Nat held out a handful of firethorn berries for so long that his arm ached. Despite the pain, he kept his arm still as a scarecrow’s, knowing the merest flinch would scare Parboyl up into the skies. Lose him now and he’d lose him forever, because this was his last time on Galley Quay. Not daring even to turn his head, the scarecrow’s gaze fell on the Tower of London’s White Tower where Sir Thomas Sherley was jailed.
‘And what punishment have I deserved,’ he thought, ‘I that put him there? To fancy myself the scourge of the Sherleys was to play a role I could be proud of, but that pride was bought at the cost of distorting Thomas beyond recognition, turning him in my mind into what I knew he was not, a bigger, badder Anthony. That was the Customer’s false picture, and I made it mine. The Customer told me Thomas was my enemy, and I made him so because I wanted to feel important. And the Customer called the Levant Company my ally, when it is my enemy and the world’s.’
Nat felt a small weight land with a little bounce upon his palm. Scaly feet curled round his fingers. A beak pecked. Very slowly, he brought his free hand across his body. Hardly daring to breathe, he stroked Parboyl’s domed head with his thumb.
‘Clever boy, right there where the lines of short life and bad luck cross.’
After a while, he gently introduced Parboyl to the inside pocket of his new hempen doublet. The skinny pigeon nestled next to Nat’s heart and settled down inside his doublet. Together they left the warehouse roof for the last time.
In a corner at the back of the warehouse, Nat found a hardwood trunk, its brass hasp decorated with Arab scrollwork. He turned the key and lifted the lid. The trunk was packed tight with jute bags. One bag was torn at the corner, spilling a few grey-green beans.
Nat scooped up the hard pellets and let them rattle back into the bag. Perhaps this was ballast and the real treasure lay hidden beneath. But when he squeezed his arm between the tightly packed bean bags, all he found were a few loose beans. What a joke! He closed the lid and examined the back of the box. Thickly painted green lettering read:
Kaveh/Cafe/Coffy
Cadiz a Londres
Galley Quay
Mr Nat Bramble
So these hard green pulses were raw qaveh - or coffy - beans. But who in Cadiz sent them to him, care of Galley Quay?
And yet there are these letters sent you from Spain, the Customer had said.
‘Who do I know in Spain?’ thought Nat. ‘Did Anthony send this merchandise to discredit me in the Customer’s eyes? If so, his plan worked, for the Customer never trusted me since. Did Thomas tell Anthony to do it? Maybe so. Where are these letters sent me from Spain?’
He searched beside the trunk. What he found there were not letters, but the last effects of Sir Thomas Sherley. It appeared that the Company had taken out an Act of Attainder on all of his possessions at the Brown Bull. Here was his straw-lined box of Baku lanterns. Nat shook each lantern in turn, but they had all been emptied. Under the box of Baku lanterns, the seditious libels were stacked as thick as the pile of outdated shipping manifests which once lined the floor of his pigeon house. There were perhaps about a hundred seditious broadsides all told, the whole batch fresh from the print and still tangy with printer’s ink.
Babylon’s New Slavemasters In The City Of London Discovered!
An Advertisement Touching The Levant Company’s Trade In Christian Slaves.
Christ’s Tears Over Galley Quay!
Tin goblets, Baku lanterns, broadsides, Nat put them all into the Cadiz trunk, shot and lot. Loose qaveh beans scurried inside the trunk as he tipped it onto the Beijderwellens’ barrow.
He pushed the single-wheeled plank barrow out of the warehouse, onto Thames Street, past Romeland, up New Fish Street, and through potted, rutted Crooked Lane where the tin cups and pots clinked in the Spanish trunk. He passed St Michael’s Church Of The Murdering Mayor, and hurried through the fetid fumes of Candlewick Street’s soap-boilers and dyers. On Walbrook Street, between sandstone St Stephen’s and the London Stone, he set down the barrow to rest his arms a moment.
A lonely Persian misfit, the unwieldy rump of the London Stone was the very opposite of prim, compact St Stephen’s, where a fellow might pop in for a neat and tidy prayer to a convenient God, who fitted into the City. Not so the London Stone. The Stone was out of proportion and scale. Its shape and purpose in no way fitted in among straight roads and gable ends. This great boulder fastened with bars of iron was all that was left of the Fire Temple of Mithras that Persianized Romans had built on the east bank of the River Walbrook, which once flowed where the street now ran.
