She was skin and bones, bulked out only by her bunched garments; the girl was an insubstantial fairyweight. It was as well she ate so slowly, or her stomach might have rebelled at the unaccustomed rich fare. Her face looked blanched, her eyes hollow, with dark rings beneath. Her tangled hair was greasy as an old sheep's wool, while bloody scratches on Kinchin's forearms and forehead told their own story of fleas and lice.
The housewife sighed. She had more compassion than many. Birmingham was a puritan town, with a famously outspoken minister, Francis Roberts. The inhabitants earned their livings by their skill and enjoyed their independence while they did so, but they had imagination and knew good fortune was easily lost. Any accident in his forge could render Lucas unable to work; then his penniless wife would have no support for herself and the baby that was gnawing its rattle in the wooden cradle. Another plague year, sooner or later, was inevitable too. The last bad epidemic had struck when the Lucases were first married. To be a young bride while trade was in the doldrums had taught hard lessons. Pie had been a rarity. The couple had eaten not even bread and butter, but bread and dripping if they ever had it, or plain crusts otherwise.
Everyone was more prosperous now. Mistress Lucas could afford to be charitable. Even so, she knew that to give more than occasional food and friendship would risk bringing down a flock of Kinchin's feckless relatives, all scrounging and whining for more than the housewife wanted to afford. She was wise enough to go warily, however much her heart pitied the pale waif.
She was preoccupied anyway. While she was out at market she had heard that the King's soldiers wanted to buy swords. 'Kinchin, lick up that dish and then run out the back and see if Lucas has anybody with him at the forge.'
Kinchin caught the troubled note in her voice. She scrambled to look outside, then squeaked excitedly that several men were arguing with Lucas. Seizing the girl by the wrist (still thinking of the danger to her pewter tankards and the firedogs if she left Kinchin indoors alone), Mistress Lucas rushed outside and approached nervously down the path. 'Oh no; I feared so. It is the King's men, wanting swords!'
Lucas had come out from the forge and was barring its wide door. Some of the soldiers had given up and were moving on, but a couple remained and were remonstrating with him.
'Tell them that you have none, Lucas!' called his wife.
He has some swords and has hidden them! thought Kinchin, in amazement, since resistance seemed so perilous. Wide-eyed, she assessed the strangers. Their court accents sounded ridiculous, as if they were exaggerating their voices as a jest. Not many such fanciful suits and boots crunched down the cinder paths to the backstreet forges. Unlike the stolid farmers who visited Birmingham, standing feet apart with their arms folded as they bought and sold cattle, these men positioned one foot in front of the other like dancing masters, while they leaned back in exaggerated poses; they had done it for so many years the stance was natural. They tilted their chins up to survey Lucas snootily, while he squarely blocked the entrance to his smithy and stared back. Beyond the group, Kinchin could see two tethered horses, expensive and glossy: wild-eyed, high-stepping beasts, too risky to be offered carrots.
'I will not sell to the King,' Lucas reiterated steadily. He was taking pig-headed pleasure in refusal. A strong man, red-faced from the fire and sure of his competence, Lucas normally conducted himself quietly. Blacksmiths had to be intelligent — and they had to be independent. He was unimpressed by the cavaliers' outrageous manners, and unafraid. He showed it.
'Five pounds the two dozen — we have offered the best price.' The King's agent spoke with astonishment. They thought money was all. Having a tradesman talk back came as a shock too.
'Not enough to buy my conscience.'
'Then you are a rebel and a traitor!'
'So be it.'
'You will be sorry. Your whole damn traitorous town will regret this!'
Lucas merely shrugged. Mistress Lucas and Kinchin shrank together as the cavaliers strode off to their tall horses, cursing.
A while later, Kinchin left Little Park Street and made her way into Digbeth to search for relatives in the taverns. The streets were quiet; the unwanted troops had left.
