Hi, if you're a new reader of this story, well may you be a little confused by the word count, chapter headings and status as "incomplete".
This work started life as a 28 chapter complete story, which was posted in episodes over 2020-21. Chapters 1-28 still form a complete whole, but two "bonus chapters", 29 & 30 were added by popular request later in 2021.
I am currently some way through posting the same story from Mr Darcy's perspective, which will be 17 chapters in total. Hence have switched the status of the whole work back to "incomplete".
Hope that helps inform your decision: to start or not to start reading, that is the question. But I think you should. In my totally unbiased opinion.
Or else if you'd rather read a finished work try my MAU take on Emma, it's called A Bee in her Bonnet and it's complete-ly lovely too.
All the best
Mel
It's a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman with a printer and a subscription to the American Journal of Quantitative Financial Studies will never be in want of an invisibility cloak. With this in mind, and though still not sure she could call herself single, Elisabeth Bennet grabbed a printout of "The effect of the measurement window on the heteroskedasticity of intra-day return metrics with non-synchronous trading: a bootstrapping experiment", and headed two floors up to the canteen.
Elisabeth did not normally feel the need to hide behind long equations in order to grab a morning coffee. She considered life too short to be wasted on looks in general, and heels, makeup and hair straighteners in particular. Perhaps it was easy for her to care nothing for appearances when she'd never had to contend with being plain, but in fairness she did contend daily with sticking out like a sore thumb, being the only woman on the bank's trading desk, one of less than a dozen on the third floor and, of those, the only one with a half decent job.
Contend she did, rarely without protest, but usually without recourse to the American Journal of Quantitative Financial Studies either. Today, however, was not a normal day. Though the markets were yet to open the atmosphere on the trading desk had already reached levels of toxicity hardly compatible with human survival. Andy, whose cock-up this was, continued screaming obscenities at his broker long after the guy had hung up:
"I don't fuckin' wanna 'ear it you tosser! You fuckin' sort it out, we're not fuckin wearin' it, you 'ear me?"
He wasn't talking about make up or heels either: what Andy didn't want to "wear" was the 20-odd million loss he'd made on a trade in the previous night's closing auction. Even for a bank this size, it was a massive balls up and, for all that he screamed and swore and shouted at his broker, Andy knew it was not the guy's fault. He bashed his handset against his desk a couple of times, then called again:
"Don't you fuckin'ang up on me, you cunt!"
Neil cut the line. Cool as anything, as usual. Andy did not hold it against him but, once again, against his handset, which he bashed against the desk again and again until the earpiece snapped. For a second Andy watched it swing, dangling off a sad precarious piece of thin grey cable. In two weeks on the desk this was the third handset Elisabeth had watched Andy destroy. The rest of the team had recently moved on to high tech headsets, but Andy didn't like wearing those– or bashing them. He stood up and walked to the helpdesk for some new, old-fashioned gear. To his right, Master Yoda stroked his bald patch then his chin, then announced in a gravelly cockney voice that he was going for a smoke. To Andy's left, Newbie let out an audible sigh of relief, his big white square jawed face flushed with the effort of not showing fear. And where, you might ask, was their illustrious leader, bald-as-a-coot "Wavy", the (knuckle) Head of the London Trading Desk?
He was in all likelihood upstairs, chummying up to the Executive Committee and trying to pass the buck or, in this case, the 20 million loss, Sterling. The last half hour before the market open was when the higher ups lived up to their name, migrating en masse to the canteen on the top floor and taking it over with the sheer size of their combined egos. Woe betide the mere mortal who dared to show her face there between 7:30 and 8:am.
On, then, went Elisabeth Bennet's invisibility cloak. Safe behind a 15 page veil of Greek letters she eavesdropped on some C-suite, Executive Level, truly world-beating arse-covering. The Head of Portfolio Management, for instance, whilst stirring his porridge maintained that he had never asked Andy to do the trade. Elisabeth distinctly remembered hearing him do precisely that, yesterday about 3:pm, in person and at the kind of volume that makes it hard for a harmless quant to concentrate on her SQL queries. Wavy swore he "had the broker by the goolies", though Elisabeth had literally just heard evidence to the contrary. Besides, with the story making the Financial Times' Lex column, the bank's financial loss was fast becoming the least of its problems. Fear not: the Head of Public Relations was on the case. He'd "give that little bitch's editor such a god almighty bollocking, if they didn't retract the story and sack her, they could go and fuck themselves, he'd leak the interim results to the fucking Guardian this year." Head of Legal, meanwhile, could see no evidence of malpractice, which was only to be expected from someone paid so handsomely never to look for any. Similarly, the Head of Risk reassured anyone who cared to ask (they were few) that no exact figure could as yet be put on what he euphemistically called the "event". Having heard all she cared to hear, Elisabeth turned her lively mind to the equations in front of her, and headed back to the desk.
