Read Chapter 9: The Missing Financier

The Bank of England on Threadneedle Street was a temple to Mammon, all soaring columns and cold marble, and Eleanor felt like a heretic merely by stepping inside. The clerk at the counter regarded her with the distant politeness one might afford an importunate child.

“I wish to open an account,” she said, keeping her chin high. “A modest one. For my correspondence.”

It was a lie, of course. She had arrived to ask about converting her remaining American currency into pounds—a sum so small it would barely keep Jarvis silent, let alone pay for the promised wages. But she had learned long ago that a woman who admitted her poverty in public was a woman who invited wolves.

“Very good, miss.” The clerk gestured toward a low writing desk near the back. “If you would complete the forms, someone will attend to you shortly.”

Eleanor settled onto the hard wooden chair and withdrew a sheet of paper from her reticule. The forms were simple enough, but her mind was elsewhere. She had promised Jarvis payment by noon. It was now half past ten, and she had precisely thirty-one pounds and eight shillings to her name—not enough to satisfy a man who believed her secret was worth a fortune.

She dipped the pen and began to write, inventing an address in Belgravia that did not exist, when two gentlemen approached the adjacent counter. Their voices carried in the cavernous hall with the unfortunate clarity of men who believed themselves alone.

“—can’t have simply vanished. Men don’t vanish with two hundred thousand in railroad bonds without leaving a trace.”

Eleanor’s hand stilled.

“Finch was always peculiar, but to walk into his club on Tuesday, settle his wagers, drink a glass of Madeira—” the second voice, reedy and conspiratorial, paused. “They found his evening coat still at his lodgings. His valet swears he went out in shirtsleeves at midnight. Not a soul has seen him since.”

“Thaddeus Finch?” Eleanor’s whisper was barely audible even to herself.

She knew the name. Everyone in the City knew the name. Thaddeus Finch was the great bear of the railway boom, a man who had shorted the Manchester & Leeds when others were buying, who had predicted the collapse of the Sheffield extension three months before it happened. He was also—and this mattered far more to Eleanor—the man whose bonds her latest, undelivered column had advised readers to purchase.

The column sat in her valise even now, folded between the pages of a gardening almanac. “Mr. Ellery observes,” she had written, “that the recent dip in Great Northern Railway bonds presents a singular opportunity. The financier Thaddeus Finch’s continued investment in the line suggests confidence; the discerning reader would do well to follow suit.”

She had written it after reading, in the financial papers, that Finch had increased his holdings. It had seemed a reasonable inference at the time—a man of his reputation did not put good money into a failing concern. But if Finch had vanished, if his investment was part of some scheme, then her column was not merely wrong. It was dangerously wrong.

“The police are calling it a disappearance,” the reedy voice continued. “But I’ve heard whispers that he was in debt to the wrong people. And the bonds—they’re worthless now, of course. Paper that cannot be redeemed by a man who cannot be found.”

Eleanor set down her pen. The form before her blurred.

If her column had been published, dozens of investors would have followed her advice. They would have bought Great Northern on her word, and now that word was poised to become ash. The thought of it—of widows losing their pin money, of clerks sacrificing their savings, of the Ellery name becoming a byword for fraud—made her stomach turn.

She rose from the desk, leaving the form unfinished, and approached the gentlemen with the composed smile she had perfected over years of ballrooms where she was never quite welcome.

“Forgive my intrusion,” she said, and both men turned, startled. The younger—a ruddy-faced man with side whiskers—blinked at her as though she had materialized from the marble. “I could not help but overhear. You spoke of Mr. Thaddeus Finch. I hold a small investment in the Great Northern line, and I confess myself anxious.”

The older man—grey, sharp-eyed, clearly the source of the news—regarded her with the wary expression of a financier confronted by an unexpected variable. “It’s no secret, miss. The papers will have it by evening. Finch is gone, and the Great Northern issue is in chaos. If you hold bonds, I advise you to sell at whatever price you can get.”

