He was proud of the dovecot’s ingenious design. He’d built it from a back axle and two old cartwheels. He’d stood the back axle on end, weighted the bottom wheel with broken bricks and on the top wheel set an empty forty gallon barrel for a pigeon house. He’d carved eye-level pop-holes into the dovecot, and topped it with a pitched roof made from two sides of a wooden box.
He unplugged a dowel peg, and the front half of the barrel swung open on its hinges like a doll’s house to reveal two pigeons sitting in their pigeonholes.
‘What cheer, Petrolio? What cheer Mithras?’ He lifted them out, one in each hand.
He’d named Petrolio for his colouring, a neck of iridescent green and purple exactly like spilt petroleum in sunlight. Mithras’s crop was still a little swollen, and so he fed her a few crushed oyster shells, before scattering millet, peas, barleycorn and firethorn berries in the dovecot.
He sat on the riverside parapet and from his doublet took Parboyl, who was named after how Nat was going to cook him. With his tatty, speckled brown feathers and a beak barnacled by a fat white cere, he was as ugly as the other birds were beautiful.
On London Bridge, the windows of its tall houses were glinting in relay as the morning light touched each one. When sunlight reached the middle of the Bridge, igniting the gold-leaf paint of Nonsuch House, it was time to pull on his hide gloves and go down to the wharf to work.
Trade had so diminished that the Company was abandoning its Billingsgate warehouse. Nat and the other hands spent a long day stacking evacuated Billingsgate stock into Galley Quay, the Company’s last redoubt. All day Nat stacked bales of raisins, coils of wire, and hundredweight pepper bags. It was exhausting work and no-one could stop for a break. Not until late afternoon did the warehousemen have a moment to share a jug of small beer on the Thames shore.
‘All this ache and blisters for what?’ asked one, after he had taken his swig. ‘Used to be that the more work in hand, the more you were sure of long usance at least. But once this lot is stacked, there’s not one man in two will be working here by next week.’
Nat wondered who among them would be dismissed. Would it be last in, first out? Or would the quay master’s say-so decide who stayed or went? Or perhaps Nat would rescue the fortunes of the Levant Company with the aid of his messenger pigeons, and the competitive advantage they’d bring! Perhaps he’d be the rescue of every last man here!
At the end of the day, when the others went home to their suppers or the alehouse, Nat went back to the roof and his pigeons. He was training them to fly further and further by waving a flagpole (a rag tied on the end of a broomstick) to stop them coming home to roost too soon. This evening, however, he was going to try something new. He was going to attach a satchel to one of his birds. He wasn’t sure if it would slip and tangle the wings and cause the bird to drop from the sky, and so he tied it to the worthless Parboyl.
He sat astride the parapet and fastened the blue silk satchel to the brown and white speckled feathers. He kissed the rolled-up cotton script for luck and tamped it into the blue satchel.
‘Get in there, it’s your birthday, Parboyl, I shall be more sorry to lose this satchel than you for I was up half the night making it.’
He tossed the bird into the sky. Parboyl spread his wings and glided the five yards across Galley Quay Alley to alight on a dormer window’s gable, where his beak ripped the blue satchel to shreds. Bird looked past scarlet-faced human to scarlet firethorn berries in the dovecot. Guessing his intention, Nat gripped the flagpole in both hands and prepared to clout Parboyl like a shinty ball far into the Pool.
There was insolence in the direct route the bird took to the berries. Parboyl flew straight for the dovecot as if the man with the stick wasn’t even there. Nat swung his pole with perfect timing. Right before the sweet strike, Parboyl did something astounding. He tumbled forward in mid-flight and rolled under the swinging stick. Nat raked the air, lost his footing and fell on his arse in a puddle.
It was in this position, rainwater soaking through the seat of his galligaskins, that he looked up to find Customer Hythe looking down on him from the white wooden cupola, blue-plumed hat upon his untidy fair hair, and goose-turd-green cloak flapping in the breeze.
Nat jumped up from the puddle, and wiped the seat of his baggy black galligaskins, as Customer Hythe said:
‘You’re the item that was old Anthony Sherley’s page, are you not?’
‘Master Bramble, sir. Except I was more in the way of his secretary, Sir Henry.’
