Will Whitaker
The King’s Diamond

For Elizabeth and Alexander

Contents

Historical Note

Prologue

Part 1

Topaz: a Perfect Sunshine Stone

1

Hammers rang on anvils, and sparks sprayed from the forges…

2

It was seven months since I had set foot in…

3

As I grew older, I used to slip away whenever…

4

Six weeks later I was standing in the steerage house…

5

For the moment, I was content to obey my mother.

Part 2

Scythian Emerald: a Courtesan among Stones

6

A month later I stepped up on to the great…

7

I went home euphoric. The smell of Ippolita was still…

8

We walked swiftly back up from the fish market, with…

Part 3

Chrysoprase: the Lantern in the Darkness

9

On a grey, drizzling morning towards the end of January…

10

Day by day, I watched in impatience as Cellini worked.

11

Next afternoon I set out with Cellini down the Via…

12

‘Are you completely and utterly out of your mind?’

13

I lay that night in my bed at the inn…

14

As I came away from the Palazzo del Bene it…

Part 4

The Golconda Diamond: a Thorn in the Heart

15

Light fell slantwise from the plain glass windows of the…

16

There was dinner, most days, in the Palazzo del Bene.

17

For two days we wound up the valley of the…

18

That very night we rode from Florence, west into the…

Part 5

Ruby of Serendip: a Stone to Heat the Blood

19

The next day Renzo da Ceri was seen in his…

20

It was easy going at first. The current did not…

21

I would have been dead already, if it had not…

22

Still the Sack continued, and the soldiers grew all the…

23

I grabbed her hand, wiping it clean, weeping, touching her…

24

I let Hannah step out of the storeroom first. When…

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

HISTORICAL NOTE

It is 1527. The young Emperor Charles V, the most powerful monarch in centuries, rules much of Europe from his capital, Madrid, and is extending his empire in a series of ruthless wars. In Rome, the wily Medici Pope Clement VII has formed an alliance to fight Charles and drive his armies out of Italy for good.

As the powers of Europe take sides in the great struggle, only England holds aloof. King Henry VIII, at the age of thirty-six, is the most glamorous and accomplished monarch of Christendom: dancer, jouster, sportsman, musician, scholar. His Court is a place of untold opulence. He has no intention of involving himself in the Pope’s quarrels. Instead his thoughts are on a woman: beautiful and beyond his reach.

PROLOGUE

6 May 1527

The Sack of Rome

He sat and gazed upon the stone. Its surface was smooth and undulating, virgin and uncut as when it first came from the mine. Over it lay a soft and milky sheen, pretty, teasing, allowing no glimpse of what lay inside. To one without experience, it would not have appeared to be a rough diamond at all.

He turned the gem in his fingers until the light suddenly penetrated, and for an instant he had a perfect view into its depths. He saw the tiny flaw that reached down, just off-centre, like a hand plunged into cold water, white against the pale blue transparency of the stone. The ray of light glanced off the flaw and dived deeper, acquiring more intense tints of marine blue and peach-bloom. It lingered on the gem’s lower surface, mellowing now, growing frail but exquisite, like the flavours of an old wine. As he turned it a fraction, the light broke, and the timid, beautiful blue exploded with animal wildness into orange, vermilion, carmine, indigo, the turquoise of burning sulphur. The whole body of the stone was alive with colours, jarring, leaping, bursting back up and out, ravishing and dazzling his eyes and making him draw in his breath. A moment later the milky veil was drawn once more over its surface, and the stone lay in his hand, mute and composed: gleaming with promise, and yet maddeningly secret and withdrawn. He shivered with exhilaration. No other diamond, and only one woman, had ever hurled him through such a rush of emotions, the teasing seduction, the passion and fulfilment, the coolness, the seeming rejection and despair. He turned the diamond again, seeking once more for that momentary gleam of light, catching it and losing it again, catching it and losing it.

That flaw fascinated him. It was like a scar on the body of an otherwise perfect woman, a part of her nakedness that he loved almost more than the rest. But he must drink his fill of the sight while he could. Soon the flaw must be cut away. There would be risk. Certainly, it was that pale, slender fissure that had frightened off all the diamond’s previous owners from any attempt to cut it. With a rough stone like this, no one could be sure of its properties. You might trim it away to almost nothing, and still find the flaw snaking through its flesh, mocking you. He turned the diamond once more, so that its flaw shimmered in the light. This was a stone among thousands, the stone that would make his fortune: or else bring him to utter ruin.

He thought back to its birth, untold centuries ago. They say that gems are born from seeds, sown by daemons or intelligences underground; the same beings that by their sports create strange effigies in rocks, in the form of shells, bones and trees. The gems grow, slowly over the ages, each in its own secret womb of rock. Rubies in the gleaming red balasse. Emeralds in jasper. Diamonds, most precious of all, in red clay or crystal, or even in gold. The mother stones enfold them, nourish them with their blood, sacrifice themselves so that the gems can live. When the gemstones have reached their perfection, the greed of man tears them from their womb.

There are only three places in all the world where true diamonds can be found. Some come from Borneo; others from the Kingdom of Bengal. But the greatest stones of all are from the mines of Ramanakotha, beyond the mountains of the Western Ghats, in the lands of the Sultan Kalim-Allah Shah in the heart of India, five days’ travel from the fortress and city of Golconda.

He had heard many stories of that broad, arid plain, scattered with rocks and twisted trees, cut across by dry ravines. No crops will grow there. On the tops of the hillocks are the ruins of ancient shrines, and newer ones too: for every time a fresh tunnel is opened, a goat is sacrificed towards its success. Everywhere are the huts of the miners, roofed with straw. Sixty thousand men, women and children work here, dirt-poor and near naked. They pass their lives in debt for food and rent and the permission to be here at all. But having come, no man ever tries to leave. They will work themselves to death sooner than that.

They dig down into the gravel, the red and black clay and sand, which is the womb in which these diamonds are formed. When the miners find the veins where the diamonds grow, half a finger wide and stretching down into the earth, they use long iron hooks to wrench the stones free, and break their way deeper with picks. Often the shock of hacking the clay gives the diamonds fresh flaws. The soft earth can subside without warning. It is a common sight to see the dust and rubble of a fallen tunnel, the bodies carried out and the pyres lit between the mine entrances and the shrines. You will hear the wailing of women, hundreds at a time. They have lost their men, and now they come forward to cast themselves into the flames – or else the mob will drag them to the pyre by force. The diamonds have killed them just as surely as their husbands. Those who survive walk past the fires and back inside the tunnels.

Further off into the hills are the older mines. Some of these were opened two thousand years ago; now for the most part they are dead, empty and haunted. Up here, the diamonds grow in a soft red rock that crumbles easily under the pick. It is a fertile rock, a legend among those who love jewels. The Old Rock of Golconda. Few stones remain. But there are still miners who work these veins, who risk the demons that are said to live here, and the frequent falling-in of the ancient tunnels riddling the hills. For these are the finest diamonds in the world.

Early in the year 1484, in the reign of the Sultan Mahmud Shah, two men walked down out of the hills and into the town square of Raolconda. They were dirty, dressed only in ragged loincloths, and in their eyes was the mad light of those who had lived too long with death and despair. They crossed to where the diamond dealers squatted in the shade with their weights and scales and bags of gold at their sides. Only here, in the kindlier green light beneath the banyan trees, could the quality of the stones be judged. The men sat down before the dealers; one of them opened a bundle and with reverence displayed a diamond. It was a pearl-smooth stone almost the size of a hazelnut, with a white flaw reaching down into it like a hand into water. Three miners had already lost their lives, extending the abandoned tunnel into the hillside. But the two who remained had gone on. They had read the signs in the rock, the brightening in its colour, and the juice that oozed from its fissures like blood. They knew they were approaching their reward.

The merchants leant forward. It was a rarity, this: a stone of the Old Rock of such a size. Their scales proclaimed it at twenty-two mañjariyañ and a half: or thirty-seven carats and three grains in the system used in the West. They muttered together, bidding and outbidding one another. Then they looked back at the stone. It was a Gujarati dealer who took it up, of the trading house of Harshadbhai. He counted out two hundred golden pagodas, about four hundred Venetian ducats in the currency of Europe. The miners took their gold and went back into the hills. The light of greed burned brighter in their eyes than ever. No fear of demons or collapsing tunnels could hold them back now. They would penetrate deeper into the Old Rock, and deeper. Within three months, both of them would be dead.

With a stone such as this in his hands, the Gujarati itched for the markets of Surat, where Arabs, Turks and even Portuguese jostled, greedy for the treasures of India. He set off west in a caravan of twenty other merchants, climbing from the plain up into the moist mountain forests, thick with laurel, cinnamon and sandalwood. Six days into the wilderness, brigands surrounded them. His companions agreed on surrender. They would lose their goods; but there would be other ventures. At least they would have their lives. In the past, Harshadbhai would have thought likewise. But he was not to be parted from that diamond. Just as the senior merchant stepped out from among the pack mules, his arms spread in surrender, Harshadbhai put an arrow to his bow and shot down the brigands’ leader. In the fight that followed, three merchants died before the brigands fled. The survivors would no longer keep such a dangerous companion in their band. Harshadbhai travelled on alone.

At Surat, he carried the stone about the usual markets. He was offered three hundred pagodas, then three hundred and fifty; but still he kept it back. He met at last an Arab seafarer named Abu al-Husn, a man who traded between Surat and Aden, carrying ginger, aloes and gems to the West, and to the East horses, rosewater, saltpetre and alum. Al-Husn paused, looked, looked again. He weighed the diamond, and tried to value it. But the manner its cut would take, its final weight and colour, all defied him. The man who bought this stone would put his gold and his peace of mind at hazard. He smiled, and began the process of bargaining. The diamond became his for five hundred pagodas. In the days that followed, making westwards across the Arabian Sea, al-Husn took his new possession out repeatedly, and bragged to the other seafarers of the golden profits he would make when he sold it in Aden; how he would accept not less than a thousand dinars, a good sixty per cent more than he had paid. Every night, as the ship rocked in the swells, he played at dice. Gradually he lost every item of trade he had with him, until he had only the diamond. He turned it in his hand so that that curious gleam struck off the flaw like some signal of warning. Then he set it down with care on the table. ‘This, against all the rest.’ The other men nodded grimly. The diamond, opaque once more, lay on the table among rubies and sapphires, mounds of gold coins and notes of promise for this cargo or that down in the holds. Hazard was the game; a Turk named Ibrahim shook back his long embroidered sleeves and threw first, a seven. This was the strongest throw he could have made. Al-Husn answered it with a four. Now he must throw, and throw again. If he could repeat his four, known as the chance, he would win. But if he repeated his enemy’s seven first, the main, he would lose. The odds were bad. He broke into a sweat. Unlucky twelves took two of the players out; another threw a six and stayed in, with better chances than al-Husn. All the time the diamond gazed at him like a cold and lazy eye. His hands shook as he made the next throw: four and three, making seven, the main, and the destruction of all his hopes.

He sprang to his feet and took the Turk by the neck. He had cheated, changed dice somehow when he shook out his sleeve. Gems and coins went flying. But the Turk had already solved the argument. The curved blade of his dagger slipped between al-Husn’s ribs. He fell, and as his eyes misted over, his last sight was of the diamond, which opened itself briefly, rolling in the ship’s motion, and favoured him with a last rose-pink gleam from its depths.

Some weeks later the stone landed in Aden, that richest port of all Arabia, where the goods of the East meet those of the West. Ibrahim walked ashore with the diamond concealed in a pouch. He knew nothing of gems. His own trade was in opium, and the dyestuff known as dragon’s blood. But the figure stuck in his mind, one thousand dinars, and he would take no less. For three days he walked the city, before meeting an eastern Yemeni named Ibn Hisham. He was a young man, an adventurer, and his usual trade was in pearls of Ormuz. Diamonds lay a long way outside his line. But when Ibrahim opened his packet for a group of traders, the flash of the early sun caught by chance on the place where the flaw shot down inside the stone, and made it burst into sudden music. Ibn Hisham paid down gladly the thousand dinars demanded, around sixteen hundred ducats. He knew he had in his hands a wonder; and it would take him far from his usual roads. The West was the place to sell gems: Cairo, where the Christians came, hungrily clustering to the edge of their world in search of the luxuries of more civilised climes. His pearls too would sell there for more than in Aden.

