The Trade Secret

by Robert Newman

  He put his fingers to the edge of the flame. Cold fire it was not. Curse you, Darius, it’s hot! Only not scorching heat. No. He rubbed his thumbs over the three brass flames embossed on the lantern’s belly, building his courage for what he knew he now must do. It was one thing to hear a tale on a windy night, quite another to trust his fingers to the flames. The flame trembled as Nat slowly let out a breath, and then righted itself, burning heavenwards again. One moment he was staring at the flame, not daring to touch it, and the next moment his hand was in.

  Blue and gold fire gloved his hand. Tepid flames danced over his hands, tingling the little hairs on the back of his hand like a hot, desert wind. He forgot all danger, forgot the need to make haste before Thomas’s return and even forgot the need to be quiet, but laughed in pure delight at the madness of being able to paddle his fingers in flickering flame. When he withdrew his hand, it was as if he were taking it out of an oven rather than fire.

  He blew on his fingertips to cool them, then put them back into the lantern’s flame. He squeezed the tall thin wick. Paper! This was, then, no wick at all, but a paper cylinder, conducting, not feeding, the cold fire of Baku. A stem of white paper clamped in a caliper of steel by means of two tiny thumbscrews, top and bottom. He tried to turn the top one but it was stuck fast, the same with the bottom screw. The longer his hands were ablaze, the hotter they became. ‘Leave your hand there long enough,’ Darius said, ‘and you will think it fire then. Cold fire will slowly cook your flesh.’

  Nat put both hands into the fire and tried to pick the paper from the caliper, but there was no prising it loose. The blood in his hands seemed to simmer. He began to panic. He tried turning both screws at the same time. It worked. The two screws turned in concert, triggering a sequence of submissive clicks. The caliper opened with a hiss, and Nat plucked the white paper cylinder from the fire.

  Instantly, the room dimmed as the yellow flame collapsed to a blue squall in the lantern’s greasy base. Blue flames flopped and writhed like landed fish, ever weaker. If they died he was done for because there was no way to relight the lantern without it blowing up. The whole Brown Bull might go up. The lantern sputtered.

  Nat ripped an old invoice in two. He rolled it into a cylinder, which he slotted into the caliper. The paper burst into flames! Nat saw his own terrified face light up the sooty windowpanes like a firework in the sky. He ripped and rolled another strip of paper from the litter on Thomas’s desk. This time he first wet the paper tube’s ends in his mouth. He then slotted it into the caliper and let go. The paper didn’t catch fire. The Baku flames only coiled around it like runner beans around a beanpole. Saved.

  Nat reached in, tightened the thumbscrews top and bottom, and closed the lantern. His hands stank of Baku oil, a weird admixture of saltpeter, marsh vapour, and rock oil, a stench that took him right back to the vug in the Temple of Mithras.

  He unrolled the secret scroll he had plucked from the fire, and read the cramped handwriting:

  Sgr. Giovanni Basadonna,

  Following buyers confirmed:

  Messrs Salter, Sadler, Antrich, Ward buy:

  currants at 5 shill bale,

  pepper per bag 3 shill;

  indigo per chest 100 shill,

  Also, Steadman, Luck and Littler sell tin at £4 per cwt.,

  Sr. Thos. Shrl, esq.

  Nat danced an ecstatic little jig. Just what the Customer ordered! A list of who bought how much gross of what commodity.

  Boots on the staircase. His flesh went cold. He stepped onto the landing and pulled the door to behind him, but there was no time to drop the latch before Sir Thomas Sherley appeared in a tall silver hat with a jewelled plume.

  ‘Ah, Master Eli Elkin, is it not?’

  Nat bowed low.

  ‘At your service, Sir Thomas.’

  ‘I really am very glad to see you again. Come in, come in. Oh, what’s happened here?’

  ‘Sir Thomas?’

  ‘Who opened the door?’

  ‘Mrs Da Silva, sir. Yes sir, she looked in and said I was to wait here for your return.’

  ‘And so you waited there, and then I returned, and now we go in together, I and Master Eli Elkin in person.’

  Nat sneaked a look at the lantern. Its flame was still burning steadily. The new paper cylinder held. But what if it were now to wilt? He sleeved the secret scroll. Suddenly he smelt the oil that had got all over his hands and fingers when he was trying to stop the blue flames from dying. His greasy hands reeked of it. They were church censers, filling the room with the Baku concoction. He wiped his hands on his doublet.

