Queen & Country (21 page)

The krames could not compete with the jewellers' shops in Cheapside, where lustred plate and trinkets glinting in the windows dazzled those who passed, to think the streets of London must be paved with gold. The Edinburgh goldsmiths did not flaunt their craft, but made their wares to order in the quiet ranks of unassuming workshops, closed off from the street. Here, Hew came at last, and hoped to buy his ring. By the Lady Steps, leading to St Giles, he remembered the shop of a goldsmith called Urquhart, who did business with his father and the lawyer Richard Cunningham. Urquhart's virtues were that he kept clients' secrets close, and the delicate touch he brought to his craft. His fault was the absence in him, of a moral intellect. He would deal with the devil if he counted profit in it. Perhaps, after all, the devil had returned to make a claim on him, for Urquhart was no more. Carved upon the lintel stone of what was once his door, were the words
George Heriot
. Hew recognised the name, as a goldsmith of repute. Therefore, he went in.

It was like looking down upon the throttle of a furnace, standing on its tongue while its hot breath bellowed out, and dribbled from its mow into a spittery of gold. The space in which he stood was six or eight feet square, lit at the back by a large open window, made secure with bars. There was space for little else, beside the blazing chimney built into a wall, but the goldsmith's board and stools, a cupboard with a lock, and a cabinet of shelves. In the centre of the
room, a young man spun a thread, to infinite fineness, from a droplet of gold. He was stripped to his shirt, and a wide leather apron caught fragments of gold, that sheared from the wire in delicate flecks, like a bright shower of rain.

‘A moment, if you will.' The goldsmith cut the wire, turning in his hands from a stream of lava to a silken strand. ‘Now, can I help you?'

‘I hope so,' Hew said. ‘But I thought this was the workshop of a man called Urquhart.'

‘Aye, so it was. He died in the plague, that ravaged through this street. Urquhart would not leave. My father telt me once, he thought his life was charmed.'

Hew remembered too. Urquhart had contrived to make himself invincible. ‘It caught him in the end. Your father is George Heriot, I suppose.'

‘He is,' the young man grinned. ‘And so am I. Geordie, to my friends. If it is my faither that ye want, ye will not find him here. This is my shop.'

‘Then,' answered Hew, ‘you may do just as well. For I should like to buy a lady's finger ring.'

The goldsmith opened up his cabinet of trays, and brought out a small rack of rings. ‘These are samples only, and are not for sale.'

The pieces were beautifully crafted, with delicate features wrought in the clasps, fruit, flowers and feathers, insects and birds, carved in the casing that held in its grasp a table ruby or emerald stone. One had been set with a sharp pointed diamond, and Hew picked it up. ‘This is exquisite work.'

‘That is a bezel for writing on glass,' George Heriot said. Hew nodded and put the ring back, finding it poignant in more ways than one. There were examples also of
memento mori
rings: an enamelled death's-head; vipers in a nest, flicking silver tongues; a tiny golden toad. There was one that was a dead kist, opening on a hinge, upon a bed of bones, one where a circle of skeletons danced, one where an eye, carved from weeping white opal, dropped dew-clustered diamonds as tears.

‘Do you like those?' the young goldsmith asked. ‘I had in my mind to send some to court, as a present for the king. My wife says tis presumptuousness, and like to cause offence. She is canny, see? I tell her that there is no profit, comes without a risk. What do you think?'

Not knowing the king's mind, Hew could not advise. ‘The work is surely fine enough, to set before a king. Perhaps you could send your gift to one of his lords. Then, were it worn at the court, his Grace might take notice of it,' he suggested.

‘That is an idea. Aye, perhaps I will. Thank you, sir,' the goldsmith smiled. ‘I have had had some call for these, in the past few days. It is, as they say, an unco ill wind, though it may be a cruel one.' His frank and cheerful confidence Hew found as engaging as his subtle craft. ‘I do not want a mourning ring, but one like this,' he said, lifting out a band with interlocking parts, which were held together by a clasp of hands.

‘That is very apt and pleasing, both as a betrothal ring, and a wedding band. You can have two or three hoops, or as many as five, with a verse on each one, interlinked. And you may have it set with any colour stone, or enamel, as you choose,' the goldsmith said.

Hew preferred two parts, the inner one inscribed, and the outer circle carved with some intricate device. He had a picture in his mind, of petals intertwined, of pansies and columbine, a thistle and a rose.

