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I dressed in anger. Even her sigh, I thought, had been a mark of boredom, not of pleasure. Almost I wished I had saved myself. Was this all that women were? No, I knew for sure they were not. As I came out I met John. He too looked disturbed. But he said, ‘Choice and dainty. Yours?’
I turned my face into the shadows. ‘Paradise.’
It seemed our life at that time would never change; but its end was hurtling upon us. One November, my father returned from one of his long, wandering voyages along with William Marshe. William was tall, droop-shouldered, with long greying moustaches. He had accompanied my father on his ventures for years. They used to come back with wonderfully unpredictable cargoes. On this occasion they unloaded saffron, velvets and the sweet Spanish wine called vino de saco, or sack. These, I gathered, had been Mr William’s choices. My father boasted of his own share: casks of nutmegs; indigo for dyeing that was dried and powdered and pressed into dark blue cakes; and seventeen small sacks of pepper. I followed him to the spicers’ shops on Coneyhope Lane, beyond Cheapside in behind the old Jewry, with a couple of hired packhorses carrying our barrels of goods. ‘Foreign lands,’ my father called these streets. We were far from the smell of the river. Noblemen’s chamberlains and stewards came here to order spices for the great households. The shopmen always had a welcome for my father. With his round, boyish face alight with the excitement of his wares, he sat himself down and told them stories of far-off ports they would never see. He pictured for them the golden light of the sunset in Lisbon, the ships at Antwerp as they came in up the river with the tide, and the lighthouse and bay at Genoa, where in the late spring the coral fishers put out for Corsica in their light, fast skiffs, two hundred at a time. I sat entranced. I promised myself that before many years were out I would see those places for myself.
When he had finished talking, my father displayed his merchandise. The shopmen offered him the best prices they could, but as usual it was not enough. He would take the shopman’s hands in his and say solemnly, ‘My friend. And so you truly cannot find it in your heart to offer me more?’ Then he would sigh and move on to try the next shop, and the next. In the end he smiled and shrugged, and sold his goods for what he could. As we turned down on to Cheapside, opposite Goldsmiths’ Row, he reached inside his doublet and pulled out a small leather pouch.
‘All is not lost, my Richard. I have one more sale to make.’ He loosened the strings and showed me three pale green stones. ‘Persian emeralds,’ he whispered. ‘From a Maltese I met in Naples.’ He crossed the road to the shop of Christian Breakespere and went inside. I followed him. He tipped the stones out on the table with a grand flourish. In that first instant I could see that something was wrong. They sent out their beams too easily, barely staining the cloth with a pallid, even glare. Their sheen was all of it on the surface, and not in the depths. The old goldsmith peered forward. He liked my father. But he frowned and shook his head.
I could have wept with frustration. I snatched up one of the stones. Even its touch was wrong. It warmed swiftly in my hand, instead of keeping that coolness which they say makes emeralds a sure charm against fevers. I held it up to my father. ‘Do you want to see how far this is from being an emerald? Do you?’ I crossed to the lapidary’s wheel at the back of the shop, set it running with the footpedal, and held the stone against it using the smallest of the iron tongs. Instead of enduring the touch of the emery, and gaining from it a new perfection and depth, this stone shattered at once into powder.
‘Glass,’ I commented. ‘Beautiful green glass.’
My father went stumping off back to Thames Street, singing below his breath. I followed, angry, and pained for him too. Any man in the world, I thought, could have told the difference between those pebbles and the real thing. In the counting house he entered his sales in the ledger with perfect calmness: Emeralds. Bought, £38.9s.6d. Sold, £0.0s.0d. It was his worst calamity yet. The nutmeg, indigo and pepper sold for little more than he had paid. Mr William’s saffron made something, but the costs of hiring ships, of inns and port fees and commissions, took up most of it.
Then there was my mother to face. ‘You are a madman, a madman,’ she screamed, aiming slaps at his face, which my father dodged with a sheepish smile. ‘Will you believe everything you are told? Are you an infant? Buy what you hate, not what you think you love. Then you will not be deceived.’
My father never replied to her tirades. But I knew the loss had hit him hard. Some days later he took to his bed. He was trembling, pale and in a sweat, though he promised us there was nothing wrong, nothing at all. The doctor declared he was suffering from a too thick crowding of the humours on his brain. He slid a lancet into his arm, drew off a good half-pint of blood, and prescribed a course of vomits and a purge of rhubarb and brimstone. For weeks his sickness ebbed and flowed. Sometimes it appeared to leave him, and he got up and went back to the counting house, where he prowled around, talking to himself, throwing out fresh ideas for ventures. But after a few days the fever always returned, and after each attack there was less of him. By the start of Lent it was plain he would never rise from his bed.
