[Downton Abbey] Charting My Own Path: Matthew Crawley SI: Chapter 3 (Patreon)

1st May, 1913.

Chambers of Matthew Crawley, Solicitor,

No. 44 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, W.C.

Four months have elapsed since I balanced my books on New Year’s Eve with sixteen thousand one hundred and thirty-three pounds sitting in cleared cash at Williams Deacon’s Bank. In that time, my single objective has been to convert those paper winnings into physical manufacturing capacity, institutional credit, and political leverage here in London.

To ensure that my legal practice at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and my mother’s domestic life at Gower Street remain completely insulated from industrial hazards, I crossed New Square to Stone Buildings during the first week of January and instructed Julian Langham to settle the incorporation papers for a separate joint-stock company under the Companies (Consolidation) Act of 1908.

We registered the enterprise at Somerset House under the name of Northern Advanced Synthetics Limited.

In drafting the Articles of Association, I drew upon the dual-class capital structures that corporate financiers utilize to separate capital from governance. Too many English manufacturers make the fatal error of issuing identical ordinary shares whenever they require fresh capital, diluting their voting authority until an outside syndicate or a quarrelsome family faction can seize the board and force a liquidation.

Under the 1908 Act, the law allows a company complete freedom to divide its share classes as it sees fit. I divided Northern Advanced Synthetics into two distinct classes. The equity foundation consists of five hundred Class A Founders’ Shares of one pound each, every one of which is registered in my name. Under Article Twenty-Two, these Founders’ Shares carry twenty votes apiece, retain the exclusive legal right to appoint and remove the managing director, and hold an absolute veto over any proposed merger, liquidation, or mortgage. The remaining capital consists of forty-nine thousand five hundred Class B Preferred Ordinary Shares. These shares are designed for outside commercial partners: they carry an attractive, cumulative preferential dividend of six percent and a modest claim on surplus profits, but they possess zero voting rights in general meeting unless their dividend falls twelve months into arrears. By this structure, I can bring twenty or thirty thousand pounds of outside equity onto our balance sheet whenever we require fresh machinery, without ceding a fraction of corporate control.

Rather than purchasing bare farmland at Trafford Park and spending nine months laying concrete foundations,  I looked for an idle industrial site that already possessed the infrastructure. The textile and engineering contractions of 1908 had left several casualties along the Manchester Ship Canal. Through an official receiver in Chancery, I secured the freehold of the Chadwick Works—a five-acre calico-bleaching and dye facility whose proprietors had failed in November.

Because the site had operated as a heavy dye-house, the essential infrastructure was already in place. The yard contained four massive Lancashire coal-fired steam boilers, an eight-foot brick chimney stack rising two hundred feet, statutory water-drawing rights from the canal, stone-lined effluent culverts, and private railway sidings connecting directly with the main lines of the Cheshire Lines Committee. The receiver’s court-ordered liquidation price was nine thousand five hundred pounds. I paid four thousand five hundred pounds out of my liquid reserves and secured a five-thousand-pound commercial mortgage through Evelyn Tritton at Williams Deacon’s Bank, secured exclusively against the bricks and boilers of the plant. That left over eleven thousand six hundred pounds of our liquid cash undisturbed in London, while giving us an industrial property that could be converted to synthetic chemical production within eight weeks.

Managing a chemical works in Lancashire from a desk in Holborn is impossible. To make the plant function, I required a works manager.

The primary weakness of British manufacturing is family nepotism. Across Lancashire and Cheshire, large industrial enterprises founded by brilliant, self-made Victorian grandfathers are now managed by grandsons who care more about country shoots and polo ponies than chemical yields. Inside those firms, a talented chemical engineer who does not possess the family surname can spend twenty years without ever being considered for a directorship.

I spent four days in Widnes and Blackley making discreet inquiries among commercial machinery merchants. That search brought me to Thomas Halstead. Halstead is forty-two, the son of a Bolton foundry mechanic, who worked up from the testing benches to become chief distiller and assistant works manager at the United Alkali Company’s Widnes plant. For twelve years he kept their heavy acid towers running at an exceptional margin, only to be passed over twice so that the board could promote twenty-four-year-old directors' sons fresh down from Cambridge. When I met Halstead in the commercial room of a hotel in Warrington, he was considering an offer to emigrate to a steel-works in Pittsburgh. I offered him four hundred and fifty pounds per annum—one hundred pounds above his Widnes salary—along with absolute operational command of the Trafford Park yard and a binding five-year contract granting him five percent of the works’ net annual operating profits. He signed the agreement before the week was out, served his notice, and took charge of the Trafford Park site on the tenth of February.

