He got back down to the courtyard gate again, his legs feeling like lead and found Janet waiting with her arms folded. She insisted on turning him around and checking the bandages on his back for bleeding, but there wasn’t any blood, he knew it. There was no longer a spike of pain there, but more a needle of itching which drove him crazy when he stayed still. At least while he was moving he didn’t feel it so much.
She smiled at him and told him to wait and ran upstairs for something, came down again carrying a thick blanket and a pair of pattens to put on over his socks.
Then she opened the courtyard door and went out and swept the snow off the steps so he could venture into the open for the first time in he had forgotten how long. He walked the distance to the barnekin gate, which had its postern open for the men who were taking fodder to the ponies and cattle in the infield. The sky seemed enormous over his head, the giant white folded sheets of the moors and hills alien and threatening.
He felt suddenly weak and wanted to sit down, but put his arm on Janet’s sturdy shoulders instead and tried not to lean too much. Janet looked up at him and smiled at him, such a beautiful smile, so full of hope and happiness that he stopped and said, “What?”
She hesitated. Then she said, “Ah’m no’ sure yet…”
“Sure of what?”
“It must have been while we were at the King’s Court after Christmas, and Ah’m no’ certain but…”
“But what?” he frowned at her. “What are ye telling me?”
“Henry, I might be wi’ child.”
He didn’t hear her words really, but understood the gesture as she put her hand on her lower stomach. “Ye’re what?” he asked, his breath coming short.
“With child,” she said again and he felt his chest lift and open as if the sun had risen inside him.
“Ye…ye think ye’ve got a babby?”
“I do, Henry, though it’s too early to say yet, for I had my courses a week before Christmas and I might lose it yet but…”
She couldn’t speak any more because he was kissing her mouth and then, very gently, her stomach and then her mouth again and he felt something stir in himself for the first time in weeks and then let go of her, lest he dislodge the wee manikin from her stomach.
“Och, God,” he said, “Ah canna believe it, how did ye…?”
“I got a charm fra the midwife, ye mind her, Mrs Hogg?”
He wrapped his arms around her warm body and hugged her as tight as he could and found his eyes betraying him again and had to cough and snort to hide it.
“Ay,” he said, “ay,” and she turned him and pushed him back into the pele tower and up all the stairs, all the way while the rising sun inside him lifted and grew and its rays filled all his body, so he didn’t notice how tired he was. Even when he had to lie down on his bed again, it was still there, warming him from his heart outwards. He fell asleep and later Janet got into his bed with him and held him all night. He knew she did because he kept waking and wondering why he was feeling so happy and then felt her arms around him and knew why.
And then on Saturday…Saturday was the prize. Today Janet had brought him his own clothes, a hemp shirt and breeches and hose and a woollen doublet and leather jerkin and a cloak to go over it all, smelling friendly of himself. He slowly dressed and put his boots on which were clean, strapped on his dagger that the Courtier had brought him, and found he needed to make another hole in the belt quite a way from the one he usually used. Janet went down and borrowed a leather punch from the tackroom and made the new hole for him. Then he stood up straight and felt like a man again and not a wean.
He went down to the hall and greeted the Elliots who were there, Mistress Elliot with her linen veil and her friend sitting next to her and the cousins and lads and maids who helped her run the place. Dodd looked at the boys, wondering about them, but no, she wouldn’t have her child with her, that would not be respectable at all. He thanked them all for helping him and they looked at each other and a few nodded, even if some of them scowled or stared into space.
There was a sound of some fuss in the barnekin, a horse squealing with anger and men trying to hush it and calm it. Dodd tilted his head to the sound.
“Ay,” said Janet, “there’s Whitesock.”
“Whitesock?” Dodd said, standing up so fast he caught his back. “Why’s he squealing? What’s wrong wi’ him?”
“He’s wood,” said Janet. “I tellt ye, after he came back to Edinburgh wi’ your bloody saddle to show us what happened, he’s been wood. He wilna let naebody back him nor groom him and now he willna hardly eat. I wouldna have brung him so soon but I’m afeared…”
By that time Dodd had walked out of the hall and down the stairs, past the ponies and the cow, out the door and into the barnekin where a horse in terrible condition was standing foursquare, teeth bared, defying the two men holding leading reins. But he had a roman nose and a white sock and he was Whitesock.
Dodd tested the wind and moved round so it would blow from him to the horse.
“Leave go of him,” he ordered the men.
“He’s like to kill ye, Sergeant.”
“Hmf,” said Dodd and walked up to the horse from the side. “Ye’ll no’ kill me, ye clever bastard, will ye?” he said softly to the horse. The horse rolled his eyes at him, reached out with his teeth to bite. Then he stopped still as a statue and his nostrils flared. Then he nickered like a foal, and pushed his nose into Dodd’s chest so Dodd was nearly knocked over. “Och,” he said and patted the muddy neck and blew into Whitesock’s muzzle. Then Dodd reached up and started untangling the matted mane and Whitesock stood and closed his eyes and swayed a little, while Dodd unclipped the reins, rolled them up and chucked them in a corner.
