The King’s Diamond

There was another way. I could turn south, and head for Rome. Rome: opulent capital of Christendom, where the finest goldsmiths, artists and dealers in luxuries flocked to make their name and fortune, and supply the endless appetites of His Holiness, Pope Clement VII, his cardinals and nobles. Rome: the seat of a mighty temporal power, for Pope Clement held absolute sway over all central Italy, as well as numerous cities in the north, and commanded Florence through his Medici relations. Rome. Only there would I find the craftsman truly worthy to work on my stones. In my dreams I saw the golden swirls and figures that must surround the gems. I saw something nobler than the common run, something alert and alive, something I had never seen in London.

As I sat, my servant, Martin Deller, paced up and down behind me. He was some ten years my elder, stocky and dark, a useful man with a dagger who had helped me out of trouble more than once. He was also, to my frequent annoyance, the voice of conscience and caution.

‘Please, master! We have had good luck. Let’s leave while we can for home.’

He was right. Plainly he was right. It was a wonder how we had crossed from Venice overland: first past the army of the Pope’s Holy League camped at Cremona, which they had recently won from the Emperor’s Spaniards, then across into the Duchy of Milan where this war had first begun. This was Imperial territory. We found the farms broken up, the fields burnt. The Emperor’s army, starved of pay and plunder, roved the shattered countryside in bands, robbing travellers of whatever they could get. We had travelled by night and hidden in the day, winning through by a mixture of my boldness and Martin’s sense.

The patch of sun on the wall of the Arsenal opposite had shrunk upwards as far as the parapet. It was drawing towards evening. At sunset the Speranza would sail. Few ships were putting out for Rome in these days of war. If I was to strike south, this would be my only chance. Perhaps she had sailed already. And that was best, I argued to myself: by far the best. The time had come to call enough, and turn for home. I faced Martin. I was on the point of telling him to unpack the trunk again, and order horses for tomorrow and a guide for the journey inland.

‘Well, master?’

A sudden, sick rage swelled up in me. Was I to give up now on the triumph I had sworn I would have, all those months before, when I folded my bills of exchange into the casket round my neck and climbed the boarding ladder on to our family ship, the Rose? Now, when I had a casket of gems the like of which had scarcely been seen? Was I to betray them? My blue diamonds of Bengal called out to me, my sapphire that was the colour of pale skimmed milk sighed to me, my fiery garnets and the great dark ruby flashed with rage. This venture had never been for those easily daunted by fears. No, there comes a time when the stakes double: a time when you must either gamble and go on, or else give in, and admit you should never have played at all.

I stood up briskly and walked towards the door. My sword was swinging, my hat already on my head. ‘Pick up the trunk,’ I ordered Martin. ‘We are going.’

I walked out of the inn beneath the painted angel with its wings spread, and into the crowds. I could hear Martin’s breath behind me as he struggled to keep pace with my trunk on his shoulder.

‘Wait! Master, please! Will you not consider a little longer?’

I did not look back. I skirted the Arsenal, heading east round the broad bay, a mile wide, that forms the harbour at Genoa. Now that I had decided, I was determined not to lose a moment. I pushed my way through the crowds past the wooden piers where the lesser vessels put in, the lighters and flat-bottomed shallops. Here, winebarrels bumped and thundered, and three men rolled a hogshead up the ramp to the roadway in front of me. I dodged round it with a curse. There was the rich scent of oil, spilling in drops from great jars borne on men’s shoulders, and the stink of hemp, its stiff fibres tied in rolls, ready for the rope-makers that twist the long cables in the alleys behind the port. As I hurried on, a mournful chanting struck up from the belly of one of the war galleys out across the bay. Strange and sad, this Mahometan song of the Turks chained at their oars: for that is the rule of the sea, that when a Christian ship lays hold of a Muslim, all her crew become slaves, and when they take a ship of ours we suffer the same.

At the fish market I stopped, impatient, while Martin caught up, the trunk bobbing above men’s heads in the thick of the crowd. Red mullet stared up at me, glass-eyed, out of open crates, and a woman in a white linen bonnet chopped the heads from eels and cast them down on the stones, where gulls swooped and flew off with them, crying. Music burst from one of the taverns, a fiddle and pipes, and I heard the clack of the dice, a harlot’s laugh, the slap of cards on a table. As Martin came out from the press, I turned and hurried on.

