A Suspicion of Silver Read online

  blackrent—protection money

  blankmanger—medieval dish made of almonds, cream, and chicken

  Border reiver—a member of the riding surnames, persistent cattle thief, horse rustler, murderer

  bread trenchers—slices of whole-meal bread used as edible plates, saved on washing up

  breeks—breeches; fighting breeches were made of leather

  brimstone—sulphur

  buck—very large wooden tub, big enough for two or three people to sit in

  buffcoat—thick leather sleeveless coat, one down from a jack, in terms of protection

  caliver—smaller hand gun

  Calvinist—variety of Protestant who follows the teachings of John Calvin

  canions—straight breeches to the knees

  carlin—old woman

  churching—forty days after she had given birth, a woman would be “churched,” or allowed back into church, after her period of ritual uncleanliness; during the period before her churching she could not do housework or cook anything

  codpiece—a flap of cloth tied at the top of the hose, to hide the privates; often stuffed to look larger (of course)

  cramoisie—very popular colour in Elizabethan times, dark purple-red

  dag—smallest kind of firearm, a large gun firing one shot at a time, with a heavy ball on the bottom of the grip to balance the barrel and hit people with when you missed

  double double beer—very very strong beer

  duds—London slang for clothes

  earthcoals—what we call coal; what they called coal, we call charcoal

  Entschuldige, Maria. Stell es einfach auf die Truhe—I’m sorry, Maria. Just put it on the chest.

  falling band—plain linen collar

  farthing—a quarter of a penny

  fewmets—deer droppings

  Four Last Things—Death, Judgement, Hell, and Heaven

  French pox—syphilis

  fried sippets—thick slices of bread fried in bacon fat, delicious

  galleas—cross between a galleon and a galley, there were four of them in the Armada

  gallowglass—Irish mercenary, allegedly from Gallway

  Geht es dir gut? Wo bist du denn gewesen? Was hast...—How are you, where have you been, what…?

  gossips—a woman’s best female friends, her god-siblings

  Gott behüte dich—God protect you

  Grüss Gott und einen guten Nachmittag, Schwager—Good afternoon, brother-in-law

  half-testered bed—only half a roof over the bed, as opposed to four-poster bed

  hammerbeam roof—magnificent roof for a hall as at the Inns of Court or Oxbridge colleges

  Hansa Steelyard—private dockyard for the exclusive use of ships from Hansa (North German) cities

  harbinger’s warrant—a harbinger was a type of herald who found food or drink while the Court was on Progress and paid for it with warrants which promised that the warrant would be paid in the unspecified future at a very advantageous rate for the Crown

  Heilige Mutter Gottes—Holy Mother of God

  Herr Ingenieur—(German formal address) Mr Engineer

  Herr Kaufmann—(German formal address) Mr Merchant

  Herr Schmelzmeister—(German formal address) Mr Smeltmaster

  Herr Steiger—(German formal address) Mr Mine Captain

  Hier kommt ihr nicht herein. Das hier ist mein Haus und meine Insel. Verschwindet!—You cannot come in. This is my house and my island. Get out!

  highman/lowman dice—dice weighted to normally throw high/low

  hobby—small sturdy horse or pony, native to the Borders

  Hobson’s livery stables—a successful chain of livery stables, where you couldn’t choose which horse you hired, hence “Hobson’s choice”

  Ich bin ein schlechter Sohn!—I’m a bad son!

  Ich versteh‘ es nicht—I don’t understand it

  infield—fields nearest the tower or farmhouse

  insight—the contents of a house that were moveable, pots, pans, blankets, etc.

  jack—two meanings: 1) a leather mug, 2) a padded leather coat with no sleeves and metal plates between the leather layers to ward off blows

  Jeddart axe—type of axe popular in Jedburgh

  kern—Irish mercenary

  kine—old plural of cow

  kissing comfits—hard sweets

  kobold—German mine-demon

  liege—a feudal lord, often meaning the King for complicated reasons to do with William the Conqueror

  livery—a great lord’s uniform for his servants

  lungfever—pneumonia

  manchet bread—best white bread, made of sieved flour

  marchpane—hard almond paste

  marker stones—notorious for going wandering, they marked boundaries

  maslin bread—second best bread, with the wheatgerm and some bran left in; very nutritious

  masque—ceremonious playlet usually about Greek gods, sung and danced by the Court