Reading the American Journal of Quantitative Financial Studies can be like wearing the perfect Spanx. As an invisibility cloak Elisabeth found it so comfortable, she'd forget she was wearing it, and bump into all manners of things. On her exit from the lift a splash of coffee, followed by a deep voiced expletive, alerted her that she should have quit reading sooner. She muttered a reluctant apology and, having ascertained that she'd not spilled any coffee on anyone but herself, she hurried behind the reception desk for some tissues to pat dry first her precious equations, then her shirt sleeve and neck. She heard no echo of her apology while she did this. Instead when she looked up again this tall man was clearing his throat and… excuse me, what?
The man was handing her his coat.
She was, in fairness to him, standing behind the reception desk and Kate Atkinson, third floor receptionist and ditz extraordinaire, was once again AWOL. Still, did Elizabeth look to this guy like a coat-checking receptionist? Did receptionists read American econometrics papers? Or couldn't he tell the American Journal of Quantitative Financial Studies from Cosmo? When Elisabeth got over herself long enough to take a closer look at this miscreant, this Spoiler of Coffee and Good Equations, she realised that he looked almost as incongruous standing there in his sharp suit, as she must do behind the reception desk. Was the bank looking for someone to pose shirtless for its next ad campaign? He's fit that bill, yes, thank you very much, but last time she checked PR operated out of the first floor, and this was three: where the real dealing happened. Could Gillette man over there not even count to the number of blades in his razor? Naah, this guy must be a client. The bank's best looking client ever, by some margin, though somewhat lacking in basic manners - and in hair. His skull was freshly shaved, but what with the quality shirt and tie the effect was more Yul Brynner than scary skinhead. Scary Yul Brynner maybe, what with the permafrown.
OK, so client, then. Clients, however weird, bald, obnoxious or good looking, pay bankers salaries and must therefore be indulged. Elisabeth forced on a smile, invited the man to sit down onto the reception's square-edged black leather sofa, and grabbed his coat. It had real weight to it: a very nice coat, of thick dense and soft navy wool. She felt sure Kate Atkinson would have gone about it in a more graceful and indeed gracious manner, but after some faffing around with the handle-less doors of the wardrobe, and some clattering of redundant hangers onto the floor, Elisabeth managed to hang the damn thing up. She returned to the sofa, where the man took a brief break from frowning at her to retrieve something from the inside pocket of his suit jacket.
"Good morning, sir, welcome to..."
But he didn't let her finish, handing her a folded piece of A4 instead.
Oh. Dear.
"Interview schedule for Fitzwilliam Kingsley-Darcy, 13-09-1999" read the first line, and despite a rising sense of panic Elisabeth couldn't quite suppress a snigger. Will? Will Kingsley? Will Kingsley's full name was Fitz, excuse-my-French-but-Fitz-bloody-William Kingsley-Darcy? Oh, this was bad. Very very bad. Worse than she'd expected, and Elisabeth usually prided herself on preparing for the worst. A slight blush, which Will no doubt put down to her ineptitude at hanging coats, followed a sharp intake of breath. What would Kate Atkinson do?
"Can I offer you a tea or coffee?"
"Coffee, black."
"Coffee, black, please," she couldn't help reply, and made for the vending machine. What to do? Safe inside the tiny kitchen she punched 32 into the machine, leant one hip against the counter, crossed her arms and did what she did best: she thought about it.
Things happen for a reason, they say, generally about bad things. For instance, perhaps the reason she'd languished for so long as a "quant" on the bank's Equity Research team without any prospect of promotion was not just because she was a woman, and spoke with a bit of an accent. Maybe it was so that they could dump the mad-cap, no-hope projects on her, like modelling the costs of trading. And maybe the reason she managed to do that, despite the terrible data and the piss-poor CPU on the research servers, wasn't just so the bank could save on the commissions they paid brokers. Maybe she did all that so that when the new Head of Trading in New York asked who "did T-cost modelling" in the UK, her name would be the only one to come up. Maybe she crunched all those numbers for all those years so that Raj, that was his name, would invite her on secondment to New York for six months. Maybe all that thankless work had been the means of her eventual escape. Out of London and to the US. Out of the flat she shared with Mike and into a tiny beige corporate studio in Manhattan, which she now thought of as her chrysalis. Out of it she came, ready to head back to London again for a new life without Mike, and for a new career. It involved dragging the traders kicking and screaming into the next millennium, from phones and paper tickets to the glory of a real time, fully electronic trading system called tradePad.
She'd be her own team, of one to start with but yes, she'd be in charge, finally and officially. She'd report directly to Raj who, as boss of all the bank's traders across four continents, had already got a small team started on tradePad in New York. They'd taught Elisabeth all they knew before sending her back to London and now here she was: on the UK Trading Desk, or Desk for short because traders are too busy and self important to speak in full sentences. Well never mind traders: Elisabeth now reported directly to the Global Head of Trading. Not so bad for a 28 year old female with a bit of an accent.