‘One more voyage,’ he whispered, as he lay in the dusky chamber that looked out towards Labour-in-Vain Hill. ‘Just one more, and I could still have my triumph.’ He looked up at us with a smile of feverish elation, as if the great venture that had always eluded him was at last within reach. After that he slipped into rambling murmurs and sudden cries which no one could understand. A month later he was buried in the little churchyard of Saint Mary Summerset, almost facing our door. We stood in line by the graveside, and then left the chantry priest to say a Mass for my father’s soul.
When we returned home, my mother beckoned Thomas and me to follow her, and William Marshe fell in behind us. None of us knew what would become of the business. I had heard it whispered that Mr William had mortgaged his warehouse to lend money to my father. She led us, unspeaking, down the narrow alley to Broken Wharf. Our footsteps echoed harshly as we trooped in procession between the warehouse’s hidden treasures, and climbed the wooden staircase that led up to the counting house. This was a room that stretched along the whole of the southern end of the warehouse, with a long rank of diamond-glazed windows like the great cabin of a ship, looking out over Broken Wharf and the wash and gurgle of the Thames.
On the left was the brick hearth, the fire unlit. Shadows clung round the shelves bearing the company’s ledgers, with their page ends turned outwards and the different dates and ventures inked across the body of their pages: Lisbon Receipts, 1519 to 1523; Ventures in Spice; Tolls and Imposts – Imperial; Customs and Subsidies of the Port of London. Once we were all inside, my mother seated herself for the first time in the high-backed chair that had been my father’s, with her hands spread across the broad, polished surface of the oak table.
‘My husband has made me his heir,’ she told us. ‘There are small bequests for Richard and for Thomas.’ We looked at one another. Many women, on inheriting their husbands’ affairs, sell them quick, or hand them over to some agent to manage; especially if those affairs were in as tottering a condition as we supposed ours must be. But we did not reckon with my mother.
‘Martin!’ she called. Into the room came Martin Deller, broad-shouldered, most trusted of the various strong-armed watchmen who guarded the warehouse. He had been in the family’s employ for years. I had seen him, in the dusk and early dawn, prowling the wharves without a lantern, moving with surprising stealth. I knew my mother relied on him absolutely. He carried with him a small chest, covered in red-and-white striped velvet, that had stood at the foot of my mother’s bed. I had never seen it opened, but had always supposed it contained lace collars or hoods, or stuff of that sort. Martin set it down heavily next to the table. My mother unlocked it and threw it open. It was filled with gold, bills and bonds: the proceeds of her many half-secret ventures. She looked from me to Thomas to William Marshe, and said, ‘The way we do business is about to change. We are going to buy a ship.’
Her plans, it seemed, had been laid well in advance; she had even picked out a vessel. The Rose was a great ship of some seventy tons. She carried a crew of forty mariners, whom we would have to recruit from the waterside taverns of the City, and had a pair of brass falconets against pirates, as well as a murderer, a light swivel-gun that could clear the decks if she were boarded. Next day William inspected her where she lay downriver, and declared her tight and well-bowed: ‘With a good wind, she will truly cut a feather.’ My mother nodded in satisfaction. She trusted William, as she had never trusted my father. And so the papers were signed, and bills of exchange handed over. She became ours in the spring of 1521, just before I turned sixteen. A few weeks later, my mother called me into the counting house. She sat stroking her chin with the feather end of a pen. It still surprised me to see her there. My father had been dead for only three months, but already she had transformed herself into that cool and independent business machine, the Widow of Thames Street.
She looked me up and down with a smile: the kind of smile she wore when she was appraising an enterprise which had so far turned out neither well nor ill. From outside the window could be heard the clunk of a ferryman’s oars, the whistling of some of our men moving about the wharf, and the suck and wash of the river.
‘Richard,’ she said at last, ‘your schooling is at an end. At the month’s close I am sending you to Lisbon, with Mr William. On a venture.’ My heart jumped. This was it: the beginning, the first opening of the door. I knew, of course, that this would be her kind of venture, and not mine, and that William would be in charge; but that did not daunt me. I had my plans. And with my small inheritance, I was ready to begin to put them into action.
On a summer’s afternoon Thomas, John and I left the schoolroom and walked in silence down Labour-in-Vain Hill together for the last time. At the angle in the lanes outside our door we stopped, and all three of us clasped hands. I had always thought of this crossroads as a place where different ways met. Now I saw it as a place where they parted. Thomas repeated the Latin verse our master was so fond of:
‘O dulces comitum valete coetus,
longe quos simul a domo profectos
diversae variae viae reportant.’