The empty street grew silent. Nat looked up and down. Suddenly there was no-one around. In the brief silence he heard a gurgling, trilling sound. Not Parboyl, no, but the sound of fresh water. Beneath the street the River Walbrook still flowed! The City of London, like ice, might silence the river’s song for a season, but not forever.
I am the Walbrook,’ sang the river.
The fire-breathing dragon fears fresh water,
And locks me underground.
But I come before and after him
And I’ll see this dragon
Carried out on his shield to the Tideway
Along with the Exchange,
And the Levant Company’s worshipful sharer,
For there are other powers than those that rule,
Untold types of commonwealth
Never seen on earth.
Listening to the River Walbrook’s song, it struck him that the key to his future was sitting on his barrow. He could turn a penny from his barrow load of Spanish-Arab beans. He’d open London’s only qaveh stall and sell hot cups of black elixir. He had, as yet, no idea how to roast the beans, but he could essay different roasts in the Seacole Lane scullery, until he concocted a brew which tasted as delicious as Kulsum’s. He seized the barrow handles and bowled along Walbrook with the qaveh pots clanking.
‘You sent a box of goods to snare me, Don Antonio,’ he said out loud, for he still believed it was he who sent the box as a sort of entrapment. ‘You chose these beans only for being the cheapest commodity to fill a box, but from these qaveh beans you think so little of, like the oil you never understood, I’ll coin a fortune. I’m on my way!’
18
Nat and Miep opened London’s first coffee stall in a sequestered nook off the West Nave Arcade of St Paul’s Cathedral, London’s busiest, noisiest building. Coffy, coffey or coffee they spelt it at different times upon the signboards of their stall. They decided to call it coffee because qaveh sounded too much like carvery and people turned up expecting a side of beef.
On seeing how people loved to drink coffee, Nat couldn’t have been more proud if he had invented the drink. Not since selling oil with Darius on the maidan, had he experienced the success he now enjoyed selling coffee with Miep. He was elated. His hunch had been right. Their hard work had paid off. Londoners loved coffee. Some patrons took their coffee with expansive, lip-smacking ‘aaahs’, others with a kind of grave, tightlipped, pensiveness, some leaned right into their cups to inhale the aroma, wafting the steam towards their noses to do so, others sat bolt upright, as wide-eyed as if someone under the table had put their feet in cold water. And they all came back for more.
The stall looked set to become a victim of its own popularity, however. Nat and Miep had gone through half the beans, and there were no more when these ran out. The coffee had peaked.
‘I curse myself,’ he told Miep, ‘for all the beans we wasted in experiment.’
‘Well, no-one’s born knowing how to roast coffee beans. Who’d have thought the right answer was to char the beans brittle and smash them with a rawhide mallet!’
They were six feet off the ground and ten feet apart, each standing on the ledge of a pair of fluted pillars, affixing the stall’s backdrop, the Persian rug which had floored Sir Thomas’s Brown Bull chamber. Nat looped the rope around a painted wooden apostle’s waist, and threw the rope across to Miep’s ledge.
&n
bsp; ‘Half a bag wasted braising them in nut oil!’
‘You could go to Cadiz for more,’ she said.
‘Cadiz,’ he scoffed. ‘I’ll try blending the beans with toast or dandelion seeds first. A tad easier, methinks.’
Miep didn’t exactly know what ‘bitter tares’ were in the Bible, but she suspected they would taste like brewed dandelion.
‘I speak enough Spanish to help you in Cadiz,’ she said, roping a painted apostle to look like a mountain guide.
‘Oh, do you now?’
‘Only we had best be quick about it.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s the Moros who have the qaveh and they’re being banished.’
‘Since when?’ Nat asked.
‘Since Spain made peace with us.’
‘With England?’