West over the hills the sun broke out briefly through the clouds. It was close to setting. At the last of the wooden piers grain was being landed, passed from shoulder to shoulder in sacks and poured out into bushel measures, sending up clouds of chaff. The men laughed and joked at their work. No one could say how long this plenty might last, or when the galleys of the League might close the sea once more and attempt to bring Genoa to obedience through starvation. I pushed past, bounding up the six stone steps on to the Mole, whose curving arm reached out into the deep water of the bay. The wind blew with full force here, and I reached a hand up to steady my hat. It was a soft bonnet of black Lucca velvet, which had in it a gold medal of the Virgin and Child, in the latest aristocratic fashion. I had paid eighty Genoese ducats for this medal. But it was more than a costly ornament. It was the guiding star of my voyage.

All along the Mole on the sheltered side towards the harbour lay the great ships, bound on far and weighty ventures. Their masts rose tall, clustered like forest trees, flying the flags of all those nations aligned with the Empire. There was the red cross of Genoa, the black and white of Siena, the red, white and yellow tricolor of Spain. The wind made the ships pull on their ropes and the waves slap against the stone. I ran along the Mole, hunting in agitation for the gilded names on their sterns.

I had sat last night in the Angel with the Speranza’s owners, a pair of Genoese brothers named Piero and Federico Fieschi. I had bought them wine and discussed terms of payment for this voyage: ten ducats they asked, for the two hundred and fifty sea miles to Rome. All risks were my own. Piero had looked at me in question. The price was high: some thirty shillings for a journey that should have cost less than ten, even supposing I needed cargo space in the hold. I told them the sum was acceptable; but I could answer at that time neither no nor yes. They went away displeased. ‘Remember,’ Federico warned me, ‘we sail tomorrow, without fail.’

Ahead, men shouted from the decks of one of the ships. Her yards were raised high and clear, slanting out over her sides, and a wooden crane swung goods out from the Mole and down into her holds. Plainly she was loading up to depart.

On the quay Piero Fieschi was standing among a band of five or six men. They had the air of old established merchants, all of them, with grizzled beards and gowns trimmed with rabbit fur and sable. They thought nothing of standing there in that chilling wind, watching with serious eyes as every last bale and crate was winched up from the Mole. Their grave faces showed they knew the risks, putting to sea in times such as these. Doubtless they had prepared well in advance. They would have their servants on board, numerous and well armed. No doubt they had insurance too for their valuables, so that, even if they perished, their heirs would profit. It gave me a sudden sense of my own vulnerability. I had taken none of these precautions. I realised, too, the hastiness and lack of dignity of my entrance. Still out of breath, I swept off my hat and bowed.

‘Richard Dansey, Merchant, of London.’

They bowed in turn and presented themselves with their nations of origin: Milan, Lucca, the Duchy of Ferrara. Their eyes lingered on me. Plainly I was a mystery to them. I must have seemed a mere boy, with my light, sand-coloured hair and my beard that was little more than a wisp of down. I was still only twenty-one, and although I was tall, and had gained some skill with a sword, I was not of a powerful build. Too young to be a merchant, in their eyes, and not dressed like one, either. My clothes had more the air of a fashionable young noble’s. I wore a purple doublet slashed with white cambric, my shirtbands falling over it from the neck, each garnished with lace and ending in a gold button. My black wool cloak was edged in silver, and my rapier too was silver-hilted.

Piero Fieschi stepped forward from among the merchants with his partner and younger brother at his side. I held out to them the purse I had prepared hours earlier, containing ten gold ducats. Piero looked at me in astonishment.

‘Messer Dansey! We sail at once: but do you have no goods to load?’

Martin came panting up behind me. Fieschi glanced at the trunk on his shoulder, clearly pondering whether it might contain anything of value. Martin swung the thing roughly down on to the stones, and sniffed. Fieschi appeared to dismiss the idea. He gestured to the knot of merchants. ‘Our companions have loaded silks of Lucca and Genoa, and we have a solid stack of salt barrels belonging to Messer Pinotti here, of Milan: most welcome for ballast. But you, nothing? Truly nothing? You tell us you are a merchant: how will you turn a profit?’

