‘They’re going to rack me! It’s your Christian duty to let me go!’
Upside down and looking behind him, he craned his neck this way and that, seeking rescue. Where was Basadonna? Couldn’t he see what was happening? Why no rescue? Where was sweet Giovanni? And then he saw him. There he was. There he went, scaling the Buontalenti’s white rope net with all the agility and conscience of a Gibraltar monkey.
‘God, oh God! Why hast thou cast down thy servant and raised up the wicked!’
The Buontalenti’s rope net shone brilliantly white against its dull hull. At the foot of the rope net a debris trail straggled along the inky river. Thomas followed the trail of shattered planks that led to the turnip barge. The last thing he saw before the Yeomen Warders carried him around the corner, was the malevolent incubus who had destroyed his and his brother’s life, and left the slaves upon the Mediterranean a helpless prey for the Mayflower, Royal Merchant, Grace of God and Samaritan. And what was Bramble doing? He was throwing back his head and laughing.
15
Body trembling, teeth chattering, Nat rolled onto his side on the turnip barge, and passed out. A few minutes later, an eeler bumped the barge.
‘Eee! He’s alive! The tilting turnipman’s alive,’ the younger of the two men in the boat exclaimed. ‘Pass him some canaries there, dad. Warm up the boy.’
They helped him into a sitting position and he took the flask and sipped warm rum. They handed him into their boat, where long black eels flowed around his shins and ankles.
‘And where’s your people?’
‘The Strangers’ Quay of the Steelyard, but I’ve got to return this turnip barge to Chapel Pier.’
With both sweeps and a tablecloth sail, the eelers towed the barge away from the Tower of London They passed the Customs House, Galley Quay and Billingsgate. Lamps were being lit on London Bridge as they rowed up through Little Lock, and scudded south along the Bridge to Chapel Lock, where they moored the barge.
Then the eelers lifted some hessian from a writhing mound of pink crabs, and wrapped it round Nat’s shoulders. Father and son pulled towards the Steelyard.
Nat closed his eyes. Flows of glistening eel-black oil coiled around his ankles at Hell’s Door, pulling him down into a petroleum quagmire. He heard hooves clip-clop. Flames sprouted as harmless as flecks of foam from the flanks of two mules, a chestnut and a sooty buckskin as he and Darius crossed the Pul-i-Shah, the King’s Bridge. He opened his eyes to find himself inches away from innumerable softly clacking pink claws. Clippety-clop, clippety clop. He closed his eyes, and sank beneath the black sludge of a vug halfway down a deep cavern wall. He opened his eyes to find Miep rowing him upriver from the Steelyard.
‘Where are we?’ he asked.
‘Between Baynard’s Castle and Blackfriars,’ she replied. ‘Soon be home and dry, Nat.’
He closed his eyes and sank back into the vug’s black sludge. He opened his eyes and found Miep basting his forehead with elm gum before pressing a coin there. He closed his eyes. Miep was as naked and sweating as he, and covered in a light dusting of almond ginger crumbs.
‘Oh, don’t give me that sweetmeat, Miep, or I’ll think this my home.’
He opened his eyes and found Roshanak whispering Dutch prayers over him as she laid a purple mallow and woundwort poultice on his neck. From outside, he heard the creaking of the Saracen’s Head pub sign across the street. The lurid red face was no Saracen but Shah Abbas, who was directing a gang of apprentices to attack Darius. Nat feared for Darius’s safety as he walked past the apprentice boys down Seacole Lane. He tried to warn him, but the garret window was stuck fast and couldn’t be opened without a crooked dogleg key. Darius had no sense of the danger he was in, being too preoccupied with calling up to Nat at his garret window,
‘None of that vomiting and befouling of thyself at any time! None at any time at all.’
But as Darius drew level with the apprentices, far from attacking him, they doffed their caps and bowed, because he was now a merchant in a long velvet cloak.
Darius walked with Nat through the Beijderwellens’ back garden down to the Turnagain Landing of the Fleet. They turned back and, Darius pointed at Miep’s window and asked,
‘Why have you not used poetry?’
