I found my mother sitting at her table in the counting house, with stacks of glittering coins before her: French écus, Portuguese cruzados, Genoese ducats. All these she would weigh before taking them to the Royal Mint to be changed for English crowns. She still looked young. Her hair was dark and waved, and always protruded somewhere or other from beneath her black widow’s hood. A fire burned in the small hearth, and the scent of cloves from the warehouse below mingled with the tang of burning charcoal. William Marshe was hunched on the high-backed settle with an account book open before him, his long face wearing its usual melancholic expression. It was growing dark. A number of tin lanterns stood on the floor, unlit, for the use of our watchmen at night. I sat down by the fire facing William.
My mother spoke without looking up at me. ‘And so you have something to say.’
It was harder to begin than I had expected. There was no use in trying to excite her over my ambitions, by painting for her the pomp and seduction of the Court. That would only turn her against me at the start. And so I went straight to the crux of it, the King’s device and motto, and the signification I read in it: the flames of passion ignited once more, to replace the discarded Mrs Mary. While I spoke, her eye rested on me like a jeweller’s, probing intently for the flaw in a stone.
‘A new mistress,’ said my mother, leaning back. ‘Really? Then why have you heard nothing of it, you with your long ears for Court news? The King’s lovers are commonly the very first to boast of their advancement.’
I leant forward from the fireplace. ‘I told you: Declare I dare not. He is still wooing her: he is on the chase. He is teasing her, tantalising her, just as she may be tantalising him. The motto, the heart in the press: everything indicates she has not yet surrendered.’
Miriam Dansey put her arms behind her head, yawned, and then laughed. ‘Not surrendered! Now, there is a wonder! Why should she not? I would, if King Henry came and heaped me with jewels.’
I clapped my hands and jumped up, delighted that she had played right into my hands. ‘There! You have said it. What will a king do when he is thwarted in love?’ I strode around the room, letting my long shadow dart out in the firelight. ‘He will bathe her in sapphires, he will pile her with diamonds, he will buy all Persia and the Indies and lay them at her feet. And I …’
My mother let out a shrill laugh. ‘Now I see it! You think that you will be the one to sell the King his jewels! Oh, my mad, mad boy! The King will buy from Mr Cornelius, and Mr Christian, and Morgan Wolf. The men he knows and trusts. Why should he trouble himself with you?’
I turned on her. ‘My jewels will be better.’
‘Hm!’ It was a grunt of amusement. ‘How, in the name of all the saints, will you accomplish that?’
I swung myself down on to a stool and crouched towards her table. William, I noticed, had his eye on me. He was sharp, for all his dropsical appearance, and he was measuring me up just as surely as my mother. ‘The stones that flow into London come to us from Antwerp or Bruges, and before that from Genoa or Venice. The Italians and French keep the best for themselves: Heyes and the others simply sit on Cheapside and wait for what the traders bring them. I shall not do that. I shall go to Venice, and catch the gems as they land from the East. I shall bring back such stones as have not been seen. I shall …’
‘Why not go further?’ said William, with his half-smile. ‘To Cairo, or even to Serendip or Golconda?’ He was testing me, trying out just how fantastically high my plans might soar. I shook my head.
‘There is too little time. To make my profit, I must be in with the first. When the lady succumbs to the King’s charms, the flow of gifts will slow. Henry will no longer want what is most rare and fine. A few little tokens will do. Like the New Year’s gifts he still sends to Bessie Blount.’
William sat back and nodded. ‘I see I am to lose you, Mr Richard.’ He glanced across at my mother, who tapped the table with her fingers in impatience.
‘I shall be the one to decide that.’ She turned back to me. ‘And so you are asking me for a loan. A very, very large one. That is it?’
I stood before her and nodded. The Widow of Thames Street frowned. She rapped the Dansey seal on the table and said, ‘I shall settle nothing until the Rose comes home.’
Mr William was due to set out any day, and myself along with him. I had hoped to avoid this voyage. I put my hands on the table. ‘But that will be too late: speed is everything. Surely you see that?’
My mother stood up slowly and rested her hands next to mine. She said softly, ‘I see you are running ahead a little too fast.’
I looked back at her, angry. ‘Very well,’ I told her. ‘Let the Rose sail first. But I am not going with her. My place is here, where I can watch the Court.’
My mother drew in her breath and lowered her brows for a fight. But then she appeared to change her mind, and smiled. ‘As you prefer.’
I turned and walked out of the room. It was two weeks before the Rose at last dropped downstream from the Tower with the tide and vanished out to sea, carrying her usual outward cargo of dank-smelling English woollens. It might be months before her return. I waited with impatience. I tried to believe that my mother intended to use some of the profits of the Rose’s venture to fund my own; but more likely she hoped to weaken my purpose through delay. I spent the time moodily patrolling the town for news. I had to know I was right: and I had to know the lady’s name. I needed to have a face, a form, a mode of beauty in my mind before I began to buy: for stones are as varied and fickle as women themselves. But my Uncle Bennet could tell me nothing of any new royal mistress. All the news from Court was of the ambassadors from France, and the new Holy Catholic League that the Pope was forming to fight the overreaching ambition of the Empire and fling the Spanish and German armies out of Italy. His Holiness had been joined in this alliance by Florence and Venice, and then by France, and these states were busily employed in raising armies. But our own King, after swift deliberation, had decided on strict neutrality. That way, said Bennet, Henry could be the peace-maker, the one all the other powers came to, begging for help and offering favours in return. With this pleasant thought, King Henry had left London to spend the summer hunting. The Court vanished into the deep country, and news dried up completely.
I might almost have thought Henry’s new love was a chimera conjured only from my own fancy but for the flow of jewels out of Goldsmiths’ Row. In April there was a gold brooch in the figure of a heart, black enamelled and set with five rubies and five diamonds, supplied by Morgan Wolf; the next month a rope of sixty pearls, and the month after that a gold frame for a portrait miniature, garnished with a falcon with eyes of emerald. All these objects disappeared into the King’s hands. Each time I brought the news to my mother, as fresh proof. I was convinced that I was right. But who was she? No one could tell me of a woman who had received these jewels, or been seen wearing them.
In July the Rose returned at last and anchored below London Bridge. I stood on the wharf, watching the boat come in with Mr William in the bow. He took my hand briefly and went straight up to the counting house. I paced the wharf anxiously, glancing repeatedly up at the window, while the men unloaded the goods from the lighters, nutmegs and pepper and casks of sack. Dusk was gathering, and mists rose from the river. Then I saw William peer from behind the diamond panes and beckon me up. I walked quickly through the dim aisles of the warehouse, climbed the wooden stairs to the counting house and stepped inside.
Still my mother made me wait. In one hand she held a paper covered in figures, which she was checking rapidly, her lips working, while the sands ran through the narrow waist of an hourglass framed in ebony. She grudged time spent checking her underlings’ accounts, and used the glass’s discipline to make herself read fast. Her other hand rested on the respected Dansey seal, a broad disc of brass with a polished wooden knob, which she toyed with as she read. I sat down in a chair facing her. My heart was beating hard.
Suddenly she put down her figures, took hold of the hourglass and laid it on its side, halting the flow of time. She looked at me a moment with her head tilted,