Under Halstead, we required qualified analytical chemists to oversee Dr. Chaim Weizmann’s bacterial fermentation vats and Charles Cross’s cellulose ester solutions during the night shifts. Oxford and Cambridge are unsuitable for recruiting works chemists; the older universities produce classicists, civil servants, and equity draftsmen, while regarding practical industrial chemistry as a trade. The real technical talent in Britain is concentrated in the redbrick technical institutions.

I called upon the professors of chemistry and dyeing at the Manchester Municipal School of Technology, and upon returning to London, visited the Royal College of Science in South Kensington. In both faculties I found young diplomates—sons of shopkeepers, clerks, and engine-fitters—who had taken first-class honors in organic and analytical chemistry, yet faced miserable prospects earning thirty shillings a week. I established four annual industrial bursaries of twenty-five pounds apiece at each institution. In return, the department heads directed their eight sharpest graduating diplomates to our service at two pounds ten shillings a week.

For the boiler houses and distillation columns, where we handle volatile organic solvents under pressure, casual yard laborers are a severe hazard. An undisciplined laborer will smuggle matches into the sheds in his waistcoat lining or ignore a rising pressure gauge. In early February, I traveled to the naval dockyard towns of Portsmouth and Chatham. Every quarter, the Royal Navy pensions off Chief Engine Room Artificers at the age of forty or forty-two after twenty years of continuous sea service. These warrant mechanics have spent their careers inside the hulls of cruisers and torpedo-boat destroyers, managing high-pressure water-tube boilers and enforcing an unyielding discipline where a failed steam joint means instant death. I engaged six retired Chief Artificers at three pounds ten shillings a week. They maintain our steam mains, lead-lined reaction vessels, and fractionating columns with military precision.

In framing our wage policy at Trafford Park, I instructed Halstead that we are operating a competitive commercial business, not a philanthropic retreat. If an industrialist burdens his cost sheet with uncalculated welfare schemes for casual yard laborers, he inflates his unit expenses and hands an immediate pricing advantage to domestic rivals like Brunner Mond or United Alkali.

We organized our workforce into two distinct tiers: Our operational core—Halstead, the eight university-trained analytical chemists, and the six naval artificers—are compensated well above the market standard, participate directly in our net operating profit pool, and are bound by ironclad legal covenants under the Trade Marks and Patents Acts that bar them from entering the employ of any rival chemical combine for five years following departure. They have every financial incentive to guard our proprietary yields, and zero temptation to listen to outside solicitations.

As for the fifty unskilled yard hands who unload raw coal wagons, shovel grain meal, and handle iron drums, they can be replaced from the Salford docks on an hour’s notice. We pay them the prevailing district trade-union day-rate, not a farthing more. To ensure labor peace without increasing base wages, I instituted an attendance rule: any yard hand who completes a four-week working month without an unexcused absence, disciplinary infraction, or work stoppage receives a two-shilling sober-conduct bonus on the final Saturday; if a laborer joins a wildcat strike for an afternoon, he forfeits both the bonus and his gate ticket. In the manufacturing sheds, we installed the exhaust hoods and lead-lined washing troughs mandated by the Home Office Factory and Alkali Acts. We comply with statutory requirements to the letter, avoiding municipal fines and official interference.

To supply our chemical feedstocks without spending ten thousand pounds constructing crude coal-tar retorts of our own, I went to Huddersfield and concluded a three-year wholesale contract with Major Lionel Holliday of Read Holliday & Sons. His works delivers regular rail tank-wagons of semi-refined benzol, toluol, and carbolic acid straight onto our private sidings at fixed wholesale prices. That same week, I traveled to Oxford to visit Professor William Henry Perkin Jr., who had recently taken up the Waynflete Chair of Chemistry. Finding him burdened by outdated laboratory facilities, I endowed a one-thousand-pound Cambrian Organic Research Grant, paid in three annual installments to furnish his postgraduate laboratory. In exchange, Perkin granted us an exclusive first-refusal commercial licensing option on all synthetic coal-tar derivatives and catalytic processes developed by his research team.