The goldsmith made a note of this, in a table book. ‘Have you any thought what poesie you would like? I have some written here, that are always popular.'

It felt a little false to Hew, to choose a lasting sentiment from the goldsmith's list. Some appeared acquisitive: ‘All that's thine is mine'; some were less than chivalrous: ‘If I think my wife is fair/why should other people care?'

‘Something simple, perhaps,
“Amour, toujours, tous les jours”
or “My hand and heart in yours”?' The choosing of a ring, meant to last a lifetime, proved harder than expected. Geordie sympathised. ‘I have not long been married mysel'. And the making of the band was the hardest part.'

‘It must have been, for you, harder still to pass the lady's expectations. If you do not mind, I will give some thought to it. I have more idea about the raw material. My mistress is a stranger. I should like the gold to come from our native soil. Whatever else it is, it should be Scots,' decided Hew.

‘Some folk,' Heriot said, ‘make their wedding band from a melted coin. If you have a ducat, and a foreign crown, you might melt your piece with hers and intermingle currence, as you meld your hearts.'

Hew considered this. There was something in it pleased, the melding of the thrissel with the English rose. He had an English angel, still, inside his purse. But he was not prepared to venture it.

‘That is a pretty idea. But I prefer that the gold should be pure.'

‘Pure gold is too soft. It will not make a ring, or aught that will endure. The trouble with our coinage, on the other hand, is that in recent years it has become debased. Yet Scots gold, cut with silver, is quite fair and light, and a becoming colour to a lady's hand.'

That was not what Hew had meant. ‘By pure, I do not mean unmingled, but rather, untouched. A coin has passed through many hands. I would like a gold, never wrought before. I have something in mind. It is foolish, perhaps. I heard there was an ancient mine, at Largo Law in Fife. That is not so far from where my home is now. They say it is the gold that gives the Largo sheep their yellow-tinted fleece.'

‘Faerie gold, you want, then,' Geordie Heriot smiled.

‘Then it is a myth?'

‘Put it like this. If a man offers to sell you gold mined from Largo Law, bring your ain touchstane. Or else it is yourself, that will be fleeced. I will ask some questions, and see what can be found. But if there was ever gold there, outside of the fairy stories, it was long ago.'

Hew thanked him for his help. It would have been simple enough, for George Heriot to spin him a yarn, and pass off to him any old gold. It was to his credit that the goldsmith did not.

‘I will draw some drafts for you, and work up some samples and costs. Can you come back in a day or two? In fact,' the goldsmith
hesitated. ‘Ach, what of it, then. Tis all but denner time. Can you spare a moment, sir, to witness an experiment? We maun go outside, for we cannot do it here.'

Young Heriot took off his apron, and folded it, from the outside in. He placed it with his tools, in a wide leather pocket nailed to the bench. He rinsed his hands in water, and dried them on a cloth.

‘We shall need some water with us.' He poured a clean draught from a pitcher into a small flask, handing it to Hew, ‘And a tinder box. And here, we have the matter, that will mak our trick.'

From the cupboard in the wall, he brought out a leather sack, a dish and pot of lead, and a glass retort, of the kind that Meg used in her still.

‘And that is all, I think. Take care to wipe your feet as ye gang out.'

‘Of what?' Hew discovered at the door a strip of metal grating above a leather mat, and complied with the request. The goldsmith winked at him. ‘Of particles of gold. You will carry off as dust a little in your hair. But we do not charge for that. This air is filled with it. Do not be alarmed, for it cannot do you harm. Some say, tis as potent as the sun, her power in earthly balm, made gentle and benign. And it wants the sun to form in streams and hills, for, without that power, no seam of gold will grow. Physicians make their medicines from it, where it is more tolerated than the sweetest herbs. I know no sweeter substance in the living world, more malleable and ductile, more sympathetic to the human body. My wife tells me, Geordie, you have a heart of gold.'

If something in his manner had reminded Hew of Giles, it was his immersion in the substance of his craft. Gold was precious in itself, not for any riches it could bring to him. He did not strive, like alchemists, to find the secret in it of some rare elixir, for he had it in his hands, could beat it to a thinness of translucent airiness or spin it to a thread as bright as angel hair.

