The King's Diamond

by Will Whitaker

  They would sell these marvels at the Court of Pope Clement in Rome. Any that were left they would take on to Naples, and offer up to the Spanish Viceroy. Even the Milanese Pinotti held out a handful of his greenish-grey salt, saying, ‘Taste it, taste it! Is it not the best?’ A Sienese called Basile tipped out a bag of hawks’ bells and dog whistles and thimbles, all in silver, that went tinkling and rolling about the table with the ship’s motion. One of the bells came to rest in front of me, and I stopped it with my finger. Their laughter was dying, and their eyes remained fixed on me. I was the only one who had not shown off any wares. I regretted that I had not taken on some cargo, just for appearances. A few casks of salt or some dried fish: anything. Their curiosity was a little too sharp. Without my intending it, my hand reached up to my throat to trace the outline of the steel casket that hung by a chain round my neck, hidden beneath my doublet and shirt. The thing was some nine inches long. A key secured it, sliding into a lock under the brass head of a cupid. Its surfaces were polished smooth by long concealment, close against my skin. That casket weighed on me, a precious burden, delicious but dangerous, and unutterably secret.

  Martin, who stood behind my chair to serve me, caught his breath, and I put my hand back down on the table. The merchants’ stares flattered me, even as they disturbed me; their rich cloths made me feel part of a high and select band. Yes, I could count myself their equal. And soon I would rise higher still. I picked up the empty bottle of wine.

  ‘Gentlemen, should not this poor deceased bottle have an heir?’

  Piero continued to stare. But several of them took up the cry of ‘Another bottle, another bottle’, and others joined in with ‘Let it be hippocras, hippocras!’

  ‘But have we a sleeve?’ asked Basile. The elder Fieschi went to a cupboard set in the wall and brandished in the air a cone of muslin: a sleeve of Hippocrates, invented by that ancient doctor for some purpose to do with healing the sick, but now used in the brewing of hot, spiced wine, known to all as hippocras. I saw Fieschi unlock a drawer and take out fragrant cinnamon bark and cassia, cloves and grains of musk. These he sprinkled into the bag, which he gave to a servant to take for’ard to the cookroom, along with another bottle of romney. The other men cheered. While we waited for the wine, I slipped out once more on deck, to give their curiosity time to cool. The sun had set, and the air was growing colder. Land was a bare line on the horizon now, black against the indigo of sea and sky. A tiny gleam marked the tower on the Mole where bundles of broom were burnt at night to guide ships into the port. A servant stepped out of the forecastle with a steaming pan of wine and swayed aft over the deck to the great cabin, trailing the scent of warm spices after him. Those smells made me think of home. In a few weeks, maybe, my work in Rome would be done, and then at last I would turn back: back home to the family warehouse, on the rain-soaked stones of Broken Wharf in the City of London. And I would have my triumph.

  2

  It was seven months since I had set foot in that warehouse, and walked its dim passages between the shadowed mounds of barrels and crates that could contain any merchandise on earth. Here, in the years of my childhood, I had explored along with the other two members of our band. We used to prowl through those mountainous landscapes in the dusty light from the few smoke-blackened windows high above, looking out always for new discoveries. There was John Lazar, bold and fast-talking, big for his age, and my rival for leadership of the group; and there was Thomas, my brother. Thomas was slender, fond of his books, but for all that ingenious in dreaming up exploits. He was never daunted by a wall that had to be climbed or a stretch of riverwater to be jumped. In our hands we carried nails, sticks, even a length of iron bar. We tapped the barrels and prised up the lids. Inside, when we were lucky, we found sweet green mastic soaked in rosewater, and dipped our fingers in for a taste: forbidden fruit from savage lands. There was Baltic amber that gleamed with its dull, orange fire; crates of Turkish knifeblades; pungent cinnamon or peppercorns; oiled canvas packages that hid shimmering rugs and damasks woven with swirling figures.

  Outside, before the grey timber front of our warehouse, the stink of the river hung in the air. Water lapped the green-scummed stones where two or three lighters always nudged against the wharf, their single sails furled. This had been my world, the world of Queenhythe Ward. East and west it stretched, the length of Thames Street, from the greasy stink of the cookshops beneath the sign of King David’s Head and the Old Swan brewhouse, all the way west to Saint Peter’s Parva and the Blue Boar, under the shadow of Saint Paul’s. Within these bounds our band of three ran and fought and explored. The streets, unpaved, stank with refuse and the night soil emptied from jutting windows overhead. Gutters ran gurgling down the street edges to discharge their effluent into the Thames, while waterwheels drove bosses, engines that sucked the riverwater back up again and drove it along lead pipes into cisterns scattered along the streets. Into these the serving maids daily dipped their pails to carry into the houses; so that, in my father’s phrase, we drank what we pissed just as surely as we pissed what we drank.