‘With the Dutch. Now King Philip turns all his fury on the Moros. It used to be that a morisco was safe so long as he converted to the Romish church and made himself a Spanish Arab or Spanish Jew or Spanish Moro. Not anymore. Conversion won’t save them now. They can change their name and Hail Mary all the livelong day, but it won’t help them because King Philip is a zealous demon bent on banishing every last convert.’
‘It would be a sin,’ Nat told her, ‘to snaffle up the goods of exiles.’
‘But if discarded cases are being left stranded on the wharf, ‘twere a sin not to.’
They jumped down from their pedestals. Miep rubbed her hands on the thighs of her baggy black galligaskins, unwound a cord from the side of a stone pillar, and lowered the iron chandelier.
Nat took out the crooked dogleg key he wore around his neck, slotted it into a socket at the back of each Baku lantern, and turned the key a quarter turn. The lamps that brilliantly lit the stall were fuelled by ordinary rock oil now, instead of whatever mysterious mixture - part Baku, part gunpowder? - fuelled them before. Half the success of the stall owed to these oil lanterns as much as to the coffee. No wick lantern could ever be winched so high because it needed constant trimming. No spirit lamp or candle could ever blaze so brightly. The dazzling oil lanterns were a novelty that brought in the curious from Pauls’ Walk in the Middle Aisle to the half a dozen tables made from beer kegs topped with slate.
‘Hang out your light!’ codded a few apprentices, mimicking the cry of the Night Constables as they hurried by to make mischief in the Walk.
And it was strange how, with its vaulted ceiling, shafts of light falling from on high, busy stalls and now these dazzling lamps, the West Nave reminded Nat of nowhere so much as the Isfahan bazaar.
‘What if we went all the way to Spain only to find all the coffee gone?’ he asked, lighting each lantern on the iron chandelier. ‘I mean, if it’s only the Moros who import it, then the coffee goes with them.’
Miep was vexed to see the return of Old Man Bramble. She spent her anger on hoisting the corona hand over hand high enough to illuminate the gaudy wooden dog roses at the fan vaulting’s joints. Five glossy pink petals around a yellow stamen, the flowering bramble.
‘Don’t you want to keep this stall going?’ she asked him.
‘With all my heart,’ said Nat, ‘but they may soon let no stalls exist here anyways.’
Just this morning the Canon Chancellor had gone round handing an eviction notice to each and every stallholder. It was then that she’d seen the shadow fall on him again. The first time she’d seen it since the spectacular success of their coffee stall began, but now that it fell it fell heavier than ever before. Nat’s soul hung in the balance between hope and despair. His sense that all was possible, his feelings of infinite capacity had flowered here, but now the old man’s face settled upon his features at the mention of the threatened eviction. She was convinced that this was Nat’s last stand. Whichever way the wind now blew would set his face for life. She wanted the ardent, keen-spirited, flowering Bramble, not the bitter what’s-the-point Bramble who would prefer to roast dandelions than to sail to Spain. Except she knew it was out of her hands. It depended upon the survival of London’s only coffee stall.
Their stall hadn’t wanted for luck so far. In fact they’d had the great fortune to set up slap bang in the middle of a rage for all things Persian, clothes, rugs, even hairstyles. The new fashion hairstyle was the Persian lock, a long lock worn just off the crown. The Persians, it was popularly believed, grew this single lock of hair in hopes of God lifting them by it to heaven.
The Persian craze had to do with the innumerable travellers’ tales being sold out of Paul’s Yard bookshops, with novel eastern imports, with playhouse revivals of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, as well as a hateful new play by John Day called The Travails of the Three English Brothers, in which Sir Anthony Sherley and his brother Robert smote the Christ-denying Shah Abbas in battle, in revenge for their brother Thomas’s imprisonment in the dungeons of the Shah’s close ally, the Great Turkish Sultan Ahmed - the battle lines between enemies and allies all wrong again, just like those drawn between Nat and Thomas and the Levant Company. Early one morning, when no-one was looking, Nat stuck a couple of Sir Thomas’s broadsides on the Nave Arcade’s walls.
Babylon’s New Slavemasters In The City Of London Discovered!
An Advertisement Touching The Levant Company’s Trade In Christian Slaves.
