“Forever is one-fifty. Bit more. One hundred only gets you a temporary situation.”
I did not like it but had no choice. “Give me a few days to get the money, and I shall pay you the larger sum. I hope, however, you are as good as your word. We can deal with this amicably and financially so long as no one is exceptionally greedy, but if you think this a well you can return to again and again, I cannot answer for your prospects. As it is, I will need to conceal this arrangement from some of my allies, men who are not so willing to seek compromise as I. I conceal it, you understand, for your benefit.”
“I take your meaning,” he said, “and I will call upon you again soon. Good evening, madam; Skye.”
He departed the coach, and I ordered the driver to move on lest we get more visitors. Skye said, “He will not be content. Not for long. There is no forever for a man like Reynolds.”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
“Then why did you agree?”
“Because I hope one hundred fifty dollars will buy us at least a little more time. And when he asks for more, we will give him more. If he asks for two hundred or five hundred, we will give it to him, as long as it is likely he will remain quiet.”
“He has too much power over us,” Skye said.
“We have one advantage, however. He does not know we need only a little more time. We have to hope his greed and his belief in his own cleverness give us the time we need.”
It was a new year, and I believed that Duer, Hamilton, and the Bank of the United States had only a few more months left. They did not know it, but the ice beneath them was cracking, and all would soon fall into oblivion.
Duer increasingly found that he did not wish to be without my advice, so he rented for me a set of rooms at a boardinghouse in New York upon the Broad Way. When he was in New York, he wished me there too, though we did not travel together. I was not permitted to visit him at his home or to meet Lady Kitty. Cynics will believe that he and I must have crossed beyond the boundaries of propriety, but it was not the case. It might be that he desired me, perhaps he even believed he loved me-or loved the woman he thought me to be-but he did not seek to break his marriage vows. He did not even hint that he longed for such a thing. I provided him with something else, but even I was never certain what. Perhaps I did not wish to know.
Pearson was but one man among many, more than a dozen that I knew of, whom Duer deceived to ruin, though none of them knew it yet. Some of these men each believed himself to be Duer’s closest friend in the world. Each had no idea that within weeks he would be revealed to be worth nothing, his money sunk into Duer’s colossal dreams. Duer would talk around these things, never addressing them directly. I would listen, and I would assuage his guilt by telling him of his greatness and his ambition, how what Washington was on the battlefield, Duer was on the trading floor. Had Washington won liberty without sacrificing some of his beloved soldiers? Of course not. When men play at grand strategy, I told him, they can weep for the pawns they sacrifice, but they must sacrifice them still.
“Your vision of grandeur is too great for small men,” I told him one day. “In any glorious enterprise, in any historic rise to power, there must be men who suffer for the greater good. If you are to show this country, this world, your vision of what financial greatness can be, are you to stop because some lesser men might get hurt? Perhaps on the surface such a sacrifice might seem noble, but if you are truly willing to turn away from your destiny because it makes you a little uneasy, it is cowardly and selfish-and I know you are not those things.”
He nodded. “You are very wise.”
“And once you have achieved your final victory, you can be generous to those who were hurt because they were foolish enough to lie down where you needed to step.”
“It is true,” he said. “I can make amends later.”
I felt nothing but contempt for him as he planned to help later those he harmed now, but I could also not help but wonder if I was any better than he. After all, was I not willing to let Cynthia Pearson suffer now and help her at some future date?
In the meantime, Duer might have struggled with his feelings of guilt, but he also laughed at men like Pearson, men who were ruined and did not know it. Yet, Duer was ruined too, and he did not know it either. He owned more and more six percent issues, but he had borrowed far more than their value, and he continued to borrow. He borrowed from the banks, and when they would give him no more, he borrowed from the moneylenders. When they would give him no more, he turned to the poor and the desperate.
“It’s really quite marvelous,” he said. “I cannot gain control of the six percents or the banks without ready money, so where is it to come from? Why, now I borrow from little people-tradesmen and shopkeepers and cart men. A few dollars here and there for a promise of absurd interest payments. I shall never make good, but that is no matter. Once I have the banks, there will be no one to hold me to account. They may complain about their interest, but it is of no matter. And I am not a bad man, you know. I shall give them back what they lent me, but no more than that, I think.”
This was too much. It was one thing to cheat speculators, men who knew they must go into trade with their eyes open. If they were too foolish to see for themselves what Duer did, they had no one but themselves to blame. They must be devoured by the beast they hoped to ride. But now for him to turn his sights on the laboring poor, to squeeze their pennies out of them so he could keep his operations afloat? It was too much.
“There must be some alternative,” I said.
“Oh, don’t you worry,” he said. “I have thought it through carefully.”
“When you own the economy, the workingmen and women of the city cannot be hobbled with debt. They will be a drag upon everything.”
“You worry too much, my dear,” he said. “And you are all goodness, which I love. But you must trust me on this. The poor shall not miss their pennies, and there are always more where their first came from. They must work a little harder is all.”
I smiled at him to show him my approbation. At what point, I wondered, does silence become complicity? At what point must the enemy of evil take responsibility for the harm done in the fight against evil? I did not know, and I dared not think of it. I would only think of poor Ethan Saunders, whom I had turned into my puppet. He would act as I wished, never knowing it was I who wished it, and he would make certain that Duer failed.
I t was during this trip to New York that Mr. Pearson himself came to visit us while we sat in the parlor of my boardinghouse. I do not think he knew I was with Duer when he arrived and he seemed surprised, perhaps even disappointed, to see him. In Pearson’s mind, he could trust me entirely, but Duer was always an object of suspicion-as he should have been. Duer, after all, was an untrustworthy man.
I think my landlady must not have told Pearson I had company, for he strode into the room manfully, but on seeing Duer begin to rise his body slackened. If I had not been watching him closely, measuring any sign of disposition-for it was now how I watched everyone-I might not have seen it, but there it was. The corners of his mouth twisted, his shoulders drooped, his arms dropped slightly, and he bent just a little at the knees.
He and Duer greeted one another-Pearson’s enormous hand circling Duer’s tiny one-but his eyes were upon me. There was something pleading there, but I could not tell what he wished from me. At first I believed he wanted me to dismiss Duer, but I soon decided it must be something else. I think even he, himself, could not have said what he wanted, but he somehow believed I would be able to provide it.