  ‘It is a proud name to bear, “Merchant of Queenhythe”,’ my father used to say, and for much of my life I had believed him. We who were born on Thames Street were suspicious of all those foreigners west beyond Lambert Hill, or east of Towne’s End Lane. The ward was a town of its own within the City. It elected an alderman, it had its own Council of Six and its Wardmote Court, nine constables and a beadle, and eight scavengers who slept in the day and prowled the streets at night, shovelling up the multifarious filth of the city and carrying it away into the country, where we imagined it was sold for a great price. There was Five Foot Lane, the narrowest in London; the tumbledown church of Holy Trinity propped up with great oak beams, which I climbed once to the level of its broken eaves, and dared John to follow; there were the poor houses of the packhorsemen and dock hands, and grand hostels with courtyards belonging to the nobles, through whose windows we peered eagerly.

  At the heart of the ward was Queenhythe itself, a bay hollowed out of the riverbank between the warehouses, some hundred and twenty feet across. The old people remembered when this had been the grandest of the London wharves, but only barges and small boats could put in here now, thanks to the decay of London Bridge: its drawbridge had grown stiff with age, and would no longer let the great ships through. Even so, the Hythe was a fair sight, when the tide was full and the lighters came upstream and put in, dozens at a time. There was a customs house, with a bailiff who stood before it with his thumbs in his belt. The lighters landed rye and coal, fresh-caught herrings and sprats, eels and mackerel, as well as salt cod, and the dried stockfish that came in from Norway, stiff as a board, which was our fare in the winter. We used to sit on the stones at the waterside, John, Thomas and I, and watch the bakers and brewers come down to buy their wheat and barley. We saw the loads of fish being winched up and weighed by a thin, pale official known as the Meter. After that, the eight master porters took charge, each with his three under-porters. They loaded their packhorses with seven sacks apiece and set off up the steep, winding ways bound for the various fish markets, by Bread Street Hill and Spooner’s Lane; and, aptest name of all, when the packbeasts stuck in the narrows between jutting house-timbers, Labour-in-Vain Hill.

  West of Queenhythe was the Salt Wharf, and then the bath-house on Stew Lane. Those steamy rooms beneath the brick chimney were about much more than getting clean. Women lived in the house, whores, and on misty nights we could hear their laughter carrying as far as home. Sodom on the Thames, my mother called it, and forbade Thomas and me ever to go near. But curiosity tugged at me, and I knew that one day I must step inside. Beyond Stew Lane was Timber Hythe, where John’s father kept his warehouse. We stopped here sometimes to watch the cargoes being unloaded: Dutch wainscot and deals, and clapboards, riven oak lengths that would go to make barrel staves. John did not like to stay here too long. He was ashamed of his father’s dull trade: he was restless, hungry for new wor
lds, just like all of us.

  Next along was our own domain of Broken Wharf. Fallen stones spilled into the water from the crumbling steps; the lime peeling from between the ancient paving threatened always a fresh landslide. The firm of Dansey had taken the lease on this wharf at first because it was cheap. Then my father, Roger Dansey, had bought the warehouse and the dwelling beyond it, and we became fixed there. We had built a new oak pier, but it remained a treacherous landing-place, and around the dark pilings river currents swirled uneasily. Here, very often, our band made its camp. We used to perch on the stone edge of the quay with our legs dangling over the water, watching the boats and the men about their business, while we debated our next venture.

  ‘Who has the courage to swim out to the mill?’ asked John. He nodded his head to the pair of barges wedged between pilings out in the river, with a waterwheel secured between, perpetually turning with a dull grind and splash. To swim out there at anything other than a slack tide was death. We had done it, John and I, three times already, each challenging the other, and I would have done it again at any moment, even with the tide running, if John thought he dared it and I did not. But Thomas said, ‘And what would I do, while you risked your necks? “Who has the courage?”’ he mimicked John’s voice. ‘We’ve all proved that we can do it. No, let it be Terra Incognita.’

  He meant the old abandoned warehouse just upriver from ours. Its grand stone frontage proclaimed that in centuries past it had been the house of a noble, before the relentless tides and currents had eaten at its foundations and driven cracks up into the stonework. Even so, some time in the last century someone had dared to erect a wooden warehouse here. Tall and crooked it stood, rearing up from the ruined old mansion, its head tilting over the river like an old man about to fall.

  Thomas was the one who first succeeded in picking the lock. He stood lookout, while John and I squeezed through the doorway into the forgotten stone court, daring one another to leap between the broken arches where the paving had cracked and dropped into dark abysses below. Did we dare go down? We dared. One by one we descended into the dripping cellars, waist-deep in water, rich with the stink of the Thames. Here were slimy caverns and cracked old wine casks, and the shipwreck of a lighter, its rotted timbers glistening with damp. But the real delight of the place was not underground. I found the way up by many a creaking ladder to the attics, where a wooden gantry opened out over the river, far, far below. With a little care and daring I inched out along the timbers and round to the eaves, and so crawled up over the tiles, with a thirty-foot drop beneath, to the roof-ridge itself. John followed, and then Thomas.

