A Suspicion of Silver

by P. F. Chisholm

  “As well as a little gold,” put in Carey, playing with his gold rings. The silversmith gave him a wary look and weighed the cake, finding there slightly more than a pound of mixed silver and lead…

  “and gold…”

  “…which would make about twenty shillings’ worth of silver, not calculating the lead…”

  “…or the gold…”

  “…which would amount to 6s 6d for each man, more or less, after the lead…”

  “What say you we agree on the twenty shillings English, and leave the silver and the spare 2d here?” put in Carey. There was silence. “Ay,” said the silversmith. “Ay, I could dae that, it’s fair enough.”

  Two minutes later they were in the street again with their shares, Leamus looking very happy and Bangtail quite thunderstruck. “Is it enough to buy land, sir?” he asked Carey. “Not round here where all the reivers are, but far south, doon in Keswick, or mebbe some ither town, away from the kobolds?”

  “You could maybe buy a field for about forty shillings.”

  “Right. Ah see, sir. Right. Or save the Queen’s life, like Sergeant Dodd?”

  “You could, though you would have to go south to find her.”

  “Ay,” Bangtail was stroking his scrubby beard and staring into the distance. “And then, once ye’ve bought it, it’s yourn.”

  “More or less. So long as the man you buy it from actually owns it, of course.”

  “Ay. And nae reivers.”

  “Almost certainly not. Though you’d have the usual problems with the weather and murrains and…”

  “Ay, everybody has those. So for a farm, I’d need about ten pound?”

  “That would be a good start.”

  “It’s no’ impossible, is it? Ah mean, it’s a lot of money, but if ye have the money and can find someone to buy from…It’s like buying a stottie cake.”

  “Or you could try what the Grahams are doing, which is squatting on somebody else’s lands and making as much money as they can out of it before they get turned off.”

  “Who’s going to turn them off?” scoffed Bangtail.

  “King James, when he becomes King of England.”

  “Oh.”

  “What my father would do, and probably already has, is buy up parcels of land on the Borders, here and there for very little money and just keep them rented out for the moment. Nobody wants land here because of the reivers, as you pointed out. But when the Scots King comes in, the reivers will be finished because there won’t be a Border anymore, and then the value of all my father’s little bits of land will go up.”

  Bangtail was staring at him in astonishment. “Jesus!” he breathed, “Jesus Almighty Christ! Do you think so?”

  “Yes. Provided King James can stay alive long enough. If he can’t, of course, there’ll probably be civil war and so all the land values will go to hell.”

  “Och.”

  Carey left him behind to think and hurried down English street to the castle because he wanted to get back to Keswick.

  They headed off to Keswick an hour later and in a hurry, with Carey, Bangtail, and Leamus all on sturdy surefooted Castle hobbies, with remounts, and Leamus with his boots and hose on for a change. So they made the sixty-mile journey in one long tiring day of mainly cantering, saving time by not getting lost, changing mounts every ten miles or so. They followed the dull red fires of Keswick and the smell of acrid yellow smoke to come past the smelting houses late at night, as the snowflakes started falling again.

  Tovey was happy to see Carey when he came into the inn by the back door. He was tired and damnably hungry and found that Mr Allerdyce wanted a word with him as soon as he felt well enough. He sent Tovey out to fetch the ordinary up on a tray and sat cross-legged on his bed in his shirt, wolfing down salt pork stew and wonderful fried sippets. After a while Mr Allerdyce came in, apologised for the lateness of the hour, commiserated with him for the fever, remarked on how ruddy with it he looked, and hoped he was well-recovered.

  “I’ll be right as rain by tomorrow,” said Carey. “Once the fever’s gone I always am.”

  “Ay,” said the Mayor, “it’s just I’m worried about Mrs Carleton and her son…”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Naebody’s seen them, either of them, since she went off to the island on Sunday, the day you told her that ye thought Joachim Hochstetter may have killed her husband.”

  Suddenly Carey’s appetite disappeared and he put the bowl down.

  “Nobody’s seen them for nearly a week?”

  Allerdyce shook his head.