‘I have my means.’ I smiled, delighting in their disappointed curiosity, and turned from them with a graceful bow. I stepped from the Mole to the wooden rungs of the entering ladder nailed to the Speranza’s waist, and pulled myself on board. Martin swung the trunk up on deck, hauling himself after it. While he asked in his London-accented Italian where he should stow my trunk, I strode around the decks, enjoying once more the feel of the planks beneath my feet and the smell of pitch in my nostrils.

The Speranza was a great ship of perhaps a hundred and twenty tons, slightly larger than the Dansey family vessel, the Rose, which I had left behind at Bruges in August. Peering down the open hatches I saw she had at least two orlops, between-decks where a man could not stand upright; here the goods were being shunted from the hatches and lashed into place. Furthest aft was the roundhouse or great cabin, from which several smaller cabins opened. In one of these I found Martin, sitting on the trunk and mopping his portly face, and cursing gently at the run I had led him through the port. I heard the rattle of the hatch cover as it was fastened into place, and the clank of the capstan as the sailors began warping the Speranza out into the bay on her anchor. All at once they broke into a song, a bawdy affair in local dialect, praising the part of the city known as Maddalena, which had the fairest churches, the richest markets, and the greatest number of brothels.

I stepped back inside the great cabin. It was of a fair size, raked back at the stern to a row of fine windows. My fellow passengers were all present, seating themselves about a table, in the high humour of men swept up in the risk and hurry of a new venture. Servants were pouring out glasses of sweet romney wine, and there were fried capons, as well as wafers, almonds and sweetmeats. Martin came out of our little cabin to attend me. This supper was my first meal since the early morning. I ate greedily and drank deep, and all of us talked and laughed more and more freely.

‘In Rome we shall buy from His Holiness an indulgence for trade with the Turk,’ Piero Fieschi was saying. ‘Without that, of course, any commerce with the Muslims would involve us in mortal sin. Then south to Naples, and over the sea to Cairo.’

‘Cairo!’ his brother picked up. ‘What wonders cannot be had in Cairo? We shall bring back silver and cinnabar, raisins, rosewater and sandalwood, cloves, porcelain and pearls, indigo and opium.’

Suddenly the Luccan, Messer Giordano, darted up from the table and into one of the cabins, and returned with a piece of silk some three yards long, shimmering crimson, pirled with a fine thread of silver. ‘Do not talk to me of Cairo. Feel this! Smell it! And tell me if the lands of the Turk can boast anything as fine!’ He draped it round our heads and we fought free of it, laughing. It had the true tang of new-spun silk, the stink o’ the worm, as the silkmen call it, and it was as smooth as the sound of lutes. The others were not to be outshone, and each dived into his cabin. Soon the table was festooned in cloths and colours, blood-red satins, green lustred taffetas, thick black velvets striped in gold with a pile as soft as cats’ fur; purple and maroon brocades with patterns stamped in silver that sparkled in the light from the oil lamps. We swam in the silks, laughing at the sheer luxury of it.

They would sell these marvels at the Court of Pope Clement in Rome. Any that were left they would take on to Naples, and offer up to the Spanish Viceroy. Even the Milanese Pinotti held out a handful of his greenish-grey salt, saying, ‘Taste it, taste it! Is it not the best?’ A Sienese called Basile tipped out a bag of hawks’ bells and dog whistles and thimbles, all in silver, that went tinkling and rolling about the table with the ship’s motion. One of the bells came to rest in front of me, and I stopped it with my finger. Their laughter was dying, and their eyes remained fixed on me. I was the only one who had not shown off any wares. I regretted that I had not taken on some cargo, just for appearances. A few casks of salt or some dried fish: anything. Their curiosity was a little too sharp. Without my intending it, my hand reached up to my throat to trace the outline of the steel casket that hung by a chain round my neck, hidden beneath my doublet and shirt. The thing was some nine inches long. A key secured it, sliding into a lock under the brass head of a cupid. Its surfaces were polished smooth by long concealment, close against my skin. That casket weighed on me, a precious burden, delicious but dangerous, and unutterably secret.

Martin, who stood behind my chair to serve me, caught his breath, and I put my hand back down on the table. The merchants’ stares flattered me, even as they disturbed me; their rich cloths made me feel part of a high and select band. Yes, I could count myself their equal. And soon I would rise higher still. I picked up the empty bottle of wine.