  We balanced with our legs straddling the roof, hallooed and waved our arms. Beneath our feet ran the great highway of London, the Thames. Every manner of boat was to be seen. There were lighters with their brown sails spread, hire boats steered by a single man at the stern, crossing from one landing-place to another, and the tilt boats with eight oars that carried larger numbers of passengers down to Greenwich. But what really drew my eyes were the great barges of the nobles with their gilt prows and raised sterns, and the heraldic banners flying with fringes of Venice gold. In time I learnt to recognise them all: the crossed keys and scarlet hat of Cardinal Wolsey; the royal leopards and lilies of the Duke of Buckingham, before he was beheaded for ambitions a little too near the throne.

  Best of all was when I saw the King himself passing between his various palaces. The royal barge had a crimson awning covering its full length, with flags flying above it and gilded dragons and wyverns on poles. No oarsmen could be permitted in so exalted a craft, and so a second boat towed it, with dozens of rowers all in the scarlet royal livery, using a long tow-rope which dipped and splashed in the Thames. The barge itself glided on, spilling the sound of lutes and shawms and laughter, and the scent of sweet perfumes that drifted even as far as our rooftop, almost masking the stench of the river. The cannons fired from the Tower downstream in salute, and sometimes I could hear the sound of the trumpets as the barge put in at the wharf at the Palace of Bridewell, four landings up, where the King from time to time held court. The others grew tired of this spectacle long before I did. They eased themselves down the tiles and crept back round into the attic, while I stayed, intoxicated. It was dusk, often, by the time I turned for home, and if I had not known the feel of those timbers in the dark I would have met death many times over.

  Our house stood immediately behind the warehouse, facing north across Thames Street to the tiny church of Saint Mary Summerset. The street makes a strange sort of a twist here, where Labour-in-Vain Hill comes snaking down to a stop against Thames Street. This meeting-place of three ways forms an odd corner of calm. Passers-by paused when they reached our crooked lane-end, as if to take stock, reconsider their journey and go on. The house itself was like a thousand others in the City: towering, steep-gabled, one rain-bleached oak beam balanced on another, cantilevered ever outwards over the road. This toppling effect, my mother said, served no other purpose but to ensure that when you threw your soil out of your bedchamber it did not end up in your parlour. Behind our windows were the dim, panelled rooms that custom demanded, a parlour and hall and even a small gallery, running along Bosse Lane towards the Thames. To me, returning from the wonders of the royal barge, home appeared a drab place, full of the greys and browns of pewter and kersey cloth, and the stink of tallow candles and rushlights. Pewter might have stood for our rank in life. The vast mass of people in London still ate their meals off trenchers of wood or earthenware; far above them, the gentry and nobility used silver. Pewter was for the well-to-do, the respected, the solid; those who stood high, but not too high. Even though we could have afforded to buy some silver vessels, my mother would not hear of it. ‘Once you begin to ape the Court, there is no end to it. Let us keep the way we are.’

  In the parlour after our plain supper, I used to question my parents on all the marvels that went into making royalty: where their treasures came from, what they cost, who brought them into England. My father rose to this, his face taking on a look of childlike delight. Sitting by the fire with the flames glinting off the oak panels, he would spin me tales of the furs and the satins that noblemen wore, the cloth of silver and gold and the fabulous dyestuffs, crimson, scarlet and indigo; the perfumes made out of the pungent musk-glands of the Indian civet cat, and the floating ambergris that is said to be the excretion of Leviathan. My mother regarded his stories with cold watchfulness. When my father was not there she beckoned me up to her, squatted down and instructed me. ‘Remember this, Richard: never fall in love with your cargo.’ I looked back at her defiantly. It seemed to me she might have added, ‘Never fall in love at all.’

  Already, in those days, my mother was a powerful woman. My father let her run a good deal of the business. He admitted freely she had more sense than he did, and her investments did well. But hers was a cold trade. ‘Buy what you understand,’ she was fond of saying. ‘Buy what you know you can sell.’ For her, all the wondrous things that she bought and squirrelled away in the warehouse were just so many ingenious routes towards profit. She enjoyed the chase, and the devious thrill of outskirting the other merchants by means of plans well judged and precisely laid, but in the end she reckoned up her happiness in marks of silver or Venetian ducats. That was her plan in life: to grow richer and even richer, and live all her life on Thames Street within sight and smell of the river.

  Thomas resembled her, in character and in looks. He was darkhaired, with brows that frowned while he thought. The careful one, she called him, who always thought before he spoke. I was the quick one, the one with no head for book-learning; I was the dreamer of impractical dreams, with my lithe frame and thin face, and quick, sharp eyes the colour of off-green pebbles. ‘Too quick,’ my mother said, ‘and too like your father.’ Too quick to be seduced by the glitter of pretty things, she meant: too quick to desire, and doubtless in the future too quick to buy. A merchant must be slow.

  But that was not the style of m
y father. His purchases were affairs of the heart. When I was eleven, he brought back a bag of Arabian pearls, which he gave me to play with. I remember rolling them about on a broad platter by the fireside, holding them up to see the way they shone in the yellow light of our candles, and then sorting them with tweezers by size.

  ‘Pearls,’ my mother frowned. ‘Why pearls, in God’s name?’

  ‘I bought them because they sang to me,’ was my father’s reply.

  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.

  3

  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.