“Accounting errors, indeed. Rampant, is what that is. Everywhere and all the time. You’d think they were possessed of invisible servants, magical ghosts to clean up their little messes, the way they act. And not always errors,” he said, with an unmistakable twinkle.
“Oh?”
“Indeed, your very own man-but I say too much.”
“You say too much not to continue. It would be the most cruel form of torment not to finish your thought. As we are friends, you must go on.”
“Just so, just so. I take your point. It is like the series, is it not? Once begun, it must be concluded. I believe you have learned that lesson now.”
“I have. And you must tell me more.”
“You press me strongly,” he observed.
“And you demur like a coquette, I think,” I said, as good-naturedly as I could. “Surely you don’t want to leave me upon the rack.”
“Of course not. No, I suppose I may tell you a bit more.” He cleared his throat. “Your patron-whose name I shan’t mention for one cannot be too safe-once approached me with a scheme to liberate from the books a considerable sum for his own use. It was a scheme he had already managed, so he said, with the cashier general, and he required my assistance in disguising the sum from the eyes of posterity. He had some tale of its being for an important Company project, but as he could say no more than that, I knew at once that the project was surely gaming or whoring. Needless to say, I denied him.”
“Why so?”
“Why indeed? In part because it would be a unspeakable crime to make free with the books. But there is another aspect to cooperation I found most instructive. The former cashier general, a fellow called Horner, aided your patron one too many times for his continued presence to remain comfortable. He therefore found his loyalty rewarded with an assignment to toil his remaining days in Bombay. To avoid such favors, I eschewed being so faithful a servant. I do not believe the Indies would agree with me.”
“But what of this missing sum? Did Ellershaw do without?”
“Oh, no. I found the sum missing soon enough. A rather gross effort was made to cover the trail, but it could not fool me.”
“Did you speak out?”
“In a company where loyalty is rewarded with exile to the most monstrous clime on earth, I hardly wished to evidence disloyalty. Rather, I took the opportunity to disguise the effort so well that no one else could ever find it. I would not willingly commit a crime, sir, but I saw no harm in smoothing things over once the crime had taken place.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “Such entertaining tales!” I exclaimed. “Surely there must be more.”
“Well,” he said, “there has been a thing or two I haven’t liked before now-before this Greene House affair, as I style it-but I can’t say much on things of the past.”
“I beg you tell me.”
He shook his head.
I decided the time had come for a strategic disregard of Mr. Cobb’s orders that I must inquire into the death of Absalom Pepper, yet never speak his name. He had said I must not raise the subject myself, but my interlocutor was now growing disoriented with spirits, and I believed I could disguise the matter should it come to that.
“Do you speak of the Pepper business?” I asked him.
His skin turned pale and his eyes widened. “What do you know of that?” he asked quietly. “Who told you?”
“Who told me?” I said with a laugh. “Why, it is common knowledge.”
He now gripped the sides of the table. “Common knowledge? Common knowledge, you say? Who has been speaking? How did he learn of it? Oh, I am ruined, undone.”
“Calm yourself, Mr. Blackburn, I pray you,” I said. “There must be some misunderstanding here. I do not see why mention of the importation of pepper should cause you such distress.”
“Pepper?” he said. “The spice?”
“Yes. I meant only that I believed the East India Company once traded nearly exclusively in pepper, and the change to textiles and teas must have been a true feat of organizational skills.”
He let go of the table. “Oh. Of course.” He took a hearty gulp of his ale.
I knew that now was my moment and I a fool if I did not seize it. “Yes, I meant only the spice, sir. Nothing but the spice.” I leaned backward, letting my shoulders rest against the wall. “But tell me, pray Whatever did you believe me to mean?”
NOW WAS THE MOMENT of greatest risk, I believed. I played a dangerous game, and I hardly knew the rules. He might realize I had deceived him, tricked him into an admission of knowledge-though of what, I was still ignorant-and turn against me. Or he might be drawn in. He shook his head. “I am sorry,” he said. “It is of no moment.”
“No moment?” I returned, in as jovial a tone as I could muster. “No moment, you say? Why, you appeared monstrous distressed, sir.”
“It is nothing, I tell you.”
I leaned forward. “Come now, Mr. Blackburn,” I said softly. “We trust each other, and you have sparked my curiosity. You can tell me what you believed me to reference.”
He took another sip of his ale. I cannot say why he decided to speak-whether it was the spirits, the feeling of solidarity, or the belief that, as the matter was half revealed, it might as well be fully uncovered, that it could be better hidden away. I can only say that he took a deep breath and set down his pot. “There is a widow.”
“What widow?”
“Not five or six months past, I received a sealed letter, marked with the imprint of the Court of Committees. The letter contained not a single name of a single director but only the seal of the Court itself. And it said I was to oversee an annuity to a widow-a hundred and twenty pounds a year, it was-and I wasn’t to mention it to anyone, not even on the Court, for it was a great secret that the Company’s enemies would use against us. Indeed, the letter informed me that, should this matter become public, I would lose my position. I had no reason to doubt the veracity of this threat. The payment, after all, was overseen by the same Horner, his last act as cashier general before he was shipped off to his Asiatic hell. Any fool might see that I was, through no fault of my own, at the center of a momentous and secret undertaking, and I had no choice but to comply if I hoped to avoid a most terrible fate.”
“The widow’s name was Pepper?”
Mr. Blackburn licked his lips and looked away. He swallowed hard of nothing, and then he swallowed hard of his pot. “Yes. Her name is Mrs. Absalom Pepper.”
Despite my best efforts and two more pots of supplemented ale, I could not contrive for Mr. Blackburn to give me much more information. All he knew with any certainty was that Mrs. Pepper was a widow whose upkeep the Court of Committees had chosen to support. She lived in the village of Twickenham, just outside of London, where she had a house in the newly constructed Montpelier Row. Beyond that, he knew nothing-nothing but that her situation was unique and inexplicable. The Company paid no such annuities, not even to directors. Pepper appeared to have had no connection with the East India Company whatsoever, yet they regularly sent his widow a handsome allotment and regarded the matter as being of the most delicate variety.
I continued to press as forcefully as I dared, but it soon became apparent that I had reached the limits of his knowledge. Yet here was the path that would lead to the secretmost desire of Cobb’s heart and very possibly to the freedom of my friends. I did not dare hope that I might soon be free of this troublesome enterprise, but perhaps I could use the discovery of Absalom Pepper, once I had learned something, as a means of alleviating the burdens set upon my uncle.