‘Gentlemen, should not this poor deceased bottle have an heir?’

Piero continued to stare. But several of them took up the cry of ‘Another bottle, another bottle’, and others joined in with ‘Let it be hippocras, hippocras!’

‘But have we a sleeve?’ asked Basile. The elder Fieschi went to a cupboard set in the wall and brandished in the air a cone of muslin: a sleeve of Hippocrates, invented by that ancient doctor for some purpose to do with healing the sick, but now used in the brewing of hot, spiced wine, known to all as hippocras. I saw Fieschi unlock a drawer and take out fragrant cinnamon bark and cassia, cloves and grains of musk. These he sprinkled into the bag, which he gave to a servant to take for’ard to the cookroom, along with another bottle of romney. The other men cheered. While we waited for the wine, I slipped out once more on deck, to give their curiosity time to cool. The sun had set, and the air was growing colder. Land was a bare line on the horizon now, black against the indigo of sea and sky. A tiny gleam marked the tower on the Mole where bundles of broom were burnt at night to guide ships into the port. A servant stepped out of the forecastle with a steaming pan of wine and swayed aft over the deck to the great cabin, trailing the scent of warm spices after him. Those smells made me think of home. In a few weeks, maybe, my work in Rome would be done, and then at last I would turn back: back home to the family warehouse, on the rain-soaked stones of Broken Wharf in the City of London. And I would have my triumph.

2

It was seven months since I had set foot in that warehouse, and walked its dim passages between the shadowed mounds of barrels and crates that could contain any merchandise on earth. Here, in the years of my childhood, I had explored along with the other two members of our band. We used to prowl through those mountainous landscapes in the dusty light from the few smoke-blackened windows high above, looking out always for new discoveries. There was John Lazar, bold and fast-talking, big for his age, and my rival for leadership of the group; and there was Thomas, my brother. Thomas was slender, fond of his books, but for all that ingenious in dreaming up exploits. He was never daunted by a wall that had to be climbed or a stretch of riverwater to be jumped. In our hands we carried nails, sticks, even a length of iron bar. We tapped the barrels and prised up the lids. Inside, when we were lucky, we found sweet green mastic soaked in rosewater, and dipped our fingers in for a taste: forbidden fruit from savage lands. There was Baltic amber that gleamed with its dull, orange fire; crates of Turkish knifeblades; pungent cinnamon or peppercorns; oiled canvas packages that hid shimmering rugs and damasks woven with swirling figures.

Outside, before the grey timber front of our warehouse, the stink of the river hung in the air. Water lapped the green-scummed stones where two or three lighters always nudged against the wharf, their single sails furled. This had been my world, the world of Queenhythe Ward. East and west it stretched, the length of Thames Street, from the greasy stink of the cookshops beneath the sign of King David’s Head and the Old Swan brewhouse, all the way west to Saint Peter’s Parva and the Blue Boar, under the shadow of Saint Paul’s. Within these bounds our band of three ran and fought and explored. The streets, unpaved, stank with refuse and the night soil emptied from jutting windows overhead. Gutters ran gurgling down the street edges to discharge their effluent into the Thames, while waterwheels drove bosses, engines that sucked the riverwater back up again and drove it along lead pipes into cisterns scattered along the streets. Into these the serving maids daily dipped their pails to carry into the houses; so that, in my father’s phrase, we drank what we pissed just as surely as we pissed what we drank.

‘It is a proud name to bear, “Merchant of Queenhythe”,’ my father used to say, and for much of my life I had believed him. We who were born on Thames Street were suspicious of all those foreigners west beyond Lambert Hill, or east of Towne’s End Lane. The ward was a town of its own within the City. It elected an alderman, it had its own Council of Six and its Wardmote Court, nine constables and a beadle, and eight scavengers who slept in the day and prowled the streets at night, shovelling up the multifarious filth of the city and carrying it away into the country, where we imagined it was sold for a great price. There was Five Foot Lane, the narrowest in London; the tumbledown church of Holy Trinity propped up with great oak beams, which I climbed once to the level of its broken eaves, and dared John to follow; there were the poor houses of the packhorsemen and dock hands, and grand hostels with courtyards belonging to the nobles, through whose windows we peered eagerly.

