A Suspicion of Silver

by P. F. Chisholm

  “Is there another smith in town?”

  “There was, but he wouldna take orders from the furriners and so his business went down and down and he died o’ drink.”

  “What will you do about it?”

  “We might go to Carlisle to find a master smith to come and train the journeymen and judge their masterpieces and the best can take over the smithy until the boy is of age. That’s what I’m thinking, any road.”

  “Was there anyone at all you can think of who might have disliked your husband, Mrs Carleton? No matter how foolishly?”

  She lifted her shoulders and shook her head helplessly. “No, you would think he would have enemies seeing he was so successful and had such a big smithy and he had come up from just a journeyman himself in the sixties. But everyone loved him, Sir Robert, honestly they did. He was such…such a funny, such a big funny man. The town seems so empty now.”

  “But somebody hated him enough to kill him, Mrs Carleton. Can you think of anyone at all?”

  Both Allerdyce and Mrs Carleton shook their heads.

  “But, Mr Allerdyce, somebody did. Somebody wanted him dead and did in fact kill him in a way…well, that is frankly so cruelly abhorrent I find it hard to think about. That argues hatred.”

  Tovey suddenly opened his mouth as if he had thought of something surprising to say and then shut it again. Nobody else moved.

  Carey sighed. “Well, Mr Allerdyce, this is a pretty mystery and I own myself as much at a stand as your inquest jury. However I am here primarily to conduct an inspection of the mines around this place and the smelting houses and stamping houses in the north of the town. Perhaps I will also take a look at some of the woods being cut for charcoal. It must be a problem finding enough charcoal with the woods being so…so sparse and sick.”

  “Ay well, Frau Hochstetter now gets most of her coals for the roasting from the Bolton earthcoal mines. You can’t use earthcoals for smelting, they’re too full of brimstone, but they’re good for roasting the ore. The packponies take the coals and charcoal straight to Newlands to the roasting houses there. She uses charcoal from Ireland for special jobs, like cupellation and some from Mr Graham’s woods if she must, since he’s very sparing.”

  Carey’s eyes stretched at the idea of Wattie Graham of Netherby being worthy of the title of “Mr” but said nothing.

  “Some people don’t like to do business with the Deutschers and the dowager Lady Radcliffe has always hated them, since the old days, though she sold them fruit trees and dung from her stables when Mr Daniel was setting up the island for his family. So Frau Hochstetter often has to rely on Mr Graham.” Allerdyce was looking a little tense and Carey got the feeling that he knew more about Wattie and his woodlands in Keswick, for God’s sake, than he admitted to.

  “Yes. Mr Graham. For instance,” he pursued, “if you’re looking for a man who casually commits murder for trifles and beats up poor farmers who can’t pay his blackrent, then Wattie Graham is that man.”

  “I don’t think he was in the town for a week after New Year’s Day,” said Allerdyce hastily. “He told me he usually celebrates with his brothers at Mr Richard Graham of Brackenhill’s tower.”

  “Well, well,” said Carey but left it. Instead he fished out and handed over the rather pompous second document that Cecil had sent, complete with the Queen’s Privy Seal. Mrs Carleton looked at it with wonder and Allerdyce treated the document with appropriate reverence and spelled his way through it since it was a general warrant and so had an English translation from the Norman French and Latin.

  “Ay,” said the Mayor, “that looks all in order. Well, Sir Robert, I think the best thing would be for ye to meet with the Hochstetters and discuss how you can make yer inspection.” He carefully folded the document and handed it back to Carey. “Perhaps you would do me the honour of bearing me company to dinner at the Oak and then we might go and see the Deutschers.”

  Carey agreed with this idea affably enough and they walked along the high street again where numerous women were busy sweeping their yards and men walking about purposefully, all pretending not to stare at the strangers. At the inn they found Allerdyce’s aldermen lined up in their Sunday best, all full of bonhomie and feverish curiosity.

