by Smith, Skye
"Where is the lad?"
"Out finding a trap and loading our gear onto it."
Peterson, on seeing Daniel, broke off from his argument with his owners and walked towards him with his hand outstretched. "Glad to see you,” he told Daniel but out of the corner of his mouth said to Cleff, "get that purse out of here before they change their minds. Where can I pick up my share?"
"The goldsmith shop closest to Saint Paul's on Cheapside,” Daniel told him. "I'll leave it with Tom Smythe so you can pick it up even if we are not home. Uh, do the lady of the house a favour, and clean up a bit before knocking on her door."
Peterson's smile grew wide. It was comments like those that allowed him to trust these men, even though he wasn't quite convinced that somehow they had tricked the owners of the collier out a their unearned profits. "Be on your way, then. I'll look for you in Cheapsides an hour before sunset."
Outside a blond lad with coal dust in his hair and smudges on his face leaped into Daniel's arms. He was just fourteen but he was at least two heads taller than any of the boys working in the coal sorting yard. He didn't stop talking all the way back to Cheapsides. Daniel and Cleff kept their cocked pistols on their laps all the way to Cheapsides. It was a great relief to them both to slip into the goldsmith's shop. The ground floor of the shop was secured by brick walls, iron bars and oak doors. The street door was only unlocked when customers were coming and going.
After locking the door behind them, Tom invited them to sit at the table he used to show the wares he crafted to his customers, while he called to his wife to have a warm bath drawn in the kitchen shed behind the building. The lad ignored everyone while looking at the silverwork displayed behind the bars of the shop window, and the old man reached inside his filthy cloak and put two heavy purses down on the table.
Daniel lifted one of the purses to gauge its weight, and then put it back down on the table. "I can't say I am not a bit disappointed. I was expecting a lot more silver than that, a twenty pounds more at least."
Cleff cackled back, "It ain't silver Danny, it's gold."
Daniel caught his breath. That weight of gold, was...was... was a fortune.
"Do you wish me to weigh it?" Tom asked.
"Of course. Who would know gold better than a goldsmith?" Cleff said as he untied the throat of the first purse and then slowly slid the coins out of it and onto the table.
With deft fingers Tom stacked up coins of a similar weight and then pulled his scales closer. "Gold is not usual in business. Most things are priced in silver shillings and troy pounds of silver. With the new pure silver shillings there are sixty-two shillings to a pound. Did you ask for gold for a reason?"
"In silver there were too many purses to carry,” Cleff replied, "but two purses of gold I could hide under my cloak."
"And this is from coal profits?" Tom held the purse low to the floor and patted away some black dust. "I hear the Tyne coal trade is now worth fifty thousand pounds of silver a year. Queen Bess should never have agreed to that monopoly. The Tyneside merchant hostmen are now the Lords of Coal."
"Aye perhaps, but she and every king since has reaped a fortune in taxes from the monopoly,” Cleff replied. "At a shilling a cartload that is a lot of tax, or so says the skipper of the collier I shipped in on. This gold is a third of the profits from just one ship. Three hundred pounds. I asked for it in gold rather than six thousand silver shillings." He watched the slow mile spread over Daniel's face. It was a vast sum.
The lad came over and picked up some of the gold coins to look at. "These are Spanish coins, and they are all missing pieces. Why didn't you get English gold coins?"
"Hah, we have all been spoiled by the quality of English shillings." Tom told him. "Here in England there is no standard for gold coins because the metal is so soft that men shave the edges. These Spanish pieces of eight were Spain's attempt to solve that problem. The reason that none are whole is because they are minted with grooves to make it easy to cut them in half, and half again, and half again."
Tom's gold scale could not hold more than ten coins at a time, so as he weighed each ten he was writing down the weight. "A pound of gold is worth about sixteen pounds of silver, so every three pounds of gold is worth about a thousand shillings. Let me add up all these weights and we will see how badly you have been cheated."