The Customer frowned at the dovecot that Bramble had had the temerity to build on Levant Company property. An upended axle with a barrel stuck on top, it looked as though a beer wagon had overturned in a slurry of pigeon shit. The Customer swallowed his disgust, climbed over the cupola’s low wall onto the roof terrace, and addressed the skink directly.
‘So now why is the Customer talking to you when there are currants to be counted, eh? Well, I’ll tell you the reason. The reason is this -’
‘Because there are no currants, sir?’
‘What?’
‘No ships, no currants,’ said Nat, waving his arm at the Thames.
The Customer narrowed his eyes. There was something unsavoury about Bramble. He seemed somehow not to have come by his knowledge fairly and squarely as Sir Henry himself had done. His literacy smacked of the looted silver candlestick in the soldier’s knapsack. What would have been clever in a gentleman was low cunning in him. Yet perhaps these unnatural wiles might yet make him the very dog for the Sherley foxhole.
‘But do you know the reason why there are no ships and no currants, Bramble, eh? D’ye know that?’
‘No, sir.’
‘The dearth is caused by a plot against our Levant Company, which is to say a plot against England. A plot led by Sir Thomas Sherley in conspiracy with an Italian named Basadonna.’
‘By piracy, Sir Henry?’
‘No, Sir Thomas lives in London now. His seafaring days are over. It is a subtle and Machiavellian plot. It is an Italian plot. Sir Thomas passes confidential lists to Basadonna.’
‘What’s on these lists, sir?’
‘They’re lists of goods. Order forms. Who buys how much at what price. Then with their fleet of swift ships and a warehouse in Livorno, they undersell us, scoop the buyers out from under us.’
‘Go slower, sir. I have not followed.’
‘I am glad you have said that. Good. I would not have a man nod five times and then carry my Southwark parcel to St Albans. It shows wit to admit incomprehension. I shall explain. Sir Thomas and this Italian Basadonna conspire to sell goods for less than we do, even if they make a loss. Because Sir Thomas and Basadonna don’t care about the trade. Basadonna’s business is the ruin of old England and the raising up of Livorno. And Sir Thomas’s fixed intent is to destroy the Levant Company. To this end as well as his trade conspiracy, he slanders and libels us to King James himself.’
‘What does he say in these libels, sir?’
‘Sermons from a pirate! It is no simple thing to win harbour rights in Constantinople, I tell you. The Sultan requires our ships for certain tasks, tasks which we perform to safeguard trade, which means safeguard England, for the two things are the same.’
‘What sort of tasks, Sir Henry?’
‘The full picture to him who has a wall big enough to hang it on. Now, Bramble, you’ve bust the seal on a fair few Sherley letters in your time, I happens to know, don’t I? So tell me, lad, got a way of secret writing, have they? A secret conduit for exchanging treasonous letters? Family codes? Ciphers?’
‘Secret anything was against Sir Anthony’s nature, sir. Display and show were a religion with him.’
‘And guile and subterfuge with Sir Thomas. I have a commission for you, Bramble. You will find out and steal Sir Thomas Sherley’s treasonous correspondence and bring it to me.’
Nat feared his next question would earn him a cuff round the head as the Customer exploded with righteous indignation.<
br />
‘Do you wish me to steal Sir Thomas’s letters, Sir Henry?’ Far from erupting with insulted honour, however, the Customer impatiently waved the suggestion away. ‘Sir Thomas Sherley’s letters are opened daily. Orders of the Privy Council. We don’t want his letters, Bramble, we want his lists of goods, his lists of our trade secrets before he uses them to eviscerate England. What I need from you, Master Bramble, is to find out how Tom Sherley passes these mercantile espials to Basadonna, the Italian. With any one of these lists in hand we have proof of the existence of a plot. Proof enough for Cecil to show the King. Letter me no letters, I want his treasonous lists.’
‘Do Lord Cecil’s spies visit his lodgings when he is out, Sir Henry?’
‘Ransacked monthly. No bloodstone found.’
‘Bloodstone, Sir Henry?’
‘Ah, the art of subterfuge has come on apace since your day, Bramble. Nowadays spies hide messages in a bloodstone worked like paste and made hard again, so that it cannot be broken but one way or else the message is destroyed. No bloodstone found. No cipher codes found. His gewgaws and lanterns broken open.’
