Wishing to redeem himself, Frost said, somewhat wildly, ‘And yet there are things about the sale of the cottage that are not yet public knowledge—that Mr. Clinch would not like to be made public, I mean.’
Löwenthal’s look was almost smouldering. ‘Let me make this very clear,’ he said. ‘I trust in your discretion, just as you trust in mine, and just as we both trust in the discretion of Mr. Clinch. But discretion is a far cry from secrecy, Mr. Frost. I do not consider that any of us is withholding information in the legal sense. Do you?’
In a voice that pretended to be casual Frost said, ‘Well, I suppose we can only hope that Mr. Clinch is of your mind’—meaning, somewhat foolishly, to curry Löwenthal’s favour by applauding his rationale. But Löwenthal shook his head.
‘Mr. Frost,’ he said. ‘You are indiscreet. I do not advise it.’
Benjamin Löwenthal hailed from Hanover, a city that, since his departure from Europe, had fallen under Prussian rule. (With his walrus moustache and severely receded hairline Löwenthal was not unlike Otto von Bismarck, but the correlation was not an imitative one: imitation was not a form of self-styling that Löwenthal had ever thought to adopt.) He was the elder son of a textiles merchant, a man whose life’s ambition had centred wholly upon giving both his sons an education. This aspiration, to the old man’s immeasurable gratification, he achieved. Soon after the boys’ studies were completed, however, both parents contracted influenza. They died, as Löwenthal was later informed, upon the very day that the Jewish people were granted formal emancipation by the Hanoverian state.
This event was young Löwenthal’s watershed. Although he was not superstitious, and so attached no real value to the fact that these events happened contemporaneously, they were nevertheless linked in his mind: he felt a profound sense of detachment from either circumstance, by virtue of their happening on the very same day. At that time he had just been offered a newspaperman’s apprenticeship at Die Henne in Ilmenau, an opportunity that both his parents would surely have encouraged him to seize—but because the state of Thuringia had not yet formally emancipated its Jewish citizens, he felt that it would be disrespectful to his parents’ memory to accept. He was torn. Löwenthal cherished an outsized fear of catastrophe, and was prone to over-analysis in self-contemplation; his reasons for his actions were always many, and rationalised in the extreme. We shall pass over these reasons why, and remark only that Löwenthal chose neither to move to Ilmenau nor to remain in Hanover. Immediately following his parents’ deaths, he left Europe altogether, never to return. His brother Heinrich took over their father’s business in Hanover, and Benjamin Löwenthal, degree in hand, sailed across the Atlantic, to America—where, for the months and years and decades after that, he recounted this very history to himself, in exactly these words, in exactly this way.
Repetition is a fortification like no other. Over time Löwenthal’s conception of the story of his past had become fixed and (by virtue of its fixity) unassailable. He lost the capacity to talk about his life in any other terms but those he had prescribed: that he was a moral man; that he was a man confronted with paradox; that he was a man who had done the right thing, who did the right thing, who would do the right thing. All of his choices, in his mind, had been moral choices. He ceased to be able to distinguish between personal preference and moral imperative, and he ceased to accept that such a distinction was possible. It was as a consequence of all of this that he chastised Charlie Frost so freely now.
Frost’s eyes were lowered. ‘I can be discreet,’ he said quietly. ‘You needn’t worry about me.’
‘I will go and speak to Tom myself,’ Löwenthal said, crossing the room in two strides, and holding open the door for the banker to leave. ‘I thank you for the invitation. I shall see you tonight, at the Crown.’
Dick Mannering, upon returning from Kaniere, had gone at once to the Gridiron Hotel, where he found Edgar Clinch alone in his private office, sitting at his desk. The magnate sat down without invitation, talked for some time about the afternoon’s occurrences, and very swiftly described the proposed conference that was to take place that evening. The men had decided, for reasons of prudence, to meet upon neutral ground, and the smoking room of the Crown Hotel, as the least attractive room of the least popular establishment in all of Hokitika, had seemed to all the assembled company to be a very sensible choice. Mannering talked with great exuberance, for he liked the idea of a secret council very much; he had always longed to be a member of a guild, the kind possessed of arcane histories, and feudal rankings, and a code. Presently he became aware, however, that the hotelier did not appear to be listening very closely. Clinch had placed both palms of his hands flat on the desk before him, as though to steady himself against a wind, and during Mannering’s long speech he had not once altered his posture, though his gaze darted anxiously around the room. His usually florid face was very pale, and his moustache was twitching.
‘You look as if something’s on your mind—I declare it,’ said Mannering at last, and in a rather sulky tone, for he was sure that whatever this preoccupation was, it could hardly be as exciting as his afternoon in Chinatown, or the prospect of a secret conference to discuss the perplexing disappearance of a very wealthy man.
‘The widow was here,’ said Edgar Clinch, hollowly. ‘She had business with Anna, she said. She went upstairs—and not half an hour later, she was back down again, with Anna in tow.’
‘Lydia Wells?’
‘Lydia Wells,’ Clinch echoed. In his mouth her name was like a curse.
‘When?’
‘Just now,’ said Clinch. ‘They left together, the very moment before you got here.’ He fell silent again.
Mannering made an impatient noise. ‘Don’t make me beg you for it.’
‘They know each other!’ Clinch burst out. ‘They know each other—Lydia and Anna! They’re the best of friends!’
This revelation was not news to Mannering, who was a frequent patron of the House of Many Wishes in Dunedin, and had seen the two women together at that place before: in fact it was at the House of Many Wishes that Mannering had first engaged Anna Wetherell to work for him. He shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘Thick as thieves,’ Clinch said mournfully. ‘And thieves is right, Dick. Thieves is what I mean.’
‘Who’s a thief?’
‘They’re in on it together!’ Clinch cried.
Really, Mannering thought, Clinch could be terribly irksome when he was vexed; he became altogether unintelligible. Aloud he said, ‘Is this about the widow’s appeal?’
‘You know what I’m talking about,’ Clinch said. ‘You know.’
‘What?’ Mannering said. ‘Is it about the fortune? What?’
‘Not the Wells fortune. The other fortune.’
‘What other fortune?’
‘You know!’
‘On the contrary: I have not the least idea.’
‘I’m talking about Anna’s dresses!’
This was the first time Clinch had ever mentioned the gold he had discovered in Anna’s dress the previous winter—when he carried her upstairs, and lowered her into the bath, and he picked up her gown, and felt a heaviness along the seam, and broke the thread of the hem, and withdrew, in his fingers, a shining pinch of it. The pressure of a long-time concealment lent an almost crazed aspect to his outburst now; for he was still convinced that the magnate was embroiled in a scheme of some kind, although he had never figured out, exactly, what this scheme might properly entail.
But Mannering only looked confused. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s all this about?’