Then they were standing at Paul’s Yard bookstall, conning by heart poems they couldn’t afford to buy, while the shopkeeper accused them with his eyes of stealing with theirs. As they walked to Newgate, Darius asked,
‘What’s the first line, Nat, what’s the first line?’
Nat cudgelled his brains.
Twenty somethings would I go… tum-te-tum-te-ta?
Something, something and Earth’s trees
And seaweed in the air…
Twenty ways…?
‘No, it’s gone.’
He stopped and his friend walked on ahead. Darius passed into the City at Newgate. No red dagger emblazoned the city shield, just the red scrawling of slaves in unfamiliar Greek and Arab script. The Mayflower softly bumped into Tower Stairs and a voice said,
‘Eee, he’s alive. Have some bullfinch.’
When Nat opened his eyes, Miep was leaning over him. He held her hand and looked at her with clear eyes. His fever had broken. She sat on the bed. He heard her clumpy shoes land one by one on the floor. She lifted the sheet and rolled into the bed beside him.
It took the next hour for his hand, crawling slower than a worm, to cross the inch to her ribcage. She turned into his arms, kissed him, and they lay there, listening to the street outside.
Seacole Lane and Snow Hill were stirring at first light, but it might have been the First Day, so novel and distinct did every sound seem. The creak of a cart wheel, the metallic scrape of a night-lamp being taken off a sill, the ring of shod hooves, a baby crying, a man coughing - they all sounded new-minted, fresh and vivid.
Not so the sound of coals being put into the kitchen grate downstairs. The Beijderwellens were stirring. Miep leapt out of bed, and was gone.
Nat suspended a long ginger hair between the thumb and forefingers of both hands. Light inched across the room as slow as his hand had inched towards her ribcage and he was still holding the hair when the sunlight set it shining.
Time to get dressed. Only where were his clothes? He looked beneath a folded pile of hemp towels on the wooden chair next to his bed. No clothes there, nor in his drawer, nor under his bed, nor in the blanket box. He looked back at the chair. He noticed a wooden button. Not like a towel to have a wooden button, was it? Was this a pile of eiderdown covers?
With a sinking heart, he realised that the oatmeal-coloured pile of hemp on the chair were his clothes. The river must have ruined his treasured old clothes. The Beijderwellens had bought him this whole new suit. He knew he should feel grateful, but he was too cast down by this porridgy concoction.
He pulled on woolly oatmeal breeches, a hempen doublet with wooden buttons, and a worsted shirt with a fall collar like a Northamptonshire bumpkin. All that remained of his old attire were his grey shoes of untrimmed suede, their red stitching the one splash of English colour in all this Dutch porridge. ‘This is the end of me.’ He stuffed an oatmeal slop cap in his oatmeal pockets and went downstairs.
At the head of the breakfast table Mr Beijderwellen said,
‘Ah, Lazarus has arisen! How do you like your elegant new suit, Mr Gentleman Secretary!’
Nat bowed and thanked him for his kindness and then thanked Mrs Beijderwellen for her care of him in his sickness.
‘And Miep, too,’ she replied. ‘And the Lord.’
He looked about for Miep but she wasn’t there. He excused himself from the table.
Miep was down in the cellar waiting for Nat to leave before she came upstairs. She knew his way of blowing hot and cold. She couldn’t stand him cold now. The way he saw it, no doubt, she’d caught him between sleep and wake. Tricked him. Got under his defenses when he was half delirious.
She shivered as she sat on the damp
sand bank that they’d sewn with headless carrots. She wished she’d thought to bring a blanket or shawl or that big black coat of his which he never wore down here. Too late now.
The door opened and a block of hard light shone in. He was coming downstairs. Or would he now just see her as his slut? Would he now be of the opinion that she came with rent? A perk of the lodging. Bed and board. She sprang to her feet.
