The Trade Secret

by Robert Newman

  He was so excited by the idea of going into trade that he began to study the hold’s freight. He unscrewed barrels, popped trunk lids and unstitched the tops of sacks to investigate the contents with a merchant’s eye. He learnt to distinguish between the odours of nutmeg and cinnamon, turmeric and pepper. His palm scooped out something excitingly labelled Dragon’s Blood Powder. He dabbed scarlet grains on his tongue, and the red-hot spice sent him coughing and spluttering to the water butt.

  Scrawled on casks and barrels were names of many more things he’d never heard of before. What was the use of soda ash, borax, scamony, storax or sal ammoniac? Who wanted this cargo? Why would you bother to travel halfway round the world at vast expense only to bring back this stuff?

  Up on deck, he asked a group of chess-playing mariners to explain. Borax was used for putty, they told him. Soda ash was used for making glass. So there were your modern windows. Scamony and storax were glues, and sal ammoniac was your metalsmith’s soldering flux. Matter-of-fact though these answers were, they opened a world of wonder in Nat’s mind.

  Back in the hold, he wandered among this citadel of merchandise and saw it in a completely new way. What the Mayflower was carrying were all the ingredients for a nation. The elements of a city. A commonwealth in storage crates. Stacks of state. A raw nation.

  Here were the building blocks for any type of country you could think of. Nothing was set in stone. The glass and the putty could be used for any kind of window you could possibly imagine. There was nothing to say where to put the window, how wide to make it, whose it would be, or how many you could own. There was absolutely nothing in the ingredients of putty and glass, nothing in the nature of the raw materials borax and soda ash, to say that most windows should be mean and small, and only a few rich men’s windows vast and full of light. Multiply that fact throughout the hold, apply it to everything here, and this ship might be used to build a city with justice for its covenant.

  If nothing was set in stone, if there was nothing inevitable about who got the big windows, who got the small, or about whose rules ruled, then nor was there any natural reason why he should return to London on the same terms as he left it: a serving or labouring man. This cargo itself seemed to confirm his dream of becoming a merchant upon his return. Just the thought of it sent his head reeling, as if he were dizzy or suffering sunstroke. What an idea!

  The following night, when the ship entered the bay of Biscay, a storm blew up. The Mayflower pitched and tossed. Nat was kneeling in the hold, investigating cargo with his lantern, when the floor tipped like a two-wheeled cart. He slid thirty feet along an aisle, only coming to a halt when he wrapped himself around the base of a wooden post.

  Fixed to the foot of the post was a pair of iron shackles. On all four sides of the beam were identical shackles. Another pair was set level with his neck. He brought the lantern close to the wood. Strange glyphs were crudely carved into the post. The beam had been coated with pitch since these marks were scored into it. He took out his pocketknife. The black pitch had been applied so thickly that he didn’t so much scrape as slice it from the timber, just as Darius had once sliced tar from the saddlecloth sling. This done, he slowly raised the lantern up the length of the beam.

  Like wood lice scuttling out of a burning log, names appeared. Names etched in Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin letters. Names carved into the timber with, it seemed, whatever was to hand: iron nail, belt buckle, coin, bodkin or perhaps the manacle’s hinge itself. By a manacle’s bolt his lamplight found a Greek legend: ‘Kidnapped To Be Sold.’

  As the ship shuddered and rolled, Nat tottered from one timber to another, scraping at the pitch with his knife. God a’ mercy, he found names etched into every single post of the Mayflower. He walked up steep aisles, his legs shaking with the presence of a great evil. He found a post where the same hand had etched four or five sets of initials together. What was the meaning of this grouping together? A whole family? A father entering the names of his wife and children? A priest indenting his flock? As Nat raised the lantern up the beam he came upon a winged Mithras and N-A-T B-R-A-M-B-L-E and was ashamed to have wantonly carved his own name among these grief-stricken testimonials.

  That night he was afraid of the dark. He only had an hour’s candle left. He feared that if the light perished, then all the ghosts of the slaves who had been carried in the Levant Company’s Mayflower would crowd upon him. So he concocted an oil lamp by pond-dipping his lantern in the Oil of Petrolio barrel and burning a tarry length of baling twine.

