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