1632: Essen Steel (10 page)

She looked at Regina as the young girl finally fell silent. A strand of Regina's blonde hair had escaped from under her cap and she played with it absent-mindedly. For a second a flash of loneliness sped across Regina's face.

Colette recognized that look. She'd seen it enough times in the mirror when she was Regina's age. The look of a young girl with no friends because she was different. Colette made up her mind. "Let's discuss the terms of your service." When she saw the sunburst smile on Regina's face she knew she'd made the right decision.

* * *

As October turned into November, the last two events of a hectic month dropped into place. It was a Thursday evening and Josh decided to attend the weekly meeting of the Grantville Chess Club. It was his first chance to go in over a month and he was pleased to see that Greg Ferrara had made it as well. When he caught Greg's eye and motioned to a corner table, Greg nodded and came over.

"You been busy too, Greg? Seems like I haven't seen you in months."

Greg laughed as he helped set up the chessmen. "Yeah, busy as hell. What about you? How's the crucible steel plant coming?"

"We're at full production now, two tons a week. I'm glad we did some advertising and free samples in the summer time, though. It's hard to break into a market with a new product. Everyone wants the other guy to try it first in case it's no good. But we've got some contracts now with several cutlery makers and inquiries from Solingen. Since the machine shops are starting to buy quite a bit we broke ground on the second plant last week. It's been a busy month."

After playing several games Josh asked Greg about the chemical plant.

"We're doing okay, but the big holdup is the lack of stainless steel. It's pretty critical if we want to produce large amounts of nitric acid. Not to mention antibiotics, DDT and sulfa drugs. Right now we are barely at the bucket stage."

Josh shook his head. "Well, if you can get me some chromite I could probably come up with some chemically resistant steel. Wouldn't be as good or last as long as stainless, but it might be good enough to break through your production bottlenecks for awhile."

Greg nodded. "We're going to ask Gustavus Adolphus to send an expedition to Finland to look for chromite at Kemi. But Kemi is going to require a lot of work even when we do find it."

"What about Maryland?" Josh asked. "From the information Vince had it looked like it would be pretty easy to spot and not difficult at all to mine."

Greg smiled. "But like you said at that first meeting, three thousand miles of ocean. Might be kind of a tough sell."

Still,
thought Josh,
both the Dutch and the English are in that general area.

Maybe Louis De Geer could be convinced to mount an expedition. It wouldn't take more than one or two hundred tons of chromite to get things rolling. He resolved to write De Geer the next day with a proposal.

Two days later Josh came home from work to find his wife sitting at the kitchen table with a letter in her lap and a stunned expression on her face. Regina was running about the room like a madwoman. She dashed up to Josh and gave him a hug. "Josh, wait till you hear the news! It's so fantastic!"

"What?" Josh asked. "What is it, sweetheart?"

Colette waved the letter at him. "I've been invited to give a lecture in Paris at the Petit Luxembourg on the Crucibellus Manuscripts. Apparently Marie de Gournay told her patroness I was the author."

"That's great! When are we going?" Josh said.

Colette laughed. "Josh, we have commitments, obligations! We promised my uncle we would help with the iron and steel plants in Essen next spring. The earliest we could get to Paris would be August."

Josh nodded. "August is fine with me. I'd love to go to Paris. Besides, don't you want to meet Marin Mersenne? And Pascal? And Roberval? You've talked about them often enough. I bet they'd love to meet the author of the Crucibellus Manuscripts. Write this patroness back, whoever she is, and tell her you can't be there until August of next year. She'll understand."

Colette laughed, but her laugh seemed a bit hysterical. "Will she? We are talking about the marquise de Combalet, Josh!"

"So?" Josh looked puzzled.

Colette sighed.
Men
. "She's the niece of Richelieu."

"Oh," said Josh. "THE Richelieu? As in the-de-facto-ruler-of-France Richelieu?"

Colette nodded.

"Oh, my," said Josh.

The next day Colette sent her apologies and explained that the earliest she could arrive in Paris would be August. The reply came back several weeks later. The marquise de Combalet would be delighted to offer her and her family rooms to stay at the Petit Luxembourg in August.