He walked through the thin rods of light cast by drill holes in the brick wall. They stood face-to-face in this cat’s cradle of light. He offered her the black coat. She put it on. He put his hands inside the coat and held her round the waist, and looked into her eyes. She saw that his eyes were shining. He said,
Twenty journeys would I make,
And twenty ways would hie me,
To make adventure for thy sake.
To set some matter by thee.
Fire heat shall lose,
And frosts of flame be born,
Earth’s trees shall seed the sky
Seaweed the air adorn,
Fire, earth, air and water, yea the globe itself shall move,
Ere I prove false to faith, or strange to you.
16
At midday, Nat set out for Fylpot Street to claim his reward. It was a cool day but by the time he came into the City at Ludgate, he was sweating in his thick Dutch clothes. The prickly kersey stockings itched and chafed through Pissing Alley, Canon Street, and all the way to Fylpot Street. The tall, top-heavy Levant House, each storey oversailing the one below, cast jagged shadows onto the whole street. The Company imposed its forms and patterns on the land. A Levant Company clerk led the man in the brand new Dutch suit to the Arcade of Curios, and told him to wait while he enquired after the Customer’s will.
Alone in the Arcade of Curios, Nat listened to an indistinct hum of chatter and clinking glasses from a farther room. He examined the Arcade’s wares, a miscellany of trade samples displayed on shelves and in cabinets. Indian cogwheels, Chinese printed silk, Turkish swords, Cypriot marble, Russian hides, and, from Persia, an old friend, a cork-stoppered clear glass jar of rock oil labelled ‘Oil of Petrolio’. The oil and water had separated. Most of the jar was water. A rind of rock oil floated on top like the head on a pint of beer.
Nat shook the jar and the water turned grey. He shook the jar again, and there it was, black and viscous.
He recognised Customer Hythe’s brash, puffed-up tone as it rose above the other voices behind the door of the adjoining suite:
‘The nicer points are being discovered in the Tower as we speak.’
‘But how was the trick done?’ someone asked. ‘How did he evade our best for spying, surveillance and house searches? What was his secret way of communicating with this Italian after all?’
‘Magic,’ cried the Customer. ‘Fire that burneth not! Since no such thing exists in nature, the Yeoman have put his feet to the fire to find out his trick. Still claims it was cold fire no matter how his corns melt in the hot one!’
‘He confesses all else?’
‘Confesses? Why, man, he proclaims! Boasts how he fought to abolish what he calls our naughty trade.’
‘If we don’t transport the Sultan’s slaves someone else will,’ said Roe.
‘Aye, and if we don’t, we’ll ship no other commodity besides,’ said the Customer. ‘The Sultan will snatch back our harbour rights and there an end of all honest trade. Let well alone, say I. For trade is a delicate tapestry. Pull one thread in the name of reform and you find yourself knee-deep in unsold silk bales. Let well alone.’
‘Tom Sherley,’ said Colthurst, ‘is no righteous Moses leading the captives out of Babylon. He’s a sharer with Basadonna in the profits sure enough. And hasn’t he bought more fancy Neapolitan clothes than are found in even my wife’s wardrobe? I tell you, gentlemen, his noble quest was for rich profits in hopes both of saving Wiston, the Sherley’s Sussex seat, and of redeeming old Sir Thomas his father from the Marshalsea, where he lies half the year like Wiston plate in the pawnbroker’s window.’
‘True enough,’ said the Customer. ‘But you only have to look at the seditious libels he printed to see that Thomas fancies himself a holy warrior against the Levant Company. In which role, by the way, no man ever pissed in the wind as hard as he. For I have brought you here, gentlemen, to make an announcement. King James has made recompense after I told him that his royal meddling with our charter was to blame for this foreign plot against us. He was most contrite and by way of recompense grants that a private consortium, headed by myself, will collect customs duty on all foreign imports. I will be Customer in person and in deed: Collector of His Majesty’s Customs and Excise.’
‘Just like your father in the old Customs House,’ said Colthurst. ‘You have come full circle, and inherited your father’s position.’
‘Earned it, Nick, earned it. This office comes with powers my father never had. Collector and Controller. I am to set the level of that customs duty as I think fit for the benefit of the company. By the powers invested in me, we shall in future endure no division between company and England. Gentlemen, here’s to the public weal and private commerce indivisible!’
