My beloved shareholders would be alarmed and panic if all was open. But then shareholders are sheep, which is why they invest in little bits of paper, rather than in something real. Why they whinge and moan if something goes wrong but would never test their own mettle against the markets. Why they congratulate themselves on their acumen if their bits of paper rise in value due to the labour of others. It is the great unspoken passion of all businessmen: they may battle against their workers, criticise bungling governments, try their hardest to bankrupt and ruin their competitors, but they all, invariably, have some respect – if only small – for each of these. But shareholders disgust them, and if they could find a way of ruining them all, they would do so with pleasure and satisfaction. Managers of public companies are like slaves, as much as the workers they in turn employ. They may serve their masters well, be obsequious and conscientious, but deep in their hearts there is loathing. I feel it in myself, and I see it in others. I can detect it in Theodore Xanthos, as resentment and greed take hold of him. He will test himself against me sooner or later. I have expected it for years.
At the moment, I have committed my entire fortune to one extraordinary operation, to build battleships which no one has ordered, for a government which has not enough courage to tell the truth, to safeguard a people which does not want to pay for them. I have calculated that they will change their minds and I am prepared to back my judgement. And if they don't, I can ruin them all. They are corrupt, greedy, little men, and their grasping nature gives me the power to bend them to my will, should they thwart me. It is exciting, what business should be when it rises above mere production and strives for grandeur. Naturally, the shareholders would take fright if they knew what I was doing – although I have long believed that people who are not prepared to risk their money should not be allowed to keep it.
So I would protect myself from my shareholders with my niggling concern. Turn it to my advantage. Show it who was the master. I visited Henderson, had a sentence put into my will: '£250,000 to my child, whom I have never acknowledged . . .' The sum had to be big, so that it would affect all the other legacies, make it impossible to wind up the estate. Unacknowledged because non-existent.
I did not even mention it to Elizabeth, whom I tell most things, because I never considered it would be necessary. Dying has never been something which has struck me as even a remote possibility. That is for others. Even visiting Cort at his last did not make me think that, sooner or later, I would become like him. All I felt when I looked at him on his bed, so thin and weak, hardly able even to speak, was a distant interest. Concern, a little sadness for him, but no identification with his plight. No; in due course the provision would become redundant, the will would be recast. That would be the end of the matter.
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.