  After dinner and feeling very full of salt cod since it was a Wednesday, Carey walked with Allerdyce down the long path to the boatlanding on Derwent Water. The island was close to the shore and the buildings on it clearly visible—and very odd they looked, being German in style and elaborately carved. There were a couple more little lake islands, covered in reeds and unhealthy-looking trees. The Deutschers’ island itself was not very large, maybe two or three acres and there were bigger buildings there as well, including one that seemed to be the source of the rather fine beer Carey had drunk at dinner, since it had a malting tower.

  Carey sniffed the air. It had an odd smell in it, woodsmoke to be sure, but also an abrasive smell which he recognised. It took him back to Whitehall palace and a winter when the Thames had frozen and he and the Earl of Cumberland were sharing a small, leaky, and ridiculously expensive room. Carey had won a lot of money at primero and had bought some earthcoals to try them out. Their servants had taken ages to get the coals to light but then once they were lit, they were warm for much longer than wood and curfewed better too. The only disadvantage was the nasty sulphurous abrasive smell—which was why the Queen refused to have anything but good seasoned oak or elm in her privy chambers or indeed anywhere she went at all.

  There was smoke hanging on the still cold air over the whole town and it seemed to be thicker to the northeast where the smelting houses were. It clung to the lower slopes of the great ugly hills, covered in snow but shockingly bald of forests except for a few sick remnants here and there. Carey looked at them and repressed the impulse to shiver. What had hurt the forests so badly? They were taller hills than he had seen in England, though he had lived as a child some of the time in the Marches of Wales. These naked hills seemed somehow sulky and malevolent.

  “Ay,” said Allerdyce, following his gaze. “They’re nae sae dangerous now, but Scafell there has eaten his share of men. In spring or summer you can go up in broad sunlight and not a care in the world and next minute the fog has come down, ye’ve lost your way and pitched off a ledge ye couldna see. At least now in winter ye can see them for what they are.”

  “I’ve always preferred tamer country,” Carey admitted, “with signs of human life. Do you know what’s wrong with the trees and why so many are sick and dying?”

  Allerdyce gave him an odd look. “They were well enough before the Deutschers came, ye ken, came and dug out the mines and started smelting. Mebbe the trees dinna like them.”

  “Allemayne is full of trees, I’m told.”

  “Well maybe it’s the kobolds from the mines.”

  “What?”

  “Little demons that break machinery and ruin the bloom—kobolds. Mebbe they kill the trees too. I’ve often thought so cos it’s not natural, is it?”

  “Possibly.”

  Down by the boatlanding where the lake was flat and still with a fringing of ice, there was a small party of people drawn up to meet them.

  “Won’t we be going to the island?” asked Carey, a little disappointed.

  “Nae need, they prefer to meet us here anyway and there’s not so many of them that lives there now either. Most of the Deutschers live in the town because they’re married to our women and some of us Keswickers work for them. There’s not many of the old Deutschers left, most went home in the seventies when the mines here were failing of ore. They’re still mining copper ore, mind, but I remember nigh on a hundred of them when I was first a journeyman mercer.”

  “Did you mix with them at first?” Carey asked, remembering how the Mayor had spat at the first mention of them.

  “No, for there was all that trouble with Leonard Stoltz and the Earl of
Northumberland’s men and after it was all over, that’s why they moved to the island, see. But it got better later, ’cause they were mostly young men that came over—fine big men some of them, that worked in the smelting houses, and all very strong with that fine yellow hair—ye can imagine the trouble we had keeping our Keswick maids from marrying them.”

  Carey laughed. They had arrived at the boatlanding. One of the Deutschers was a short stout determined-looking woman in a Deutscher cap and hat with a veil, very old-fashioned, two men who looked in their thirties, and one who was quite a young man. Everybody was wearing sober brocades, mainly green, and fur-lined robes in the Deutscher style. The bald boatman was sitting behind them in his boat, smoking a clay pipe and watching a heron that was standing sentry in the reeds of one of the other islands.

