The Coffee Trader (35 page)

33

Maybe she had wanted it to happen. When she thought back on it, that was how it seemed. She hadn’t hidden the book particularly well, setting it in the pocket of an apron, with one corner sticking out, or under a pile of scarves, its sharp corner jabbing through the fabric.

She took it out often, leafing through its uncut pages, peeking at the images hidden in pages that were still attached. She knew she ought to separate them—it was her book and she might do as she pleased—but she did not know how and she was afraid of damaging it.

The words meant nothing to her. She could not tell one letter from another, but the woodcuts were pretty and they suggested to her a world beyond what she knew. Delicately drawn fruit, a fish, a boat, a little boy at play. Some of them were silly, like the cow with the almost human face, smiling out at her with maddening cheer.

She and the new girl, Catryn, had been washing the floors before Shabbat when Daniel entered the hallway and trod along the clean floors with his muddy shoes. His face was blank, hardly even changing as he slipped and had to grab onto the doorjamb to keep from tumbling. Catryn muttered under her breath but didn’t look up.

“Come with me,” Daniel said to Hannah.

She raised herself and followed him to the bedroom. The book had been set out on the bed. She had known it would happen. She had been waiting for it. Even so, her stomach wrenched so hard she feared for her child. She took deep breaths and willed herself calm.

“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.

34

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.

Miguel drank heavily with these new friends and retold the story of his triumph as though it had only just happened. The look of surprise on Parido’s face when Joachim began to sell. The delight when the Tudesco merchants sent the price falling. The surprising interest of those strangers from the Levant. Was that truly an East Indian who had bought fifty barrels of coffee from the Frenchman?

They might have continued this celebration for hours, or at least for as long as Miguel bought wine, but Solomon Parido entered and silenced their conversation. Miguel felt a strange mixture of fear and delight. He had expected Parido to be there. A man such as he, so invested in his power, could not hide from defeat. He would show his face publicly, demonstrate to the Nation that his little losses were nothing to him.

Parido leaned forward and spoke to some friends with particular warmth. Miguel expected the
parnass
to remain among these men, turn his back on his enemy, and make nothing of his presence, but such was not Parido’s plan. After speaking with his fellows, he came over to Miguel’s table. Those who had just moments ago been laughing at the stories of Parido’s failure now climbed over one another to show their respect for him, but the
parnass
had no interest in their display.

“A word,” he said to Miguel.

He smiled at his companions and followed Parido to a quiet corner. All eyes were upon them, and Miguel had the uncomfortable feeling that now he was the subject of merriment.

Parido stopped and leaned in toward him. “Because I am a kind man,” he said quietly, “I gave you these weeks to revel in your glory. I thought it cruel to crush you too soon.”

“Who among the children of Israel is as wise and good as you?”

“You may be flip, but you and I both know that I have never done anything but in the service of the Nation, and nothing I did deserved the schemes you hatched against me. And what of your poor brother? He protected you and lent you money when you were friendless, and you repay him by undoing his finances, cuckolding him, and stealing his wife.”

Miguel could not correct the world’s belief that he had cuckolded Daniel, not without betraying Hannah, so he let the world think what it liked. “You and my brother are of a piece. You plot against me and seek my ruin, but when your methods fail you blame me as though
I
had acted against
you
. This surely is a madness worthy of the Inquisition itself.”

“How can you look me in the face and say it was I who plotted against you? Did you not seek to ruin my whale-oil scheme for your own profit?”

“I sought to ruin nothing, merely to profit from your own manipulations. Nothing more than any man does on the Exchange each day.”

“You knew full well your interference would cost me money, even while I interceded on your behalf with your brandy futures.”

“An intercession,” Miguel pointed out, “that left me the poorer.”

“You don’t seem to understand that I did not act against you. I had bet on the price of brandy going down, and my machinations in that field threatened to turn your futures into debt, so I did what I could to rescue you. I was as surprised as anyone when the price of brandy rose at the last minute. Unlike you, who made a small profit, I lost by my efforts.”

“I am certain you had nothing but the best of intentions in plotting against my coffee trade as well.”

“How can you speak to me thus? It is you who trod upon my coffee trade—you and your heretic friend.”

Miguel let out a laugh. “You may call yourself the injured person if you like, but that will not change what is.”

“I have a great deal of power to effect changes, you forget, and when I bring this case before the council, we will see how smug you look then.”

“And for what reason am I to stand before the Ma’amad? For making you look a fool or for refusing to be ruined by your scheme?”

“For conducting unseemly business with a gentile,” he announced. “You deployed that man, Joachim Waagenaar, intentionally to create a drop in the price of coffee. I happen to know he is the very same Dutchman you ruined by brokering for him and forcing upon him your foolish sugar scheme. Clearly he found it hard to get enough of you, but I think you will find the Ma’amad feels somewhat differently. You have violated the law of Amsterdam and so put your people at risk.”

Miguel studied Parido’s face. He wanted to savor the moment as long as he could, because it might be, he knew, the most satisfying of his life. Then, knowing he could not wait too long, he spoke. “When I am called before the Ma’amad,” he began, “shall I mention that I only asked Joachim to work with me after he came to me and confessed that you had attempted to force him into discovering the nature of my business arrangements? You, in other words, deployed a gentile as a spy, not even for Ma’amad matters but in the hopes of ruining a fellow Jew against whom you harbor resentment. I wonder what the other
parnassim
will think of that information. Should I also mention that you conspired with Nunes, a merchant with whom I had placed an order, and that you used your position as a
parnass
to force him into betraying me so you might prevail over me? This should make for a very interesting session.”

Parido chewed upon his lower lip for a moment. “Very well,” he said.