John rolled his eyes, and did a good imitation of our master’s thin, sharp voice, that for all its severity could be strangely sentimental. ‘You are ignorant, and I shall beat you. The sense is: “Sweet band of friends, farewell. Together we set out from our far home, but many diverse roads lead us back.”’
Thomas nodded with gravity, and clasped our hands more tightly.
‘Swear,’ he said. ‘Swear that whatever roads lead us apart, one day we shall meet again.’
John laughed, and I did too. To us it was a curious oath. True, John was about to begin a life of voyaging as I was, following his father’s ventures into the Low Countries and the Baltic in search of timber and salt. But doubtless our future would have in it many meetings. Why should it not? Thomas, however, was serious.
‘Swear. By the Holy Virgin, we shall meet again.’
We each repeated the words. I let my hand fall from theirs and turned away. My mother had asked me to meet her in the counting house the moment I came home, to receive her detailed instructions for the voyage. A new life lay before me, and I swore an oath of my own: that I would snatch the chances offered to me, and turn them to my own ends.
4
Six weeks later I was standing in the steerage house on board the Rose as we passed the yellow stone fort and the monastery of Belém on the approach to the Roads of Lisbon. It was a hazy evening. The ship glided into harbour slowly, while I gazed ahead in excitement.
At my side stood Mr William. At sea, he had revealed a different side to himself. He was no longer the rather bedraggled tame dog who followed my mother round and took orders from the House of Dansey. With every mile we drew away from London, he stood a little taller. I saw that he understood gunnery and navigation, how to plot a course and calculate a latitude with the astrolabe, as well as possessing a fair grasp of the curiously pleasing Portuguese tongue. All these things I set myself to learn.
When we landed, William left the ship’s master to unload the woollen stuffs we were bound to carry on the outward run, and set off like a hound, sniffing round the merchants’ offices in the lanes behind the great market square that fronted the harbour, asking questions and greeting old friends. I saw one man after another shake his head and cross himself on hearing of Roger Dansey’s death. William patted them on the arm, nodded at the news he was receiving in return, and moved on. I saw in his strategy something of my father’s charm, his absolute attentiveness to the man he was speaking to, that made each one feel he was the most favoured being in the world. I was determined to watch Mr William’s methods closely, and learn fast.
These were the days of Portugal’s pride: King John the Pious, better known as Spicer John, was sending his trading ships round Africa to the Indies. There they dealt in nutmeg from the Moluccas, pepper from Serendip, ginger and cinnamon from India. The Portuguese were cutting the Arabs and Turks out of this trade altogether. They had burnt the city of Aden to the ground, and William told me that Cairo and Venice were both feeling the pain. The government’s Casa da Índia held a monopoly on every peppercorn and cinnamon stick in Lisbon, and they set their prices as high as they pleased. But, William explained, there were certain dark dens where goods came to rest that had slipped off ships unknown to the King’s Customs; all it took was a little ingenuity and boldness to find them.
Where William went, I followed. He led me through coiling streets as narrow as any in London, where dogs ran out into blinding sunlight and then back into opaque shadow, and women called out their wares: wine and honey, almonds, figs, fishing nets and twine. We stepped inside a Moorish courtyard ornamented with round brick arches, and a fountain playing in its middle.
‘It was your father discovered this place,’ William whispered to me, ‘and he was the one talked to them until they trusted us. Never think ill of him, Richard. You know he used to say it is not the profit that counts, but how you make it. Your mother thinks I am a cleverer merchant than he was. But if Roger Dansey had never made his losses, I could not have made my profits.’
I pictured them together. I imagined my father, with his quick imagination, his charm and his thirst for wonders, penetrating into every crevice of these lanes. I liked to think of him snatching the best bargains from under the noses of the competition. But I suspected that Mr William had been propping the business up for years; that without his sense, my father would have brought home many more of his profitless cargoes.
While a servant poured us wine, William negotiated with a lean, dark-faced Moor concerning two bushels of cinnamon and one of cloves. He came away rubbing his hands in satisfaction. ‘Done! We shall come back with our men to fetch them after dark. True cloves come from only two islands in the world, my boy. We were lucky to find them at the price, excellently lucky.’ He stretched. ‘A good day’s business.’ He patted his chest, and looked at me with a glint in his eye. ‘Now, my dear boy, it is time we found a brothel.’
I started involuntarily: this animated, cheerful figure was so far from the Mr William I knew at home. With his arm about my shoulder he guided me through yet more alleys to a low doorway which he appeared to know well. I wondered if my father, too, had visited this place. Inside we had our choice between six or seven ageing whores, tricked out as shepherdesses or heathen goddesses, each one clutching a wooden lyre or a milkmaid’s pail, as a badge of sophistication or innocence.
