The Triple Goddess (27 page)

When the gurgling stopped he took the earthenware jug from underneath the box, poured the steaming coffee into the silver pot, put on the lid, returned the jug to its place of concealment, served the coffee, and passed a cup to Arbella.

As he did so she noticed that he was wearing a pair of worn gold links in his double cuffs, one of which had a cameo of a lion’s head on it and the other a unicorn.

‘I do apologize, I forgot the milk this morning—I hope that doesn’t make it too strong for you. Please...help yourself.’ Carew motioned to the plate.

‘I prefer it black anyway. Thank you.’

They drank the coffee and ate the macaroons in silence.

‘The coffee’s delicious,’ said Arbella, ‘as is the macaroon.’ She dabbed her lips with the napkin to remove a smear of chocolate.

‘If I know nothing about anything else, I know about coffee. When I owned a shipping company I used to have cargoes of the best beans in the world shipped to London from Colombia. A certain Edward Lloyd worked for me at the time, as an apprentice clerk. Part of his duties was to make coffee to serve to the merchant seamen and ship owners who visited the office on business.

‘We were quite successful and there were so many of them that young Edward himself became a caffeine addict…and that’s not too strong a term, for he drank about thirty cups a day at my expense. Edward had always been a restless and talkative lad, but from then on he hardly slept and greatly annoyed the other office workers with his incessant bobbing and jiggling about.’

‘Edward Lloyd?. That’s a coincidence, having the same name as the founder of the Market.’

‘No, it’s the same chap. In the end, because he was such a terrible clerk and always messing up the ledgers—he worked round the clock—and since he made very good coffee, I suggested that he might like to make a career change and start a coffee house. Edward went for that like a shot of espresso and opened his first place, Lloyd’s, on Tower Street, using seed money I gave him to get started.

‘I kept Eddie supplied with coffee beans, and encouraged everyone to go there to support him, to ensure that he made a go of it and never needed to ask for his old job back.

Arbella gaped; which, uniquely for her, did not make for an attractive expression. That did it, she thought: the man was nuts. She resigned herself to failing to score an underwriting line from him. The only consolation would be that she had been right to disbelieve the legend that he was an easy touch.

She looked at her empty coffee cup and thought of asking for more, but decided that it was time to accept defeat and withdraw.

But Carew carried on, ‘Our Edward distinguished himself by devising a process for roasting the beans, grinding them just before they were needed, and brewing the granules quickly in a special system that used very hot water, just under the boil. It’s the same method followed by modern baristas.

‘Eddie had ideas as strong as his coffee, which he would expound upon at great length to anyone he could buttonhole. But as much as he spilled the beans to potential competitors about how they should be stored, temperature- and light- and humidity-wise, he never had to worry about his competition once word got around about how successful his business was and coffee houses started opening everywhere.

‘Customers poured in to Lloyd’s from all over the City, and once they were hooked kept coming back, often several times a day. The smell of roasting beans was the perfect advertisement, and it wasn’t long before Lloyd’s Coffee House had a permanent queue winding down Tower Street, one that was longer than Bullion Bill Goldsack’s. There would be people waiting for the shop to open in the mornings, and Edward had to extend his business hours, starting earlier and closing later. Within a few years he moved to a bigger space, in Lombard Street.

‘Eddie always ensured that the best tables were reserved for me and my shipping associates and clients, and in return I gave him discounts on the beans he ordered from me in increasingly larger quantity. He considered those from the Blue Mountains of Jamaica superior to any other. However much I imported, he always wanted more, and would be on tenterhooks every time a shipment was due, turning to frantic if a vessel was late or reported missing. I swear Eddie could smell the coffee in a hold when it was still thirty leagues off the Lizard.