It took some trouble to run her father to earth, for he was not at the Bull, the Crown, the Swan, the Peacock, the Talbot, the Old Leather Bottle, the White Hart or the Red Lion. When she found him, pretending to wash pots at the Old Tripe House — which rarely sold tripe now, since it was easier to offer ale only — he told her that one of her brothers had answered the King's call for local recruits. 'Our Rowan. He thinks they will pay him — he's a fool but so are they. If they don't use his head as a firing mark, he'll take anything he can grab and run away'
'Shall we ever see him again?'
'Who cares? He's a mardy good-for-nothing, all mouth and snot. He's only gone for the rations and the plunder. Any army that takes him is piss-poor and ready for defeat.'
Suspecting that Rowan might really be quite clever to enlist, Emmett changed the subject. He had further news. Local men had ambushed a small group of Royalists who were tagging behind the main cavalcade with the baggage. Some of these guards had been killed; the rest were made prisoner and sent for safe keeping to Coventry, a better stronghold than Birmingham. The captors refused even to speak to their prisoners, thereby coining a new catchphrase: sending to Coventry. Correspondence, plate and jewels seized from the baggage train had been despatched to Warwick Castle.
'They should never have done it,' grumbled Tew. He was a thin wraith who hovered on the edges of taprooms, drawing suspicion to himself by the very furtive way he lurked. 'They will rue the day they set upon the King — and I'll tell you — ' He was wagging his finger insistently. He must have found plenty of people to stand him a tankard to celebrate the very ambush he was deriding. 'It will never be the hotheads who suffer for it, but innocents like us.'
'The King stayed with Holte,' Kinchin muttered, knowing the effect it would have if she mentioned the man who had made the Tews homeless.
'Then the King is a whoreson bastard and I hate him!' yelled her father. He banged his tankard down so hard a great wash of ale slopped out. Kinchin sat quiet. Almost vindictively, Emmett turned on her. 'You have an admirer, my girl. Someone came looking for you, Kinchin!
… Don't you want to know who he is and what he's after?'
'No.' Kinchin's tone was drab. She knew it could only have been Mr Whitehall, the mad minister, wanting what he always wanted.
Chapter Twelve — Birmingham: October, 1642
The sword Lucas was making had been hurriedly hidden from the cavaliers. He returned inside the smithy. It was purposely kept dark so he could evaluate the fire and judge from the colour of heated metal when it had reached the correct temperature — changing through a range of pale colours that did not show in the darkened forge, through dull red, sunrise red, cherry red, bright red, light red, orange, and yellow. Swords were forged at cherry red, then tempered at a lighter colour.
There were many stages to making a sword; that was why, apart from the metal they needed, they were never cheap. Birmingham was turning out weapons upon which soldiers could rely; there would be thousands of these sent to Parliament's armies eventually. They were workaday models that never carried makers' marks, short tough blades that the soldiers often abused. There were famous cutlers, many of them foreigners, who had worked in London and who would soon move to Oxford to follow royal patronage. These high-flown Swedes and Germans made long rapiers with polished gold- and silver-decoration and bijou daggers for gentlemen. They always sneered at the plain Birmingham blades, yet the King's men today had known what they were trying to buy. The war would be won using these unsigned, affordable, mass-produced weapons.
Purse-lipped, Lucas began work again. First he dragged open a large shutter with which he had closed off his workplace when the unwelcome purchasers came. To work in the heat and dust, he needed good ventilation. Still pensive, he added extra expensive charcoal to the forg
e. The brick-built hearth had its bellows permanently attached, with an air pipe that ended in an iron 'duck's nest' at the heart of the fire. Country forges allowed the smoke to wander upwards and find its own way out, but towns were more sophisticated and Lucas had a brick hood and a chimney to draw off smoke and fine ash. His anvil stood as near as possible to the fire to reduce the distance he must move when carrying hot metal.
The smithy interior was cluttered, both with items he had made or was still making, and with his tools. He was a true blacksmith; he worked with ferrous metals, never lead or tin. Nor did he use gold or silver, the jewellers' material, nor bronze, although for his own amusement very occasionally he would make a household item of brass, to prove he could do it and to please his wife with the gift. Although he could shoe horses, he hardly ever did so; that was a farrier's job. Nor did he like to mend wagons' iron rims, but would send would-be customers on to a wheelwright. He had originally specialised in knives, though to earn extra money he mended pots, farm tools and firedogs. Now he made swords.