With Trafford Park’s physical installation underway, I moved to expand our financial machinery in the City of London.

To scale rapidly, I required an established City house that could underwrite debentures, discount trade bills, and manage capital pools without paying fees to outside brokers. Several small provincial deposit banks were available for purchase, but I avoided them entirely. A commercial deposit bank takes cash over the counter from shopkeepers and farmers who hold the statutory right to demand their gold sovereigns back at sight. When the general European war breaks out, the opening weeks will trigger an intense financial panic; any small deposit bank with its assets tied up in fixed industrial advances will face immediate insolvency.

What I required was an acceptance and discount house—a firm that takes zero retail deposits from the public, but maintains clearing facilities at the Bank of England and operates by syndicating commercial loans, discounting ninety-day trade paper, and placing high-grade securities with institutional clients.

Since the previous autumn, the Bank of England had held the official discount rate at five percent to protect its gold reserves during the Balkan conflict. That prolonged credit stringency had placed severe pressure on smaller bill-broking partnerships in the City. In Abchurch Lane, off Lombard Street, sat Messrs. Thornton, Loyd & Co., an old acceptance and discount house founded in 1864. In January, the senior partner, Mr. Thornton, died at his residence in Surrey. Under their partnership deed, his executors were legally mandated to withdraw his capital within ninety days to satisfy estate duties, leaving the surviving partner, an elderly bachelor named Edward Loyd, facing mandatory liquidation.

Julian Langham discovered the firm's position through an equity probate matter and brought the details to my chambers. I examined their balance sheet: the firm had no non-performing debts, held discount privileges at the Bank of England, and maintained an established network of correspondent banks across Yorkshire and Lancashire. In late February, I paid three thousand five hundred pounds in cash to satisfy the Thornton executors, retained Mr. Loyd on a modest consultancy stipend to preserve continuity, and re-incorporated the business as Cambrian Securities Limited.

Managing a registered issuing house and corporate share registry requires technical accounting credentials that cannot be improvised. Joseph Molesley has served me with absolute fidelity since we departed Yorkshire, but a man whose background is village charity accounting cannot be placed in charge of stamp duty audits or statutory share registers under the 1908 Act.

Instead, taking advantage of the joint-stock bank amalgamations that have closed redundant offices across Cornhill and Lombard Street, I recruited Mr. Arthur Pendelton, an accredited Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Secretaries, along with two experienced senior ledger clerks. Mr. Pendelton manages our formal accounting, transfer registers, and bill-discounting technicalities in Abchurch Lane.

Molesley I elevated to the position that suits his character completely: my Confidential Private Secretary and Executive Assistant, at five pounds a week. Molesley occupies the room adjoining mine at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and accompanies me whenever I travel to the City, the Law Courts, or Manchester. He manages my confidential correspondence, maintains my appointments diary, receives our landed clients, and conveys my personal instructions directly to Pendelton in the City and Halstead in Lancashire.

With Cambrian Securities operational in Abchurch Lane, I established two distinct capital pools to maximize our legal safety and speculative leverage.

Under the Trustee Act of 1893, ancestral family settlements and landed trusts are strictly forbidden from investing in common equities or speculative commodity ventures; if a trustee risks estate principal on an unauthorized investment, he is personally liable for every pound lost. Yet wealthy individuals also possess unencumbered personal capital—money sitting in private current accounts that is bound by no statutory trust deed.

I organized our operations into two separate vehicles: The first is our Wholesale Trustee Pool, reserved for family settlements, landed estates, and conservative municipal reserves. This capital is placed exclusively into five-and-a-half and six percent asset-backed first-mortgage debentures, bonded warehouse warrants, and imperial rail bonds.

The second vehicle is the Cambrian Special Opportunities Syndicate. This is a private discretionary investment partnership designed for wealthy clients deploying risk capital. The syndicate contract grants Cambrian sole, unhindered authority to trade forward commodity warrants, corporate turnarounds, and market arbitrage. In return, Cambrian charges a one percent annual management fee to cover research and execution, along with a twenty percent performance carry on all net profits generated above an eight percent annual hurdle.

