A Suspicion of Silver

by P. F. Chisholm

  It was the Devil. He knew it was because it was a man’s face but it had horns. The face didn’t look like the woodcuts of the Devil in prayerbooks, but somehow noble. He had stood and stared, his mind unable to take it in, unable to understand.

  Was the cave an entrance to Hell? He didn’t think it was because it wasn’t hot; in fact it was quite cold. With his lantern and pickaxe he had climbed up to where the Devil was and found there was a rubble of rocks hiding the Devil’s body. Tentatively he pulled out a few rocks and found part of a painted shoulder.

  He climbed back down and stared in the flickering light of the lanterns until one of the candles guttered and went out. And then he had carefully picked his way out over the stones, and found steps carved, going a different way down to join a small stream that came out under an overhanging rock a little below where the opening to the bat cave was. It was a gift to him and much easier than crawling up through the chimney.

  It was as if the Devil had shown him a way to come back.

  And so he did come back, and the Devil’s Cave became his sanctuary, his refuge from the nonsense of his mother, the strangeness of other people, even before he found the Devil’s Gift. He had gone to the local school for a while to learn to read English as well as Deutsch; he already knew how to calculate with Arab figures. Then he had been apprenticed to his father to learn the making and care of machinery, to be an engineer. He had liked that, found it fascinating the way the force generated by water power or animal power could be directed and aimed to move waterwheels and stampers and bellows. It was so much easier and more predictable than people, there were rules of thumb you could use, ways of calculating how many cogs you needed. It was so satisfying. More and more he felt alone among his large noisy family, alone among the miners. People were a mystery to him: why did they sometimes weep for no reason, why did they sometimes get angry for no reason, why did people sometimes embrace him? When his father died in 1581, taken after a short illness that made his breath rasp and his face swell, the family had gone into mourning. His mother had been impossible, weeping and wailing and calling “Daniel, Daniel!” as if his father could answer back. He couldn’t. He had been alive and now he was dead. It was a pity because there was so much more Joachim could have learned from him, but what could you do about it? Why did weeping help?

  Long before that, he had found that the enormous cave led back through interconnecting tunnels and caves to a place right next to one of the main mine tunnels of Goldscope mine. Nearby he had found what he thought of as the Devil’s Gift. Using it, he had recruited a miner who drank a lot, to help him break through and then when the job was done, he had got the man drunk in the little alehouse. On the way back to the bunkhouse in the dark, Joachim had tripped him and hit his head hard with a pickaxe so he had snored for two days in his bed with his anxious wife and sons and daughters around him, and finally died.

  That was when Joachim had realised that if there was a God, He really was not interested. Nothing happened. Joachim had waited with bated breath, his heart beating hard, for the lightning to strike, the voice to come from Heaven. He had made a false wall to hide the opening to his cave and he had waited for that to be discovered as well. And it wasn’t discovered. It was not like the boy at Whitehall which had been self-defence, this was a murder pure and simple and he had done it to keep the Devil’s Cave and more importantly, the Devil’s Gift, a secret, nothing more. Day after day passed; the miner, whatever his name was, had been buried. Nothing had happened.

  He had gone back to the cave and pulled some more rocks away from the Devil’s body and stared at the painting. It was as if the Devil was smiling at him, though that was the lantern light, the painting hadn’t moved, of course. If, as he had always suspected, God really wasn’t interested in what he did, he could do what he liked. So long as people or his family didn’t realise what he was doing, why he was doing it, he could do whatever he liked. It didn’t matter that he didn’t believe adult baptism was better than infant baptism, that in fact, he couldn’t care less about Anabaptism, that he found the Bible boring and the character of Jesus both mad and weak. He could do whatever was more convenient, was best for him. It was a moment of pure liberation.

  He had laughed with relief and gone back to the island and agreed to be baptised with his face contorted into an expression so holy, he felt sure it would be spotted as fake. Instead his mother had embraced him with tears in her eyes. Stupid bitch. And his father, still alive then, had shaken his hand. Why?