“Did ye think Ah wis deid?” Dodd said to him, his fingers working on the crest of the mane, clearing knots. “Did ye think Ah wis gone? Ah wisna, and it’s thanks tae ye, ye clever lummock, eh?”
Janet and Mistress Elliot watched from the door of the pele tower and then stepped away so that Dodd could lead Whitesock into the dim tower stable and one of the empty stalls beside the ponies.
In the morning, it was still snowing, though fine flakes now that stung the eyes because it had frozen hard in the night. Carey found that nobody was doing anything except going to church because it was Sunday, so he dutifully gathered his men and set off for the little church in the south of town where there was a scattering of the better folk, plenty of townsmen and no Deutschers at all.
Carey’s eyebrows went up and after the service he went to talk to the pastor, a nervous young curate standing in for a courtier with a number of other benefices.
“So,” he said, after congratulating the young man on his sermon which had not been about vestments nor the Four Last Things, but simply about the real difficulty with loving our neighbour, which is that our neighbour is normally not very lovable. “Where are the Deutschers? Are they Papists, recusants?”
“No sir, not at all Papist…in fact, no, not Papists at all. They have their own assembly on the island and my Lord Burghley gave them permission for it to be in their own language, so long as it wasn’t Papistical, which it isn’t. It’s very simple, in fact, and on Sundays the men often meet in Crossthwaite church which is their official parish, so they don’t have to row, which would be servile work on the Sabbath. They have readings from Scripture, prayers, sometimes a very simple Eucharist.”
“Ah. Well, I’m pleased to hear it.”
“They don’t allow the bakehouse or the brewhouse to work on Sundays either, sir. They’re very strict about it and there’s no nonsense about vestments, just a simple surplice without lace and…”
Carey was already bored, but he was mollified. The Deutschers being Puritans was less worrying than their being Papists or indeed Anabaptists. “Do you know what the best way of gaining permission to visit the island might be?”
he asked. “I’d particularly love to see the brewhouse—the beer in this town is wonderful.”
The curate brightened up a little and said mournfully that it might be possible but that his honour would have to gain permission from Frau Radagunda Hochstetter. Carey sighed at this and went to join Red Sandy and Bangtail and pretended he hadn’t seen them quickly hide their dice.
They headed for dinner at the inn and ate more stewed salt beef with neeps, which was universal winter fare, especially in a small town with only two butchers in it.
Halfway through, and deep in an argument about how the animals might have been stowed on Noah’s ark and how in fact you stopped the lions from eating the goats, the sheep, the deer and so on, he realised that Tovey wasn’t there and hadn’t been for a while.
After Leamus said that Tovey had last been seen heading in the direction of the smithy, he went that way, paid his respects to the servants, and went in to find Tovey searching through a chest in the corner of the smithy, filled with odd bits of metal.
“What are you looking for?”
“Notebooks,” said Tovey, sitting back on his heels and rubbing his hair the wrong way so it stood on end. His scholar’s gown with its pathetic bits of rabbit was all dusty. “Some smiths use them, especially smiths that like making new things. I feel sure that Mr Carleton could read.”
Carey helped him search but none of the various boxes or chests in the smithy had any such things.
They went to the house to ask the elderly woman servant if Mrs Carleton had any notebooks of her husband and found she was expected back from Divine service on the island, and shortly after saw her walking up the road that led from the lake with her young son, Josef. The apprentices seemed to have gone to the church at Crossthwaite.
Carey bowed, she curtseyed, and he asked, “Ma’am, did your husband keep any notebooks?”
Pain crossed her face and she said nothing for a while. Young Josef pulled at her skirt and said something urgent in Deutsch. “Yes, he did,” she said slowly.
“I would greatly appreciate it if I could inspect the notebooks—they might contain clues to his murderer.”
“His notebooks? They are about smithying and making strange things of metal.”
“Nonetheless.”
More Deutsch from the boy and she shrugged. “Why not? I cannot understand them.”
“I do,” said Josef to Carey with a brilliant smile. “I have been looking at them, they make me feel closer to Vater, even though if he was alive he would never let me have them.”
“Why not?”
“They are to do with the mysteries of smithing, the different colours of the fires, the different prayers you say. It is for the master smith to have them and he is dead, so I have them. I will be the master here one day.”
The boy made a small bow. “If you will permit, I can show you the notebooks that are not about the mysteries but about things he made. He kept them in his study—it was really the parlour but he liked to eat in the kitchen with the apprentices, not separately as they do in so many smithies, and he needed a place to think, he used to say, and he did that in the parlour. I will show you his last notebook first.”
It was a little leatherbound notebook, half full. Josef handled it gently and delicately, as if it could feel. “This notebook…” he began, “this notebook…” He tried again. “I have found that this notebook has had two pages torn out of it, the last two pages. My father would never have done that! Never! He always said that your mistakes taught you as much if not more than your successes, that an idea that didn’t work one time in one machine might work wonderfully another time and in a different machine. My father never never tore a page out of his notebooks…” Josef’s chest was heaving and he was fighting not to cry.
