The King’s Diamond

The girl said, ‘Are you not going to let go of my hands?’

Already I was behaving like a fool, and showing I was no courtier. ‘Only if you show me your face.’

I released her hand, and just as she lifted off her mask, so I did mine. Her face was round, soft, alight with excitement: an excitement so far from the world of trade that it made me gasp. She cared for nothing, nothing but the pleasure of the moment and the delight of being alive. She gave me a sense of infinite promise. With a girl like this beside me I could go anywhere, become anything. Even as I was thinking these thoughts, I saw the girl’s face change, and take on a curious smile. And yes, I saw it too. I had not seen that face for six years, but there was no doubt whatsoever. The girl was Hannah Cage. She threw back her head and laughed.

‘The boy who played in the street! What, have you inherited a dukedom?’

The music began again, I slipped my mask back on to hide my annoyance and took her hand. We whirled together back into the figures.

‘Not yet,’ I told her. ‘And you? You left home? Married?’

My heart began to pound as I asked it. She laughed.

‘My father bought us a finer town house. Away from the stink of the river. Married! To marry me they would have to catch me. And courtiers are so horribly slow.’

‘But I caught you. Did I not?’

‘For a short time. But I am going somewhere I do not think you will find me.’

A jester tumbled and shrieked in front of us with a jangle of bells. I relaxed my hold for an instant and Hannah broke away, to vanish back into the dance. I ducked under the trees and ran after her; in a clearing I looked left and right, darted to the left towards the door of the hall, and then ran right up against my Uncle Bennet. He frowned in displeasure, and shook his head. I was furious and shamed. He was right: if I was caught, he would be the one to suffer. The chase was over. For the moment.

After Christmas, the plague began to ease. Bennet told me the King was moving his Court a little closer to London, and would be holding a great joust for all the nobility at his palace of Greenwich on Shrove Tuesday, to mark the beginning of Lent. ‘But this time,’ he added sternly, ‘you must be discreet.’ I thanked him. My meeting with Hannah Cage had made me greedy for more. And besides, if I was ever to break into the Court world I knew I had to keep watch, and follow the King in all his doings the way a thief follows his prey. So there I stood, on the morning of the sixth of February 1526, in the midst of the crowd at the Tiltyard, the open field that runs all down the eastern flank of the palace of Greenwich. Behind me rose its towers and pinnacles, while beyond began the low houses of the village, crouching like beggars at the King’s gate.

Down the centre of the field were the barriers, built some six feet high of stout planks, to separate the jousters. To my right was a huge cluster of tents. I saw squires and armourers moving between them carrying tongs, hammers and bags of rivets, stablemen in their particoloured tabards and gentlemen waiters in white satin carrying steaming hot wine. There was the King’s great lodging pavilion, its conical roofs topped with gilt dragons and lions, where men must now be helping King Henry into his armour. Further off were the cook-tents, with smoke rising from vents in their roofs, and the camp of the King’s mariners who had come off their ships bringing capstans and cranes to set up all the various pavilions. Some thirty trumpeters and drummers on horseback stood waiting.

At last I saw the flaps of the great tent drawn back, and out rode King Henry. He was in full armour from head to toe, brilliant steel where it could be seen, but draped all over with surcoats of cloth of gold and silver, on which was some device in crimson, and a motto or poesy snaking round it. His horse too was in armour, with crimson ostrich feathers on its brow. The King held his lance upright in his hand, gilt and painted, a tremendous length, yet cunningly hollowed for lightness and ease. Eleven other riders came out from among the tents and fell into line behind him, all in the same colours, and they came trotting forward, their horses kicking up clods of the muddy turf. With a tremendous sudden clangour the drums beat and the trumpets sounded. The crowd around me took off their hats, and I cheered with the loudest of them and cried, ‘God save you! God save King Harry!’

A second line of horsemen gathered at the lists at the opposite end, all in coats of green and crimson satin. Both troops rode to the Queen’s pavilion halfway down the field, where they dipped their lances in salute. Beyond them I scanned the courtiers ranged on either side of the Queen, searching for signs of Hannah, but without success.