"They were weighed twice in the coal yard office, and by two different clerks." Cleff mumbled, suddenly wondering if he had been cheated. Tom was checking his addition. The lad was looking at the various faces stamped upon the coins. Daniel was just sitting there smiling. This was very good pay indeed for one timely flare in a storm and a bit of contract trickery.
"Not bad,” Tom gave Cleff's shoulder a push. "You are perhaps ten shillings short of six thousand, so the clerks kept a bit for themselves. A tiny bite that would hardly be missed. An acceptable level of error in measuring such sums." He looked at Daniel. "I suggest that you keep as much of it as possible in gold. With the Dutch now making trouble for the Spanish treasure ships, the price of gold is sure to rise. Before the New World treasure ships began flooding Spain with gold, it was worth twice what it is today."
"Then we will keep most of it in gold for now,” Daniel replied. "Can you keep it here for us?" Smythe's was the only goldsmith he trusted.
Thomas shook his head. "I am uncomfortable at the thought of keeping so much gold in my shop."
"But you are a goldsmith,” the lad pointed out.
"I keep my own stores of silver, but rarely any gold. I created the display of fancies in the window from my own silver. When a woman asks for one of them fashioned in gold rather than silver, she brings me the gold, usually a gold coin, for me to use in the making. Whatever gold is not used, I give back to her."
"You mean that a rich woman can't just walk into your shop, choose a gold fancy, pay and leave with it?"
"Unfortunately for me that is exactly what I mean. When rich women want something, they tend to ignore the price. When rich men are trying to impress expensive women, they tend to ignore the price. But the rich do not like waiting for the fancy to be made, so they buy their gold fancies with the wealthier goldsmiths who have them on display and ready to buy."
The lad looked up from the gold coins he was spinning on the table. He was trying to get five of the costly coins spinning at once. "So if a woman wanted a gold fancy and did not have any gold coins, how would she get them?" The three men laughed at his question and he blushed.
Tom saw the lad's embarrassment and patted him on the shoulder. "She could pay me in silver, and I would go to the Guildhall exchange and buy the gold. All goldsmiths are registered with the Guild, the Goldsmith Company, and there we can buy, sell and deposit our gold. It is far safer to leave gold at the Guildhall than to hide it in your shop, especially in these violent times."
Daniel and Cleff looked at each other and nodded the unspoken thought. "Our village is planning a voyage to the New World to look for a fertile island. We have the ship, and now we have this gold, but winter is coming, so our plans must go on hold until spring. Would you be willing to deposit our gold at your Guildhall?"
"Would you be willing to loan me enough of your gold to create a display of gold fancies for my own window?" A moment later they were all shaking hands. "Your bath will be ready by now. Once you are cleaned up you can escort me to the Guildhall. I won't rest easy until most of this gold is on deposit."
"Er,” Cleff mumbled. "We need to leave six hundred shillings' worth here for later. Our friend Cap'n Peterson will be dropping by later to collect his share."
* * * * *
Despite his own best efforts at bathing and his almost new clothes, Commander Peterson still looked grubby. "I apologize, my dear,” he said graciously to his hostess, Alice, "it will take a week of my wife's hard scrubbing before I look civilized again." He pointed down at his carry-all. "When I leave here I will go directly to her cottage in Hampstead."
"So you're not going back to your ship?" Cl
eff asked as he topped up the tiny glasses on the table with Dutch Genever.
"The owners have given the entire crew a furlough until the Scots withdraw from Newcastle,” Peterson told them. "The political pamphlets on the streets say that it could be months before our king swallows his pride and signs a treaty." He picked up the glass and took a gulp. When he had his voice back he said, "Even if I weren't on furlough, I wouldn't be in a hurry to return to the ship."
"Oh, right, you want to put your share of the gold somewhere safe."
"Not just that. There are a lot of angry Londoners hanging about the coal sorting yards. I wouldn't be surprised if riots broke out. If I am marked as working for the Tyneside monopoly I could be robbed and beaten. Bloody Lords of Coal. This didn't need to be. Do you know what they have gone and done? They've almost doubled the price of the sorted coal they sell to the wagon men."
"But that was to be expected," Cleff said. "Bulk coal shot up in price before we put into the docks."
