Stone's Fall (13 page)

“So what do I do?”

“If I were you? I’d forget I’d ever seen it. If you say so much as a word you will start a financial storm the likes of which London has not seen for decades.”

I could see that he was enjoying this brush with the occult secrets of the mighty. I wasn’t. I knew better than he realised what we were dealing with. He was right. I should leave this alone; forget all about it. But I
was
a reporter. I wanted to know what was going on; where that money had gone. The fact that it had nothing to do with Ravenscliff ’s child was irrelevant. I had completely forgotten about the little brat.

Franklin brought me back to myself. “I must go,” he said. “I have to go to church.”

How he could think of such a thing, when he had just discovered proof that all these people he liked to associate with in the pews were not quite what they seemed I did not know. But Franklin was not the sort who would allow one sinner to call into question his entire outlook on life. I suspected he would pray fervently that God would show him His favour by allowing him to get a good price for his Rialto Ordinaries the next morning.

I nodded. He left, but not without reminding me of his advice. “One other thing,” he added as he opened the door. “File three/twenty-three. Personal disbursements. Try that. Apart from anything else, it seems that His Lordship has been supporting the International Brotherhood of Socialists for the past year.”

I sat in Ravenscliff ’s study for the next hour in a reverie, occasionally emerging from my mood to study the notes Franklin had made. I did quite well. Not that I uncovered any significant new financial information, of course. That was quite beyond me. But I at least managed to understand it. And I discovered, by comparing handwriting, that the accounts detailing the true situation at Rialto had been prepared for Ravenscliff by Joseph Bartoli, his right-hand man. My simple solution to the problem—simply asking Bartoli what was going on—disappeared. If Bartoli was part of some elaborate fraud, he was hardly going to open up to me.

Eventually I put down the file, and took out file three/twenty-three. It was, as Franklin had said, Ravenscliff ’s personal expenses, and exactly the sort of documents I should have been studying. If there were any payments for illegitimate children they should be here, buried amongst the itemised notes for clothes, shoes, household expenses, food, servants’ wages and so on. The lists went back to 1900, and there were many entries which were ambiguous. I realised after a while that detailed study would yield nothing: an entire schoolroom of bastards could easily have been hidden under the heading of “miscellaneous expense” (1907: £734 17s 6d). All it established was that, by the standards of the wealthy (if, perhaps, no longer quite as wealthy as I had imagined) Ravenscliff was not at all extravagant. His greatest expense was his wife (1908: £2,234 12s 6d) and he spent more on books than he did on clothes. The payments Franklin referred to were on a separate sheet on the top of the file. Easy enough to understand, they were headed “Provisional list of payments to the International Brotherhood of Socialists.” No ambiguity there. And a list of dates and amounts. This was curious. It was a lot of money; nearly £400 in the past year. Nor did it occur in the more detailed sheets of expenses underneath it. And what on earth was someone like Ravenscliff doing giving money to a group who, one assumed, were dedicated to abolishing everything he stood for? Had he had a Damascene conversion? Did that explain the sucking of money out of his own companies? I went back to his appointments diary and there, jotted down for a few days after his death, was the entry, “Xanthos—ibs.”

I did not like Ravenscliff by instinct, but I was beginning to find him fascinating. A book-reading, socialist-sympathising, child-begetting capitalist fraud. Wilf Cornford at Seyd’s had told me he was nothing but money; he was beginning to be very much more than that. Too much more, in fact.

“They told me you were still here,” came the voice of Lady Ravenscliff from the door. I looked up. It was getting dark in the room and I glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. Nearly eight o’clock. No wonder I felt uncomfortable. I was hungry. No more nor less than that. That was a relief.

“Working away,” I said cheerfully.

“And have you discovered anything?”

“Not on the main question, no,” I said, dragging my thoughts away from the disappearing millions and resolving to follow Franklin’s advice. “Merely somethings which revive the nosy old journalist in me.”

I handed her the sheet of paper about the Brotherhood. She looked at it with a very prettily arched eyebrow, then her glance returned to me.

“Did your husband start going around calling for world revolution in his last months?” I asked. “Tell the butler over the kedgeree that property was theft, and how he should throw off his chains?”

“Not to my knowledge. He rarely said anything over breakfast. He usually read
The Times.
”

“Then this is a bit of a curiosity, don’t you think?”