  Even with the oil lamp burning a bright, steady flame, the moaning waves that thudded against the hull, and the timbers’ groans and squeaks were voices lurking in the dark corners of the hold, the voices of those who had been kidnapped and sold, who had been manacled in hoops and chains at the foot of the timbers, hidden behind the soda ash which was used for making glass, and the borax for putty.

  In the morning he asked the chess school about the slaves. They told him that the Levant Company did not itself trade in slaves, but that if it wanted to retain its harbour rights, the Company must suffer its ships being used to transport Christians, who were snatched from their beds all round the Mediterranean to be sold upon the block in public marts at every Levantine port.

  It was late afternoon before Nat dared go back down in the hold. Lit by shafts of daylight from the hatches, it was not as frightening as it had been the previous night. He ran his fingertips over the names. Then he looked around at the citadel of merchandise.

  Here was no embryonic city of righteousness. The Mayflower was a Sea-Monster who gorged herself on human flesh, just like the galleys. Multiply that fact throughout the hold, apply it to all the rich commodities piled here, to the tuns of borax mined for a pittance and loaded for less, and what did you end up with? The reason why it took a lot of hard work by a few dedicated men to make the world so unjust was precisely because nothing was set in stone.

  In ways that Nat couldn’t fully explain, his dream of becoming a merchant was dispelled by the discovery that the Mayflower was a slave ship. The trade secret no longer seemed to be an understanding of how all these commodities might be used, of why they were bought and sold. The trade secret now seemed to be that the poverty of the poor made the riches of the rich. Scratch the trade and discover the sin. He no longer felt full of capacity and ambition. He felt like krill in the belly of a Sea-Monster, and he didn’t know where he’d be thrown up.

  ‘It’s a shame you’re a university man,’ the Mayflower’s master told him when they reached Rotherhithe, ‘for half this crew are sick and we’ll be shorthanded in the Pool.’

  ‘Oh no, sir, I’m no university man. I have been nothing but a general dogsbody time out of mind. I’ll fill the breach for you, master.’

  ‘No, I’ll have no readers, for readers is too proud and curious to hump a sack of macadamia nuts. On your way.’

  ‘Sir, I’ll hump any sack or any barrel you care to name, and what’s more, I can tell you what’s in them, no matter what language is scrawled upon the barrel head. That’ll save you from opening ‘em up only to have the wind take your dragon’s blood or scamony!’

  When the Mayflower was mooring at Galley Quay, and the Levant Company’s quay master, Mr Levitt, came aboard to inventorise the hold, her master pointed out Nat Bramble as one who was able to read what was written on chests, boxes and barrels.

  Quaymaster Levitt looked Nat up and down.

  ‘Can you lift a hundredweight in each arm?’

  ‘And whistling like a carman all the while.’

  ‘You shan’t be paid for whistling,’ said Quaymaster Levitt. ‘Only lifting. Work well today, do what I say in every particular and, if you do, I’ll employ you as a warehouseman on Galley Quay.’

  ‘I’ll not fail you, Mr Levitt.’

  The quay master sent Nat back down the hold where he hooked a lowered rope net to bales of currants. The jib-crane was the block and tackle’s squeak and trundle. He heard his vo
ice echo around the oil well as he sent up another bale of currants in the rope net:

  ‘We’re on our way, Darius, we’re on our way!’

  And so Nat’s first job back in London was the evacuation of the hold that had been his home for six weeks. When he climbed out of the hold onto the deck, a pigeon landed beside him on the Mayflower’s rail. He listened to the bright cries, and shouts and laughter, he looked down at all the dockers and merchants on Galley Quay, and over and over he repeated to himself in delight:

  ‘London! I am in London again! This is London! London! I am home!’