‘Lanterns?’
‘He is in a small way a merchant of eastern lanterns. He imports them a box at a time.’
‘Then it’s clear this must be how he gets the messages. The lanterns.’
‘All searched,’ said the Customer. ‘Broken open, emptied out, top and tail. The sole purpose of his importing these gewgaws is to provide him with a pretext to meet with Italian merchants up and down the river. One of Cecil’s spies, investigating a lamp at Whitehall, lit one and was blown up as if by a grenade. Bang! Seems they have to be lit just so, but we can hardly ask Tom Sherley how.’
‘I have less idea than any man about Sir Thomas Sherley. I couldn’t even tell you where he lives, Sir Henry, so I respectfully decline the offer, sir. But if the Customer will allow me two minutes of his time, which I know to be ten of any other man’s, then I shall expound my scheme for the use of messenger pigeons in commerce.’
‘Have you forgot your wet bum so soon? The piebald pigeon that pitched you in the puddle should be proof enough that foreign newfangledness withers on the vine. Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, Bramble, I tried to grow a medicinal poison called the tomato plant, but contrary to what certain suggestible sharers had me believe, I proved that the to-ma-to can no more be grown in England than the greengage. And it’s inedible to boot! I learnt my lesson about novelty, then. Cost me five-hundred that little lesson did. Why, only yesterday I had a Spanish fellow try to interest me in a scheme to import Arabian beans from Cadiz.’
‘Qaveh?’
‘What? Aye, that’s the boy: qaveh! And a drink called chocolate too! Chocolate! Tusk, tusk, tusk, if I went with every skyey scheme put in my way, the Levant Company would not last out the season. Forget these intelligencing doves and sentient starlings. You have ended the career of one Sherley, but he was not the worst of them. Sir Thomas is the worst. He is the eldest brother and the most dangerous.’
‘For as long as I’ve worked for the Levant Company,’ said Nat, ‘I’ve hoped that the Customer might one day remember me as a former secretary who speaks Greek and Persian and who might be asked to translate documents from Cyprus Island or Patras better than any here can, and that you would recognise me as one who might be given a clerk’s position or decide what goods we buy from where, and not as a doer of knavish deeds.’
‘Not until yesterday did I know that you were working on Galley Quay. Soon as I learn you are here, up to the roof I come to seek you out. And that’s the truth of it.’
‘I fear, Sir Henry, that if I steal papers from Sir Thomas, you will never trust me with clerking confidential mercantile documents, and I will forever be humping silk bales about the quay.’
‘Ability, not birth, is what counts on Galley Quay,’ said the Customer. ‘Apprentices can become members of the Company for twenty shillings when they are twenty-six. If you do not do this, there may be no Levant Company to employ you or anyone.’ He flapped a goose-turd-green sleeve at the river. ‘Look out upon the Pool. All’s barren. If Sir Thomas’s plot holds sway, we will be back in Boudica times with nothing on the river but a detritus of half-foist skifflers, penny-ferry piddlers and shrimpers - a flotsam and jetsam which counts for nothing in the great scheme of merchant venture! All because Sir Thomas Sherley’s Machiavellian stratagem has unbalanced the world’s trade.’
‘But what can a poor warehouseman do?’
‘When England is off-balance, the smallest actions of the merest Bramble have mighty sway. To borrow a phrase of His Majesty’s: we are at the pinpoint of the protractor. The actions we take here have wide effects. In this present hour, with England off balance, a twitch of the hand on the protractor now decides the fate of the land for good or evil for all time. Let the pin slip or wiggle in its point and a Sherley’s world shall radiate far and wide.’
‘But, sir, I never met Sir Thomas. How will I present myself to him?’
From his right sleeve, the Customer produced a sealed and beribboned letter.
‘Anthony Sherley has become - there is no nice way of putting this - a Spaniard. The Sherley brothers compete as to who can be the biggest traitor. Anthony is a Spanish admiral, Thomas… something worse.’ Then the Customer hardened his voice.
‘Do you know anyone else who lives in Spain?’
‘No, sir.’
