Christie Dickason - The Lady Tree

Blankaart swallowed audibly and looked at Vrel. ‘The true Admiral is a very rare bloom…if you can be sure of him. That is the problem. Being sure.’

Vrel sent a dragon’s jet of rage toward his perfidious ally.

‘The Semper Augustus has become a whore with too many masters,’ said Coymans. ‘And too many little bastards. You alone in Holland would rule our Admiral .’

‘I’m not a washerwoman or streetsweeper,’ warned Vrel, ‘who’ll give my life savings to some tavern rogue in exchange for an onion.’

‘And I’m not a Batavian spice farmer who will accept any price you offer just because your company has a big ship with four hundred guns on it.’

There was a pause.

‘Tch,’ said Coymans. His moustaches danced like playing dolphins. His teeth appeared and disappeared. ‘Oh, Vrel …!’

‘You’ve heard my last offer. One thousand florins, the nutmegs, and the silk.’

For a second, Coymans did not move at all. Not a hair, nor ruffle, nor swag, nor fold. Not a moustache. Not a finger. Then he held out his hand. ‘May I have that bulb back?’ he asked Blankaart politely.

Blankaart returned it with treacherous reluctance.

‘How can I raise your value?’ Coymans enquired of the bulb. ‘Tch.’ One moustache arched briefly. He dropped the bulb onto the floor and stamped on it with his boot.

Blankaart gave a strangled yelp of protest.

Coymans stamped again, and ground his sole against the polished wooden floor. He held his boot aloft and peered past it at the white mess on the floor. Then, with his knife, he scraped the rest from the sole of his boot.

‘Only two left in the world now,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And the two infants. We must rethink things a little.’

In the silence, Timmons noticed that the bad-tempered viol had stopped. A nearly-guttered candle on the table sang a high, tiny note. Blankaart coughed.

After a long moment, Coymans pushed the grass nest along the table to Timmons. ‘While our friend thinks, would you like to hold a fortune in your hand? Feel for yourself the weight and texture of true wealth?’

Timmons hesitated.

‘Go on. I trust you.’

Timmons crossed to the table and picked up a bulb. He turned it curiously in his thin hand. He was only an agent, not one of your gentleman enthusiasts, had never handled such a thing before. Smooth and shiny, like satin against his thumb. Hard under its crisp papery skin, with grey scarring around its neck like a hanged man.

It could just as well be an onion, he thought. How can anyone tell?

He had never before in his life thought about tulips, and certainly not in the same way as spices, or coal, or Baltic grain and oak. He weighed it in his palm.

‘Vrel?’ asked Coymans.

Vrel still stared at the juicy pulp on his floor. He was breathing heavily now.

‘Vrel?’ Coymans plucked the last bulb from the grass nest – the one with the two offshoots – and dropped it on the floor. He raised his boot.

‘No!’ cried Blankaart. ‘Please!’ He dropped to his knees and snatched at the tulip bulb. ‘Ough!’ He grunted as Coymans’s boot pinned his hand against the floorboards.

‘Wait!’ Vrel wrapped himself with his thick arms and rocked in an agony of indecision. ‘This house…and its contents.’

‘Not enough.’

Vrel pulled a spark of red fire from a finger of his left hand and dropped it on the table in front of Coymans. Then a chip of ice. ‘Let me think!’ begged Vrel. ‘I was prepared only for one…Only expected to pay…Just give me a moment to think!’ He added a band of gold and a cold tapestry of pearls to the other rings in front of Coymans.

Coymans leaned over and picked the bulb up from the floor. He put it back into the nest, crossed his arms and waited, with his eyes on Vrel’s face.

In the following silence, an extraordinary thing happened to Simeon Timmons. The chestnut-coloured tulip bulb in his palm began to change from the ordinary piece of vegetable matter which a few seconds before he could think of only on a slice of bread. First it grew heavier and heavier in his hand, until it was as heavy as the high stacks of bales on the wharf. Heavy as a ship’s load of barrelled nutmegs and pepper. Heavy as the wood and stone and brick from which men build palaces. As heavy as gold.

The shiny chestnut skin grew translucent. In the heart of the bulb, Timmons saw the growing glow of the ruby ring, the diamond, and the pearls. And deep among all these fires flickered the small glints of greed in the eyes of Cornelius Vrel. In his hand, Timmons held possibility. For the men in London. And for himself, perhaps, at last.

Only a few years earlier, all the riches of the East Indies had been mere possibility. Travellers’ tales. Speculative dreams. Then brave men, with wit, patience and imagination had turned possibility into the reality of ships, spices and empires.

They sent me from London to assess possibilities, thought Timmons. Am I brave enough to tell the Company to forget Baltic grain, Chinese porcelain kraacke-ware , nutmegs and gold? For the possibility I am holding in my hand? For onions?

HAWKRIDGE HOUSE, HAMPSHIRE, 1636

May 22, 1636 . Sun at last. A sad cold night. Hot bed cucumbers in bud under handglasses. First swallow. Too much to do before Eden opens her gates. The Serpent stirs.

Journal of John Nightingale, known as John Graffham.

At fourteen he had been dangerous. At twenty-six, he feared, he had become merely reliable.

John crunched across the gravel forecourt of Hawkridge House in long angry strides, scattering geese and speckled goslings. A yellow cur from the stable yard trotted purposefully after him with its nose stuck to his heavy work boots to read his morning of horse, herb, pigeon and pig.

John stopped abruptly and glared over the high brick forecourt wall. In two days, even reliability would be stripped from him.

‘Heads down, lads,’ muttered a man with a rake.

Fourteen men and women, cottagers and workers on Hawkridge estate, watched him sideways as they weeded, raked and polished.

‘Poor man,’ said a young weeding woman under her breath. She hoiked a plantain rosette out of the gravel of the forecourt with a stubby knife and tossed it into a wooden trug.

‘Poor us,’ said her companion who squatted beside her in a crumple of woollen skirt. She uprooted a hawkbit. ‘He’s family. He’ll be all right.’

The two women waddled their bunched skirts forward like a pair of geese to attack a young colony of Shepherd’s Purse.

‘He’ll see us all right too,’ said the first woman.

‘… if he’s here to do it.’

They twitched their goosetail skirts forward again, eyes still on the dark, curly-haired, bearded storm which had blown itself to a brief stop in the centre of the forecourt. What would the Londoners make, they wondered, of a gentleman with such brown hands and arms, who wore coarse linen shirts rolled to the elbow and a leather jerkin? Each then looked down into her private fears. Change was almost never good.

John’s black brows, as delicate as a woman’s, dived fiercely together over a long, fine but slightly skewed nose. Light grey eyes gave him a wolfish look. A labourer who was oiling the iron forecourt gates turned uphill towards the road to see what had caused that grey-eyed rage, but he pursed his lips, puzzled. Beyond the forecourt wall, the avenue of beeches that curved down from the road to the house rustled peacefully with sea-green early leaf. High up, near the road, a cottager swung his scythe through the long grass, wild campions and meadow cranesbills. A spotted flycatcher dropped from a beech into the grass. Sheep munched.