It was the season of the hot and sudden winds that blow down from the mountains across the straits; but despite that he set off at once. He passed in safety into the Red Sea, and coasted Abyssinia as far as the port of Locari. From there he struck across the desert. Six days’ waterless journey, with the only signs of life the distant scudding of the ostriches, kicking up trails of dust with their feet. Then, after coming at last to the Nile, twelve days more by boat downstream, travelling by day, by night keeping watch against the desert Arabs who raided at will along the banks. By the time he reached Cairo he was longing for the tranquil dawns of Ormuz and the sight of the pearl fishers coming in to the shore. For all the diamond’s bewitchments, he was in a hurry to be rid of it.

That autumn, in the bazaars of Cairo, a Venetian named Marin Pompeo caught sight of a stone the like of which he had never before seen. Its owner, a nervous young Yemeni, allowed himself to be beaten down to two thousand ducats. Returning home by galley up the rainswept Adriatic, the Venetian turned the diamond in his hands. He soon learnt the knack of catching the light and making it shine. Pompeo was no stranger to diamonds. He had bought and sold them for thirty years, and he had seen them in every size and colour and form. He had handled the rare greens, the common, less prized yellows, the noble whites and blues; he had seen table cuts and pyramids, rough stones with a black flaw at their hearts, strong stones and weak. Once he had owned a diamond that shattered merely with the pressure of his fingers, a beautiful stone with a wild and reckless glint to it. This diamond, he thought, might be another one the same. Again and again he held it up gingerly, by morning light and noon, by lantern and candle. Each time it was different. He yearned to see it cut, and he swore to himself he would do it, whatever the danger. But back home again, walking the Rialto that winter with its jewellers’ shops by the dozen, he found he did not dare. When a young nobleman of Florence named Lorenzo de’ Bardi offered him two and a half thousand ducats for it he handed it over, grieving, regretful, yet relieved. The temptation was over. He, at least, would not be the one to shatter that stone.

De’ Bardi took the diamond with him back to Florence. He had just come into his inheritance. He travelled with fifty retainers, his own suite of furniture, a jester, twelve minstrels, his wife, a concubine and a dwarf. He had come to Venice for pleasure, and he had found it. But of all the beautiful things he bought in Venice’s markets, none pleased him so much as this diamond. Pompeo had shown him how to turn the stone and make it shine, and had whispered to him how much greater it could be, if he ventured to have it cut. But that risk was not for him. Why should he wish to share his diamond’s beauty with others? It pleased him to think that he alone could see inside its heart; that if anyone else happened to pick it up, the chances were that they would see nothing but a dull, grey pebble. To cut the stone would have meant answering the trust it showed him with betrayal.

Over the years, de’ Bardi lost much. His wife left him, and then his mistress. When his family became caught up in the wars of the Borgias, he lost almost everything else; but still he kept hold of his stone. Every night for forty-three years he took it out of its casket and gazed upon it. Those glimpses he allowed himself into its heart were a secret bond, a love that was greater than any he had known.

Only as he lay dying did it finally leave his hands. At his side knelt a young Englishman, a merchant in jewels.

‘Who will wear the diamond when I am dead?’ murmured the old man.

‘A king’s lady,’ answered the Englishman. ‘The most beautiful woman in the world.’

The Englishman rode away south to Rome with fierce exhilaration. He had almost paid for this stone with his life. But a diamond such as this drove away all fears.

He turned the stone in his fingers once again. Since his return to Rome, another man had given up his life for the diamond of the Old Rock. There lay the body in the corner, over by the open chest in a pool of blood, its left arm thrown out, its right clasped over the hilt of a sword. A bloody stain on the back of the green velvet doublet showed the force of the sword thrust that had passed clean through his chest.

Again he caught that deceptive gleam for an instant, and once more lost it. It was exasperating how that window into the diamond’s heart was so small, so elusive. He was weak and lightheaded with hunger. His temples throbbed, and yet he felt strangely detached. Nothing in the world save his stone really seemed to matter. At last he had time: time to turn the gem, slowly, lovingly, to see the beginnings of each change, the opening of that chink that led down into its depths, the plunge of the light, the smile of the breaking colours, and then the sudden drawing of the veil across its surface. He could imagine himself dying like this.

Dimly he perceived that he must fight the pull of the stone that whispered to him to stay, look, drink from my waters, just another hour. From outside the room there were the sounds of shots, and running feet. He knew that if he was to live he must leave this place, with the dead body lying in its blood beside the chest. Soon it would be too late. Hunger and thirst would leave him too weak to walk, and too weak to choose. But just a little longer first. Catch the gleam in the stone one more time, and again, and again.

PART 1
Topaz: a Perfect Sunshine Stone

Now my trembling mind yearns to wander,

Now my joyful feet spring with eagerness.

Sweet band of friends, farewell;

Together we set out from our far home,

But many diverse roads lead us back.

CATULLUS, POEM 46

1

Hammers rang on anvils, and sparks sprayed from the forges out across the stones. Men in flame-blackened aprons held lumps of glowing iron in the fires, then drew them out, refashioned them with more ringing blows, and plunged them into barrels of water with a rush of steam. I watched the new-made halberd heads, the sword blades of their various kinds, the boarding axes that are used in sea-fights. Under the arches of the Arsenal, I could see men forming the finer parts of guns, the twisted serpentines that held the match fuse, and the powder pans, bending the soft metal with their tongs, and I saw the silvery molten lead poured into moulds for bullets. The finished weapons were carried down towards the quay, to be loaded on the Spanish galleys anchored in the harbour, ready for war.

I was in my room in the Angel Inn, late on a cold January afternoon. Since morning I had sat here, unmoving, gazing out at the forges of the Arsenal, fighting a furious battle with my thoughts. ‘Go home,’ a voice seemed to say. ‘Any man of sense would say you have done enough. See what you are in the midst of. Destruction may come to Genoa any day now. Get out of Italy by the safe route, while you still can.’ Genoa was a Republic split in two, always prone to revolutions. At the moment, it sided with the Emperor. But the city’s greatest prince, Andrea Doria, was an admiral in the pay of the French and the Pope’s Holy League, and his galleys hovered out in the blue distances of the Mediterranean, waiting to inflict a stinging blow against the merchant ships of the city that was once his own.

But the road north still lay open. Just two days’ ride would take me across the border into the Duchy of Savoy, a region still untouched by the carnage of war. After that I would cross the mountains into France: calm, peaceful France. There were no armies there, roving and looting at will, no plague, no famine; there would be bandits and wolves, perhaps, but they were no more than the common dangers of European travel. A few weeks would bring me to English Calais, that comforting outpost of home planted on the edge of the Continent, and then it would be over the Channel and back to London.

I pictured myself back home on Broken Wharf by the bank of the Thames, climbing the creaking old stairs to the counting house and stepping inside. Here my mother, Miriam Dansey, known to all London as the Widow of Thames Street, directed her many ingenious business endeavours. I imagined laying before her my haul, the emeralds and sapphires, the great ruby, the amethysts and all the rest. I imagined her with her trading partner, William Marshe, the two of them drawing in their breaths and raising their eyebrows in wonder. Yes, I would have a triumph, of a kind. But I would know in my own heart that I had failed. I would have to take my gems to be cut and set by one of the London goldsmiths. I knew these men, and I knew that my stones, that had the capacity to be so extraordinary, would come out looking like all the other trinkets fashioned on Goldsmiths’ Row. I might make a profit on my venture, yes, but it would be small, and I would have lost the glory I longed for, that would come only if I could astonish and dazzle a king.

There was another way. I could turn south, and head for Rome. Rome: opulent capital of Christendom, where the finest goldsmiths, artists and dealers in luxuries flocked to make their name and fortune, and supply the endless appetites of His Holiness, Pope Clement VII, his cardinals and nobles. Rome: the seat of a mighty temporal power, for Pope Clement held absolute sway over all central Italy, as well as numerous cities in the north, and commanded Florence through his Medici relations. Rome. Only there would I find the craftsman truly worthy to work on my stones. In my dreams I saw the golden swirls and figures that must surround the gems. I saw something nobler than the common run, something alert and alive, something I had never seen in London.

As I sat, my servant, Martin Deller, paced up and down behind me. He was some ten years my elder, stocky and dark, a useful man with a dagger who had helped me out of trouble more than once. He was also, to my frequent annoyance, the voice of conscience and caution.

‘Please, master! We have had good luck. Let’s leave while we can for home.’

He was right. Plainly he was right. It was a wonder how we had crossed from Venice overland: first past the army of the Pope’s Holy League camped at Cremona, which they had recently won from the Emperor’s Spaniards, then across into the Duchy of Milan where this war had first begun. This was Imperial territory. We found the farms broken up, the fields burnt. The Emperor’s army, starved of pay and plunder, roved the shattered countryside in bands, robbing travellers of whatever they could get. We had travelled by night and hidden in the day, winning through by a mixture of my boldness and Martin’s sense.

The patch of sun on the wall of the Arsenal opposite had shrunk upwards as far as the parapet. It was drawing towards evening. At sunset the Speranza would sail. Few ships were putting out for Rome in these days of war. If I was to strike south, this would be my only chance. Perhaps she had sailed already. And that was best, I argued to myself: by far the best. The time had come to call enough, and turn for home. I faced Martin. I was on the point of telling him to unpack the trunk again, and order horses for tomorrow and a guide for the journey inland.

‘Well, master?’

A sudden, sick rage swelled up in me. Was I to give up now on the triumph I had sworn I would have, all those months before, when I folded my bills of exchange into the casket round my neck and climbed the boarding ladder on to our family ship, the Rose? Now, when I had a casket of gems the like of which had scarcely been seen? Was I to betray them? My blue diamonds of Bengal called out to me, my sapphire that was the colour of pale skimmed milk sighed to me, my fiery garnets and the great dark ruby flashed with rage. This venture had never been for those easily daunted by fears. No, there comes a time when the stakes double: a time when you must either gamble and go on, or else give in, and admit you should never have played at all.

I stood up briskly and walked towards the door. My sword was swinging, my hat already on my head. ‘Pick up the trunk,’ I ordered Martin. ‘We are going.’

I walked out of the inn beneath the painted angel with its wings spread, and into the crowds. I could hear Martin’s breath behind me as he struggled to keep pace with my trunk on his shoulder.

‘Wait! Master, please! Will you not consider a little longer?’

I did not look back. I skirted the Arsenal, heading east round the broad bay, a mile wide, that forms the harbour at Genoa. Now that I had decided, I was determined not to lose a moment. I pushed my way through the crowds past the wooden piers where the lesser vessels put in, the lighters and flat-bottomed shallops. Here, winebarrels bumped and thundered, and three men rolled a hogshead up the ramp to the roadway in front of me. I dodged round it with a curse. There was the rich scent of oil, spilling in drops from great jars borne on men’s shoulders, and the stink of hemp, its stiff fibres tied in rolls, ready for the rope-makers that twist the long cables in the alleys behind the port. As I hurried on, a mournful chanting struck up from the belly of one of the war galleys out across the bay. Strange and sad, this Mahometan song of the Turks chained at their oars: for that is the rule of the sea, that when a Christian ship lays hold of a Muslim, all her crew become slaves, and when they take a ship of ours we suffer the same.

At the fish market I stopped, impatient, while Martin caught up, the trunk bobbing above men’s heads in the thick of the crowd. Red mullet stared up at me, glass-eyed, out of open crates, and a woman in a white linen bonnet chopped the heads from eels and cast them down on the stones, where gulls swooped and flew off with them, crying. Music burst from one of the taverns, a fiddle and pipes, and I heard the clack of the dice, a harlot’s laugh, the slap of cards on a table. As Martin came out from the press, I turned and hurried on.

West over the hills the sun broke out briefly through the clouds. It was close to setting. At the last of the wooden piers grain was being landed, passed from shoulder to shoulder in sacks and poured out into bushel measures, sending up clouds of chaff. The men laughed and joked at their work. No one could say how long this plenty might last, or when the galleys of the League might close the sea once more and attempt to bring Genoa to obedience through starvation. I pushed past, bounding up the six stone steps on to the Mole, whose curving arm reached out into the deep water of the bay. The wind blew with full force here, and I reached a hand up to steady my hat. It was a soft bonnet of black Lucca velvet, which had in it a gold medal of the Virgin and Child, in the latest aristocratic fashion. I had paid eighty Genoese ducats for this medal. But it was more than a costly ornament. It was the guiding star of my voyage.

All along the Mole on the sheltered side towards the harbour lay the great ships, bound on far and weighty ventures. Their masts rose tall, clustered like forest trees, flying the flags of all those nations aligned with the Empire. There was the red cross of Genoa, the black and white of Siena, the red, white and yellow tricolor of Spain. The wind made the ships pull on their ropes and the waves slap against the stone. I ran along the Mole, hunting in agitation for the gilded names on their sterns.