I saw the armourers helping the King lower his lance into position. This was no simple matter. The butt end of the lance was secured to the body armour by clips, and the King’s right gauntlet was hooked over the lance and locked by more fastenings to his left arm. Another pair of clips caught the lance firmly in the crook of his left elbow, resting on the notch in his shield. Then, with legs straight, and his jousting spurs reaching up on their long steel wires to touch the horse’s flanks, King Henry set himself in motion.

His horse’s hoofs tumbled forward in turn, never breaking into a canter or a gallop, in the peculiar, rolling gait called the amble that is proper for the joust: for only with this steady gait can the rider hope for any kind of accuracy in his hit. Like a stormcloud the King rolled forward, not fast, but with an immense, calm strength, and his lance dead level. The Marquis of Exeter, one of Henry’s oldest childhood friends, launched himself into an amble on the other side of the barrier, closing the distance with the King. He was skilful too, but the sway of his lance showed that he lacked King Henry’s strength and control. When the pair met, the King’s lance struck full on Exeter’s shield with a bang. The lance shattered, Exeter swayed and his own lance swung clear. I cheered and huzzaed for the King, whose broken lance marked him as the victor. He rode on, wheeled round and then came slowly back up to the top of the course. He passed by not ten feet away from me, and I had my first clear view of the design on his coat. I stared after him. My palms began to sweat, and my pulse beat in my ears.

What I saw, repeated on the King’s back, on his shield, and on his horse’s flank, was a crimson heart in flames. This heart was trapped in a press, perhaps a wine-press or the sort that book-binders use. Beneath it curled the motto, DECLARE JE NOS. Declare I dare not. This was the heart of a tortured lover, caught in the agony of a secret and unrequited passion. Four years ago, when I had just returned from my first venture to Lisbon, the King had ridden to a joust wearing just such an emblem. His badge then was a wounded heart, and the other jousters sported a variety of matching symbols, hearts shattered, hearts chained, hearts in prison. Their mottoes had groaned in concert: ‘Without remedy’, ‘My heart is broken’, ‘Between joy and pain’. No one at the time read the meaning in it; but shortly afterwards it became known Henry had begun an affair with a new mistress. Mrs Mary was a niece of the great Duke of Norfolk, married to a certain William Carey, the King’s distant cousin and another of his childhood friends. She had been at the French Court, and now she was one of the Queen’s ladies, while Carey became an obliging Court cuckold.

I had watched the progress of this affair from Goldsmiths’ Row, where I saw in preparation the gold lockets, the crystal scent bottles, the crosses and pendants bloated with rubies and pearls. I cursed my luck that I was too young and too poor to share in the profits of King Henry’s love. In time the flow of jewels from Cheapside to the King’s various palaces slowed. Indeed, according to Uncle Bennet, the King had recently handed Mrs Mary back to her husband, pregnant with Henry’s child. The King’s wounded heart of four years ago had healed. But now this: a heart once more in flames, and Declare I dare not.

A fresh pair of riders thundered past, their lances wavering and failing to hit, and the audience groaned in disappointment. Who was she, I wondered. One of his wife’s ladies, perhaps, as Mary and his previous mistress, Bessie Blount, had been? But whoever the woman was, I was in no doubt that this, at last, was my moment: the chance, the piece of fortune I had been waiting for. The spoils for those who supplied jewels to feed the King’s passion would be immense. And this time I was determined to have my share.

As I travelled back up to London, squeezed on a bench between the tiltboat’s other passengers, to the rattle and bump of the oars and the splash of riverwater against my back, my mind hammered at the problem before me. It was exasperating. I had waited a long time. I had schooled myself, trained my senses, my skill and my judgement until they were fine tools, ready for use. But if I was to make a serious attempt I had to have funds on a scale beyond anything I could raise on my own. There was no way round it: I would have to ask my mother. My pride rebelled against it, going to her begging. I would have to fight her old distrust of the bewitchment of beautiful stones that had cost her husband so much money down the years.

I found my mother sitting at her table in the counting house, with stacks of glittering coins before her: French écus, Portuguese cruzados, Genoese ducats. All these she would weigh before taking them to the Royal Mint to be changed for English crowns. She still looked young. Her hair was dark and waved, and always protruded somewhere or other from beneath her black widow’s hood. A fire burned in the small hearth, and the scent of cloves from the warehouse below mingled with the tang of burning charcoal. William Marshe was hunched on the high-backed settle with an account book open before him, his long face wearing its usual melancholic expression. It was growing dark. A number of tin lanterns stood on the floor, unlit, for the use of our watchmen at night. I sat down by the fire facing William.

