The King's Diamond (4 page)

They sang to me too. They spoke of a life beyond what I knew, and for which I was developing a vague but powerful longing.

As I grew older, I used to slip away whenever I might and steal northwards up Labour-in-Vain Hill to Cheapside. Here I was truly in a different world. The breadth and openness of the street, the stone paving, unlike most of the city which lay in its own filth, the houses that stood in their majesty like the sterns of great ships, the water conduit with its gilded statues of saints; at all these things I marvelled.

Here, on the corner of Bread Street, is that wondrous stand of houses known as Goldsmiths' Row. Four storeys high they rise, beautified all along the front with figures of wild woodmen riding on monstrous beasts, all richly painted and gilt. There were fourteen shops in all. At the centre of the Row, beneath the largest and fiercest of the woodmen, was the shop of the King's own goldsmith, Cornelius Heyes. He was a man of weight, received at Court with as much deference, so they said, as a great noble. There were others too, almost as grand: Christian Breakespere and Bartholomew Reade, and Morgan Wolf. They knew my family, of course. My father traded with them all, on occasion. Here I came to perch on a stool in a corner, and watch, and learn.

In a goldsmith's shop you are struck, first of all, by the light. The Row faces north, like a painter's studio, and the shelves inside the shops are draped in white cloths, so that there is always the same gentle radiance. Set against these cloths the gems glow, each with its own proper fire. On one shelf stand solitary stones in their purity, rubies and amethysts, garnets and sapphires, some exquisitely cut and polished, others virgin stones straight from the earth, rough like hailstones. On another shelf are rings and signets, threaded on wire or perched on silver stands made to look like the branches of trees. One wall holds crosses and reliquaries, and crystal tablets engraved with scenes of the saints, and the precious things that princes love: little crucifixes for rosaries, jewelled combs, tinderboxes, scent flasks, inkhorns, hourglasses, mirror frames and hawks' bells, all worked in gold and set with agate or enamel or mother of pearl. Higher up stand the great flagons and ewers of gold or silver gilt, gleaming down over the shop like suns, waiting to be presented to the King. I remember in the shop of Mr Cornelius a pair of gilt basins chased with beasts and dragons that weighed over six hundred ounces, and a vase of rock crystal graven with roses and crowns and the cipher of the King and Queen, H and K woven together, sprinkled across it in gold.

In the corners were other rarities: oliphants' teeth, branches of crimson coral, or the horn of a unicorn, garnished in gold. Further back squatted the brick furnace that purred always with a deep-throated fire, and the lapidary's wheel where the goldsmith sat like a potter, pedalling with one foot to polish his stones or grind them down into facets. Close to this, on the workbench, were little jars of pastes and emery powders, and the diamond-tipped rods with which he carved tiny intaglios or signets. Then there were the drills, from the great augers turned with two hands to the tiniest picks for drilling pearls; the pincers that likewise came in every conceivable size, the crucibles, the casting ladles and hammers, the miniature anvils, the moulds, the leather gauntlets and aprons stained black from use;
and high up the blocks of wax and the acids, the
aqua fortis
and
aqua stygia
used for engraving. Closer to the front of the shop was a broad table with richly carved legs, where the smith sat when he was expecting a customer. He would have his scales before him and the minute brass weights, the scruples and the drachms, the carats that are the hundred and forty-fourth part of an ounce, and the grain weights that are a quarter of that again and can only be lifted by tweezers.

What I most loved to see were the stones, in all their varied temperaments and tribes. I learnt the twelve types of the Emerald, with the Scythian at their head, that shines like new spring grass. I learnt of its kindred stones, the jasper and the blue-green beryl that must be cut in a six-sided figure if it is not to lose its brilliance. I learnt of the Diamond: the pure whites of Golconda, the blue stones and the green, and the fair, pointed stones of the Mahanadi River in Bengal. These will cut through armour. Yet if you hit them a blow with a hammer they shatter into shards too tiny to be seen. I learnt too of the cutting of their facets, the stone's eyes, as it were, through which you gaze down into its soul. The principal facet, where possible, will be a flat rectangle or table: the table-cut stone being everywhere the most prized. It has a dark brilliance and a mystery that the pyramid cut can never have. I studied the Ruby also, the great stones and the lesser that incline to the orange of the garnet and the jacinth. I learnt of Amethysts with their delicate peach-bloom shades, that are almost as valued as diamonds, and Sapphires, the true sky-blue, as well as the green, the yellow, the rose and the white.