The capital arrived rapidly. In February, Julian Langham and I appeared before the Chancery Division to conclude the application under Section 35 of the Settled Land Act for Evelyn Napier and his father, Viscount Branksome. By cutting through the objections of their family trustees, we secured the court's sanction to sell sixty acres of mature Hampshire oak to the Great Western Railway for timber sleepers, extinguishing the estate’s five percent mortgage. Lord Branksome placed eight thousand pounds of his freed family settlement into our conservative Wholesale Pool, and promptly drew a private check for two thousand pounds of his own unencumbered money to join the Special Opportunities Syndicate.

Branksome discussed our results at White’s and Brooks’s; Alderman Caleb Hetherington and Arthur Fairbairn spoke to fellow manufacturers at the Manchester Royal Exchange. By mid-April, Lord Merton and Lord Willoughby de Broke had placed twenty thousand pounds of trust capital into our Wholesale Pool, the land stewards of the Earl of Derby were routing short-term Lancashire agricultural revenues through our Liverpool cotton warrants, and Sir Charles Macara had organized a circle of textile-machinery makers from Bolton and Salford to subscribe thirty-five thousand pounds across both funds. Furthermore, through my associations at the Reform Club and the Oxford and Cambridge Club, three Members of Parliament from both sides of the House, two senior magistrates from the County of London bench, and a former Admiralty supply director quietly allocated private savings into the Special Opportunities Syndicate. In English law, there is no statute preventing a public official from participating in a private commercial partnership; when those gentlemen receive quarterly statements showing twenty percent returns, their interest in Cambrian’s institutional protection becomes very real.

With thirty-five thousand pounds in our discretionary syndicate alongside my own capital and Williams Deacon’s credit facilities, we possessed the liquidity to execute significant macro trades between February and April.

The first was the Mexican oil dislocation in February. When General Victoriano Huerta overthrew President Francisco Madero during the Ten Tragic Days in Mexico City, the London market panicked, driving Lord Cowdray’s Mexican Eagle Petroleum shares down thirty-five percent within a week. I reviewed the shipping registers at the Baltic Exchange. The military violence was confined to Mexico City, seven thousand feet up in the interior mountains. On the coast, the vast oil gushers at Tampico and Tuxpan were entirely unmolested, heavily protected by British and American naval vessels, and pumping crude oil into tank-steamers on normal schedules. Using six thousand pounds of my liquid reserves alongside twenty-four thousand pounds from the Special Opportunities Syndicate through our brokers, Heseltine, Powell & Co., we purchased thirty thousand pounds of Mexican Eagle shares at the bottom of the slump. When the regular dividend cables arrived from the Gulf in April and commercial calm returned, the shares rallied forty percent. We liquidated the entire holding, securing a gross profit of twelve thousand five hundred pounds. Cambrian’s twenty percent performance carry on the syndicate’s portion, combined with the return on my personal capital, yielded four thousand six hundred pounds in net fees and profits to the firm.

The second trade was in munitions metals. The naval race and the Balkan mobilizations had European cartridge plants operating at peak peacetime volume. Every brass cartridge case consists of seventy percent copper and thirty percent refined zinc, known commercially as spelter. Although the British Empire holds the world’s richest zinc deposits at Broken Hill in Australia, Britain had almost no domestic smelting works; under long-term pre-war contracts, nearly the entire Australian zinc concentrate was shipped to Antwerp and Hamburg to be smelted by the German Metallgesellschaft cartel. By late March, with German industrial combines stockpiling spelter for domestic munitions, spot supplies in London dock warehouses fell to critical levels. Using acceptance credits through Cambrian Securities, I bought up the physical warehouse warrants for eighteen hundred tons of refined Belgian and Silesian spelter lying on the Thames wharves. We held the warrants for five weeks until Midlands rolling mills were forced to bid aggressively to meet War Office deadlines, liquidating the metal for a net profit of six thousand eight hundred pounds.

The third trade was in Chilean sodium nitrate. Every pound of naval cordite and picric acid requires nitric acid, and Britain produces no synthetic ammonia; every ton must be refined from sodium nitrate imported from the Atacama desert in Chile. Recognizing that domestic explosive plants were accelerating production, I utilized Cambrian Securities’ acceptance facilities to finance three steam-charters carrying bulk nitrate from Antofagasta directly into the Mersey, securing forward delivery contracts with northern acid manufacturers that yielded four thousand two hundred pounds in net arbitrage.

