“Ah…” began Hochstetter.
Tovey started to give them an explanation based on Agricola but found himself shhhed by Carey.
“Sorry, Mr Tovey,” said Carey, “but I can hear your ideas whenever I like, whereas Mr David is of the famous mining family, Hochstetter of Augsburg, and I’d like to hear what he has to say.” Tovey flushed and went silent because he and Mr David were close in age.
This unleashed a learned disquisition from young Mr David, the upshot of which as far as Carey could make it out among all the technical words in Deutsch, was that metals came from juices that flowed through the veins of the earth and hardened when they met the air at the surface.
“And are the metals separated or mixed together in these juices?” Carey asked respectfully.
“They are mixed,” said Mr David, “always mixed in greater or lesser proportion.”
“So is there iron in this mine?”
“Copper and gold and arsenic and lead, of course. And other metals in small quantities.”
“Really? Fascinating! How do you know which metal is which if they’re all mixed together?”
“It is a great art to assay them, but my uncle, Herr Schmelzmeister Mark Steinberger, can tell you more about it.”
“So what is assaying?”
Off Hochstetter went about the colours and consistency of various ores and how you could tell them apart and how you needed to assay them frequently in a small furnace because the proportion of one metal to another in ore changed all the time. Carey listened carefully, asking more questions until they came down Newlands valley to the entrance of the mine. They heard it long before they arrived because there was a dull thunder as if a giant were hitting rocks with a hammer, constant creaking, and the sound of water.
Most of the wooden machinery was protected from the weather by wooden rooves, but water tumbled everywhere in channels. Some of the huge machines were still, some were working, and there were two patient blindfolded ponies walking round and round to drive some of it. Mr David waved at a long tall building where the worst noise came from, the giant crashing and crashing his boots on gravel.
“What in God’s name is going on in there?” shouted Carey, riding a few frightened crow hops from his horse. Mr David’s palfrey was stolid and unafraid, but Red Sandy and Leamus’ hobbies started to buck and Leamus went off over his horse’s shoulder and did a magnificent roll. He came to his feet, dusting off his buff coat and smiling with embarrassment. Red Sandy was still on his hobby’s back and laughing at him. Bangtail’s pony only twitched an ear.
“Sure and I’m no horseman,” said Leamus, hopping back on his hobby.
“It’s the stamping house,” shouted Mr David. “We’re using the meltwater from the hills. If it snows and freezes again we’ll have to stop.”
“Stamping house?”
“Yes, the….BANG…hammers…BANG…small pieces…BANG.” Mr David’s fairly thin voice was competely drowned.
“Can I see?”
“What?”
“SEE?”
Without waiting for an answer, Carey jumped down from his hobby and went towards a door. Mr David scrambled down from his palfrey and led him to another door. Tovey dismounted more cautiously and peered. Of course he knew in theory what would be there but was immensely curious. He hadn’t expected the levels of noise for a start.
The stamping house was the tallest in the valley, twice as tall as the other sheds, built against the hill and vibrating with thunder. Inside, huge hammers made of treetrunks, some of them shod at the end with iron, banged up and down on the stones. The shed was built on an incline so there was a raked path for the rocks to roll along under the first stamper and then the second and so on. Boys were bringing baskets of rocks and throwing them under the top hammer and they broke and rolled down and were stamped by another massive hammer. The hammers were attached to a waterwheel by complicated cogwheels like the ones you would find in a flour mill and they rose and fell one after the other as if they were alive.
Two greybeards raked the rocks in and out as the hammers came down and lifted. They had curious leather coats on, pointed at the back with pointed hoods which also covered the ears, which must have helped a bit with the noise. They were very skilled. Nobody lost a rake or a leg under the remorseless hammers.
The rocks and gravel were carried down a water channel which ended in a series of sieves. A tow-haired solid-looking boy collected the larger lumps out of the sieves and carried them back up the shed to the first stamper again. Nobody paid Carey any attention.
Mr David showed Carey out through a second door to another building, further up the valley, made of brick not wood, where large faggots of firewood were piled up against the walls as well as sackfulls of black earthcoals.
“This is the furnace house,” he shouted, “where we give the ore its first roasting, which makes it easier to break up.” This was where all the smoke came from. Yellow and acrid, it billowed out of the brick furnace chimneys and out of openings in the roof and was pummelled a little by the weak breeze. Most of it stayed where it was, making the air yellow and hard to breathe. Further on were long low sheds and another greybeard in his leather coat, his hood stiffly pointed above his grey head.
“This is Herr Steiger Schlegel,” said Mr David. “He is one of the two mine captains.”
“Herr Captain Schlegel, delighted to meet you,” said Carey and shook the proffered hand. “I wonder if we can go in the mine?”
Schlegel said something in Deutsch to Mr David. “He says it wouldn’t be safe for you, for you are not used to ladders and because of the frost, the ladders are very slippery.”
Carey raised his eyebrows, to be met by bland looks from Schlegel and Mr David. So he smiled with pretended relief and asked, “Well, what’s in this house?”
