New York - The Novel

for all its wealth, the interior of the church retained a pleasant simplicity. There was a single stained-glass window at the east end; all the other windows were plain, and bathed the interior in a soft light. The walls were wood-paneled. It almost reminded William of a library, or a club—but if so, a club of which the kindly Deity was certainly a member.
    William wasn’t very religious. He went to church; he supported the vicar. It was what you did. He didn’t pray much—just in church on Sundays, really. But although it was only Friday, he was trying to pray today. For he was very much afraid.
    He was about to lose everything he had.
    When you thought about it, William considered, there were only two ways to make a lot of money on Wall Street. The first was the more conservative. You persuaded people to pay you to manage their money, or even just to move it, from one place to another. That was the banker’s way. If the sums were large enough—if you could persuade a government, for instance, to put its funds in your hands—then the fee, or the tiny percentage on the transaction you took, could amount to a fortune.
    The second way was to gamble.
    Of course, gambling with only your own money was unlikely to get you very far. You needed to borrow huge sums. Borrow a million, make ten percent, return it with a little interest, and you’d just made nearly a hundred thousand. And all the transactions that you might undertake, the complex bets that you placed on the future price of this or that, thehedging of positions, the science and the art still came down to this one and only fundamental: you were placing bets with someone else’s money.
    In the process, naturally, you might lose their money from time to time. And so long as they didn’t know you’d lost their money, you should be able to string them along, and borrow some more, and recoup it. But at some point—perhaps far off, or if there was a panic, horribly soon—you would have to pay them back.
    William Vandyck Master couldn’t pay. He’d done the numbers. His obligations exceeded his assets. And now that a panic had started, everyone wanted their money. He was wiped out.
    He hadn’t told Rose. There wasn’t much point. Anyway, he couldn’t. So there was just himself and God, now, to discuss the position. And he was wondering whether, by any chance, God would care to bail him out.
    If only he’d done what his father wanted. William knew he’d disappointed him. Tom Master’s dream had always been that his son would be a banker. A real banker. And when Tom Master said a real banker, William knew that his father had only one man in mind.
    J. P. Morgan. The mighty Pierpont. His father’s hero. Since the days when he’d started reorganizing the railroads, the great banker had moved into shipping, mining, all kinds of industrial production. When he put together the great combination that was U.S. Steel, it became the mightiest industrial corporation ever known to man. The power of the House of Morgan was huge, and through its board directorships, it controlled industries worth far over a billion dollars.
    Morgan’s reach was global. He ruled, and lived, like a king. And was feared like a king as well. Perhaps more than a king. Perhaps a god. Jupiter, the men on Wall Street called him.
    When William was still at Harvard, Tom Master had managed to get him an interview with the great man. Morgan’s reputation was fearsome and William had been pretty terrified, but Morgan had sent word that he should come to his house on Thirty-sixth Street in the evening, and when he’d been ushered into the great man’s presence, he’d found the banker in a gentle mood.
    Morgan was sitting at a long table. The curtains were drawn, the lamps lit. His tall frame, leonine head and bulbous nose were just as William had expected. The angry stare of his eyes was legendary, yet alone in his home, his eyes seemed almost soft. One end of the table was piled with ancient books. At the other end, still in its wrapping, a marble classicalhead, and, on a dark cloth, a collection of gemstones—sapphires, rubies and opals—that glowed softly in the lamplight. Open in the middle of the table was an illuminated medieval manuscript that the great man had just been inspecting.
    What did Morgan look like, William wondered: an ogre in his den? A pirate surrounded by his treasure? A Renaissance prince, a Medici? Or something more Celtic, rich and strange: Merlin the magician,