“Wet? I should think so. It’s not as easy as you may think to put a corpse into water and then rocks on top. Why?”
Steinberger only shook his head. Carey waited, then went on.
“I have a letter already drafted in Carlisle which will be sent to London only if I do not return,” he said, thinking about the letter to his father he had left with Bessie. He wasn’t lying very much. “In it I recount what I have found out about the silver from Gottesgaab or Goldscope and how disgracefully you have cheated the Queen of her rights for years. It is addressed to Mr Secretary Cecil and I suspect he will find it very interesting.”
Steinberger’s expression still hadn’t changed, but a runnel of sweat ran down the side of his granite face.
“You are blackmailing us to give up Joachim for the silver.”
“Yes,” said Carey, “he’s a killer, an outlaw in Scotland and in England, and will cause you nothing but trouble. Give him to me and perhaps I will not send the letter.”
“Perhaps we could also arrange a small but regular payment to you as well, Herr Ritter,” said Steinberger quietly.
Carey contemplated the man for a moment. “As you do for my Lord Scrope and perhaps Sir Richard Lowther, the other Deputy Warden.” Carey thought that that would be very acceptable and quite appropriate but he was not going to deliberately make Steinberger’s life any easier.
Steinberger moved speedily sideways to the door. “I must speak to my brothers-in-law and Frau Hochstetter.”
“By all means, but I suggest you do not waste your time with the Frau.”
Steinberger grimaced and was gone.
They called a hue and cry throughout the town for Joachim Hochstetter. The town crier cried a description of him at the market cross, the parish church, and Crossthwaite church, a torch beside him and a boy beating a drum before him. The whole of the little town was turned over in the darkness and the gold of torches. Carey had taken the precaution of setting a guard on the boats at the island and with Allerdyce he went house to house, checking outhouses and sheds, and found nothing, no trace of the man. Maybe he had run out of town into the white hills where he would die…No, he had a plan.
So Carey went back to the smelthouses with Tovey and his book, identifying each furnace, each smelter and what they did, each channel and tank of water. He didn’t insist on the men opening the ovens that were too hot to touch, but he looked everywhere else. You had to admit, the Deutschers knew how to build and work machinery, there was something very satisfying in the way the furnaces were arranged and how the ore came in at one end and came out the other as metal cakes. The whole place smelled raw, of the charcoal and the metals themselves. In the house with the cupellation ovens, two of the ovens were working and closed, the other two in the next room were cold and empty. Sitting there on the edge of a cold furnace, patiently listening, you could imagine the whole world turned into a smelting house, no trees or grass, just chimneys and great noisy machines, smoke everywhere.
Carey realised he had dozed off into a nightmare, and sat up. The fires were banked and the room was empty as the hue and cry moved away.
Except it wasn’t empty. Carey had heard a sound like a dog at the mouth of one of the furnaces. It was hot from the fires burning next door and sweat was starting to go down his back. He sat and pretended to go to sleep again. He was in fact still tired from covering seventy miles on foot in a few days and returning on horseback. But he wanted to see what manner of dog slept in a furnace—and was it perhaps Joachim?
He heard breathing coming towards him, it sounded high-pitched for a man, but he gripped his dagger and prepared to jump the man, opened his eyelids.
A filthy boy stood there, staring at him with huge hollow eyes.
“Josef, the smith’s son,” he said quietly.
The boy nodded and then remembered his manners and bowed.
“I am very glad to see you’re not dead, Josef,” Carey said gravely. “Who killed your mother?”
“Mr Joachim,” said Josef, his fists clenched and his eyes shut. “He grabbed her and held her neck…her throat after she shouted at him for killing Father and I…didn’t…I couldn’t…”
Tears were carving channels in the soot on his face.
“I was afraid to try and stop him. I couldn’t, I was too afraid. I hid in the reeds. I let my mother be killed…” He put his head in his hands and wailed. “Ich bin ein schlechter Sohn!”