  Mews—where falcons were kept

  milled powder—stronger and finer gunpowder than serpentine

  minister—Protestant priest in Scotland

  mithered—annoyed, cross

  morion—curved helmet of the period

  neck-verse—before the Reformation, the clergy could claim Benefit of Clergy if they were facing hanging, by reciting a verse of scripture and getting away with a lesser punishment

  neeps—root vegetables

  New Spain—the Americas

  oil of vitriol—sulphuric acid

  orangeados—a Seville orange skin stuffed with sugar

  outfield—rough pasture, further away from the tower or farmhouse

  Papists, recusants—people who refused to go to a Protestant church because they were Catholics and got fined for it

  pattens—wooden clogs to lift your shoes out of the mud

  pele tower—small fortress very common on the Border

  pelican—alchemical device

  petticoat forepart—the pretty triangular part of a petticoat that was deliberately displayed

  poinard—long thin dagger with a very sharp point

  postern gate—small gate in a bigger one to let in one person at a time

  pottage—thick soup made with beans, vegetables and bacon (if available); standard peasant food

  procurator fiscal—Scottish lawyer

  rammer—the thing you rammed a cannonball into a cannon with

  retting tubs—where flax was soaked in water and lye to separate the fibres to spin linen

  roodscreen—the wooden screen between the altar and the congregation in an old-fashioned Catholic church

  roughshod—a horse shod with spiked shoes for frosty weather

  Sea Beggar—independent Dutch Protestant ship

  Secretary script—the other kind of Elizabethan handwriting, differing from Italic by normally being unreadable to modern eyes

  serpentine powder—basic ordinary mixed gunpowder, quite weak. If you wanted to shoot a four-pound ball, you needed four pounds of serpentine powder.

  small ale—the weakest kind of drink, about 2 percent by volume, no hops; what children, women and invalids drank

  snips—ancestors of scissors

  sweet oil of vitriol—ether, made by pouring sulphuric acid into strong wine

  swordblanks—what you make swords out of

  thrawn—stubborn

  Tollbooth—Edinburgh prison

  toothdrawer—early dentist

  Trained Bands—the men of a city or town would train together to fight, often as pikemen or arquebusiers

  truckle—small bed on wheels

  vitriol—sulphuric acid

  Warden Raid—the Warden wo
uld raid a particular area and burn down towers to teach the reivers better manners. There is no evidence this ever improved anybody’s manners.

  Was höre ich da? Joachim ist der Mörder meines Mannes?—What is this I hear? Joachim is the murderer of my husband?

  Was soll dieses Eindringen bedeuten?—What is the meaning of this invasion?

  wean—child

  whishke bee/uisge beatha—whisky

  wood—woodwild, mad

  The stable boys stood around their fallen hero, silent and staggered at the impossibility of what had happened. Marty couldn’t be dead, he couldn’t! Now he would never sail the seas to find gold or fight the foreigners as he had boasted he would. He had ruled them with justice and his fists for a year and led them in wonderful adventures that yielded apples and sweetmeats and stories. He hadn’t explained why he wanted a rich boy’s clothes, but that was all right, he never explained anything and it always turned out well. Now this.

  The youngest of them knelt, tears running down his cheeks, to shut Marty’s eyes, and the eldest suddenly turned and ran to find the Head Groom.

  At last, after the usual chaos of getting warm gowns on and cloaks and then spending half an hour looking for Joachim’s hat which turned out to be on the top banister, the Hochstetter family of Augsberg were ready to see the famous sights of London.

