They spent about an hour going through the smelthouses, except for one section which was apparently closed for repairs although smoke was rising from a chimney in the centre. The whole place was full of smoke and hot despite the snow, and the rooves had melting water running off them into neat gutters and so into tanks.
It seemed that smelting was largely a matter of first roasting and pounding ore into gravel which they did near the mine. Then you put the gravel in a very hot fire until the metals melted out of it, to make a cake. Then you cooled the metal cake in water, chiselled the good metal from bad, and melted it again until you got something fairly pure.
Carey was full of happy interest and excitement. “So, most of the ore here produces copper once you have baked the sulphur out of it. What happens to the sulphur?”
“It becomes smoke which we collect and lead to a tank of water to make vitriol after air has passed through it.”
“Wonderful! It sounds quite alchemical.”
Steinberger tried not to sneer. “Nobody really understands why the things we do work, but one thing is certain and that is that alchemists do not know. Their theory of the Elements is childishly simple and does not work for metals. Those alchemists that are not outright frauds are fools and children, entranced by their texts.”
Tovey was gasping at this. “But the theory of the Elements is one of the most well-attested foundations of philosophy and medicine…”
“Maybe. It is nott at all well-attested and for sure it does not work for ores.”
“Fascinating!” interrupted Carey, standing on Tovey’s foot. “So you start with, for instance, that green kind of copper ore. You crush it, roast it, crush it again, roast it again. If you catch the smoke and pass it through water in an alembic, you eventually get vitriol which burns with invisible flames.”
“Ach, you have seen it.”
“Yes,” said Carey, “it was impressive. Is there a use for it in mining?”
“Yes,” said Steinberger. “It is said it can be used for improving gold ores.”
“Ah, gold,” said Carey, with greed glowing in his eyes. “How do you get the gold out of the rock? For Her Majesty, of course?”
“If the ore is rich enough you can find lumps of it. However usually the ore is not rich. Usually we find an uncium of gold to a truckle of ore. This much ore…” With his hands Steinberger sketched out in the air a box as wide as his arms that came to his chest. “…to this much gold.” He held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Or vorse.”
Carey’s face was comically disappointed. “Oh,” he said.
“For gold you must put the treated stein to a different kind of furnace and heat it much hotter and then you pour off your first cakes.”
“But you don’t eat it,” said Carey, laughing a lot at his wit.
“Nein,” said Steinberger with another tight smile.
“And there’s your copper?”
“No, of course not,” said Steinberger patiently. “It’s a mixture of copper, perhaps lead, perhaps even gold.”
“Aha,” said Carey, nodding his head. “The Queen’s share?”
“Off course.”
Tovey appeared to be about to say something else and Carey stood on his other foot.
“Perhaps arsenic, perhaps litharge, you never know. You must test and try a sample and add fluxes such as glass or sand, melt again. Herr Gans, the Jew that came here ten years ago, greatly improved our operations by showing us the use of fluxes and thereby cut the amount of roasting and melting and so the cost of charcoal. A very skilled and learned man.”
“I see,” said Carey, obviously not seeing. “So how long before we have copper, or should I say bronze, for guns?”
“No, bronze is made of copper with a little tin,” said Steinberger, not quite rolling his eyes at this. “As it happens we have great stores of copper cooking pots…”
Nothing would do but Carey must see the piles of cooking pots, some covered with verdigris, kept in a storeroom. Carey exclaimed over them and spent time thinking of a use for the copper.
“Surely these are valuable?” he burbled.
“It is hard to sell them,” Steinberger admitted. “I thought noble kitchens and gentlemen would be glad to purchase them but they must be cleaned and polished after each use and the lazy kitchen boys would rather use an earthenware pan a couple of times and then throw it away than…Don’t go in there!”
Carey had wandered through the piles of copper pans and opened a door which led through to another smelting house that had three odd-looking furnaces with round domed lids attached to chains. The heat was stunning and Tovey wondered if they ran the furnaces in summer too.