I had sat last night in the Angel with the Speranza’s owners, a pair of Genoese brothers named Piero and Federico Fieschi. I had bought them wine and discussed terms of payment for this voyage: ten ducats they asked, for the two hundred and fifty sea miles to Rome. All risks were my own. Piero had looked at me in question. The price was high: some thirty shillings for a journey that should have cost less than ten, even supposing I needed cargo space in the hold. I told them the sum was acceptable; but I could answer at that time neither no nor yes. They went away displeased. ‘Remember,’ Federico warned me, ‘we sail tomorrow, without fail.’

Ahead, men shouted from the decks of one of the ships. Her yards were raised high and clear, slanting out over her sides, and a wooden crane swung goods out from the Mole and down into her holds. Plainly she was loading up to depart.

On the quay Piero Fieschi was standing among a band of five or six men. They had the air of old established merchants, all of them, with grizzled beards and gowns trimmed with rabbit fur and sable. They thought nothing of standing there in that chilling wind, watching with serious eyes as every last bale and crate was winched up from the Mole. Their grave faces showed they knew the risks, putting to sea in times such as these. Doubtless they had prepared well in advance. They would have their servants on board, numerous and well armed. No doubt they had insurance too for their valuables, so that, even if they perished, their heirs would profit. It gave me a sudden sense of my own vulnerability. I had taken none of these precautions. I realised, too, the hastiness and lack of dignity of my entrance. Still out of breath, I swept off my hat and bowed.

‘Richard Dansey, Merchant, of London.’

They bowed in turn and presented themselves with their nations of origin: Milan, Lucca, the Duchy of Ferrara. Their eyes lingered on me. Plainly I was a mystery to them. I must have seemed a mere boy, with my light, sand-coloured hair and my beard that was little more than a wisp of down. I was still only twenty-one, and although I was tall, and had gained some skill with a sword, I was not of a powerful build. Too young to be a merchant, in their eyes, and not dressed like one, either. My clothes had more the air of a fashionable young noble’s. I wore a purple doublet slashed with white cambric, my shirtbands falling over it from the neck, each garnished with lace and ending in a gold button. My black wool cloak was edged in silver, and my rapier too was silver-hilted.

Piero Fieschi stepped forward from among the merchants with his partner and younger brother at his side. I held out to them the purse I had prepared hours earlier, containing ten gold ducats. Piero looked at me in astonishment.

‘Messer Dansey! We sail at once: but do you have no goods to load?’

Martin came panting up behind me. Fieschi glanced at the trunk on his shoulder, clearly pondering whether it might contain anything of value. Martin swung the thing roughly down on to the stones, and sniffed. Fieschi appeared to dismiss the idea. He gestured to the knot of merchants. ‘Our companions have loaded silks of Lucca and Genoa, and we have a solid stack of salt barrels belonging to Messer Pinotti here, of Milan: most welcome for ballast. But you, nothing? Truly nothing? You tell us you are a merchant: how will you turn a profit?’

‘I have my means.’ I smiled, delighting in their disappointed curiosity, and turned from them with a graceful bow. I stepped from the Mole to the wooden rungs of the entering ladder nailed to the Speranza’s waist, and pulled myself on board. Martin swung the trunk up on deck, hauling himself after it. While he asked in his London-accented Italian where he should stow my trunk, I strode around the decks, enjoying once more the feel of the planks beneath my feet and the smell of pitch in my nostrils.

The Speranza was a great ship of perhaps a hundred and twenty tons, slightly larger than the Dansey family vessel, the Rose, which I had left behind at Bruges in August. Peering down the open hatches I saw she had at least two orlops, between-decks where a man could not stand upright; here the goods were being shunted from the hatches and lashed into place. Furthest aft was the roundhouse or great cabin, from which several smaller cabins opened. In one of these I found Martin, sitting on the trunk and mopping his portly face, and cursing gently at the run I had led him through the port. I heard the rattle of the hatch cover as it was fastened into place, and the clank of the capstan as the sailors began warping the Speranza out into the bay on her anchor. All at once they broke into a song, a bawdy affair in local dialect, praising the part of the city known as Maddalena, which had the fairest churches, the richest markets, and the greatest number of brothels.

I stepped back inside the great cabin. It was of a fair size, raked back at the stern to a row of fine windows. My fellow passengers were all present, seating themselves about a table, in the high humour of men swept up in the risk and hurry of a new venture. Servants were pouring out glasses of sweet romney wine, and there were fried capons, as well as wafers, almonds and sweetmeats. Martin came out of our little cabin to attend me. This supper was my first meal since the early morning. I ate greedily and drank deep, and all of us talked and laughed more and more freely.

‘In Rome we shall buy from His Holiness an indulgence for trade with the Turk,’ Piero Fieschi was saying. ‘Without that, of course, any commerce with the Muslims would involve us in mortal sin. Then south to Naples, and over the sea to Cairo.’

‘Cairo!’ his brother picked up. ‘What wonders cannot be had in Cairo? We shall bring back silver and cinnabar, raisins, rosewater and sandalwood, cloves, porcelain and pearls, indigo and opium.’

Suddenly the Luccan, Messer Giordano, darted up from the table and into one of the cabins, and returned with a piece of silk some three yards long, shimmering crimson, pirled with a fine thread of silver. ‘Do not talk to me of Cairo. Feel this! Smell it! And tell me if the lands of the Turk can boast anything as fine!’ He draped it round our heads and we fought free of it, laughing. It had the true tang of new-spun silk, the stink o’ the worm, as the silkmen call it, and it was as smooth as the sound of lutes. The others were not to be outshone, and each dived into his cabin. Soon the table was festooned in cloths and colours, blood-red satins, green lustred taffetas, thick black velvets striped in gold with a pile as soft as cats’ fur; purple and maroon brocades with patterns stamped in silver that sparkled in the light from the oil lamps. We swam in the silks, laughing at the sheer luxury of it.

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 worlds, 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 my 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.

In a goldsmith’s shop you are struck, first of all, by the light. The Row faces north, like a painter’s studio, and the shelves inside the shops are draped in white cloths, so that there is always the same gentle radiance. Set against these cloths the gems glow, each with its own proper fire. On one shelf stand solitary stones in their purity, rubies and amethysts, garnets and sapphires, some exquisitely cut and polished, others virgin stones straight from the earth, rough like hailstones. On another shelf are rings and signets, threaded on wire or perched on silver stands made to look like the branches of trees. One wall holds crosses and reliquaries, and crystal tablets engraved with scenes of the saints, and the precious things that princes love: little crucifixes for rosaries, jewelled combs, tinderboxes, scent flasks, inkhorns, hourglasses, mirror frames and hawks’ bells, all worked in gold and set with agate or enamel or mother of pearl. Higher up stand the great flagons and ewers of gold or silver gilt, gleaming down over the shop like suns, waiting to be presented to the King. I remember in the shop of Mr Cornelius a pair of gilt basins chased with beasts and dragons that weighed over six hundred ounces, and a vase of rock crystal graven with roses and crowns and the cipher of the King and Queen, H and K woven together, sprinkled across it in gold.

In the corners were other rarities: oliphants’ teeth, branches of crimson coral, or the horn of a unicorn, garnished in gold. Further back squatted the brick furnace that purred always with a deep-throated fire, and the lapidary’s wheel where the goldsmith sat like a potter, pedalling with one foot to polish his stones or grind them down into facets. Close to this, on the workbench, were little jars of pastes and emery powders, and the diamond-tipped rods with which he carved tiny intaglios or signets. Then there were the drills, from the great augers turned with two hands to the tiniest picks for drilling pearls; the pincers that likewise came in every conceivable size, the crucibles, the casting ladles and hammers, the miniature anvils, the moulds, the leather gauntlets and aprons stained black from use; and high up the blocks of wax and the acids, the aqua fortis and aqua stygia used for engraving. Closer to the front of the shop was a broad table with richly carved legs, where the smith sat when he was expecting a customer. He would have his scales before him and the minute brass weights, the scruples and the drachms, the carats that are the hundred and forty-fourth part of an ounce, and the grain weights that are a quarter of that again and can only be lifted by tweezers.

What I most loved to see were the stones, in all their varied temperaments and tribes. I learnt the twelve types of the Emerald, with the Scythian at their head, that shines like new spring grass. I learnt of its kindred stones, the jasper and the blue-green beryl that must be cut in a six-sided figure if it is not to lose its brilliance. I learnt of the Diamond: the pure whites of Golconda, the blue stones and the green, and the fair, pointed stones of the Mahanadi River in Bengal. These will cut through armour. Yet if you hit them a blow with a hammer they shatter into shards too tiny to be seen. I learnt too of the cutting of their facets, the stone’s eyes, as it were, through which you gaze down into its soul. The principal facet, where possible, will be a flat rectangle or table: the table-cut stone being everywhere the most prized. It has a dark brilliance and a mystery that the pyramid cut can never have. I studied the Ruby also, the great stones and the lesser that incline to the orange of the garnet and the jacinth. I learnt of Amethysts with their delicate peach-bloom shades, that are almost as valued as diamonds, and Sapphires, the true sky-blue, as well as the green, the yellow, the rose and the white.

I studied too their faults and diseases. Some stones are shadowed and opaque; others are washed and pale; others again they call clouded, when there is a whiteness or mist that hovers in the stone’s outer regions, even though its heart may be clear and true. Other stones are discoloured, or split, or stained by some alien vein of metal. Again and again I was told that a goldsmith must never show pity for these marred and maimed stones. He must be as ruthless in culling imperfection as anyone else who aspires to the favour of kings.

But it was from Morgan Wolf that I learnt the most. He taught me the tricks jewellers use to improve upon nature; how, if you steep a dull ruby in vinegar for fourteen days it will regain its fire just long enough for it to be sold. He showed me how plain rock crystal can be treated with indigo to make a counterfeit sapphire, and how to set a diamond with a dab of paint beneath to make it shine with any colour you please. He showed me the various foils made of copper, silver or gold, with which the gems’ settings were lined. These foils could be tinted, if you hung them in the smoke of burning cloth, or brightly coloured feathers. And so I shall give you this advice: if you have a dead parrot, sell it to a dishonest goldsmith. He will buy it, and give you a good price too. Wolf even kept a wicker cage of pigeons in the back of his shop, and when he had a pearl that had turned old and blind he would coax one of the birds into eating it, and retrieve it the next day from the ordure, bright and restored to youth. But there was always a falseness about these impostures, and in time I learnt to detect them all.

As I sat in the corner of Breakespere’s or Wolf’s shop with my head resting on my arm, my mind drifted into the future. I knew the life of a goldsmith was not for me. I could not have borne those hours of labour sitting at a workbench on Cheapside, or waiting at the counter for a customer like a spider watching for a fly. No, I decided: I would be a voyager, a prince among merchants. But I would not be selling my goods on Thames Street. I saw myself instead travelling up the river, perhaps in one of those same gilded barges I loved to gaze on, to Westminster Palace or Richmond, alighting at the fabled landing-places with their flags and golden dragons set on poles, and ushered inside, where royalty would await. Such were my dreams. I told no one about them; certainly not my mother.

The years were passing. Our band of three sat on the highest form in the schoolroom on Old Fish Street, where we learnt the rudiments of Latin, arithmetic and accounting from a wiry young Franciscan. Dust motes swirled in the light from the dirty windows and water gurgled in the lead cistern outside. For six years we had sat there each morning, stifling hot in summer and cold in winter, with the little charcoal brazier in the midst of the room. There were some twenty-five of us, sons of the stockfish traders and other merchants of Thames Street. I yearned to be gone; but I set myself to learn what I thought I needed for the life before me. Numbers were dull beasts in themselves, but when used to reckon up ducats into crowns or for counting profits they acquired a keen interest. Latin, the language of legal contracts, ambassadors and churchmen, I mastered as well as I might; though often, when I should have been committing some verse or other to memory, my mind was drifting restlessly north to Cheapside, and the wonders I would see there later that afternoon.

‘I shall beat you,’ murmured our master, his voice lowered as if in awe of the punishment he was about to mete out. But he never wielded the rod himself. Instead, he handed us over to a sinewy usher who had an arrow scar on his cheek from the Battle of Flodden some seven years before. Between blows, the Franciscan repeated the verses he was trying, through the medium of pain, to force into us.

‘O dulces,’ he whispered, with tears in his eyes at the beauty of the words. His deputy lifted the rod over my waiting hand. Whack! ‘… comitum …’ Whack! ‘… valete coetus.’