Louis De Geer received Josh Modi's proposal for an expedition to Maryland early in 1633. After reading over the proposal he smiled.

Already on it, nephew-in-law
, he thought,
already on it.
He chuckled to himself. Some of these American phrases were addicting.

* * *

When De Geer had toured the crucible steel plant in April of 1632, Josh Modi had explained that steel was simply a carbon alloy of iron, as was cast iron. Changing the percentage of carbon combined with proper heat treatment would allow the steel maker to tailor specific steel for specific uses, from cutlery to cannon.

"It's all just a matter of understanding the chemistry," Josh said.

De Geer staggered.

It was as if a lightning bolt had run through his body from head to toe.

For almost thirty years he had been involved with blast furnaces, gun foundries, and cast iron cannon. He owned iron mines, tin mines, calamine ovens, brassworks and numerous foundries. But never had there been an adequate explanation for the different kinds of iron that he dealt with every day. All the questions and thoughts he had ever had about iron coalesced suddenly into a coherent whole.

"And red shortness?" De Geer asked.

"Too much sulfur," Josh replied. "Any time you get poor quality iron, it's due to some contaminating element. The two major ones are sulfur and phosphorus. Even then, if you add just the right percentages you can get a different alloy steel with properties you might want. It's all just a matter … "

"Of understanding the chemistry," finished De Geer.

Josh nodded and smiled. "Correct. The interesting thing of course, is that the chemistry will change with different types of alloys and different percentages of alloys, as will how you need to heat treat the steel or iron. Up-time it had become pretty much of an exact science, whereas down-time everyone is still groping in the dark and doing all kinds of strange things, some of which waste a lot of time and money."

"Besides carbon," De Geer asked, "which types of alloys are most important for iron and steel?"

Josh stopped to ponder the question. "For steel right now I think tungsten and chromium are the most important. Tungsten would allow you to make a steel close to what was called 'hi-speed tool steel.' With proper heat treatment it allowed you to machine metal and parts at high temperatures. It was at least six times as good as regular carbon tool steel. Chromium would give you a better structural steel and at high percentages provides a lot of corrosion resistance to the steel. With around twelve to twenty percent chromium, if you could get the carbon part of the steel down low enough, say below two tenths of one percent, you would have what we call 'stainless steel.' But this will be pretty difficult until we can build induction furnaces and get pure chromium metal. Not impossible, just very difficult. Four-forty types of stainless actually contain from seven-tenths up to one percent carbon.

"For cast iron," continued Josh, "silicon is the most important alloy, I would say. Higher silicon content makes for a more homogenous cast iron that is less likely to crack and have holes and gaps, especially if you heat treat it properly."

As they continued the tour, De Geer motioned to De Vries who had been standing nearby. "Find out everything you can about steel alloys, especially tungsten, chromium and silicon. Locations, uses, everything."

On the day before their departure from Grantville, De Vries met with De Geer to go over what he had discovered.

"So tungsten can be found in the tailings of tin mines?" De Geer asked in surprise.

De Vries nodded. "The mineral is called wolframite and will be found in ores in combination with another mineral called cassiterite."

"And chromium?" De Geer asked.

"Easiest to use form would be chromite. The Americans have identified the locations in general terms: Kemi in Finland, Bursa in Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Maryland in North America. Kemi may be difficult because of the rock overburden. Maryland was the world supplier of chromite for many years in the up-time early 1800's. The formations occur in what are called 'Serpentine Barrens' which will actually be easy to find because they have a different ground cover than the surrounding forest. One of Josh Modi's friends, Vince Masaniello, showed me a copy of a brochure with a simple map of an area called Soldier's Delight where some of the chromite was mined. While it was used as an alloy for steel eventually, most of its early use was for producing a yellow dye."

De Geer grunted. If chromite in the up-time universe was used for a dye, he might be able to use that fact to enlist Amsterdam dye makers in an expedition. But something nagged him. "Maryland? Where have I heard that name?"

De Vries smiled. "I looked up the history. Does the name Lord Baltimore sound familiar?"

De Geer snapped his fingers. "Of course, Lord Baltimore. George Calvert."