  Daniel Hochstetter and his four eldest children would walk to the Tower Gatehouse to see the lions and perhaps the armouries, but not the Mint which they had seen by special royal permission the week before. They would walk back, perhaps taking a detour to look at the goldsmith’s shops on Cheapside and perhaps even going on London Bridge as well to see the draper’s shops there. The baby would stay at their lodgings in Dowgate by the German Steelyard with her nurse. Daniel’s wife, Frau Radagunda Hochstetter, her eleven-year-old son, Joachim, and her daughter, Little Radagunda, would actually go to see the wonders of Whitehall palace.

  Daniel found his wife a boat from Dowgate watersteps, a double-ended skiff rowed by two muscular men in the famous red boatman’s livery with their pewter badges on their shoulders. He lifted Little Rady into the boat while his wife nervously stepped onto the boards holding the boatman’s hand in a vicelike grip and the boat wallowed. Joachim hopped in and grinned, sat down on the cushions at the back like a lord. Radagunda sat rigidly in the middle, gripping the sides.

  It was a long trip upriver. Little Rady wriggled and knelt on the seat to dabble her fingers in the water. She was told to stop it at once by her mother, who was deathly afraid that she would fall in and die and go to limbo because, of course, she was only a child and as yet unbaptised. In their religion, only adults could be baptised.

  It was too far to walk, but Radagunda wished and wished she had not asked to see the Queen’s palace, for the terror of tipping the boat over filled her heart. It hadn’t occurred to her they would have to take such a dangerous route as the Thames. She muttered prayers the whole way, feeling sick, seeing nothing of the proud palaces and churches and gardens going past, nor the newly built Bearbaiting Ring on the south side.

  Little Rady wriggled the whole way and Joachim pelted the boatmen with questions in English. Radagunda couldn’t understand him at all, although she had taken lessons in English too. Her lord and husband had insisted because they were moving from Augsberg to England, where there was copper ore but the people had no idea how to mine it. He had arrived back home from England in the summer, looked around the countryside, talked to some people, and by October they were in London. She supposed it was a wise decision, seeing how the poorer sort of people in Augsberg were starting to die of sickness and the harvest had failed again when they left. But she was nervous of going to the strange town of Kes-wick—where she knew nobody, and which was full of the peculiar English—though her lord was readying an island in a lake for her to live on and planting an orchard and building a mill and brewery there. That was a comfort.

  “Haug and Company can afford it,” he reassured her over their first dinner in England, picking up a feebly spiced bread-stuffed English sausage on his knife. “And we will be mining copper and silver and gold for Her Majesty of England and the new Company of Mines Royal.”

  She almost smiled with pride at this thought because her husband was an important man, never mind the constant difficulties with shareholders over money, and lazy English carpenters, and getting assays of the ores correct. He had told them stories of where he had been in England for so long, stories of the northern English who were hard to understand and lived in Cumberland. They didn’t know anything about mining, poor souls, but had incredibly rich veins of copper ore in the hills right next to them.

  Some of the stories were a little frightening: the evil servants of the evil and Catholic (of course) Earl of Northumberland had actually killed Leonard Stoltz, their preacher, for being an Anabaptist. But then God had punished him through his own actions because he rebelled against the Queen and ran away to Scotland, where he was now imprisoned and it was only a matter of time before he was executed.

  There was a shout and a clatter and one of the watermen waved an oar at another boat that had come too close. The sound of the shouting was ugly and frightening and Radagunda clasped Little Rady to her, though the child was trying to escape to see what was happening. Joachim was kneeling up on the seat, laughing at the people on the other boat who had got splashed.

  The older waterman said something gruff to Radagunda, who had no idea what it meant, and bent to his oar again.

  Her heart was beating so hard she felt as if it was actually outside her chest. The horrible wallowing of the boat seemed to slow a little and as the speed picked up, she felt a breeze. Her hand cramped on the side of the boat and she had to let go of Little Rady for a second to ease it. Rady instantly got up on her knees again so she could see and wobbled so that Radagunda had to hold her tight again, despite her muffled protests.

  Joachim was laughing at her. “Mutti, Mutti, Mutti,” he said, shaking his head, “it’s only a boat.”