Meanwhile, for our conservative Wholesale Trustee Pool—which now commands over eighty thousand pounds—I diversified our capital across both domestic and imperial holdings. In 1913, Britain’s domestic heavy industries are operating at their historical peak. I directed thirty thousand pounds into five percent First-Mortgage Debentures of Vickers Limited and Armstrong Whitworth, secured colliery rail-wagon financing trusts in South Wales, and asset-backed electrification bonds of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London. The remaining fifty thousand pounds was allocated under the Colonial Stock Act into Canadian Pacific Railway equipment debentures, Harrisons & Crosfield Malayan rubber plantation paper, and discounted First-Mortgage Debentures of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which are trading at an artificial discount while the company completes its pipeline to Abadan.

Simultaneously, Cambrian Securities moved to address the major structural flaw in British corporate finance: the institutional neglect of domestic mid-sized manufacturers. City merchant banks focus almost exclusively on foreign sovereign loans, while commercial joint-stock banks provide only thirty-day overdrafts.

First, we underwrote a twenty-thousand-pound issue of Six Percent First-Mortgage Debentures for Northern Advanced Synthetics, placing the paper with our landed trust accounts and Hetherington’s Manchester group. That paid off Mr. Tritton’s five-thousand-pound bank mortgage on the Chadwick Works and fully funded the installation of our fractionating columns, copper solvent condensers, and Weizmann fermentation tanks without diluting our equity.

Immediately following that placement, four established northern firms—a machine-tool manufacturer in Broadheath, a heavy plate roller in Gorton, a colliery winding-engine works in Wigan, and a coastal shipbuilder on the Wear—retained Cambrian Securities to arrange long-term capital. Over ten weeks, we underwrote and distributed seventy-five thousand pounds of First-Mortgage Debentures for those enterprises across our institutional network. We charge a standard two-and-a-half percent underwriting commission at issuance, a half-percent annual paying-agency fee, and my legal chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields collect the statutory conveyancing fees on every mortgage indenture. That corporate finance business alone brought over two thousand two hundred pounds in cash commissions into our house account this spring.

With working capital secured, I targeted the specific technical bottlenecks that will affect the British military next year.

I avoided airframe construction in the South, where small builders are losing capital on experimental timber fuselages. Instead, at Brownsfield Mill in Manchester, I met with Alliott Verdon Roe. Roe is an exceptional aeronautical designer whose company, A.V. Roe & Company, was short of working capital while building the prototype of the Avro 504 tractor biplane. Through Cambrian Securities, I underwrote a six-thousand-pound convertible debenture for his works. The capital provided Roe with the timber and rotary engines he required; in exchange, Cambrian secured an option on twenty-five percent of his equity, a seat on his board, and an exclusive contract under which every square yard of linen on an Avro aircraft is treated with Northern Advanced Synthetics’ non-flammable cellulose acetate dope.

A more severe strategic vulnerability is the high-tension ignition magneto. Nearly every military lorry, naval launch, and aeroplane engine in the British armed forces relies on a magneto to fire its cylinders—and over ninety percent of them are imported from the Robert Bosch works in Stuttgart. In March, through the Royal College of Science, I located two electrical engineers in Coventry who had designed a high-tension rotary armature. I provided two thousand pounds to incorporate Midland Ignition & Magneto Limited, leased a precision workshop in Birmingham, and instructed them to reverse-engineer the Bosch magneto utilizing domestic Sheffield tungsten steel.

In Whitehall, our position is now balanced across both political parties. At the Reform Club, Arthur Salter introduced me to Captain Murray Sueter of the Admiralty Air Department and Mervyn O’Gorman of the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough. Because we took over an existing works at Trafford Park, Halstead and Charles Cross had our solvent-recovery systems operating by late March. We delivered ten fifty-gallon drums of cellulose acetate dope to Farnborough; following flight trials in the rain, O’Gorman placed our company on the War Office list of approved contractors with an initial three-thousand-pound delivery contract. At the same time, Sir Frederick Nathan at Waltham Abbey confirmed that our grain acetone met naval purity standards for Cordite MD, securing us an Admiralty testing subsidy.

