The King’s Diamond
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We balanced with our legs straddling the roof, hallooed and waved our arms. Beneath our feet ran the great highway of London, the Thames. Every manner of boat was to be seen. There were lighters with their brown sails spread, hire boats steered by a single man at the stern, crossing from one landing-place to another, and the tilt boats with eight oars that carried larger numbers of passengers down to Greenwich. But what really drew my eyes were the great barges of the nobles with their gilt prows and raised sterns, and the heraldic banners flying with fringes of Venice gold. In time I learnt to recognise them all: the crossed keys and scarlet hat of Cardinal Wolsey; the royal leopards and lilies of the Duke of Buckingham, before he was beheaded for ambitions a little too near the throne.
Best of all was when I saw the King himself passing between his various palaces. The royal barge had a crimson awning covering its full length, with flags flying above it and gilded dragons and wyverns on poles. No oarsmen could be permitted in so exalted a craft, and so a second boat towed it, with dozens of rowers all in the scarlet royal livery, using a long tow-rope which dipped and splashed in the Thames. The barge itself glided on, spilling the sound of lutes and shawms and laughter, and the scent of sweet perfumes that drifted even as far as our rooftop, almost masking the stench of the river. The cannons fired from the Tower downstream in salute, and sometimes I could hear the sound of the trumpets as the barge put in at the wharf at the Palace of Bridewell, four landings up, where the King from time to time held court. The others grew tired of this spectacle long before I did. They eased themselves down the tiles and crept back round into the attic, while I stayed, intoxicated. It was dusk, often, by the time I turned for home, and if I had not known the feel of those timbers in the dark I would have met death many times over.
Our house stood immediately behind the warehouse, facing north across Thames Street to the tiny church of Saint Mary Summerset. The street makes a strange sort of a twist here, where Labour-in-Vain Hill comes snaking down to a stop against Thames Street. This meeting-place of three ways forms an odd corner of calm. Passers-by paused when they reached our crooked lane-end, as if to take stock, reconsider their journey and go on. The house itself was like a thousand others in the City: towering, steep-gabled, one rain-bleached oak beam balanced on another, cantilevered ever outwards over the road. This toppling effect, my mother said, served no other purpose but to ensure that when you threw your soil out of your bedchamber it did not end up in your parlour. Behind our windows were the dim, panelled rooms that custom demanded, a parlour and hall and even a small gallery, running along Bosse Lane towards the Thames. To me, returning from the wonders of the royal barge, home appeared a drab place, full of the greys and browns of pewter and kersey cloth, and the stink of tallow candles and rushlights. Pewter might have stood for our rank in life. The vast mass of people in London still ate their meals off trenchers of wood or earthenware; far above them, the gentry and nobility used silver. Pewter was for the well-to-do, the respected, the solid; those who stood high, but not too high. Even though we could have afforded to buy some silver vessels, my mother would not hear of it. ‘Once you begin to ape the Court, there is no end to it. Let us keep the way we are.’
In the parlour after our plain supper, I used to question my parents on all the marvels that went into making royalty: where their treasures came from, what they cost, who brought them into England. My father rose to this, his face taking on a look of childlike delight. Sitting by the fire with the flames glinting off the oak panels, he would spin me tales of the furs and the satins that noblemen wore, the cloth of silver and gold and the fabulous dyestuffs, crimson, scarlet and indigo; the perfumes made out of the pungent musk-glands of the Indian civet cat, and the floating ambergris that is said to be the excretion of Leviathan. My mother regarded his stories with cold watchfulness. When my father was not there she beckoned me up to her, squatted down and instructed me. ‘Remember this, Richard: never fall in love with your cargo.’ I looked back at her defiantly. It seemed to me she might have added, ‘Never fall in love at all.’
Already, in those days, my mother was a powerful woman. My father let her run a good deal of the business. He admitted freely she had more sense than he did, and her investments did well. But hers was a cold trade. ‘Buy what you understand,’ she was fond of saying. ‘Buy what you know you can sell.’ For her, all the wondrous things that she bought and squirrelled away in the warehouse were just so many ingenious routes towards profit. She enjoyed the chase, and the devious thrill of outskirting the other merchants by means of plans well judged and precisely laid, but in the end she reckoned up her happiness in marks of silver or Venetian ducats. That was her plan in life: to grow richer and even richer, and live all her life on Thames Street within sight and smell of the river.
