watched her Company stock yield profits. Unlike the rest of us, she sold when the stock had almost reached its pinnacle, and for a time she had all the independence she could have desired. Alas that such things cannot last, and Miriam saw her long-sought-after freedom crushed by an ill-advised marriage that I have neither the space nor the heart to detail here.

Adelman and Bloathwait both survived the upheavals of the South Sea year and continued with their schemes and rivalries for as long as they lived. Of Jonathan Wild, I hardly need mention the inauspicious conclusion of his life, but before he met justice at the end of a Tyburn rope he lived long enough to cause me far more troubles than he did in this little history. I take some comfort at the thought that the troubles I finally caused him were far more permanent and allowed no opportunity for revenge.

As for me, I find that my many exploits are too varied to recount in this volume. I can only say that my inquiry into the forged South Sea stock changed forever the way I would think of and conduct my business.

At my uncle’s urgings, I took my new lodgings in Dukes Place, just off Crosby Street. Elias complained that he should risk his foreskin every time he came to pay me a visit, but to the best of my knowledge, he died with it still attached. I continued to live in that neighborhood until this day, and while I never feel that I entirely belong, I suppose I feel less out of place here than any other neighborhood of the metropolis.

It was at an alehouse near my new home that Elias and I always met to remember Martin Rochester’s villainy. I often recall that first anniversary because in the autumn of 1720 the disaster of the South Sea Bubble, as it came to be known, was foremost in our and everyone’s thoughts, and it seemed as though Elias’s rants on the dangers of the new finance turned out to be nothing short of prophecy.

The South Sea scheme had been approved by Parliament shortly after the events of this history, and holders of funded government issues flocked to exchange their certain investments for the vague promise of Company dividends. As each investor converted his holdings, the South Sea stock rose—indeed it rose more than anyone could have imagined, until my five hundred pounds of stock was worth more than five thousand. Throughout the Kingdom, men who had held but small investments were now as rich as lords. It was an era of opulence and excess and wealth—an era in which men who had been middling shopkeepers or modest tradesmen suddenly found themselves transported to their massive town houses in gold equipages drawn by six stout beasts. We ate venison and drank fine old claret and danced to the most expensive Italian musicians we could import.

Then, in the summer of 1720, London awoke and said, “For what reason is this stock worth so much?” and as though a spell had been cast, those who had made money sought to solidify their holdings, to turn their promises into reality; that is to say, they flocked to sell, and when they sold, the stock plummeted. My five hundred pounds of stock was once more worth five hundred pounds, and men who had unimaginable wealth one day were merely comfortable the next. Countless investors who had bought in after the stock had already risen were utterly ruined.

The nation cried out for justice, for revenge, for the heads of the South Sea directors to be set upon stakes along the London road, but what the nation had not yet learned, what it would never learn, was that the spirit of stock-jobbing, once conjured up by the wizards in ’Change Alley, could never again be banished to perdition. As for justice and revenge, those lofty principles for which the South Sea victims clamored—these too are but commodities to be bought and sold upon the ’Change.

HISTORICAL NOTE

T
HE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE
of 1720 was a real event, best remembered as the first stock-market crash in the English-speaking world, but it was also the culmination of years of confusion and abuses within the London financial markets. For Great Britain in the early eighteenth century, stocktrading, government issues, and lotteries were all relatively new, and the uncertainty that comes with newness created an exciting culture within Exchange Alley. Certain thinkers—some as well-known as Daniel Defoe, others anonymous or forgotten—cast the financial markets as either foreboding or wondrous, promising either bounty or doom. This volatile atmosphere yielded a massive body of writings about the new financial order, which has lately generated an intense scholarly interest in the South Sea scheme, the crash, and eighteenth-century British finances in general. Within the past five years, historians, literary critics, and sociologists have shown a markedly increased interest in the fiscal volatility of this period, and this interest suggests something about the economic uncertainty of our own era.

This novel grew out of my work as a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, where my research focused on the ways in which eighteenth-century Britons imagined themselves through their money. After years in the archives, reading pamphlets, poems, plays, periodical essays, and long-forgotten novels, I failed to find the source that told me precisely what I wanted to know about the new finance. So I wrote one. My goal in this novel has been to capture both the unbridled enthusiasm and the pervasive anxiety of the period leading up to the South Sea Bubble.

Most of the characters in this novel are purely fictional, though they are frequently composites of figures who appeared in eighteenth-century writings and in the historical record. No such person as Benjamin Weaver ever lived, but I found inspiration for his character in the story of Daniel Mendoza (1764-1836), who credited himself with inventing what he termed the “scientific method of boxing” and who later became a professional debt-collector. Jonathan Wild and his henchmen Mendes and Arnold, however, were indeed real people, but I have taken numerous liberties with their characters. From the mid-1710s until his execution in 1725, Wild controlled much of the criminal activity around London, and he is generally acknowledged as the first modern crime lord. Until the early part of this century, Jonathan Wild was a household name on both sides of the Atlantic, but the twentieth century has lately produced enough of its own colorful criminals who are well able to take the great thief-taker’s place in our cultural imagination.

I have, in the language of this novel, tried to suggest the rhythms of eighteenth-century prose, although I have made many modifications in the interest of readability. My intention was to invoke the feel of contemporaneous speech without burdening readers with idiosyncrasies that often seem inhospitable or circuitous by today’s standards.

Finally, I would like to address the matter of money. British money in the eighteenth century broke down this way: twelve pence equaled a shilling, five shillings a crown, twenty shillings a pound, and twenty-one shillings a guinea. Early readers of this novel have often asked what those denominations are worth in today’s currency. Unfortunately, there is no direct mathematical formula that would accurately convey value, because the uses of money varied so dramatically within the different social classes. A poor laborer in London might earn twenty pounds a year, with which he would feed his family bread, beer, and occasionally meat, buy inexpensive clothing and cheap lodgings. A fashionable gentleman might spend twice that amount on an evening’s entertainment without risk of being called extravagant. Benjamin Weaver talks of earning one hundred to one hundred fifty pounds in a year, which constitutes a solid middle-class income, particularly for a man living alone. For someone who wished to wear fashionable clothing, entertain guests in high style, keep numerous servants, and drive a handsome equipage, five hundred pounds a year could prove a tight squeeze. Money’s value, of course, is most visibly constituted by what it can buy, and in eighteenth-century London, what money bought depended on the social position of the spender.