My mother spoke without looking up at me. ‘And so you have something to say.’

It was harder to begin than I had expected. There was no use in trying to excite her over my ambitions, by painting for her the pomp and seduction of the Court. That would only turn her against me at the start. And so I went straight to the crux of it, the King’s device and motto, and the signification I read in it: the flames of passion ignited once more, to replace the discarded Mrs Mary. While I spoke, her eye rested on me like a jeweller’s, probing intently for the flaw in a stone.

‘A new mistress,’ said my mother, leaning back. ‘Really? Then why have you heard nothing of it, you with your long ears for Court news? The King’s lovers are commonly the very first to boast of their advancement.’

I leant forward from the fireplace. ‘I told you: Declare I dare not. He is still wooing her: he is on the chase. He is teasing her, tantalising her, just as she may be tantalising him. The motto, the heart in the press: everything indicates she has not yet surrendered.’

Miriam Dansey put her arms behind her head, yawned, and then laughed. ‘Not surrendered! Now, there is a wonder! Why should she not? I would, if King Henry came and heaped me with jewels.’

I clapped my hands and jumped up, delighted that she had played right into my hands. ‘There! You have said it. What will a king do when he is thwarted in love?’ I strode around the room, letting my long shadow dart out in the firelight. ‘He will bathe her in sapphires, he will pile her with diamonds, he will buy all Persia and the Indies and lay them at her feet. And I …’

My mother let out a shrill laugh. ‘Now I see it! You think that you will be the one to sell the King his jewels! Oh, my mad, mad boy! The King will buy from Mr Cornelius, and Mr Christian, and Morgan Wolf. The men he knows and trusts. Why should he trouble himself with you?’

I turned on her. ‘My jewels will be better.’

‘Hm!’ It was a grunt of amusement. ‘How, in the name of all the saints, will you accomplish that?’

I swung myself down on to a stool and crouched towards her table. William, I noticed, had his eye on me. He was sharp, for all his dropsical appearance, and he was measuring me up just as surely as my mother. ‘The stones that flow into London come to us from Antwerp or Bruges, and before that from Genoa or Venice. The Italians and French keep the best for themselves: Heyes and the others simply sit on Cheapside and wait for what the traders bring them. I shall not do that. I shall go to Venice, and catch the gems as they land from the East. I shall bring back such stones as have not been seen. I shall …’

‘Why not go further?’ said William, with his half-smile. ‘To Cairo, or even to Serendip or Golconda?’ He was testing me, trying out just how fantastically high my plans might soar. I shook my head.

‘There is too little time. To make my profit, I must be in with the first. When the lady succumbs to the King’s charms, the flow of gifts will slow. Henry will no longer want what is most rare and fine. A few little tokens will do. Like the New Year’s gifts he still sends to Bessie Blount.’

William sat back and nodded. ‘I see I am to lose you, Mr Richard.’ He glanced across at my mother, who tapped the table with her fingers in impatience.

‘I shall be the one to decide that.’ She turned back to me. ‘And so you are asking me for a loan. A very, very large one. That is it?’

I stood before her and nodded. The Widow of Thames Street frowned. She rapped the Dansey seal on the table and said, ‘I shall settle nothing until the Rose comes home.’

Mr William was due to set out any day, and myself along with him. I had hoped to avoid this voyage. I put my hands on the table. ‘But that will be too late: speed is everything. Surely you see that?’

My mother stood up slowly and rested her hands next to mine. She said softly, ‘I see you are running ahead a little too fast.’

I looked back at her, angry. ‘Very well,’ I told her. ‘Let the Rose sail first. But I am not going with her. My place is here, where I can watch the Court.’

My mother drew in her breath and lowered her brows for a fight. But then she appeared to change her mind, and smiled. ‘As you prefer.’

