The Trade Secret Read online

  For Vesi

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  Part Two

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Part Three

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Part One

  1

  As Nat Bramble searched the brilliantly lit Isfahan bazaar, he found an indoor city with a separate lane for each trade. Down one alley he passed all the clock-makers and down another the glassmakers, but when he came to a neighbourhood of metalworkers, he found a curious exception. For here, wedged between tinsmiths, was a narrow stall selling books, inks and paper, the very things that he’d been sent to buy.

  Inside the stall, a burly young man about Nat’s own age seemed entirely oblivious to the clanking. Could he not hear the loud stacking of samovar shells? The chank and tunk of tin being knocked into shape? Could he not smell the soldering irons? He dabbed at a silk page with a reed pen as peaceably as if he were in one of the sylvan scenes that hung across his stall like bunting. Perhaps he was deaf, or had no sense of smell? Just then, as if scenting Nat’s presence, the young man sniffed and looked up.

  ‘Why,’ Nat asked him, ‘does your master put you here among the tinsmiths and copper beaters?’

  ‘Master? There’s no master. This poor humble stall is my poor humble stall.’

  ‘Yours? What are you? Eighteen?’ Darius inclined his head. ‘A year older than me and you’ve got your own stall,’ said Nat enviously. He consoled himself that for all his independence this fellow was poor. He had surely been wearing that faded kameez a long time. Its floral print must once have been rows of blue flowers with yellow stamens, but now most of the petals had paled to invisibility, shaken by many winters.

  Into the stall there stepped a young man as smartly dressed as the two of them were shabby, in an indigo tunic patterned with bright pink tulips. He was a couple of years older than they, with a horseshoe moustache to show for it. As Horseshoe Moustache reached up to unpeg an illustrated lyric from the line, an indigo sleeve fell back to reveal a forearm festooned with a motley of bandages and dotted with burns about the size of the brass coin with which he paid for his poem. The stallholder scrolled and beribboned the lyric. He handed it to Horseshoe Moustache and said,

  ‘May this poem help you to win your true love’s heart.’

  After he’d gone, Nat asked about the burns and bandages.

  ‘Marks of love,’ came the grave reply. ‘With us, the ardent suitor proves his love sincere by burning himself in front of his beloved. If she likes him, she gives him a bandage, dipped in healing salves and unguents, with which to bind his wounds. If she doesn’t love him, she offers no poultice, no bandage and the spurned lover must walk away, the pain in his arm banishing the anguish in his heart. The more bandages you wear the more she loves you.’

  ‘Are you a poet?’

  ‘I am a silkworm. Here I sit in my narrow stall spinning out my silk, and I’ve just sold my finest poem for one single shahidi.’

  ‘Have you no copy of the poem?’

  ‘Here,’ he replied, tapping his head and heart to show where his copy of the poem was lodged. Nat mistakenly thought he was doing the salaam m’lakum gesture and so touched heart, lips and head in return.

  ‘Nat Bramble at your service.’

  ‘Nat Bramble, I am Darius Nouredini. The poem goes like this.’ He lifted his chin and recited:

  I yearn for your touch

  as silence before the final chord

  aches for your fingers

  upon copper and silver strings.

  ‘Strum,’ begs silence

  after the last-but-one chord,

  ‘for until the touch of your hand

  the whole world hangs suspended,

  like a frozen waterfall.’

  ‘And what makes the poem exquisite,’ he continued, ‘is that the word shor means both to pour and to strum. My love, Gol, is a musician. She doesn’t know I love her yet but I’ll tell her very soon. What brings you here?’

  When Nat told him his errand, Darius asked whether the ink and paper were for the writing of his letters or for drawing. Nat smiled at the very idea that he might be someone who entered into correspondence. He was a skink: the servant that other servants gave orders to, the dogsbody, potboy and errand-boy. Was the ink for his letters indeed! Or was Darius Nouredini mocking him? Nat cut him a look but found no trace of mockery in those dark brown eyes in their pure milk whites. The writing materials, he explained, were for the gentlemen of the Sherley party. Darius laid out his wares. The sealing wax was runnier than English and Venetian, the ink ordinary, but the quality of the smooth, strong cotton-blended paper was beyond compare.

  Emerging from the bazaar’s narrow covered alleys out onto the maidan, Nat was envious. There was a fellow his own age, a masterless man. Independent. What had Nat to look forward to when he crossed the maidan? What would he do today? More skinking. Polish more boots. Wash more clothes. Sharpen more swords and knives. Wait at table during more interminable suppers he could smell but never taste. Skink, skink, skink.

  2

  Sir Anthony Sherley stood on the Ali Qapu Palace’s high veranda with one arm on the shoulder of the skink, and the other pointing across Isfahan’s ten-acre city square.

