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Bathing With Coal

Written by Russ Rittgers

Fall, 1633

"Barnabas Kitchner! Wake up! It's Tuesday morning and you have to buy wood for the bathhouse fire."

The thirty-eight year-old man rolled over in bed and opened one eye. His wife, Margarete Lutsch, was already dressed and standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips.

Tuesday. People bathed on Saturday and Tuesday in this town of a thousand souls. Saturdays were regimented about who bathed and when. Mothers with young children bathed first. Then old women. Then teenage girls and single women. Single and old men, and then married couples. But today was Tuesday and in this town that meant first come, first served, no separation of ages or sexes. Each day had a completely different social atmosphere which served the community.

The early risers wanted a warm bath, no matter what the season. The late bathers, especially in summer, didn't mind cool water as long as it was halfway clean.

And oh, dear God, did they have clean water. The large reservoir for the baths had to be refilled at least three times every Saturday. Trip after trip, hauling water a hundred yards from their river near the Elbe, back and forth. The small consolation was that he didn't have to personally haul it all. The bad news was that his helpers, Lucas and Peter, lived with their parents and had to be lightly shepherded. Everyone in town had some kind of a useful job, including those who were not as smart or clever as others. Bigger towns and cities had pumps but using Lucas and Peter to haul water was far cheaper and gave them regular employment.

"But it's not even daylight yet! Nobody's going to be at the bathhouse." His feeble protest fell on deaf ears. As usual.

"Get up! You know Augustin Ramminger will be there even before the water is hot enough for you to finish filling the bathing tank. Now get moving!"

Yes, he did know. Augustin had been Barnabas' rival for Margarete's hand ten years earlier. Not infrequently Barnabas asked himself what Augustin would have done in his situation and decided that was why he was now Margarete's husband.

Barnabas had been footloose and fancy free sixteen years ago, the third son of a Lutheran pastor who had no inclination to follow in his father's footsteps or scholastic ambitions beyond his city’s gymnasium. So he was without regular gainful employment when he arrived in town. Margarete was good-looking and full-bodied, the daughter of the only bathhouse operator in town. When Barnabas was hired by her father to service its water and fires, he thought himself incredibly lucky. Not only would he have regular employment but he would be in contact with the object of his affections on a daily basis.

One thing led to another and her father—being wise enough not to object—agreed to their marriage ten years ago. The only surviving child of Papa Lutsch, Margarete inherited the bathhouse along with the family home three years later. And in arguments never let him forget where the source of his livelihood originated.

Barnabas sat up in the bed, sighed and scratched his head. There was only the slightest hint of light outside their window.

****

"Good morning, Barnabas. I've already set aside your usual order of wood." Titus Erlingen pointed towards a stacked pile. He gave a sigh. "But I'm going to have to charge you more. Because of all the construction in Magdeburg, prices for wood, even firewood such as I provide, are going sky-high."

"How much higher?" Barnabas twisted a lock of his graying hair. Margarete was going to give him fits if it was much above what it had been last Saturday morning. Her father had taught her how to manage the bathhouse and one of those skills was bookkeeping.

Titus grimaced. "Ten percent higher today than it was the other day. Heaven only knows when the prices will come down again."

"Ten percent! That's robbery, pure and simple! Why don't you just get out your knife and slit my purse?"

The wood-seller raised his eyebrows in innocence and shrugged. "You know I wouldn't charge you that much if I didn't have to. As it is, I'm barely covering my own costs. I'm having to go farther and farther afield to find firewood, so much of it having been burnt or otherwise destroyed by the imperial forces or the Swedish army. Every stick of this firewood had to be purchased from its owner, or from a villages' allocations."

Barnabas had no idea of where Titus acquired his firewood but had his own suspicions. For one thing Titus was here every Tuesday and Saturday morning, which meant he couldn't have gone that far, not out and back with his lone horse pulling the cart. For another, Titus was simply too well-fleshed. Barnabas suspected that Titus knew of an abandoned farming village and just gathered it himself without payment.

That said, in the fifteen years Barnabas had been buying, Titus never charged more than his competition.

He tried not to moan. "Five percent. I have to be able to tell my wife that I didn't pay the price you first quoted."

Titus shook his head. "Nine percent. Because we've been dealing with each other so long."

Barnabas hesitated. He might be able to get Titus down to seven but he doubted it. Titus looked entirely too unhappy even quoting the nine percent.

"Eight percent, all dry wood and you have a deal."

"Done. You can check each piece yourself."

****

Barnabas always split some of the new wood into kindling after he filled the stone heating tank. It also gave him something to do while he thought about how to tell Margarete about the price increase.

"Will I have to wait long?" Augustin asked, leaning at the open doorway, a towel over his shoulder. The still unmarried Augustin had done well in the past dozen years. He'd gone from being Barnabas' equal, a gymnasium graduate, to something of a dandy, working as the town's bookkeeper. Barnabas didn’t envy him his position or money. He didn't hate Augustin either, but there was no love lost, mostly because he still flirted with Margarete. All Barnabas knew was that there'd never been any gossip with real substance.

Barnabas opened the stopcock on the side of the heating tank and tested the water. "Fifteen minutes, no more."

"Quite all right. I'll just go back to the entrance and talk with your lovely wife." He turned gracefully and walked back towards the front of the bathhouse where Margarete would be waiting at the entrance for early bathers. She enjoyed his company entirely too much. Barnabas growled, thinking about it.

Years ago he would have seethed with indignation for an hour, but now he simply returned to his work.

The bathhouse wasn't large as such things go. Not halfway comparable to the one in the city he came from. No, this bathing tank was only a dozen feet across with room for no more than several bathers at the outer rim. On Saturdays there would be a line of waiting bathers, but on Tuesdays most of his hot water didn't go into the bathing tank.

