Kitabı oxu: «The King’s Diamond»

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.