  Sir Thomas took off his tall silver hat with its pearl-encrusted plume, and swung off his long black cloak. Nat gawped at the brilliance, the sheer expense of Thomas’s new clothes. A silver shot-satin doublet with bronze slash-pane sleeve-heads. Silver knee-length canions with chunky black brocade. White leather gloves with silver knuckle studs. Silver garters on dazzling silver hose.

  But as Nat was staring at Thomas’s clothes, Thomas was staring at his:

  ‘Why aren’t you dressed like a Christian, Elkin?’

  ‘Clothes earned, Sir Thomas, in the service of your noble brother.’

  ‘I hoped I would see you again, Master Elkin.’

  ‘Have you now a position for me, sir?’

  ‘You were born for it.’

  ‘Sir Thomas?’

  ‘Master Elkin, here’s work for you!’ cried Thomas, and then still louder: ‘Here’s work for you, I say, Master Elkin! Come quick Eli Elkin, Elkin! Here I say, here! Elkin! Elkin!’

  From the landing came the tread of boots.

  ‘Your pardon, master, only I was fetching -.’

  A bag of sea-coal dropped to the floor with a heavy chunk. A small cloud of black dust rose around Eli Elkin.

  Nat’s knees sagged as he saw again the vindictive leer of that uncomfortable, small-featured face with its exposed gums, upturned nose and bunched eyes. Elkin hopped up and down.

  ‘Ha! ha! The fish is on the hook! This is that same whoreson Bramble, Sir Thomas. Look! Look at his clothes! I told you he worshipped Ali in the mosques! See how what I told your honour about him is true!’

  ‘Lock the door, Master Elkin’ said Thomas.

  Nat heard the key turn in the iron lock. Thomas punched him in the head and he crumpled to the floor. He heard the sound of steel rapier being drawn from steel sheath.

  Nat came up with his knife in his hand and squared off against Sir Thomas. For a moment it was a fight: two men facing each other, weapons drawn. Then Thomas slashed with his rapier, Nat parried with his knife, and that was that: one blow from the sword was all it took to snap the knife in two. Nat heard the end of his knife’s blade fall onto the rug, leaving him holding a half-inch stump of steel by the handle. Then he felt the point of Sir Thomas’s rapier pricking the hollow of his throat - exactly as his brother had done back in Isfahan - his windpipe squid for the Sherley skewer.

  Thomas steered Nat backwards round the room with his sword point, grunting, humming and growling. Elkin tripped Nat’s heels, sending him crashing to the black oak floorboards by the fireplace. Thomas’s knee pinned down Nat’s shoulder as he punched his head against the floorboards. He raised his sword’s silver pommel for the deathblow to Bramble’s temple. Elkin grabbed his wrist.

  ‘Not here, sir, not yet,’ he said. ‘Beg pardon, sir, but seven flights of stairs is a long way to haul a carcass. Better not do the deed at home, Sir Thomas.’

  ‘Unhand me.’

  ‘Sir Thomas.’ Elkin swept his wool cap off his head and bowed his head. ‘I humbly beseech your forgiveness, Sir Thomas.’

  ‘Bind your foul copy to the chair, Elkin! Bind him fast, arms, legs, and feet.’

  ‘What cheer, Bramble?’ Elkin’s fetid spittle sprayed Nat’s face as he roped him to the chair, talking all the while. ‘Stealing from his lordship, that’s hanging, Bramble! You and your cleverness!’

  Thomas took the crooked dogleg from arou
nd his neck, slotted it into the back of the lantern, and turned down the flame until it disappeared. Nat knew he was going to die by the fact that Thomas did all this in plain sight. He watched him put a pistol in his belt and clip the lantern to his hip. Elkin followed his master out onto the landing. Thomas leant both hands on the balustrade and Elkin closed the door. Through the thick door Nat heard Thomas say:

  ‘Bring Bramble to Old Swan stairs at five, Elkin. That’s where I’m meeting Basadonna, who’ll slit his throat on the Buontalenti and dump him in the sea.’

  ‘Saving your honour, but from here to Old Swan’s a long way to wrestle a live one.’