Tuesday was when the townswomen did their laundry. Barnabas took each woman’s bucket, filled it and received a token in return. Margarete sold the tokens while she took bathhouse entrance fees. A simple enough process but one which drove Barnabas crazy on those occasions when Margarete had been ill.

****

Katerine Paffenburg handed him her bucket. "How are you today, Barnabas?"

Barnabas placed it on the stand and opened the stopcock. "Not bad, not bad, Katerine. How's your husband? I hear he's back to working as a regular crewman on the river."

The sturdy woman gave Barnabas a grudging smile. "Yes. He's transporting coal downriver to Magdeburg. They need tons of it every day."

He gave a sour grunt. "Tons of coal and the prices of firewood are going up every time I buy. Too bad I can't . . ." He stopped, his mind racing faster than he could put together coherent speech. If Magdeburg was using tons of coal every day, then either the city was richer than Croesus or . . . coal was dirt cheap.

"Well, I for one wouldn't want to use coal at home,” Katerine sniffed. “Willi brought home a sack of it last week and threw several chunks into our fireplace while I was out. Our entire house stank by the time I got home! I tell you, I gave him a piece of my mind!" Her red face was pinched in memory of her anger.

"Umm, I think I heard about that. Hadn't heard the details though." In this town, everyone knew almost everything about their neighbors, whether it happened outside or inside the walls of their home. Katerine was not known as a mild, submissive wife who had nothing but adoration for her husband. She’d given him much more than her opinion.

On this occasion, she chased Willi out of the house and down the street, screeching and hitting him with her broom every third or fourth step. Gossips of both sexes had a gleeful field day and last Saturday the bathhouse was filled with reports of the incident.

Barnabas gave Katerine an appreciative smile as he handed her the bucket of steaming water. "Well, now I'll know not to do that myself."

****

The day went smoothly. Barnabas only had to drain and replace the bath tank water once. The heating tank, on the other hand, had to be topped off frequently.

"What are you thinking about?" Margarete asked as they sat facing the fire after supper that evening. "You're normally complaining about your back or how slow Lucas and Peter refilled the reservoir."

He gave a sigh. "Like I told you, the price of firewood went up again. I think it will keep going up as long as they're building in Magdeburg."

"Well, I think Titus is overcharging. I've looked at the records and we've never, ever paid that much, except when Tilly's army was nearby, seizing all the available firewood for their own fires. Well, and during the middle of winter. But it's certainly not that now."

Barnabas shook his head. "Same or better price than the other woodsellers. I checked. What we need to do is change over to coal. I hear it burns hotter and is cheaper."

Margarete disagreed. "And it stinks. This bathhouse has been in my family for over a hundred years and we've always used wood. Besides, where would we get coal? Our customers would smell of coal fumes when they finished their baths. Surely you heard about Katerine and Willi the other day."

He rubbed his tired eyes. "Okay, you tell me. How much money did we make today, what with having to pay more for firewood?"

His wife’s lips tightened into a pucker. "Not nearly enough."

"I’m going to Magdeburg to find out how to use coal to make hot water."

****

"Lignite," Willi, Katerine Paffenburg’s husband, told him Monday morning, taking a rest from poling as the barge floated down the Elbe. "That's what we're hauling. Not the best kind of coal. That's anthracite. Almost as hard as rock and black as pitch. This isn't as hard and doesn't burn as hot, but for most purposes it's good enough. There are boats coming from elsewhere bringing anthracite to Magdeburg.”

As soon as the boat docked in Magdeburg, the boatmen began shoveling coal as fast as they could onto the waiting carts. Barnabas jumped off and ran to talk to the first teamster whose cart was nearly full.

"Yeah, I'll take you to where I take this but you'd be better off to run over to the building over there. He pointed to a series of tall brick smokestacks belching a dark brown smoke.

"Heating water?" the foreman asked over the din of men shoveling coal into fiery openings behind him. "That's all we do here. See those fires? "Inside the firebox, just past the fire is a cluster of water-filled tubes. Water flows from a feed water tank through the tubes. Gets boiling hot and powers its machine through steam pressure."

"No, no, that's not what I meant," Barnabas broke in, uncomfortably aware that the boat would soon be empty and, as his fare, he had to help pole it back upriver. "I operate a bathhouse. How hard would it be to heat water using coal?"

"Easy as pie. Same operation, but you don’t need to keep it under pressure. You’ll have to be careful to fill the feed water tank before firing the furnace. That's number one. You’ll probably want cast iron tubes for a more efficient transfer of heat. Never, never let them go dry with a fire under them. Number two, you'll want a smoke stack. Not as high as these because you're not going to do that much volume. But high enough to be taller than any chimney in town. That way the wind will blow the smoke away from town. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of unhappy neighbors. They won't like the smell of coal smoke, anyway, but that's the price you have to pay."

"Right. Thanks. I really have to leave. What's your name?"

"Krupp. Andreas Krupp. I'm from Essen but didn't want to be a gunsmith."

****

“Cast iron water tubes in the furnace and a tall chimney?” Margarete repeated. “That has to be expensive. Very expensive. We simply don’t have the money.”

“What if we got a loan?”

“Papa always said never to take out loans because it gives the lender power over you.”

“Well, I guess we could raise the price of the baths and the water. Or did Papa Lutsch have something against that?”

His wife thought for a few moments. “No, not really. But we’d practically have to double our prices at a minimum. As it is, we charge two pfennigs per bucket. Add a third and you’ve increased the price by half again. We’d have the same problem with baths. I don’t know what people would do but it wouldn’t be nice. Probably riot.” The corner of her mouth turned in a way ...