Mr David answered that eagerly. “It’s the bellows house,” he said. “We aren’t working the mine at the moment because of the frost, so they aren’t moving.”
“Are they for the fires?”
“No, no, these are quite different. Here, come inside, you can see.”
The lad seemed very relieved to get Carey into the bellows house. Inside there was a harness for the pony to go round and round and a rod that led down into the earth. Carey squinted down under the floor and found a row of bellows in a cellar.
“Good Lord,” he said, standing up and dusting down his hose, “those bellows are huge. What are they for?”
“We must keep air blowing into the mine or otherwise the air becomes stuffy and bad and in the end men die of suffocation.”
“Oh.”
“The other house has bellows worked by paddles for men to use, and we’re running those at the moment.”
Nothing would do but they must go over to the other wooden shed and go inside where there was a continuous stamping and creaking as two men trod the boards that forced open a huge pair of bellows in front of them and then sighed shut, pushing better air into the mine.
“Very interesting,” Carey declared, with some amusement as Tovey stared around him with an expression of delight on his face. “Looks like a lot of hard work, eh?”
“Yes,” said Mr David seriously, “it is a lot of hard work. That was why we came from Augsburg: you need hard work and skill and machines to make a mine and the English have no skill at mining or knowledge of machines and…”
“Indeed,” said Carey, coming out of the older bellows shed and finding a path that led up the side of the bare hill. He immediately started following it, trailed by Tovey and Mr David. Slightly short of breath when he got to the top of the hill, he looked around at the short grass and peered into the next valley which was equally bald. Some skinny sheep were wandering around, cropping the grass. “What happened to the woods?”
“They were all burnt for charcoal when we first came,” said Mr David, “before we fou
nd the earthcoal in Bolton about nine miles away and we’re mining that. It’s excellent and comparatively clean of brimstone too. But we still need charcoal and it’s hard to find now the woods are gone. Mr Graham keeps promising to give us…well, sell us…some charcoal from his woods in Borrowdale, but he never does.”
Carey came jumping down the rocks and smiled at Mr David. “Well, Mr Hochstetter, if I can’t go into the Goldscope mine itself, I think I’ve seen what I can now, haven’t I?”
Mr David was working hard not to look very relieved. “Do you want to go back?”
“Oh, I think we had better, it’s getting dark now.”
Carey and Tovey mounted up and they turned their horses around and started back behind the usual packtrain, heavy-laden with roasted and hammered ore. Behind them in the distance the mine bell sounded.
Carey kicked his horse suddenly and galloped ahead into the dusk when they came in sight of the faint and few lights of Keswick. The others caught up with him sitting at his ease by the fire in the Oak Inn’s parlour, drinking mulled and spiced ale.
Mr David had gone on down to the lake by the curving path running through a large stand of sick trees full of arguing crows settling down for the night. The innkeeper came and announced that the ordinary was salt beef stew with neeps again and there was still some left. They all ordered some.
“Well, Mr Tovey,” said Carey as they tucked into the thick salty stew, “I’m sorry I had to cut you off but I wanted to win young Mr David to me. What did you make of the mine workings?”
Tovey smiled shyly. “I am no expert…”
“You’re the nearest I’ve got. Also I don’t want the Deutschers realising that you know more than I do—I want them to think us both Court fools they can get rid of quickly and easily without us learning anything, especially whatever it is they are hiding.”
“Oh. I see, sir. Sorry, sir, I should have realised. Well, the mines seemed very interesting and it accords with Agricola’s account. You roast and stamp the ore near the mine if you can, because that makes it easier to pack on the ponies if it’s in small pieces.”
“Infernally noisy, though!”
“I suppose it is. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“And what do you think to the idea that the earth juices make the metals?”
“It is also Agricola’s theory, very orthodox.”
“They haven’t mentioned Agricola’s great tome either, not once. You would think they would when faced with such an ignoramus on mining as I am.”
“Sir?”
“They could say to me, you should read about it in Agricola and then I might do that and leave them alone. So why are they silent about a book full of diagrams about mining? At least Herr Steinberger must have read it.”
“I don’t know sir,” said Tovey unhappily. “I don’t…”
Carey leaned over and patted his shoulder. “Thank you, Mr Tovey.”
“Why?”
“I much prefer an honest statement of ignorance to the more usual piles of speculation and nonsense.”
Tovey went red and buried his nose in his beer.
“They are hiding something. I know nothing of mining or smelting, but I know that. Possibly they are hiding more than one thing. What was that Allerdyce was saying, that Leonard Stoltz was an Anabaptist preacher? Sounds funny to me and they’re from the right part of Germany, so they might well be Anabaptists.”
“What are Anabaptists?”
“Terrible heretics that caused the religious wars in Allemayne in the time of Good King Henry.”
“Oh.”
“According to the Catholic church at least, which makes me think more kindly of them. Though good English churchmen seem to be hot against them as well, for reasons I can’t quite fathom.”
“Why do you think they are hiding something, sir?”
