A Desperate Fortune

“I’ve always been,” he told her, “of an easy temper, which I am come to believe has been given me not as a gift but a scourge for my sins, for all my misfortunes proceeded from that.”

The greatest of these, so he said, began when he was not yet one and twenty and against his father’s good advice decided to become involved with what then seemed to be as good a company as any young man might desire to work for: the Charitable Corporation. To move from his father’s offices in Edinburgh to the financial heart of the City of London had been itself exciting, and when he’d been made the Corporation’s warehouse keeper he’d seen nothing in his future but advancement.

“I had already, with my father’s guidance, been a man of business. Now I was a man of reputation, with not one but two assistants and the trust of the directors.”

But those same directors, as he came to learn, were so infatuated with the great advantage they were making of their money that they paid no great attention to their duties, running all things in a fashion most irregular, and while they often grumbled and found fault with everything they could find fault with, not a one of them was minded to apply the rules and articles by which the corporation should be governed.

“This fatality of their affairs left things unguarded for my two assistants to indulge in schemes and speculations and to wreak so much havoc that by the time I discovered what they had been up to the damage was done, and the company was like that log there,” he said with a nod to the fire, “seeming sound on the outside yet eaten away from within by the flames, and prepared at any moment to collapse.”

She was not moved to pity him, for he must also have neglected his own duties to allow the damage to become so far advanced, and in her mind there would have been but one way for an honest man to deal with such a fraud. She asked, “Why did you not denounce them?”

“Because there were others involved in their schemes, men more senior than I in the company, and they persuaded me that if the losses were ever exposed and made public, the whole corporation would fall into ruin and all its investors made bankrupt. The remedy, they said, was to restore the balance of the books, and to this end they brought into our company another man: George Robinson.” He spoke that name in darker tones and brought his gaze to Mary’s. “Mark that name, my dear, and shun the man if ever you encounter him, for truly he’s a rogue to be avoided. But the others did persuade me he was the most proper man to suit our purpose, being well-known as a broker in Exchange Alley, and a man—so they assured me—of an easy fortune.”

Looking to the fire again, he watched the flames in silence for a moment, as though thinking on a memory he would rather have forgotten. In the interlude, the log he’d pointed out before as being half-consumed and on the point of falling splintered at its center and collapsed in fragments, sending up a swirl of sparks that briefly burned and just as quickly vanished.

Thomson settled deeper in his chair. “We had a plan that would have raised a profit large enough to pay back all that had been taken. To achieve this, we had but to borrow money from the Corporation’s coffers for a brief time and replace it shortly afterwards, but when the time arrived for us to put our plan in action we discovered Mr. Robinson had taken all the money into his own hands and lost it by mismanagement. And so we were then worse off than before, and forced to grasp at any scheme we could to try to set things right again.”

By now there were suspicions among others in the company, and some few men stepped forward to insinuate they knew the secret, and had to be paid off or dealt with otherwise.

“One man, our late cashier,” he said, “had often in a merry way inquired of my assistants what they did with all that money, and as time went on he gained a sharper instinct that the funds were misapplied and had expressed himself to me more fully on that subject; even threatened to expose it. Mr. Robinson arranged to have him taken off and paid a handsome salary, which might have been the end of it, but…”

Something caught his conscience then and made him look away, and Mary pressed him. “But?”

“Our late cashier,” he told her, “is now very late indeed. If you would seek him now you’d have to seek him in the churchyard, where you’ll find him in his grave.”

Her eyes grew wide as she made sense of what he’d just revealed to her. “They murdered him?”

“I have no proof,” he said. “No proof. But you perhaps will see why I was hesitant to go against the others. With the secret having killed one man already, I feared it would kill me, too, though I was not its instrument nor cause.”

So he’d held his silence, and together with the other men had latched upon another scheme, yet more ambitious than the first and every bit as certain to restore their funds, but once again their need forced them to turn to Mr. Robinson. And as before, “While we were satisfying ourselves with the prospect of repaying what we owed, he up and cut our throats a second time and sold the stock from under us, and so we all together were in debt for half a million pounds.”

The number dropped into a somber silence. In the fireplace one more log fell in amongst its fellows in a slide of sparks and ashes. Mary tried to form an image of that great a sum of money. There could be no quick way to climb from such a pit, she knew. Small wonder Mr. Thomson had despaired.

“I will admit,” he said, “when Mr. Robinson imposed that new deceit upon us, I was on the point then of submitting to my fate and telling all to the authorities, but he and all the others made apologies and promises, and God forgive me, I believed them.”