Hew followed him out to the lane, and down a narrow alley to a small back yard, behind a metal fence. George unlocked the gate. ‘I rent this from the kirk.' In the corner was a burner built of brick,
with a little bed of charcoal, onto which George struck his tinder, sparking up a flame, sheltered from the wind by the high wall of the kirk. ‘Now,' the goldsmith said, ‘open up the sack, and pour a little out into the flannel cloth.'

Hew opened up the sack, and found it full of dust. ‘What kind of stuff is this?' he asked.

Geordie smiled at him. ‘Does it look like gold?'

There was little sun in the bleached March sky to snatch at any glimmer that lay lurking in the dust. Perhaps it looked different to a practised eye? George admitted, to him it did not. ‘For that purpose, dae you see, we maun put it to the test. This is the powder from a piece of rock that was given to my father by a certain Dutchman, painter to the king. Bronckhorst was his name. That man had an interest in a Scottish gold mine, six or eight years back, that, as I recall, came to the attention of the king's regent Morton, and Bronckhorst and his complices had little profit from it. My father gave some gold to him for gilding of a picture frame, and in return for it, the painter gave to him a sack full of the ore recovered from that mine – this is washed and pulverised, powdered to a dust, but not as yet refined. My father had no use for it, but as a curiosity. He has nor will not time to work up from the raw, and this – were there gold in it at all – would scarcely hold enough of quantity or quality to repay that effort. He gave it to me, when I took on this shop.

‘This pot of lead holds quicksilver, which, ye may ken, is to a goldsmith his alchemist's stone. Pure gold will dissolve in it. Fine particles will cling to it, and leave behind the sand. It must be washed quite clean, or else it will not stick. The silver must not flower into a myriad particles, or else the fused amalgam never will be split.'

Hew watched the liquid silver chase and cluster on the cloth, fugitive and vacillating, like a living thing.

‘Now,' Heriot said, ‘we can squeeze the excess of the quicksilver out in the basin of water, and what is amalgamated, draw off in the still. For that reason, we are outdoors, for heating of the quicksilver
gives off noxious fumes; it is harmless to swallow, but elusive where it spills, where it will gradually insinuate into a noisome air.

‘What remains is dust. Now we shall still it, in a retort. The vapours that flow off, collecting in the cup, consolidate as mercury. What remains behind will be native gold.'

The nugget that remained, once the drops of quicksilver were carefully drawn off, and re-sealed inside their pot, was mottled, dark, and dull.

‘It does not look like gold,' Hew said, disappointed.

‘You are impatient, sir. It is not finished yet. There are other metals, precious in their kind, the mercury adheres to, that must be drawn off. This lump must be put to the fire, and heated seven times, before it will yield up its perfect heart of gold. And that may not be much. Come back in a day or two. I will show you what the molten fire has made of it, and ye may try it on the touchstone, whether it be pure or not. If you like it then, this dust may be incorporate into your lady's ring. Then you shall say, at least, there is a story to it, that you saw it forged, and sifted from the rock where ancient feet did walk.'

Their bargain was concluded in a tavern near the kirk, where the city merchants did their business at midday, over soused Lenten herrings and a stoup of mellow ale. Hew left there well content, to find a crowd had gathered at the mercat cross. His wam was warm and weak, full of drink and meat, and he could not stomach seeing harlots stripped or lusty beggars scourged. He was sloping off, shyly, to the Cowgate, when he heard the sounding of a herald's horn, and a speech read out. Before he could come close enough to try and catch the sense of it, it was at an end. The herald blew his horn again, and with this second flourish, nailed his proclamation staunchly to the cross.

‘What was that?' Hew asked a man, who answered, ‘Limmars to be dealt the blaw that is restanding tae them. High time, an' a',' and spat into the dust.

Hew waited for a moment for the crowd to disperse, which did not take long. The notice on the cross meant little to the multitude,
for few of them could read. They viewed a piece of paper with a grim suspicion, for by such and such a scrap some of them were damned, with little understanding of the writing there. Had any of them dared, they would have torn it down, whatever was its sentiment, for fear that in its ciphers they would stand accused. And if they did not tear it down, bluntly from its nail, it was kenning that their lugs might be hammered in its place. Such papers were reviled, and were rarely read. They hung until they dropped, shrivelled into strips like the hanging skins of men, and were sidestepped in the mud, by superstitious feet.