I went home often with red lines on my palm; but pain meant little to me. I was waiting my time. Thomas, the bright star and our mother’s darling, always knew the answers. Though a year younger, he had rapidly moved up to join John and me. Miriam Dansey never spoke of him as a future merchant. No, it was the Church for Thomas, and high promotion in it, if she knew anything at all. She had marked him down as the King’s chancellor, or at least a great bishop.

As we made our way home, the three of us, the boys from the other, more prestigious schools used to lie in wait for us. These were the scholars of Saint Paul’s and Saint Anthony’s: pigeons of Paul’s and Anthony hogs we called them, after the birds on the great cathedral, and the pigs that wandered everywhere about London, snuffling up scraps until they were slaughtered by the prior of Saint Anthony’s for his own and his brethren’s enjoyment. These proud boys used to surround us, them in their black velvet gowns as if they were clerks or king’s councillors already. They gave us the traditional challenge, ‘Placetne disputare?’ Will you dispute? And Thomas, with the light of battle in his eye, replied, ‘Placet.’ We trooped all together into the nearest churchyard and perched on the tombs. I can picture Thomas, his thin body straight, tongue licking his teeth, waiting to hear what his enemies would throw down for debate. It might be, ‘Whether a hundred petty sins are as damnable as one great one’, ‘Whether even Lucifer can be saved’, ‘Whether it is too late for the dead to repent’. He could prove anything, in his schoolboy Latin that became more fluent year by year. His opponents gradually lost their tempers, until it became a battle of satchels and heavy books, and even sticks and stones. Then John and I waded into the fight, and Thomas swung his satchel with a fury that made up for his lack of strength, until the three of us won clear, bruised but triumphant.

Our band still roamed the streets of London, but our interests had changed. We were in love, all three of us, with a certain girl who used to watch from the window of a grand, stone-built mansion on the corner of Bosse Lane, just up the street. Her dark gaze would dart up and down Thames Street as she brushed back a wisp of black hair under her hood, as if she too were restless, and looking for something that was still beyond her sight. We did not know her name, but she looked to be of an age with us, about fourteen. She came from that world I so longed for. The pearls at her throat, the ruby brooch and the silver thread in her gown all proclaimed it, even without the languid ease of her movements and the way she laughed at us and called to her sister, a sharp-eyed little ten-year-old, to come and watch our antics. Plodding home from school we used to throw our satchels down in the street, bow and kiss our hands, whoop and cut capers.

‘Sweet sugar sucket, come down!’

‘Dance with us!’

‘Be my bride!

In response, she would rest her chin elegantly on one hand and smile. Once she even rewarded John with a suggestive pout of her lips, and a finger run along the edge of her bodice and up round her throat. I found a way to climb the sheer face of that house, clinging to the barely projecting stones with fingers and toes, and pulled myself up to her window. Perching there like some strange bird, not two feet away from the soft and suddenly surprised face of the girl, I had not a notion what I ought to do. But with the other two staring up at me, there was no question I had to do something. What a mass of ill-formed scrags of wooing I spun out of my brain! I took her hand and counted off her fingers, this one pretty, that one a little too fat, oh, but that one, I die for it! She drew back her hand and laughed. ‘Oh, Susan,’ she called through the open door behind her, ‘come and listen! This boy is actually trying to woo me!’ I was a game to her, a petty amusement, like a lapdog or a juggler. I burned with anger and shame then. If she could only see what I longed to be, and not what I was, a tradesman’s son, a schoolboy, one born and bred to the stink of the Thames.

‘The Devil carry you off, Richard Dansey,’ yelled John from below. He tried to jump and follow me up the wall, but he was too heavy and slid back down again. That recalled my courage. In John’s eyes, at least, I was a conqueror. I swung myself forward, and before the girl knew what I was doing, I kissed her loudly on the lips so that John and the rest could see. She drew back with a frown: I had gone too far. Then I lowered myself carefully back down, leaping the last six feet or so. Thomas whooped and slapped me on the back, but John threw himself at me, punching me and knocking me down, so that in an instant we were rolling together in the filth at the far edge of the street. When we pulled ourselves upright to stand glaring at one another, both our faces were bleeding.

‘I will win her,’ John promised.

‘Not while I live,’ I replied.

We stood still, wary in case the other made a fresh attack. Then John laughed and held out his hand. ‘We’ll not let a girl come between us.’ He was right. His friendship mattered; though often, as now, our rivalry almost outran it. Slowly I took the offered hand. He nudged me with a mocking gleam in his eye and whispered, ‘But I will win her.’

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:

‘O dulces comitum valete coetus,

longe quos simul a domo profectos

diversae variae viae reportant.’

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.”’

Thomas nodded with gravity, and clasped our hands more tightly.

‘Swear,’ he said. ‘Swear that whatever roads lead us apart, one day we shall meet again.’

John laughed, and I did too. To us it was a curious oath. True, John was about to begin a life of voyaging as I was, following his father’s ventures into the Low Countries and the Baltic in search of timber and salt. But doubtless our future would have in it many meetings. Why should it not? Thomas, however, was serious.

‘Swear. By the Holy Virgin, we shall meet again.’

We each repeated the words. I let my hand fall from theirs and turned away. My mother had asked me to meet her in the counting house the moment I came home, to receive her detailed instructions for the voyage. A new life lay before me, and I swore an oath of my own: that I would snatch the chances offered to me, and turn them to my own ends.

4

Six weeks later I was standing in the steerage house on board the Rose as we passed the yellow stone fort and the monastery of Belém on the approach to the Roads of Lisbon. It was a hazy evening. The ship glided into harbour slowly, while I gazed ahead in excitement.

At my side stood Mr William. At sea, he had revealed a different side to himself. He was no longer the rather bedraggled tame dog who followed my mother round and took orders from the House of Dansey. With every mile we drew away from London, he stood a little taller. I saw that he understood gunnery and navigation, how to plot a course and calculate a latitude with the astrolabe, as well as possessing a fair grasp of the curiously pleasing Portuguese tongue. All these things I set myself to learn.

When we landed, William left the ship’s master to unload the woollen stuffs we were bound to carry on the outward run, and set off like a hound, sniffing round the merchants’ offices in the lanes behind the great market square that fronted the harbour, asking questions and greeting old friends. I saw one man after another shake his head and cross himself on hearing of Roger Dansey’s death. William patted them on the arm, nodded at the news he was receiving in return, and moved on. I saw in his strategy something of my father’s charm, his absolute attentiveness to the man he was speaking to, that made each one feel he was the most favoured being in the world. I was determined to watch Mr William’s methods closely, and learn fast.

These were the days of Portugal’s pride: King John the Pious, better known as Spicer John, was sending his trading ships round Africa to the Indies. There they dealt in nutmeg from the Moluccas, pepper from Serendip, ginger and cinnamon from India. The Portuguese were cutting the Arabs and Turks out of this trade altogether. They had burnt the city of Aden to the ground, and William told me that Cairo and Venice were both feeling the pain. The government’s Casa da Índia held a monopoly on every peppercorn and cinnamon stick in Lisbon, and they set their prices as high as they pleased. But, William explained, there were certain dark dens where goods came to rest that had slipped off ships unknown to the King’s Customs; all it took was a little ingenuity and boldness to find them.

Where William went, I followed. He led me through coiling streets as narrow as any in London, where dogs ran out into blinding sunlight and then back into opaque shadow, and women called out their wares: wine and honey, almonds, figs, fishing nets and twine. We stepped inside a Moorish courtyard ornamented with round brick arches, and a fountain playing in its middle.

‘It was your father discovered this place,’ William whispered to me, ‘and he was the one talked to them until they trusted us. Never think ill of him, Richard. You know he used to say it is not the profit that counts, but how you make it. Your mother thinks I am a cleverer merchant than he was. But if Roger Dansey had never made his losses, I could not have made my profits.’

I pictured them together. I imagined my father, with his quick imagination, his charm and his thirst for wonders, penetrating into every crevice of these lanes. I liked to think of him snatching the best bargains from under the noses of the competition. But I suspected that Mr William had been propping the business up for years; that without his sense, my father would have brought home many more of his profitless cargoes.

While a servant poured us wine, William negotiated with a lean, dark-faced Moor concerning two bushels of cinnamon and one of cloves. He came away rubbing his hands in satisfaction. ‘Done! We shall come back with our men to fetch them after dark. True cloves come from only two islands in the world, my boy. We were lucky to find them at the price, excellently lucky.’ He stretched. ‘A good day’s business.’ He patted his chest, and looked at me with a glint in his eye. ‘Now, my dear boy, it is time we found a brothel.’

I started involuntarily: this animated, cheerful figure was so far from the Mr William I knew at home. With his arm about my shoulder he guided me through yet more alleys to a low doorway which he appeared to know well. I wondered if my father, too, had visited this place. Inside we had our choice between six or seven ageing whores, tricked out as shepherdesses or heathen goddesses, each one clutching a wooden lyre or a milkmaid’s pail, as a badge of sophistication or innocence.

‘Is this not fine?’ William asked, as we climbed the stairs with our arms around our chosen nymphs. ‘You must learn to enjoy the sweets of travel, my Richard, as well as suffering the pains. Richard, allow me to introduce you to Woman.’ Then, as we slipped together into a darkened room, he murmured, ‘Only promise me one thing: never, never tell your mother.’

I did not tell him that John and I had already explored the bath-house on Stew Lane. The whores of Lisbon were in much the same mould, and left me displeased and brooding, wishing to go back and begin again, yet knowing that the next time would be no better than the last. On the couch next to mine, William lay back with a sigh. He was entirely satisfied. The present, with its simple pleasures, delighted him. I rolled over, and felt my purse beneath me. It had in it sixty crowns: all the inheritance that had become mine on the death of my father. I was itching to break free from Mr William and begin to spend. But it would not be easy. He had kept me close every moment, and what I planned would have to be done in secret. No breath of it must get back to my mother: not yet.

The following day we were back in the alleys. William turned to me at a street corner and told me his next associate was of a wary turn of mind, and it was better if he visited him alone: could I forgive him if he left me for an hour or two? My heart jumped. I watched him out of sight and set off swiftly by myself. I knew exactly where I was headed. While following loyally on William’s heels, I had kept my eyes open. First I went to a money-changer down on the quayside, and turned in my crowns for Portuguese cruzados. Then I plunged back into the lanes and made for a certain small shop we had passed the day before, in the shadow of the vast, fortress-like Cathedral. I went in. There, just the same as on Cheapside, were the shelves with their white cloths and the ranks of gems that gleamed in the brilliant southern light, fresh in from the Indies, from Burma and Serendip and Bengal. As I looked along them, holding this stone or that up to the sun, I felt the thrill of a deep passion for beauty satisfied. I saw diamonds. I saw Oriental rubies, Persian emeralds and pearls. But I could not yet venture that high. I forced myself to look instead at the lesser stones, the beryls and cats’ eyes and cornelians. These stones were within my grasp; but even here it would be prudent not to lay out all my money at once. Buy modestly, and risk little the first time. So spoke my mother’s voice within me. But my eyes strayed upwards again to the shelf with the nobler gemstones on it, and fixed on a topaz, of a perfect sunshine colour, without a cloud. The shopman showed me its weight, eight carats, a good size. It was of Ethiopia, I was almost certain: home to the best of this kind of gem. A topaz is almost diamond-hard, and brilliant. If you put it in the fire to leach its colour out, it will make as close an approach to an Indian diamond as you will find. But this stone had no need of adulteration. To my eye, it already surpassed a lesser diamond in beauty. Its price stood at a hundred cruzados: I had a mere seventy-one. I began to bargain. I was stern, then teasing; I lifted the topaz and frowned, pretending to see a flaw, then turned and walked away; but I came back. Some of these tricks I had seen William perform; others welled up naturally, leaving me both excited and alarmed. The shopman’s offer came down to ninety, then eighty, then seventy. My palms were sweating. I could buy it. But that would be the end of my inheritance: more than twelve pounds sterling, perhaps eighteen months’ salary for a poor priest or a clerk. If I was wrong, I would never see that money again. I knew in that instant that my life could branch in two ways. One way led to safety, ease, and dullness. The other would lead to danger and worries and, yes, if I had enough luck and skill, my heart’s deepest desires. I also knew that if I quailed at the risk now, I would never again buy a single stone. I nodded quickly, and counted out the gold.

I was in an agony of expectation until William could complete his buying. He bought furtively and cheap: and that meant he bought slowly. A cask of saffron here, three crates of pepper there. A month passed before the Rose’s holds were sealed and we put out once more, and heard the chanting of the Hieronymites in their monastery die away on the breeze as we turned our prow out to sea.

