"Not that they're worth more than a few shillings," she said with a martyred smile; she was a mountainous woman with handsome little features buried in her broad face. "More patches and darns than anything else. Still, you won't want them, will you, so it's doing you a favour. I've only thirty shillings. Will you wait while I fetch the rest of the money?"

"No." I could not bear to stay here any longer, for I wanted to contemplate both my loss and my good fortune in peace and quiet. "I will take the thirty shillings and collect the balance later."

"As you wish," she said. "Three Gaunt-court. It's not a stone's throw away."

"A long throw."

She gave me a hard stare. "Don't worry, I'll have the money waiting for you. Six shillings, no more no less. I pay my debts, Mr Shield, and I expect others to pay theirs."

I could not resist a schoolboy pun. "Mrs Jem," I said solemnly, "you are indeed a pearl of great price."

"That's enough of your impudence," she replied. "If you're going, you'd better go."

The balloon of mirth subsided as I walked away from the house where my aunt had lived. So this was all that a life amounted to – a mound of freshly turned earth in a churchyard, a few pieces of furniture scattered among other people's rooms, and a handful of clothes that nobody but the poor would want to buy.

There was also the small matter of the money which would come to me. For the first time in my life, I was about to be a man of substance, the absolute master of £103 and a few shillings and pence. The knowledge changed me. Wealth may not bring happiness, but at least it has the power to avert certain causes of sorrow. And it makes a man feel he has a place in the world.

6

Wealth. That brings me to Wavenhoe's Bank. It was Mr Bransby who first mentioned its name to me. I never went there, never met old Mr Wavenhoe himself until he was on his deathbed, but Wavenhoe's was the chain that bound us all together, the British and the Americans, the Frants and the Carswalls, Charlie and Edgar. Money plays its own tune, and in our different ways we all found ourselves dancing to it.