Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

And he felt even more of a fool when he tried to buy tulip bulbs to take away with him, when he wanted to exchange a sackful of gold – real money – for a sackful of bulbs – real bulbs. Everyone else was trading without ever holding a bulb in their hand. They bought and sold the promise of the tulip crop when it was lifted, or they bought and sold the name of a tulip. Some flowers were so rare that there were only ten or a dozen in the whole country. Such bulbs would never come to market, John was assured. He would have to buy the slip of paper with the name of the tulip written on the top of it, and have it attested at the Bourse. If he had any sense he would sell the slip of paper the very next day as the price jumped and leapfrogged. He should make his profit in the rising market and not hang around the dealers and ask them for real tulips to take home with him. The market was not for a bulb in a pot, it was for an idea of a tulip, the promise of a tulip. The market had gone light, the market had gone airy. It was the windhandel market.

“What’s that?” John asked.

“A wind market,” a man translated for him. “You are no longer buying the goods, you are buying the promise of the goods. And you are paying with a promise to pay. You don’t actually have to give your gold and receive your tulip until – oh – next year. But if you have any sense by then you will have sold it at a profit and you will have made a fortune merely by letting the wind blow through your fingers.”

“But I want tulips!” John exclaimed in frustration. “I don’t want a piece of paper with a tulip name written on it to sell to someone else. I want a bulb that I can take home and grow.”

The man shrugged, losing interest at once. “It’s not how we do business,” he said. “But if you go down the canal toward Rotterdam you will find men and women who will sell you bulbs that you can take away. They will call you a fool for paying money on the nail.”

“I’ve been called a fool before,” John said grimly. “I can bear it.”

He was dining in a tavern at the end of this expedition, drinking deep of the thick ale which the Dutch loved and eating well of their rich food, when the door darkened and a well-loved voice shouted into the gloom. “Is my John in here?”

John choked on his ale and leaped to his feet, overturning his stool. “Your Grace?”

It was Buckingham, modestly dressed in a suit of smooth brown wool, chuckling like a madman at the sight of John’s astounded face.

“Caught you,” he said easily. “Drinking away my fortune.”

“My lord! I never-”

He laughed again. “How have you done, my John? Are you rich in tulip notes?”

John shook his head. “I am rich in tulips, in real bulbs, my lord. The men in this town seem to have forgotten what they are buying and selling; they want only a piece of paper with a name written on it and the Bourse seal at the bottom. I had to go far inland to find growers who would sell me the real thing.”

Buckingham came into the ale house and sat at John’s table. “Finish your dinner; I have dined already,” he remarked. “So where are they? These tulips?”

“They are packed away and ready to sail tonight,” John said, reluctantly picking up a crust of bread smeared with creamy Dutch butter. “I was on my way home to New Hall with them.”

“Can they sail alone?”

John thought quickly. “I’d send a man I could trust to go with them. It’s too precious a cargo to leave to the captain. And I’d like someone to see them all the way to New Hall.”

“Do it,” the duke said idly.

John swallowed his question with his bread, rose from the table, bowed swiftly to the duke and went out of the tavern. He ran like a deer for his inn, engaged the landlord’s son to go to England and to see the barrels of tulips safely delivered to New Hall, pressed money and a note of introduction to J into the young man’s hand, and then ran back to the tavern as the duke was downing his second pint of ale.

“All done, Your Grace,” he reported breathlessly.

“I thank you,” the duke said.

There was a tantalizing silence. John stood before his master.

“Oh, you can sit down,” the duke said. “And have an ale. You must be thirsty.”

John slid into the seat opposite his master and watched him as the girl brought his drink. The duke was pale, a little tired from the festivities of the French court, but his dark eyes were sparkling. John felt a stir of his venturing spirit.

“Are you not attended, Your Grace?”

The duke shook his head. “I am traveling unknown.”

John waited but his master volunteered nothing.

“Anywhere to stay?”

“I thought I’d bed with you.”

“What if you had not found me?” John grimaced at the thought of the greatest man in England wandering around the Low Countries in search of his gardener.

“I knew I only had to wait somewhere near the tulip exchange and you would turn up,” Buckingham said easily. “And besides, I do not crumple without a dozen servants to support me, you know, John. I can fend for myself.”

“Of course,” John agreed quickly. “I just wondered what you are doing here?”

“Oh, that,” Buckingham said as if recalled to his mission. “Why, I have a job to do for my master and I thought you might help me.”

“Of course,” John said instantly.

“We’ll drink a little more and then roister a little, and then in the morning we shall do some business,” Buckingham suggested engagingly.

“Are we to go far?” John asked, thinking wildly of the ships which left for the Dutch Indies and for the spreading Dutch empire. “It may be that I should prepare while you make merry.”

The duke shook his head. “My business is in town, with the gold and diamond merchants. But I want you with me. My amulet. I shall need all my luck tomorrow.”

They slept in the same bed. When John woke in the morning the younger man had thrown an arm out in his sleep and John woke to a touch on his face like a caress. He lay still for a little while, under that casual blessing, and then slid out of bed and looked out of the little window down at the street below.

The cobbled quayside was crowded with sellers of bread and cheese and milk, up from the country by barge at dawn and spreading their stalls for all to see. Among them, and starting to lay out their wares, were the cobblers and sellers of household goods: brushes and soaps, kindling and brassware. Artists were setting up easels and offering to sketch portraits. Sailors up from the deep-water docks were moving among the crowd and offering rarities and foreign goods – silk shawls, flasks of rare drink, little toys. The low barges plied constantly up and down the canal; and ducks, in continual flurry away from the prows, quacked and complained. The sunlight glinted on the water of the canal and threw back the reflection of the market stalls and the dark shadows of the crisscrossing bridges.

Tradescant heard Buckingham stir in the bed behind him and turned at once.

“Good morning, my lord, is there anything I can get you?”

“You can get me a hundred thousand pounds in gold or I am a ruined man,” Buckingham said, his face buried in the pillow. “That’s what we’re doing today, my John. We’re going to pawn the Crown Jewels.”

Cecil’s long training stood John in good stead through that day. Buckingham was trying to raise the money to equip a mighty Protestant army to attack Spain and to free Charles’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia, and her husband and restore them to their rightful throne. There was no money in the royal treasury. The English Parliament would vote no more to a king who had done so little to bring in the reforms they had demanded. It was left to Buckingham to raise the funds. And he had nothing to offer as security but the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland and any related valuables that the moneylenders might require.