Nat’s heart beat faster as the Customer handed him a letter that had touched Anthony’s hand. He sniffed the cream white paper folded decimo quarto. There was no whiff of ambergris. Nat examined the blobs of blood-coloured wax. The way Cecil’s spies had cracked and resealed each wax boss was excellently done. Hairline fissures were visible in the wax, but you could get that from a courier riding over rough ground on a cold day. It was almost perfectly resealed, and they didn’t have copies of the seal rings.
‘You will deliver to Thomas this letter from his brother in Spain, and pretend to be a messenger from the docks.’
‘No, Sir Henry, if I deliver this, it is too clear you sent me. But this letter from Anthony reminds me that I’ve another way into Sir Thomas’s service.’
‘Very good.’
‘Is Sir Thomas at Blackfriars in the Sherley townhouse?’ asked Nat.
‘Sold to pay the father’s debts. He lodges at the Brown Bull in Aldgate now.’
‘Sure, I cannot succeed where the best intelligencers have failed.’
‘They did not hate all Sherleys as you do.’
‘I hope I hate no man, sir.’
‘You haven’t met Thomas yet.’
‘If I am going to be absent from Galley Quay for a fortnight,’ said Nat, ‘then please may I have my wages in advance, Sir Henry.’
The Customer produced from his sleeve a brown velvet purse with golden strings.
‘Here’s rather more than that.’
‘Who will explain my absence to the quay master, sir?’
‘Myself. I will await your report at Fylpot Street a fortnight Friday at three o’clock.’
The Customer stepped over the wall into the cupola, then turned back to Nat and rested his gloved hands on the cupola’s wall, like a Paul’s’ Cross preacher in the covered pulpit looking out over his open air congregation.
‘Beware of Sir Thomas,’ he said. ‘He is a man disfigured by hate and bitter vengeance. Those three years in the Turk’s jail soaked his soul in vinegar like your prizefighters’ knuckles. Traitor though he be, yet I pity him his rough usage in Turkish dungeons, fed bread and water on the floor like a wolf. For three years he endured cruel tortures, and expected execution with every dawn. Well now, that kind of suffering does not make you a merry dancing fellow like his cousin Wil Kemp! They say suffering burns off a man’s sins. Don’t believe it. It burns off the last of his virtues. It breeds monsters. He blames the Levant Company for all the tortures and privations he suffered. He believes our Vice-Consuls argued for him to be kept clapped in irons. My God, I am
glad it is you going into his chambers and not I. Believe me, your bravery shall not be forgot. Only beware of him, Bramble. He’s not gentle like Sir Anthony.’
6
In Aldgate, in his seventh-floor garret at the Brown Bull, Thomas Sherley was reading a letter from his brother Anthony. The letter explained why Thomas’s imprisonment in the Turk’s dungeons had gone on so long. It appeared that a former servant of his brother - one Bramble - had intercepted his letters.
As Thomas read Anthony’s words, he had a sensation that the very bones of his forehead were constricting. One night, during his imprisonment in the Seven Towers, the guards had bolted an iron hoop around his head and told him they would be back at first light to tighten the bolts and crush his skull like a walnut. Orders of the Sultan, they said. He had spent the night wearing the iron hoop, awaiting his execution, preparing for a terrible death. The next morning, some other guards entered his cell. Without a word, they unbolted the iron hoop and took it away. Thomas never knew whether this meant he was to live another day or another year. From that day on he had worn an invisible iron hoop around his head, which now tightened with this news. He fell to the floor clutching his skull in both hands.
All those letters Thomas had written with broken or frozen fingers, every page his scurvy lips had kissed in blessing as he sent it on its way, all those days he had gone without food so as to be able to bribe a friar to carry a letter - every single one of those letters, along with most of Anthony’s letters to him, had been sleeved by Bramble, who had sold them to the Sherleys’ enemies, singlehandedly tripling Thomas’s jail time.
He jumped to his feet and paced the garret’s threadbare Persian rug with his side-on way of walking which was another product of his captivity. It came from when he was transported in chains from Kea to Constantinople. For five-hundred miles, a great, heavy galley chain shackled his ankles under a donkey’s belly. At Izmir something between his hip and groin had cracked and given him this slightly side-on, loping stride, as if he was turning his body into the wind, as he prowled the seventh floor garret, trying to control himself. The more he thought about this thieving Bramble the more enraged he grew.
The Trade Secret Page 26