Thomas resembled her, in character and in looks. He was darkhaired, with brows that frowned while he thought. The careful one, she called him, who always thought before he spoke. I was the quick one, the one with no head for book-learning; I was the dreamer of impractical dreams, with my lithe frame and thin face, and quick, sharp eyes the colour of off-green pebbles. ‘Too quick,’ my mother said, ‘and too like your father.’ Too quick to be seduced by the glitter of pretty things, she meant: too quick to desire, and doubtless in the future too quick to buy. A merchant must be slow.
But that was not the style of my father. His purchases were affairs of the heart. When I was eleven, he brought back a bag of Arabian pearls, which he gave me to play with. I remember rolling them about on a broad platter by the fireside, holding them up to see the way they shone in the yellow light of our candles, and then sorting them with tweezers by size.
‘Pearls,’ my mother frowned. ‘Why pearls, in God’s name?’
‘I bought them because they sang to me,’ was my father’s reply.
They sang to me too. They spoke of a life beyond what I knew, and for which I was developing a vague but powerful longing.
3
As I grew older, I used to slip away whenever I might and steal northwards up Labour-in-Vain Hill to Cheapside. Here I was truly in a different world. The breadth and openness of the street, the stone paving, unlike most of the city which lay in its own filth, the houses that stood in their majesty like the sterns of great ships, the water conduit with its gilded statues of saints; at all these things I marvelled.
Here, on the corner of Bread Street, is that wondrous stand of houses known as Goldsmiths’ Row. Four storeys high they rise, beautified all along the front with figures of wild woodmen riding on monstrous beasts, all richly painted and gilt. There were fourteen shops in all. At the centre of the Row, beneath the largest and fiercest of the woodmen, was the shop of the King’s own goldsmith, Cornelius Heyes. He was a man of weight, received at Court with as much deference, so they said, as a great noble. There were others too, almost as grand: Christian Breakespere and Bartholomew Reade, and Morgan Wolf. They knew my family, of course. My father traded with them all, on occasion. Here I came to perch on a stool in a corner, and watch, and learn.
In a goldsmith’s shop you are struck, first of all, by the light. The Row faces north, like a painter’s studio, and the shelves inside the shops are draped in white cloths, so that there is always the same gentle radiance. Set against these cloths the gems glow, each with its own proper fire. On one shelf stand solitary stones in their purity, rubies and amethysts, garnets and sapphires, some exquisitely cut and polished, others virgin stones straight from the earth, rough like hailstones. On another shelf are rings and signets, threaded on wire or perched on silver stands made to look like the branches of trees. One wall holds crosses and reliquaries, and crystal tablets engraved with scenes of the saints, and the precious things that princes love: little crucifixes for rosaries, jewelled combs, tinderboxes, scent flasks, inkhorns, hourglasses, mirror frames and hawks’ bells, all worked in gold and set with agate or enamel or mother of pearl. Higher up stand the great flagons and ewers of gold or silver gilt, gleaming down over the shop like suns, waiting to be presented to the King. I remember in the shop of Mr Cornelius a pair of gilt basins chased with beasts and dragons that weighed over six hundred ounces, and a vase of rock crystal graven with roses and crowns and the cipher of the King and Queen, H and K woven together, sprinkled across it in gold.
In the corners were other rarities: oliphants’ teeth, branches of crimson coral, or the horn of a unicorn, garnished in gold. Further back squatted the brick furnace that purred always with a deep-throated fire, and the lapidary’s wheel where the goldsmith sat like a potter, pedalling with one foot to polish his stones or grind them down into facets. Close to this, on the workbench, were little jars of pastes and emery powders, and the diamond-tipped rods with which he carved tiny intaglios or signets. Then there were the drills, from the great augers turned with two hands to the tiniest picks for drilling pearls; the pincers that likewise came in every conceivable size, the crucibles, the casting ladles and hammers, the miniature anvils, the moulds, the leather gauntlets and aprons stained black from use; and high up the blocks of wax and the acids, the aqua fortis and aqua stygia used for engraving. Closer to the front of the shop was a broad table with richly carved legs, where the smith sat when he was expecting a customer. He would have his scales before him and the minute brass weights, the scruples and the drachms, the carats that are the hundred and forty-fourth part of an ounce, and the grain weights that are a quarter of that again and can only be lifted by tweezers.