  ‘Make your mind up, man! First you say don’t kill him here, now you say don’t kill him on the ship! Where can I kill him, I’d like to know?’

  ‘Not where but when, Sir Thomas. After dark, we can do him in any alley you please.’

  ‘No, we’ll miss the tide.’ A sigh. ‘Nothing’s ever simple is it?’

  While his fate was being decided, Nat rocked the chair and put his weight on his feet. He waddled, half-man-half-chair, across the room, and sat the chair back against the door. His fingertips found the long iron key in the lock. He turned the lock, and listened to its tumbler turn. He heard Thomas say,

  ‘Since it must be done in daylight hours, bandage his face so there’s none can recognise him.’

  Nat withdrew the key and waddled back to the centre of the room.

  ‘Give out that a sawbones has trepanned him with the crown-saw,’ Thomas was saying, ‘to remove a nail that lodged in his skull following an alehouse fight. Blood may help.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll look like the part, Sir Thomas.’

  ‘See that he does, Elkin. This is more important than my vengeance and yours. The slaves, Elkin. Think of those poor captives. Think of the slaves.’

  ‘I was half a one myself, Sir Thomas, in the Venice galley where Bramble put me.’

  ‘From Old Swan,’ said Thomas, ‘Basadonna’s people will row him to the Buontalenti, and there an end of him. We shake the dust from our feet, and return to our work, Elkin.’

  ‘God’s work it is, Sir Thomas.’

  ‘Old Swan at five, Elkin.’

  Nat heard Thomas’s footsteps go downstairs. Elkin rattled the handle, and then flung himself at the door. A shower of ceiling plaster sprinkled the threshold.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Bramble. Now you put me to use of my bill hook here, and you shall rue that soon enough. I say, you shall wish you never gave me cause to use this bill hook soon enough.’

  Nat heard the bill hook scrape the door a long single stroke, and then rap it sharply. He jumped.

  ‘D’ye hear that Bramble? That’s your destiny. This iron shall soon mar ye. Top hinge first, methinks. Fall to your prayers, Bramble - if Ali will hear you - for I shall soon have this door off its hinges.’

  Nat tipped the chair onto its side. Face down on the Persian rug, he scrabbled behind his back for his broken knife. With its snaggle-edged stump of blade, he sawed at the fetters binding his wrists.

  The door squeaked under the pressure of the bill hook’s levering. Elkin sang while he worked.

  ‘Rats or mice,

  Have ye rats or mice?

  Polecats, weasels?

  Or have ye any old sows sick o’ the measles?

  Nat heard iron against iron, hook on hinge.

  ‘I can kill vermin,

  And I can kill moles,

  that creepeth up and down,

  and peepeth into holes!’

  He snapped his fetters. Both hands free, he rolled on his back with the chair legs pointing straight up at the ceiling. He sawed at the rope binding his ankles. Kicking the last fetter from his legs, he rolled free of the chair and onto his feet.

  ‘When I get in,’ came Elkin’s voice, ‘I shall split your nose so your face looks like the sign of the Spread Eagle. Ohh-hoo, I can hear it now!’ A loud crack sent a fissure running up the door.

  Nat saw the billhook through the crack. He backed away in terror. His heart thumped so hard he thought it might burst. And then came the strangest sensation of his life, far stranger than putting his hands in fire, a sensation so astounding that he froze in the middle of the room, not daring even to breathe.

  His heart came loose. It squirmed out of his chest and escaped his doublet. His heart spread its wings and flew across the room to perch on a shelf. Parboyl stared from Nat to the door, cocking his head from side to side. In his pocket, Nat found a fistful of firethorn berries, and held them out.

  ‘Parboyl, come here!’

  Parboyl walked along the shelf, fixing an amber eye on the berries, and flapped to his hand, hawk to glove. Nat grabbed the bird and chucked the berries on the desk. With his free hand, he plucked the paper cylinder from his sleeve. He clacked pen nib in inkpot, and on the secret scroll he scrawled:

  5 o’clock on Old Swan Stairs. Sir Thomas Sherley will be there.

  In flagrante delicto.

  He folded the secret scroll into the miniature blue silk satchel, looped the satchel over Parboyl’s head, knotted its straps under the bird’s keel, opened the lattice window above the desk, and tossed him into the London sky.