‘Is this not fine?’ William asked, as we climbed the stairs with our arms around our chosen nymphs. ‘You must learn to enjoy the sweets of travel, my Richard, as well as suffering the pains. Richard, allow me to introduce you to Woman.’ Then, as we slipped together into a darkened room, he murmured, ‘Only promise me one thing: never, never tell your mother.’
I did not tell him that John and I had already explored the bath-house on Stew Lane. The whores of Lisbon were in much the same mould, and left me displeased and brooding, wishing to go back and begin again, yet knowing that the next time would be no better than the last. On the couch next to mine, William lay back with a sigh. He was entirely satisfied. The present, with its simple pleasures, delighted him. I rolled over, and felt my purse beneath me. It had in it sixty crowns: all the inheritance that had become mine on the death of my father. I was itching to break free from Mr William and begin to spend. But it would not be easy. He had kept me close every moment, and what I planned would have to be done in secret. No breath of it must get back to my mother: not yet.
The following day we were back in the alleys. William turned to me at a street corner and told me his next associate was of a wary turn of mind, and it was better if he visited him alone: could I forgive him if he left me for an hour or two? My heart jumped. I watched him out of sight and set off swiftly by myself. I knew exactly where I was headed. While following loyally on William’s heels, I had kept my eyes open. First I went to a money-changer down on the quayside, and turned in my crowns for Portuguese cruzados. Then I plunged back into the lanes and made for a certain small shop we had passed the day before, in the shadow of the vast, fortress-like Cathedral. I went in. There, just the same as on Cheapside, were the shelves with their white cloths and the ranks of gems that gleamed in the brilliant southern light, fresh in from the Indies, from Burma and Serendip and Bengal. As I looked along them, holding this stone or that up to the sun, I felt the thrill of a deep passion for beauty satisfied. I saw diamonds. I saw Oriental rubies, Persian emeralds and pearls. But I could not yet venture that high. I forced myself to look instead at the lesser stones, the beryls and cats’ eyes and cornelians. These stones were within my grasp; but even here it would be prudent not to lay out all my money at once. Buy modestly, and risk little the first time. So spoke my mother’s voice within me. But my eyes strayed upwards again to the shelf with the nobler gemstones on it, and fixed on a topaz, of a perfect sunshine colour, without a cloud. The shopman showed me its weight, eight carats, a good size. It was of Ethiopia, I was almost certain: home to the best of this kind of gem. A topaz is almost diamond-hard, and brilliant. If you put it in the fire to leach its colour out, it will make as close an approach to an Indian diamond as you will find. But this stone had no need of adulteration. To my eye, it already surpassed a lesser diamond in beauty. Its price stood at a hundred cruzados: I had a mere seventy-one. I began to bargain. I was stern, then teasing; I lifted the topaz and frowned, pretending to see a flaw, then turned and walked away; but I came back. Some of these tricks I had seen William perform; others welled up naturally, leaving me both excited and alarmed. The shopman’s offer came down to ninety, then eighty, then seventy. My palms were sweating. I could buy it. But that would be the end of my inheritance: more than twelve pounds sterling, perhaps eighteen months’ salary for a poor priest or a clerk. If I was wrong, I would never see that money again. I knew in that instant that my life could branch in two ways. One way led to safety, ease, and dullness. The other would lead to danger and worries and, yes, if I had enough luck and skill, my heart’s deepest desires. I also knew that if I quailed at the risk now, I would never again buy a single stone. I nodded quickly, and counted out the gold.
I was in an agony of expectation until William could complete his buying. He bought furtively and cheap: and that meant he bought slowly. A cask of saffron here, three crates of pepper there. A month passed before the Rose’s holds were sealed and we put out once more, and heard the chanting of the Hieronymites in their monastery die away on the breeze as we turned our prow out to sea.
Back home in London I lost no time before taking my topaz to Christian Breakespere. It was of a shade I thought would please him; his shop always had in it a good number of stones with the shades of autumn sun, yellow opals, garnets, amber. The old man lifted the stone in his tweezers and held it to the light so that it took fire, and stained his hand with gold. Then he lowered it and looked at me with his gentle smile.
‘A fine stone. Of its kind, very fine. Shall we say sixty crowns?’
I held his gaze. ‘I had thought eighty.’
‘Had you?’ His eyes twinkled. ‘Then we had better say seventy. Done?’
‘Done.’
‘See that you go on as you have begun, young Richard. Do not disappoint me.’
I took the payment there and then, in gold. My profit was ten crowns, but it felt to me like a thousand. I ran whooping back home down Labour-in-Vain Hill and round the corner of the churchyard, the bag of gold clinking in my hand. Then I pulled myself in. It would not do to give away my secret too soon. There was a long road ahead of me first.