‘Because there’s nothing like a jolt of caffeine to stimulate the brain, and I was as susceptible to it as anyone, while I was sitting in Eddie Lloyd’s Coffee House one day I hit on the idea of a subscription arrangement whereby we ship owners might share our risks of loss and damage. My insomnia had nothing to do with the amount of coffee I was drinking, so long as I knocked off drinking it early enough in the day, and I knew that I should sleep better at night if I wasn’t hazarding my entire investment every time a ship left port.

‘My nerves were on the way to being as shot to pieces as a frigate’s rigging by grapeshot. As an island Britain’s dependence on ships for trade had always made us vulnerable to bad weather, plus we had the depredations of the Spanish across the Atlantic, and pirates and privateers up and down the English Channel, to contend with. And the infamous Bermuda triangle in the Caribbean.

‘My risk-sharing idea was a success from the start, as a means whereby the losses of the few might be shared amongst the many. Soon I was taking so many partial interests every day in the safety of other people’s ships and cargoes, and they in mine—marine trade around the world was growing in size and importance every day as demand increased for an ever-increasing variety of commodities—that I sent a round robin letter to all my colleagues identifying the principle of
Uberrima fides
, or Utmost Good Faith, that I thought it essential we adopt if we were to continue making such arrangements with each other. We already had more than enough hazards to contend with without having to worry about each other’s probity. Our word would be our bond, and anyone who deviated from the strictest standards would be ejected by peer pressure from our circle and seriously hampered in their ability to do business.

‘I never intended to set up a company, you understand, only to encourage the foundation and expansion of a marketplace wherein everyone agreed to adhere to an unwritten code of honesty, and to be open in sharing information, and prompt in paying premiums and losses. There were many unprincipled characters amongst us, as you would expect in an unregulated offshore trade where there was so much to gain at others’ expense.

‘It was essential that we cultivate a standard of trust amongst ourselves that would enable us to do business on a handshake and not have to worry about being defrauded, or the trouble and expense of having to get formal agreements drawn up on every business deal by overcharging attorneys. Legalese about limits of coverage, scope of peril, timing of payment and reimbursement, definitions and clauses, terms of credit, letters of intent, contract wordings—all we had in those days were conversations and scraps of paper. We wanted to spit on our palms not in each other’s faces.

‘Because we all frequented Edward Lloyd’s coffee house, it was understandable that our activities started to become synonymous with the place. “I’ll see you at Lloyd’s,” was the watchword: no appointments were necessary, because we always knew where we might find each other. Although we were competitors our interests in our ships we held in common, and trade was booming. Lloyd’s was neutral ground, and provided a congenial atmosphere in which to conduct our affairs, exchange up-to-the minute intelligence received from outposts around the world, and be convivial.

‘Until, that was, Edward died in seventeen thirteen and we buried him at St Mary Woolnoth church. His legacy was secure, however, and we set up the New Lloyd’s in Popes Head Alley, where for the first time the serving of coffee was subsidiary to commerce. When we outgrew that, a number of us got together and subscribed enough to rent premises in the Royal Exchange. Things had changed a lot by then, and we were all so busy with our underwriting activities that we were out of the ship-owning business altogether.

‘For years, if you can believe it, I lived and breathed risk with the best of ’em on the underwriting floor. Sometimes I even slept underneath my box, which in those days was in prime position next to the Rostrum. I was so hungry for business that I made Bullion Bill Goldsack look like...well, like me today. Then, about a century and half ago, although I continued to come into the market every day I lost interest in anything to do with venture and gain, and stopped accepting business.’

Carew shook his head at the memory of how different things used to be, and his silver-blond curtain of hair swung about his shoulders like a bead curtain. ‘Which hasn’t stopped every new broker from coming to see me…or rather being sent here. The supplicating flow has never ceased, the young ’uns are sworn to secrecy after they’ve been blooded by Carew, and the myth of the omnivorous underwriter endures. As well as everyone’s conviction that I’m a crackpot.’