I studied too their faults and diseases. Some stones are shadowed and opaque; others are washed and pale; others again they call clouded, when there is a whiteness or mist that hovers in the stone's outer regions, even though its heart may be clear and true. Other stones are discoloured, or split, or stained by some alien vein of metal. Again and again I was told that a goldsmith must never show pity for these marred and maimed stones. He must be as ruthless in
culling imperfection as anyone else who aspires to the favour of kings.

But it was from Morgan Wolf that I learnt the most. He taught me the tricks jewellers use to improve upon nature; how, if you steep a dull ruby in vinegar for fourteen days it will regain its fire just long enough for it to be sold. He showed me how plain rock crystal can be treated with indigo to make a counterfeit sapphire, and how to set a diamond with a dab of paint beneath to make it shine with any colour you please. He showed me the various foils made of copper, silver or gold, with which the gems' settings were lined. These foils could be tinted, if you hung them in the smoke of burning cloth, or brightly coloured feathers. And so I shall give you this advice: if you have a dead parrot, sell it to a dishonest goldsmith. He will buy it, and give you a good price too. Wolf even kept a wicker cage of pigeons in the back of his shop, and when he had a pearl that had turned old and blind he would coax one of the birds into eating it, and retrieve it the next day from the ordure, bright and restored to youth. But there was always a falseness about these impostures, and in time I learnt to detect them all.

As I sat in the corner of Breakespere's or Wolf's shop with my head resting on my arm, my mind drifted into the future. I knew the life of a goldsmith was not for me. I could not have borne those hours of labour sitting at a workbench on Cheapside, or waiting at the counter for a customer like a spider watching for a fly. No, I decided: I would be a voyager, a prince among merchants. But I would not be selling my goods on Thames Street. I saw myself instead travelling up the river, perhaps in one of those same gilded barges I loved to gaze on, to Westminster Palace or Richmond, alighting at the fabled landing-places with their flags and golden dragons set on poles, and ushered inside, where royalty would await. Such were my dreams. I told no one about them; certainly not my mother.

 

The years were passing. Our band of three sat on the highest form in the schoolroom on Old Fish Street, where we learnt the rudiments of Latin, arithmetic and accounting from a wiry young Franciscan. Dust motes swirled in the light from the dirty windows and water gurgled in the lead cistern outside. For six years we had sat there each morning, stifling hot in summer and cold in winter, with the little charcoal brazier in the midst of the room. There were some twenty-five of us, sons of the stockfish traders and other merchants of Thames Street. I yearned to be gone; but I set myself to learn what I thought I needed for the life before me. Numbers were dull beasts in themselves, but when used to reckon up ducats into crowns or for counting profits they acquired a keen interest. Latin, the language of legal contracts, ambassadors and churchmen, I mastered as well as I might; though often, when I should have been committing some verse or other to memory, my mind was drifting restlessly north to Cheapside, and the wonders I would see there later that afternoon.

‘I shall beat you,' murmured our master, his voice lowered as if in awe of the punishment he was about to mete out. But he never wielded the rod himself. Instead, he handed us over to a sinewy usher who had an arrow scar on his cheek from the Battle of Flodden some seven years before. Between blows, the Franciscan repeated the verses he was trying, through the medium of pain, to force into us.

‘
O dulces
,' he whispered, with tears in his eyes at the beauty of the words. His deputy lifted the rod over my waiting hand. Whack! ‘…
comitum
…' Whack! ‘…
valete coetus
.'

I went home often with red lines on my palm; but pain meant little to me. I was waiting my time. Thomas, the bright star and our mother's darling, always knew the answers. Though a year younger, he had rapidly moved up to join John and me. Miriam Dansey never spoke of him as a future merchant. No, it was the Church for Thomas, and high promotion in it, if she knew anything at all. She had marked him down as the King's chancellor, or at least a great bishop.

