School, for which Martha had thirsted like a spent hart for the thicket, provided scant relief, for despite returning with his behind in weals from the cane, Guy still seemed to have enough energy left for hours of mayhem before she got him into bed. Nevertheless, it was from this small, red-brick building between the slaughterhouse and the glue factory that deliverance came. Two years after Guy had come to her, Martha was sent for by the headmaster.

‘He is a devil, Mrs Hodge,’ said Mr Forster. ‘A thoroughgoing, copper-bottomed fiend in hell.’ He embarked upon a recital of the damage that Guy Farne had inflicted in his short time at Titley Street Board School. ‘However…’

Martha, lifting her head at the ‘however’, was then informed that her foster-child had a remarkable capacity for learning: had, in short, more brains than any child that had passed through Mr Forster’s hands in twenty years and could, in his opinion, win a scholarship to grammar school.

She came home, burst into tears and was discovered thus by Guy. Though disappointed that what she wanted of him was something as humdrum as a scholarship, when he was prepared to raise an army or build a fleet, Guy applied himself. Going out with her rolling pin one day to rescue a neighbour’s little boy who was pinned against the sooty brick wall of the shipyard, Martha discovered that the child was warding off not Guy’s threatened blows but his determination to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics; then she knew that the battle was won.

When he got his scholarship, there was a street party and Guy, now sporting a black blazer with a tower on the pocket, went to the Royal Grammar School. Soon he became, as such children do, bilingual in English and Geordie. His passion was for science, but he had an ear for languages and the kind of maths-and-music brain that gives tensile strength to this type of high intelligence. He still fought at the slightest provocation, but now there were sports to channel his energy and though he was too wary to make friends, friends — cautiously — began to make him.

The scholarship to Cambridge was a surprise to no one except Guy himself. He went to Trinity for natural sciences, and Martha, just as she had braced herself through the years of his childhood for the reappearance of his lost parents, now prepared herself to let him go, without complaint, out of her life.

These preparations were unnecessary. No one was ever to come forward and claim kinship with Guy, nor did Guy himself now show the slightest signs of turning his back on his past. Though he spent the long vacation getting such work as he could to help pay for his clothes and extra expenses, he returned every Christmas and Easter, changing as the train steamed over the Tyne Bridge into his old ways and old dialect as easily as one changes coats. At nineteen, Guy Farne was still on the short side, still trailing his extraordinary strength and compactness as though his muscles were of a different clay. The springy dark hair, the pointed ears which Martha had bandaged to his skull in vain, combined with his high cheekbones to give him that puckish, foreign look that in the orphanage had been laid at the door of the Lithuanians, but his wide mouth and strong chin recalled a simpler, more pastoral heritage. Guy’s eyes, during those years at Cambridge, were seldom without the glint of blue which signalled the well-being of his soul as he came into his own in scholarship, in sport and friendship. Only women he left alone, knowing — as men whose sexual power has never been in doubt do know — how to wait.

He got a First and went to the University of Vienna which, in the year 1911, was unrivalled for its work on the conduction of metallic ions through water. Martha Hodge never knew what happened during that year for which he left bursting with confidence and from which he returned, green-eyed and taciturn, with the information that he was no longer interested in academic life and had thrown up his studies. That he had been deeply hurt was obvious; that it was by a woman she did not find it difficult to guess. Wisely, she held her tongue and received, with her usual quiet attention, the information that nothing mattered except to be extremely rich.

The first million, they say, is the hardest. Guy made his by selling to the house of Rothschild (one of whose youthful members he had known in Vienna) a detailed and audacious scheme for the forward purchase of options on cargo shipping rights. Based on the prediction of a war which, owing to the almost equal balance of power in Europe, would be long, and presented to the amazed old banker in a red student’s exercise book which was to become a family heirloom, it provided at minimum risk — for the down payments to the shipping companies were to be regarded as interest-free and recallable loans — an opportunity to corner the charter market within five years.