"But our cargo was the only one that was unloaded for that price. The coal yards are filled with coal that was unloaded at the old price. They aren't charging more for just the coal off my ship, they are charging more for all the coal, even the coal that was unloaded in the summer. Why, it's ..."
"Then these Lords of Coal should be hung,” Alice interrupted. "In a cold winter a lump of coal is a necessary as food. Doubling the price on the street is the same as stealing food from the mouths of the hungry. Hang them all, I say."
"It may very well come to that, my dear,” Peterson said softly to the comely young mother with the baby sucking on her breast, "My trap driver was quite frightened by the angry coal vendors we drove through. If they become a mob, then they will throw down the gates of the coal yards and help themselves to the filthy stuff."
"Do the Lords live near the yards?" Alice asked.
"Of course not. They live on their estates along the Tyne, or in fine town houses in the City." Peterson put his fat finger forward to see if the infant would grab it with his perfectly tiny hands, but as soon he saw the difference in color between the imbedded grime of the one, and the soft cleanliness of the other, he pulled his finger back. "I must beg your leave, madam, if I am to reach my cottage before nightfall."
As Peterson stood, so did Daniel. "I'll see you and your gold safely home, friend,” he said as he reached for his holsters. He looked towards Tom and Cleff. "I know there is to be a political meeting at Pym's house tonight, so I will be dropping in there on the way back from Hampstead. Don't wait up. If I'm not home by ten tonight, then I have stayed the night at Pym's house."
* * * * *
There was a political meeting of the Reform Party members of the Commons that night, not at Pym's house, but at Henry Marten's house just up the road from Pym's. As Daniel knocked on the door he was hopeful that his friend, Robert Blake from his wild days in the Dutch militia, would be at the house. Mary, the mistress of Henry's house, told him it was not so as she took his arm and led him into the bright lights of the oversized dining hall.
As Mary announced him to the twenty men in the room, both Pym and Henry pushed their way through the men to greet him. "This is the man,” Pym called to the room, "who brought that fantastic news from Alex Leslie."
Daniel tried to shush the acclaim. He didn't know most of these men and he certainly didn't want to be marked to any of the king's many spies. If spies ever found out that he had given vital aid to General Leslie, once on the Tweed River and once on the Tyne, then the king would surely see him hung, drawn and quartered. Luckily Pym had spoken before the room was paying any attention to the handsome man on Mary's arm.
Most of the men in the room barely gave a dismissive glance to the stranger at the door with the host and hostess. They did not recognize him as anyone of import, sized up the worth of his tailor and then dismissed him from their thoughts as a nobody. It was lucky that Mary had taken his navy blue cavalier hat and cloak at the door, else they would have paid more attention to him. It was a measure of how shallow the well-dressed gentlemen of London were.
Poor Oliver must have also been dismissed as a nobody, because he was sitting alone on a couch nursing a glass of Genever and trying not to look so out of place. However, within ten minutes of Daniel's arrival, the dynamics of the room had all changed. This because John Pym, John Hampden, Arthur Haselrig, Henry Marten and Oliver Cromwell had taken the newcomer into a corner of the room, and their discussion with him was excluding all others.
"The word from York is that the king and his Great Council of useless nobility have finally admitted that Alex Leslie has them by the short and curlies," Henry told them. "In an attempt to hide the humiliation, Charlie has awarded the Garter to his darling general, Lord Strafford. Can you imagine, the Garter to the man he should have hung for incompetence? There is good news, though. Edinburgh fortress has surrendered peacefully to Argyll. The Scottish Parliament is now beyond the reach of the king's armed forces in Scotland."
"Who are all these men?" Daniel asked while waving towards the room full of men. "Are they all members of Parliament?"
"Only half of us," Henry replied. "The rest are a deputation of London gentlemen that tomorrow will leave for York to plead with the king to hurry treaty with the Covenanters. We have told them of Leslie's terms, and so they will plead for the immediate calling of a new Parliament so that it is ready and waiting to approve the treaty."
