Writing down the words did not make me the master of the thought, though. Instead, I found I had given it life. It preyed on me even more. Old memories came back, jumbled and confused, some all too real, some no doubt imaginary. It distracted me, and I hate distractions. I have never sat and waited for a problem to resolve itself on its own. I issued my instructions, began enquiries, and started to jot down these notes, to order the past, sort out what was real and what was not.
The source of my concern lay in Venice – then and now, the city in Europe which has the least interest in anything industrial or commercial, despite the fact that its wealth was built on trade every bit as much as its buildings rest on wooden piles driven deep into the mud of the lagoons. Like a grand English family fallen on hard times, it has turned its back on commerce, preferring genteel decay to a vigorous restoration of its fortunes. At the time I visited it, I almost admired the old lady (if ever a city could be so described, Venice in the late 1860s merited such a title) for her refusal to compromise with the modern world.
I was there on a tour, my first and only holiday until Elizabeth began her futile attempts to convert me to the pleasures of idleness. I had had a certain good fortune a year or so before; my uncle had died, childless and unmarried and, rather than leave his small fortune to my father, whom he utterly despised, he left it to me. Certainly this showed a desire on his part to sow dissent in our family, as my father lived only on a small stipend, and my sisters he pretended did not exist. Not a penny to them, and the entire amount of £4,426 to me, with strict instructions that I was in no way to distribute, give or otherwise alienate any part of the said sum to any other member of my family. Nasty of him, and had my father been less gentle than he was, Uncle Tobias might have had his way and begun a family feud. Possession in this fashion gave me no pleasure, so I resolved to dispose of the money in a way which would have the old man rolling in his grave, gnashing his teeth in rage.
Why did he despise my father so much? That story, like that of so many family disputes, went back a long way. My father had married poorly. Scandalously poorly, in fact, for he had married a woman of no family or wealth. She was, even worse, the daughter of people who had arrived on these shores from somewhere in Spain only a few decades before, and had even been born in Argentina herself. She was (to my eyes) fabulously exotic and (to Uncle Tobias's) totally unacceptable. How he knew this I do not know, as they never met. He refused ever to come anywhere near her. A pity as (old rogue that he was) he could not have failed to be charmed by her.
But she was not English; of that there was no doubt, and to the end of her life spoke with a noticeably foreign accent – although of such a mixture it was impossible to discern what it was. This made her all the more charming to those who liked her, all the more repugnant to those who did not. I am quite well aware that the memory of her predisposed me to Elizabeth when we met.
She also communicated to me a tendency to be different. Because of her, I have never fitted in quite comfortably to this country of mine, much as I love it. I could, I suppose, have become totally conventional in response, but some of the fiery defiance of the mother transferred itself to the child, and I instead did the opposite. I have, in my life, followed my own course, wherever it might lead. And thus have been able to grasp opportunities others have not even noticed.
When I received Uncle Tobias's money, I realised that the usual options available to a young man of small fortune were not open to me. Wine, women and gambling would not do, because Uncle Tobias had dissipated a far greater fortune on such things in his youth, and would have thoroughly approved of my recklessness. It would have meant the triumph of his side of the family. Donating the money to a worthy cause was also out because, although he loathed my father's gentle brand of Christianity, he was a resolute high Tory himself and would have held that, at least, the money was helping to keep the lower classes in their place.
Then, one day in London, lunching with a friend, I hit on the perfect solution. If there was one thing Uncle Tobias hated more than the common people, it was the commercial ones. The traders, the industrialists, the factory owners, the bankers, the upstart new orders, the Jews, with their crassness and breathtaking wealth. Ruining the country with their gaudy vulgarity, their contempt for everything that was proper and decent and ordered. And now taking over the country in politics as in money. It was his defeat at the 1862 election by a Liberal factory owner (if only of gloves) that finished him off. England was ruined, all that was good in the country had been destroyed; there was no point in continuing.
Six months later he expired in the midst of sexual congress with the parlourmaid on a billiard table at the age of seventy-nine, at which point it was discovered that his fortune, net of debts, was very much less than anyone anticipated, and that I was the sole beneficiary.
After a certain amount of thought, I gave all the money to precisely one of these upstarts so they could continue the labour of reducing Uncle Tobias's England to rack and ruin. In brief, a highly speculative and utterly hopeless early venture in imperial mining that was being run by an associate of my mother's family who was not only Jewish but had a reputation for highly doubtful honesty. In this, popular report was only part accurate. Joseph Cardano (whom I knew ever better for a quarter of a century until his death in 1894) was indeed Jewish, but he was also perhaps the most honest person I have ever met. Had I known this about him at the time, of course, I would never have entrusted Uncle Tobias's money to him.
At this point I thought the matter was taken care of and resumed my life as it had been before. Then, at the beginning of 1867, I received a letter from Mr Cardano, informing me of certain important developments concerning my investment. It had, quite literally, struck gold, and Uncle Tobias's legacy was now worth many times what it had been. I was, in fact, tolerably wealthy and, as most of my money was earned (in a fashion) by myself, I felt quite free to give a sum equivalent to the legacy to my parents and to my sisters, thus causing, I hope, Uncle Tobias's mortal remains to give a few more spins in their coffin.
In the meantime I had turned my thoughts to dissipation, but found it did not suit me overmuch. My parents had brought me up too well and, besides, my head was ill-suited to it. I found the life of pleasure-seeking frivolity too dull to endure. I visited Joseph Cardano once more, this time to place my money in the most advantageous but safe fashion, and prepared to leave England for a tour of the Continent, in the hope that this would provide inspiration for some suitable way of filling in my days.
By that stage I had spent considerable time, with his assistance and often enough in his offices, studying money and its infinite variety. I had started with The Times, but found the daily reports of stock prices and interest rates of insufficient interest. So I became something of an apprentice to Mr Cardano, in whose company I discovered the great secret that multiplying money is remarkably easy, once you have some to begin with. The first five thousand is the most difficult, the second less so, and so on. As Uncle Tobias had got me over the difficult stage, there was little to stop me. The only thing I have never understood is how others are blind to this obvious fact. Although, I suppose, I must be grateful that they are.
On the whole, I stick firm to the conclusions I formed then. The Stock Exchange is merely an elaborate means for the wealthy to extract money from the less well off. It is not those who buy and sell shares who prosper; it is those who insert themselves in between the two sides who grow rich. Once I realised this, and (tutored by Mr Cardano) grasped the poetry of capital formation, of share issuance and flotation, of how to make capital be in two, three or four places simultaneously so that all profit accrues to you, and the losses to someone else – only then did my interest begin to be aroused. Even so, I found this all too abstract. It has never been my desire to amass money; I find possession a dull business. Rather, I had the desire to do something with it. In England, commerce is divided strictly into three parts: the world of money, the world of industry and the world of trade. While I was at Mr Cardano's side, I began to ponder how vast fortunes might be made by blending those three worlds into one.