To maintain an equivalent footing with the Conservative opposition, Julian Langham and I filed formal petitions before the Comptroller-General of Patents under Section 27 of the Patents and Designs Act of 1907, seeking the revocation or compulsory licensing of dormant British patents held by the German chemical cartels—BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst. Leo Amery raised our petitions in the House of Commons, citing our actions as an example of domestic industrial defense. As the Comptroller issues compulsory licenses, we retain the strategic reagents—acetone, cellulose acetate, and phenol—for in-house production at Trafford Park, while sub-licensing the broad synthetic dye patents to Read Holliday and Levinstein Limited for a four percent gross royalty on production.

My primary focus, however, has been consolidating my personal authority here in London, where political and financial power reside.

Opposite our house on Gower Street stands University College Hospital. In March, I subscribed one hundred guineas to the hospital funds, which under their charter elected me a Life Governor. As a Life Governor, I sit on the hospital finance and estates committee alongside Treasury administrators and senior City bankers. This provides an absolute institutional shield for my mother: she serves on the dispensary board by right, entirely immune to the patronizing interference she faced in the country. That same month, I took up the Freedom of the City of London through the Worshipful Company of Drapers, and upon the recommendation of the local borough council, the Lord Chancellor placed my name on the commission of the peace as a Justice of the Peace for the County of London. Sitting as a magistrate on the Holborn bench once a fortnight ensures that municipal surveyors, police authorities, and rating officials treat my chambers with complete deference.

To establish broader public visibility, I concluded two debt investments in April.

The first was in North London. Woolwich Arsenal Football Club had finished at the bottom of the First Division and faced severe financial distress at Plumstead. Their chairman, Sir Henry Norris, took the gamble of relocating the entire club north of the river to Highbury in Islington. Norris needed eighty thousand pounds to level the land, secure a lease from the Church of England, and construct grandstands before the autumn season. I avoided ordinary club shares, which are limited by the Football Association to a five percent dividend. Instead, Cambrian Securities underwrote a ten-thousand-pound Six Percent First-Mortgage Ground Debenture, secured directly against the club's twenty-one-year Highbury ground lease and gate receipts. The transaction gives us a secure yield backed by prime London real estate, a seat on the directorate, and substantial public goodwill among the North London electorate.

The second investment was in the Strand press. Buying a daily London newspaper outright is an expensive error that immediately draws the hostility of Fleet Street press barons. Instead, I examined The Globe, the oldest evening paper in London, and a commercial weekly, The Financial Observer. Both publications were short of working capital to purchase modern printing equipment. Through Cambrian Securities, I advanced eight thousand pounds across the two enterprises in Six-and-a-Half Percent First-Mortgage Convertible Debentures, secured on their buildings, rotary presses, and mastheads. The indenture contains a specific conversion clause: so long as they pay their quarterly coupon, the existing proprietors retain editorial control; but if either publication misses two consecutive coupon payments, our debentures convert at par into fifty-five percent of their voting equity. In peacetime, they can maintain the interest. When the war begins next year, newsprint costs will quadruple, advertising will contract, and both publications will default, giving us majority ownership of an evening daily and a City financial weekly at minimal cost.

In the second week of May, the white dust-sheets were removed from the furnishings at Grantham House in St James’s Square.

The London Season had opened, and this year the house moved with the specific routine of a daughter’s coming-out. Lady Sybil was eighteen; she was to be presented at Court before King George and Queen Mary in her court gown and ostrich feathers, and the mornings were filled with dressmakers from New Bond Street, millinery boxes, and floral deliveries.

Yet beneath the activity of the Season, Robert Crawley, seventh Earl of Grantham, found his mind continually unsettled.

When Matthew and Isobel had departed Downton Abbey the previous August, Robert had comforted himself with a conventional paternal assumption. He had assured Cora that the young man’s northern pride had been stung, and that a winter spent in London and facing the realities of the legal profession would temper his attitude. Robert had expected a formal letter by Easter regarding the entail, allowing him to travel to town, resolve the dispute, and establish a comfortable allowance.

No letter had arrived. What troubled Robert was the news that reached him through his clubs.

Fin

P.S.- Next chapter would be the interaction between the Granthams and Matthew through an intermediary and maybe the start of Matthew's love life- who can tell?