  Nat heard the door whine as the bill hook strained at the bottom hinge. In terror, he saw the foot of the door sway from side to side.

  Elkin kicked the door. The bottom hinge flew off. Nat saw a muddy toecap through the gap. Elkin heaved and strained against the middle hinge, grunting his threats all the while.

  ‘Gouge… you… up… I shall! Score grooves… in your… cheeks… with this bill hook of mine.’

  Parboyl flew back in through the open window to alight on the desk. His ragged pink claws paced towards the rest of the berries. He had only gobbled a few when Elkin kicked the door a ferocious bang which sent Parboyl flapping out of the window for good.

  Growling in rage, Elkin hurled his body against the door. The whole room reverberated. The fire tongs hanging in the andiron hummed.

  The fireplace! Nat went to the grate. It would be a short climb up the chimney to the roof. He reached his hand over the grate’s glowing embers to the flue. The chimney was too narrow to get an arm up, let alone a man. He groaned in dismay. The next second his hand and sleeve burst into flames. He leapt into the centre of the room flapping his arm. But then he stopped trying to extinguish the flames and touched them with his fingers instead. Cold fire. His hands and sleeve were still greasy with Baku oil.

  A plan of escape seized Nat. He dragged the box of Baku lanterns from under the desk, lifted lantern after lantern from the straw, unscrewed every one, and poured the admixture of marsh vapour, saltpeter and rock oil all over himself, and in a circle on the Persian carpet. He put his foot in the glowing embers of the fireplace. Within seconds, cold fire danced all over his body, racing up and down like light.

  With flaming fingers, he removed the chair from in front of the door, then returned to his circle of fire in the centre of the rug, where he slit his doublet and hung the knife handle in the slit. The black embers of his bonnet’s plume, fine enough even for cold fire to incinerate, floated towards the heaving door.

  The door flew off its hinge. Elkin burst into the room and stared in horror at the ghostly apparition before his eyes.

  The ghost of Nat Bramble stood in the middle of the room cloaked in the Fire Everlasting. The handle of the dagger with which the coward had murdered himself stuck out from his body. Flames rose all around the ghost like a protestant martyr. But martyrs went to heaven and here was Hell’s Envoy! A red heron peeled off the ghost’s black doublet and flew upwards in flaming red strings, becoming invisible as it rose.

  Elkin staggered backwards, tripped over a chair, fell down on his knees and clasped his hands together.

  ‘Jesus defend me!’ he cried. ‘Hell’s Own Fiery Man has come to summon me down into his furnace.’

  Bramble’s ghost extended an arm of fire to point straight at him. When the thing spoke, its voice
was an unearthly growl.

  ‘You! I come for you! Lucifer sends me hither to fetch ye, Eli Elkin, down to the Lake of Fire. Canaanites, Hittites, Satan summons all sinners and shall annihilate all the cities of these nations. Hell’s Own Fiery Man lays hands of fire upon thee, Elkin, abominable sinner, for thou art damned!’

  A finger of flame anointed Elkin’s forehead and chest. Elkin rolled himself on the carpet to extinguish this unholy blessing. Legs of fire stepped over him, walked out the door and down the stairs.

  ‘Follow me down, sinner. Do not delay.’

  ‘Not I!’ screamed Elkin. ‘I defy the devil!’

  Elkin jumped up, ran into Sir Thomas’s bedchamber and locked himself in. He sank to the floor, where he rocked to and fro, howling, gibbering, insane.

  10

  A burning man strolled out of the door of the Brown Bull. Screaming citizens leapt out of his way. The burning man crossed the street to the horse and cattle trough, but he didn’t jump straight in, as everyone expected him to. Instead, he sat on the edge, dipped his neckerchief, and began to rub the flames off his breeches as if they were chalk marks.

  As the fire subsided, the full horror of the assault Nat had endured at Sherley and Elkin’s hands struck him. His body began to shake. He splashed his face and neck and became aware of the onlookers crowding round. He must get away from this gaggle of hard-faced gawkers. He stood up, slipped on the wet cobbles and fell to the street. With that stumble, the spell was broken that had suspended the onlookers’ ordinary sympathy. This was no bizarre prodigy, the crowd now understood, but a man like them all. Old and young, male and female, were suddenly helping him to his feet, all asking questions at once: