Hand in hand they climb out of the river, and hobble barefoot through grass and thistles to the burnt-out tree that forms a triangle with the earth. He drapes his astrakhan coat over the cracked trunk’s apex. Behind this modesty screen she changes into his calico shirt, and spreads her wet clothes on the grass.
She sits shivering beside the astrakhan screen. Darius’s hand appears over the top. She closes her long fingers upon his as if resuming their dance either side of the tangerine screen in Kulsum’s barn. Only instead of dancing, she lifts the astrakhan coat and wraps it around them both. They sit shoulder to shoulder, dripping water into cinders, teeth chattering in the sunshine.
Part Three
1
Nat walked onto London Bridge, a sack of his landlord’s barleycorn over his shoulder. He passed from sunlight to shade as the bridge’s tall houses met above his head to form a covered arcade echoing with cries:
Strawberries ripe and cherries on the rise!
Buy my dish of great smelts!
Salt, salt, white Worcestershire salt!
What d’ye lack?
The woman shouting, Fine Seville oranges! took one look at Nat’s dirty clothes flecked with birdlime and rested her throat while the ragamuffin passed.
‘The day will come,’ he vowed, ‘when I will buy up all her fine Seville oranges and bowl them one by one down the street through the filth. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. Or else I’ll buy every last strawberry ripe and cherry on the rise and eat them right in front of her.’
Pretty pins, pretty women?
Quick, quick, periwinkles, quick, quick, quick!
Brass Pot Or An Iron Pot To Mend!
Fine Writing Ink!
The covered arcade opened out to the sky again, and below him roared the Long Entry waterfall. Long Entry was the steepest, narrowest, loudest arch of London Bridge. Before they chained its mouth, Long Entry was known as the sawmill, since any boat that fell into its torrential waters was chopped into tiny pieces. He could still hear its roar as far as the gaudy pile of Nonsuch House.
At the southern end of London Bridge, he turned into the narrow passageway that led to the corn mills. He joined the knot of people standing on the sack floor, sacks between their feet. Quitrenters, immigrants, the poor and the thrifty brought their grain here to be ground.
When Nat’s turn came, he emptied the Beijderwellens’ barleycorn into a battered wooden hopper. The corn slid through a funnel in the floorboards to the revolving runner stones below. He took the stairs and followed the barleycorn down to the stone floor’s thundering grindstones. A miller, white from head to toe, doused a scorching runner stone. Steam hissed as loud as a cymbal crash. Nat coughed in a speckled cloud of chaff. A man could choke to death on the superflux of grain, the want of which had orphaned him. He crossed to the stairs, each flight being set against a different wall to save the mill house from being shaken to bits. One hand on the newel post, he looked back the way he came and saw falling flour obliterate his footprints. Down he went to the low sheds of the meal floor, the lowest floor, where a little boy was hunting through a fog of wheat to whack rats and mice with a stick. The cast-iron waterwheels sounded like a limping ogre, his walking stick coming down hard and angry on the third beat, clank, clank, CLANK! clank, clank, CLANK!
Nat emerged from the gloomy depths of the meal floor onto a sunlit jetty, where the whole wide, magnificent sweep of the Pool opened to him. All those people waiting up at street-level on the dusty sack floor didn’t know what they were missing. Here lay a grand vista where you would least expect one: not up high but down low. The Pool of London was bright and sunny, except for the mist and spray over Long Entry, which was spanned by a small rainbow, as if it had concluded a separate covenant with God. A dozen Levant Company ships rode at anchor, flying the City of London’s red dagger flag. A sail-foist full of eels glistened, and a barge loaded with sea-coals winked. All manner of skiffs, ferries and lighters were plying their trades across the glittering Pool, and all the bankside cranes were nodding and swinging.
Nat loved standing on the jetty for its contrast to the lack of perspective in his own life. Across the Pool, a giant merchantman moved out of St Katherine’s Dock. The ship’s hull planks were the same dark brown as the warehouses, and it looked to Nat as if a warehouse were detaching itself from the City of London to sail free. What appeared to be fixed and stuck in place might yet go some place. For the past three years he’d been stuck in the rut of Galley Quay, working in the Levant Company’s warehouse. The old dream of being a London oil merchant had died. What was the use of knowing about oil in London?
