Without ice there would have been no cities.
From Revolution
I had never been a morning person, even under the best conditions, which these were not. A pot of tea was usually just about enough to get me on my way, not a cup of water from the pump, drunk so cold as to make the head hurt.
Though I had slept in my clothes, the bedbugs had found a way through. I halted in the track to scratch through layers of skirts and stocking at my calf, which was dotted with bites, raised and hot. At least we were not riding – my legs and back were sore from the previous day in the saddle. As should Julia’s have been, though she sprang up the path ahead of me, as if returning from a rest cure. With Julia, mood would always rule over physical considerations. And today she was excited.
We’d still not been told whether the crowd leading us was merely a deputised group or the whole community. There had been little talk since we started walking an hour before. For most of that time the path had been rising.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” said Julia.
I chose not to answer.
Dark lines had for some time been visible at the top of the ridge above us. I’d taken them to be a phenomenon of geology, but as we climbed I saw that they were too regular to be natural. Closer still, I realised that they were raised above the ground surface, reminding me of the kind of racks that fishermen use to dry their catch. Only when we had reached the top of the path was it possible to see their true nature. They were metal troughs, supported above the ground by a framework of posts. The crowd had stopped and were gathering around the nearest one.
“They grows the ice here,” said Gideon.
“We do,” said the wrinkled man.
“Grow?” I asked. “How does ice grow?”
Gideon pointed up the next rise. “There’s a lake up top. When they raise the sluices water gets to flood the troughs. The ice grows fast.”
“Five a night, with good freeze on,” said the wrinkled man.
“Five what?”
“Five times it gets filled and frozen,” explained Gideon.
“We did eight once,” interjected a woman standing on the far side of the trough. Others nodded, smiling wistfully.
I knelt and looked up at the metalwork from below. The base was thick with baffles, looking like black gills. I wondered where the workers sheltered through the night as they waited for the water to freeze.
The wrinkled man rapped a bony knuckle on the metal, making it ring. “Hundred and fifty blocks a trough,” he said.
I stood again. Looking along its length, I noticed that it was divided up by lines of projecting metal, and that ice formed within them would indeed break naturally into regular blocks. One hundred and fifty blocks multiplied by – I did a quick count of the troughs – multiplied by twenty then tried to multiply again by five for the number of nightly loads.
“Fifteen thousand,” said Julia.
“Seventy-five tonne a night,” said the wrinkled man.
The figure seemed extraordinary. I wondered how much of the year it fell below freezing. Being the highest land between the Welsh mountains and the east coast, there would be nothing to stop the wind. It would howl across the tops in winter. Imagining the scene, I found Gideon’s belief in a cruel God easier to understand.
“How do they count the blocks?” asked Julia.
“Best shown,” said the wrinkled man. Then he set off along the line of a small gully that traversed the hillside. It was a man-made water course, though with only a trickle in the bottom. But in winter I imagined it would be full. And frozen. There could be no better surface to slide a heavy load along than ice. Perfectly flat, almost frictionless. I thought back to the strange implements we had seen in the outhouse. Some of them might indeed have been designed to hook ice blocks and haul them.
I glanced behind and saw that Peter followed on with the last stragglers at the back of the group. He had kept to himself all morning, smoking most of the time. He seemed more isolated than before. If he had recognised me, I did not believe he’d mentioned it to Gideon, who remained unchanged in character. Or, if something had passed between them, the older man must have brushed it off as ridiculous.
The path now rounded a bluff. Ahead of us it dipped into a small valley and disappeared into a dark opening in the mountainside. There were other people here. Families dressed just like the ice farmers we’d already met. Greetings were waved. Some shook hands. But it was Julia and myself who drew their interest. All eyes followed us as we approached the hole in the hillside.
Gideon and the wrinkled man each took a candle lantern from a niche in the wall and led us into a downward sloping tunnel.
“You dug this?” I asked.
The wrinkled man laughed. “Not us. Miners dug it long ago.”
“The hills are full of holes like this,” said Gideon. “Lead, copper, zinc. They dug it all here.”
I thought back to the strange trackway we had followed, also built by the miners.
The temperature dropped as we descended. Then, quite suddenly, the chill became intense. The wrinkled man hauled open a wooden door and winter flooded out to meet us. “This is what tha come for to see.”
He held up his lantern, revealing ice stacked all around. I was vaguely aware of someone closing the door behind us as we stepped along a narrow way between piled blocks. Every few paces there were side corridors, identical to the one we were walking along. I couldn’t see the full size of the chamber, which receded into darkness all around.
“What’s all this ice worth?” My breath steamed as I spoke.
The wrinkled man chuckled. “It’s worth nowt.”
“It’s worth nowt yet,” Gideon explained. “That’s the trick. Four month of freezing. One month for mending broken kit. Then seven month for carting ice down to the bargemen. That’s the life up here. What’s frozen water at Christmas – by midsummer it’s treasure.”