The tools of his trade were cumbersome: the forge with its fuel buckets, riddles and rakes; the single-horned anvil, set into a heavy oak stump at the right height for his knuckles, with its variously shaped elements for different tasks; the bicks, fullers and swages that were the anvil's moveable accessories; the quenching bath and the slack tub, where worked metal cooled. On racks that Lucas had made for the purpose hung his hammers, especially the crowned peen hammers that he used most often, with their slightly rounded edges that would not mark a blade as it was worked; he had also a great sledge hammer and other hammers with large, flat heads. Beside the anvil stood the vice. Close to hand were tongs in various sizes, then chisels, punches, files, a treadle-operated grinder that he had devised himself, drills and presses. All around the workplace were racks for holding work-in-progress. The fuel hut was outside, along with water butts.
To make a regular sword, first iron would be drawn out: pulled to the required length and flattened. A small tang would be formed on one end, where eventually a pommel and protective hilt would be fixed. The edge would be dressed on the anvil with glancing hammer blows, finished, then polished by hand. Some swords tapered towards the point, which affected their balance. Bringing the weight back close to the soldier's fist would make a weapon easier to manoeuvre, though at the same time it reduced the killing power available at the point. Most of the swords Lucas made had very little tapering. The civil war armies generally used swords of almost equidistant width, with neat points, longer for cavalrymen who needed to sweep down from horseback, shorter for the close hacking of infantry.
There was a great deal of work in the early stage, when the metal was worked in sections of six or eight inches at a time, being continually turned over and worked from both sides, and frequently reheated. Carbon was added to the iron, forming steel and strengthening the blade. The whole piece would be completely heated in the forge and allowed to rest through cooling, to remove stresses. Once shaped, it would be reheated again and this time cooled down extremely slowly, for many hours and perhaps a whole day. This made it soft enough for grinding the edge. Then came more heating to harden the blade again, which had to be done evenly at the cherry-red temperature, during which process it was swiftly quenched in cold brine, maybe several times until the smith was satisfied. This rapid cooling created hardness, then tempering added toughness to the steel and ensured the blade was not too brittle. To temper a sword, Lucas would clean any scale from its blade, then take a solid iron bar as long as the sword itself. The sword was placed upon the bar, back down for a regular single-edged blade; it would heat up to a blue colour before being allowed to cool naturally in the air. The result would be a tough and springy body, with a hard edge.
Lucas was a worrier. He was distressed by the incident with the King's men, and he admitted it to himself. With his mind still in turmoil, he took the current half-finished blade and prepared to continue where he had left off. He was hardening the blade. His concentration was elsewhere. That was how this sword became, if not 'a Friday job', at least a Wednesday one. In his agitation, Lucas rushed the work.
After he resumed, he decided it would never be a good one. He had already worked on it for days. He was reluctant to dispose of it and start again. He was a sensitive, honest craftsman, so he knew when to give up and abandon a bad piece; yet there were some faults he could mend. That knowledge too was part of the skill he had built up over the years. He felt in his heart that this sword was beyond saving.
The fault, if there was one, could not be seen by eye. In time Lucas grudgingly completed the weapon, added metal guard, hilt and pommel, and finally sharpened the edge. But he hated it. The sword assumed abnormal significance, coloured by the sour incident with the cavaliers. They had caused him to make a bad piece. So long as he possessed this sword he would remember their visit, but he could not be rid of it because his instinct kept telling him it was not right. If he sent it to the army, he would never know what happened, but he feared it was too brittle and would shatter. That could be the death of the man using it.
Irritated with himself, Lucas kept it back from sale. He hung it in the rafters, out of the way. It would remain at the smithy for another six months, a perpetual reproach to him. Only when Prince Rupert of the Rhine came to Birmingham to exact revenge for anti-Royalist activities, would this sword be brought out and begin its travels.