Late in the winter of 1631 De Geer had attended a meeting hosted by Philip Burlamachi who had been the financial agent in Amsterdam for the English Crown for almost twenty years. As usual they gossiped about the kings they represented and Burlamachi had told him about Lord Baltimore's latest land venture.

Despite the fact that George Calvert was a Catholic, he was a favorite of Charles I. In 1625 Charles had given George Calvert the title of Baron of Baltimore in the kingdom of Ireland for services rendered to the crown. Due to the pressure Calvert felt because of his Catholicism, he kept founding colonies or obtaining land grants in the New World, hoping to persuade the king to legalize the practice of Catholicism in the colonies. His latest attempt was a charter granting him palatine rights to millions of acres north of Virginia. He had wanted to call the colony Cresentia, but Charles I insisted, said Burlamachi, on having it named after his Queen, Marieland. In order to interest people in coming to Marieland, said Burlamachi, Lord Baltimore intended to offer a variety of rewards, including large land grants, government appointments, and noble titles. Those who transported sufficient numbers of colonists could have their tract designated as a manor.

De Geer smiled. "When we return to Amsterdam, remind me to send you to England to see Lord Baltimore. I'll offer to supply a ship with colonists. Miners, of course."

De Vries laughed. "Perhaps you can be the count of Soldier's Delight?"

* * *

But the Maryland expedition had been complicated by the fact of George Calvert's death in London on April 15, 1632 while De Geer was in Grantville. De Geer waited until he had heard that Cecil Calvert, the new Lord Baltimore, had obtained another charter which had gone into effect on June 20, 1632. He then dispatched De Vries to London along with Dirck Graswinckel to negotiate a land grant in the northern part of the colony that contained the serpentine barrens.

"Tell him I will transport a ship full of colonists on the Dragon," De Geer told them. "Attempt to get at least one hundred thousand acres in the area we want."

For Louis De Geer, the spring of 1633 was a boom time for his armament business. Everyone seemed to be buying. The French, the Danes, the States General, even the English. The Spanish too had approached him, but he had never knowingly armed an enemy of The United Provinces, unlike Elias Trip. It was the English purchases that surprised De Geer the most. Rumors in the winter of 1632 had indicated that Philip Burlamachi was close to bankruptcy and that there had been a serious disagreement between Burlamachi and his brother-in-law and major creditor, Philip Calandrini. Then, as if by magic, Burlamachi seemed to be as wealthy as Midas. Longstanding debts going back as far as a decade had been paid off and Burlamachi was purchasing war material and recruiting mercenaries. A lot of mercenaries.

The question was, where was the money coming from?

There was only one reasonable answer.

France.

The question then became, what did Richelieu get out of it? What did the English have that Richelieu would want? And who would know the answer?

There was one major source of information that De Geer could count on. Jean Hoeufft. Through his brother, Mathieu Hoeufft, Jean Hoeufft was one of two agents that Richelieu used to obtain credit and purchase war material in Amsterdam. Earlier in the 1630's Jean Hoeufft had been the conduit for French money sent to Gustavus Adolphus through De Geer. If anyone would know what Richelieu had received for pouring silver into the hands of Charles I, it would be Hoeufft. De Geer sent for Jan de Vries. "I want you to go to Paris. Talk to Jean Hoeufft and see if you can discover what the French got for the money they're pouring down the English rat hole."

De Vries nodded. "By land or by sea?"

De Geer smiled. "By sea. It will be quicker."

Five weeks later De Geer received three separate dispatches from Jan de Vries over the space of a week. Clearly, De Vries wanted to make sure the message got through. Each had been encoded using the cipher system given them by Colette, and each had the same message once decoded.

NORTH AMERICA.

Oh ho
, thought De Geer when he read the message.
Lord Baltimore is going to be unpleasantly surprised, if he doesn't already know.

De Geer shook his head. No, if Cecil Calvert knew then the news would have leaked by now. So both the English and the French were keeping this a secret. Which, given the nature of the royal courts in both countries, astonished him. In fact, it made De Geer uneasy. If they could keep something this momentous secret, what else might be going on?