  “What does Frau Radagunda say?”

  “She says she hasn’t seen them either and assumes that Mrs Carleton simply ran away.”

  “Ridiculous! Why would she leave the smithy? It’s a going concern and all she has to do is marry one of the journeymen to make it official.”

  “Ah wis wondering, did you take her to Carlisle?”

  “No, of course not, I was sick of an ague. The last time I saw her was with you, in fact. Have you searched the lake?”

  “The what?”

  “Have you checked the lake for a dead body or two?” Carey asked, “That’s what I’d do.”

  “Ye mean suicide?”

  “No, Mr Allerdyce, I mean murder. What if Mrs Carleton went and accused Hepburn of killing her husband and he decided to shut her up the quickest way?”

  “Good God! But…”

  The trouble with country bumpkins was that they were slow.

  “I’ve told you that Hochstetter or Hepburn likes killing.”

  Allerdyce clenched his jaw. “We’ll search after sun up tomorrow,” he said, “but I’m sure she’s just…gone somewhere for a few days.”

  After the Mayor had taken his leave, looking troubled, Carey polished off the stew absentmindedly, moved the tray to a chest, rolled into his bed and pulled the blankets over his shoulder. Five minutes later he was trumpeting through the night.

  Tovey returned, found the tray, sighed at the noises coming from Carey and, after taking the tray back down to the kitchen, sat over his wonderful book again which he had finally managed to wrest back from Mr Anricks. Mr Anricks was an amazing man, despite not looking very impressive. He had read everything, even Maimonides, and was a merchant with the strange hobby of tooth-drawing. He was staying at the Oak Inn as well, in one of the expensive bedrooms, like Sir Robert and was surrounded by piles of books which he was reading at a ferocious rate. Every day he had a lesson in Deutsch from Mr Ullock, who had a father who was a Deutscher. Sometimes he would walk through the town and had allowed Tovey to come too and had even begun to teach Tovey Portuguese. John Tovey already had quite a bad case of hero-worship of Sir Robert, and now he had a second hero because he had dared to ask Mr Anricks about the scars on his palms and after a moment, Mr Anricks had told him about his time in the galleys—no, it was a galleas—during the Armada. And Mr Anricks always called him Mr Tovey.

  Still Mr Anricks was apt to keep books, and Tovey was very glad he had finally got the De Re Metallica back. He spent a long time admiring the woodcuts showing all the magical machinery that kept the mine working, until the candle guttered and went out. When he lay down to sleep he was still wondering why, for instance, were there three enormous bellows in a row, pointing into the mine, being moved by men treading on planks? Why did the air go bad if you didn’t force new air into the mine?

  In the morning, Carey was up and dressed in his respectable olive brocade, tall hat, and furlined cloak, before the sun had done more than dirty the sky with blood. First he asked the inn’s landlord where the town stews were and whether it was the men’s day or the women’s day, and after finding that today was the men’s day, decided not to use the stews for the miners in the north of town, but the smaller, more respectable ones in the south. He found Anricks in the inn parlour, reading a
book of Chancellor Melville’s sermons in Scots and chuckling occasionally which surprised Carey. Melville, the Chancellor of St Andrews University and a stern Calvinist, was notoriously the most boring preacher in Scotland, a hotly contested honour.

  “Oh, I enjoy the way the Chancellor tortures logic and yet never hears its cries of pain,” said Anricks primly. “Alas, the most interesting of Mrs Burn’s books are in Deutsch and I can’t make head or tail of them yet. I have nearly recovered from my journey and so I shall be leaving soon. But not until I’ve read all Mrs Burn’s books and found her a good dry place to keep them until she has a household of her own again. And perhaps I may stay longer still to learn Deutsch without having to go to Allemayne.”

  Carey took Tovey to attend him who, unlike Dodd, had visited the stews at Oxford while he was a poor student there and missed them when he came back to his little village where the duckpond was the best washing place. Although Tovey had gone very pink at the ears when he confessed to visiting the Oxford stews.