I turned and walked out of the room. It was two weeks before the Rose at last dropped downstream from the Tower with the tide and vanished out to sea, carrying her usual outward cargo of dank-smelling English woollens. It might be months before her return. I waited with impatience. I tried to believe that my mother intended to use some of the profits of the Rose’s venture to fund my own; but more likely she hoped to weaken my purpose through delay. I spent the time moodily patrolling the town for news. I had to know I was right: and I had to know the lady’s name. I needed to have a face, a form, a mode of beauty in my mind before I began to buy: for stones are as varied and fickle as women themselves. But my Uncle Bennet could tell me nothing of any new royal mistress. All the news from Court was of the ambassadors from France, and the new Holy Catholic League that the Pope was forming to fight the overreaching ambition of the Empire and fling the Spanish and German armies out of Italy. His Holiness had been joined in this alliance by Florence and Venice, and then by France, and these states were busily employed in raising armies. But our own King, after swift deliberation, had decided on strict neutrality. That way, said Bennet, Henry could be the peace-maker, the one all the other powers came to, begging for help and offering favours in return. With this pleasant thought, King Henry had left London to spend the summer hunting. The Court vanished into the deep country, and news dried up completely.

I might almost have thought Henry’s new love was a chimera conjured only from my own fancy but for the flow of jewels out of Goldsmiths’ Row. In April there was a gold brooch in the figure of a heart, black enamelled and set with five rubies and five diamonds, supplied by Morgan Wolf; the next month a rope of sixty pearls, and the month after that a gold frame for a portrait miniature, garnished with a falcon with eyes of emerald. All these objects disappeared into the King’s hands. Each time I brought the news to my mother, as fresh proof. I was convinced that I was right. But who was she? No one could tell me of a woman who had received these jewels, or been seen wearing them.

In July the Rose returned at last and anchored below London Bridge. I stood on the wharf, watching the boat come in with Mr William in the bow. He took my hand briefly and went straight up to the counting house. I paced the wharf anxiously, glancing repeatedly up at the window, while the men unloaded the goods from the lighters, nutmegs and pepper and casks of sack. Dusk was gathering, and mists rose from the river. Then I saw William peer from behind the diamond panes and beckon me up. I walked quickly through the dim aisles of the warehouse, climbed the wooden stairs to the counting house and stepped inside.

Still my mother made me wait. In one hand she held a paper covered in figures, which she was checking rapidly, her lips working, while the sands ran through the narrow waist of an hourglass framed in ebony. She grudged time spent checking her underlings’ accounts, and used the glass’s discipline to make herself read fast. Her other hand rested on the respected Dansey seal, a broad disc of brass with a polished wooden knob, which she toyed with as she read. I sat down in a chair facing her. My heart was beating hard.

Suddenly she put down her figures, took hold of the hourglass and laid it on its side, halting the flow of time. She looked at me a moment with her head tilted, still playing with the seal. Then she tapped it on the table three times, and pushed towards me a sheet of paper. I snatched it up and ran my eyes greedily down it. At sight of this bill I request that you pay to the said Richard Dansey, merchant, of Thames Street in the City of London, for value received, the sum of one thousand marks in Venetian ducats or bonds as shall be agreed, on or before Michaelmas in this year of Grace 1526. It was a bill of exchange addressed to the Venice branch of the great Nuremberg banking house of Anton Fugger, signed at the bottom, Miriam Dansey, next to a large red disc of wax pressed with the rearing wyvern of the firm. Finally I had it: the thing I had longed to hold in my hands for all those months. And the sum was ample, more than I had dared hope for. I let out a whoop of delight. ‘So you are really funding my venture.’

My mother nodded, but did not smile.

‘You may not be so thankful soon. You have not seen what else I have written for you.’ She pulled the bill back and slid towards me a second paper, which I took and quickly read. It was a bill of sale: one of those crafty instruments by which usury was conducted without sin, so that the business of the City could go on, while keeping itself free from the Church courts. By this bill, I acknowledged the receipt of a thousand marks, and sold to her in return a twelve hundred mark chunk of my business. At the bottom was the space for me to sign. Twenty per cent interest to my mother, that was the meaning of it: only after that would I make a profit. It was a steep rate. She had made not a single concession to the fact I was her son. She was investing in a venture, that was all: and a venture in which she had very little trust. Anger rose up in me as I set the paper down. I had prepared myself for her refusal, but not this. In a single move she was both helping me and throwing up another barrier in my way.

‘You are right,’ I told her. ‘I am feeling a good deal less thankful already.’