“Who counts the blocks?” I asked.
“It’s family by family. Eldest keeps tally.”
“In a ledger?”
“Don’t need to write it,” said the wrinkled man tapping the side of his head with a crooked finger. He strode off down the passage gesturing to one pile of blocks after another. “Logan, Linnell, Speller, Bradshaw, Mansell, Martin, Williams...”
“The ice farmer families,” Gideon explained.
“Men from Derby come to fix the bargain – that’s the price. Then we haul the ice down to the canal and the boatmen take it.”
“So it’s never written down?” asked Julia.
“No use writing,” said Gideon. “None of us can read.”
It was past noon by the time our guides suggested we take our leave. The wrinkled man shook my hand. His finger joints were distorted and the skin felt like roughly sawn wood. Then he moved to Julia.
“Goodbye,” she said.
“Tha knows how it is being poor?” he asked.
The question seemed to unsettle her.
“I know what it’s like to be hungry,” I said.
He nodded and let go of her hand. “What they take – it’s nowt but pennies. But it’s bread to us.”
“We’ll stop them,” said Julia. “I promise.”
I bit my lip, wishing her words unsaid.
The journey back to the cottage was quicker for being downhill. Peter and Gideon strode off ahead. But to guard against injury, Julia and I were obliged to walk with eyes fixed on the uneven path before our feet. There was little conversation.
At the cottage, Gideon saw to the horses, which had been tethered on long ropes so they could graze circles in the thin grass. As dusk fell, Peter built a fire in the grate. The men seemed immune to the smoke, which failed to properly clear up the chimney. But Julia and I were made of weaker stuff and retreated to sit by one of the outhouses. The sky was so clear that it seemed milky with stars.
“Out here there’s no one to know who you are,” Julia whispered.
“They might already know.”
“Nonsense! You could live in a cottage in the mountains and never be found.”
“What would I do for food?”
“It would cost so little. I’d send money.”
“And how long before news spread of the eccentric woman huddled by a peat fire in the mountains?”
“You’d see them coming. You could move on.”
“And on. And on again.”
“Then why not live in secret on the wharf. The boat people would keep you safe.”
“They’d turn me in.”
“No!”
“You didn’t see how they changed when the Kingdom flag went up in Bessie’s porthole.”
Julia regarded me with a sceptical eye. “You’ve surely misjudged them. In your distress you’ve imagined ill-feelings that they don’t hold.”
“Someone told the constables to look for me in the library.”
“As I might have done if I hadn’t known the dangers! If you came back to the wharf we’d explain to them. You’d be cared for by those who admire you – who are many.”
I shook my head. “There’s nowhere in the Gas-Lit Empire for me to hide.”
“Well I surely hope you won’t be hiding beyond it!”
“No,” I said. “No chance of that. There’s too little law beyond the Empire. Yet too much law within it.”
We had been able to hear the sound of Peter and Gideon conversing inside the cottage. Now Gideon began to sing. I couldn’t make out the words but the tune I knew from my childhood as the King of the Faeries. One of the trick riders in the Circus of Mysteries had whistled it to the horses to calm them.
“Have you thought more about the code?” I asked.
“I’ve put it out of my mind,” she said.
“You mentioned a code book. What might it look like?”
“I’ve never seen one.”
“Can such things be bought?”
“You’d make one yourself,” she said. “Or rather, you’d make two. One for the sender to put the message into code and one for the receiver to turn it back to plain text.”
“It might look like a notebook, then?”
“Perhaps. Or loose sheets. Or anything you could write on. Best put the puzzle out of your mind. There’s no solving it.”
My instruction to Tinker had been to look for papers. He might not have recognised a book as being important enough to take. Or, if it was a small thing, the man might have kept it on his person. In a pocket perhaps, or sewn into the lining of his coat.
“You’re more likely to find answers in the newspaper pages,” Julia said, interrupting my thoughts. “At least those we can read.”
The truth was I had read through the sheets of newsprint three times already. The only articles that could relate to the case were two that mentioned Mrs Raike, but they were of no consequence. The first being a notice of a fund-raising dinner and the second being an article about charitable foundations in the city.
“Ice is mentioned three times,” I said. “There’s a list of commodity prices on one page. Tea, coal and the like. And ice. But I can’t fathom why that could be important. What difference if the ice farmers have lost ninety-nine pennies or one hundred? It’s mentioned once more in the business section – an article on the profitability of the canals through the year. The phrase there was ‘ice-bound’. And once in the foreign news – the report of a public execution in Bristol. They hanged a murderer from a low drop so the neck bones would be preserved. The body was quickly packed in ice and transported for medical research.”
“Public executions,” Julia said, speaking the words as if she had swallowed rancid milk. “How are Royalists so callous?” And then quickly she added: “I don’t mean you, Elizabeth. You’d never go to see such a thing.”