  The Keswick stews seemed respectable and there was a changing room with shelves for clothes and an old man with one leg looking after the place. Unlike the Oxford stews, these were not on the Turkish model but the more usual English system. In the bath-room there were five large wooden bucks, with stools to sit on in the water, which had a plug in the bottom to let the dirty water out, and were refreshed with buckets of boiling water as and when they were needed. The price was a very reasonable 2d. Carey had an extra bucket of boiling water poured into his buck which was just what he needed to unkink his muscles and bones. He stretched out and got Tovey to scrub his back and in his turn scrubbed Tovey’s pitifully skinny spotty back. There were very few other people there so early in the morning, which was why he had come at that hour. He had almost dozed off when somebody new arrived and got into the wooden buck next to him and had boiling water poured into it.

  “Grüss Gott,” said Mark Steinberger, soaping his legs carefully.

  “Er…good morning,”

  “You are better of your ague, Herr Ritter?”

  “Yes, much better, Herr Schmelzmeister!” said Carey brightly, wondering if he could get some mulled ale brought to him. In London it would be complimentary, but…”Thank you for your concern. Tell me, can I get a drink here?”

  Steinberger nodded, beckoned one of the stews servants, and mulled ale—clearly from the brewery on the island—arrived a little later. The girl who would have accompanied the ale in London to ask hintingly if he needed anything else at all and possibly recite her prices for him, was unaccountably missing. He found bathing much more relaxing without anxious tarts trying to seduce him. On the other hand, Steinberger was looking at him now with just as anxious an expression on his face as any whore.

  “Do you…ah…know Frau Burn?” asked Steinberger heavily.

  “Not in the biblical sense,” said Carey quickly. “I met her briefly while she was enceinte. She is a friend of my cousin, Lady Elizabeth Widdrington. A little while ago, I was also able to hang the murderers of her husband, which gave me great satisfaction.”

  Steinberger relaxed a little. “She iss moved into our house, she iss my sister-in-law and my vife, Annamaria, has insisted.”

  Carey had not in fact noticed the lack of caterwauling at the inn and had in fact forgotten all about the baby. “Oh good,” he said enthusiastically, “that is so much more suitable than the Oak, don’t you think?”

  “I sink it is,” said Steinberger heavily, “though off course the vet nurse is arguing with Annamaria about the best vay to swaddle the baby and my sister-in-law iss sitting and reading books which my wife does nott approve of and…vell, it’s impossible for her to go anyvere else, but efen so, I vish…” He looked around with a harassed expression.

  “Ah,” said Carey sympathetically, rinsing his shoulders with a bucket of lukewarm water, “best leave them to it, don’t you think?”

  “Ja,” said Steinberger after a pause, getting out of the buck and towelling himself down with one of the linen cloths. Carey got out as well and jogged Tovey out of his doze.

  “I wonder,” said Carey, wrapping his own towel round his middle and smiling at Steinberger, “have you seen Mrs Carleton? Mr Allerdyce told me last night that she went missing while I was…sick.”

  “I know she iss missing,” said Steinberger. “I’m sure she is well.”

  “Where do you think she might have gone?”

  Steinberger shrugged, a very different gesture from the French.

  “I’m sure she vill come back.”

  “I’m surprised at you,” said Carey, choosing his words carefully. “She’s one of your own, not just another Keswicker. Why don’t you care about her?”

  Steinberger’s jaw set and he turned and left the bathing room in silence. Carey stared after him and then went into the changing room himself, followed by Tovey who had his towel round his shoulders, showing scrawny legs under it like a beetle.

  They went back into town to get breakfast at the Oak and for Carey to change into his arming doublet which didn’t matter so much if it got wet. There Carey found Red Sandy and gave him the third share of the proceeds from the cake of silver. “It’s because you were here, backing up Tovey, instead of following the packtrain,” Carey explained and Red Sandy looked stunned and pleased about it. That was worth doing, and what did he need a 6s 6d share of the stolen cake of silver for? Carey had much larger game than that in his sights.

  Then they went to the lakeside to find Allerdyce shouting at some sulky-looking workmen who were poking around the boatlanding with boat hooks in an ineffectual way.