Back home in London I lost no time before taking my topaz to Christian Breakespere. It was of a shade I thought would please him; his shop always had in it a good number of stones with the shades of autumn sun, yellow opals, garnets, amber. The old man lifted the stone in his tweezers and held it to the light so that it took fire, and stained his hand with gold. Then he lowered it and looked at me with his gentle smile.

‘A fine stone. Of its kind, very fine. Shall we say sixty crowns?’

I held his gaze. ‘I had thought eighty.’

‘Had you?’ His eyes twinkled. ‘Then we had better say seventy. Done?’

‘Done.’

‘See that you go on as you have begun, young Richard. Do not disappoint me.’

I took the payment there and then, in gold. My profit was ten crowns, but it felt to me like a thousand. I ran whooping back home down Labour-in-Vain Hill and round the corner of the churchyard, the bag of gold clinking in my hand. Then I pulled myself in. It would not do to give away my secret too soon. There was a long road ahead of me first.

On our next voyage William and I went further, southward and round into the Mediterranean. In Barcelona I acquired the small steel casket with its cunning lock and slender chain, which I used, from then on, for my purchases. In Toulon I bought a sardonyx, in Genoa a lesser opal. The time after that we coasted down Italy, to Ostia and then Naples, and I added some jacinths and a small, pale amethyst. Nothing I bought was of the rarest or most prized. But I used my eyes, and always when I carried my purchases back to Goldsmiths’ Row I made a profit.

Two years passed. My mother’s grip on the business grew. She hired more agents, and sent out fresh ventures. On every ship that left London, it seemed, she had paid for a corner in the hold and was sending out wool or hemp, with instructions to fetch back some carefully chosen commodity in return. An air of excitement hung about Broken Wharf. Our men moved with quickened steps, as if aware they were part of an enterprise that was pulsing with new life. I often thought how my father would have liked to see the firm of Dansey in its new condition, and to set in train that last great venture of which he had dreamt.

On my return home, the first thing I did was to go to the schoolroom to wait for Thomas. He had opted to remain with the master there, reading deeper and deeper into works of theology and canon law. My mother spoke of him with pride. He had distinguished himself in the annual disputations held in the churchyard of the priory at Smithfield, where all the schools of London competed. Many great men had risen from those contests, Sir Thomas More among them. All that was needed was for Thomas to catch the eye of some man of rank, for nothing was possible without a patron. As we walked together along the familiar route down Old Fish Street past the market, where the gutters were clogged with fish guts and blood, Thomas told me about the plans our mother had formed for him.

‘Uncle Bennet, she says, is the best hope. You know that the Cardinal is at work founding a college?’

Our mother’s brother, Bennet Waterman, a city lawyer with a beaming face and bald head, and a devilish air of guile, had recently joined the employ of the great Cardinal Wolsey, proudest and most powerful man in the land after the King. Wolsey had need of Bennet’s services. He was proposing to liquidate a number of lesser monasteries to fund the largest foundation Oxford had ever seen, to be known as Cardinal College.

‘And you are to be one of its first scholars?’ I asked. ‘That should be pleasing to you.’

Thomas did not answer. That was the first hint, I think, that my brother smarted just as much under our mother’s domination as I did. But we were not yet ready to work as allies. That is the worst of tyranny: it divides its subjects. Instead of taking the quick way home, Thomas led me down Labour-in-Vain Hill. Just on the corner, a figure came out from the shadows. It was John. I ran to embrace him; but his air was subdued, just like Thomas’s. Soon after my first voyage to Lisbon he had embarked on his family’s great ship, Lazarus, for Germany and the Baltic, trading in the commodities that had made his father wealthy: tar and pitch, clapboard, iron and salt. Since then I had seen him only a few times.

I said, ‘So the band is all together again.’

Thomas gave a wry laugh. ‘Is it?’

He was right. Though we were all three present, we were not the same band who had joined hands and sworn our oath in the meeting of the ways two years before. But this was hardly my fault. I sensed there was a kind of shared and obstinate secrecy between my old friend and my brother. I did not know how to break it, and I began to grow annoyed. At the foot of the hill where the lane met Thames Street, Thomas and John turned right instead of bearing left for our two houses. I let them lead the way. In a few paces we found ourselves below the window where we had called and sung to the bewitching Hannah Cage. We stopped. The window was dark, and tight shut. Thomas and John both gazed up at it for a few moments. Then John said, ‘She isn’t there.’

‘You are not still haunting that girl?’ I asked with a laugh. I had not been down that way in a long time. Not that I had forgotten Hannah: I still stung from her mocking laughter. I meant to set myself up in the world before approaching that kind of girl again. Still, I resented the way Thomas and John had been looking for her without me. ‘You surprise me,’ I teased. ‘What mysterious men you are growing into.’ But neither of them smiled. The friendship that had come to us so easily seemed far out of reach. I was certain John could not be happy, plying the family trade he had always despised. Thomas’s malaise I understood less. He had always been private, content with himself and his books, bursting out only in his disputations with wild and quick displays of wit and learning. We walked back along Thames Street as a cold wind blew up from the river. Dusk was not far off. I said, ‘Come with me. To the warehouse: for the sake of old times.’

They followed me on to Broken Wharf. At the door to the warehouse we passed Martin Deller, sitting on a barrel with his wooden cudgel across his knee, keeping watch on the comings and goings of the wharf. He watched us through half-lidded eyes, and nodded. We stepped inside the old, familiar dimness, heavy with mingled scents, cinnamon, cloves, pepper. Thomas said, ‘And what of you and your trade?’

I still had not dared reveal my new trade to my mother; and that meant it was not safe to tell Thomas or John either. Instead I spoke to them of the alleys and courts of Lisbon, the wonderful bargains we struck, Mr William’s skill in trade, my own attentiveness and submission. I knew what I was telling them must sound vague and only half-truthful. It was the story of Mr William, not of myself. Thomas knew well enough that I dreamt of dealing in gems, though I had rarely spoken of it. I tapped the cases in irritation. I ached to tell them everything: the stash of gemstones that even now rested in the little casket, locked in the chest in my chamber, the bag of gold and silver that nestled by its side. Thomas and John were walking on together down one of the dim corridors between stacks of barrels. The sense of isolation was dreadful. I called out to them.

‘Wait! I have something to show you.’ I ran back out, round the corner into the house and up to my chamber overlooking Bosse Lane and the cracked stone court of Terra Incognita. Breathless, back with them, I opened my casket and set out on a barrel head the small hoard of stones I had brought back with me from my latest voyage. William and I had ranged as far as Naples, where I had acquired a batch of large citrines, showy things that the goldsmiths loved to carve; then there were a couple of Arabian rock crystals, six-pointed, and four or five brilliant red cornelians. John whistled. Thomas reached out a hand to cover the stones, and peered over his shoulder.

‘Our mother will kill you if she finds out.’

‘But you are not really making money?’ John pressed me. His face wore the old, challenging smile, that had a good tinge in it of envy. In reply I set before them my purse, heavy with coins that had all grown out of that first sixty crowns.

‘We shall never tell,’ Thomas said. ‘Now, put them away.’

I tossed a cornelian up in the air. ‘Why should I? What makes you so afraid?’

Thomas looked at me. ‘You have spent too long off with the seagulls, dear brother. You forget how things are, back here on dry land.’

‘Well, and how are they?’ I was beginning to be angry.

Thomas stood up. ‘Come with me, and you will see.’ I gathered the stones reluctantly back into the casket and followed him, down to the darkest end of the warehouse. We passed the various goods Mr William had bought on our last venture, the Lisbon spices, the French woad that was a cheap equivalent to indigo, the Turkish rugs. At the far end Thomas stopped at a case I did not recognise, marked in a curling hand, ‘Damascus silk’. I had heard of no such thing coming in. Nothing of the kind would be carried by our other agents, who worked the shorter routes to Flanders, and I was certain it had not been in the holds of the Rose. I kicked the case: it was heavy. I turned to the others.

‘So it is the old game. Is Thomas daring us to have a look? Shall we?’

I drew out my knife, and John, with a sombre smile, did the same. We worked away at the lid, casting glances back towards the door, where Martin still sat. At last it sprang clear. Inside were a few folds of crimson fabric, but underneath lay something hard. John pulled back the silks to reveal stacks and stacks of books, bound in pale new leather. I stared at them in surprise. The firm of Dansey had never dealt in such things. Books ranked among the goods my mother regarded as poor investments, like gems. And what book could be worth the trouble of bringing from overseas? John picked one up and opened it. The titlepage was covered in strange swirls of foliage. At its foot was a crucifix: but in place of Christ, there was a serpent twining up the cross, and on its head sat the Pope’s triple crown. Thomas said, ‘Well? Have you forgotten your Latin so soon? Or is it too dark for you? Darkness is best for such things, I promise you. This is On the Babylonish Captivity of the Church. And the author is Martin Luther.’ John dropped it as if he had been stung.

To be caught merely opening such a book meant arrest, imprisonment in the Lollards’ Tower by Saint Paul’s where the heretics go, interrogation by the Cardinal; excommunication and death at the stake. Rumours ran round of the fearsome contents of these books, of the fiery rhetoric that smashed down all you thought was sure. They said that if you once read a book of Luther you would never be the same again. We stood for some moments, staring down at them. Then I reached out my hand, touched the leather of the fallen book and picked it up. The others watched me intently. I flicked beyond the serpent on the cross, and read as quickly as my Latin allowed, jumping from page to page. The Pope was portrayed as a ruthless huntsman, demon of tyranny and avarice, the greedy shopkeeper who released souls from Purgatory for gold. I saw the powers of the priests one by one refuted. There was no such thing as the Last Rites. The priests had invented it for profit, twisting the meaning of an apocryphal verse. Priestcraft has no power to conjure the blood and body of Christ into the sacrament; the Communion is an act of Faith, and no mere Work of man. Confession too had to be Faith, not Work; the task the priests set us, contrition for all our sins, is impossible; our sins are so great, so far beyond the reach of our memories and minds. Even the best works of our lives, of which we are proudest, will turn out on examination to be terrible sins. None of the tyrannical ceremonies of a rotten Church can save us; only Faith, Faith, Faith. I read on, amazed, until Thomas struck the book from my hands.

‘That is enough. Now do you see?’

I was beginning to. My mother had no love of Luther, I was sure. But there were many in London who would pay handsomely for those books, and few who dared bring them into the country from Germany where they were printed. The profit for her in that deadly case of books was large and certain: always provided she did not get caught. It was a sign of just how confident she was in her own power, and how far she was prepared to take her policy of ruthless and finely judged risk.

Thomas put the lid in place and began forcing the nails back in with the haft of his little knife.

‘You think you can simply strike off on some trade of your own?’ he hissed. ‘She is the one who decides what is bought and sold. She chooses the risks, and takes them. What will you do if she cuts you off? I promise you, she’ll do it.’

‘What makes you so sure of that?’

Thomas looked down. ‘Because she has threatened me with it. And I am the one she calls her favourite.’

That sobered me. I could not imagine what peaceable Thomas might have done to stir that degree of anger in the Widow of Thames Street. Thomas and John met one another’s eyes. That veil of secrecy was back. I was as far apart from them as ever. When the last nail was in the lid we turned swiftly away and made for the door. Martin watched us leave with a stony expression.

‘I don’t envy you,’ said John. ‘Not with your family. I had rather take the clapboards, stockfish and pig iron, even though they do bore me to death and beyond.’

He turned away across the stones towards Timber Hythe. It was beginning to rain. Thomas made for the door of our house. ‘Are you coming?’

‘Soon.’ I was thinking hard. Thomas was right. But yet, in our mother’s recklessness, I saw my moment of opportunity. I walked quickly back inside the warehouse, crossed to the stairs at the far end, and climbed to the counting house.

Miriam Dansey looked up at me in surprise. She had a sea chart of the western Mediterranean spread out before her, the jagged coasts thick with place names, the open seas scored by myriad compass lines. Without any ceremony I set my casket down on the table, turned the key and opened it up. In the light of her two candles, the cornelians and the citrines gleamed like burning coals. My mother stood up slowly, her eyes fixed on the stones. Then she reached out a long forefinger, poked at them and drew it back as if they were scorpions. At last she looked at me, her face white, the skin around her mouth twitching.

‘Christ and all his angels!’ She flicked the casket shut. ‘I should have forbidden you to travel. I should never have trusted you off and alone. You are just a baby. No: worse, and I know where you had this mischief from. Dead? No, he is not dead. I am looking at him.’ She shouted beyond me, down the stairs to the warehouse. ‘William! William! Where is he? What was the fool thinking? I told him to watch you and keep you out of folly!’

