David Liss - The Coffee Trader

“Explain this,” Daniel said, jabbing a bony finger in the direction of the book.

Hannah stared at it but said nothing.

“Do you not hear me, wife?”

“I hear you,” she said.

“Then you will answer me. By Christ, I’ve not often raised a hand to you, but I will do so now if you continue to be obstinate. Has someone been teaching you to read?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Then where did the book come from?”

There was no point keeping it a secret. Daniel could no longer do him any harm. She suspected that Miguel would want her to tell him, that he would get some pleasure from her doing so. “It came from Senhor Lienzo, your brother,” she said. “He gave it to me.”

Daniel could not have turned any more red if he had held his breath. “Miguel,” he said softly. “What business had he giving you things?”

She shook her head. “I told him I wished I knew how to read, and so he gave it to me.”

Daniel sucked in his breath. He rubbed his jaw and then stuck his thumb and index finger into his mouth and began to root around. After a moment he stopped. “Did he give you anything else?” he asked bitterly.

She had not known she was going to say it. She could not have willed herself to do it. The courage would have eluded her. And it was hardly a choice she felt entitled to make herself. There could be nothing more selfish than to entangle another person in her lies, and yet she did it. The words slipped out.

“This child,” she said, both hands on her belly. “He gave me this child.”

She felt so cold she could hardly keep her teeth from chattering. She became dizzy, her vision blurred. What had she done? What horrible step had she taken? She nearly threw herself at Daniel’s feet and told him she had spoken those words out of spite and that of course she had never defiled her marriage bed. But though it would be the truth, the words would sound like lies. That was why she had spoken them. Once uttered, they could never be retrieved.

Her husband remained still, with his arms hanging limply by his sides. She had expected him to rush at her, to beat her with his hands or with whatever he could grab. She was prepared to protect her baby, come what may.

He might have simply walked out of the room or he might have cursed her. He did none of those things, and Hannah now had cause to regret her words, not for what they might mean for her or even for Miguel, but for what they might mean for her husband. She had imagined him enraged, furious, murderous, but not broken and defeated.

“I have nothing, then,” he said softly. “Everything has been lost. I will have to sell the house. And now I won’t even have my son.”

“She’s a daughter,” Hannah said softly. “I dreamed it.”

Daniel seemed not to hear her. “I’ve lost everything,” he said again. “And to my brother. I’ll not stay here.”

“Where will you go?” she asked, as though she were speaking to a grieving friend.

“ Venice. London, perhaps. You will go to Miguel?”

“I don’t know that he will have me.” Why should he? Those few words, spoken out of malice toward Daniel, had changed Miguel’s life forever. How could she have done something so cruel? Yet, if she could take them back, she wouldn’t.

“He will have you. He has honor enough. I will ask the Ma’amad grant a divorce, and I will be gone.”

She thought to step forward and take his hand and offer some kind word-but she would be doing it for herself, only to lessen her guilt. And she dared not break the spell. “I’ll leave now,” she told him.

“That would be best.”

As she walked through the Vlooyenburg, the terror slipped away drop by drop. She had imagined Miguel turning her away, cursing her, slamming his door in her face. What would she do? She would have no home and no money, and a child to look after. She might find a convent to take her in, but she did not even know if there were convents in the United Provinces. She might have to go south, perhaps to Antwerp, to find one. How would she get there? She had only a few coins to her name.

But she would not torment herself with these fears. Miguel would never turn her away. At the very least, now that he was a great merchant again, he would give her something with which to support herself. She too could go somewhere and start afresh, perhaps pass herself off as a widow. It would not be an ideal life, but neither would it be a miserable one. The world was all before her, and if it was not for her to choose her place of rest, she believed anything would be better than the place from which she had emerged.

Miguel had not yet hired a servant for his new home, so he answered the door himself. He stared at her for a moment, not certain what to do, and then invited her in.

“I told your brother that the child is yours,” Hannah said, as soon as she heard the door click shut.

He turned and looked at her, his expression inscrutable. “Will he give you a divorce?”

She nodded.

Miguel said nothing. His jaw clenched and his eyes half closed as he indulged in a long, a cruelly long, inscrutable silence.

Too many shutters in the house remained closed, she thought, and the hallways remained dark and murky, the whiteness of the tiles appearing as a dull gray. Miguel now lived here, but he had not made the place his own. No paintings hung on the walls. A dusty mirror leaned against the floor. In the distance, Hannah could smell the burning of an oil lamp, and she could see the faint dance of light from another room. Somewhere in the house a clock chimed.

“If I take you as my wife,” he said at last, “will you agree to obey me in all things?”

“No,” she said. She bit her lip to fight back both tears and a grin.

“Not even a little?” he asked.

“Very well. I will obey you a little.”

“Good. A little is all I require,” he said, and reached out for her.

With a belly full of slightly cured herring, served with turnips and leeks, Miguel leaned back to survey the Flyboat. The moment was his. All the men of the Portuguese Nation spoke of his wondrous though still largely incomprehensible manipulation of the coffee market, a market so insignificant that most men had never given it more than a passing glance. Lienzo had shown himself a man of substance, they said. Parido had set out to destroy him, but Lienzo had turned the villainy back on itself. Brilliant. Ingenious. This man who had once seemed no more than a foolish gambler now showed himself to be a great man of commerce.

A half dozen traders of the highest order sat at Miguel’s table, drinking their fill of the good wine for which he had paid. Eager fellows had crowded around him the moment he walked through the door, and Miguel had found it difficult to force his way through to his new friends. Older senhors who had once looked at Miguel with contempt now wished to do business. Would Senhor Lienzo be interested in considering a matter of ginger? Would Senhor Lienzo be interested in hearing of the opportunities arising on the London Exchange?

Senhor Lienzo had a great deal of interest in these matters, and he had an even greater interest in the fact that these men now sought his business. But, he thought, men of commerce were best treated like Dutch sluts. If they were put off a bit now, they would only be more anxious later. Let them wait. Miguel still had no firm ideas about what he wished to do with his newfound solvency. He was not as wealthy as he had hoped to be by now, but he had wealth enough, and he would soon have a wife and-sooner than expected-a child.

He could not help but laugh at the irony. The Ma’amad would expel from the community a righteous man who dared to cast a few coins to an unsanctioned beggar, but Miguel could steal his brother’s wife so long as he did so legally. She would have her divorce, and then she would be his. In the meantime, he had rented for her some rooms in a neat little house in the Vlooyenburg. She had hired a girl of her own choosing, she drank coffee, she entertained friends she never knew she had, women who flocked to her parlor now that she was the subject of so delicious and neatly resolved a scandal. And she had been to visit Miguel in his new house. Of course she had. There was no reason to wait for the legal sanction of marriage.