‘What happens then if I don’t pay you back?’
Harrison roared with laughter. ‘Simple. We sell your house. We get the ten thousand pounds back. We have had such interest as you may have paid, and the arrangement fee for giving you the loan in the first place. You may lose, Lord Powerscourt. We cannot. It’s all so simple!’
The cormorant was back in the swell beyond the windows. It seemed to be choking on a fish that looked too big to swallow. The cormorant was doing its best.
‘Do you find it hard, selling off your customers’ assets?’ Powerscourt was sure he knew the answer.
‘No, I do not.’ Harrison laughed again. ‘It is your choice as the customer, not mine. You want the money, you pay the price. And most of our customers repay their loans in the normal way, without anything having to be sold at all.’
Leopold Harrison sounded as though he preferred the less prudent ones.
Powerscourt thought he would try one last parting shot. He smiled happily at the little man.
‘Just one question about the woman in the feud. Is she still alive?’
The atmosphere changed very suddenly. Powerscourt felt cold even though the sun had come out and Cawsand Bay was bathed in sunlight.
‘She is alive,’ Harrison snarled. ‘I have had enough of your questions. Will you please leave now.’
Harrison rose to his feet and showed Powerscourt the door. As he walked through the narrow streets of the village he wished he had been able to ask one more question. Where was she, this cause of the Harrison feud? Was she in Germany? Was she in England? Was she – he looked back incredulously at the house he had just left – was she in Cawsand, hiding on the upper floors?
William Burke sat alone at the head of the great table in the boardroom of his bank in Bishopsgate. Another decision had been taken. He and the four colleagues who had just departed had decided to buy another small bank to increase the spread of their own branches. His bank, he sometimes thought, was like a spider or a squid, tentacles reaching out from the City of London to wrap themselves over other enterprises right across London and the Home Counties.
William Burke often thanked his God that he belonged to a joint stock bank, owned and run on behalf of its shareholders. The beauty of the joint stock bank, in his view, was that it enjoyed limited liability, unlike the private bankers where the partners were personally liable for any losses. The old names of the City, the Couttses, the Hoares, the Adams, might sneer at the joint stock bankers for living on their deposits rather than on their wits. But if a private bank failed, the partners faced financial annihilation – houses, pictures, racehorses, land would all have to be sold. Cautious, conservative, even boring his bank might be, but its owners could never meet such a fate.
And the joint stock banks had a further advantage in his view. All private banks were plagued by the problem of the succession. It was rather like the monarchy, he felt. A good and prudent heir could ensure the stability of throne or bank. A bad one, a spendthrift or a fool could bring the whole institution to its knees.
As he waited for his next appointment, Burke glanced round the great boardroom. It was as familiar to him now as his own drawing room at home. The long mahogany table was polished daily till it was almost a mirror in which he could observe the expressions of his colleagues. The walls were lined with pictures of banks and bankers, counting houses and the Bank of England. Lorenzo de Medici stared down on his successors, sandwiched between a view of the opening of the Victoria Dock and a reproduction Canaletto of the Thames by Somerset House. Lorenzo had met the same fate in the end as so many of his successors, imprudent lending with insufficient security, the crime of all crimes in Burke’s private register of banking sins.
There was a knock at the door.
‘Come in, come in,’ Burke called cheerfully.
‘Mr Clarke, Mr Burke.’
The head porter closed the doors carefully behind him. His footsteps faded away in the marble hall outside.
Burke had remembered Powerscourt suggesting the possibility of his infiltrating somebody into Harrison’s Bank. That he had refused to do in case his own position was compromised. Burke had even considered buying Harrison’s Bank outright but he felt it might bring down his own. So he had asked the senior clerk to find him the brightest, most charming young man his bank employed in the City. Advancing towards him with a nervous smile was one James Clarke, highly recommended by all who knew him.
‘Clarke,’ said Burke, rising to his feet, ‘come and sit down. You can be a director for fifteen minutes!’ He waved at the well-padded seat beside him. ‘Mr Bagshaw, our senior clerk, tells me you have been with us for five years.’
‘That’s right, sir.’ James Clarke was a tall slim young man, clean shaven, with a mop of brown curly hair. He had no idea why he had been summoned to the presence, if not of God, then at least one of his senior partners.
‘And how do you find us? Do you think you will enjoy the business of banking?’
Burke was resolved to take the mettle of the young man for himself rather than rely on the word of his subordinates, however reliable.
‘I do enjoy it, sir,’ James Clarke said, ‘I’ve always liked figures and arithmetic, ever since I was a little boy.’
Burke smiled at the young man with his best uncle’s smile, friendly but a little firm. ‘And what do you think the most important qualities are for a banker? Not necessarily in one of your age, but a mature banker, a banker of consequence.’
The young man didn’t know it, but on this answer depended the fate of the interview. James Clarke thought of the books he had read, the sections on interest rates, on foreign lending, on the theory and practice of bookkeeping. He didn’t think the answer lay in their lifeless prose.
‘Well, sir,’ he looked thoughtfully at his superior, ‘I don’t think it has to do with figures, the record keeping and all those things. I mean,’ he hurried forward, aware that he might have been seen to deny much of his own work in the bank, ‘those things are important but I think it has more to do with judgement. Especially judgement about people so you don’t put the bank’s money in the wrong place. And discretion, so that people will trust you. And remembering that the money you deal with is not your own.’
Burke clapped him hard on the shoulder. ‘Capital, Clarke, capital! I couldn’t have put it better myself! Now then, I want to ask you to do something for me. I have to tell you that it does not have directly to do with our bank. It is more of a private matter, but it is of the greatest importance. Before I tell you what it is, I must ask you to promise not to tell a single soul, not even your own family, about it.’
James Clarke wondered what on earth was going on. Had the old man been losing money on the side? Had he lost his fortune on the Exchange?
Burke sensed the unease coming from the young man. ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘it is nothing illegal I would have you do. It may seem perfectly innocent at this stage. Nothing may ever come of it. But I regard it as very important.’
The young man smiled. This could be rather a lark, a private adventure all of his own.
‘Of course I will help, sir. And I promise I won’t tell a single soul. What would you like me to do?’
William Burke rose from his chair and walked quickly to the great window above the street. Below him the hawkers and the telegraph boys, the messengers and the carriages continued the daily dance of the toiling City.
‘I want you to make friends with somebody of your own age in Harrison’s Bank. Somebody in the same position. You know Harrison’s Bank, of course?’
The young man nodded. Old Mr Harrison’s death, the cynics said, had done what no advertising campaign or publicity spree in the newspapers could have ever achieved. It had made Harrison’s Bank universally known down to the last costermonger in the City of London.