‘What about you?’ I answered. ‘Do you not think those books in the warehouse just a little bit reckless?’

She sat down again and glared at me with her steely eyes.

‘I see Martin has been somewhat lax in his guard duties,’ she said quietly. She rapped the table with her hand. ‘Those are entirely different. Everyone knows what they are worth. We buy in Antwerp for a crown, and sell here for three. Cash trebled in less than two weeks. Pure profit, if no one talks. And they won’t,’ she added, with a fierce narrowing of her eyes. ‘But these!’ She lifted the lid again and took out one of the stones, a pale, gleaming citrine the size of a walnut. ‘This might be anything. Yellow glass.’

In reply, I took out my purse, loosened the strings and poured a cascade of silver and gold over her map. The effect was pleasingly dramatic. Covering the coastlines of France, Spain and the Barbary Coast were a dozen or so angel nobles, discs of gold an inch broad worth six shillings and eightpence each. There were nine of the larger royals or rose nobles, at ten shillings, and mixed among them some thirty gold crowns, at four shillings and twopence each, as well as gold half crowns and a good number of silver shillings and groats. My mother’s eyes opened in surprise. She leaned forward, and stirred the coins with her finger. Then she looked up.

‘You made this? Out of gems?’

‘Nothing but.’

‘Hm!’ She drew back. She tried not to show it, but I knew she was impressed. Money spoke to her, whatever its source. ‘Well, you may risk your coins if you choose. But Mr William’s is the real trade, and you will learn it. Come back in a year, and show me what you have then. If you have anything left at all.’

5

For the moment, I was content to obey my mother. I was growing, I thought to myself, maturing just like a gemstone deep in the bowels of the earth, that advances slowly to its perfection. I was acquiring a good grasp of Italian, and fair Portuguese and Spanish: accomplishments of value, since few enough men abroad would trouble to learn a lesser tongue like English. My eye for stones was getting sharper with every trip, and my reserves of coin were growing too. Soon I would be able to buy one or two of the dearer stones. It was time I began to look ahead to the next stage in my ambitions. I had set myself to become a merchant in jewels: not a mere retailer who brought in stones to Breakespere and Wolf and Heyes, but a man of standing who dealt directly with the Court. That meant somehow getting close to that wondrous, gilt and tinselled world. Just as for Thomas, I thought, my best hope lay with our uncle.

Bennet Waterman thought very highly of himself these days. He was one of Cardinal Wolsey’s audiencers: a legal clerk who prepared chancery bills, and generally took on any business that the Cardinal’s labyrinthine affairs required. It brought Uncle Bennet within a breath of the Court. He wore a velvet gown with silk lining, and a silver brooch with a small garnet in his hat. When Cardinal Wolsey was in residence at York Place, his vast house in Westminster, Uncle Bennet often took a boat down the river and paid us a visit on Thames Street. In the winter draughts of our candlelit parlour, while my mother and Mr William discussed the latest tariffs on pepper, Uncle Bennet took Thomas and me aside, his portly belly creaking after one of our generous but plain dinners. He enjoyed playing the courtier before his sister; and even though she might scoff at his posturing and airs, he was a connection she could not afford to despise, at least for the sake of Thomas.

‘Ah, King Henry. He is the flower of chivalry, my boy. Have I told you how he came to marry Queen Katherine? He was only eleven when he became betrothed. She was seventeen, the widow of his poor brother, Prince Arthur. For six years after that their engagement lasted, while the late King fussed and grubbed and tried to prise her dowry out of Spain. He would never let his son go, you know. They say he envied him terribly, for his looks and his strength. He kept him locked up, like some poor virgin in a tale. But when King Henry the Seventh died, what did our young King do? Married her at once. Dowry or no dowry. No knight out of an old romance could have done fairer.’

That Christmas of 1523, when I was back in England after another voyage with Mr William, Uncle Bennet smuggled me into a general audience in the King’s great hall at Westminster. He whispered to me to keep close by his side, and not to draw attention. I stood among the pages and lesser followers of the Cardinal, and looked at the ranks of great personages where the various factions and powers of the Court were on display. My heart was beating hard. I had never before been this close to the King. There he sat, immobile, a daunting and powerful presence: our sovereign lord, King Henry the Eighth. He was in his early thirties, as handsome a man as there was in the world, large-limbed, with a long, lean face, bearded, even though the common English fashion was to go clean-shaved. He darted his gaze about the hall. He was in a towering temper: news had just reached England that the Turks had driven the Knights of Saint John from Rhodes. An envoy from the Pope was before him and his powerful voice thundered repeatedly, ‘I am Defender of the Faith!’ The title was a gift of the Pope in which Henry took great pride.

As he was speaking, I took in every aspect of his appearance with a goldsmith’s eye. His black velvet cap had a badge in it bearing a large, pyramid-cut diamond. His shirt collar was of gold thread set with emeralds; his doublet was sewn with gold in a lozenge pattern, and at every crossing a cluster of pearls. Round his neck was a gold chain set with great table-cut sapphires and amethysts; a heavy pendant hung from this chain, and in it shone four dark rubies. At his belt was a dagger, its sheath set with yet more stones. He wore rings on the forefingers of both hands, one an opal, one a diamond; and over his crimson silk hose, below his right knee, was the Garter, enamelled and set with pearls. When he moved, a sparkle of jewels darted from his chest, his fingers, his legs, just as if he were God himself seated in his glory.

Beside him sat Queen Katherine, almost forty, with a plump, heavily painted face and a jutting chin. At her bosom she wore a gold cross and several chains of rubies and pearls: doubtless a part of the wardrobe she had brought from Spain. I knew from my friends on Goldsmiths’ Row that she seldom bought anything new. Seated with her was the Princess Mary, a small, half-pretty seven-year-old with dark eyes, the only surviving child of Henry and his Queen after fourteen years of marriage. It appeared more and more likely that she would one day be Queen Regnant herself, and so an aspiring merchant would do well to cultivate her favour. But that was far in the future. The real prize was the King.

I knew that Henry acquired mountains of gems each year, and that he had made Cornelius Heyes and the others rich. The trade was there, but how to break in on it? Everything flowed through the hands of those few great goldsmiths. If I only had a patron at Court. I looked along the ranks of the great courtiers. There was Cardinal Wolsey, with two tall priests carrying the silver crosses, nine feet high, that represented his authority as Papal Legate and Archbishop of York. His pride was immense. At a distance stood his almoner, his chamberlains and treasurers, and then in a gaggle round us the constables, the audiencers, the clerks, and even the official whose job it was to melt the Cardinal’s sealing wax. I suspected that Uncle Bennet, a humble lawyer, did not have as much influence with the Cardinal as he liked to pretend.

Then, across from the Cardinal, were the other, rival, powers at Court: there was the wise and ironical Sir Thomas More, who had just been made Speaker of the House of Commons; and stern Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, the tough old soldier and veteran of Flodden who had spent years watching, greedily and in vain, for the fall of the Cardinal. He was a figure of little practical power, though much patronage and grandeur. To enter the graces of any of these men was almost as difficult as approaching King Henry himself. What I needed was a chance, an advantage, a piece of luck.

In 1524, on the anniversary of my visit to my mother, I once more opened my casket to her. By now my collection included a small but perfect sapphire, which I handed to her as a gift. She rolled the stone under her finger, then pushed it back to me over the table.

‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘Sell it. You may yet need your pennies. Carry on, my Richard. You have not persuaded me yet.’

Somehow, the old band was never all in London at the same time. In the autumn I was home once more. But by then John had left for Hungary, on a venture concerning salt. The great mines there were threatened by the savage advance of the Turks, and the house of Lazar was looking for a swift profit before the market was closed to them.

‘He has found his adventure,’ commented Thomas, as we sat together on the wharf, his eyes on the moving swirls of the river. ‘If he lives through it.’ Thomas was more and more downcast these days. Still he was reading with the Franciscan. The Cardinal’s college was not yet ready; the monasteries destined for funding it refused to disband.

‘Can you not find a place somewhere else?’ I prompted him.

He shook his head. ‘Our mother says wait. A little longer.’

The next summer, 1525, I turned twenty. Over these years I boiled with discontent. Ventures with Mr William had lost their savour for me. I had learnt all that I could from him, and my profits were slow. The Portuguese had no real interest in gems, even though their ships touched in at all the best markets: Surat, Calicut, Pegu. No, ‘Let it be spice,’ declared their King, chief grocer of Portugal, and spice it was. The city I longed for was Venice: that was the place for stones, as well as every other luxury that could give life opulence and wonder. When the day came to display my treasures to my mother again I poured out before her opals and amethysts, garnets, jacinths and pearls, and threw down my three purses of gold beside them with a loud chink. She raised one eyebrow.

‘If you would only lend me a little money,’ I protested. ‘If you would let the Rose trade a little further.’

She sat back in her chair and stared at me with her ice-blue eyes. ‘And why should I “let” you do anything of the kind? As long as you follow the firm of Dansey, my boy, Naples is our furthest port. Between London and there we can find all that we need.’

But her eyes as they lingered on my jewels had a thoughtful gleam. With the right proposition I believed I might just win her over.

I pestered Uncle Bennet for openings at revels and mummeries, audiences, maying, processions, pilgrimages, feasts … He was a hard man to catch up with, that summer; he was involved in Wolsey’s great visitation of the abbeys, that squeezed so much gold from the abbots and raised so many angry murmurs. Nevertheless, he obliged me when he could, half out of liking for me, I thought, and half to prove his importance to my mother.

As winter came, the Court stayed out of London. The plague was running fiercely, and we crept about, all of us, with herbs clasped to our faces, keeping well clear of anyone we saw on the streets. ‘The King is keeping Christmas in the country at Eltham Palace,’ Bennet told us. ‘The Secret Christmas, they are calling it. Still, I believe I can smuggle you in, if you have a mind to it.’ I arrived there by night, and Bennet helped me to slip into the Great Hall, mingling with the servants who were serving gold cups and bowls of wine. I stopped in the doorway in amazement. The hall was a forest: trees of green damask stood in groves, and from their branches hung leaves of beaten gold and bunches of gilded acorns that flashed in the glare from the burning torches. Between the trees were wondrous beasts, antelopes and oliphants and lions made of canvas with gold crowns and tails of iron wire, and jesters dressed as wild men who leapt about in masks draped with ivy, letting out shrill shrieks and hoots. Laughter and music filled the room. Round the forest were bowers of silken roses, and through these the King and his courtiers danced to the sound of shawms and violins. They were in masks too, gilded and smiling, the men all with beards of gold thread. The couples dipped their heads beneath the hoops of the arbours, the ladies’ pearl chains clinking on their bosoms. It made me burn with longing as I watched from my place among the butlers and pages, and the bowls of steaming wine. Why should I be apart from all this? What iron law kept me a tradesman in bales of woad and boxes of spice, while these golden creatures taunted me with their laughter? In an instant I grabbed up a mask that was lying by the wine, and slipped among them. The dancers separated and whirled beneath the arbours, and I was swept after them, the fiddlers skipping among us and the wild men chattering, the men and the ladies gasping and laughing.

One girl especially I noticed, wilder and freer than all the rest, flinging her head back as she spun round, the black hair streaming from beneath her hood. She was strong-hipped and tall; her breasts pressed against the white cambric stomacher stretched across the opening of her sea-blue gown. Around her neck she wore two ropes of good pearls of the Orient, which descended her bust and vanished down beneath her bodice. When the dancers separated briefly I darted after her through the glittering trees and caught her hands. Her eyes, dark brown behind the gold of her mask, sparkled with surprise. We swung together between the trees, while the shawms bayed and the violins sang. I was, in that instant, one of them, a blessed, golden being in a world of beauty and gems. I swung her fast, and she put her head back and laughed. But the music was dying already, and the dance swaying to a halt. We stopped at the foot of an arbour of paper roses. They had become torn by the violence of the dance, and lay scuffed underfoot.

The girl said, ‘Are you not going to let go of my hands?’

Already I was behaving like a fool, and showing I was no courtier. ‘Only if you show me your face.’

I released her hand, and just as she lifted off her mask, so I did mine. Her face was round, soft, alight with excitement: an excitement so far from the world of trade that it made me gasp. She cared for nothing, nothing but the pleasure of the moment and the delight of being alive. She gave me a sense of infinite promise. With a girl like this beside me I could go anywhere, become anything. Even as I was thinking these thoughts, I saw the girl’s face change, and take on a curious smile. And yes, I saw it too. I had not seen that face for six years, but there was no doubt whatsoever. The girl was Hannah Cage. She threw back her head and laughed.