  And he had treated God fairly. If anything had happened during his baptism, then he would have reconsidered. It was an experimentum. He went seriously through the whole business, firmly resisting the urge to laugh, wearing a white shirt, getting ducked by Pastor Waltz in the Greta which was bloody freezing, saying all the prayers and the whole time thinking, here I am, God. Do your worst.

  Nothing happened. Nothing ever happened afterwards either. Here he was, he had lost count of the people he had killed or had had killed by the useful Hughie Tyndale, and he was better than ever. He had learned how to manipulate people as well, so they did what he wanted. Once he had found out what had happened at Court, he would make the next play in the long game that would make him, not just an engineer, but a power in the land, perhaps even the King. At worst the Spanish King would make him richer even than the Devil’s Gift had done.

  He skirted round the smelthouses carefully, not wanting to be seen by any of the workmen. Most of the older men knew him by sight, which was awkward, though some of them liked it that he wore their kind of clothes when he was in Keswick, and not the usual furs and brocades of his family. They seemed to think he was sympathizing with them, somehow on their side. He had encouraged that, although he had not realised why at the time. Now he knew it was to make it easier to recruit them as soldiers. Anyway he hoped that the years he had spent in the Spanish Netherlands and in Spain and Scotland had changed him enough.

  He was heading to a little hamlet just beyond the smelthouses, where some of the workers lived. It had an alehouse and he hoped Long Tom would be waiting there for him. The other likely place was the Oak Inn, right in the centre of Keswick, but that was expensive and far too public.

  He walked into the alehouse which had a small ceramic stove that turned a tiny cottage into a haven of warmth from the cold. There was an old man dozing in the corner and the woman who owned it, Frau Magda, was standing tapping herself some beer. She knew him and there was no point pretending he didn’t know her. He knew her very well indeed, in the Biblical sense, and she had been his second woman.

  “Grüss Gott, Frau Magda,” he said to her in Deutsch. “I’m looking for a man with a message for me? Have you seen him?”

  She clasped her heart and smiled at him. “Jesu, Mr Joachim, you gave me a turn, I didn’t know you were here.”

  He smiled back, although he had tired of her plump tits and obedience when he was still in his teens. “Well, I am, just staying for a short while. Have you seen my messenger?”

  She frowned. “A man came in yesterday, said he was a merchant’s servant, wanting to buy copper.”

  Joachim nodded brightly. That’s what Long Tom had been told to say, at least partly to have some fun at Steinberger’s expense who was always worrying about the vast quantities of useless copper they produced as a byproduct.

  “Oh, he’s still upstairs,” she said. “He’ll be down soon…”

  Joachim went to the familiar staircase beside the stove, leading to the two upper rooms under the thatch, went upstairs and knocked on the door, put his head round and saw Long Tom sitting on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands.

  “Good morning, Long Tom,” said Joachim and for the first time felt a little tickle of discomfort, a tiny thrill of fear that the Devil had played him false. Because there was no reason why Long Tom should be in despair, no reason at all.

  “Och, sir,” wailed Long Tom. “O
ch, it’s terrible, that’s wha’ it is, it’s…”

  “What’s wrong, Long Tom, was it hard to get away…?”

  “Ay, oh ay, it was, it was, the King’s men wis everywhere, and poor Sir David’s under arrest and like tae be hanged and…”

  Well you’d expect some disruption to a court with the King dead or gravely ill, but…why was Sir David…? Joachim sat down on the bed next to the man and shook him, not very gently.

  “What happened?”

  “Ay, well there wis summat went wrong wi’ the Queen’s Masque but nae damage done tae the King then, jist his throne and a robe burnt, but New Year’s morning wis a disaster, so it was…”

  Joachim suddenly felt cold. It was ice radiating from his core, and it made him colder than the Baltic, colder than a winter’s night in the Netherlands. “Tell me what happened?” he asked very calmly, wanting to shout and rage but the ice always in his heart helped him.

