The King's Diamond (5 page)

Then we heard the bolts drawn back from the great gate under her window, and the growling of a servant, and we ran off together down the street, laughing and pushing one another. I felt elated at my triumph with the girl, and the dangerous thrill of running so close to losing John's friendship.

For months in the summer we would trudge down dusty Thames Street to stand under her window and find it empty and fastened shut. Only the curmudgeonly servant was left, sweeping the cobbles clean before the great gate. Thomas one day approached him, offered him some coins, stood talking a few moments and then came back to us.

‘Her name is Hannah Cage,' he reported. ‘Her father is Stephen Cage, a great courtier, with a castle in Kent. The family is off with the King on his country progress: Eltham Palace, Greenwich, Richmond.'

We heard the news in silence. I felt a void open up inside me. There it was again, brutally plain: that gulf between what I wished to be, and what I was. Well, the girl was out of my sphere, and best forgotten.

As we went brooding round London that sweltering summer, John one evening led us past the bath-house on Stew Lane. We
stopped and looked up at its brick chimney and mysteriously shuttered windows.

‘You dare not take a shilling to the bath-house and buy a night of pleasure,' John challenged me.

My heart began beating hard. The girl might be gone, but I would have my first taste of woman. ‘By God, I do,' I replied.

‘Together, then? Tonight?'

After dark I slipped from the house and met John at the end of Stew Lane. Fog lay on the river. Lights shone from chinks in the shuttered windows of the bath-house, but all the rest of the waterfront was dark. We handed in our shillings at the door to a smiling old woman with just two teeth, who told us to undress and pass through the curtain. Together we advanced naked across a rush-strewn floor into a cloud of hot steam. All along the walls, in curtained cubicles, were the individual baths, from which came the sound of splashes and laughter. I imagined myself in some fantastic castle out of a romance, where a noble damsel who was the image of Hannah Cage waited for me. I began to tremble with expectation. John, looking at me, winked, and stepped aside into a cubicle. I parted a curtain, stepped into another and climbed into the bath. As I lay back in the warm water, a girl slipped in beside me. She was large, a rounded heap of breasts and thighs that astonished me. She clambered quickly athwart me, red-faced and flaxen-haired, and I braced myself for the exquisiteness of my first taste of pleasure. But lord, she was heavy. As she plunged and gasped I had to fight for my breath, and, instead of being free to explore those unfamiliar reaches of female flesh with my hands, I found I had to grasp both edges of the bath to stop myself from going under. She brought me quickly to my fulfilment, and rolled off with a sigh and a tremendous splash of water. I lay half-submerged, panting. Before I could even think of a new caress the girl leant over the edge of the bath, waved an arm through the curtain and shouted, ‘Sally! We're done here. Have that ale and pie for me by the time I'm dry, or I'll baste you.'

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:

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.”'