‘The boy who played in the street! What, have you inherited a dukedom?’

The music began again, I slipped my mask back on to hide my annoyance and took her hand. We whirled together back into the figures.

‘Not yet,’ I told her. ‘And you? You left home? Married?’

My heart began to pound as I asked it. She laughed.

‘My father bought us a finer town house. Away from the stink of the river. Married! To marry me they would have to catch me. And courtiers are so horribly slow.’

‘But I caught you. Did I not?’

‘For a short time. But I am going somewhere I do not think you will find me.’

A jester tumbled and shrieked in front of us with a jangle of bells. I relaxed my hold for an instant and Hannah broke away, to vanish back into the dance. I ducked under the trees and ran after her; in a clearing I looked left and right, darted to the left towards the door of the hall, and then ran right up against my Uncle Bennet. He frowned in displeasure, and shook his head. I was furious and shamed. He was right: if I was caught, he would be the one to suffer. The chase was over. For the moment.

After Christmas, the plague began to ease. Bennet told me the King was moving his Court a little closer to London, and would be holding a great joust for all the nobility at his palace of Greenwich on Shrove Tuesday, to mark the beginning of Lent. ‘But this time,’ he added sternly, ‘you must be discreet.’ I thanked him. My meeting with Hannah Cage had made me greedy for more. And besides, if I was ever to break into the Court world I knew I had to keep watch, and follow the King in all his doings the way a thief follows his prey. So there I stood, on the morning of the sixth of February 1526, in the midst of the crowd at the Tiltyard, the open field that runs all down the eastern flank of the palace of Greenwich. Behind me rose its towers and pinnacles, while beyond began the low houses of the village, crouching like beggars at the King’s gate.

Down the centre of the field were the barriers, built some six feet high of stout planks, to separate the jousters. To my right was a huge cluster of tents. I saw squires and armourers moving between them carrying tongs, hammers and bags of rivets, stablemen in their particoloured tabards and gentlemen waiters in white satin carrying steaming hot wine. There was the King’s great lodging pavilion, its conical roofs topped with gilt dragons and lions, where men must now be helping King Henry into his armour. Further off were the cook-tents, with smoke rising from vents in their roofs, and the camp of the King’s mariners who had come off their ships bringing capstans and cranes to set up all the various pavilions. Some thirty trumpeters and drummers on horseback stood waiting.

At last I saw the flaps of the great tent drawn back, and out rode King Henry. He was in full armour from head to toe, brilliant steel where it could be seen, but draped all over with surcoats of cloth of gold and silver, on which was some device in crimson, and a motto or poesy snaking round it. His horse too was in armour, with crimson ostrich feathers on its brow. The King held his lance upright in his hand, gilt and painted, a tremendous length, yet cunningly hollowed for lightness and ease. Eleven other riders came out from among the tents and fell into line behind him, all in the same colours, and they came trotting forward, their horses kicking up clods of the muddy turf. With a tremendous sudden clangour the drums beat and the trumpets sounded. The crowd around me took off their hats, and I cheered with the loudest of them and cried, ‘God save you! God save King Harry!’

A second line of horsemen gathered at the lists at the opposite end, all in coats of green and crimson satin. Both troops rode to the Queen’s pavilion halfway down the field, where they dipped their lances in salute. Beyond them I scanned the courtiers ranged on either side of the Queen, searching for signs of Hannah, but without success.

I saw the armourers helping the King lower his lance into position. This was no simple matter. The butt end of the lance was secured to the body armour by clips, and the King’s right gauntlet was hooked over the lance and locked by more fastenings to his left arm. Another pair of clips caught the lance firmly in the crook of his left elbow, resting on the notch in his shield. Then, with legs straight, and his jousting spurs reaching up on their long steel wires to touch the horse’s flanks, King Henry set himself in motion.

His horse’s hoofs tumbled forward in turn, never breaking into a canter or a gallop, in the peculiar, rolling gait called the amble that is proper for the joust: for only with this steady gait can the rider hope for any kind of accuracy in his hit. Like a stormcloud the King rolled forward, not fast, but with an immense, calm strength, and his lance dead level. The Marquis of Exeter, one of Henry’s oldest childhood friends, launched himself into an amble on the other side of the barrier, closing the distance with the King. He was skilful too, but the sway of his lance showed that he lacked King Henry’s strength and control. When the pair met, the King’s lance struck full on Exeter’s shield with a bang. The lance shattered, Exeter swayed and his own lance swung clear. I cheered and huzzaed for the King, whose broken lance marked him as the victor. He rode on, wheeled round and then came slowly back up to the top of the course. He passed by not ten feet away from me, and I had my first clear view of the design on his coat. I stared after him. My palms began to sweat, and my pulse beat in my ears.

What I saw, repeated on the King’s back, on his shield, and on his horse’s flank, was a crimson heart in flames. This heart was trapped in a press, perhaps a wine-press or the sort that book-binders use. Beneath it curled the motto, DECLARE JE NOS. Declare I dare not. This was the heart of a tortured lover, caught in the agony of a secret and unrequited passion. Four years ago, when I had just returned from my first venture to Lisbon, the King had ridden to a joust wearing just such an emblem. His badge then was a wounded heart, and the other jousters sported a variety of matching symbols, hearts shattered, hearts chained, hearts in prison. Their mottoes had groaned in concert: ‘Without remedy’, ‘My heart is broken’, ‘Between joy and pain’. No one at the time read the meaning in it; but shortly afterwards it became known Henry had begun an affair with a new mistress. Mrs Mary was a niece of the great Duke of Norfolk, married to a certain William Carey, the King’s distant cousin and another of his childhood friends. She had been at the French Court, and now she was one of the Queen’s ladies, while Carey became an obliging Court cuckold.

I had watched the progress of this affair from Goldsmiths’ Row, where I saw in preparation the gold lockets, the crystal scent bottles, the crosses and pendants bloated with rubies and pearls. I cursed my luck that I was too young and too poor to share in the profits of King Henry’s love. In time the flow of jewels from Cheapside to the King’s various palaces slowed. Indeed, according to Uncle Bennet, the King had recently handed Mrs Mary back to her husband, pregnant with Henry’s child. The King’s wounded heart of four years ago had healed. But now this: a heart once more in flames, and Declare I dare not.

A fresh pair of riders thundered past, their lances wavering and failing to hit, and the audience groaned in disappointment. Who was she, I wondered. One of his wife’s ladies, perhaps, as Mary and his previous mistress, Bessie Blount, had been? But whoever the woman was, I was in no doubt that this, at last, was my moment: the chance, the piece of fortune I had been waiting for. The spoils for those who supplied jewels to feed the King’s passion would be immense. And this time I was determined to have my share.

As I travelled back up to London, squeezed on a bench between the tiltboat’s other passengers, to the rattle and bump of the oars and the splash of riverwater against my back, my mind hammered at the problem before me. It was exasperating. I had waited a long time. I had schooled myself, trained my senses, my skill and my judgement until they were fine tools, ready for use. But if I was to make a serious attempt I had to have funds on a scale beyond anything I could raise on my own. There was no way round it: I would have to ask my mother. My pride rebelled against it, going to her begging. I would have to fight her old distrust of the bewitchment of beautiful stones that had cost her husband so much money down the years.

I found my mother sitting at her table in the counting house, with stacks of glittering coins before her: French écus, Portuguese cruzados, Genoese ducats. All these she would weigh before taking them to the Royal Mint to be changed for English crowns. She still looked young. Her hair was dark and waved, and always protruded somewhere or other from beneath her black widow’s hood. A fire burned in the small hearth, and the scent of cloves from the warehouse below mingled with the tang of burning charcoal. William Marshe was hunched on the high-backed settle with an account book open before him, his long face wearing its usual melancholic expression. It was growing dark. A number of tin lanterns stood on the floor, unlit, for the use of our watchmen at night. I sat down by the fire facing William.

My mother spoke without looking up at me. ‘And so you have something to say.’

It was harder to begin than I had expected. There was no use in trying to excite her over my ambitions, by painting for her the pomp and seduction of the Court. That would only turn her against me at the start. And so I went straight to the crux of it, the King’s device and motto, and the signification I read in it: the flames of passion ignited once more, to replace the discarded Mrs Mary. While I spoke, her eye rested on me like a jeweller’s, probing intently for the flaw in a stone.

‘A new mistress,’ said my mother, leaning back. ‘Really? Then why have you heard nothing of it, you with your long ears for Court news? The King’s lovers are commonly the very first to boast of their advancement.’

I leant forward from the fireplace. ‘I told you: Declare I dare not. He is still wooing her: he is on the chase. He is teasing her, tantalising her, just as she may be tantalising him. The motto, the heart in the press: everything indicates she has not yet surrendered.’

Miriam Dansey put her arms behind her head, yawned, and then laughed. ‘Not surrendered! Now, there is a wonder! Why should she not? I would, if King Henry came and heaped me with jewels.’

I clapped my hands and jumped up, delighted that she had played right into my hands. ‘There! You have said it. What will a king do when he is thwarted in love?’ I strode around the room, letting my long shadow dart out in the firelight. ‘He will bathe her in sapphires, he will pile her with diamonds, he will buy all Persia and the Indies and lay them at her feet. And I …’

My mother let out a shrill laugh. ‘Now I see it! You think that you will be the one to sell the King his jewels! Oh, my mad, mad boy! The King will buy from Mr Cornelius, and Mr Christian, and Morgan Wolf. The men he knows and trusts. Why should he trouble himself with you?’

I turned on her. ‘My jewels will be better.’

‘Hm!’ It was a grunt of amusement. ‘How, in the name of all the saints, will you accomplish that?’

I swung myself down on to a stool and crouched towards her table. William, I noticed, had his eye on me. He was sharp, for all his dropsical appearance, and he was measuring me up just as surely as my mother. ‘The stones that flow into London come to us from Antwerp or Bruges, and before that from Genoa or Venice. The Italians and French keep the best for themselves: Heyes and the others simply sit on Cheapside and wait for what the traders bring them. I shall not do that. I shall go to Venice, and catch the gems as they land from the East. I shall bring back such stones as have not been seen. I shall …’

‘Why not go further?’ said William, with his half-smile. ‘To Cairo, or even to Serendip or Golconda?’ He was testing me, trying out just how fantastically high my plans might soar. I shook my head.

‘There is too little time. To make my profit, I must be in with the first. When the lady succumbs to the King’s charms, the flow of gifts will slow. Henry will no longer want what is most rare and fine. A few little tokens will do. Like the New Year’s gifts he still sends to Bessie Blount.’

William sat back and nodded. ‘I see I am to lose you, Mr Richard.’ He glanced across at my mother, who tapped the table with her fingers in impatience.

‘I shall be the one to decide that.’ She turned back to me. ‘And so you are asking me for a loan. A very, very large one. That is it?’

I stood before her and nodded. The Widow of Thames Street frowned. She rapped the Dansey seal on the table and said, ‘I shall settle nothing until the Rose comes home.’

Mr William was due to set out any day, and myself along with him. I had hoped to avoid this voyage. I put my hands on the table. ‘But that will be too late: speed is everything. Surely you see that?’

My mother stood up slowly and rested her hands next to mine. She said softly, ‘I see you are running ahead a little too fast.’

I looked back at her, angry. ‘Very well,’ I told her. ‘Let the Rose sail first. But I am not going with her. My place is here, where I can watch the Court.’

My mother drew in her breath and lowered her brows for a fight. But then she appeared to change her mind, and smiled. ‘As you prefer.’

I turned and walked out of the room. It was two weeks before the Rose at last dropped downstream from the Tower with the tide and vanished out to sea, carrying her usual outward cargo of dank-smelling English woollens. It might be months before her return. I waited with impatience. I tried to believe that my mother intended to use some of the profits of the Rose’s venture to fund my own; but more likely she hoped to weaken my purpose through delay. I spent the time moodily patrolling the town for news. I had to know I was right: and I had to know the lady’s name. I needed to have a face, a form, a mode of beauty in my mind before I began to buy: for stones are as varied and fickle as women themselves. But my Uncle Bennet could tell me nothing of any new royal mistress. All the news from Court was of the ambassadors from France, and the new Holy Catholic League that the Pope was forming to fight the overreaching ambition of the Empire and fling the Spanish and German armies out of Italy. His Holiness had been joined in this alliance by Florence and Venice, and then by France, and these states were busily employed in raising armies. But our own King, after swift deliberation, had decided on strict neutrality. That way, said Bennet, Henry could be the peace-maker, the one all the other powers came to, begging for help and offering favours in return. With this pleasant thought, King Henry had left London to spend the summer hunting. The Court vanished into the deep country, and news dried up completely.

