"By this time, the tragic calamity that was the First World War had been well under way. However, the family prospered by this, selling its manufactured goods to both the Canadian and British armies and other European nations as well. And the need for food in Europe was paramount, even for a little while after the war was over, and Eleonore's past decision to invest heavily in the agricultural sector certainly paid off.
"Another fortunate convenience that the war provided was a very believable cover story for the existence of Samantha. Her fictional father was born in Montreal where Rebecca had fictionally met and married him before he went off to war and got fictionally killed in action at Vimy Ridge. God knows that war made widows and fatherless children by the thousands, so it wasn't a story anybody would ever doubt for a second, and only added to the already strong righteous appearances Odette had built up around House De la Garde.
"So life went more or less back to normal for a while. Rebecca took her place in her office to begin the completion of her familiarity with the ever more convoluted family business, and once again took part in the frequent sex parties that she and her mother hosted in the second floor parlour.
"As her mother and grandmother was, Samantha was homeschooled and, regarding Sera, was uninformed to the same degree while being similarly warned to never speak of what happened within the home while she was without. But it turned out that Rebecca's daughter wasn't the problem where the need to maintain secrecy was concerned."
Shifting in her seat once again, Auntie leaned back, propping her elbow on its arm as a reflective expression came to her features. She regarded the desk for a few moments as though composing her thoughts before looking up, a brief glance at each of us in turn, before she continued with what I could swear was shame.
"As you might imagine, information on a person that comes from that same person isn't necessarily accurate or complete due to a natural level of impartiality. So, while some of what comes next is provided by Rebecca, a lot of it was provided by Grammy. ... Rebecca started to... lose it... for want of a better description. It started when she was young, I think, but to such a small and slow degree that it wasn't recognizable as a progressive thing until she was older, when the pace of her emotional degradation made it impossible to excuse or rationalize it away, much less ignore.
"One might say that by the mid nineteen-twenties her 'Mistress' persona had bled through the confines of her sexual identity and had begun to assert itself in her everyday life. She'd become more stoic and her expectations of those around her, especially the staff, became greater while her patience with them shrank. Only her mother was immune to this. Her slaves, John and Jane, were perspectively exempt, being that they were used to and enjoyed much worse from her. To see a smile on her face became almost a rarity, replaced by an expression of tension, as though she were under some personal stress. Odette was only too glad to have her back to pay very much attention. Later on, she would tell Grammie that she certainly noticed a change in her daughter in later years, but attributed it to her dominant sexual practices becoming a crutch in dealing with what was becoming an unmanageably large business empire. Odette admitted to being stressed over their work herself, and therefore didn't pay as much mind as she might have.
"But eventually, a decision was made to alleviate their workload. While this decision was made between Odette and Rebecca, the details were contested and, in the end, Odette had to pull rank, and it's a good thing she did. See, unlike Rebecca, she'd been around for the turn of the century and had been taught her business ideals by Eleonore while she also witnessed the birth of the then modern business model and how it had come about, as well as what was lost in its creation. I won't get into the details because I'm no financier myself, and there's only one person in the room who wouldn't hear anything other than gibberish if I were to try," she said, looking at my Stevie.
"So, if I may keep it simple, Odette didn't like the centralized banking system. Furthermore, the idea that the family's wealth was represented by a paper currency that this system more or less controlled made her very uncomfortable, as is understandable given that Odette was raised by the woman who kept her family's wealth beneath her root cellar in a strong-box, right? This unease with paper currency had always been at the back of her mind, so the decision was finally made to convert most of their currency, which was really only a number at the bank anyway, to gold. At the same time, a home renovation was commissioned which created a small sub-basement, most of which was used as a secure vault for their wealth. Everyone who had anything to do with the building of that vault, from workers to the people who employed them and those who subcontracted them, were influenced to never speak of it as it was being constructed and to forget it existed once it was finished. Once all of their gold was transported there, it was watched over by a heavily armed and influenced private security team and Odette's concerns over the centralized banking system were effectively put to rest.
"Meanwhile, the root of disagreement between mother and daughter, that being how to downsize their empire for manageability, was beginning to drive a wedge between the two. Rebecca's newfound and increasing tyranny wouldn't work on Odette, who saw her daughter thinking more from a control point of view rather than her own perspective of common sense. In the end, after a shouting match that Grammie remembered well, Odette put her foot down when Rebecca started moving around the topic of dividing the family's wealth. This pulling of rank didn't sit well with Rebecca and, although they did reconcile, their relationship was never quite the same.
"The result of their- I should say Odette's- business decision saw a mass sell-off of their manufacturing companies and most of their natural resource interests. Not trusting the "flighty" markets any more than the centralized banking system, Odette only invested a small sum of their wealth there, enough to supplement the expansion of the only real business they had left, which was real estate, cartage, agriculture and beef, pork and poultry production.
"So, while income was drastically cut, their gold reserves were fattened much, much further by this mass sell-off and, since their actual living expenses were relatively small, the business they did retain could more than adequately support them without requiring practically every waking, stressed out hour of their day in order to maintain. Even Rebecca had to admit that it made things a lot easier, but she disliked the almost total sacrifice of their heavy control and influence over others and, to a great extent, the political and social world around them. To her, this power was infinitely more important than the fact that they now had literally more wealth than they could ever know what to do with.
"As I mentioned earlier, this downsizing would turn out to be a critically fortunate move because about three years later, on October twenty-ninth, nineteen-twenty-nine, came an event known in the annals of history as 'Black Tuesday'. Auntie glanced again at Stevie with a smile, who was nodding slowly with a grim smile of his own before she elaborated with, "On that day, the
New York Stock Exchange
lost all gains of the previous year within hours. By November thirteenth, over one hundred billion Dollars had disappeared from the American economy which, in today's terms, comes to about one point three Trillion. What followed was a world-wide economic depression that beat Canada's head in for the next decade. This was the reason our father had quit school in grade three to start his work life. By nineteen-thirty-three, the unemployment rate was thirty percent. At the same time, the wages of those who were fortunate enough to have jobs were cut as prices and profits dropped in every sector.
"The family did suffer some losses, but their fortune wasn't tied up in the markets and they'd already sold off ninety percent of their business interests. But, as so many people had lost their jobs, they naturally couldn't afford to pay their rent and with the disappearance of so many business, both big and small, many De la Garde properties were no longer bringing in profits. Their cartage firms had taken a hit as well, what with such a drop in cargo volume to be moved, and since food prices had dropped along with the price of everything else, the agriculture and meat production aspect of the family's income was also hurt. Nevertheless, people have to eat, have shelter and, since many other cartage business went under, there was enough work to keep De la Garde cartage running. When the dust settled, enough income remained that Odette and Rebecca didn't have to worry, or even adjust their personal lifestyles.