What I most loved to see were the stones, in all their varied temperaments and tribes. I learnt the twelve types of the Emerald, with the Scythian at their head, that shines like new spring grass. I learnt of its kindred stones, the jasper and the blue-green beryl that must be cut in a six-sided figure if it is not to lose its brilliance. I learnt of the Diamond: the pure whites of Golconda, the blue stones and the green, and the fair, pointed stones of the Mahanadi River in Bengal. These will cut through armour. Yet if you hit them a blow with a hammer they shatter into shards too tiny to be seen. I learnt too of the cutting of their facets, the stone’s eyes, as it were, through which you gaze down into its soul. The principal facet, where possible, will be a flat rectangle or table: the table-cut stone being everywhere the most prized. It has a dark brilliance and a mystery that the pyramid cut can never have. I studied the Ruby also, the great stones and the lesser that incline to the orange of the garnet and the jacinth. I learnt of Amethysts with their delicate peach-bloom shades, that are almost as valued as diamonds, and Sapphires, the true sky-blue, as well as the green, the yellow, the rose and the white.
I studied too their faults and diseases. Some stones are shadowed and opaque; others are washed and pale; others again they call clouded, when there is a whiteness or mist that hovers in the stone’s outer regions, even though its heart may be clear and true. Other stones are discoloured, or split, or stained by some alien vein of metal. Again and again I was told that a goldsmith must never show pity for these marred and maimed stones. He must be as ruthless in culling imperfection as anyone else who aspires to the favour of kings.
But it was from Morgan Wolf that I learnt the most. He taught me the tricks jewellers use to improve upon nature; how, if you steep a dull ruby in vinegar for fourteen days it will regain its fire just long enough for it to be sold. He showed me how plain rock crystal can be treated with indigo to make a counterfeit sapphire, and how to set a diamond with a dab of paint beneath to make it shine with any colour you please. He showed me the various foils made of copper, silver or gold, with which the gems’ settings were lined. These foils could be tinted, if you hung them in the smoke of burning cloth, or brightly coloured feathers. And so I shall give you this advice: if you have a dead parrot, sell it to a dishonest goldsmith. He will buy it, and give you a good price too. Wolf even kept a wicker cage of pigeons in the back of his shop, and when he had a pearl that had turned old and blind he would coax one of the birds into eating it, and retrieve it the next day from the ordure, bright and restored to youth. But there was always a falseness about these impostures, and in time I learnt to detect them all.
As I sat in the corner of Breakespere’s or Wolf’s shop with my head resting on my arm, my mind drifted into the future. I knew the life of a goldsmith was not for me. I could not have borne those hours of labour sitting at a workbench on Cheapside, or waiting at the counter for a customer like a spider watching for a fly. No, I decided: I would be a voyager, a prince among merchants. But I would not be selling my goods on Thames Street. I saw myself instead travelling up the river, perhaps in one of those same gilded barges I loved to gaze on, to Westminster Palace or Richmond, alighting at the fabled landing-places with their flags and golden dragons set on poles, and ushered inside, where royalty would await. Such were my dreams. I told no one about them; certainly not my mother.
The years were passing. Our band of three sat on the highest form in the schoolroom on Old Fish Street, where we learnt the rudiments of Latin, arithmetic and accounting from a wiry young Franciscan. Dust motes swirled in the light from the dirty windows and water gurgled in the lead cistern outside. For six years we had sat there each morning, stifling hot in summer and cold in winter, with the little charcoal brazier in the midst of the room. There were some twenty-five of us, sons of the stockfish traders and other merchants of Thames Street. I yearned to be gone; but I set myself to learn what I thought I needed for the life before me. Numbers were dull beasts in themselves, but when used to reckon up ducats into crowns or for counting profits they acquired a keen interest. Latin, the language of legal contracts, ambassadors and churchmen, I mastered as well as I might; though often, when I should have been committing some verse or other to memory, my mind was drifting restlessly north to Cheapside, and the wonders I would see there later that afternoon.