She looked again at the piece of paper. “It is. Have you ever heard of these people?”

“No,” I said, a little disingenuously. It was true, but these sorts of people had been talked about at my socialist reading group. If such an admission would have produced in her a look of alarm at my dangerous political associations, I might have mentioned it, but I suspected it would produce nothing more than contempt and even pity. Earnest men in scruffy clothes in a dingy room arguing about things they had no power to alter. Well, it was a bit like that.

“I imagine they are some sort of revolutionary group,” I said lamely.

“How very odd.” She tossed the paper aside, and changed the subject. “I was wondering whether you have eaten? And if not whether you would care to do so? I am not in the mood for company, but do not wish to dine alone. You would do me a great kindness if you accepted.”

I looked up, my eyes caught hers and my world changed forever.

I was paralysed; literally, I could not move. Rather than simply looking at her eyes, I seemed to be peering deep into her soul. I felt as though I had been punched in the stomach. How can I put it? Lady Ravenscliff vanished from my mind to be replaced by Elizabeth; I can give no better account of the transformation in my mind. Her vulnerability and her pride were both part of it, I suppose, as were her beauty, and her voice, and the way she moved. A strand of dark-brown hair hanging down over her left eye made all the difference in the world, as did the slightest glimpse of a collarbone above the top of her dark dress.

Something happened to her as well, I believed, although I could not tell whether it was real, or simply a reflection of what was going on inside my head. I could not tell if I truly saw something, or glimpsed only what I wanted there to be. I looked away eventually, and had I been required to move just then I do not know if I would have managed to do so without trembling.

I had no idea what happened, or rather how it happened. I still do not. I was, naturally, aware that it was quite ridiculous. For me, a young man of twenty-five, to become transfixed by a woman nearly twenty years older than I, a member of the aristocracy, my employer, and a recent widow still genuinely in mourning for her husband. A woman whose annual pin money was as much as I was likely to earn in the next decade. How much more ludicrous could anything be?

Then I became aware that, although I hoped that Elizabeth had noticed nothing, she too had fallen quite silent, and was looking away from me at the fire.

“You are tired,” I said, trying to be hearty but merely sounding nervous instead. “It is kind of you to invite me, but I really must see what I can discover about this matter tomorrow.” I wanted to get out of that house, out of her presence as quickly as possible. It was all I could do not to bolt for the door.

She looked back at me and smiled wanly. “Very well. I will dine alone. Will you come back with your discoveries?”

“Only if there is something to tell. I do not wish to waste your time.”

We rose, and I shook her hand. She did not look at me, nor I at her.

I was sweating when I got into the street although the air was cool. I felt as though I had just escaped from a furnace, or from some mortal danger. All the way home her face and her perfume and her smile, and those eyes, danced in my head and refused to obey my instructions that they should leave me alone. They were phantoms, nothing more. Again I slept badly that night.

CHAPTER
15

I will not describe the next day. Not because it wasn’t interesting, but more because getting anything done was a supreme act of will when all I wanted to do was sit and stare and think thoughts I should never have allowed inside my mind. And at six o’clock, when I again entered the house, I knew the entire day had been spent killing time, waiting for the moment when I could see her again. And not wanting to, because anything which was likely to take place could only be a disappointment after the previous evening. Even though nothing whatsoever had happened then.

She received me, we talked about little of importance. There was an awkwardness in our conversation which I had not noticed before. I could not talk to her as an employee, someone doing a job for her, an expert at my task. But I dared not adopt any other tone and, in any case, was hardly experienced enough to do so.

After a particularly long pause during which the fire in the grate seemed to become of excessive importance to both of us—it was better than avoiding each other’s gaze—she turned back to me once more.

“May I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Did you wish to kiss me last night?”

I didn’t know what to say. Tell the truth? That would alter things totally; I could never stand in front of her and talk to her in a normal way again. And I did not know, still, how she would reply. As I have said, the ways of the aristocracy, and of foreigners, and of women, were a mystery to me. I did not understand her in the slightest; I could not untangle what I thought from what I wanted to think. All I knew was that the sudden shortness of breath, the racing of my heart, had returned even more powerfully than the previous evening.

“Yes,” I said after a long pause. “Very much.” There was another long silence. “What would you have done if I had?”

She smiled, but only very faintly. “I would have kissed you back,” she said. “I am glad you did not.”

