“He sent me a present in a box, a year and a half ago, but it had quite spoiled in transit, and was buried. Mr. Newton, you may be assured that I, and certain acquaintances of mine in France, are bending all efforts to establish Jack’s whereabouts, but this is well-nigh impossible, as he seems to be flitting all about Araby trading. When I learn anything definite, I shall—”
But here Eliza broke off, for she’d been interrupted. Not by any utterance, for both Fatio and Newton were silent, but rather by the expressions that had come over the faces of Newton and Fatio, and the wild looks that were passing between them. Newton in particular seemed too preoccupied to speak.
Fatio, coming alive to the fact that the room had been silent for rather a long while, explained: “It would be a grievous misfortune if these pirates, ignorant of what they had, coined the Solomonic Gold and spent it. For then it would be dispersed all over the world, and melted down—con-fused—and commingled with ordinary gold, and dispersed to the four winds.” Fatio turned his eager gaze back on Newton. His face collapsed, and he launched himself out of his chair, alighting on a knee next to the savant. Newton had raised one trembling hand and clapped it over his eyes. He was shifting about in his chair without letup, almost writhing. Sweat had beaded up on his brow, and a vein in his temple was throbbing at a tempo twice or thrice Eliza’s pulse. In all, it seemed Newton was devoting every ounce of will to restraining his body’s wild urge to break out into a frenzy. For the moment, his will prevailed, but only just, and he could attend to nothing else.
Eliza might have supposed that Newton was suffering a stroke; but the way Fatio perched next to him, stroking his hand, suggested that this was not the first time it had happened.
Eliza stood. “Shall I summon a physician?”
“I am his physician,” was Fatio’s answer. Odd that, from a mathematician. But perhaps he’d been reading medicine-books.
To oblige the patient and his physician to rise and bid her a courtly farewell did not seem the wisest course. Eliza curtseyed and walked out of the room.
HALF AN HOUR LATER, she was in the House of the Golden Mercury. The office was full of English lawyers—not stacked lock-boxes containing three tons of silver, as she had every right to expect. Indeed, the lawyers out-numbered their clients: four (presumably German) bankers. Of these she had met three before, when she had stopped by with the Marquis of Ravenscar to present the Bills. The fourth was unfamiliar, and older. Eliza supposed that he had come in from Amsterdam.
“Is this a trading-house, or an art gallery?” Eliza inquired, if only to break the silence that had been her only greeting. “For I expected to see silver pennies stacked to the ceiling. Instead of which I am confronted by a Still Life such as has not been seen since the heyday of the Dutch Masters.”
No one was particularly amused. But it did look like a group portrait. This office was scarcely large enough to serve as a muffin-shop. It contained two heavy desks, or bancas, and diverse shelves where ledgers and rolled documents were stored. A strong-box on the floor served as a small reserve of cash; but this was not the sort of place that customarily dealt in large volumes of specie. Such would normally be handled through one of the larger goldsmith’s shops, or Apthorp’s Bank. A narrow door in the back gave way to a staircase that executed an immediate fierce turn and then shot diagonally upwards through the middle of the office, reducing its volume by one quarter; it was on these stairs that two weeks ago the strong-boxes containing the first installment of the silver had been stacked. But no strong-boxes were there now. Rather, the first stair was claimed by the old banker, who was using it as a sort of dais from which to glower at the entire contents of the London branch of the House of Hacklheber. The old banker was stout, and his bulk entirely filled the width of the stairway, so that as he stood there, just on the far side of the narrow doorway, it looked as if he had been chivvied and tamped into a coffin standing vertically on end with its lid swung open. His jowls bulged like flour-sacks, forming profound vertical crevices to either end of his upper lip, which was as high, white, and sheer as the Cliffs of Dover.
Even if Eliza had not already met the London factor and his two assistants, she would have been able to pick them out amid the crowd by their postures. For they all stood with backs exposed to the old banker, hunched forward, frozen in mid-shrug, as if with his blue eyes he were boring slow holes into their spines.