Steinberger slammed the door and smiled in a strained way. “Yes,” he said, “that is simply a way of…er…making the copper a good red colour.”
“Of course,” said Carey, “I realised that.”
They were guided through another brick building at a fierce heat where cakes of shiny metal were being poured from a furnace and then dunked hissing into tanks of water. Carey bent to touch one and had his outstretched hand knocked aside by young Mr David.
“Careful, sir, they are very hot, even after the water.”
“Are they?” Carey laughed, rather a whinnying laugh which no one there could recognise as a deadly accurate imitation of the Earl of Southampton’s laugh. “Bless me, thank you, Mr Hochstetter. And is this where you get the gold out?”
Steinberger and Mr David exchanged glances.
“Well…” began Mr David.
“In a manner off speaking,” said Steinberger, “although there is only a tiny amount of gold in this ore, perhaps as I said, one or two uncia per truckle.
Mr David waved helpfully at a large truckle being mended in a corner of the yard.
Carey’s face became comically downcast. “Is that all? Isn’t there anything else of value in the ore? Lead, silver, arsenic?”
“Sometimes yes, ve haff lead and arsenic, sometimes efen silver.”
“Ah yes, silver.”
“But in this ore from Gottesgaab…I mean Goldscope, not fery much,” said Steinberger and Tovey saw a bead of sweat on his forehead, probably because even with the door wide open, the heat and smoke in the smelting house was savage. “In Augsburg, yes, there are such ores. Efery ore is different.”
“Oh. Well, gentlemen, I own I am set down by that. I thought there might be a lot more gold than that.”
“It iss all in the accounts we gif the shareholders,” said Steinberger in a stuffy voice. “The gold iss alvays a very small amount.”
“Well, yes, but…” started Tovey and stopped with a squawk.
“I see,” said Carey, looking thoughtful with a masterful expression of thwarted greed underneath. “And are there perhaps diamonds and rubies and pearls?”
“Not at this mine,” said Mr David, “although they say there are rubies near Pot—” and suddenly Mr David squawked and went silent. Tovey rubbed his toe, Mr David rubbed his shin.
Leamus made a little noise like a grunt, turned aside politely and blew his nose with great vigor into the snow at the side of the yard.
“Vell,” said Steinberger smiling, “perhaps ve can refresh ourselves after the heat of the smelting houses.”
“Splendid idea,” said Carey, “but it’s a long walk back to town.”
Steinberger looked smug. “Follow me, meine Herren.”
“But…” Tovey was spluttering to Carey, “what about…?”
“Shut up,” said Carey very quietly, “or I’ll make you my official valet.”
Tovey gobbled and swallowed, going quite purple.
“Ah, yes, your Deutsch beer,” Carey said loudly and enthusiastically, “wonderful stuff, Herr Schmelzmeister, puts most of ours to shame, I’m afraid, how do you make it so fine?”
Steinberger smiled patronisingly. “I think, Herr Ritter, that the secret is in the copper vessels that ve use which can be made much more cleaner than wooden bucks.”
“And that helps?”
“So I am told.”
It was only a short way to a small alehouse tucked under the high cliffs on one side of the river which was lower than before and looking to freeze again. Two red-faced men were carefully keeping the sluice from the river free of ice. The alehouse had the statutory red lattices, but was empty and there was a plump woman there, with a pink face under her linen cap, and her kirtle a vivid blue. She brought all of them quart tankards of a dark brew which Carey sipped cautiously and then grinned and raised his tankard to Herr Steinberger.
Carey asked questions of Steinberger about the accounts and the apprentices, probing for something that would prise him open. As the day darkened, the mine bell rang in the distance and a closer bell answered and shortly afterwards came a rush of greybeards and young men from the smelthouses, who all had a fierce thirst and generally downed their first quart tankard in one and held it out for more beer. Some greybeards and young men went off to their families, and the rest demanded the ordinary which the woman, whose name was apparently Frau Magda, went bustling around to bring them. It was bread, spiced sausages, and some kind of salt-pickled cabbage which smelled very sour. Carey had found a large tub of it in the yard when he came back from the jakes, sneaked a bit from under the ice and found it remarkably edible. The woman warmed it up on the stove and he ordered the same ordinary for all of them.
