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.”