Dark Matter

“Please, sir, wait a moment,” said Scroope, unctuous again. “You are right. I am most ungrateful for the service you do me. Forgive me, sir. It is merely that I was most occupied with something, and I am without a servant for an hour. But now I think that it can wait a while. And I should count it an honour to have my books inspected by you, Doctor Newton.”

Scroope ushered Newton through to an even smaller office where, there being very little room, it was not possible for me to follow, so that I was obliged to remain behind; and as soon as I heard Scroope begin to explain his book-keeping to Newton, I excused myself and went to look about the house.

It was plain to me that St. Leger Scroope was a man of very evident wealth. On the walls were many fine tapestries and pictures while the furniture reflected the taste of a man who had travelled a great deal abroad. There was a library of sorts, with several handsome bookcases and dominated by the largest and dustiest binding press I had seen outside of a bookshop; but there was no time to wonder at it, for I was quickly in front of the cases and examining the spines of Mister Scroope’s books; and finding these ordered according to the letters of the alphabet, I quickly found a copy of the Polygraphia by Trithemius. This book I removed from the bookcase and opened in the hope that Mister Macey might even have inscribed it, but there was nothing, and I was about to replace the volume when it occurred to me to look at some of the other books also; and finding many of these were on the subject of alchemy, I came away from that room with the strong notion that Newton’s suspicions were correct: that Scroope did indeed have some involvement in the terrible murders at the Tower.

It was now that I made a most fortuitous discovery. Upon leaving the library, I took a wrong turn so that I found myself standing on the threshold of a courtyard that was enclosed on three sides by single-storey wooden workshops, each of which was topped by a tall chimney not visible from the street.

I crossed the open courtyard and stepped inside one of these workshops, which was arranged very like the melting-house at the Tower, with an open furnace and various forging tools. Not that there was anything very strange about any of this Mister Scroope was a goldsmith, after all. Rather it was what Mister Scroope chose to smith that interested me, for all about the place were pewter plates, jugs and tankards, as well as the moulds from which these had been newly cast, since some were still warm. Others were already in packing cases that bore the official licence of the Navy Office.

First it struck me as strange that Scroope should be supplying tableware for the Navy Office, until I remembered that many smiths loyally manufactured all kinds of things for our army in Flanders, and that doubtless they had as much need of plates and tankards with which to carry their victuals as they had need of cannon and shot.

I was starting to leave the workshop when my eye caught sight of some empty Mint money bags lying on the cobbled ground. When full of silver coin, these bags were sold at the Mint and their dissemination among the people at large left to chance, for there was no public expenditure available for the money’s distribution—which was, as every Englishman knew, a great fault of the recoinage. Rather it was the contiguity of these various items at the forge—the empty money bags and the pewter—that caused me to suspect that there was some bad businesshere; and examining one of the pewter plates more closely, I scratched the surface with the point of my sword, which prompted the discovery that the pewter was only a patina. For this tableware was not pewter at all, but solid silver, made of the melted coin that all those in the Mint laboured so hard to produce. What Scroope was evidently doing did not only undermine that recoinage, to the great disadvantage of the realm—to say nothing of King William’s campaign in Flanders, for if there was no good coin, his troops could not be paid—but he was also making a profit by melting the coin and smuggling it across the Channel to France, where silver fetched a higher price than in England. What was more, the face value of thenew coins was less than the value of the silver they contained. So that the mathematics of Scroope’s scheme were obvious: Scroope bought a pound’s weight of silve for sixty shillings to sell it in France for seventy-five.

It was a profit of twenty-five per cent. Not a great sum, perhaps, but if the main purpose of the scheme were not the profit but the advantage of the King of France, then it was clear to me how this treasonous act of economic impedition could easily pay for itself.