  Carey sighed and went up to Allerdyce. “Tell me, Mr Mayor,” he said, “if Hepburn killed Mrs Carleton and Josef, do you think he wants the corpses found?”

  Allerdyce’s face went from puzzled to embarrassed and he flushed.

  “Mebbe he buried her?”

  “In this weather? No. Why not start this side of the boat landing and work your way round, or perhaps have two boats. Better yet, do you have a sleuthdog?”

  Allerdyce didn’t have a sleuthdog as such, but he did have a couple of hunting dogs he used for wildfowling in the rushes, not that he got many these days, since the kobolds had scared the fish away.

  Once the dogs had been fetched and let off the leash they instantly splashed into the icy rushes where they set up some moorhen and the heron. They dove into some more rushes and came out chewing something noisome. They bounced around setting up wildfowl and one attacked an old oar that was floating in the rushes and chewed it until it broke.

  Allerdyce wanted to give up then, but Carey was watching intently as the dogs barked and snuffled their way around the reeds, splashing busily in and out and retrieving the sticks Allerdyce started throwing for them. There was one area of dense thicket which they avoided and so he went back to the boat-landing and took a boat, got one of Allerdyce’s men to row him into the middle of the patch of reeds that the dogs didn’t like. He picked up a boathook, stood and stirred around in the water and eventually the hook snagged on something soft. With infinite care, he brought it up to the surface. At least it was not a boy’s hand, although smaller than a man’s hand.

  “Mr Allerdyce,” he called sadly and once the Mayor got to him, he lifted the hand which was still attached and not rotted at all despite the nearly week of time it had probably been there. Mr Allerdyce stared at it as if he had no idea what it was and then he suddenly bent over the side of the boat and puked up his breakfast.

  The workmen were called and many boathooks released Mrs Carleton from the pile of rocks holding her down. There was a woman, Carey thought was Frau Radagunda, watching impassively from the island. Mrs Carleton had been strangled and there was a slit in her stomach as well, perhaps to let the gases out. Not that that was a problem with the hard frost. Her face above her ruined throat was white, her cap still on and tendrils of blonde h
air round her face like a delicate kind of waterweed.

  Mr Allerdyce himself helped the workmen haul the sodden body up into the boat and there were tears in his eyes. As they rowed to the boatlanding, Carey said, “We’ll have to go back and search for her son too.”

  “Oh, he wouldn’t…”

  “Why not, Mr Allerdyce? He certainly wouldn’t want to leave a witness.”

  Mr Allerdyce was nearly as pale as Mrs Carleton when they handed her body up to the makeshift litter of oars to take her into town, to the church. Then Allerdyce turned the boat around and they searched for two more hours and found no trace of her son. By that time the waterdogs had gone to sleep and Carey had been joined by Bangtail and Red Sandy, looking happy.

  “D’ye think the boy is still alive?” asked Mr Allerdyce finally.

  “I’m afraid not, Mr Allerdyce.”

  The Mayor looked at the floor of the boat, his lips tight. “Why doesn’t…Joachim Hochstetter just leave Keswick?”

  Carey felt sorry for the Mayor—this was a far worse problem than the murder of Stoltz. “Why should he?” he answered. “This is his home. You wouldn’t have found the body without my help.”

  “Well, damn it, where is he?”

  Carey gestured at the island where the bald boatman was sitting watching them, his pipe lit. “There,” he said, “at his mother’s house probably.”

  “We’ll have the inquest tomorrow,” said Allerdyce, scowling, “or no, we can’t, it’s Sunday tomorrow. I’ll swear you out a warrant now to search for the killer of Mrs Carleton and Mr Carleton too. Bloody Deutschers.”

  “Can you give me any men?”

  “I can. Will five do?”

  “I want to get on that island before it gets dark, any chance of that?”

  “Ay.”

  And astonishingly, it was so. The piece of officially watermarked paper was in Carey’s hand within the hour and he had his mixed bag of Borderers and Keswickers on three boats that belonged to the town. They went across as the sun was westering, which was a pity but couldn’t be helped so far north.