At the heart of the ward was Queenhythe itself, a bay hollowed out of the riverbank between the warehouses, some hundred and twenty feet across. The old people remembered when this had been the grandest of the London wharves, but only barges and small boats could put in here now, thanks to the decay of London Bridge: its drawbridge had grown stiff with age, and would no longer let the great ships through. Even so, the Hythe was a fair sight, when the tide was full and the lighters came upstream and put in, dozens at a time. There was a customs house, with a bailiff who stood before it with his thumbs in his belt. The lighters landed rye and coal, fresh-caught herrings and sprats, eels and mackerel, as well as salt cod, and the dried stockfish that came in from Norway, stiff as a board, which was our fare in the winter. We used to sit on the stones at the waterside, John, Thomas and I, and watch the bakers and brewers come down to buy their wheat and barley. We saw the loads of fish being winched up and weighed by a thin, pale official known as the Meter. After that, the eight master porters took charge, each with his three under-porters. They loaded their packhorses with seven sacks apiece and set off up the steep, winding ways bound for the various fish markets, by Bread Street Hill and Spooner’s Lane; and, aptest name of all, when the packbeasts stuck in the narrows between jutting house-timbers, Labour-in-Vain Hill.

West of Queenhythe was the Salt Wharf, and then the bath-house on Stew Lane. Those steamy rooms beneath the brick chimney were about much more than getting clean. Women lived in the house, whores, and on misty nights we could hear their laughter carrying as far as home. Sodom on the Thames, my mother called it, and forbade Thomas and me ever to go near. But curiosity tugged at me, and I knew that one day I must step inside. Beyond Stew Lane was Timber Hythe, where John’s father kept his warehouse. We stopped here sometimes to watch the cargoes being unloaded: Dutch wainscot and deals, and clapboards, riven oak lengths that would go to make barrel staves. John did not like to stay here too long. He was ashamed of his father’s dull trade: he was restless, hungry for new worlds, just like all of us.

Next along was our own domain of Broken Wharf. Fallen stones spilled into the water from the crumbling steps; the lime peeling from between the ancient paving threatened always a fresh landslide. The firm of Dansey had taken the lease on this wharf at first because it was cheap. Then my father, Roger Dansey, had bought the warehouse and the dwelling beyond it, and we became fixed there. We had built a new oak pier, but it remained a treacherous landing-place, and around the dark pilings river currents swirled uneasily. Here, very often, our band made its camp. We used to perch on the stone edge of the quay with our legs dangling over the water, watching the boats and the men about their business, while we debated our next venture.

‘Who has the courage to swim out to the mill?’ asked John. He nodded his head to the pair of barges wedged between pilings out in the river, with a waterwheel secured between, perpetually turning with a dull grind and splash. To swim out there at anything other than a slack tide was death. We had done it, John and I, three times already, each challenging the other, and I would have done it again at any moment, even with the tide running, if John thought he dared it and I did not. But Thomas said, ‘And what would I do, while you risked your necks? “Who has the courage?”’ he mimicked John’s voice. ‘We’ve all proved that we can do it. No, let it be Terra Incognita.’

He meant the old abandoned warehouse just upriver from ours. Its grand stone frontage proclaimed that in centuries past it had been the house of a noble, before the relentless tides and currents had eaten at its foundations and driven cracks up into the stonework. Even so, some time in the last century someone had dared to erect a wooden warehouse here. Tall and crooked it stood, rearing up from the ruined old mansion, its head tilting over the river like an old man about to fall.

Thomas was the one who first succeeded in picking the lock. He stood lookout, while John and I squeezed through the doorway into the forgotten stone court, daring one another to leap between the broken arches where the paving had cracked and dropped into dark abysses below. Did we dare go down? We dared. One by one we descended into the dripping cellars, waist-deep in water, rich with the stink of the Thames. Here were slimy caverns and cracked old wine casks, and the shipwreck of a lighter, its rotted timbers glistening with damp. But the real delight of the place was not underground. I found the way up by many a creaking ladder to the attics, where a wooden gantry opened out over the river, far, far below. With a little care and daring I inched out along the timbers and round to the eaves, and so crawled up over the tiles, with a thirty-foot drop beneath, to the roof-ridge itself. John followed, and then Thomas.