‘I learn something in one place only for life to fling me where it’s useless.’
But perhaps not all he learned in Isfahan was useless, he considered, catching sight of his two best doves, Petrolio and Mithras, looping the Tower of London. If not pioneering the sale of oil, then perhaps he might yet introduce his countrymen to another Persian innovation: messenger pigeons. Unlike a barrel of oil, pigeons could be bought for sixpence. Here was a venture needing no rich patron and no capital.
Messenger pigeons were unknown in England. As far as the English were concerned no-one since Noah had ever received a message by pigeon. The idea that a pigeon could bring a merchant in Cornhill the price of silk in Bruges was as fantastical as Mercury the winged messenger flying about the Greek Islands. Sunlight caught the underside of Petrolio and Mithras’s wings as they raced back towards the coop that Nat had built them on the Galley Quay warehouse roof.
Into Nat’s thoughts intruded a sound more striking than noise on silence: silence on noise. The corn mill seemed to hold its breath. The master miller had disengaged the grindstones. For a few seconds, Nat could hear the river softly lapping at the jetty by his feet. He waited for the sound he knew was coming next. The chink of the master miller’s switch lever striking the pit wheel gearing, the chink that announced that the Thames was about to power the enormous wall-mounted drum wheel that hoisted the flour sacks up three flours to the street. He loved how that single sharp note set off a great cacophony. Tap one peg in one cog and the whole mill house began to tremble.
Chink went the miller’s lever, followed by the ringing of the drum wheel chains, taking the strain against the river. Next, the black oak drum wheel on the wall began its trundling turn, powered by the immemorial force of the Thames, and then the chains rattled as they whisked the flour sacks up three floors to the street.
Chink! Ring! Trundle! Rattle! Whoosh!
As the empty sling was lowered back through clouds of flour dust, Nat saw the saddlecloth lowered down to him in the vug, ready for another goatskin full of oil.
The miller switched the gears from drum wheel back to grindstone, and the mill house resumed its regular throbbing, clanking, skirring din. Nat climbed three flights of stairs to the sack floor, where he heaved the landlord’s flour onto his shoulder, and walked back through the shops, taverns and houses of London Bridge. In one window a spherical waterglass multiplied candlelight. An oil lamp would do the job much better. Ah, it was agony to have the solution to the whole city’s heat and light problem when you could not put it into practice! But perhaps, were Nat to succeed with the messenger pigeons then the Levant Company might finance his plan to import oil.
He passed the Three Neats’ Tavern, which marked the end of the Bridge, and walked up New Fish Street. On Crooked Lane, he stood to one side to make way for merchant families in velvet and furs, who were crowding into St Michael’s Church of the Murdering Mayor, its bells ringing for evensong. Nat looked through the churchyard railings at Walworth’s tomb and monument, upon which was inscribed in antique script, all the ‘u’s in the shape of ‘v’s:
Here vnder lyeth a Man of Fame,
William Walworth callyed by Name;
Who with Covrage stovt, and manly Might,
Slew Wat Tyler, in King Richard’s sight.
The red knife on the City of London’s crest was in honour of the dagger w
ith which the Mayor of London, Sir William Walworth, murdered peasants’ leader Wat Tyler during a parlay under a flag of truce. After Walworth stabbed Tyler, King Richard galloped up and down screaming at the peasant petitioners, ‘Villeins ye were and villeins ye shall remain! In bondage ye shall abide!’
‘A warehouseman ye are,’ the red dagger told Nat, ‘and a warehouseman ye shall remain. On Galley Quay ye shall abide!’ And to make sure he never forgot it, the red dagger was everywhere he looked as he walked home: on street corner signs, on tabards hanging outside shops and warehouses, on ceramic tiles in guild halls, on flags flown by half the ships in the Pool, and on shields held by dragons roosting in the middle of Cheapside. The red knife gave the City of London’s short answer to the equalising instinct in the hearts of common people. For equality was a tropical cyclone that levelled whole cities.
