Iain Pears - Stone's Fall

You will see from those pages how my rise to success began, and it will also tell you of my involvement with your mother, many long years ago. You will finally know the circumstances of your father's breakdown and why you were abandoned. It was my doing; your mother was a terrible woman, I say this frankly. I have little sympathy for her. But if she was mad, then it was I who drew out that madness, and turned it from petty cruelty into something much more dangerous. Marangoni used to say that the madness of the degenerate was latent, and needed merely the right circumstances to awaken it.

Perhaps so; perhaps such fury builds up over the generations until it bursts out like some festering sore. Perhaps I was merely the trigger, not the underlying cause. I do not know. I do not excuse myself with such arguments. Her punishment was harsh, but at the time I regarded it as a relief, a satisfactory solution to a problem which allowed me to forget all about it. I do not claim that I was better than she. Merely more fortunate.

Your father broke down completely after these events, and never properly recovered. He was always of an excessively sensitive temper, and the duties placed on him in Venice were too great. He was an easy target for someone like Louise, who not only tormented him but enjoyed his suffering. Drennan accompanied him back to England, and I ensured that he never wanted for anything in the financial way. It was little enough to do. He was a kind, gentle man, who deserved better. I also made the necessary arrangements to allow Mr and Mrs Longman to look after Esther Macintyre, and continued paying her an allowance when she married.

I did this because I knew that, although my title to Macintyre's torpedo was perfectly legal, I had in reality all but stolen it by subterfuge. It was far more valuable than the sum I paid for it, and a more honest person would have admitted this fact and made greater amends. In my ambition, I did not make any such admission and I clung to a belief in my integrity, in the laws of business, instead. It is now time to give that illusion up. I have made provision for Signora Vincotti in my will, but I do not wish her to know the reason behind it.

Now I must proceed to more important matters, that is the other provision in my will, which I told you was merely to block undue inquisitiveness in case I died. That was not its origin, which lay more with a last conversation with your father just before he died. It was very important for him to see me that one last time, I did not know why. There was, I'm glad to say, no trace of the old bitterness in him, even though he was more than justified in hating me. Louise had told him she was going to have my child. She had told him this in their last conversation when her cruelty and taunting sent him mad with despair. It was her special way of goading him, a way to prove his weakness and failure, to demonstrate how completely I had taken her from him.

I did not take it seriously. She was a habitual liar, and prepared to say whatever she felt would have the greatest effect. But once he had told me, I could not let it rest. I began making enquiries.

It took a considerable time to get the asylum in Venice to respond, and I had to apply considerable pressure to break through the walls of confidentality which surround such places. It would have been easy had Marangoni still been alive, but he died in 1889, at the age of only forty-eight. His files live on, however. He did as he was told, although with some resentment; Louise was declared insane, incarcerated without a hearing or charge, by administrative fiat. A simple solution to an awkward problem. As the Marchesa said, I had influential people on my side. Louise did not.

She was never released while he was alive, and was kept perpetually in that wing given over to the dangerous, the raving and the incurable. Such people are allowed no hearings and no appeal, and it sent her truly insane. But when he died, she won her freedom. She apparently gave no more sign of being dangerous, and the hospital was overcrowded. She never tried to contact me; I think she knew quite well what my response would have been had she done so.

Instead, she became a medium, Madame Boninska, and adopted what she remembered from the Marchesa as her only way of making a living. She travelled the Continent performing tricks of the Far Beyond, eking out a penurious living duping the foolish, mixing this in with a little blackmail and emotional torture. She was good at that. It was, if you like, her natural calling.

But there had been a child; for once she had told your father the truth, even though she did so out of cruelty and a desire to hurt. It was taken from her at birth, as is usual. She was never allowed to touch it or see it. Marangoni took care of everything. He knew her by then. He knew what she was capable of, and what being the child of such a creature might mean. It was tainted by bad blood, degenerate. The wrong circumstances could bring that out in the next generation and begin the cycle again. Only an entirely safe environment might counteract the tendency. Even then, I imagine, he was not hopeful.

So the child was hidden from its mother in the forests of bureaucracy with no name and no identity, no birth certificate, nothing. And he destroyed all records of where it had gone. Adopted? By a family, one in a town nearby? The records were silent, I was told. His successors told me the truth; I could sense it from their letter; they did not have to deny me knowledge, and did not have to lie. They simply did not know.

But Louise looked. This was clear from the record; she had left the asylum and the notes had recorded her intentions. Not you; she never once asked about you in the twenty-three years she spent in that place. In her eyes, you were your father's child, not hers. But the other one, the one she gave birth to in the asylum, that one she wanted to find; that one was hers, she knew it; felt it in her blood.

As I had never heard from her again, I assumed she had not succeeded, or that the child was dead. But I found I wanted to know about this infant, my child, and she was the one person who might be able to tell me something. I became almost obsessive in a way that business never affected me. You know me there well enough; the greatest problems, the biggest projects, are things I take in my stride. Even disaster and failure make me lose no sleep.

This did; I became preoccupied, it played on my mind. Elizabeth saw it and worried, but I was too ashamed to tell her what concerned me. I know all about her life and what it was like, but she has never done a cruel thing. I did not want to acknowledge how much better a person she was than I.

So, all in secret, when I should have been concentrating on other things, I looked for Louise Cort, as my one chance of finding the truth. Eventually I got a lead from Germany, and instructed Xanthos to go and make sure it was really her; I would not go myself. The idea of seeing her once more frightened me. What did he say to her? What did she reply? I do not know; I have not seen him since; he always finds a reason to be out of the country, plotting away and thinking I am unaware of his ambitions.

But, whatever passed between them, it brought her to London and produced several whingeing letters asking for money. Threatening, hinting, but empty. She knew I wanted something, that was all. She did not know what. A few days ago, I went to see her, and again this afternoon.

She never knew the significance of what she told me. Any feeling of sympathy or remorse for her evaporated on meeting her again. She has spread nothing but cruelty in this world and now she is my end as well. She will have her final triumph. Mine is that she will never know what it was.

Oh, she was foul; rank, wheedling, disgusting. I could hardly bear to talk to her; could not sit down in the same room. 'Why don't we talk over old times? You loved me once.'