The Coffee Trader Read Free Page A

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