Arbella’s brain was reeling like a drunken sailor, but she wanted to do her best to reassure this amiable but delusional man. ‘I couldn’t say about that, sir. Perhaps a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, as Churchill said of Russia.’

‘Well. Changing the subject, how do you like Chandlers? Is the firm treating you well?’

‘Oh...I suppose so. It’s a prestigious outfit, of course, if very old-fashioned and stuffy, and of all the Lloyd’s brokers they have the oldest and biggest accounts. It’s supposed to be a privilege to work for Chandlers, hence the pathetic starting salaries they pay to university graduates like me, which a mouse couldn’t live on. But their management training programme is a farce: they fling young recruits into the market without proper training—on the job training, they call it. Underwriters are always complaining about being inundated with callow brokers who don’t understand what they’re supposed to be doing, and how to do it, and about their having to waste valuable time explaining things to them when it should be the other way round.’

Carew nodded sympethetically. ‘Really, I don’t mind it at all. I’ve nothing else to do except tie fishing flies. I like talking to people with different backgrounds, and learning about what they would rather be doing than working in insurance. It diverts me from my own humdrum existence.’

Arbella recalled one of her English literature subjects. ‘“Variety’s the very spice of life |That gives it all its flavour”, says William Cowper in
The Timepiece
.’

‘After he left London William Cowper rarely strayed from Hertfordshire, and he wrote a long poem called
The Task
on the subject of a sofa. Although I’m more of a timepiece and more heavily seasoned than any, there’s no variety in my life.’

‘And although I’m beyond the callow stage, as the first female placing broker in the market it’s especially difficult for me to get taken seriously by underwriters. Sometimes I wish I’d gone to work for some Hughie, Dewey, and Louie outfit—one of the small houses with out of the usual new accounts, not just renewals, that are fun to work on.’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, anything…crocodile farms…malpractice for witch doctors…orchid disease protections…plagues of locusts. Most of the assignments I’m given by my boss, Oink, involve renewing the small lines on contracts that have been around for ever. I only rarely get something new, and when I do it’s very small.’ Arbella regarded with distaste her buttoned slipcase containing the Seattle purse-seining risk that she had yet to get quoted.

Carew picked up the silver spoon in the sugar bowl, which was plain with a round black button on its handle like a currant, scooped up a few grains of sugar, and dropped them back into the bowl. ‘Regarding yesterday, and the Tower...’

‘Really, you don’t have to explain.’

‘I’m always there under the same circumstances, as a prison visitor. I had hoped that going with you would help me see the place in a different light.’

‘Well that’s what it is, a prison. Neither of us are tourists. You certainly seem to know the place well. I was a little put out, actually: there was I, wanting to impress you with my historical knowledge, and you made it clear in the nicest possible way that you were already up on everything and knew everyone who works there. Nonetheless I got the impression that you don’t like the Tower of London very much. If so you should have said, and we could have gone somewhere else.’

‘I have…complicated feelings about the place. I know it too well. And I have no choice but to go there, often.’

‘You weren’t imprisoned there once yourself, were you? After all that talk of how well you were acquainted with Edward Lloyd, you must be a lot older than you look.’ Arbella attempted what on anyone else would have been a grin, but which made her look as if she had come over queasy.

Carew answered slowly, ‘It is my father who is the prisoner at the Tower of London, Arbella. As for me, I was born there and baptized in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. With the exception of my father and a couple of others, from the aggregate amount of time I’ve spent within the Tower’s walls over the years one might say that I have spent more time there than anyone in history.’

Arbella now felt genuinely queasy. She was finding the eccentricities of this non-practising underwriter disturbing, especially so soon after her encounter with the so-called Sir Walter Ralegh. She wished that Mr Carew’s box was still near the rostrum, if indeed it ever had been, where there were people around to help her keep her sense of reality, and make it easier to get away. It was as if this man was a weird but harmless interloper who for some reason was tolerated by the authorities, if they even knew he was here, and humoured by the brokers because of his entertainment value.