  The man who stepped forward first, Allerdyce introduced as Mr Emanuel Hochstetter, the managing director of the family firm and old Mr Daniel’s eldest surviving son. He had a slightly moth-eaten thatch of bright blond hair under his fashionable beaver hat and blue eyes, and a settled anxious expression on his face. Next to him was a thin balding man in a narrow tall hat, introduced as Mark Steinberger, perhaps a few years older than Emanuel Hochstetter. The woman bowed to Carey and Carey bowed back. Allerdyce murmured that this was Frau Radagunda Hochstetter and the young man was her youngest surviving son, David.

  Frau Hochstetter said some words in High Dutch which the lad David translated into English, words of formal welcome and a promise of co-operation. Carey handed over his warrant to Emanuel Hochstetter who read it carefully aloud in Latin and Mark Steinberger also read it and gave it to Frau Hochstetter who didn’t read the Latin, gave it to the youngster and the youngster scowled over the official English section. They gave it back with a certain amount of muttering.

  “Master David,” Carey said to the youngster, “would you translate for me?”

  “Yes, yes of course,” said the young man with no trace of an accent. And so Carey smiled and bowed all round and asked if he could have a guide to show him round the mines and smelting houses and so on since, alas, Mr Secretary Cecil had wished this inspection on him when he had more than enough to do at Carlisle and in the Debateable Land and he knew nothing at all of mines or miners. Not today of course, it was far too late in the day for that, but perhaps tomorrow or the day after if that was convenient to Mr Emanuel Hochstetter and Mrs Hochstetter?

  It was. She said some more words in High Dutch and then all four of them got back in the boat and were rowed back to their mysterious island, where tendrils of fog were already preparing to take the houses back. Carey watched them and wondered what was wrong with them. Why did he have the feeling he had missed something important?

  Tovey came close. “Why were they so tense, sir?” he murmered. “Even the lady?”

  “That’s probably because they’re hiding something,” said Carey, “and they almost certainly are.”

  “What?”

  “No idea. It would be nice if they’re tense because Jonathan Hepburn is in fact here, but I doubt it. Peculation to wholesale theft, I suspect. If, as Mr Secretary says in his letter, the main mine, called…er…Goldscope, I think, is exhausted, why are they still here?”

  Tovey nodded.

  “I’m looking forward to seeing the smelting houses,” he said with a sudden eager grin. “All those wonderful machines.”

  “I am too,” Carey admitted, “and the mines as well. I’ve never seen a working mine or been down one except siege mines, of course, which were damned small and dark and smelly and uncomfortable and apt to collapse at any minute.”

  They walked back up to the town through the dusk, wondering at the dirtiness of the buildings which were covered in a kind of black dinge that also speckled the piles of snow on every side where the small few streets of Keswick had been shovelled clear.

  At the inn, Carey presided over all of them at supper in the common room and told Red Sandy and Bangtail of the surprising respectability of Wattie Graham, hereabouts known as Mister, which made them laugh. They agreed to have a drink with the drovers again and see if they could find out where Wattie’s woods were and anything about them. After some ferocious games of shove-groat and quoits, Carey retired to his chamber and beckoned Tovey to follow.

  “Mr Tovey,” he said, “I have a job for you.”

  Tovey looked anxious. “Yes, sir?”

  “It is not, you will be relieved to hear, a lucrative position as my valet. I’ll find someone else as soon as I can. I want you to talk to people and report back to me.”

  “Sir, are you really here to inspect the mines?”

  “Well, Mr Secretary has been remarkably co-operative, not to say speedy, in the matter of my warrant. No delay, no messing about, comprehensive. Why?”

  “Does he actually want the mines inspected?”

  “Yes. His father is a shareholder in the Company of Mines Royal and I expect he’s happily killing two birds with one stone. Get the mines inspected anyway and find this would-be assassin for His Majesty at the same time.”

  “Oh.”