Carey put his hand on the lad’s shoulder, filthy though it was. “You couldn’t have stopped him,” he said thoughtfully. “You’re too small still. All you could have done was to get killed as well. But tell me where he is and I’ll kill him for you. I’m not too small, I’m as big as he is, in fact bigger, and I’m certain I’m a better swordsman because I’m the Deputy Warden of Carlisle and he’s only an engineer.”
Josef’s eyes snapped open. “You will? But he’s Frau Radagunda’s favourite.”
“How unfortunate. I am not only happy to kill him but I have His Majesty of Scotland’s direct order that he be destroyed for trying to assassinate the King at New Year. Where is he?”
“I don’t know for sure. I came here for I was afraid to go home, it’s empty, the journeymen aren’t there, nobody is there, Joachim might come and find me. Joachim is friends with everybody, nobody will believe he killed my mother.”
The boy’s voice trembled and he gulped several times and Carey saw that he was shivering. He took his cloak off and put it round Josef’s shoulders, sat the boy down next to him on the ledge of the cold furnace. “Why not go to your relatives, do you have no aunts and uncles?”
“Mark Steinberger is my uncle but he works for the Hochstetters, he will never believe me, never…Nobody will…”
“I believe you Josef, and I think Herr Steinberger would too,” Carey said, “but you have to tell me where you’ve been hiding. I was worried you were dead too.”
“Oh.” The boy looked surprised. “I’ve been sleeping here among the cakes of silver in the store house since…since my Mutter…I thought I was safe here, so long as I kept still when the men were working and sometimes I found food…But then…but then…”
He started crying into the fur of Carey’s cloak, which made Carey sigh. “Did you see Joachim again?”
A nod. “He came running in here, an hour ago, he came running in, gasping, all wet and shivering. Dieter and him had an argument in Deutsch, Dieter was telling him to leave, he didn’t want him here and he laughed at Dieter and said, “Silver?” He took off his wet clothes and Dieter fetched him a shirt and breeches and jerkin and a mining tunic with the padded hood and clogs. And he made Dieter give him a gun, a small one for wildfowling, and the powder and shot.”
That was smart. There were so many miners and they all looked so similar in their mining tunics. “So? Where did he go?”
“Dieter asked him and he said, “Gottesgaab, I have business there.”
“Do you think he was telling the truth?”
Josef looked down, shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“He is going to hide in Gottesgaab mine at least?”
Josef was shivering again. “If you follow him, you’ll die because he knows the mine and you don’t. But he’s frightened of you. When he was alone, I heard him cursing you.”
“And you’re sure it’s Joachim?”
“Yes. He shaved off his curly hair. But it’s him.”
Carey smiled his hunting smile. “Do you know the mine well enough to guide me?”
Josef swallowed. “I have been down with my father when we were working on the great waterwheel and other times as well. It’s very big, but I will try.”
Carey called Tovey from where he was looking at the machines and measuring them and they hurried into town from the smelthouses, picking up Red Sandy at the gate. At the Oak, they found Leamus, and Carey went up to his room and brough
t down his matched pair of wheel lock dags in their carrying cases. They took ponies at a ridiculous hire price from the landlord because they were in a hurry and it was late at night, cantered out of town westwards towards Newlands and Goldscope mine, with Josef in Carey’s cloak bumping up and down in the saddle and holding the pommel tight. Allerdyce was nowhere to be found and the men of the Keswick trained band had gone home at sunset, so that was all the men he could muster. Carey wished he had brought more in the first place, as usual.
The mine bell had long sounded and the valley was quiet apart from the chuckle of water going through the waterwheels which had been uncoupled from the stampers. The ore-roasting continued day and night and the smoke blew across the hills. There was one lantern lit on what looked like a bunkhouse and another at the mine entrance. It wasn’t locked, which made Carey frown.
