The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason

as if it were a phoenix’s egg. ‘Ecco! Look there!’ He placed a blunt red finger lightly on two tiny, tooth-shaped bulblets just above the union with the roots. ‘Two more infant Admirals, which will grow to blooming size in three short years. Then there will be five true Admirals, all of the same unadulterated substance. Not a rich man’s original and four cheap copies for hoi polloi. What other commodity can perform this magic?’

      When Vrel did not answer, Coymans interrogated Timmons. ‘Can gold multiply its true self? Or a porcelain jar? Or a painting?’

      Timmons shook his head in helpless assent.

      Vrel collected an arrangement of dolphins and mermaids from a sideboard and carried the extra light to the table. ‘Blankaart!’

      Blankaart leaned forward over the table and extended his wrinkled neck out its lace collar. ‘May I?’ He picked the largest bulb from the nest and sniffed it. Then he held it close to the candles, turning it in his fingers. ‘Tulipa,’ he announced at last.

      Coymans blew like a surfacing whale. His moustaches heaved upward on the force of his irritated breath. ‘Of course it’s a tulip! I don’t trade in turnips! Vrel, can’t your tame botanist do better than that?’

      ‘Probably not the common Turkish type,’ continued Blankaart resolutely, with one eye now on Vrel. ‘It’s darker and a little longer from base to nose. But an Admiral den Boom? Hard to say without seeing it in bloom.’

      ‘It’s more expensive to buy in bloom,’ said Coymans to Vrel. ‘Buy now, in the dry. The advantage will be yours when you sell again.’

      ‘Blankaart?’ demanded Vrel. ‘What’s your advice?’

      ‘If you buy now, you must trust your dealer.’ Though Blankaart’s voice was flat, his botanist’s hands cradled and caressed the smooth chestnut-coloured shape.

      A bad actor, thought Timmons. No help to Vrel. In all my ignorance, I could serve better than that.

      Coymans’s teeth showed briefly in the shadows of his moustaches. ‘A cheat can sell only once. I intend to last in business till I’m old as Methuselah.’

      ‘I’ll agree a price now but wait till the thing blooms before I pay you,’ said Vrel.

      ‘Then I’ll sell tomorrow in auction in the collegium, as I am bound to do by law,’ replied Coymans. ‘I’m only risking a private sale because you asked it.’

      Vrel made a small nervous swing back toward the window. ‘Add four barrels of nutmegs, and seven bales of wrought silk.’

      Coymans laughed. ‘For three? And two offsets? Think what you would have to pay for three bulbs of Semper Augustus! Ten times that. And the flames of the Roman emperor are a tiny candle next to the meteor of our own Dutch sailor!’ He turned to Blankaart. ‘Is that true or not, high priest of things botanical?’

      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