London’s only coffee stall soon filled with the usual morning crowd of Paul’s Walkers, fashionable gallants hoping to see and be seen under the brilliant lanterns while sipping an Arab-East-African-drink in the belief that it was Persian. Then off they strolled, swinging their gorgeous Persian locks up and down the Nave’s Middle Aisle, Paul’s Walk, while swapping glances with the gangs of young women dangling a female version of the Persian lock, created by beribboning a topknot of hair from crown to end, and by wearing shorty waistcoats and baggy-arsed breeches in the Persian style.
By midday, just before the lunchtime rush, Nat was setting out more of the slate-topped kegs that served as tables when he looked up to see Miep returning from the direction of the Rose Window, that vast fireball in the east.
‘What cheer?’ he asked her.
‘I’ve organised a meeting here at six against the planned eviction of stallholders, pedlars and tinkers from St Paul’s.’
‘Here? But we’ve only got one pot.’
19
This being a free assembly of Paul’s stallholders,’ Nat announced at the meeting’s commencement, ‘coffee is served free to all.’
London’s only coffee stall had never been so busy. There were upwards of sixty people. Nat brewed pot after pot, while Miep passed round tin goblets of steaming coffee to the assembly of pedlars, hawkers and traders whom she knew not by name but by the cries they barked.
‘If we were to offer tithes,’ said Hot Sheep’s Feet, ‘then the Church Warden would stay his hand and not put us out on the street. Tithes in kind, I mean. We should offer him a tenth of our produce.’
‘That may serve you and your mutton trotters,’ said Old Satin, Old Taffety, Old Velvet, ‘but how many linen stomachers does the Church Warden want? How many yards of taffety petticoat is the Dean wearing?’
‘Well, then we may pay him a part of our earnings in coin,’ suggested Hot Sheep’s Feet.
‘That’s all right for you fine burghers who hold stalls,’ said New Brooms For Old Shoes, ‘but it is death to us pedlars. The Canon Chancellor will set the rent beyond our means to pay.’
‘Might we write a petition?’ asked Fine Writing Ink, his funnel dangling at his side.
The echo of hooves reached them. The assembly looked round. In at the Ludgate entrance, a steaming mare pulled an onion wagon, the wagoner calling out,
‘White onions, white St. Thomas onions!’
‘Look at that!’ said Spectacles To Read, who wore a dozen pairs of glasses all at once. Miep was entranced by this boggling array which gave him more eyes than a peacock’s fan tail, each magnified eye identically appalled by what he now saw: ‘An onion wagon in the side-aisle. I tell you it�
��s wagoners, not Church Wardens, who’ve caused all our ache! I thought the new bye-law was supposed to have banned horses from inside the cathedral.’
‘Too good a short cut, though,’ said Strawberries Ripe, handing round a tray of cherries.
‘Not when they lock the door against us it won’t be,’ said Spectacles To Read. Empty tray in hand, Miep herself addressed the meeting from the centre of the crowded assembly.
‘What if we change the locks here ourselves,’ she suggested, ‘before the Dean has a chance to change them? Then we give him a present of one of our keys. So he can let himself in but nevermore lock us out.’
‘The Dean will never agree to that, young maid,’ said Fine Writing Ink. ‘It would never work.’
‘Oh, he’ll be most agreeable,’ said Old Satin, Old Taffety, Old Velvet, ‘when he can’t get in! Once we change the locks on the doors he’ll agree to have a key all right!’
‘It worked in Holland,’ said Miep. ‘When the Spaniards demanded keys to all the public buildings, we handed over the keys but changed the locks.’
‘Well, we had better ask the Dean first, that’s all I’m saying,’ said Fine Writing Ink.
‘And give him time to change the locks himself?’ asked Ripe Cowcumbers, Ripe.
‘Well, it is his church,’ said Fine Writing Ink.
‘Build it, did he?’ asked Miep.
‘If you think the Dean and Canon Chancellor are against us now,’ said Old Cloaks, Gentlemen, Fine Felt Hats, ‘just wait till you start forging your own keys!’
‘No,’ said Will Ye Buy Any Straw, ‘they are the ones desecrating a customary usage of this cathedral that goes back long before King Richard’s time.’
The Trade Secret Page 33