On our next voyage William and I went further, southward and round into the Mediterranean. In Barcelona I acquired the small steel casket with its cunning lock and slender chain, which I used, from then on, for my purchases. In Toulon I bought a sardonyx, in Genoa a lesser opal. The time after that we coasted down Italy, to Ostia and then Naples, and I added some jacinths and a small, pale amethyst. Nothing I bought was of the rarest or most prized. But I used my eyes, and always when I carried my purchases back to Goldsmiths’ Row I made a profit.
Two years passed. My mother’s grip on the business grew. She hired more agents, and sent out fresh ventures. On every ship that left London, it seemed, she had paid for a corner in the hold and was sending out wool or hemp, with instructions to fetch back some carefully chosen commodity in return. An air of excitement hung about Broken Wharf. Our men moved with quickened steps, as if aware they were part of an enterprise that was pulsing with new life. I often thought how my father would have liked to see the firm of Dansey in its new condition, and to set in train that last great venture of which he had dreamt.
On my return home, the first thing I did was to go to the schoolroom to wait for Thomas. He had opted to remain with the master there, reading deeper and deeper into works of theology and canon law. My mother spoke of him with pride. He had distinguished himself in the annual disputations held in the churchyard of the priory at Smithfield, where all the schools of London competed. Many great men had risen from those contests, Sir Thomas More among them. All that was needed was for Thomas to catch the eye of some man of rank, for nothing was possible without a patron. As we walked together along the familiar route down Old Fish Street past the market, where the gutters were clogged with fish guts and blood, Thomas told me about the plans our mother had formed for him.
‘Uncle Bennet, she says, is the best hope. You know that the Cardinal is at work founding a college?’
Our mother’s brother, Bennet Waterman, a city lawyer with a beaming face and bald head, and a devilish air of guile, had recently joined the employ of the great Cardinal Wolsey, proudest and most powerful man in the land after the King. Wolsey had need of Bennet’s services. He was proposing to liquidate a number of lesser monasteries to fund the largest foundation Oxford had ever seen, to be known as Cardinal College.
‘And you are to be one of its first scholars?’ I asked. ‘That should be pleasing to you.’
Thomas did not answer. That was the first hint, I think, that my brother smarted just as much under our mother’s domination as I did. But we were not yet ready to work as allies. That is the worst of tyranny: it divides its subjects. Instead of taking the quick way home, Thomas led me down Labour-in-Vain Hill. Just on the corner, a figure came out from the shadows. It was John. I ran to embrace him; but his air was subdued, just like Thomas’s. Soon after my first voyage to Lisbon he had embarked on his family’s great ship, Lazarus, for Germany and the Baltic, trading in the commodities that had made his father wealthy: tar and pitch, clapboard, iron and salt. Since then I had seen him only a few times.
I said, ‘So the band is all together again.’
Thomas gave a wry laugh. ‘Is it?’
He was right. Though we were all three present, we were not the same band who had joined hands and sworn our oath in the meeting of the ways two years before. But this was hardly my fault. I sensed there was a kind of shared and obstinate secrecy between my old friend and my brother. I did not know how to break it, and I began to grow annoyed. At the foot of the hill where the lane met Thames Street, Thomas and John turned right instead of bearing left for our two houses. I let them lead the way. In a few paces we found ourselves below the window where we had called and sung to the bewitching Hannah Cage. We stopped. The window was dark, and tight shut. Thomas and John both gazed up at it for a few moments. Then John said, ‘She isn’t there.’
‘You are not still haunting that girl?’ I asked with a laugh. I had not been down that way in a long time. Not that I had forgotten Hannah: I still stung from her mocking laughter. I meant to set myself up in the world before approaching that kind of girl again. Still, I resented the way Thomas and John had been looking for her without me. ‘You surprise me,’ I teased. ‘What mysterious men you are growing into.’ But neither of them smiled. The friendship that had come to us so easily seemed far out of reach. I was certain John could not be happy, plying the family trade he had always despised. Thomas’s malaise I understood less. He had always been private, content with himself and his books, bursting out only in his disputations with wild and quick displays of wit and learning. We walked back along Thames Street as a cold wind blew up from the river. Dusk was not far off. I said, ‘Come with me. To the warehouse: for the sake of old times.’
They followed me on to Broken Wharf. At the door to the warehouse we passed Martin Deller, sitting on a barrel with his wooden cudgel across his knee, keeping watch on the comings and goings of the wharf. He watched us through half-lidded eyes, and nodded. We stepped inside the old, familiar dimness, heavy with mingled scents, cinnamon, cloves, pepper. Thomas said, ‘And what of you and your trade?’
I still had not dared reveal my new trade to my mother; and that meant it was not safe to tell Thomas or John either. Instead I spoke to them of the alleys and courts of Lisbon, the wonderful bargains we struck, Mr William’s skill in trade, my own attentiveness and submission. I knew what I was telling them must sound vague and only half-truthful. It was the story of Mr William, not of myself. Thomas knew well enough that I dreamt of dealing in gems, though I had rarely spoken of it. I tapped the cases in irritation. I ached to tell them everything: the stash of gemstones that even now rested in the little casket, locked in the chest in my chamber, the bag of gold and silver that nestled by its side. Thomas and John were walking on together down one of the dim corridors between stacks of barrels. The sense of isolation was dreadful. I called out to them.
‘Wait! I have something to show you.’ I ran back out, round the corner into the house and up to my chamber overlooking Bosse Lane and the cracked stone court of Terra Incognita. Breathless, back with them, I opened my casket and set out on a barrel head the small hoard of stones I had brought back with me from my latest voyage. William and I had ranged as far as Naples, where I had acquired a batch of large citrines, showy things that the goldsmiths loved to carve; then there were a couple of Arabian rock crystals, six-pointed, and four or five brilliant red cornelians. John whistled. Thomas reached out a hand to cover the stones, and peered over his shoulder.
‘Our mother will kill you if she finds out.’
‘But you are not really making money?’ John pressed me. His face wore the old, challenging smile, that had a good tinge in it of envy. In reply I set before them my purse, heavy with coins that had all grown out of that first sixty crowns.
‘We shall never tell,’ Thomas said. ‘Now, put them away.’
I tossed a cornelian up in the air. ‘Why should I? What makes you so afraid?’
Thomas looked at me. ‘You have spent too long off with the seagulls, dear brother. You forget how things are, back here on dry land.’
‘Well, and how are they?’ I was beginning to be angry.
Thomas stood up. ‘Come with me, and you will see.’ I gathered the stones reluctantly back into the casket and followed him, down to the darkest end of the warehouse. We passed the various goods Mr William had bought on our last venture, the Lisbon spices, the French woad that was a cheap equivalent to indigo, the Turkish rugs. At the far end Thomas stopped at a case I did not recognise, marked in a curling hand, ‘Damascus silk’. I had heard of no such thing coming in. Nothing of the kind would be carried by our other agents, who worked the shorter routes to Flanders, and I was certain it had not been in the holds of the Rose. I kicked the case: it was heavy. I turned to the others.
‘So it is the old game. Is Thomas daring us to have a look? Shall we?’
I drew out my knife, and John, with a sombre smile, did the same. We worked away at the lid, casting glances back towards the door, where Martin still sat. At last it sprang clear. Inside were a few folds of crimson fabric, but underneath lay something hard. John pulled back the silks to reveal stacks and stacks of books, bound in pale new leather. I stared at them in surprise. The firm of Dansey had never dealt in such things. Books ranked among the goods my mother regarded as poor investments, like gems. And what book could be worth the trouble of bringing from overseas? John picked one up and opened it. The titlepage was covered in strange swirls of foliage. At its foot was a crucifix: but in place of Christ, there was a serpent twining up the cross, and on its head sat the Pope’s triple crown. Thomas said, ‘Well? Have you forgotten your Latin so soon? Or is it too dark for you? Darkness is best for such things, I promise you. This is On the Babylonish Captivity of the Church. And the author is Martin Luther.’ John dropped it as if he had been stung.
To be caught merely opening such a book meant arrest, imprisonment in the Lollards’ Tower by Saint Paul’s where the heretics go, interrogation by the Cardinal; excommunication and death at the stake. Rumours ran round of the fearsome contents of these books, of the fiery rhetoric that smashed down all you thought was sure. They said that if you once read a book of Luther you would never be the same again. We stood for some moments, staring down at them. Then I reached out my hand, touched the leather of the fallen book and picked it up. The others watched me intently. I flicked beyond the serpent on the cross, and read as quickly as my Latin allowed, jumping from page to page. The Pope was portrayed as a ruthless huntsman, demon of tyranny and avarice, the greedy shopkeeper who released souls from Purgatory for gold. I saw the powers of the priests one by one refuted. There was no such thing as the Last Rites. The priests had invented it for profit, twisting the meaning of an apocryphal verse. Priestcraft has no power to conjure the blood and body of Christ into the sacrament; the Communion is an act of Faith, and no mere Work of man. Confession too had to be Faith, not Work; the task the priests set us, contrition for all our sins, is impossible; our sins are so great, so far beyond the reach of our memories and minds. Even the best works of our lives, of which we are proudest, will turn out on examination to be terrible sins. None of the tyrannical ceremonies of a rotten Church can save us; only Faith, Faith, Faith. I read on, amazed, until Thomas struck the book from my hands.
‘That is enough. Now do you see?’
I was beginning to. My mother had no love of Luther, I was sure. But there were many in London who would pay handsomely for those books, and few who dared bring them into the country from Germany where they were printed. The profit for her in that deadly case of books was large and certain: always provided she did not get caught. It was a sign of just how confident she was in her own power, and how far she was prepared to take her policy of ruthless and finely judged risk.
Thomas put the lid in place and began forcing the nails back in with the haft of his little knife.
‘You think you can simply strike off on some trade of your own?’ he hissed. ‘She is the one who decides what is bought and sold. She chooses the risks, and takes them. What will you do if she cuts you off? I promise you, she’ll do it.’
‘What makes you so sure of that?’
Thomas looked down. ‘Because she has threatened me with it. And I am the one she calls her favourite.’
That sobered me. I could not imagine what peaceable Thomas might have done to stir that degree of anger in the Widow of Thames Street. Thomas and John met one another’s eyes. That veil of secrecy was back. I was as far apart from them as ever. When the last nail was in the lid we turned swiftly away and made for the door. Martin watched us leave with a stony expression.
‘I don’t envy you,’ said John. ‘Not with your family. I had rather take the clapboards, stockfish and pig iron, even though they do bore me to death and beyond.’
He turned away across the stones towards Timber Hythe. It was beginning to rain. Thomas made for the door of our house. ‘Are you coming?’
‘Soon.’ I was thinking hard. Thomas was right. But yet, in our mother’s recklessness, I saw my moment of opportunity. I walked quickly back inside the warehouse, crossed to the stairs at the far end, and climbed to the counting house.
Miriam Dansey looked up at me in surprise. She had a sea chart of the western Mediterranean spread out before her, the jagged coasts thick with place names, the open seas scored by myriad compass lines. Without any ceremony I set my casket down on the table, turned the key and opened it up. In the light of her two candles, the cornelians and the citrines gleamed like burning coals. My mother stood up slowly, her eyes fixed on the stones. Then she reached out a long forefinger, poked at them and drew it back as if they were scorpions. At last she looked at me, her face white, the skin around her mouth twitching.
‘Christ and all his angels!’ She flicked the casket shut. ‘I should have forbidden you to travel. I should never have trusted you off and alone. You are just a baby. No: worse, and I know where you had this mischief from. Dead? No, he is not dead. I am looking at him.’ She shouted beyond me, down the stairs to the warehouse. ‘William! William! Where is he? What was the fool thinking? I told him to watch you and keep you out of folly!’
‘What about you?’ I answered. ‘Do you not think those books in the warehouse just a little bit reckless?’
She sat down again and glared at me with her steely eyes.
‘I see Martin has been somewhat lax in his guard duties,’ she said quietly. She rapped the table with her hand. ‘Those are entirely different. Everyone knows what they are worth. We buy in Antwerp for a crown, and sell here for three. Cash trebled in less than two weeks. Pure profit, if no one talks. And they won’t,’ she added, with a fierce narrowing of her eyes. ‘But these!’ She lifted the lid again and took out one of the stones, a pale, gleaming citrine the size of a walnut. ‘This might be anything. Yellow glass.’
In reply, I took out my purse, loosened the strings and poured a cascade of silver and gold over her map. The effect was pleasingly dramatic. Covering the coastlines of France, Spain and the Barbary Coast were a dozen or so angel nobles, discs of gold an inch broad worth six shillings and eightpence each. There were nine of the larger royals or rose nobles, at ten shillings, and mixed among them some thirty gold crowns, at four shillings and twopence each, as well as gold half crowns and a good number of silver shillings and groats. My mother’s eyes opened in surprise. She leaned forward, and stirred the coins with her finger. Then she looked up.
‘You made this? Out of gems?’
‘Nothing but.’
‘Hm!’ She drew back. She tried not to show it, but I knew she was impressed. Money spoke to her, whatever its source. ‘Well, you may risk your coins if you choose. But Mr William’s is the real trade, and you will learn it. Come back in a year, and show me what you have then. If you have anything left at all.’
5
For the moment, I was content to obey my mother. I was growing, I thought to myself, maturing just like a gemstone deep in the bowels of the earth, that advances slowly to its perfection. I was acquiring a good grasp of Italian, and fair Portuguese and Spanish: accomplishments of value, since few enough men abroad would trouble to learn a lesser tongue like English. My eye for stones was getting sharper with every trip, and my reserves of coin were growing too. Soon I would be able to buy one or two of the dearer stones. It was time I began to look ahead to the next stage in my ambitions. I had set myself to become a merchant in jewels: not a mere retailer who brought in stones to Breakespere and Wolf and Heyes, but a man of standing who dealt directly with the Court. That meant somehow getting close to that wondrous, gilt and tinselled world. Just as for Thomas, I thought, my best hope lay with our uncle.