  15

  King James entered Richmond Palace Chapel for the very first time. An involuntary moan escaped him and echoed around the chapel. It looked more like a bawdy house. The checkered parti-coloured ceiling was festooned with plaster roses of every gaudy hue that English artifice could devise. The peach and rhubarb rood screen looked like the headboard of a whore’s bed. The chapel was above a wine cellar, its hatch propped open to reveal wine bottles - wine bottles! - stacked below. Scottish kirks were flint chisels cracking open the heavens. But above this checkered ceiling, a suite of offices was interposed between prayer and God. He heard administrators’ high heels knocking on the plaster roses. He heard women giggling, too. Good God Almighty, his wife’s bedchamber window opened into the chapel! He shouted at one of the Danish ladies to close the window and the shutters.

  Bawdy house or not, it would have to do, for James never needed Divine Guidance more than now. A few hours earlier, Venetian ambassador Scaramelli had very formally, very serenely plunged him into the greatest spiritual crisis of his whole life. Sultan Ahmed had sentenced Sir Thomas Sherley to death, staying his Imperial hand only to allow the King of England to enter a plea of clemency.

  ‘Plea?’ asked James. ‘Am I to beg Sultan Ahmed?’

  ‘If Your Majesty seeks Sir Thomas Sherley’s release, you must petition the Sultan with a personal letter. Nothing less will do.’

  ‘Will Venice, our go-between with the Turk, do nothing to save this Christian soldier?’

  ‘The Serene Republic of Venice would rather see the pirate hung, Your Majesty.’

  How simple a thing would it be to write a letter to the Sultan, had he not sworn very publicly never to have any dealings whatsoever with him or any other Mohammedan. No letters, no treaties, no trade.

  ‘For merchant causes I will not do things unfitting a Christian prince,’ he vowed before untold merchants in the Guildhall, and promptly suspended the Levant Company’s corporate charter to show the City he was serious about ending trade with the heathen.

  ‘That fine speech,’ Crookback Cecil told him, his long, spindly fingers fiddling with his pendant like the evil hobgoblin of the folk tale, ‘has cost Your Majesty four-thousand a year.’

  ‘I am laying up treasures in heaven, instead,’ James had replied, and felt like a true king for the first time since the coronation, pure and righteous and sure he was doing God’s will.

  But now, to save one Christian was to pollute Christianity. To help one, harmed all! Either he must break an old, private vow to Thomas, or a new public vow to the merchants. Whatever he did was wrong. King James knelt before the rhubarb and peach rood screen.

  ‘Help me, Lord, for I am frozen by the altitude of my position and know not what to do. If I write to the Sultan for the sake of Sir Thomas, I will change forever the destiny of these united kingdoms. Hear me, oh Lord, for we are at the pinpoint of the protractor, and decisions taken now will spread far and wide. Am I, your servant James, to reign, or is the City of London to reign instead? To write to the Grand Turk robs me of my last argument against dealing with Mohammedans, and my kingdom’s future course will be charted by the Levant Company. Cecil and the City will suffer this teuchter to wear a silk cape and sit upon a throne only so long as I serve merchant causes. Shall I lose my crown, dear Lord? Shall I lose my power all for the sake of one sinner, your servant Thomas, who may not even live so long as it takes my letter to reach the Sultan Ahmed! Tell me, oh Lord, what to do.’

  Between his praying palms, James held a scrap of paper as worn as a dusty old moth wing. He unfolded the letter and reread words he already knew by heart:

  ‘Without Your Majesty’s express letters to the Grand Turk for my liberty I am likely to end my miserable life in most wretched servitude. Twice in the last month, galley-masters have come through the jail picking out slaves for the galleys. A bout of sickness saved me the first go. The second time they could not find the key to my cell, and so they rattled the lock only. A third time and I shall not be so lucky.

  May God command King James, his anointed, to reach out his royal hand for the deliverance of his most loving subject,

  Sir Thomas Sherley

  And the King wept when God told him what to do.

  Three months later, at the crack of dawn, a King’s Messenger alighted from a royal barge before the onion-shaped towers of Richmond Palace. Following the sound of guitars, he walked to the tennis courts, where he found King James drunkenly entangled with the bodies of Philip Herbert, Susan Vere and Gentleman of the Bedchamber Jim Hay, all of them still dressed in costumes from the masque they had performed the night before: Zeus Mounting the Goddess Europa In The Form of A Bull.