  ‘Over there. Those are the moneychangers, Bramble. On those steps on the far side of the square? There’s two-hundred and fifty silver abbassi in this hawking bag. You will exchange these Persian coins for three-hundred Dutch lion dollars. Each Dutch dollar has a lion rampant on one side and is printed with the words leeuwen daalder. Dutch for lion dollar. Then you will come back, and place three-hundred dollars right here where the lines of good fortune cross long life.’

  Nat was troubled. Why me? he thought. Why not send an upper servant? Why not send Angelo, the gentleman interpreter? What trick was Anthony pulling? Was he secretly planning to leave Isfahan, abandoning all the servants? Did he fear his gentlemen would want paying if they knew he had dollars in his purse? Clouds rolled off the veranda’s mirrored pillars, and, dizzied by his commission, Nat’s head spun with them.

  ‘And if I cannot get three-hundred, Sir Anthony, then am I to bring the abbassi back?’

  ‘Agh! Cock a’ bones!’ gasped Anthony, doubling over and clutching his side. When he slowly straightened up, his stone-blue bug eyes were blood shot and leaky with pain.


  ‘Your stone, Sir Anthony?’

  ‘Whoreson kidney stone! ‘Tis gone. A spasm, a mere spasm. Cock a bones, that hurt! I’m quite well again. Now get thee gone, Bramble!’

  It was all transacted very quickly. Nat found a sarrafi offering three-hundred and three Dutch dollars for his silver abbassi. Three more than Sir Anthony had reckoned on! His master would be well pleased with that. The sarrafi poured the lion dollars straight from the scales into the hawking bag. Nat buckled the bag around his hips, pulled the skirts of his bumfreezer doublet down over it, and hurried back across the world’s biggest city square to the Ali Qapu Palace.

  In the lobby outside the Sherley brothers’ second-floor chambers sat three gentlemen of the party, Parry, Pincon, and Angelo Corrai, the Venetian interpreter, who waved Nat away.

  ‘Any business that you have can wait. Sir Anthony is sick with his stone. He will see no-one.’

  ‘But he said he was well an hour ago, sir,’ said Nat.

  ‘And now he is ill, gnat’s piss,’ replied Parry. ‘His stone has shifted.’

  ‘When he’s well again,’ said Nat, ‘please tell Sir Anthony that his order has been transacted at three-hundred and three.’

  ‘What order?’ asked Pincon, the Frenchman.

  ‘Three-hundred and three what?’ demanded Parry, the Englishman.

  ‘If you have a letter you must give it to me to pass to him,’ said Angelo.

  ‘No letter, my masters. God give you good day,’ said Nat.

  Smiling to himself, he climbed the spiral staircase up to the fourth floor servants’ quarters. He had reduced Signor Corrai, Monsieur Pincon and Mr Parry to mere go-betweens. Who’s gnat’s piss now?

  3

  Nat awoke at first light, hips and waist sore from sleeping on a belt full of coins. When he went down to the second floor he found everything pell-mell. The Shah’s own physicians were within and he could hear Sir Anthony groaning in delirium. All the other servants were busy with hot water and cold compresses, passing in and out of the onion-shaped double doors of the Sherley brothers’ chamber. The large and lumbering Eli Elkin handed Nat a steaming chamber pot of blood and piss, and said:

  ‘Here’s your breakfast, Bramble.’

  Nat was extremely wary of Elkin, Sir Anthony’s enforcer, his vicious master’s vicious man. He knew that Elkin was looking for the slightest flicker of rebellion, the slightest excuse to crack his skull, and so he meekly took the pot of blood and piss from his hands. With his bunched eyes, turned-up nose and twisted leer, Elkin always looked as if he were halfway through pulling a tight collar off over his head. Nat never knew a man look so uncomfortable in his own skin. Perhaps that was why Elkin always had to make Nat and every other servant around him feel uncomfortable as well.

  Returning the cleaned and polished chamber pot, he found a dozen of the Shah’s bodyguards, the Tofangchi, posted outside Sir Anthony’s chambers. Sir Robert Sherley, the weak-chinned, younger brother, came out.

  ‘How does your noble brother, Sir Robert?’ asked Nat.

  ‘Why, Master Bramble, he recovers. Still abed, but better. The Shah attends him in person.’

  ‘Just like Her Majesty at Lord Burghley’s bedside, sir, when the Queen spoon-fed him with her own royal hand.’

  ‘Let us hope not,’ said Robert Sherley with asperity, ‘for he died soon after.’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir, I forgot.’

  All Anthony’s people, his upper servants and the gentlemen of the party, were gathering in the lobby. Such was the air of grave, muttered speculation that no-one thought to give Nat any more orders for the day. In a trice he skipped away to the bazaar.