Bennet Waterman thought very highly of himself these days. He was one of Cardinal Wolsey’s audiencers: a legal clerk who prepared chancery bills, and generally took on any business that the Cardinal’s labyrinthine affairs required. It brought Uncle Bennet within a breath of the Court. He wore a velvet gown with silk lining, and a silver brooch with a small garnet in his hat. When Cardinal Wolsey was in residence at York Place, his vast house in Westminster, Uncle Bennet often took a boat down the river and paid us a visit on Thames Street. In the winter draughts of our candlelit parlour, while my mother and Mr William discussed the latest tariffs on pepper, Uncle Bennet took Thomas and me aside, his portly belly creaking after one of our generous but plain dinners. He enjoyed playing the courtier before his sister; and even though she might scoff at his posturing and airs, he was a connection she could not afford to despise, at least for the sake of Thomas.
‘Ah, King Henry. He is the flower of chivalry, my boy. Have I told you how he came to marry Queen Katherine? He was only eleven when he became betrothed. She was seventeen, the widow of his poor brother, Prince Arthur. For six years after that their engagement lasted, while the late King fussed and grubbed and tried to prise her dowry out of Spain. He would never let his son go, you know. They say he envied him terribly, for his looks and his strength. He kept him locked up, like some poor virgin in a tale. But when King Henry the Seventh died, what did our young King do? Married her at once. Dowry or no dowry. No knight out of an old romance could have done fairer.’
That Christmas of 1523, when I was back in England after another voyage with Mr William, Uncle Bennet smuggled me into a general audience in the King’s great hall at Westminster. He whispered to me to keep close by his side, and not to draw attention. I stood among the pages and lesser followers of the Cardinal, and looked at the ranks of great personages where the various factions and powers of the Court were on display. My heart was beating hard. I had never before been this close to the King. There he sat, immobile, a daunting and powerful presence: our sovereign lord, King Henry the Eighth. He was in his early thirties, as handsome a man as there was in the world, large-limbed, with a long, lean face, bearded, even though the common English fashion was to go clean-shaved. He darted his gaze about the hall. He was in a towering temper: news had just reached England that the Turks had driven the Knights of Saint John from Rhodes. An envoy from the Pope was before him and his powerful voice thundered repeatedly, ‘I am Defender of the Faith!’ The title was a gift of the Pope in which Henry took great pride.
As he was speaking, I took in every aspect of his appearance with a goldsmith’s eye. His black velvet cap had a badge in it bearing a large, pyramid-cut diamond. His shirt collar was of gold thread set with emeralds; his doublet was sewn with gold in a lozenge pattern, and at every crossing a cluster of pearls. Round his neck was a gold chain set with great table-cut sapphires and amethysts; a heavy pendant hung from this chain, and in it shone four dark rubies. At his belt was a dagger, its sheath set with yet more stones. He wore rings on the forefingers of both hands, one an opal, one a diamond; and over his crimson silk hose, below his right knee, was the Garter, enamelled and set with pearls. When he moved, a sparkle of jewels darted from his chest, his fingers, his legs, just as if he were God himself seated in his glory.
Beside him sat Queen Katherine, almost forty, with a plump, heavily painted face and a jutting chin. At her bosom she wore a gold cross and several chains of rubies and pearls: doubtless a part of the wardrobe she had brought from Spain. I knew from my friends on Goldsmiths’ Row that she seldom bought anything new. Seated with her was the Princess Mary, a small, half-pretty seven-year-old with dark eyes, the only surviving child of Henry and his Queen after fourteen years of marriage. It appeared more and more likely that she would one day be Queen Regnant herself, and so an aspiring merchant would do well to cultivate her favour. But that was far in the future. The real prize was the King.
I knew that Henry acquired mountains of gems each year, and that he had made Cornelius Heyes and the others rich. The trade was there, but how to break in on it? Everything flowed through the hands of those few great goldsmiths. If I only had a patron at Court. I looked along the ranks of the great courtiers. There was Cardinal Wolsey, with two tall priests carrying the silver crosses, nine feet high, that represented his authority as Papal Legate and Archbishop of York. His pride was immense. At a distance stood his almoner, his chamberlains and treasurers, and then in a gaggle round us the constables, the audiencers, the clerks, and even the official whose job it was to melt the Cardinal’s sealing wax. I suspected that Uncle Bennet, a humble lawyer, did not have as much influence with the Cardinal as he liked to pretend.