Red Sandy and Bangtail were highly suspicious and refused to try the cabbage while Tovey tried some at least and Leamus plowed through his whole plateful and then finished Red Sandy’s and Bangtail’s. Tovey ate his way absent-mindedly through his cabbage as well, scowling as if he was trying to remember something.
Late in the evening, Carey was singing an old English round with a greybeard and two youngsters singing what was evidently the same song in Deutsch and making a truly lovely sound. Everyone else stopped and listened to them and then clapped like customers in a barber shop. Carey started singing another old song and the greybeard sang extempore and Tovey put his head on his arms and passed out.
He came-to breathing water and found his head in one of the water tanks, fought wheezing to the air. Carey was standing there looking stern with his arms folded and Leamus was dunking him.
A word was screaming at him through his headache and the fumes of the beer pulsing in his eyes. It was a Deutsch word and it came from Book III of the De Re Metallica of Agricola, or as his friends knew him, George Bauer. And he suddenly remembered the rest of the relevant paragraph.
He surged to his feet, shook Leamus off and started running through the dark streets of Keswick, slipping and sliding on the newfallen snow on top of the old. When his old habit of coughing caught up with him, he slowed to a walk and then trotted on when the coughing died down and so walking and running he came back to the Oak Inn, plunged through the side door and staggered upstairs to the little room he was sharing with Carey. He found the leatherbound volume of De Re Metallica, lit a candle with trembling fingers and flipped through the heavy pages full of woodcuts. Where was it, at the end of Book 3? He could see the words now…
He found it, breathed out fully at last and laughed for joy.
“Well, Mr Tovey,” said Carey’s voice behind him, not nearly as out of breath as he was, presumably because Carey had ridden back and Tovey hadn’t even thought of his horse in the heat of the moment. “Perhaps an explanation would be in order?”
“Yes, sir,” said Tovey, now feeling his chest tight and starting to cough as he often did when he ran, having a narrow chest and too much of the phlegmatic humour. “Look, sir, see…”
“See what? I told you, my Latin is desperate.”
“The name of the mine here is Goldscope but in Deutsch it is Gottesgaab.”
“Sounds similar.”
“Yes. Gottesgaab means God’s Gift in Deutsch, but anyway, here in Cumberland, Goldscope and Gottesgaab mean the same thing, the mine in Newlands valley.”
“Ye..es.”
“But there’s another mine called Gottesgaab in a place called Abertham in Allemayne. Almost certainly our Gottesgaab is named after the one at Abertham, which came first. And they called that Deutscher mine God’s Gift because…it says here…‘for they have dug out of it a large quantity of pure silver.’”
Carey hefted up the volume and squinted in the bad light of the inn’s muttonfat tapers. “Ah, argentum!”
His face was suddenly wreathed in a joyous smile and he chuckled long and low. “Well, well.”
“And I’m sorry, I kept trying to tell you, but you didn’t understand. You know those funny-looking furnaces with the domed lids lifted by chains?”
“That they really didn’t want us to see, though two of them were fired?”
“Yes, sir, well, they were cupellation furnaces, see here. Here’s a picture.”
There was and very clear.
“Cupe…what?”
“To get the silver out of copper, you first have to melt in lead which the silver prefers to stick to than the copper, you pour off a cake and cool it and then you chip off the lead and silver mixture. You put it in a cupellation furnace again, lined with charcoal—I’m still not sure how it works, sir, but the Athenians did it in the time of Socrates so it can’t be new— that separates the silver and lead and then all you have to do is get the gold out of the silver by the same method of cupellation and then…”
“You have some gold to give the Queen her share which she is very particular about and then you have all the silver which is probably considerably more than the gold, being a baser metal, to do what you want with.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Which is why they did their best never to speak of silver and why Herr Steinberger didn’t want young Mr David even mentioning Potosi, in case we thought of silver.”