"Charlie will ignore them,” Arthur Haselrig snorted.
No one replied to the probable truth of his words. As for Daniel, he had never warmed to this haughty man, Haselrig. He was the type of man who would say, 'damn, the cup is half gone,' rather than, 'good, we still half a cup left.' He looked around to make sure that only men he knew could hear him. "Unless,.... unless news reaches Charlie that riots are sweeping London." He now had their undivided attention but he said no more than, "Not now. Later, after the rest have left."
To say that the host, Henry Marten, hurried his guests out the door would do an injustice to Mary, the gracious hostess. Despite being called upstairs time and again by a crying infant, Mary encouraged them all to stay longer by feeding them sweet-cakes and the darkly bitter drink, Kofe, that was becoming a craze within the wealthiest households in London. Despite her hospitality, by ten o'clock Henry was almost pushing the deputation out his front door.
Those that did not go included seven parliamentarians, and Daniel. Mary stared daggers at Henry for his rudeness, and even to Daniel her only words of goodnight were that he could make his own bed in the front bedroom. Henry hadn't even noticed her temper, and was rubbing his hands together and calling the men towards his library-office where his best stock of whisky was kept.
"Earlier we were speaking of riots," Pym chose the topic for discussion. "I believe it was in the context of worrying Charlie into paying attention to our deputation from London. I hope you don't expect me to raise and lead a mob. I do not mind speaking to the people and teaching them about the misrule of our king, but I refuse to directly incite violence. Violence in the City has far more chance of hurting the poor and the innocent than hurting the nobility and their king."
There was general agreement from all. Haselrig commented, "What does it matter if the gutter trash are hurt so long as Parliament is recalled?" Daniel held Oliver back from leaping out of his chair to hit the man.
"What about,” Daniel chose his words carefully, "a riot that benefited the poor and the innocent, and hurt some of the richest men in the kingdom?" They all leaned forward toward him as he told them of the anger around London's coal-sorting yards because of the unnecessary leap in the street price of coal. "If the coal vendors ever realized that they were paying double for lumps of coal that did not cost the sorting-yards double, well those yards would be overrun by the mob. London's entire winter stockpile of coal would be spirited away by the, uh, what did you call them? The gutter trash."
Pym's fine quick mind was sprinting ahead of everyone. "The effect of such a riot coul
d be that the poorest of the city would all have coal, while there would be none left to be delivered to the finest houses and palaces. Wouldn't it be a shame if the companies that own the London stockpiles were ruined by it?"
"The stockpiles are owned by the monopoly of the Hostmen of the Tyne,” Daniel pointed out. "They can well afford the loss so long as they are allowed to replace the coal with shipments from the mines. That they cannot do while Alex Leslie is in Newcastle."
While all were digesting this tactic, Oliver spoke up. "It is interesting that Daniel and I were both thinking about riots, but of different mobs." He waited until everyone had turned to hear his thoughts. "Yesterday when I passed Saint Paul's, I noticed that the work was complete on remodeling the chapels. Inigo has done a splendid job. I mentioned it to my father-in-law, but instead of agreeing with me, he railed in anger. Apparently Archbishop Laud plans on re-convening the Court of High Commission in one of the redone chapels at Saint Paul’s."
Everyone of these Puritan politicians sat back aghast at Oliver's news. Only Daniel did not react. Oliver leaned over to him and quietly explained the news. "Do you still remember my description of the purpose of the king's Star Chamber?"
"You mean the court that is even higher than the Privy Council, and directly under Charlie? It tries those nobility who are above the laws that rule the rest of us, ummm, and cases of slander and treason against them. Didn't you say that they are allowed to use torture to force men to incriminate themselves, and they can forbid the arguing of a defense?"
"Yes, exactly," Oliver replied. "The Court of High Commission is the equivalent court but for the Church. It mostly tries members of the clergy so as to keep their misdeeds a secret from the rest of us. However, it has another more sordid reputation. It also tries blasphemy and witchcraft. It is the Archbishop's equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition, for it can also use torture to force a man to incriminate himself."