  “So while I’m shinning up and down ladders and inspecting smelting houses, I’m also expected to find Jonathan Hepburn or Hochstetter, if he’s here, or get some kind of clue as to his whereabouts if he isn’t.”

  “Why would he be here, sir? Surely he’d be safer in the Spanish Netherlands.”

  “Of course, though I’m sure King James will send men to all the uusual places in the Low Countries. No, in fact I agree with Mr Secretary. It’s worth me coming here with a licence to poke around. There’s something here that might have brought him back, something he can find nowhere else, wheresoever he wanders.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “His home.”

  Tovey was silent for a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Carey had started unbuttoning his doublet. “I really want to get onto that island too. What are they hiding there apart from a brewery and a bakery? Perhaps Hepburn himself?”

  Tovey shook his head. “Could you arrest him if he is there?”

  “Probably not,” admitted Carey frankly, “since I only have four men and myself. That’s going to have to be me killing him, I’m afraid.”

  Tovey looked shocked and Carey laughed as he unbuttoned his waistcoat and carefully took it off without untying the points at the back and bringing the canions and hose with them. Then he hung it on a hook, where it dangled looking like some kind of fashionable ghost.

  “Let me explain something to you, Mr Tovey. King James gave me the commission, himself personally—find Hepburn and kill him. No nonsense about a trial. His Majesty doesn’t want to frighten his people or make the commoners demand the execution of the bloody earl of Huntly nor Lord Maxwell. It seems that Cecil has found out or has been told by His Majesty that he’s commissioned me and not only does not disapprove but approves enough to help me out with that warrant—and the banker’s draft I exchanged in Carlisle too.”

  “What about the Queen?”

  “I am quite sure that Cecil has only told Her Majesty what she needs to know on the subject, although…Well, she’s as good at playing that game as he is, if not better. And so it’s dirty work but I’ll do it, because I personally object to assassination attempts being made on my liege, present or future.”

  Tovey’s eyes were round. “It wouldn’t be against your honour, sir?” he asked hesitantly.

  “Good question, because, after all, King James is not yet my king. However if the Queen said to me, ‘Find him and kill him,’ of a would-be assassin like Hepburn, I would regard it as an honourable deed in the service of my liege. Odds are that King James will eventually be my liege, if he lives long enough, so on the whole, I don’t think my honour will be touched if I kill Hepburn. And of course, I will be pleasing King James and possibly Cecil, which is no bad thing. I regard assassins as
vermin anyway.”

  Tovey nodded.

  “Also you should remember one other thing.”

  “What, sir?”

  “Hepburn or Hochstetter may kill me.”

  Dodd was on his side on his pillows, bored and extremely grumpy while his back drove him mad with itching and his joints felt sore. He wanted to get up and walk around but both Janet and Mistress Elliot were adamant that he couldn’t. Janet had gone downstairs to rest since she was tired and feeling sick, and so the veiled Mistress Alyson Elliot sat down on the stool and gave Dodd the spoon. He had insisted the day before he wouldn’t be fed like a wean anymore, but he also remembered something from when he had been feverish and was wondering if it was the truth or a fever dream.

  He spooned the usual pottage clumsily a couple of times and then stopped. “Och,” he said, gesturing at her veil. “Will ye take that off?”

  “Why?”

  “Ah wantae see what Ah did tae ye.”

  “It’s no’ pretty.”

  “I ken that.”

  “Why d’ye want tae see it? Your gazing on it willna make it better nor even less sore.”

  “Is it still sore?”

  “Ay, it is. Even if ye were to greet and say, ‘Och, I’m sorry,’ and all that, it wouldna make it better nor bring back my lost eye.”

  Dodd said nothing.

  “Ay well,” she said, “why not?”

  She moved the veil from around her face carefully and then the rest of the way with a sharp angry movement so he could see the ruination of her face. He looked steadily for several minutes and then turned away.

  “Och, God, ye’re not greeting after all?”