Stone's Fall

'And my editor hinted that some people consider you to be an agent for the Dual Alliance and are alarmed that much of the Empire's capacity for manufacturing weapons has fallen into your hands.'

'It hasn't,' she said shortly. 'At present it has fallen into the hands of the executor. Where it will stay until these matters are resolved.'

I looked at her curiously. 'Ah,' I said.

'Discover this child, Mr Braddock,' she said with a faint smile. 'And the thanks of the Kaiser will be yours.'

I looked at her aghast. She sighed with exasperation.

'A joke, Matthew. A joke.'

'Oh. Right. Good.'

CHAPTER 19

After I left Elizabeth, I went round the corner to the pub, to breathe in rancid air of normality and to order my thoughts. Please do not think that there was much chance of this. I will edit much from the account, and describe only those facts which concerned the matter of Lord Ravenscliff. In fact, they occupied my mind for only the smallest fraction of my time. The rest was taken up, almost obsessively, with my feelings for his wife. I will not dwell on them; anyone who has been in my situation will understand all too well; anyone who has not will be unable to imagine it. So I will instead pretend that, with clear head and reasoned thought, I applied myself to writing down in my little notebook, the facts and the theories.

One stood out; the circumstances which led to the impossibility of finding this child meant that control of Ravenscliff's business empire had fallen semi-permanently into the hands of the executor. And who was this Michael Cardano, exactly?

The more I thought about it, the more excited I got. What about Cort's intervention when Ravenscliff died? He had concealed the fact for three days, and with the time bought, had arranged for Barings Bank to intervene and prop up the share price. Had the price collapsed, the City would have wanted a full accounting, reassurance that the businesses were sound. And in such an atmosphere, it might easily have been discovered that they were not sound at all. Even worse, perhaps, regrettable information about the integrity of many senior politicians might also have been revealed. A crisis in Government, together with the collapse of the greatest manufacturer of weapons in the country: not an ideal preparation for a trial of strength against our greatest foe. It was easy to see how a man like Cort might have considered the theft of a folder of papers a small thing to avert such a calamity. And I assumed, from my limited knowledge of the subject through reading spy novels, that breaking into a house and stealing papers was simple enough.

That was one question answered to my satisfaction, although perhaps not completely. But there were many others. The big one, of course, was the money. I had not learned a great deal about finance from Franklin, but I knew that, if a large sum of money is extracted from a company, it has to go somewhere. Where did Ravenscliff's millions go? Then there were the lesser problems of the anarchists and the spiritualist. Why was Ravenscliff associating with people for whom, I assumed, he had nothing but contempt?

To that last question, I had no answer. But as I did not have the expertise even to begin tackling the first ones, I decided this would be the place to start. Someone like the witch-woman was very much in my line of business. I had covered the murder, after all. I closed my notebook, stuffed it in my pocket and drained my beer.