“Come, sit next to me for a moment,” she said.
He thought to say no, he preferred to stand, but sitting next to her was much more delicious than standing nearby, so he felt himself nodding before he’d realized he’d made a decision.
It was not that Geertruid was more beautiful than other women, though she certainly had some beauty about her. At first glance she seemed nothing unusual, a prosperous widow of her middle thirties, regally tall, still quite pretty, particularly if a man gazed upon her from the proper distance or with enough beer in his belly. But even though she was past her prime, she yet retained more than her share of charms and had been blessed with one of those smooth and circular northern faces, as creamy as Holland butter. Miguel had seen youths twenty years her junior staring hungrily at Geertruid.
Hendrick appeared from behind Miguel and removed the man sitting next to Geertruid. Miguel moved in as Hendrick led the fellow away.
“I can only spare a few minutes,” he told her.
“I think you’ll give me more time than that.” She leaned forward and kissed him, just above the border of his fashionably short beard.
The first time she had kissed him they had been in a tavern, and Miguel, who had never before had a woman for a friend, let alone a Dutchwoman, thought himself obligated to take her to one of the back rooms and lift her skirts. It would not have been the first time a Dutchwoman had made her intentions known to Miguel. They liked his easy manner, his quick smile, his large black eyes. Miguel had a rounded face, soft and youthful without being babyish. Dutchwomen sometimes asked if they could touch his beard. It happened in taverns and musicos and on the streets in the less fashionable parts of town. They claimed they wanted to feel his beard, neatly trimmed and handsome as it was, but Miguel knew better. They liked his face because it was soft like a child’s and hard like a man’s.
Geertruid, however, never wanted anything more than to press her lips against his beard. She had long since made it clear that she had no interest at all in having her skirts lifted, at least not by Miguel. These Dutchwomen kissed anyone they liked for any reason they liked, and they did so more boldly than the Jewish women of the Portuguese Nation dared to kiss their husbands.
“You see,” she told him as she gestured to the crowd, “even though you’ve been in this city for years, I still have new sights to show you.”
“I fear your stock of the new may be running thin.”
“At least you needn’t worry about that Hebrew council of yours seeing us in this place.”
It was true enough. Jews and gentiles were permitted to conduct business in taverns, but what Jew among the Portuguese would choose this foul pit? Still, a man could never be overly cautious. Miguel took a quick look around for the telltale signs of Ma’amad spies: men who might be Jews dressed as Dutch laborers, conspicuous fellows alone or in pairs, eating none of the food; beards, which hardly anyone but Jews wore, cut close with scissors to resemble clean shaves (the Torah forbade only the use of razors on faces, not the trimming of beards, but beards were so out of fashion in Amsterdam that even the hint of one marked a man as a Jew).
Geertruid slid her hand along Miguel’s, a gesture that came just short of the amorous. She loved freedom with men above all else. Her husband, whom she spoke of as the cruelest of villains, had been dead some years now, and she’d not yet finished celebrating her liberty. “That sack of fat behind the bar is my cousin Crispijn,” she said.
Miguel glanced at the man: pale, corpulent, heavy-lidded-no different from ten thousand others in the city. “Thank you for letting me witness your bloated kinsman. I hope I may at least ask him to bring me a tankard of his least foul beer to drown the stench?”
“No beer. I have something else in mind today.”
Miguel did not try to suppress a smile. “Something else in mind? And is this where you have decided I might finally know your secret charms?”
“I have secrets aplenty-you may depend on it-but not such as you’re thinking.” She waved over to her cousin, who replied with a solemn nod and then disappeared into the kitchen. “I want you to taste a new drink-a wondrous luxury.”
Miguel stared at her. He might have been in any one of half a dozen other taverns now, speaking of woolens or copper or the lumber trade. He might be working hard to repair his ruined accounts, finding some bargain that he alone could recognize or convincing some drunkard to sign his name to the brandy futures. “Madam, I thought you understood that my affairs are pressing. I have no time for luxuries.”
She leaned in closer and looked him full in his face, and for an instant Miguel believed she meant to kiss him. Not some sly buss on the cheek but a true kiss, hungry and urgent.
He was mistaken. “I didn’t bring you here idly, and you will find that I offer you nothing ordinary,” she told him, her lips close enough to his face that he could taste her fine breath.
And then her cousin Crispijn brought out something that changed his life.
Two earthen bowls sat steaming with a liquid blacker than the wines of Cahors. In the dim light, Miguel gripped the lightly chipped vessel with both hands and took his first taste.
It had a rich, almost enchanting, bitterness-something Miguel had never before experienced. It bore a resemblance to chocolate, which once he had tasted years ago. Perhaps he thought of chocolate only because the drinks were both hot and dark and served in thick clay bowls. This one had a less voluptuous flavor, sharper and more sparing. Miguel took another taste and set it down. When he had sampled chocolate, he had been intrigued enough to swallow two bowls of the stuff, which so inflamed his spirits that even after visiting two satisfactory whores he had felt it necessary to visit his physician, who restored his unbalanced humors with a sound combination of emetics and purges.
“It’s made of coffee fruit,” Geertruid told him, folding her arms as though she had invented the mixture herself.
Miguel had come across coffee once or twice, but only as a commodity traded by East India merchants. The business of the Exchange did not require a man to know an item’s nature, only its demand-and sometimes, in the heat of the trade, not even that.
He reminded himself to say the blessing over wonders of nature. Some Jews would turn away from their gentile friends when they blessed their food or drink, but Miguel took pleasure in the prayers. He loved to utter them in public, and in a land where he could not be prosecuted for speaking the holy tongue. He wished he had more occasions to bless things. Saying the words filled him with giddy defiance; he thought of each openly spoken Hebrew word as a knife in the belly of some Inquisitor somewhere.
“It’s a new substance-entirely new,” Geertruid explained when he was done. “You take it not to delight the senses but to awaken the intellect. Its advocates drink it at breakfast to regain their senses, and they drink it at night to help them remain awake longer.”
Geertruid’s face became as somber as one of the Calvinist preachers who railed from makeshift pulpits in town plazas. “This coffee isn’t like wine or beer, which we drink to make merry or because it quenches thirst or even because it is delightful. This will only make you thirstier, it will never make you merry, and the taste, let us be honest, may be curious but never pleasing. Coffee is something… something far more important.”
Miguel had known Geertruid long enough to be acquainted with her many foolish habits. She might laugh all night and drink as much as any Dutchman alive, she might neglect her affairs and tromp barefoot around the countryside like a girl, but in matters of business she was as serious as any man. A businesswoman such as she would have been an impossibility back in Portugal, but among the Dutch her kind was, if not precisely common, hardly shocking.