Extorting his reward, under the threat of publishing the details of his scheme, Guy left for South America where he spent three months exploring the backward and mineral-rich Minas Cerais. Within a year he had extracted from the Brazilian government an option on the mining rights of the Ouro Preto range, offering in exchange foreign investment and the building of roads and schools for the Indians. It was not the gold and emeralds which were his chief concern, but the cobalt, for he foresaw the western world’s insatiable demand for high-grade steel.

Thus, in those first years, he established a pattern which was to make his success a legend: the use of his scientific training to predict events, the nerve to back his hunches and the direct and practical entrepreneurism of the man on the spot; for he was always to return to the products of the earth’s crust and the adventure of their extraction.

By the time war came, he had a facienda on the Amazon and a diversity of interests from oil to real estate, but he chose to honour his commitment to the Indians and it was 1916 before he returned to England. Resisting the efforts of the War Office to recruit him on the staff, he joined the Northumberland Yeomanry, fighting with a detached ferocity directed not at the enemy but at the blundering fools who had made the war. A year later he was invalided out with a shattered leg and a Distinguished Service Order and set about forming his own investment company. By now he had a retinue, an international reputation and offices in a dozen capitals, but Martha Hodge — as he returned at intervals to install into the house she resolutely refused to leave, first running water, then electricity, then a bathroom — continued to be troubled by the colour of his eyes.

Then, in the spring of 1922, he returned to Vienna.

1

Guy returned to the capital of a dismembered empire: a city impoverished by defeat, in the grip of inflation but still beautiful. The theatres were open, the concert halls were packed. The Viennese still danced, still sang. Sometimes, as the new republic struggled with the shortages and disruptions left by the war, they even ate.

Guy took a suite at Sachers, saw that his stenographer and chauffeur were suitably housed nearby and allowed himself a week of the swashbuckling entrepreneurism that was his hallmark, wresting the copper concessions in the Eisen Gebirge from an Armenian syndicate after a spectacular battle, and gleefully beating a South African tycoon to the lignite deposits near Graz. After which, considerably refreshed, he presented himself at the Treasury and plunged into the work which had brought him to Vienna.

It was work shrouded in secrecy, as vital and exacting as it was outwardly unspectacular. For Austria was seeking a huge loan from the League of Nations, seeing in this her only chance to stabilize her currency and set off along the road to recovery. It was to assist the new republic in presenting her case to the League that Guy had been sent out by the British government, who feared that a permanently weakened Austria would seek union with Germany. No one seeing him, day after day, courteous and patient, would have imagined how irksome he found the ponderous bureaucracy and time-wasting social functions in the stuffy, grandiose rooms of the Hofburg.

Then, on a fine Saturday at the end of March, Guy, obeying a summons from his young secretary David Tremayne, left the city, dismissed his chauffeur and turned his car southward towards the fortress known as Pfaffenstein. This is the most famous castle in Burgenland, an emblem for the whole of Austria — the embodiment for close on a thousand years of defensive power, aggression, grandeur and pride.

The position alone is breathtaking. At the head of a dark green lake whose glacial waters chill the blood even in midsummer, is a great pinnacle of rock rising skyward from the pines which cling to its base. To the east the crag, split from top to bottom by a fault in the rock, drops sheer to the Hungarian plain. To the north are the wooded slopes and jagged peaks of the Pfaffenstein mountains whose passes it dominates; to the west, sloping more gently, are the vineyards and orchards which merge in the far distance with the snow crown of the Alps.

On the summit of this gigantic eyrie, the last outcrop of the Pfaffenburg spur, the Franks built a fort at the time of Charlemagne, but even they were not the first. Two hundred years later, the Crusaders added a square of turreted towers, threw a drawbridge over the dizzying ravine to the east of the castle and rode out full panoplied against the infidel, bearing aloft the banner of the Pfaffensteins with its impaled griffin and crimson glove.

By the time Richard Coeur de Lion was brought there, pending his imprisonment at Durenstein, Burg Pfaffenstein was a thriving Romanesque citadel with a council chamber, a chapel and a village clinging humbly to the base of its crag. In subsequent centuries, as the Tartars invaded Hungary, the Hungarians invaded Austria and the Turks invaded both, its fame and importance increased as steadily as the power of its owners who became, by conquest and marriage, first counts, then margravines, then princes.