The Luminaries

purpose , to tell you the truth.’
    ‘That’s just it,’ Löwenthal said, shaking out the match. ‘There’s another dimension to this whole business, and Tom knows about it. He told me this afternoon that Alistair Lauderback is sitting on a secret—something big. He might be unwilling to break Lauderback’s confidence, of course (he kept his peace with me) but if I put the matter to him in the context of this assembly … well, he can be the master of his own choice. He can make up his own mind. Perhaps, once everyone else has shared his own piece, he might be moved to speak.’
    ‘To speak,’ Frost repeated. ‘All right. But can he be trusted—to listen?’
    Löwenthal paused, pinching the charred match between his finger and his thumb. ‘Please correct me if I am mistaken,’ he said coldly, ‘but I understood from your invitation that this is to be an assembly of innocent men—not of schemers, or conspirators, or felons of any kind.’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Frost. ‘But even so—’
    ‘And yet you ask whether Tom can be trusted to listen,’ Löwenthal went on. ‘Surely
you
are not in possession of any information that might indict you? Surely you know nothing that you would not want to share aloud, and freely, with a company of innocents united by a common cause?’
    ‘Of course not,’ said Frost, blushing. ‘But we still need to be cautious —’
    ‘Cautious?’ Löwenthal said. He dropped the match into the woodpile, and rubbed his fingertips together. ‘I am beginning to doubt your better interests, Mr. Frost. I am beginning to wonder whether this is not a kind of conspiracy after all.’
    They looked at each other for a long moment, but Frost’s will was not equal to Löwenthal’s; he ducked his head, his cheeks flaming , and nodded once.
    ‘You should invite Mr. Balfour—certainly,’ he said. ‘Certainly you should.’
    Löwenthal clucked his tongue. His manner could be very schoolmasterly when his code of ethics was aggrieved: his reprimands were always stern, and always effective. He gazed at the younger man now with a very sorrowful expression, causing Frost to blush still more furiously, like a schoolboy who has been caught doing violence to a book.
    Wishing to redeem himself, Frost said, somewhat wildly, ‘And yet there
are
things about the sale of the cottage that are not yet public knowledge—that Mr. Clinch would not like to be made public, I mean.’
    Löwenthal’s look was almost smouldering. ‘Let me make this very clear,’ he said. ‘I trust in your discretion, just as you trust in mine, and just as we both trust in the discretion of Mr. Clinch. But discretion is a far cry from secrecy, Mr. Frost. I do not consider that any of us is withholding information in the legal sense. Do you?’
    In a voice that pretended to be casual Frost said, ‘Well, I suppose we can only hope that Mr. Clinch is of your mind’—meaning, somewhat foolishly, to curry Löwenthal’s favour by applauding his rationale. But Löwenthal shook his head.
    ‘Mr. Frost,’ he said. ‘You are indiscreet. I do not advise it.’
    Benjamin Löwenthal hailed from Hanover, a city that, since his departure from Europe, had fallen under Prussian rule. (With his walrus moustache and severely receded hairline Löwenthal was not unlike Otto von Bismarck, but the correlation was not an imitative one: imitation was not a form of self-styling that Löwenthal had ever thought to adopt.) He was the elder son of a textiles merchant , a man whose life’s ambition had centred wholly upon giving both his sons an education. This aspiration, to the old man’s immeasurable gratification, he achieved. Soon after the boys’ studies were completed, however, both parents contracted influenza. They died, as Löwenthal was later informed, upon the very day that the Jewish people were granted formal emancipation by the Hanoverian state.
    This event was young Löwenthal’s watershed. Although he wasnot superstitious, and so attached no real value to the fact that these events happened contemporaneously, they were nevertheless linked in his mind: he felt a profound sense of detachment from either circumstance, by virtue of their happening on the very same day. At that time he had just been offered a newspaperman’s apprenticeship at
Die Henne
in Ilmenau, an opportunity that both his parents would surely have encouraged him to seize—but because the state of Thuringia had not yet formally emancipated its