Josef shook his head and walked through to the main entrance, a place where there were many tools all laid out neatly on shelves, mattocks and hammers and pickaxes. On a higher shelf was an array of lanterns and candles on little trays with a ribbon that went round the neck. There was one lantern missing. Josef took one of the candles with a short ribbon and lit it from the entrance lantern, so Carey also took one and lit it and put the ribbon over his head. Damn it, he didn’t have his helmet, only his tall hat. He took it off and put it on the shelf and Josef gave him a workman’s statute cap, stuffed with wool which he put on reluctantly.
The boy was already standing at the top of the stout ladder which plunged down into utter darkness.
“I don’t know that I should take you with me,” he said to the boy, though from the look of it, they would be the other way around, with the boy taking him.
“You should,” said Josef.
“If we find him in here, he’ll be all the more dangerous, because cornered.”
“I know the mine too. I do. From when I was a little boy I came here with Vater.”
“Yes, but…” Carey was looking down the hole. He did not want to go down the ladder into that darkness which looked so thick and physical, with all his heart he did not want to.
Did it really matter so much? Maybe he could let Joachim go? After all, he hadn’t actually killed the King of Scots…
Ay, in two ingenious attempts, by sheer luck and the grace of God. He had murdered three people, at least, Carey thought, and I told the King I would deal with him. Am I to be foresworn?
There was also the undoubted fact that Joachim held the upper hand, alone though he was. Not only was he on familiar ground but he could simply wait in ambush at some underground chokepoint and jump out with an axe. And he would.
“Are there other entrances to the mine?”
“Ay,” said Josef, “they are not sure how many. There’s one round the other side of the hill where they bring in the ponies and places the water escapes…”
“Where are the ponies now?”
“In their stables with Hans to watch them. They work the machines.”
“Leamus, will you go around the hill and wake the man who’s looking after the ponies? Red Sandy, will you keep a watch here with Mr Tovey?”
He reached out to put his hand on the ladder and found his hand wouldn’t obey him. He did not want to go down the ladder into darkness, even with a lit candle on his chest. He didn’t want to do it, and how long would a mere candle stay lit, down there in the dark? Also he would get candlewax on his doublet.
Maybe Joachim was waiting there, just out of sight, waiting for legs to come down so he could cut them off…
“This is Furdernuss shaft,” said Josef, “It’s not very deep, only eighty feet, and under it is the great waterwheel…”
“What—bigger than that one?”
“That one is small. The great waterwheel is twenty-two-foot round to bring up the water from deep below.”
“And it’s down there?”
“Yes.”
Too much information, Carey didn’t want to know any more. Maybe Joachim wasn’t even there. Maybe he had only taken the mining tunic as a ruse, only pretended to come to the mine, maybe even persuaded young Josef to lie and draw Carey in and then…
I am afraid, he thought suddenly, looking at himself as if he were a stranger. I don’t want to follow Joachim into the mine, not only because he might ambush me but because I’m…because I’m scared of the dark in the mine…
He was immediately angry with himself for the fear and grabbed the ladder in defiance of it, but at the same time, something inside him baulked absolutely. What was wrong with him? His spirit was willing to climb down the ladder, find Joachim and kill him. But his body was not. His body said no.
His mouth was as dry as a smith’s leather glove.
An earlier time came back to him, last year when he was in France and leading men through the cramped mine tunnels dug into the side of a fortress. He had gathered the engineers’ maps and learned them as well as he could, and had his men practising crawling on their hands and knees. They had gone in and crawled through the stifling darkness with little candles on their chests and broken through to the counter-tunnels and found them empty and…
The older Captain of Engineers had immediately ordered a retreat, over Carey’s orders and to his annoyance. Carey had been the last man scrambling out just as the petards in the counter-tunnels had expoded and that whole side of the hill had slumped into ruination, nearly taking Carey with it. He had been so appalled that he had apologised to the Captain of Engineers who only grunted that Carey was a young fool, but seemed capable of learning.
He needed more men. He couldn’t go haring into the mine after Joachim; he needed men who were expert in it and could go cautiously and methodically, just as the Captain of Engineers had done and incidentally saved Carey’s unworthy hide from being buried alive.