I might almost have thought Henry’s new love was a chimera conjured only from my own fancy but for the flow of jewels out of Goldsmiths’ Row. In April there was a gold brooch in the figure of a heart, black enamelled and set with five rubies and five diamonds, supplied by Morgan Wolf; the next month a rope of sixty pearls, and the month after that a gold frame for a portrait miniature, garnished with a falcon with eyes of emerald. All these objects disappeared into the King’s hands. Each time I brought the news to my mother, as fresh proof. I was convinced that I was right. But who was she? No one could tell me of a woman who had received these jewels, or been seen wearing them.

In July the Rose returned at last and anchored below London Bridge. I stood on the wharf, watching the boat come in with Mr William in the bow. He took my hand briefly and went straight up to the counting house. I paced the wharf anxiously, glancing repeatedly up at the window, while the men unloaded the goods from the lighters, nutmegs and pepper and casks of sack. Dusk was gathering, and mists rose from the river. Then I saw William peer from behind the diamond panes and beckon me up. I walked quickly through the dim aisles of the warehouse, climbed the wooden stairs to the counting house and stepped inside.

Still my mother made me wait. In one hand she held a paper covered in figures, which she was checking rapidly, her lips working, while the sands ran through the narrow waist of an hourglass framed in ebony. She grudged time spent checking her underlings’ accounts, and used the glass’s discipline to make herself read fast. Her other hand rested on the respected Dansey seal, a broad disc of brass with a polished wooden knob, which she toyed with as she read. I sat down in a chair facing her. My heart was beating hard.

Suddenly she put down her figures, took hold of the hourglass and laid it on its side, halting the flow of time. She looked at me a moment with her head tilted, still playing with the seal. Then she tapped it on the table three times, and pushed towards me a sheet of paper. I snatched it up and ran my eyes greedily down it. At sight of this bill I request that you pay to the said Richard Dansey, merchant, of Thames Street in the City of London, for value received, the sum of one thousand marks in Venetian ducats or bonds as shall be agreed, on or before Michaelmas in this year of Grace 1526. It was a bill of exchange addressed to the Venice branch of the great Nuremberg banking house of Anton Fugger, signed at the bottom, Miriam Dansey, next to a large red disc of wax pressed with the rearing wyvern of the firm. Finally I had it: the thing I had longed to hold in my hands for all those months. And the sum was ample, more than I had dared hope for. I let out a whoop of delight. ‘So you are really funding my venture.’

My mother nodded, but did not smile.

‘You may not be so thankful soon. You have not seen what else I have written for you.’ She pulled the bill back and slid towards me a second paper, which I took and quickly read. It was a bill of sale: one of those crafty instruments by which usury was conducted without sin, so that the business of the City could go on, while keeping itself free from the Church courts. By this bill, I acknowledged the receipt of a thousand marks, and sold to her in return a twelve hundred mark chunk of my business. At the bottom was the space for me to sign. Twenty per cent interest to my mother, that was the meaning of it: only after that would I make a profit. It was a steep rate. She had made not a single concession to the fact I was her son. She was investing in a venture, that was all: and a venture in which she had very little trust. Anger rose up in me as I set the paper down. I had prepared myself for her refusal, but not this. In a single move she was both helping me and throwing up another barrier in my way.

‘You are right,’ I told her. ‘I am feeling a good deal less thankful already.’

She sat back in her chair, stroking the polished wooden knob of the seal, her face wearing a faint smile.

‘Having second thoughts?’ she said.

I reached for one of the goosefeather pens that stood in the pewter inkpot, and tapped off the excess ink.

‘By God, no.’

‘Wait!’ She put the seal down and leant towards me. ‘Dear Richard. You are taking a very great risk. And you are asking me to share in that risk too. Would it not be far, far better to stay with me? Work for the family business? Go where I advise, with our dear, trusted old Mr William to look after you? Build yourself up little by little: that is the best way in trade. You cannot swallow the whole world in one bite, my Richard. Why do you want to strike out fresh paths of your own, when there is so much for you here?’

Her voice was soft and seductive. Before her on the table lay the two documents: one threatening me with its brutal terms of repayment; the other, I suspected, intended to daunt me with the sheer size of the loan. I saw plainly what she was up to. If I embarked on my venture and succeeded, she made a handsome profit; the thought of those two hundred marks doubtless attracted her. If I failed, I would be in her debt, and entirely in her power. I would have to work for years to pay off what I owed her, travelling where she sent me, and buying what she told me to buy. She would be able to remind me forever after that she had been right and I had been wrong. I would become her creature, a humble minion of the house of Dansey. Even if she never saw her money again, power like that was cheaply bought at a thousand marks. There would be no question of my ever affording another venture on my own.

That was if I failed. But to succeed: to be my own man, to escape the Thameswater stink, the murky family world that had become a prison to me, and rise into a sphere my mother could not guess at, that was worth any risk.

The ink on the pen tip had gone dry. I forced myself not to show my rage. I said, ‘Do you have any other conditions to add before I sign?’

She rapped the seal on the table, suddenly irritated.

‘Only that you take along a family servant, whom I shall pick for you. I would not like to think of you entirely alone on your wild errand. That is acceptable?’

‘Very well.’

I dipped the pen once more in the pot, angrily splashing ink on its pewter rim. ‘You will have your twelve hundred marks,’ I told her. ‘And I shall make my profit, I promise you.’

I signed the document with a quick flourish, R. Dansey. It was done. I had mortgaged myself: there was no going back. My mother pulled the paper towards her and handed me the bill of exchange. She looked at me, thoughtful, and a little surprised, as if she had not expected me to accept her bargain. I stood up.

‘Listen to me, my Richard,’ she said. ‘You have a sharp eye for gems, I will grant you that. But, by God, you have the heart of a child. See that you do not go the way of your father.’

I looked back at her levelly. ‘I am following in no one’s footsteps. Not his, and certainly not yours.’

She looked back up at me with a faint frown. ‘I am very much aware of that.’

I folded the bill of exchange crisply in three, and stooped to kiss her on the cheek. Then I walked quickly out of the room, down the stairs and through the warehouse. I was fuming. That second document seemed to drag at me like a stone about my neck; a bargain with the Devil that one day I would be forced to pay. But as I emerged into the moist air of the riverside, my anger and fears left me, and I felt only exhilaration. That night, as I lay in my bedchamber, unsleeping, I worked out the various conversions and began to conceive all that that money might mean. A mark is a measure of silver, worth two-thirds of a pound, and so a thousand marks are six hundred and sixty-six pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence sterling. At the current rate that made two hundred and ninety-six ounces of gold, or a little over three thousand Venetian ducats. Sufficient, I reckoned, for some fifteen good diamonds, or else maybe twenty diamonds of poorer water, and twenty of the finest opals. Or a hundred Oriental amethysts. Perhaps I might even stretch further, if I bought wisely. How to choose? A dozen different schemes for a collection of jewels of intoxicating wonder presented themselves to me.

In the days that followed I counted out my own modest savings and changed them into bills, while Christian Breakespere and even William Marshe volunteered small loans of their own. I made a last effort to discover the mistress’s name, going round all my trade connections and pressing Uncle Bennet to use his wiles at Court. But to no purpose. It was galling: without that knowledge my whole venture was at risk. I considered putting off my departure. But I had waited far too long already; if I was to have any chance of success I must sail now, even in my ignorance. I was convinced the mistress’s name would not stay secret long. I begged Uncle Bennet to discover it, and write to me as soon as possible. He nodded his bald head in assent.

‘Well, well, I will do all I can. And in return you must promise to send me news of Italy: her politics and the progress of the wars. Send me rumours, send me secrets. I have a particular reason for asking this of you, my Richard. See that you do not fail me, and I shall do my best for you in return.’

On the night before I was due to sail I folded my various bills of exchange inside my casket and nestled it down next to my skin. My great venture was about to begin.

PART 2
Scythian Emerald: a Courtesan among Stones

My enterprise is slow and late in coming,

My hope unsure, while my desire mounts and grows;

To abandon or pursue, alike I grudge.

PETRARCH, CANZONIERE

6

A month later I stepped up on to the great wooden bridge that spans the Grand Canal in Venice. I was swelling with pride and excitement. Crowds pressed round me, noblemen with their servants, girls selling nuts and oranges, and merchants of every nation, Venetians and Turks, Jews and Greeks. Beside me trudged my servant, burly Martin Deller. He was the last person I would have chosen to accompany me. Many was the time in my childhood he had caught me in the forbidden depths of the warehouse, and dragged me out by one ear. But, ‘No servant, no thousand marks’: those were the Widow’s terms, and she insisted on the right to choose. He called me ‘master’ now, he wore a dagger at his side as well as an oak cudgel nine inches long, with a leather wrist strap at one end and some lead shot hammered into the other for weight. He was here to serve me and guard my goods: or so I was supposed to believe.

‘Master,’ he whispered, ‘do you think this is wise? Carrying so much coin?’

I paused at the highest point of the bridge and glanced at him in irritation. We had just come from the Fontego dei Tedeschi, the Exchange House of the Germans, a vast building of white stone with jagged crenellations like some Saracen fortress that rose five storeys high out of the water of the Grand Canal. Here, in the office of the agent of Anton Fugger, banker to emperors and popes, I had presented my mother’s bill and asked for a quarter of my sum in gold, and the rest in smaller bills of exchange. The agent unlocked one of the chests that stood against the wall and lifted out a large canvas bag. From this he scooped out gold, and gold, and more gold. It thrilled me to see those shimmering stacks of ducats, which the clerk marshalled into ranks, counted and then counted again: thirty stacks and more, of twenty ducats apiece, like the towers of a golden city. Seven hundred and seventeen coins in all, stamped on one side with Saint Mark and the Doge, and Christ seated in His glory on the other. I had the coins gathered into a leather purse, which I fastened to my belt beside my dagger. It was a fair burden: nearly four pounds’ weight of gold.

‘We shall not be carrying this for long, my Martin. We are about to begin to spend.’ Before us lay the Rialto: the richest two hundred yards of ground in the world. It formed an island, with the Grand Canal wrapping itself round it, north, east and south, while lesser canals cut it off to the west. All along its waterfronts vessels were constantly landing, a fresh one putting in just as soon as the last had discharged its cargo. Behind the canal, the Rialto’s lanes and squares were filled with myriad warehouses and shops, the fonteghi and botteghe, where you could buy anything that grows or is fashioned under the sun. I saw rich tapestries and carpets, ostrich eggs garnished in gold and coral, and backgammon tables inlaid with jasper and chalcedony and ivory, carved with heads and heraldic shields. There were painted playing cards crusted with gold leaf, and the most wondrous printed books with woodcuts on almost every page, for the best books in the world are Venetian; and of course all manner of marvels woven out of the gold thread which goes by the name of Venice gold. I could have filled the Rose seven times over with treasures.

I strode forward, down off the bridge, and at once caught sight of a goldsmith’s shop. It had as its sign a gold chain painted on a board, and several steps led down to its door from the street. I leapt down those steps and pushed open the door. For many a night I had dreamt of this, and I was here at last. But, as I stood in the dappled light that glimmered in through a barred window from the canal outside and looked round, I was puzzled. On the shelves of the shop were gold chains: nothing but slender gold chains, of a wonderful fineness, some enamelled, others set with pearls, others bearing the repeated SS of the spiritus sanctus. I questioned the jeweller as he came out from behind his workbench. It was then that I learnt the vast scale of the trade in Venice. There was no Goldsmiths’ Row as in London, with its fourteen shops, each one selling a little of everything. The goldsmiths of Venice were divided into twelve separate guilds, each encompassing dozens of craftsmen and shops. The establishment I had stepped into was of the branch that dealt only in catenelle d’oro: small gold chains. There were other shops for basins and chalices in silver, others for gold and silver cutlery; there was another guild for trinkets, another for the larger gold chains as opposed to the smaller, another for filigree and one for the setting of jewels; another for embossing and engraving and work with the chisel and stamps; there was even a guild all of its own for buttons made of fine gold wire. And that was not to mention the diamanteri: the jewellers, who are themselves split in two: those who trade in diamonds, and those who sell gems of colour. There was even a guild for sellers of imitation jewels and false pearls. ‘Then finally,’ the shopman went on, ‘there are those who carve rock crystal, and those who specialise in faceting, or casting gold in moulds of clay, with or without the use of clamps.’

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