Chapter Thirteen — Wallingford: November, 1642
Juliana Carlill and Orlando Lovell were married at the end of November.
To arrive at a wedding had involved a flurry of negotiation. Persuading Juliana to accept him had been relatively easy for Lovell. He was always persuasive. Although she was sensible and thoughtful, as soon as he broached the proposal, Juliana felt the allure. He was a mature man who posed a challenge, a challenge that the much younger and nicer Treves would never have matched. Though Lovell's interest was unexpected, he did seem serious. He had studied Juliana closely enough to express willingness to be her life's partner on equal terms. If he was not exactly befriending her — for his manner remained cool, rather than that of a besotted lover — at least he appeared to be offering kindness. No realistic woman could ask for more.
Initially Juliana suspected that Mr Gadd, as her cautious guardian, would resist this match. However, Gadd's enquiries about the two cavaliers had unearthed a pedigree for Orlando Lovell — a landed, county pedigree that would have been excellent, but for his quarrelling with his father and running away from home at the age of sixteen. To Lovell's ill-concealed annoyance, Mr Gadd had discovered that he was the second son of a gentleman in Hampshire; his father believed he had emigrated to the Americas eight years before, with no communication since.
The Lovells were solid Independents and supporters of Parliament. The elder brother was now a captain in the Earl of Essex's army. How such a family would view this other son, if it became known he had been a mercenary soldier in Europe, was something Mr Gadd could guess. Lovell's current service with Prince Rupert would offend them even more. Was there was any chance of a reconciliation between Lovell and his father? Marriage could be the occasion for patching things up.
Mr Gadd had explored whether Lovell's mother might intercede, but discovered she was long dead.
When challenged, Lovell frankly confessed the quarrel's cause: 'I attempted an elopement with the dangerously young daughter of a wealthy neighbour. The girl, who was the sole heir to extensive property, was intercepted by family servants when already in a carriage with her favourite gowns, her jewellery and a picnic which consisted only of fresh pears.' He must have realised that the detail of the pears would make Juliana laugh, her first step towards forgiveness. Only much later did she guess he had invented the fruit.
The young heiress was whisked away to distant relatives. Lovell was flatly told he would never see her again. His parents, old friends of the girl's family, were horrified by the escapade. Orlando refused to admit any error; he claimed tha
t a second son needed to find himself a future by whatever means he could. Worse, he refused to apologise.
'So you believed you were in love?' suggested William Gadd. He had no doubt Orlando Lovell was still finding himself a future — hence his interest in Juliana.
'I believed it,' said Lovell, looking pious. 'I was quite devoted.' Mr Gadd did not argue, though he was sure such a youthful infatuation would never have lasted.
'You have a romantic past,' commented Juliana who, because it affected her so directly, had been allowed to share their conversation. She managed not to sound as though a romantic past impressed her, although naturally it did. She already thought Lovell no better than he should be, so this did him no harm. 'What became of the poor young lady?'
'I do not know.' Lovell appeared to sound regretful. 'I dare say she has a whining husband, half a dozen children and gout.' Then he continued disarmingly: 'Inevitably people thought that I was in love only with her money — too foolish to realise that if the elopement had succeeded, the money would have been taken away from her.'
Mr Gadd surveyed him thoughtfully. He believed Lovell had never been foolish. The elopement would probably have worked: Gadd was wondering whether the sixteen-year-old had seen that the sole heiress of truly loving parents was unlikely to be stripped of her entire fortune, no matter what adventurer carried her off.
The question now was whether Lovell had prospects. Given his turbulent family history, his chances looked slim. He came up with an answer.
With an air of deep sorrow, Lovell explained why suddenly he could contemplate marriage: 'Tragedy has struck my family. At the battle of Edgehill last month, a ghastly incident occurred. Wearied beyond sense, a musketeer in the Earl of Essex's army clapped his hand into a wagon of gunpowder, forgetting that he still held a length of lighted match in his fingers. There was an enormous explosion, killing him and many comrades. One casualty, I grieve to tell it, was my elder brother Ralph.'
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