The Expulsion

The news arrived, as most useful news did, through two channels simultaneously: the official version from Castres, who sent a brief note on a Thursday morning, and the commercial version from Dinis, who appeared in the counting house doorway that same afternoon with his hat in his hands and the expression of a man delivering information he expects to be paid for.

Croft heard Dinis out, thanked him, gave him nothing except a glass of wine, and sent him on his way. The official note he read again after Dinis had gone. It said, with diplomatic care, that the Society of Jesus had been removed from their advisory positions at court, their schools closed pending a review of the charges currently under examination by the Cardinal Inspector. The Cardinal Inspector was Saldanha. The charges were the ones everyone knew — illicit and scandalous commerce, the phrase that had been circulating since January. The note said nothing about the schools or the advisory positions being permanent. It said nothing about the Távoras. It said nothing, as Castres's notes generally said nothing, about money.

Croft went to his private ledger.

He had been keeping a column, separate from the sequence on the expropriations, for what he thought of as institutional movements — the shifts in who stood where, who was appointed, who was moved sideways or removed. He had started it after Bristow's first visit, in the first weeks of 1756, on the understanding that the expropriation intelligence was not the only thing in motion. He had entries on Figueiredo's appearances at Factory meetings before and after the earthquake; on the arrival of Pombal's reconstruction commission and the speed with which it produced a plan; on the Saldanha appointment itself, which had struck him as remarkable in its timing.

He wrote the date and then: Jesuits: formal removal from court advisory positions and schools, February 1757. Commercial investigation ongoing under Saldanha. Note: finding of guilt in report dated 15 May 1758 (in advance: Saldanha appointed April 1; declared guilt May 15 — 44 days. Pombal lobbied Benedict XIV before Benedict died). Formal process completed before substantial investigation possible.

He stopped and looked at what he had written. He was recording something that had not happened yet — the Saldanha finding was prospective, a conclusion he was drawing from the appointment's structure rather than its results, which were fifteen months in the future. He left the parenthetical as written. He had learned, in Lisbon, to record what he expected to find rather than waiting until the record confirmed it. The ledger had been right about the Factory surcharge before it was announced. It had been right about Figueiredo.

He thought about the schools. The Jesuits in Lisbon ran — had run — the Colégio de Santo Antão in the Alfama and the Colégio das Artes in Coimbra and a network of smaller establishments that Croft had never had occasion to visit. He was not a Catholic; their theology was not his concern. But their commercial arrangements were a different matter, and he had been thinking about those for some weeks.

It had begun with a conversation with Bristow, in December, about the nature of the debt acknowledgement. Pombal had borrowed from Bristow when he was serving as ambassador in London — 1738 or thereabouts, the sum substantial, the terms never formally discharged. Bristow had the acknowledgement. What Croft had been trying to understand was why a man of Pombal's intelligence had left that debt unresolved — why he had not simply paid it, or arranged for it to be paid, and removed the liability. The answer that presented itself was not comfortable: because the debt was not a liability if the creditor had no means of collection, and a creditor in Lisbon in 1757, trying to recover money from the man who now controlled Portuguese courts and customs and commercial licences, had no means of collection.

This was not remarkable in itself. What was remarkable was the mechanism. Because the mechanism, as Croft had been slowly assembling it in the months since October, was not purely Pombal's. It required intermediaries. Parties who could hold instruments, pass funds, hold title to properties without those properties appearing in the ledgers of anyone who might be examined. Parties who could arrange, on behalf of noble families with capital but no clean way to deploy it, the acquisition of properties in advance of a disaster that would give those acquisitions their cover. Parties with access to merchant networks and to court circles and to the confessional intelligence that ran between them.

He wrote: Jesuits: intermediaries between noble capital and merchant transactions. Expulsion removes one layer of cover.

He read it back. Then he added: Question: which transactions. Which noble capital. Which merchants.

He did not yet have answers to any of the three. He had, on the first question, the acquisition sequence — six plots, three months before the earthquake, the same holding name in the court registry and in the Factory ledger's marginal reference. He had, on the second, nothing beyond inference. Noble families with pre-earthquake capital and post-earthquake expropriation grievances were not a small set; the Baixa had been full of aristocratic property before November 1755. He picked up his pen and wrote under which noble capital a name: Távoras — pre-earthquake property, Jesuit access, court position. He looked at it. Then he drew a single line through the entry. The same logic that made them the first answer made them the wrong one. A man who had taken the precaution of a holding company and a merchant intermediary was not a man who stood at the obvious centre of any investigation. The family whose name appeared first was the family being used as a target. Whoever had stood behind the holding company had survived this season. Pombal's current target had not.

On the third question he had only what he had always had: the payment. The sum to someone who had arranged something. The supplementary deed that documented it, filed and removed in those eighteen days before the earthquake made removal unnecessary.

Bristow knew the ledger's side of it. Someone knew the deed's side of it. The deed was gone. The question was whether the knowledge of it had gone with the deed or survived it.

He thought about the Jesuits in their schools, hearing confessions, managing the devotional finances of noble houses, arranging the practical matters that noble families preferred not to handle directly. Preferred not to deal directly — Bristow's phrase, which Croft had noted in October and not let go of. It applied to the noble families and their Jesuit intermediaries with equal precision. It applied, he thought now, to the holding company and whoever had stood behind it, who had needed a merchant to receive funds and had not wanted that arrangement visible in the company's own accounts.

He closed the private ledger and locked the drawer and sat for a while with his hands flat on the desk.

Malagrida, he knew, had been sent to Setúbal in November — exiled from Lisbon before the formal expulsion of his order from court. The old Jesuit's pamphlet had been the opening move in Pombal's campaign, or rather the move that gave Pombal his opening: a theological attack on the reconstruction programme that could be read as an attack on the king's authority, and therefore managed as sedition. Whether Malagrida had understood this, or had simply been unable to stay silent about what he believed, Croft could not say. He had no opinion on the earthquake as divine punishment. He had an opinion on the political value of a man who said so publicly.

He sat back from the desk and put his hands flat on the surface. It was the hour when the building work stopped and the counting house returned to its own sounds — the creak of the building in the afternoon wind, the faint cart traffic from the lower streets. He stayed where he was.

He was not a man given to summary. He distrusted it: summary was where precision went to die, reduced to what could be held in a single sentence. But he held the shape of it now, and the shape was almost complete. A set of acquisitions. A set of intermediaries. A destroyed record. An expulsion that removed the intermediaries from the field before anyone thought to ask them directly what they had arranged.

He did not know yet what the acquisitions had been for. He did not know who had stood at the centre of the holding company and given the instructions. He did not know what the supplementary deed had said.

But he knew that when the Jesuits left the court, one possible route to those answers had closed. The question, as he returned to his desk and picked up the afternoon's correspondence, was how many routes remained.