The King's Diamond (6 page)

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.

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.'