  As he emerged onto the broad expanse of the maidan he felt a surge of joy. Here was a whole day of liberty! He did not know when he would ever be so free again. Swinging his arms merrily, he sang snatches of the Carman’s Whistle.

  As I abroad was walking

  By the breaking of the day

  Into a pleasant meadow

  A young man took his way.

  He would show this Darius that a servant also had his free days, as much as any artisan stallholder. He would lounge and loiter. He would hum and haw. Let Darius see who had to work today and who had not. That’s what a little visit would teach him.

  Oh God a mercy, carman,

  Thou art a lively lad

  Thou hast as rare a whistle

  As young man ever had.

  Passing by the moneychangers, he allowed himself to dream. Ah, what if Anthony should die from his sickness! Then Nat might set himself up as independent as Darius Nouredini! Three-hundred and three lion dollars. He didn’t know what that was in pounds sterling, but he could work it out from Spanish ducats. He enquired after the value of Spanish ducats at a succession of sarrafi stalls, and then it was that he made an astounding discovery: no two sarrafi agreed on their worth. Dutch dollars’ value was consistent, but not so Spanish ducats. Was this an oversight, Nat wondered, due to the press of business?

  The Isfahan sarrafi ran the greatest currency exchange in the world. Nowhere else were so many different currencies traded. Coins hammered from every metal ore ever mined out of the earth were traded in the open-air stalls. Coins from the east, west, north and south: Ottoman dinar, Indian rupee, Chinese liang, Malayan tael, Spanish ducat, Dutch dollar, Venetian zecchino, the Holy Roman escudo and dockatoon, and the home currency, the Persian gold toman, silver abbassi, and brass shahidi. All were exchanged on the maidan. Small wonder, then, that the value of a fringe currency such as Spanish ducats differed wildly from stall to stall. Small wonder that no two stalls agreed on how many abbassi a silver Spanish ducat might be worth. Perhaps they would spot their mistake as soon as he tried to act on it.

  Nat drew three leeuwen daalder from the hawking bag around his waist and exchanged them for six Spanish ducats. Then he went to another sarrafi and converted his six ducats into six leeuwen daalder! He had now made Sir Anthony six more dollars. His master would be so delighted his thumb might even flip a spinning dollar Nat’s way. For Anthony always preferred impulsive largesse to paying a servant the wages he was due. Largesse cost less.

  4

  Darius was enjoying the silence in his narrow stall. The metalworkers either side of him had not opened for lack of oil. He worked peacefully, delighting in sounds usually inaudible under the din, such as the swish of the smooth seashell with which he was shellacking cotton-rag paper for binding into an album.

  Blank albums sold well. The fashion among young Isfahanis was for swapping artwork to paste into one another’s albums. Lyrics and musical notation, meticulous full-colour illustrations of flowers and herbs, caricatures of friends or famous wrestlers, calligraphy samples, design motifs, proverbs, funny stories, bawdy verses and, more than all of these put together, illustrated poems, his main stock in trade.

  As he worked, Darius weighed in his mind whether he dared yet give Gol a love poem to stick in her album. The last time they swapped keepsakes, he had come away kicking himself for his timidity in not giving her his lyrical ‘I Yearn For Your Touch.’ But having had a day to think about it he was relieved. The hour was not yet ripe to declare his love.

  His single lamp’s filament made a contented pop and sigh. An oil shortage had all but closed the bazaar. Bandits raiding the Baku convoy, not for its oil but for money belts, silk turbans and horses had caused the shortage. And yet these deep country bandits, who’d probably dumped the oil in a ditch somewhere, dung burners that they were, would soon plunge a city they had never seen into darkness. No-one could imagine a life without oil. Soon he’d be no better than a beast in its cave.

  At which point he smelt something exactly like a beast in its cave, looked up and saw the foreigner from yesterday. Nat Bramble had the look of a small nocturnal animal grown saucer-eyed in the dark as he asked,

  ‘Why’s the bazaar gone dark?’

  After Darius explained, Nat went quiet for a long time, tipped his head this way and that, and then stuck ou
t his arm and pointed at the lantern hanging on a hook.

  ‘Do you mean to say there’s oil in that lamp?’ he asked.

  Darius was flummoxed. It was like a toddler’s question. Is there air in the sky? Is there light in the sun? He had no idea how to answer such a strange question – until it dawned on him that Nat might come from a land where oil was unknown.

  ‘How do you heat your homes?’ asked Darius. ‘How do you cook?’

  ‘Sea-coal, charcoal and wood.’

  ‘And for light?’

  ‘Wax for the rich, tallow for the poor.’

  ‘Tallow?’ asked Darius, but then didn’t let Nat get more than a few words into his description of how animal fat was rendered before waving him to a stop. ‘None of that at any time,’ he said, screwing up his face with a shudder and blowing hard.