I did this because I knew that, although my title to Macintyre’s torpedo was perfectly legal, I had in reality all but stolen it by subterfuge. It was far more valuable than the sum I paid for it, and a more honest person would have admitted this fact and made greater amends. In my ambition, I did not make any such admission and I clung to a belief in my integrity, in the laws of business, instead. It is now time to give that illusion up. I have made provision for Signora Vincotti in my will, but I do not wish her to know the reason behind it.
Now I must proceed to more important matters, that is the other provision in my will, which I told you was merely to block undue inquisitiveness in case I died. That was not its origin, which lay more with a last conversation with your father just before he died. It was very important for him to see me that one last time, I do not know why. There was, I’m glad to say, no trace of the old bitterness in him, even though he was more than justified in hating me. Louise had told him she was going to have my child. She had told him this in their last conversation when her cruelty and taunting sent him mad with despair. It was her special way of goading him, a way to prove his weakness and failure, to demonstrate how completely I had taken her from him.
I did not take it seriously. She was a habitual liar, and prepared to say whatever she felt would have the greatest effect. But once he had told me, I could not let it rest. I began making enquiries.
It took a considerable time to get the asylum in Venice to respond, and I had to apply considerable pressure to break through the walls of confidentiality which surround such places. It would have been easy had Marangoni still been alive, but he died in 1889, at the age of only forty-eight. His files live on, however. He did as he was told, although with some resentment; Louise was declared insane, incarcerated without a hearing or charge, by administrative fiat. A simple solution to an awkward problem. As the Marchesa said, I had influential people on my side. Louise did not.
She was never released while he was alive, and was kept perpetually in that wing given over to the dangerous, the raving and the incurable. Such people are allowed no hearings and no appeal, and it sent her truly insane. But when he died, she won her freedom. She apparently gave no more sign of being dangerous, and the hospital was overcrowded. She never tried to contact me; I think she knew quite well what my response would have been had she done so.
Instead, she became a medium, Madame Boninska, and adopted what she remembered from the Marchesa as her only way of making a living. She travelled the Continent performing tricks of the far beyond, eking out a penurious living duping the foolish, mixing this in with a little blackmail and emotional torture. She was good at that. It was, if you like, her natural calling.
But there had been a child; for once she had told your father the truth, even though she did so out of cruelty and a desire to hurt. It was taken from her at birth, as is usual. She was never allowed to touch it or see it. Marangoni took care of everything. He knew her by then. He knew what she was capable of, and what being the child of such a creature might mean. It was tainted by bad blood, degenerate. The wrong circumstances could bring that out in the next generation and begin the cycle again. Only an entirely safe environment might counteract the tendency. Even then, I imagine, he was not hopeful.
So the child was hidden from its mother in the forests of bureaucracy with no name and no identity, no birth certificate, nothing. And he destroyed all records of where it had gone. Adopted? By a family, one in a town nearby? The records were silent, I was told. His successors told me the truth; I could sense it from their letter; they did not have to deny me knowledge, and did not have to lie. They simply did not know.
But Louise looked. This was clear from the record; she had left the asylum and the notes had recorded her intentions. Not you; she never once asked about you in the twenty-three years she spent in that place. In her eyes, you were your father’s child, not hers. But the other one, the one she gave birth to in the asylum, that one she wanted to find; that one was hers, she knew it; felt it in her blood.
As I had never heard from her again, I assumed she had not succeeded, or that the child was dead. But I found I wanted to know about this infant, my child, and she was the one person who might be able to tell me something. I became almost obsessive in a way that business never affected me. You know me there well enough; the greatest problems, the biggest projects, are things I take in my stride. Even disaster and failure make me lose no sleep.
This did; I became preoccupied, it played on my mind. Elizabeth saw it and worried, but I was too ashamed to tell her what concerned me. I know all about her life and what it was like, but she has never done a cruel thing. I did not want to acknowledge how much better a person she was than I.
So, all in secret, when I should have been concentrating on other things, I looked for Louise Cort, as my one chance of finding the truth. Eventually I got a lead from Germany, and instructed Xanthos to go and make sure it was really her; I would not go myself. The idea of seeing her once more frightened me. What did he say to her? What did she reply? I do not know; I have not seen him since; he always finds a reason to be out of the country, plotting away and thinking I am unaware of his ambitions.
But, whatever passed between them, it brought her to London and produced several whingeing letters asking for money. Threatening, hinting, but empty. She knew I wanted something, that was all. She did not know what. A few days ago, I went to see her, and again this afternoon.
She never knew the significance of what she told me. Any feeling of sympathy or remorse for her evaporated on meeting her again. She has spread nothing but cruelty in this world and now she is my end as well. She will have her final triumph. Mine is that she will never know what it was.
Oh, she was foul; rank, wheedling, disgusting. I could hardly bear to talk to her; could not sit down in the same room.
“Why don’t we talk over old times? You loved me once.”
No; I didn’t. I never did. Any more than she ever loved me. She never knew the meaning of the word and, until I met Elizabeth, neither did I. We deserved each other, I have no doubt, but neither your father nor Macintyre deserved either of us. They were better men than that.
She was too addled in her brain to know what I was asking; could not put the pieces together. All she wanted was money; she could have had it all, if she had given me a different answer. She got the money, much good would it do her. Oh, her lovely little child, so cruelly snatched from her mother’s arms. But a mother’s love is insatiable, she tracked it down, almost, had found the woman who had taken it away, persuaded her to talk. Such a long way they had sent it, so she would never suspect. She outwitted them, she was clever. But fate was cruel, she was defeated again. It had gone by the time she got there, walked out. It was working nearby, she went to see. The child had fled. Oh, she looked, certainly she looked, a child in trouble needs a mother’s love. But not a sign or a trace was there ever again.
And there were only a few more questions left to ask. I didn’t expect the answers to be anything but banal, uninteresting, a tidying up. I was perfectly calm, almost relaxed. Just a bit of unfinished business before I could leave. I almost didn’t bother to ask at all.
Was it a boy or a girl?
A girl.
Where was this?
Lausanne.
What was the name of the family?
Stauffer.
And her name? Elizabeth.
I was wrong. I thought that I had left Venice behind me when I travelled back to England with Macintyre’s machinery, but it has been with me all my life. I have now made my preparations; swiftly and inadequately, no doubt, but they will serve. I must carry out my plans before I weaken, and I have a change of heart. I am a coward physically, I know myself well. It will not be easy to take the necessary steps, all too easy to find some reason for changing my mind. But I must not weaken. This is the only entirely satisfactory end. Many people will be inconvenienced because of what I am about to do, but I do not care. Eli
zabeth would suffer if I acted differently, and that I could not bear.
I cannot remain with her. I cannot ever see her again, for fear that I would confess the terrible truth that I learned this afternoon. I cannot even say goodbye, nothing must suggest anything other than an accident. She would work to find out the truth. She is a very intelligent, determined woman, as you know. Despite my efforts to protect her, she might succeed.
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 muc
h 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.