Page 1 of Undercover with the Heiress
Chapter One
9 June 1876
Nine inches was the perfect length. Three inches the perfect width.
Phineas aligned his ruler with the edge of the page and drew a sharp red line along its length. He waited a moment for the ink to dry, then slid the ruler across so he could mark out the next column. He set the square edge against the bottom of the page. Checked its position. Readied his pen.
‘Babbage!’
Martins, the supervisor of clerks for the new accounts sector at Empire Savings and Loans, hollered at Phineas from the door, his head turning as he glared across the room. He strode between the desks and took each corner at an angular jerk. Clerks perched on stools cowered into their ledgers, all of them focusing hard on their numbers but tilting their heads just a little, no doubt to witness the approaching telling-off. All of them grateful that, today, it was not them.
Phineas pressed his pen against the ruler’s edge. Blood-red ink leeched from the nib onto the page as he dragged the penalong the wood. It really was an excellent piece of equipment. A ruler like this was stable. It had a smooth, flat base that didn’t shift with the pressure of his pen but still allowed him to see the existing margins without losing track of the other columns on the page.
It was also flimsy enough to snap with a determined flick, yet sturdy enough to plunge into a man’s throat without splitting.
Not that Phineas had much need for violence.
Not these days, anyway.
Martins tapped Phineas’s desk. ‘Beaverbrook tells me you were late.’
Phineas slid from his stool to stand in some form of contrition. He’d forgotten the difference between a conciliatory and a bored expression and hoped that his slight frown and set mouth conveyed some hint of penance. ‘I may, perhaps, have been delayed a little,’ he said. ‘The streets were busy.’
In reality, he had been at a board meeting for Spencer & Co. Travel. The damn thing had gone on for far longer than necessary. He probably could have antagonised Lawrence Hempel a little less. Then he might have arrived at the bank on time.
Martins crossed his arms over his chest, his flat palms tucked against his side, lifting his chin so that he could look down his nose. The man had been promoted from amongst the clerks a little over a month ago, and he seemed intent on lording his newfound power over his subordinates rather than using his experience at their level to ease their day. Yet, the light coating of dust on the tip of his boot showed he still buffed them himself at home, and his trouser hems had been tacked with an experienced yet inattentive hand, as they ran at an uneven angle. As Martins blustered something aboutmanagerial expectations, andpunctuality is an indicator of commitment, Phineas gathered other fragments of informationabout the man. A black button that was a slightly different size to the others. A loose thread. A stiff collar. A perfectly trimmed moustache.
‘What do you have to say for yourself, Babbage?’
What did he have to say? In another life, another world, he would have so many things to say. He would look Martins square in the eye. He wouldn’t even blink as he delivered his assessment.They gave you a promotion but not much of an increase in wages to accompany the extra duties, but you took it anyway because you value status over quiet stability. The dust on your shoe shows you take a different route to work, which means you’ve moved. You no longer have your shoes cleaned by a boot-spit, and the smudge on your collar suggests you shine them yourself, at home. Your wife still sees to your laundry and mending, but she takes no care, as she’s exhausted from seeing to the extra work from the boarder you’ve taken on so that you can afford the rent on rooms over a shop on a slightly better street. The rose tint that saw her accept your proposal has faded, and she’s wondering what else there is in a future with you, as after three years there is still no babe. While you blame her, she can’t help but wonder—what if it’s you? And there’s one surefire way she can find out the answer, and he’s leasing your spare room…
‘Well, Babbage? I’m waiting.’
Phineas straightened as he met Martins’s hard stare. Martins’s nostrils flared slightly.
‘It won’t happen again,’ Phineas said.
Martins grunted what he likely thought was a manly dismissal. He sounded like an old dog growling into a dream of better days. Then he spun and stomped from the room.
As Phineas slid back into his seat, the bank clerks around him settled back into their worship of the pen. They called them the kings of the clerks, and in their own way, he supposed they were.Paid a little more than other clerks, working in clean offices, and perched on stools that were their thrones—there was no chance of a maimed leg, like on a construction site, or a hand crushed between crates, like on a loading dock. This bank was smaller than Barclays or the Bank of London, but it still offered enough opportunities for promotion, which gave their trivial lives a little hope and aspiration. Something that they lacked as they trudged the distance between Clapham and here like a morose, conformist, black-suited army, only to drown in the mundane repetition of column after column.
Thank heavens he wasn’t one of them. He was just a man passing through, gathering information. And now that he was certain there was nothing else to learn here, it was time he moved on.
The other clerks sunk back into their ledgers, focusing on the mind-numbing tedium of tracking income, orders, and papers. Phineas flipped back through the pages of the ledger he’d been working on and scanned the columns before his eyes settled on a few inconsistent numbers. A four that should have been a six. A problematic two. He checked the company name at the front of the ledger, then scanned the room, searching for the clerk who was responsible for updating these accounts. No, it couldn’t be. He’d had such hope for the boy. Phineas inspected the pages again, scooped up the heavy tome, and folded it into the crook of his arm to cross the room. He slid the ledger onto Taylor’s desk.
‘Would you mind checking my figures, sir?’
Taylor paused mid pen-stroke. His ash and grey eyebrows furrowed. ‘I’m tired, Babbage. And it’s been a long week already.’
‘Just check my figures.’
His figures were fine, of course. Precise. Never a number wrong, never a sum out. There were no errors when it came to his calculations of pennies and pence. The phrase was code for an anomaly in the columns, a shuffling of money from oneaccount to another, or an odd withdrawal. Usually an indicator that an employee, surrounded by all that wealth, had decided to take a little for himself.
Ever since the days of the Bank of London’s financial catastrophe, many banks kept a few men on the floor to oversee the books in a way that went beyond tallying columns. Sniffing out scams and swindles or unusual financial activity, they allowed the bank to deal with an indiscretion before it got out of hand. It wasn’t about the money—it was about maintaining public esteem and confidence. Men like Phineas and Taylor received no glory for their work, just a few more notes in their pay packet. But looking for signs of fraud did make the monotony more tolerable, and for Phineas, it also gave him an extra motive to keep his distance from his colleagues. He didn’t want to hesitate if he needed to rat out a man.
Perhaps that was why he’d let himself become embroiled in the lives of his neighbours in Honeysuckle Street—it gave him something of substance to do and tested his brain instead of seeing him stuck in the paper-pushing tedium of columns and rows and margins.
Taylor leant forwards and studied the page, his gaze lingering on the suspect transfers. ‘Who?’