But Miguel was not finished. “I might add that there is the matter of Geertruid Damhuis, a Dutchwoman you employed with the single purpose of ruining me. How long was she your creature, senhor? The better part of a year, I think.”

“Geertruid Damhuis,” Parido repeated, suddenly looking a bit more cheerful. “I heard something of this. She was your partner in your schemes, but then you betrayed her.”

“I merely did not allow her to ruin me. What I have never fully understood, however, is why you needed Joachim if you already had Geertruid. Was she not telling you all? Was she hoping to turn this treachery into a little profit for herself, and you could not live with the knowledge that you could not control your own creature?”

Parido let out a laugh. “You are correct about one thing. I cannot bring you before the Ma’amad. You have won on that score. I admit here between the two of us that I did ask that foul Dutchman to find out information about you. But you must know I had nothing to do with that whore you ruined. As near as I can tell, she was a perfectly honest slut who wanted nothing more than to aid you. And you destroyed her.”

“You are a liar,” Miguel said.

“I don’t think so. There is one thing I do admire about you, Lienzo. Some men are cold in matters of business. They harden their hearts against those they hurt. But you are a man with a conscience, and I know you will truly suffer for what you did to your honest partner.”

Miguel found Geertruid in the Three Dirty Dogs, where she was so drunk that no one would sit with her. One of the other patrons warned him to be careful. She had already bit the cheek, to the point of drawing blood, of a man who had attempted to feel her bosoms. But she had clearly drunk herself past the point of anger, because when she saw Miguel she made a sloppy effort to stand and then held out her arms as though ready to envelop her former partner.

“It’s Miguel Lienzo,” she slurred. “The man who ruined me. I had hoped to see you here, and now you are here. Where I hoped to see you. Will you sit with me?”

Miguel sat himself down very carefully, as though afraid the bench might break. He looked across the table at Geertruid. “Who were you working for? I must know. I promise you I’ll take no action on the information. I need to know for myself. Was it Parido?”

“Parido?” Geertruid repeated. “I never worked for Parido. I would never even have heard of Parido if it had not been for you.” She laughed and pointed at him. “I
knew
that’s what you thought. The moment you told me you had undone me, I knew you thought I was Parido’s agent. If I were Parido’s agent,” she explained, “I would have deserved to be crushed.”

Miguel swallowed hard. He had hoped to hear something very different. “You tricked me into trusting you. Why?”

“Because I wanted to be wealthy,” Geertruid said, slamming her hand upon the table. “And a respectable woman. That’s all. I was not working for anyone. I had no plan to destroy you. I only wanted to go into business with a man of influence who would help me make my fortune. And when you lost your money, I stuck by you because I liked you. I never meant to trick you. All I am is a thief, Miguel. I’m a thief, but I am no villain.”

“A thief?” he repeated. “Then you stole that money, the three thousand guilders?”

She shook her head, and doing so let it drop so low that Miguel feared she might bang it upon the table. “I borrowed that money. From a moneylender. A very nasty moneylender. So nasty even the Jews won’t have him.”

Miguel closed his eyes. “Alferonda,” he said.

“Yes. He was the only man I could find who was willing to lend me what I needed. He knew what I wanted it for, and he knew who I was.”

“Why did he not tell me so?” Miguel demanded aloud. “He played the two of us against each other. Why would he do such a thing?”

“He’s not a kind man,” she said sadly.

“Oh, Geertruid.” He took her hand. “Why did you not tell me the truth? How could you let me ruin you?”

She let out a little laugh. “You know, Miguel, sweet Miguel, I don’t blame you at all. What could you have done? Confronted me? Asked of my scheme? You knew already I was a deceiver, and you wished to make your money as best you could. I can’t blame you. But I could not have told you the truth either, for you would never have continued to trust me. You feared that council of yours over a matter of merely doing business with a Dutchwoman. Would you have convinced yourself that any good can come with doing business with a Dutch
outlaw
? Particularly one such as me.”

“One such as you?”

“I must leave the city, Miguel. I must leave tonight. Alferonda has been searching for me, and he won’t go easy with me. There are tales of his wrath, you know.”

“Why should Alferonda care? Can you not simply give him the money I transferred to your account? I have repaid the three thousand I borrowed of you.”

“I owe him another eight hundred in interest.”

“Eight hundred,” Miguel blurted out. “Does he know no shame?”

“He is a usurer,” she said sadly.

“Let me speak with him. He is my friend, and I am certain we can come to an understanding. He needn’t charge you so much interest as that. We will reach a more reasonable fee, and I will help you pay him.”

She squeezed his hand. “Poor sweet Miguel. You are too good to me. I can’t let you do that, for you would be throwing away your money, and nothing would be gained but your ruin. Alferonda may be your friend, but he is not mine, and he won’t let his reputation suffer by a kindness. And how good a friend is he, deceiving you as he has done? Even if you could stay his hand, there is the money I owe the agents in Iberia. They have my name, not yours, and they will come looking for Geertruid Damhuis in Amsterdam. If I stay, it will be only a matter of time before I am undone. I must leave tonight, so I will give you no more than you deserve by telling you the truth at last.”

“There is more?”

“Oh, yes. There is more.” Through the fog of her drunkenness, she managed a smile such as never failed to fell him. “You asked what I meant when I said a thief such as me. I’ll now tell you.” She leaned in closer. “I am no ordinary thief, you must understand. I don’t pick pockets or cut purses or break into shops. You’ve wondered often about my journeys to the countryside and, poor foolish man, you have read all the tales, and you have read them because I introduced you to them, imp that I am.”

Miguel reminded himself to continue breathing. “What are you saying? That you and Hendrick . . .?” He could not quite finish.