Stone's Fall (71 page)

You must know this, Cort. You owe me nothing; had I acted differently, your father might, perhaps, have held on to his frail health long enough to be a proper parent. I do not apologise for using you in the matter of Barings in Paris and I imagine you do not expect such an apology. These things happen in politics and in business. My only mistake there was assuming you were sufficiently worldly-wise to expect it. Equally, I do not think that watching you over the years pays off my debt to you in any way. Had things been otherwise, you would not have needed me.

But you do owe a debt to Elizabeth. You took it on in Paris when you were willing to sacrifice her for the sake of some gold. You were her friend, she trusted you, and you betrayed her to vent your anger at me. I did not understand it at the time, but I fear the cruelty of your mother lives on in you. You enjoyed what you did that night too much; I saw it in your eyes, and I know that you have tried to justify yourself since by thinking that I, too, was prepared to do the same, if necessary. That I had Drennan acquire her diaries that I might use them myself. You were wrong. Even then I would have allowed the entire Empire to crumble to protect her. And you killed the man who saved you from the flames.

The bill you incurred then is outstanding, and I am calling it in. It is your only chance of throwing off forever that terrible inheritance which lies within you. You must hide or destroy this memoir of mine, ensure Louise Cort never grasps the truth, and watch over your half-sister for the rest of your life, enduring her hatred of you, never saying a word. Your father is part of you as well; you will comply with my wishes.

I love Elizabeth more than anything else in my life. I would gladly and willingly have given up every last penny I possessed for her. She could have asked anything, and I would have done it. She is my love. To see her sleep, to see her smile, to see the way she rests her head on her hand as she sits reading on the settee. That is all I have ever needed. This is my wife, and for every moment of the past twenty years I have loved her as a wife. She is the best person I have ever known; how that is I do not understand. Perhaps the cruelty and malice of her parents cancelled each other out, and by some miracle produced a woman who has neither. I do not know. All I know is that I would have laid down my life for her. Now I will.

My sins, the sins of Venice, have defiled the one person I have loved, the woman I should have protected and nurtured. I am married to my own daughter, the child I should have held in my arms and loved as a father. Whom I should have brought up, cherished, seen married, seen holding children in her arms. Instead, I consigned her to a cruel childhood, and then a terrible fate. I saw with my own eyes what I had done when I was confronted with the hideous product of our union, but I did not recognise it as such until now. It is too great to bear. I can no longer live with her, and I cannot live without her.

As long as she knows nothing, she will miss me and regret my passing, and will be able to build a new life, a happy one. Her husband, who was getting on in years, tripped on a carpet and fell from a window. Sad; he was a loving husband, but he never liked heights. She will mourn and, I hope, forget. She is young enough to remarry, and will be wealthy beyond care. I had wished to grow old with her—older, I should say—and that is no longer possible. She will instead carry a fond memory of me, rather than the repelled loathing that she must feel if she knew the truth.

She has done nothing wrong in her entire life, except love me. You thought I did not know of her past. I knew nearly everything; but I could find out nothing about her origins. Her story began at that orphanage in Lausanne. There was no trace of the identity of her mother, or her father, no notion where she had been born or even when. I looked, but came up with nothing. She was an orphan and what did it matter who or what her parents were? I loved her too much to be bothered by her way of life, so why should matters so far beyond her control be of any importance? Why should I have connected her with the ravings of a monster in Venice years before, cajoling a man with a tale to bend him to her will?

In a few moments I will open the window that has been waiting for me for near half a century. I do not fear it. That old Venetian has been patient, and will wait a few moments longer. All those things of which I was so proud, which gave me such satisfaction, have fled from my mind as if they had never happened. All those businesses, those tangled connections of money, will unravel when I am dead. I leave it to you to salvage what you can, if you wish. In a few short years, everything I have done will fade and be forgotten, as I will be and deserve to be.

Very well. Let it be so.

Author’s Note

Part of the fun of writing, for me at least, is to take ideas and situations that few people know much about and to try and make them interesting. When I began
Stone’s Fall
about three years ago, there were few things less interesting than crises in the banking system. There hadn’t been any for half a century, and we were told that they could never happen again. The bankers were just too clever now. Such things were for historians and novelists.

As I was both, and had once worked as a financial journalist in the City as well, then the worlds of finance and industry seemed perfect settings for a novel–doing the research was a little like going back to my old haunts. I also wanted to fill out one of the gaping holes in English literature–although many novelists have bankers and financiers as characters, their occupations tend to have little to do with their roles in the books. Their emotions and their lives never interact.

Equally, they are invariably portrayed in a negative light–I cannot think of many novels (and certainly not thrillers) where chief executives of corporations are portrayed as anything other than monsters. In Britain, the "industrial novel" of the nineteenth century, written by people like Mrs. Gaskell, has vanished entirely; there are more novels about novelists than there are about industry.

I have always thought this was a wasted opportunity; the current situation we find ourselves in is stuffed full of drama waiting to be turned into stories–how often do such gigantic egos, vast sums of money, and huge consequences come into such close conjunction? The global effects of credit crunch make the plot lines of the usual sort of thriller seem almost domestic in comparison.

I wish I could claim prescience and say that my finely tuned instincts made me realize better and earlier than the masters of the universe that trouble was a’coming. That my literary unconscious told me a collapse of the banking system was on its way. And that this was why I began
Stone’s Fall
.

Alas, if it did, then my unconscious kept the knowledge very much to itself. The more my manuscript and the front pages of the
Financial Times
came to resemble each other, the more surprised I became, not least because my book was set in the nineteenth century, and was supposed to be far removed from modern-day events. In fact, there are many similarities between then and now. What surprised me most (although perhaps it should not have done) was that, however much the world changes, human nature remains the same. The great constant in finance is the tendency of men to become befuddled by their own success, making them willing to take ever greater risks and eventually be brought down by their own vanity, which can easily overcome the most sophisticated expertise.

And that is the story, then and now.
Stone’s Fall
is a historical tale about how human weakness interacts with the great structures of modern industry and finance, and brings all to ruin. With Barings Bank in 1890, it was the vanity of the chairman that brought the City of London to the brink of ruin; with my (fictional) industrialist John Stone, it is a more intricate set of decisions and failings that lead to his fall from a window. It is a tale of love and frailty, as much as it is of high finance and skulduggery. The mixture, then, as now, is an often fatal combination.

Copyright © 2009 by Iain Pears for
Borders.com

WITH THANKS TO

Charlotte Bannister-Parker, Felicity Bryan, Véronique Cardi, Dan Franklin, Julie Grau, Kalypso Nikolaides, Lyndal Roper, Nick Stargardt, Karina Stern, Lucinda Stevens, Françoise Triffaux and, more than anyone and as usual, Ruth Harris.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I
AIN
P
EARS
was born in 1955. Educated at Wadham College, Oxford, he has worked as a journalist, an art historian, and a television consultant in England, France, Italy, and the United States. He is the author of the international best seller
An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Dream of Scipio,
a series of highly praised detective novels, a book of art history, an opera libretto, and countless articles on artistic, financial, and historical subjects. He lives in Oxford, England.

Stone’s Fall
is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people,
events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and
incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Iain Pears

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape,
a member of The Random House Group Limited, London, in 2009.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pears, Iain.
Stone’s fall/Iain Pears.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-385-53024-8
1. Capitalists and financiers—Fiction. 2. Arms transfers—Fiction.
3. International finance—Fiction. 4. Europe—History—1871–1918—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6066.E167S76 2009
823′.914—dc22          2009000472

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