But would the miners be on Joachim’s side, wouldn’t they want to protect him?
They might, true. But at any rate, he could not go climbing down into a mine where eighty foot of ladder was just the start and not with only courageous young Josef with him, because that might be brave and dashing but would play into Joachim’s hands and he and the boy would die.
“Where do the miners sleep?”
“The men who have the first shift tomorrow and the bachelors sleep in the bunkhouse, so they don’t have so far to walk.”
“Who is the captain?”
“Ulrich Schlegel. He has his own little cottage.”
“I remember. He doesn’t speak English, does he?”
“He understands it. I can translate. Will we not go into the mine?”
“No, Josef. I’m too ignorant and Joachim is too clever. Can we lock it up?”
“Yes, there is a key to the door but we never lock it…”
They found the large iron key and locked the door, which would slow Joachim down and then Carey followed Josef to the little carved wooden house nearby with the small tidy garden around it, locked up tight for the night.
It was late, at least nine o’clock. Without a doubt the mine captain was in bed. Carey knocked firmly on the door, knocked again. Josef shouted anxiously in Deutsch.
At last there was a grunt and the sound of the bar being moved and the middle-aged greybeard in a nightcap and dressing gown peered out of the top half of the door with a mattock in his hand.
“Herr Steiger Schlegel,” said Carey formally, “I’m very sorry for troubling you at this time of night but it’s urgent…”
Schlegel’s eyes fell on Josef and he exclaimed, put down the mattock, opened the lower half of the door and hugged Josef, who muttered something in Deutsch and the greybeard waved them volubly into the little house where they sat by the covered fire. Mrs Schlegel was sitting up in a cupboard bed near the fire. She jumped out of bed, talking nineteen to the dozen in Deutsch, started sharpening the fire and pulled a stockpot on a bracket over the flames. All
this time Josef was talking in their peculiar language. Sometimes Carey thought he could understand bits of it but then he realised that he still couldn’t make out what was being said. He heard the name Herr Joachim though.
By the time Josef had finished, Frau Schlegel had given him a wooden bowl of soup, offered some to Carey, been told off by her husband, then offered him some beer from a barrel in the corner instead, in a large pewter mug that she mulled skilfully with the poker.
It sounded like Herr Captain Schlegel was swearing, for Frau Schlegel said, “Now then, less of that, Mr Schlegel.” Her comfortable Northern tones surprised Carey.
“You’re English?”
“Ay. I speak to him in English and Dutch, he speaks to me in Dutch and we get along very well. Did Herr Ingenieur Joachim really do all that and kill poor Mrs Carleton?”
“And more, Mrs Schlegel,” said Carey, very relieved. “He killed Mr Carleton too because the smith knew too much about how Hochstetter had planned to kill the King of Scots for the King of Spain.”
“Fancy?” said Mrs Schlegel. “Both of them?”
“Joachim tried to shoot me with an arquebus today, missed, and killed one of my men instead.”
“Och.”
“I believe he may have taken shelter in Goldscope mine and I want to find him before he gets out and goes to Workington. There will be good tracks in the snow if he comes out again, but I want to find and stop him now.”
“And ye need a guide,” she said, her eyes narrowing, “a miner to see ye through the mine.”
“Yes.”
“But Mr Schlegel isn’t a fighting man. He might get killed.”
Schlegel himself interrupted at this point and they had a big argument, Mr and Mrs Schlegel going at it hammer and tongs while Josef gulped the soup and Carey sipped the hot beer. At last Carey stood up and went softly out of the house, Josef trotted after him like a stray dog.
Carey was just going to tell the boy to go back to Mrs Schlegel when Ulrich Schlegel came out wearing his leather coat with the pointed tail and the pointy hood and a lantern in each hand. He was looking extremely mulish. Mrs Schlegel was getting dressed, pulling on her kirtle and she shouted something from the middle of it.
A Suspicion of Silver Page 27