My heart fell. My small experience was limited to girls who either wanted to be kissed, or did not. Not women who wanted both at the same time. But I knew what she meant.

“Your Ladyship…”

“I think, in the circumstances, you might call me Elizabeth,” she replied, “if you wish to do so. And also I think it would be best to talk of it no more. We both know quite well that relations have changed between us. It is foolish not to recognise it, to some measure.”

But how had they changed? I wanted to ask. What am I meant to do? What do you want of me?

“You must think very badly of me; I am quite shocked by myself, although not as much as I should be. I am an immoral foreigner and blood will out. That does not mean I feel free to act on my desires.”

That was something, at least, although I did not know what. All sorts of explanations went through my head. This was a woman crazed by her loss who was defying fate by having such thoughts, by deliberately acting in such a fashion. Or, she was a woman who (so I assumed) had not made love to anyone for years, and was no longer in control of herself. I even considered that she might like me, that I was the only person who could offer her any sort of understanding. That I was the only person who knew anything of what she might feel. That was the most dangerous, insidious option.

“Matthew?”

She had said something. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was a little distracted.”

“I said, please tell me of your discoveries.”

My discoveries? I wanted to say. Who on earth gives a hoot about my discoveries? All I wanted to do was tell her how I had wanted to take her in my arms, and run my fingers through her hair, and have her look at me like that again. Lost children, fraud, failing companies, what trivial nonsense was all this in comparison?

But it was her conversation, not mine. And she had a better notion of how to be sensible than I had. Where had she learned that? How do people gain an intuitive grasp of when to stop, when to go forward in such circumstances? Is it just from age and experience?

“Oh, them,” I said. “Well, there’s nothing exciting there. Except for a couple of things. Did you know that the Rialto Investment Trust is having its annual meeting soon?”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, it is. I thought I would go along, just to get a sense of these people. From my limited experience of these things it won’t be very interesting, but you never know. And you know Mrs. Vincotti told us that her father had left her some money? A certain amount which came from Barings every month?”

She nodded.

“That wasn’t an annuity. It was money sent by your husband. And from what she said, it has been paid every quarter for years. The records only go back ten years, but we can assume that he was responsible for payments right back to the beginning.”

She looked interested, then her face fell. “But does this help?”

“Not obviously. Mrs. Vincotti cannot be the person we are looking for. If he paid her money, he would hardly need to instruct his executors to launch a search for her. She cannot possibly be either the child or the mother of the child. I cannot explain the payments at all, except to say that they are not helpful. So I propose dropping the matter, unless something else suggests they are relevant.”

“It seems John had a less straightforward life than I thought,” she said. “I didn’t think he had any secrets from me. Now he is dead I am discovering nothing but.”

There was, of course, the greatest secret of all. All my instincts were to lay it in front of her; your husband was a cheat and a fraud. He was stealing money from his own companies on a vast scale. But how could I say that to a woman who had looked me in the eyes like that? Who had such hair? If I kept silent, it was not for the sake of the shareholders of Rialto.

“On the subject of the Brotherhood or whatever they’re called,” I said, hurrying along, “I’ve found out little. Except that it is obviously a group so small that it poses little danger to the onward march of world capitalism, and consists of people so fractious that they were thrown out of another group called the Union of Socialist Solidarity two years ago, for being disruptive. The Union of Socialist Solidarity, in turn, walked out of the International Organisation of Workers… well, you get the idea.”

“So how many of them are there?”

“Not many. I haven’t found out much.”

“They don’t sound very interesting either,” she said calmly. “Are you sure there isn’t some explanation consistent with his record as a capitalist exploiter of the masses?”

“Not that I can think of without more information.”

She shook her head. “Don’t concern yourself with this at the moment. It’s not much money and does not seem to be relevant to your task. I think you should concentrate on that.”

“I just had this vision of his long-lost son turning up as a wild-eyed revolutionist.”

“In which case he would have known exactly who he was, no?”

“True.”

She turned to me, and took my hand. “I need this business settled,” she said softly. “It is beginning to prey on my mind. I have to start a new life, not spend my days tidying up the old one. Please help me. Promise you will concentrate on the important.”

Of course I would. Anything. Once more, as she held my hand and looked at me, I wanted to reach out for her. Once more I did not. But my resistance was already becoming enfeebled.