  King James told the King’s Messenger to hook the message on his buffalo horns and retire, whereupon he forgot the letter until an hour later when Susan, wearing a stag’s antlers, locked horns with him. As they rutted on all fours back and forth across the service line, the message ripped and fell onto the dewy grass.

  King James rescued the pierced document, and, having focused his eyes, read the words the Khatt-i-humayun, the Imperial Ottoman Writ. He broke the carmine seal and discovered three sheets of very fine, coral-white paper, one written in Turkish, one in Latin, one in Greek. Choosing the Latin, he rubbed some dew in his face, and extemporised a translation.

  To King James of England,

  May Allah, the Most Merciful and Most Forgiving, be glorified by the clemency of kings, and may the mercy of kings be a beacon to their subjects.

  I have heard a brother sovereign’s plea for clemency on behalf of his justly condemned subject Sir Thomas Sherley. Notwithstanding this man’s fault, I give him to the King of England, King James who has begged his release.

  James, my brother, we are both new sovereigns, but I have learnt that there is no might nor power, except by Allah’s leave, the Exalted, the Wise, the Lord of the Worlds.

  Tumbling lists of titles and territories followed Sultan Ahmed’s elaborate calligraphic signature.

  First light strained through the tennis net in long rays, which fanned out over the wet grass like a protractor’s degree markings. The pinpoint of the protractor. For a moment, James remembered what he’d lost, and frowned, but then forgot why he frowned. In fact, why be disquieted and downcast? After all, was this not Sir Thomas Sherley’s pardon from Sultan Ahmed? Aye, it was! And did it not prove King James to be a right royal fellow who never forgot a friend? Yes it did! A splendid good fellow! Why, if ever a man was entitled to be entwined in the arms and legs of so many pretty pieces all at once, was it not he?

  ‘Susan,’ he said. ‘King James is a splendid good fellow. Pull off ma canions, Susan, Jim and Philip. The bull will mount. All three sweet bums are my Europa, my demesnes and territories - for if Great Zeus is to be denied a godhead’s rule, then, by God, he mun hae his prerogatives and perquisites!’

  16

  Darius Nouredini pokes his toe in the ash and cinders at the base of the burnt-out tree, the same blackened trunk from which he caught his last glimpse of Nat Bramble when the Great Persian Embassy was departing. Even this monument to what’s gone is going. The trunk has snapped in two while he was in Tabriz, and now forms a triangle with the earth. Migrating cranes pass overhead, flying north.

  He reflects upon the ways in which his life is better or worse than it used to be. To be an oil merchant is better by far than selling blank albums in the
bazaar. The road between Isfahan and Tabriz is safe following Persian victories over the Ottomans. What’s also better is that he’s left home. In Isfahan, he’s building two handsome rooms abutting his grandmother’s house. In Tabriz, he loves to close the door upon his rented single room. So quiet, so peaceful, so entirely his. A room of his own. A brass key in a brass lock.

  So much to the good.

  ‘But I have lost Gol. The hope of her. I might meet a woman prettier, wittier, wiser, kinder or sweeter - but never all at once. From now on, life will be a poor shadow of what it might have been had it been lived with Gol. And I have lost Nat to the far frozen wastes, with its trembling candlelight made of rendered hog fat. I will never see him again in this life, and nor, due to his heretical beliefs, the next. Each morning I pray the day will bring me a fresh memory of Nat, for even my memories of him are fading.’

  He is suddenly thirsty, but his leather bottle is empty. He climbs down the steep, sheer grassy bank, unwinds the bottle’s long strap, and casts it into the water. When the leather bottle is full it tugs like a heavy fish on the line, and he reels it in. He takes a folded cloth from his pocket and dries the outside of the leather bottle, but just before drinking he stops with the bottle poised at his lips. A brightly sparkling memory of Nat has come back to him. Darius stands stock still, halfway up the bank, not wanting to lose this fleeting memory, like a fisherman not wanting his slightest motion to scare away a rare fish.