Page 159 of The Evening and the Morning

Den nodded his graying head. “Good enough,” he said. “Come and let me know. We’ll be ready.”

That evening Wynstan went around the hamlet and gave every household a side of bacon.

Before breakfast next morning Cuthbert went into his workshop and started a fire, using charcoal, which burned hotter than wood or coal.

Wynstan made sure the outer door of the workshop was closed and barred, then stationed Cnebba outside to stand guard. Finally he handed Cuthbert an ironbound chest full of silver pennies.

Cuthbert took a large clay crucible and buried it in the charcoal up to the rim. As it heated, it gradually turned the red color of the sun at daybreak.

He combined five pounds of copper, in thin slices cut off a cylindrical ingot, with the same weight of silver pennies, mixing them thoroughly, then poured the metal into the crucible. He boosted the flames with a pair of bellows, then as the mixture melted he stirred it with a puddling stick. The wood scorched in the hot metal, but that did no harm. The clay crucible continued to change color, becoming the bright yellow of the sun at noon. The molten metal was a darker shade of yellow.

On his workbench he arranged ten clay molds in a row. Each when full to the brim would hold a pound of the molten mixture: Wynstan and Cuthbert had established this, some time ago, by trial and error.

Finally Cuthbert took the crucible out of the fire, using two pairs of long-handled tongs, and poured the mixture into the clay molds.

The first time Wynstan had witnessed this process he had been scared. Forgery was a very serious crime. Any act that subverted the coinage was treason against the king. The punishment was amputation of a hand, theoretically; but a worse sentence might be imposed.

On that first occasion, when Wynstan was only an archdeacon, he had paced around the minster, going in and out of the forge, ceaselessly looking to see whether anyone was coming. He had behaved, he now realized, like the picture of a guilty man. But no one had dared question him.

He had quickly realized that most people preferred not to know about the crimes of their superiors, for such knowledge could get them into trouble; and he had reinforced this feeling with gifts. Even now he doubted whether the residents of the hamlet guessed what happened four times a year in Cuthbert’s forge.

Wynstan hoped he had not become careless—just more confident.

When the metal had cooled and hardened, Cuthbert turned the molds upside down and ejected fat discs of the copper-silver alloy. Next he hammered each disc, making them thinner and broader, until each one filled a large circle precisely scratched on the bench with dividers. One disc, Wynstan knew, would now provide two hundred and forty blank coins.

Cuthbert had made a punch of exactly the diameter of a penny, and now he used it to cut out blanks from the sheet of alloy. He carefully swept up the leftover fragments to be melted again.

On his bench he had three heavy iron objects of cylindrical shape. Two were dies, painstakingly engraved by Cuthbert with molds for the two sides of a King Ethelred penny. The lower die, called the pile, showed the king’s head, seen in profile, with the title “King of the English” in Latin. Cuthbert set this piece firmly into its slot in the anvil. The upper die, called the trussel, had a cross, plus, deceitfully, the attribution “Made by Elfwine in Shiring,” also in Latin. Last year the design had been modified, making the arms of the cross longer; a change that made life difficult for forgers—which was why the king did it. At its other end the trussel was mushroom shaped from much hammering. The third object was a collar that held the upper and lower dies perfectly aligned.

Cuthbert placed a blank on the pile, slipped the collar on, and inserted the trussel into the collar, letting it down until it rested on the blank. Then he gave the trussel a sharp tap with his iron-headed hammer.

He lifted the trussel and removed the collar. The top of the metal blank was now impressed with the cross. Cuthbert used a blunt knife to prise the coin off the pile, then turned it over to reveal the king’s head on the other side.

It was the wrong color, because the alloy was brown rather than silver. But there was a simple solution to that problem. Using his tongs, Cuthbert heated the coin in the fire then dipped it in a bowl containing dilute vitriol. As Wynstan watched, the acid took the copper away from the surface of the coin, leaving a sort of skin of pure silver.

Wynstan smiled. Money for nothing, he thought. Few sights pleased him more.

Two things gave him joy: money and power. And they were thesame, really. He loved to have power over people, and money gave him that. He could not imagine ever having more power and money than he wanted. He was a bishop, but he wanted to be archbishop, and when he achieved that he would strive to become the king’s chancellor, perhaps to be king; and even then he would want more power and money. But life was like that, he thought; you could eat your fill in the evening and still be hungry come breakfast time.

Cuthbert replaced the clay crucible in the fire and refilled it with another measure of mixed real coins and copper pieces.

While it was melting, he hammered the trussel again and popped out another penny.

“Fresh as a virgin’s tit,” Wynstan said appreciatively.

Cuthbert dropped the penny in the vitriol.

There was a sound from outside.

Cuthbert and Wynstan froze and listened in silence.

They heard the voice of Cnebba saying: “Go away.”

A young man’s voice said: “I’ve come to see Cuthbert.”

Cuthbert whispered: “That’s Edgar the builder.”

Wynstan relaxed.