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 forge. 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