There were only two catches with Raj's grand vision. One: the London traders laboured under the misapprehension that Elisabeth was going to code them out of a job, and therefore loathed her. Nothing she hadn't expected or indeed encountered before: a woman with her kind of skill-base, in the olden days they'd have burnt her for a witch. They'd soon see the light, when their commissions halved and they couldn't screw up a trade like Andy just had, not if they tried. But this led to catch number two: Raj needed to replace Wavy with a dynamic young Head of Trading in London, one who wasn't quite as scared of a computer and would support the tradePad vision. Raj was tremendously excited to have headhunted one Will Kingsley, ex Goldman Sachs, ex some hedge fund or other, to lead the tradePad implementation from the trading side while she, well -she did all the work, as usual.
It's another truth universally acknowledged that Goldman bankers are arrogant, greedy, power grabbing, credit stealing bastards. Often clever with it, but no one in their right mind would look forward to sharing a pencil sharpener with someone from Goldman, let alone a project like tradePad. In this too, however, Elisabeth had soon bowed to Raj's superior wisdom. Her first day on the desk was enough to persuade her that no Goldman guy could be worse than that shouty, red-braced, leery old dinosaur: Wavy.
Thinking about Will now, she supposed she'd only expected him to be a standard issue trader: aggressive, a bit thick of neck and intellect. And also arrogant, because of the Goldman thing. But nothing had prepared her for the full six feet of this double-barrelled arrogance. And she'd certainly never expected him to expect her to hang his coat and fetch him coffee. A sexist, arrogant, preposterously-named pain in the backside then. What would Kate Atkinson do?
Wait: who cared what Kate would do? What Elisabeth did, was walk back to reception with a 1000-Watt smile on her face, and a 32 from the vending machine served over a green recycled paper serviette. Pure class. This she served to Will, neither spilling a drop nor dropping her smile. She then plonked herself next to him on the sofa and picked up the phone on the coffee table. He looked in horror from her to the dashboard behind the reception desk and back, tried to shrink away from her but he couldn't: she had him cornered against the opposite armrest.
"Hi!" she said when HR picked up, then swivelled to face Will as she spoke. "Good morning, it's Elisabeth. Bennet, yes. From the Trading Desk," she said slowly, so he wouldn't miss it. "I've literally just bumped into Will Kingsley, he's here for his interviews...? Yes, no, mine's not 'til this afternoon. Shall I tell him you'll be down soon?... OK, thanks then, bye!"
She hung up and stood up, the better to beam down at him:
"Delighted to meet you at last, Will. I'll see you later, do enjoy that coffee!" she said, and left him to it.
It was only a short walk back to the desk, diagonally across a glass-walled, marble-floored atrium. But half way there her face dropped: Justine from HR, aka the Angel of Career Death, aka Head of Sackings, was handing Wavy the Cardboard Box of Doom, and explaining that he couldn't bring home the personalised mousepad he'd won at some broker do, because it was "a company asset". Andy fumed, Newbie blushed to the tip of his blonde hair, Yoda shook his head, Elisabeth stared, dumbstruck, and only Neil, despite his young years, looked squarely at what was going on. When the cardboard box was packed he walked over to Wavy, shook his hand and said:
"It's been an honour, boss."
Elisabeth thought of her own boss, Raj. Unlike Wavy he wasn't scared of a computer and you had to hand it to him: Efficiency was his middle name. She liked that in any human, but in a boss, and after years of putting up with double PhDs with the dynamism and charisma of peri-menopausal sea slugs, it was especially refreshing. Using the time difference with New York to his advantage, he'd recognised the opportunity presented by Andy's balls up, and pounced. A higher up paying with his career for the misdeeds of his underling: this had to be a first at the bank. It usually worked the other way around: the bosses screwed up and the underlings carried the can. So there was some poetic justice in this sacking, for sure. And it was all for the good of tradePad but still: not even Wavy deserved to be sent off without leaving drinks, a whip-round or even a branded mousepad.
Elisabeth sighed and opened her Inbox:
From: Mike_perso Michael_Ronson
To: Elisabeth R. Bennet, WBC UK Ltd.
Sent: Tue, 13 September, 08:12
Re: Heard you're back.
Hello darling. Can I still call you that? I'm sorry, perhaps you'd rather not hear from me just yet but our friends tell me that you're back from New York and I'm thinking of you. I hope you're doing OK. I'd love to speak to you. Is that all right?
Love
Mike
An uneasy mix of guilt and panic seized her chest. No, it wasn't all right. Not all right at all.
On the Market is Copyright Mel Liffragh 2021, all rights reserved