‘Tempests in state,’ said Sir Francis Bacon, ‘are commonly greatest when things grow to equality, just as natural tempests are greatest about the equator.’ Nat stroked the scar on his forehead where Anthony’s red knife had sliced off his last coin from the oil venture.
At Old Swan stairs, he dropped the flour sack into the boat, and began the long row home. The river gave off that whiff of the green sea that it somehow retained even above the Bridge. He pulled past the wooden warehouses lining the river, behind which rose banks of red, pink and orange roofs, and behind them the towering megalith of unsteepled St Paul’s, that primeval slab in the sky that could be seen from seven counties.
At Hay Wharf, he had to go round a moored ship. He detested being in the middle of the broad river, where the wind blew across the wide reach, for fear of his atoms being scattered to the four winds.
Not once, but twice in his short life his whole world had scattered on the wind. The first scattering had been when he was nine: the Datchworth famine which killed his father, mother, sister and brother, along with half the village, and every girl he had impressed at the summer fete by being the boy who won the cheese hat for walking the greasy log. The second scattering had been his loss of Darius. This double scattering left him an arbitrary figure in a landscape, Godforsaken, a third-growth forest, all scrappy dogwood and bramble, a scattering of chaff upon the muddy Thames.
He scarfed his nose against the noxious outflow from Water Lane, and then rowed through the harum-scarum junction where Thames met Fleet at Bridewell dock, with its swinging jib-cranes, barges and lighters, the flat-bottomed boats used for rowing goods from ship to quay. He ran along the gunwale with the boathook to squeeze the skiff through the river traffic. He had that skill which lightermen called ‘the walk’, the ability to step to all parts of the boat without losing your footing come rain or shine or choppy tide. If you didn’t have ‘the walk’ it could take you an hour to get your boat through Bridewell dock’s log-jam. Bobbing and weaving, and running nimbly on the gunwales with his eerie balance, Nat was through in a matter of minutes.
After Fleet Bridge it was easy rowing. The river was far quieter on this last stretch. A starling’s chink sounded like the master miller’s switch lever. Soon Fortune’s solid oak drum wheel was going to turn for Nat. The chains would rattle and he’d rise, rise, rise, driven by the mighty waters of justice. Chink, called the starling, chink, chink, chink.
Nat moored the skiff to the Turnagain Lane landing. Flour sack on one shoulder, oars on the other, he walked to the Beijderwellens’ house on Seacole Lane.
2
Three years!’ exploded Customer Hythe. ‘Bramble has worked three years on Galley Quay, and in all that time no-one thought to inform me! And now come goods and a letter from Spain addressed to Mr Nat Bramble - Mister indeed! - care of the Levant Company, if you please!’
… And in Venice, he thought darkly, this same Bramble had witnessed Foscarini duff him up like a drayman his boy.
Customer Hythe, Governor of the Levant Company, was sitting in the walnut-paneled chambers of the Levant House on Fylpot Street with his Vice Consuls Roe and Colthurst. He picked up the English translation of the Spanish letter and read it out loud to them.
Esteemed friend Nat Bramble,
Since last we spoke in Venice, I have been lodged with Jesuits in Valladolid.
His Majesty King Philip and Queen Margaret stood as godparents at my baptism in the Royal Chapel of the Palace at Valladolid, where I was dressed in a suit of white satin. On that day Uruch Bey became Don John of Persia, and King Philip gave command of his royal and Christian generosity that I should receive 1200 crowns a year.
I was resolved that after my baptism I would return to Isfahan to fetch my wife and children, and carry them out of the country by way of Ormuz which the Portuguese now hold in the name of his Catholic Majesty, my godfather. But he forbad it. I protested that the plan was already far advanced, a ship’s cabin paid for, an hour set to sail. His Majesty told me that my plan was no secret to the Shah, who would imprison me the moment I set foot upon Persian soil.