“The Goldscope mine is described as being worked out and yet here they are still working it and spending good money on mining coals at Bolton to roast the ore. The returns are steady but miserable, according to their accounts. Yet here the Deutschers still are, able to afford brocades and furs, when they could go home. Depend upon it, Mr Tovey, they are hiding something.”
Carey blinked at the fire, which had earthcoals in it, and rubbed his fingers. “I really want to get on that island,” he murmured. “What have they got there?”
The next morning when they woke there was snow falling silently in soft permanent-looking lumps and the huge bald hills were hidden by the low clouds.
Carey saw no reason to stop what he was doing simply because it was snowing and persuaded the innkeeper’s boy to show him the way to the smelthouses via a court where the ponies were lined up ready to go out to Newlands again, through a back lane and onto the Penrith Road. He left Red Sandy and Bangtail to exercise the horses and took just Tovey and Leamus.
The smelthouses were behind a stout fence with two gates in it large enough to let a pony through. The houses themselves were a clutter of ugly raw wood and raw brick buildings, separated by muddy yards that were nonetheless swept clean, and the thick metallic-smelling smoke was colouring the snow yellow and black as it fell.
The foreman there was another greybeard in a leather tunic with a pointy hood. His younger men were dressed in jerkins and hose and, from the way they talked in Deutsch and English mixed, they were the second generation.
Hans Altschmer, the foreman, was extremely offended at the sudden appearance of Carey, Tovey, and Leamus—Carey in a fur-trimmed cloak, Tovey shivering in his scholar’s gown, and Leamus comfortable in his buffcoat with a scarf wrapped round his stringy neck to keep the cold snow out. He insisted that before anybody could venture into the smelting houses, he must first ask Herr Schmelzmeister Steinberger, and as Herr Schmelzmeister lived on the island, this would take all morning.
To Tovey’s surprise, Carey smiled at the indignant Deutscher and said it was fascinating just to watch what was happening and stood around in the main yard where there were unlit furnaces, getting in the way and asking fatuous questions. He watched yet another packtrain arrive laden with earthcoals and thought it was unloaded with an efficiency and lack of fuss that argued a lot of practice. The snow fell gently the whole time and boys swept it up, red-nosed and red-fingered and shouting at each other in the incomprehensible coughs and splutters of Deutsch. From the laughter, he guessed they were saying rude things about him. He wandered among the ponies, slapping them and being nosed inquisitively and found that there were very few Graham brands, but plenty of Ridley, Storey, and Liddle brands, which meant the ponies had been reived once upon a time.
“Hm, interesting,” he said to himself, scribbling with a piece of blacklead in his notebook. “Let’s see. The packponies come from Bolton with earthcoals, they unload some here, they go up to Goldscope with coal and supplies, and come back down again with ore which they unload here. And then where do they go? Do they go to Bolton with supplies? Do they go unladen?”
“Why does it matter?” asked Tovey.
“Nobody ever sends a packpony train anywhere unladen if they can. They’re ponies, they eat their heads off whether they’re working or not. How do they get to Bolton?”
“Should we go and look? Or ask a drover?”
“Certainly we should go and look as soon as the snow stops.”
Both of them looked up at the clouds and the way the dirty snow was disappearing under something whiter and the flakes kept coming in little flurries, as if someone in the sky was flinging them out of a sack.
Carey closed his notebook with an impatient snap. “I’m bored,” he announced. “I suppose there’s no hunting around here?”
Tovey shook his head. “I was asking the innkeeper if he knew of any useful herbs around here and he laughed at me and said there had been plenty when he was a lad and hunting too, but now there were no trees and no herbs, save grass a
nd some weeds in the summer, and even the lake had hardly any fish in it, though the water was so clear and it used to be stuffed with fish.”
“Did he say why?”
“He didn’t know, only said it was the kobolds from the mines roaming around after dark and turning everything they touched to ruination.”
“Ah. Kobolds again.”
“They cause roof falls and poisonous airs too, and the water kobolds even poison the hill streams so there are no fish.”
“Has anyone ever caught a kobold?”
Tovey shook his head.
At that point Herr Schmelzmeister Mark Steinberger arrived with young Mr David, his oblong angular face conveying grim acceptance.
“Ah, Herr Schmelzmeister,” carolled Carey, “how kind of you to make time for me in your busy day. Will you be acting as translator, Mr Hochstetter?”
“I speak gut English,” said Steinberger, with a tight smile.
“Splendid, splendid!” said Carey, “That’s considerably more than I could manage with High Dutch, alas. Now then, perhaps you could explain the smelting process to me?”
Steinberger smiled a little. “It vood take at least a year to teach you efen the basic principles, Herr Carey.”
“Herr Ritter Carey,” smiled Carey. “I’m sure it would take at least that long if not longer. Could you just tell me the main outlines?” Once again Tovey had his mouth open to answer and Carey stared fixedly at him. Damn it, why did clever, bookish young men always have to show off?
Tovey caught the glare and shut his mouth, his spots going a nasty colour. Leamus was just staring into space, holding the horses, with no expression on his face, and Carey wondered if he knew how to play primero.
A Suspicion of Silver Page 20