‘I shall beat you,’ murmured our master, his voice lowered as if in awe of the punishment he was about to mete out. But he never wielded the rod himself. Instead, he handed us over to a sinewy usher who had an arrow scar on his cheek from the Battle of Flodden some seven years before. Between blows, the Franciscan repeated the verses he was trying, through the medium of pain, to force into us.
‘O dulces,’ he whispered, with tears in his eyes at the beauty of the words. His deputy lifted the rod over my waiting hand. Whack! ‘… comitum …’ Whack! ‘… valete coetus.’
I went home often with red lines on my palm; but pain meant little to me. I was waiting my time. Thomas, the bright star and our mother’s darling, always knew the answers. Though a year younger, he had rapidly moved up to join John and me. Miriam Dansey never spoke of him as a future merchant. No, it was the Church for Thomas, and high promotion in it, if she knew anything at all. She had marked him down as the King’s chancellor, or at least a great bishop.
As we made our way home, the three of us, the boys from the other, more prestigious schools used to lie in wait for us. These were the scholars of Saint Paul’s and Saint Anthony’s: pigeons of Paul’s and Anthony hogs we called them, after the birds on the great cathedral, and the pigs that wandered everywhere about London, snuffling up scraps until they were slaughtered by the prior of Saint Anthony’s for his own and his brethren’s enjoyment. These proud boys used to surround us, them in their black velvet gowns as if they were clerks or king’s councillors already. They gave us the traditional challenge, ‘Placetne disputare?’ Will you dispute? And Thomas, with the light of battle in his eye, replied, ‘Placet.’ We trooped all together into the nearest churchyard and perched on the tombs. I can picture Thomas, his thin body straight, tongue licking his teeth, waiting to hear what his enemies would throw down for debate. It might be, ‘Whether a hundred petty sins are as damnable as one great one’, ‘Whether even Lucifer can be saved’, ‘Whether it is too late for the dead to repent’. He could prove anything, in his schoolboy Latin that became more fluent year by year. His opponents gradually lost their tempers, until it became a battle of satchels and heavy books, and even sticks and stones. Then John and I waded into the fight, and Thomas swung his satchel with a fury that made up for his lack of strength, until the three of us won clear, bruised but triumphant.
Our band still roamed the streets of London, but our interests had changed. We were in love, all three of us, with a certain girl who used to watch from the window of a grand, stone-built mansion on the corner of Bosse Lane, just up the street. Her dark gaze would dart up and down Thames Street as she brushed back a wisp of black hair under her hood, as if she too were restless, and looking for something that was still beyond her sight. We did not know her name, but she looked to be of an age with us, about fourteen. She came from that world I so longed for. The pearls at her throat, the ruby brooch and the silver thread in her gown all proclaimed it, even without the languid ease of her movements and the way she laughed at us and called to her sister, a sharp-eyed little ten-year-old, to come and watch our antics. Plodding home from school we used to throw our satchels down in the street, bow and kiss our hands, whoop and cut capers.
‘Sweet sugar sucket, come down!’
‘Dance with us!’
‘Be my bride!
In response, she would rest her chin elegantly on one hand and smile. Once she even rewarded John with a suggestive pout of her lips, and a finger run along the edge of her bodice and up round her throat. I found a way to climb the sheer face of that house, clinging to the barely projecting stones with fingers and toes, and pulled myself up to her window. Perching there like some strange bird, not two feet away from the soft and suddenly surprised face of the girl, I had not a notion what I ought to do. But with the other two staring up at me, there was no question I had to do something. What a mass of ill-formed scrags of wooing I spun out of my brain! I took her hand and counted off her fingers, this one pretty, that one a little too fat, oh, but that one, I die for it! She drew back her hand and laughed. ‘Oh, Susan,’ she called through the open door behind her, ‘come and listen! This boy is actually trying to woo me!’ I was a game to her, a petty amusement, like a lapdog or a juggler. I burned with anger and shame then. If she could only see what I longed to be, and not what I was, a tradesman’s son, a schoolboy, one born and bred to the stink of the Thames.