And so here in Spain I stay, striving daily to believe those doctrines, which I as yet do not fully understand but which are, it seems, necessary to belief, and are called the Mysteries of the Faith. Jesus told my new namesake John: ‘Marvel not that I say ye must be born again, for except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of heaven.’ I confess I am not yet born again for I miss my family, and my homeland, and marvel too much at what I have lost.
Mr Nat Bramble, a sum of money has been conveyed to me by means of havala, our Persian system of remittance. The funds come from Isfahan by way of Ormuz and Cadiz. Darius Nouredini has arranged for you to be paid monies still owing to you from the oil venture, the expedition to the Temple of Mithras in Masjid-i-Suleiman. Darius has prospered selling oil in Tabriz, but cannot enjoy his prosperity while you are poor, Antonio Mirza having robbed you. This sum of money is half of his half of the Temple of Mithras money, and arrived with me almost two years ago. To my great distress I have not, up until now, been able to fulfil the role of havaladar because of the wars between Spain and England. While war raged, your money stayed in a locked drawer, during all of which time I felt like a low thief, little better than Antonio Mirza himself.
How relieved I am at last, therefore, to be able to send you this bill of credit to be drawn upon Don Zuniga the Spanish Ambassador in Fenchurch Street. Upon production of this bill the Ambassador is to pay you the sum equivalent to one hundred Spanish dollars in English coin, to the value of no less than twenty-five pounds sterling, nor to exceed thirty pounds sterling.
I send you also a gift of my own. When we sat near the Camel Palace in Venice, you told me of your love for the Arab drink qaveh. Well, since peace with the English, King Philip has begun to expel those Spanish Arabs who turn their face away from our Redeemer, as well as those so-called moriscos, who only pretend to love Christ Jesus but are really infidels too. The King is expelling all of them. Every day of the Grand Expulsion, Sunni Arabs, exiled from Grenada and Cordoba, leave tons of excellent qaveh behind them, piled high in the cellars of their deserted houses. Spanish Catholics have no more taste than Shia Persians for qaveh, and so sacks of beans are free for the taking. All this great circumstance of war and peace means that I send you a chest of beans!
If you find a market for this commodity in London, inform Don Zuniga and I shall send you more chests of qaveh beans. Then we can establish the trade on a proper footing with commercial articles drawn up between us, and - God willing! - I may help you prosper in London as Darius prospers in Tabriz, by finding a market for qaveh as he has found for oil.
By the way, as well as these bags of qaveh beans, I discovered a bag of cocoa beans from the Indies. The chief use of these cocoa beans with them is in the manufacture of a drink that they call chocolate. Shall I send them also?
If through sale of qaveh and chocolate you become a rich merchant with servants of your own, I trust you will dress them better than that awful blue and yellow livery that Antonio forced you to wear!
To speak of the Devil, he is a
t large here in Spain where he has become, would you believe, Admiral Don Antonio Xerley, all of whose schemes and shallow plans for wars infect feeble-minded ministers in Madrid and Cadiz - and may yet lead to war.
But let me end on good news. Indeed, I save the best for last. Darius Nouredini wishes you to know of his marriage to the daughter of Atash Zarafshani. I enclose a strip of the hem of the actual wedding blanket upon which husband and wife sat on their wedding day. I pray that they are blessed with children, from whom they may never find themselves - as I, for my sins, find myself - half the world away.
Inshalla!
(or, as they say here, Oxala!)
I remain, as ever,
your altered never altering,
Don John of Persia,
the erstwhile Uruch Bey
‘Well, what are we to make of this?’ Customer Hythe asked his Vice-Consuls Roe and Colthurst. ‘What does it mean? Is it in code? So fantastic a farrago simply has to be code! But what sort of code?’
‘By commodity?’ suggested Roe. ‘Cecil’s merchant-code?’
‘His what?’ asked the Customer.
‘Cecil tells his spies to make up their codes merchant-wise, so that “chocolate” might mean frigates, say, and “qaveh,” the assassination of King James.’
The Trade Secret Page 24