As we made our way home, the three of us, the boys from the other, more prestigious schools used to lie in wait for us. These were the scholars of Saint Paul's and Saint Anthony's: pigeons of Paul's and Anthony hogs we called them, after the birds on the great cathedral, and the pigs that wandered everywhere about London, snuffling up scraps until they were slaughtered by the prior of Saint Anthony's for his own and his brethren's enjoyment. These proud boys used to surround us, them in their black velvet gowns as if they were clerks or king's councillors already. They gave us the traditional challenge,
‘Placetne disputare
?' Will you dispute? And Thomas, with the light of battle in his eye, replied, ‘
Placet
.' We trooped all together into the nearest churchyard and perched on the tombs. I can picture Thomas, his thin body straight, tongue licking his teeth, waiting to hear what his enemies would throw down for debate. It might be, ‘Whether a hundred petty sins are as damnable as one great one', ‘Whether even Lucifer can be saved', ‘Whether it is too late for the dead to repent'. He could prove anything, in his schoolboy Latin that became more fluent year by year. His opponents gradually lost their tempers, until it became a battle of satchels and heavy books, and even sticks and stones. Then John and I waded into the fight, and Thomas swung his satchel with a fury that made up for his lack of strength, until the three of us won clear, bruised but triumphant.

Our band still roamed the streets of London, but our interests had changed. We were in love, all three of us, with a certain girl who used to watch from the window of a grand, stone-built mansion on the corner of Bosse Lane, just up the street. Her dark gaze would dart up and down Thames Street as she brushed back a wisp of black hair under her hood, as if she too were restless, and looking for something that was still beyond her sight. We did not know her name, but she looked to be of an age with us, about fourteen. She came from that world I so longed for. The pearls at her throat, the ruby brooch and the silver thread in her gown all proclaimed it, even without the
languid ease of her movements and the way she laughed at us and called to her sister, a sharp-eyed little ten-year-old, to come and watch our antics. Plodding home from school we used to throw our satchels down in the street, bow and kiss our hands, whoop and cut capers.

‘Sweet sugar sucket, come down!'

‘Dance with us!'

‘Be my bride!

In response, she would rest her chin elegantly on one hand and smile. Once she even rewarded John with a suggestive pout of her lips, and a finger run along the edge of her bodice and up round her throat. I found a way to climb the sheer face of that house, clinging to the barely projecting stones with fingers and toes, and pulled myself up to her window. Perching there like some strange bird, not two feet away from the soft and suddenly surprised face of the girl, I had not a notion what I ought to do. But with the other two staring up at me, there was no question I had to do something. What a mass of ill-formed scrags of wooing I spun out of my brain! I took her hand and counted off her fingers, this one pretty, that one a little too fat, oh, but that one, I die for it! She drew back her hand and laughed. ‘Oh, Susan,' she called through the open door behind her, ‘come and listen! This boy is actually trying to woo me!' I was a game to her, a petty amusement, like a lapdog or a juggler. I burned with anger and shame then. If she could only see what I longed to be, and not what I was, a tradesman's son, a schoolboy, one born and bred to the stink of the Thames.

‘The Devil carry you off, Richard Dansey,' yelled John from below. He tried to jump and follow me up the wall, but he was too heavy and slid back down again. That recalled my courage. In John's eyes, at least, I was a conqueror. I swung myself forward, and before the girl knew what I was doing, I kissed her loudly on the lips so that John and the rest could see. She drew back with a frown: I had gone too far. Then I lowered myself carefully back down, leaping the last
six feet or so. Thomas whooped and slapped me on the back, but John threw himself at me, punching me and knocking me down, so that in an instant we were rolling together in the filth at the far edge of the street. When we pulled ourselves upright to stand glaring at one another, both our faces were bleeding.

‘I will win her,' John promised.

‘Not while I live,' I replied.

We stood still, wary in case the other made a fresh attack. Then John laughed and held out his hand. ‘We'll not let a girl come between us.' He was right. His friendship mattered; though often, as now, our rivalry almost outran it. Slowly I took the offered hand. He nudged me with a mocking gleam in his eye and whispered, ‘But I will win her.'