‘The Devil carry you off, Richard Dansey,’ yelled John from below. He tried to jump and follow me up the wall, but he was too heavy and slid back down again. That recalled my courage. In John’s eyes, at least, I was a conqueror. I swung myself forward, and before the girl knew what I was doing, I kissed her loudly on the lips so that John and the rest could see. She drew back with a frown: I had gone too far. Then I lowered myself carefully back down, leaping the last six feet or so. Thomas whooped and slapped me on the back, but John threw himself at me, punching me and knocking me down, so that in an instant we were rolling together in the filth at the far edge of the street. When we pulled ourselves upright to stand glaring at one another, both our faces were bleeding.
‘I will win her,’ John promised.
‘Not while I live,’ I replied.
We stood still, wary in case the other made a fresh attack. Then John laughed and held out his hand. ‘We’ll not let a girl come between us.’ He was right. His friendship mattered; though often, as now, our rivalry almost outran it. Slowly I took the offered hand. He nudged me with a mocking gleam in his eye and whispered, ‘But I will win her.’
Then we heard the bolts drawn back from the great gate under her window, and the growling of a servant, and we ran off together down the street, laughing and pushing one another. I felt elated at my triumph with the girl, and the dangerous thrill of running so close to losing John’s friendship.
For months in the summer we would trudge down dusty Thames Street to stand under her window and find it empty and fastened shut. Only the curmudgeonly servant was left, sweeping the cobbles clean before the great gate. Thomas one day approached him, offered him some coins, stood talking a few moments and then came back to us.
‘Her name is Hannah Cage,’ he reported. ‘Her father is Stephen Cage, a great courtier, with a castle in Kent. The family is off with the King on his country progress: Eltham Palace, Greenwich, Richmond.’
We heard the news in silence. I felt a void open up inside me. There it was again, brutally plain: that gulf between what I wished to be, and what I was. Well, the girl was out of my sphere, and best forgotten.
As we went brooding round London that sweltering summer, John one evening led us past the bath-house on Stew Lane. We stopped and looked up at its brick chimney and mysteriously shuttered windows.
‘You dare not take a shilling to the bath-house and buy a night of pleasure,’ John challenged me.
My heart began beating hard. The girl might be gone, but I would have my first taste of woman. ‘By God, I do,’ I replied.
‘Together, then? Tonight?’
After dark I slipped from the house and met John at the end of Stew Lane. Fog lay on the river. Lights shone from chinks in the shuttered windows of the bath-house, but all the rest of the waterfront was dark. We handed in our shillings at the door to a smiling old woman with just two teeth, who told us to undress and pass through the curtain. Together we advanced naked across a rush-strewn floor into a cloud of hot steam. All along the walls, in curtained cubicles, were the individual baths, from which came the sound of splashes and laughter. I imagined myself in some fantastic castle out of a romance, where a noble damsel who was the image of Hannah Cage waited for me. I began to tremble with expectation. John, looking at me, winked, and stepped aside into a cubicle. I parted a curtain, stepped into another and climbed into the bath. As I lay back in the warm water, a girl slipped in beside me. She was large, a rounded heap of breasts and thighs that astonished me. She clambered quickly athwart me, red-faced and flaxen-haired, and I braced myself for the exquisiteness of my first taste of pleasure. But lord, she was heavy. As she plunged and gasped I had to fight for my breath, and, instead of being free to explore those unfamiliar reaches of female flesh with my hands, I found I had to grasp both edges of the bath to stop myself from going under. She brought me quickly to my fulfilment, and rolled off with a sigh and a tremendous splash of water. I lay half-submerged, panting. Before I could even think of a new caress the girl leant over the edge of the bath, waved an arm through the curtain and shouted, ‘Sally! We’re done here. Have that ale and pie for me by the time I’m dry, or I’ll baste you.’
I dressed in anger. Even her sigh, I thought, had been a mark of boredom, not of pleasure. Almost I wished I had saved myself. Was this all that women were? No, I knew for sure they were not. As I came out I met John. He too looked disturbed. But he said, ‘Choice and dainty. Yours?’
I turned my face into the shadows. ‘Paradise.’