Tovey nodded.
“And which is also why they have all that big stockpile of copper pans they can’t sell and keep sending pathetic letters to Mr Secretary Cecil about.”
“Yes, sir.”
Carey sat back on his bed and laughed again. “Wonderful, Mr Tovey,” he said. “I saw something in you at Oxford and this confirms it.”
Tovey blushed. “Th…thank you, sir.”
Carey’s blue eyes were bright with merriment. “They’ve been cheating the Queen since they started or possibly since Daniel Hochstetter died. They are still here mining, so there is still silver in Goldscope mine and perhaps others of their mines in the area.”
“Shouldn’t we challenge them, sir?” Tovey asked, who was rather shocked. “Shouldn’t we report back to Mr Secretary and…?”
“Oh no,” said Carey. “I don’t think that would be a good idea at all. No, no. You may have noticed that I was playing rather stupid today, eh?”
“You were?” said Tovey tactlessly. Carey sighed.
“Yes, I was. That’s because fatuous ignorance is an awful lot better for prying secrets out of people than marching up to them and hitting them until they tell you. Not that there’s anything wrong with the traditional way in its proper place, but here we are in Keswick, sixty miles from Carlisle, and whereas I have only four men, including you, Mr Tovey, the Hochstetters have at least twenty men accustomed to wielding picks and axes and probably a lot more.”
“Ah.” Tovey had gone white again.
“So we will remain tactful and quiet on the subject of the silver, until we find where they’ve got it hidden and until we get back to Carlisle as well. Eh, Mr Tovey?”
Tovey nodded.
“I bet I know where it is, too,” said Carey thoughtfully. “It’s on their precious island along with the brewery, the bakery, and the mill, and no doubt Hepburn or Hochstetter too, sitting on top of the pile li
ke the dragon in a nurse’s tale.”
He leaned over and gave Tovey a slap on the back that started him coughing again. “Good work,” he said, as Tovey’s heart swelled. “I wonder what else you’ll find for me, Mr Tovey? Come on, let’s go to bed, if you can get my points undone.”
Sergeant Dodd had spent most of the Friday stepping slowly down the spiral staircase at Stobbs, two storeys down, past the hall and down to the storeroom and stable on the ground floor, past the internal iron gate for stopping besiegers. He then slowly shuffled across the floor, watched with grave disapproval by a couple of lame ponies and a cow. Once on the other side of the floor he sat on a stone and pushed the thick barred door open a little so he could see was it still snowing in the barnekin, and get his breath back. Then he shut the door and doddered back through the comforting smell of horse and cow shit and straw, up the spiral stairs, past the entrance to the hall, up the stairs again, trying not to stop at the cubby hole for people to pass each other, though sometimes he had to, up the last few stairs to the third floor, through that gate, through one large chamber and then through the door to the one that had held him prisoner for weeks. There he fell on his stomach on the bed until his breath had stopped cawing in his throat and his head had stopped whirling. And then he got up and did it again. Janet had wanted to help him at first but he had snarled at her to leave him be and so after watching him intently through one entire journey, she disappeared to the kitchen which was in a separate building right next to the tower.
After a couple of full journeys, he had fallen asleep and woken to find a bowl of broth and a spoon on the little table, and so he had drunk the broth and started down the spiral stairs again.
After two more journeys, the snow had stopped and the sky cleared a little and he looked out at it longingly for a while before snarling at himself and setting off again. He passed by the ponies and the cow, which looked as if it was still in milk for a wonder, and climbed the spiral stair again. Everyone had been in the hall by the fire, but now they had all gone out and got on with the things they should have done earlier when it was snowing too much to see. This time he didn’t fall on the bed, but sat on it and waited for his breathing to ease.
A Suspicion of Silver Page 21