She sat back in her chair, stroking the polished wooden knob of the seal, her face wearing a faint smile.

‘Having second thoughts?’ she said.

I reached for one of the goosefeather pens that stood in the pewter inkpot, and tapped off the excess ink.

‘By God, no.’

‘Wait!’ She put the seal down and leant towards me. ‘Dear Richard. You are taking a very great risk. And you are asking me to share in that risk too. Would it not be far, far better to stay with me? Work for the family business? Go where I advise, with our dear, trusted old Mr William to look after you? Build yourself up little by little: that is the best way in trade. You cannot swallow the whole world in one bite, my Richard. Why do you want to strike out fresh paths of your own, when there is so much for you here?’

Her voice was soft and seductive. Before her on the table lay the two documents: one threatening me with its brutal terms of repayment; the other, I suspected, intended to daunt me with the sheer size of the loan. I saw plainly what she was up to. If I embarked on my venture and succeeded, she made a handsome profit; the thought of those two hundred marks doubtless attracted her. If I failed, I would be in her debt, and entirely in her power. I would have to work for years to pay off what I owed her, travelling where she sent me, and buying what she told me to buy. She would be able to remind me forever after that she had been right and I had been wrong. I would become her creature, a humble minion of the house of Dansey. Even if she never saw her money again, power like that was cheaply bought at a thousand marks. There would be no question of my ever affording another venture on my own.

That was if I failed. But to succeed: to be my own man, to escape the Thameswater stink, the murky family world that had become a prison to me, and rise into a sphere my mother could not guess at, that was worth any risk.

The ink on the pen tip had gone dry. I forced myself not to show my rage. I said, ‘Do you have any other conditions to add before I sign?’

She rapped the seal on the table, suddenly irritated.

‘Only that you take along a family servant, whom I shall pick for you. I would not like to think of you entirely alone on your wild errand. That is acceptable?’

‘Very well.’

I dipped the pen once more in the pot, angrily splashing ink on its pewter rim. ‘You will have your twelve hundred marks,’ I told her. ‘And I shall make my profit, I promise you.’

I signed the document with a quick flourish, R. Dansey. It was done. I had mortgaged myself: there was no going back. My mother pulled the paper towards her and handed me the bill of exchange. She looked at me, thoughtful, and a little surprised, as if she had not expected me to accept her bargain. I stood up.

‘Listen to me, my Richard,’ she said. ‘You have a sharp eye for gems, I will grant you that. But, by God, you have the heart of a child. See that you do not go the way of your father.’

I looked back at her levelly. ‘I am following in no one’s footsteps. Not his, and certainly not yours.’

She looked back up at me with a faint frown. ‘I am very much aware of that.’

I folded the bill of exchange crisply in three, and stooped to kiss her on the cheek. Then I walked quickly out of the room, down the stairs and through the warehouse. I was fuming. That second document seemed to drag at me like a stone about my neck; a bargain with the Devil that one day I would be forced to pay. But as I emerged into the moist air of the riverside, my anger and fears left me, and I felt only exhilaration. That night, as I lay in my bedchamber, unsleeping, I worked out the various conversions and began to conceive all that that money might mean. A mark is a measure of silver, worth two-thirds of a pound, and so a thousand marks are six hundred and sixty-six pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence sterling. At the current rate that made two hundred and ninety-six ounces of gold, or a little over three thousand Venetian ducats. Sufficient, I reckoned, for some fifteen good diamonds, or else maybe twenty diamonds of poorer water, and twenty of the finest opals. Or a hundred Oriental amethysts. Perhaps I might even stretch further, if I bought wisely. How to choose? A dozen different schemes for a collection of jewels of intoxicating wonder presented themselves to me.

In the days that followed I counted out my own modest savings and changed them into bills, while Christian Breakespere and even William Marshe volunteered small loans of their own. I made a last effort to discover the mistress’s name, going round all my trade connections and pressing Uncle Bennet to use his wiles at Court. But to no purpose. It was galling: without that knowledge my whole venture was at risk. I considered putting off my departure. But I had waited far too long already; if I was to have any chance of success I must sail now, even in my ignorance. I was convinced the mistress’s name would not stay secret long. I begged Uncle Bennet to discover it, and write to me as soon as possible. He nodded his bald head in assent.