  It was a long and complex tale, made worse by the fact that Long Tom was terrified of the fact that the nobleman he had helpfully bought belladonna for had turned out to be the King and that his master and distant cousin Sir David was clearly guilty of high treason and would, at the very least, hang. He had no interest at all in whatever might have gone wrong with Joachim’s elaborate plan for the masque.

  At last Joachim leaned back and looked at the thatch where the daylight came in under the eaves. There was enough light that they didn’t need a candle, snow was reflecting and magnifying it. Long Tom had got away from the Court, despite the feeble attempts at security, by eavesdropping on the doings in the King’s Great Bedchamber and immediately it started to go wrong, walking out carrying a hawk on his fist. That had been his excuse to be there at all. He had taken the hawk to the mews and left it there on a perch, gone to the noblemen’s stables next door and taken two horses, which he told the head groom were for his grace the Earl of Huntly who had promised him a job if all went well. He had ridden out of Holyrood house by ten o’clock and waited for news at a coaching inn in Edinburgh, by which time there had been a hue and cry for any men of the name of Graham as well as a day of fasting and abstinence to celebrate the King’s deliverance from the toils of the unGodly. That had caused enough confusion, considering how many collateral branches of the Graham clan there were, for him to be unremarked as the Liddle he claimed to be until the next day. And on that day he had headed for Newcastle and then Carlisle and finally Keswick, hoping to lie low in England until the whole thing had blown over.

  All in all, Long Tom had handled himself well and got away when he could easily have been scooped up as one of Sir David’s relatives. There was after all much less confusion at Court than there would have been if all had gone well.

  If all had gone well. Why hadn’t it worked? Why now?

  He sat there staring into space for so long that Long Tom started to recover from his fear and was putting his doublet and hose on, hopping around in his stockinged feet and tying his garters and wondering aloud whether the Netherlands would be far enough away.

  “Well, Tom,” said Joachim slowly, “I think you’re right. We need to think of leaving England as well as Scotland.” He had no intention of leaving Keswick yet, but Long Tom certainly needed to leave the country one way or another because he knew far too much about Joachim. In fact the Netherlands were not far enough.

  “I’ll help you,” he added, “of course. There’s a small port near here called Workington and there are regular ships from Ireland and Scotland and Bristol, mainly coastal traders. I’d say you should take the first ship that will let you on board…”

  “I’ll need money, sir,” said Long Tom. “Ah spent all ye gave me getting awa’ from the King’s men and to stay here a couple of days.”

  “Of course, of course,” said Joachim with one of his easy smiles that let people trust him and occasionally got women into bed. “I’m just thinking aloud. With the snow at the moment and more on the way, I think it would be dangerous to try and get to Workington today. The hills are treacherous, local people call them man-eaters.”

  Long Tom shuddered.

  Joachim got up and nodded his head. “Thank you for bringing me this news,” he said, “I won’t forget that you took the trouble to do that when you might have gone to Leith…”

  “Nay, sir, the day after, that bastard Englishman was searching the port, that’s why I went back into Edinburgh.”

  “Ah. Which particular bastard Englishman..?”

  “Ye ken, the one the King likes, the one that wis at the Disputation with his friend the philosopher and then he was the man Sir David Graham invited to give the King his first wine cup of the day…” Which Sir David had done at Joachim’s suggestion, in fact, so that the nosy Englishman could be blamed for the death of the King.

  “Sir Robert Carey?”

  “Ay sir, that’s his name a’right. I think he knew the taste of the poison despite all the sugar and spices.”

  Joachim sighed heavily. Inside he was feeling utterly bewildered. Outside he kept his face smooth and pleasant. What was going on? Was it that he should have killed the Englishman when he had the chance, while Carey had no suspicion of what would happpen?