“Can I see?” said Carey, holding his hand out for the notebook. Reluctantly, Josef handed it over. Carey flipped to the end and found diagrams for some kind of fantastical machine which involved water and coalfire and a boiler to drive something that looked like a London waterpump. And two pages had indeed been torn out. Carey looked at it for a moment and then lifted the notebook up to the light and squinted sideways across the blank page. “Hm,” he said, “do you happen to have any blacklead around the place, plumbago some people call it? Look, I have some for writing in my own notebook.”
“Ah,” said Josef, “waad. Yes, we use it for polishing, there’s a waad mine near here at Seathwaite.”
“There is? You must show it to me.”
“My father used to get annoyed with how the waad dirtied his fingers and he was trying to come up with a way to protect the fingers and yet have the waad useable.”
“I think all Christendom would be grateful for something like that. Could you fetch me some, the very softest? And a pestle and mortar.”
A few minutes later Josef came trotting back with a small lump of blacklead and a pestle and mortar he had clearly got from the kitchen because it smelled faintly of pepper. Carey dropped a bit of the blacklead into the bowl and then crushed it into a fine powder. Then he took a pinch of the fine dust and blew it over the blank page following the two torn out. And there, ghostly in the sunlight, appeared lines and confused writing. Clear among them was a sketch of a half-sphere, and by the side some just readable Latin.
Silently Carey showed the words to Tovey who nodded and said, “Plumbum. Contra vitriol. Lead against vitriol.”
Carey sketched what was there into his own notebook. Josef watched owlishly.
“What are the round things?”
“The two halves of a sphere made of lead. Real lead, the metal, not blacklead. It’s important for reasons I can’t tell you.”
“Will it help to solve the death of Vater?”
“Yes. It means that the person who killed your father also probably had a hand in the…the outrage at the King’s court.”
“Do you know who he was? Or is?”
“I’m not sure. Do you know a man called Joachim Hochstetter?”
Josef made a face. “I remember him from a long time ago when I was littler; he used to help my Vater make tools and machine-parts for the mines. I didn’t like him, he frightened me.”
“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. Well, if you see him again, I want you to tell me immediately.”
“Do you think he killed Vater?”
“I’m not sure. But possibly.”
The boy seemed to want to add something else but stopped and just nodded. Carey gave him back his father’s notebook. “Thank you, Mister Josef,” he said formally. “Keep the notebooks safe.”
The boy nodded again and then ran off into the house because there were tears in his eyes.
“We have to talk to Allerdyce now,” said Carey and so they walked to the Mayor’s house where they found him at dinner eating salt pork, neeps, bread, and a chicken blankmanger with his wife and family in his parlour. Allerdyce waved his arm expansively and invited them to join him which after a bit of polite prevarication, they did.
The Mayor had a brown-haired wife and two polite children who budged up for Carey and Tovey without complaint. They discussed the sermon which Allerdyce had found funny since it was a well-known fact that the curate was embroiled in a dispute with a neighbour over some boundary markers which both sides were alleging had been moved by the other, although in Allerdyce’s opinion, the River Greta had changed her course slightly and that probably caused the confusion. Carey wondered if the river could be called as a third party to the dispute and they laughed at the idea of a river appearing in court.
When asked his views on the matter, Tovey, who had been modestly silent until now, said that in his opinion the only person who could represent the river in court was the Queen, because in her Person, she represented all of the land of England, and that they should subpoena Her Gracious Majesty immediately. Everybody laughed at that, especially Carey who co
uld imagine the likely royal reaction and gave a deadly rendition of the letter that would be received from the Queen in response to such a summons.
When the laughter had died down, Allerdyce’s wife and children excused themselves and left, and then Carey could tell him what he had found sketched in the smith’s notebooks.
“This half globe sketch by itself connects Carleton with whoever made the attempt upon His Majesty, although I think it’s more than probable that Hepburn didn’t explain what the lead half-spheres were really for and came up with some colourable tale. That man was clearly Jonathan Hepburn and we can make the connection between him and Joachim Hochstetter.”
“How d’ye think it all happened?”
“I’m fairly satisfied that Carleton, no doubt unknowing, made the half-spheres of lead and the alchemical alembics to produce the vitriol. Hepburn took them to Edinburgh before Christmas. He came back in a hurry after New Year’s Day, perhaps because he knew his attempt had failed, perhaps simply to wait here until the King’s death had happened. At any rate somebody rides into town very early on a snowy morning two or three days after New Year, wearing a white cloak and the Apollo mask from the masquing chests, as seen by Betty. It was done deliberately so anyone who saw him would sound utterly mad—and it worked. Hepburn goes straight to visit his friend the smith, the man who had taught him to be an engineer, knocks him on the head and then…er…spits him on a red hot sword blank and leaves him so nobody can connect him with the attempt on the King. I don’t think he expected the sword blank to be discovered, probably because he has never laid a body out.”
Mr Allerdyce had his lips well-compressed.
“I’m sure I don’t have to say that I’d rather this was kept confidential, Mr Allerdyce,” Carey said, because he wanted to make sure that the Mayor passed it on to the Hochstetters.
A Suspicion of Silver Page 22