‘Here’s to the Customer! Here’s to Customer Hythe!’
Cheers rang out, boots stamped the floor and hands drummed tables.
Nat felt ashamed of his role in Thomas’s capture. He had been on the wrong side. Thomas’s ‘plot’ had been a campaign to end the Levant Company’s stake in shipping slaves from one Ottoman port to another. Knowing that posters and sermons alone were not enough to end the slave trade, Thomas and Basadonna had gone into competition with the Levant Company hoping to ruin them by shipping Eastern imports from the free port of Livorno. No Levant Company, no slave trade. That was the plot for which they had locked Thomas in the Tower.
‘Oh, what have I done?’ he whispered to the oil.
Blinking back tears, he watched the petroleum resolve itself into its two constituencies. Oil detached itself and formed discrete black strands in the water. How honest of rock oil to divulge its true properties in this way, to show its true separateness, to reveal that what looked compounded was always two constituents, Customers and Brambles. Customer Hythe had made him his gull, had used him to an evil end. In the reflection of a spindle of drifting oil, he saw him standing behind his back. Nat whipped round to face him.
‘So you have escaped the hempen loop,’ said Customer Hythe, ‘as some call the hangman’s noose. Now why is your neck not upon the block?
‘But, sir, you must know that it was I who sent you that messenger dove.’
‘I know no such thing! I know the dove was sent to you! I know it was I who intercepted it on Galley Quay just when you thought me safely kicking my heels in Fylpot Street, waiting for your report which never came.’
‘Consider, Sir Henry, that I got these wounds from Sir Thomas.’
‘When thieves fall out fists will fly. Are you still in touch with Sir Anthony?’
‘No, Sir Henry!’
‘And yet there are these letters sent you from Spain, aren’t there?’
‘Letters from Spain, Sir Henry? On my life I never -.’
‘On your life it will be if I catch you on Galley Quay again. You cheat your doom today, but you shall not be so lucky again. Believe it! Avaunt, cur! Shoo! Shoo!’
17
Come for your box?’ asked Galley Quay’s master as he slung a smashed barrel into a tall brazier’s flames.
‘Box? What box? I never owned any box!’
‘It’s in the warehouse. If it’s still here in half an hour it goes in the brazier, shot and lot. Put it on your barrow or leave it for the flames.’
Feathers rose on an updraught from the pyre. With horror Nat suddenly recognised what was being chucked into the flames. He snatched his dovecot’s door from the quay master’s arm.
‘That’s mine!’ he cried. The quay master shoved Nat down onto the muddy wharf, and shouted,
‘Nothing’s yours!’
Nat snatched his woollen hat from the mud, ran into the warehouse, up the stairs, and out onto the roof terrace.
A compass circle of white droppings marked the spot where his dovecot once stood upon its cartwheel base. All his pretty pigeons were cremated. Smoke wafted up to the roof from the wharfside brazier. Smoke, cinders and a speckled downy feather that settled on his hemp doublet. He picked it off. Brown and white. The only scrap of Parboyl to survive the flames. One of his keel feathers, by the looks of it. Hot tears stung his eyes. He didn’t know why he should be distraught at the incineration of this unbiddable runt, why it grieved him more than the loss of his two best birds, Petrolio and Mithras, but the tears rolled down his muddy face and would not stop. The tatty brown and white pigeon had faithfully carried Nat’s message to the Customer on Galley Quay - hence the Sheriff’s men at Old Swan stairs - only to be cremated for his good service.
A flutter of wings, a scrape of claws, and Parboyl landed clumsily on the cupola’s copper roof, where he fussed and struggled to keep his footing.
‘Parboyl!’ cried Nat in elation.
A breeze swung the cupola’s brass galleon. Parboyl took fright, and flapped awkwardly to the warehouse’s parapet, and nervously tore out his own feathers. Could he smell Mithras and Petrolio’s cremation?
The Trade Secret Page 32