  “Sit down and hold your hat on,” she snapped at him. He slowly put his hand to his hat and clamped it onto his head, deliberately insolent. She sighed. No, not insolent, he was a boy and a boy didn’t see these things the same way: despite how ill he had been with the measles last year, despite how his little brother had died of it and gone to limbo, despite the way he had been dazzled by even dim lights and she had had to keep the shutters closed, despite the nights she had sat up with him as he fought his way through delirium and far more frightening deathly stillness, it seemed he wasn’t frightened of death. He should be. Until he had been safely baptised, he could go to limbo at any time and she would never see him again, ever. Until she had children she had never doubted that the Anabaptist way, which followed Jesus Christ Himself in baptising adults, was right. Now? It was terrifying. If she let herself think of little Leonard whom she would never ever see again until the end of time and beyond, she couldn’t stop the tears from rising.

  At Westminster steps, the boatmen were still tying up when Joachim jumped from the boat to the steps which nearly stopped Radagunda’s heart again. She told him off and he just stood there smiling. Well, he was eleven. Boys were supposed to be bold. One of the boatmen picked Little Rady up and deposited her ashore, so she didn’t have to get her lovely green brocade kirtle wet. Radagunda climbed out of the rocking boat trembling, holding the other boatman’s calloused hand as tight as she could. She gave Joachim the 6d to pay the boatman, because the man should pay.

  They walked up the steps and through into New Palace Yard with a still fountain in it, across to a towered gateway, and then turned right into King’s Street, away from Westminster Abbey. At the end was an impressive towered gate where they had to pay sixpence each to the Queen’s servant in his black-and-white livery in order to go through. Then they came to another courtyard where they had to queue up to go through the next elaborate gate. Other peop
le were already queuing up, French people and some Low Dutch-speakers from the Netherlands, probably, and a couple of Scots and some English as well. They joined the queue and waited to pass through the famous Court Gate. There was an oddly pointless fence that they had to queue round.

  Men in good woollen doublets were waiting nearby and one of them instantly attached himself to the Hochstetters, explaining in a loud slow voice that the gate they had just come through, yes, that building with the round towers and flags, was the King Street Gate. He pointed out interesting places over the walls: the Queen’s Privy Garden and the Privy Gallery on one side; on the other the Great Close Tennis Court, the Great Open Tennis Court, the Whitehall Bowling Alley, and in the distance the Little Close Tennis Court and the round roof beyond it of the Whitehall Cockpit. Yes, young sir, the courtiers enjoy playing tennis. No, young sir, bless you, you can’t go and try it.

  Finally they were allowed to pass through the Court Gate into the Court itself, cobbled and swept clean; they went into the Chapel Royal which had not been badly damaged by Reformers and still had its roodscreen, to Radagunda’s disapproval. They did not go into the palace kitchens behind it whence curled pleasant smells of venison, chicken, and potherbs. They came out into the Preaching Place and the guide told them how many famous preachers and ministers had preached there, but they hadn’t heard of any of them. They looked into the Council Chamber which was panelled in pale yellow oak and had a long table with Persian rugs on it and comfortable chairs, but no councillors.

  They went through the mazelike passages of the Court to the Great Hall and stared at the hammerbeam roof and the minstrels’ gallery and the portraits of the Queen and her father, Henricus VIII. A single small table and chair were on the dais, with a Cloth of Estate over it. All the people they had been queueing with were there, and they watched as four dazzlingly dressed and exquisite courtiers entered in procession. One in tawny damask and green velvet announced that the Queen’s Majesty would be at the dinner although Her Royal Person was absent. Then the courtiers attended the empty chair which four red-and-black-striped Gentlemen of the Guard were guarding. Each courtier collected a large silver or gold dish from a kitchen servant, brought it to the chair, knelt on both knees to the chair, lifted the cover off the dish and waved it over the chair, put back the cover, stood up, took three paces backwards as if the chair actually had the Queen sitting there instead of empty space. Then the courtier turned and carried the dish down from the dais to the door to the kitchen and gave the dish to the same servant who took it away and reappeared a moment later with another dish. Joachim had to swallow a laugh because it was totally ridiculous.