  Maybe. Maybe so. Well, he wouldn’t be so tentative next time. Or ever again. He had ended the life of the man who had been his best friend in Keswick, almost like a father to him after Daniel died. It was right to do it, despite the strange feeling of heaviness he had carried just under his breastbone afterwards. He didn’t know what you called the feeling, which was odd because usually he felt nothing at all when he killed. He had used a new and complicated method to see if it would work, a way of killing someone without showing that he had been killed, and more reliable than poison. It was logical to kill him because he knew so much about Joachim’s equipment. And he should have killed Carey as well.

  “Let’s hope he doesna come here…”

  Joachim said nothing to that either because he was rerunning the casual conversation with Carey that he had had on Christmas Day, the conversation in which he had let out where he came from and what his real name was, the conversation in which he had denied that he knew Hans Schmidt, the man who had claimed to be an expert gunfounder, in which he had also denied all knowledge of his sister. He had been helping with the fireworks, not that the Han artificers really needed any help, and he had decided not to kill Carey after all, once he had convinced him that the Earl of Huntly was the man to watch. Killing him then would have been so easy to do, because Carey had been behind the scenes at the firework display, checking fuses and tubes to be sure none of them were pointing at the King. One charge, one hidden fuse and Carey would no longer have been a problem.

  But he hadn’t done it because he thought he had the man fooled. He had thought that with two elaborate plots to kill the King, nothing could go wrong. He had given Carey for free all the information Carey could have wanted to find him, and he had done it because…

  Because he had thought he was safe. Dear stupid Jesus, how could he have been so…so mistaken? How could he have let so much out? Years of caution blown away in an afternoon, talking. Had he been mad? Insane? He started to sweat, thinking about the ramifications. Carey knew his right name was Hochstetter and where he came from. It was only a matter of time before he arrived in Keswick.

  Long Tom was still talking, hammering out the question of whether to go to Dublin or Bristol. He didn’t know it was irrelevant; Joachim knew he couldn’t afford to make another mistake like Carey. Unlike most men, he could learn from his mistakes, just as he had from the one he had made with Steinberger’s niece.

  He left the alehouse just before noon and as he was walking back to town, he saw a crowd around the Keswick marketplace, a boy with a drum and the broad new Mayor standing with his thumbs in his belt, making a speech. He instantly knew what that was about and turned casually down a lane that skirted the town to the south, cut
through Castlehead wood and Cockshot wood until he came to the Derwentwater landing stage and took the boat back to the island, tied up and went into his mother’s house and changed his clothes. He hoped the hue and cry wouldn’t find Long Tom, that would be inconvenient. At least he was safe. He knew the Keswickers would stop at the landing stage on the Keswick side so the yokels wouldn’t find him. Joachim smiled and went down to dinner.

  When Janet came to bed that night she was late. Widow Ridley was already tucked up and the three dairymaids snoring in the other bed. She unpinned her cap slowly, loosened her laces and took her kirtle off over her shoulders. Her shift was linen of her own spinning and weaving and was a credit to her, even without the embroidery of the cuffs in black silk, very expensive and elegant. Then she unplaited her plait of wild red hair and found a wooden comb in her petticoat pocket as she untied the back and took that off. She started combing her hair until it lay shining, melted copper, on her shoulders.

  “Ye could marry again,” said Widow Ridley judiciously, from her pillow. “Ye’re not young but ye’re a good looking woman, so you are.”

  Janet gave her a piercing look. “It’s a little soon tae be thinking o’ that,” she said very staidly.

  She lay down next to Widow Ridley who outed her candle. She lay on her back, and stared into the darkness listening to the soft snores and deep breathing that was so reassuring, that helped her to sleep. But she didn’t sleep.

  In the depth of the night she got up and put her shawl over her shoulders, lit the candle again from the watchlight and left the room with its snoring cargo of dairymaids and Mrs Ridley.

  She knew where his room was and as far as she knew only his clerk would be sleeping there, the toothdrawer having left the Court and Carey’s valet dead. Of course, he might have locked the door.

  He had. She tapped softly on it, her breath coming short and her heart quailing in her breast at what she was about to do. But she knew fighting men. He’d wake to her soft sounds, if he was asleep at all and hadn’t been drinking and playing cards with the other courtiers.