“But the line itself is sound,” Eleanor pressed. “The track is laid. The locomotives run. Why should one man’s absence affect the value of the railway?”

The younger man laughed, a short unpleasant sound. “Because no one knows where the money went. Finch was the trustee of the bond issue. He collected the subscriptions. He held the accounts. And he has vanished with all of it. The railway may be sound, but the investment is hollow.”

Eleanor’s mind raced. The column was not merely wrong. It was *manipulated*. Someone had wanted investors to buy those bonds—someone who knew Finch would disappear, someone who stood to profit when the price collapsed. The question was whether Finch was the architect of the fraud or its victim.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” she said, managing a smile. “You have been most helpful.”

She left the Bank of England in a daze, the morning sunshine doing nothing to warm the chill that had settled in her chest. Her feet carried her past the Exchange, through the narrow streets where messenger boys darted between carriages and clerks in cheap coats hurried toward offices she would never enter.

Mr. Ellery could not write a column based on false foundations. Mr. Ellery could not advise readers to purchase bonds that were worthless—not merely because it would ruin them, but because it would ruin her. Her reputation, so carefully constructed over three years of anonymous correspondence, would be revealed as the work of a fraud, a woman who had lied to her readers for sport.

The thought of Ashworth—of his knowing eyes and his certain belief that Mr. Ellery was a woman—made her feel faint.

She stopped at the corner of Cheapside and gathered her breath. The valise weighed heavily on her arm. Inside it, the column waited like a ticking clock.

She could destroy it. She could write a retraction, a warning to her readers, couched in the careful language Mr. Ellery had developed over years of practice. But she had no money to send it—the delivery to the publisher required a messenger, and messengers required payment, and payment required Jarvis to keep her secret until she could earn more.

And Jarvis’s noon deadline was approaching.

Eleanor looked up at the sky, watching clouds drift across the pale blue expanse. Somewhere in this city, Thaddeus Finch had walked out of his lodgings in his shirtsleeves and disappeared. Somewhere in this city, the man who had bribed Jarvis was waiting for her correspondence. Somewhere in this city, Ashworth was looking for her.

She had no money. She had no allies. She had only her wits and her pen.

The decision came to her with a clarity that surprised her. She would not destroy the column. She would not write a retraction. She would find Thaddeus Finch—or she would discover what had happened to him—and she would expose the fraud herself. Mr. Ellery’s reputation could survive a bad prediction if the columnist was the one to uncover the truth behind it. It could not survive silence.

But first, she needed to buy herself time.

She turned toward Mayfair, her steps quickening. Jarvis would have his payment by noon—or rather, he would have the promise of payment, backed by a threat. She had spent her life learning how to read men, how to find the cracks in their armor. The butler who had served her for two months was loyal to money, but he was also loyal to self-preservation. She would remind him that his interception of her letter had made him an accomplice to fraud, not merely a blackmailer. They would fall together.

The thought was cold comfort, but it was comfort nonetheless.

As she turned onto Bond Street, she caught a glimpse of a familiar silhouette—tall, broad-shouldered, moving with the easy confidence of a man who had never once worried about the next payment due. Ashworth. He was emerging from a bookshop, a parcel under his arm, speaking with a companion Eleanor did not recognize.

She ducked into a milliner’s doorway and pressed herself against the glass, watching as he laughed at something his companion said. In the afternoon light, he looked almost approachable, almost warm. She remembered the weight of his hand on her arm at the archery contest, the way he had said he enjoyed her company more than was prudent.

If he knew who she was, that warmth would freeze.

Ashworth glanced down the street, and for one terrible moment, his gaze swept over her hidden form. Eleanor held her breath. His eyes passed without recognition, and he turned, continuing toward the club and whatever business awaited him.

She watched until he was out of sight. Then she straightened her bonnet, adjusted the valise on her arm, and hailed a hansom cab.

She would pay Jarvis. She would retrieve the column. And then she would find the missing financier—before Ashworth found her.