Kinchin was frightened by the fire, more frightened by the soldiers' continuing violence. She pushed her way through to the High Cross, trying to leave town. But all the buildings ahead of her were ablaze. Their destitute owners stood weeping in the street; cavaliers only jeered as thick smoke gusted everywhere. Above Dale End and the Welch End, crackling flames leaped twice as high as the timber houses. To Kinchin's left, Moor Street was noisily burning, and when she ran into Chapel Street, a strong wind blew a great conflagration across the cherry orchards towards her.
At the Bull Inn, opposite the disused priory, with flames hot on her face, Kinchin stopped. A soldier barged past, carrying a pan of hot coals, on his way to start another fire somewhere. A man waved a besom broom at her, its bound twigs streaking the air with sparks. Too much terror finally overcame the girl. As she stood on the cobbles in confusion, she caught two riders' attention.
She recognised the red-haired cavalier and his horse: Faddle. A second rider loudly swore at people, 'The prince deals with you mercifully now! When we come back, with the Queen's army, you will know our true minds — no one will be left alive!'
Edmund Treves saw her. 'Get to safety!' He struggled to control his horse, disturbed by the fires. He could tell how the night's events had changed the girl. She had lost all her earlier trust of him. Of course she was right. Treves had stayed at the Ship Inn, on the outskirts, but he knew what had gone on in the town. Guilt sickened him — though he would not change his loyalty to the King.
Someone else spotted Kinchin, Her father, Emmett, had been loitering in the hope of grabbing property from open houses. Emmett dropped his robbery sack; with ghastly determination he grabbed his daughter and hauled her right under the cavaliers' horses. Gripped so fiercely, the nightmare of her encounters with Mr Whitehall returned to her. 'Here's a nice clean girl, sir!'
'Will you make her a doxy?' Treves retorted angrily.
'No, you may do that!' leered Emmett. 'She will know no other trade, sir,' he wheedled plaintively, as if this excused selling her. He sounded desperate. A kinchin mort — that's a girl, sir, who is brought to her full age and then — '
'No!' His daughter shrieked, now mortified.
Kinchin rebelled. The nickname she had always endured was suddenly hateful. She struggled wildly. Until now, she had accepted her family's intentions. They brought her up to sell. If she stayed with them, they would do it. The closest friends she had ever had were killed last night. Nobody cared for her now.
Unexpectedly, Kinchin wrenched free. In the fight with her father, she dropped the sword that she had taken from the forge. Then Treves's companion reined in his great horse above where it lay upon the ground.
She knew that man too. Kinchin looked up into those unblinking eyes. It was the man with the turquoise hatband. He was holding his carbine. Once again the idea of shooting this girl, the idea that had crossed Orlando Lovell's mind last night, returned to him.
This time, Kinchin picked up and held the sword so Lovell could see it. Lovell reached to hook it from her grasp. Kinchin scrambled backwards. Her father grabbed at her again but it was a feeble movement. She dodged Emmett and fled.
The fire roared all around her; she saw only one way to run. She beat a path back through the unburned part of the town, moving as fast as she could manage through the lamenting crowds. Slowing, she doubled back down the High Street past the Swan Inn where Thomas had been shot, back through the markets where Mr Whitehall had been mangled, around St Martin's Church and past Little Park Street where Mistress Lucas lay dead in her house. She ran down into Digbeth. The last cavaliers were leaving, over the stone bridge. Finding a gap in the procession, she went through Deritend where unknown numbers of killed defenders lay under the flattened earthworks. She passed the Ship Inn, where the elegant Prince Rupert had spent a civilised night, allegedly unaware of the deeds being perpetrated throughout Birmingham in his name.
When the distraught girl reached the end of the houses and taverns, she kept walking. The road she was on travelled out through the water meadows into open country. She went with it, sobbing. Once she was certain of her intent and sure that nobody was following, she paused, turned herself and looked back bleakly. Much of Birmingham was burning. Almost a hundred houses would be lost that day, with numerous barns and outbuildings. But the wind was changing; she could feel it on her tearstained face. The wind would eventually blow back upon itself, so the fire was contained and doused.
Hundreds of people were homeless and destitute, many more were shocked and grieving. They would cluster together and support one another. They would relate their troubles to the kingdom at large and perhaps be consoled by the telling. But this set-faced, lonely vagabond would gain no comfort, for she possessed no family and no community. Empty-handed, godless, friendless, hopeless and even nameless now, the young girl took one last look at the fiery desolation she had left behind. Then she turned her face to the south again and strode onwards in her sorrow.
Chapter Eighteen — London: May, 1643
Bad men bearing dubious offers always appear at the right time. So, once again, Bevan Bevan correctly chose his moment to manipulate his great-nephew, Gideon Jukes.
Bevan understood Gideon's situation. A young man of twenty-two, newly created a company freeman and recently cheered by military success, would be looking around for a woman. Unlike Lambert, a lively lad from puberty, the younger Jukes brother was a straightforward and still naive bachelor. Despite his heritage as one of London's merchant class, Gideon did not canoodle with other men's wives or flirt with their daughters. He had never engaged with lewd women in back-alley taverns, let alone visited the notorious brothels that lay over the river in Southwark. Even if he secretly considered that, Gideon liked the easy life; he was too frightened of discovery. He still cringed at the fuss over his dotterel escapade. For him, marriage was the only solution.
Bevan knew, too, that Parthenope and John Jukes were leaving Gideon to find his own wife. The dangerous times made them cautious. They wanted him to be happy, but it seemed less urgent to push Gideon into marriage than when they had begged Lambert to wed Anne Tydeman after courting her for years. Anne and Lambert now lived in the family home; if Gideon married, it raised tricky questions about how far his parents should go in setting him up. The Jukes always claimed their sons were equal, but in families equality can be elastic.
Although it was a decade since Bevan regularly dined at the Jukes table, once in a while he still arrived on the doorstep. He expected his slice of roast beef and demanded more gravy with it, as if he were the family patriarch. Then when John Jukes angrily stomped out to the yard for a pipe, Bevan — who was less mobile with his gouty legs — would push back his chair and pontificate on how Lambert and Gideon should manage their lives. Gideon was generally at home to hear it. Bevan seemed to have studied his pattern of behaviour.
'Don't leave it so long as I did! Marry while you have the spirit to manage your wife and brood.'
Startled by the idea of a brood, Gideon merely raised his eyebrows and scuttled off to join his father beside the burnt-out house-of-easement, where they gloomily enjoyed their tobacco and waited for the uncle to depart.
Undeterred, Bevan next brought his wife, Elizabeth, and her wide-eyed unmarried niece.
The niece, Lacy Keevil, was a relative through Elizabeth's previous marriage. 'Up from the country' — which only meant from Eltham — Lacy had been taken into the Bevan household to help with their rumbustious children. She seemed to know when to hang her head shyly among strangers. 'More to her than she shows!' Lambert muttered, conspiratorially. Gideon liked the sound of that.
He stared at Lacy Keevil. She looked too anxious to be dangerous. For her years — sixteen — she had a rounded, mature figure. Her rather ordinary face was a blank, with no signs of character to worry him, but she had exotic almond-shaped eyes that drew male attention, including his.
Proffered a paper of his mother's jumbles, Lacy treated Gideon as a special acquaintance. He fell for it. He knew he should be more wary; indeed, his previous lack of success with women made him wonder at his sudden popularity now. Still he let himself believe that Lacy had a sweet, shy personality to which he was keenly attracted, and that his looks and urbane charm had captured her heart. He decided he could handle the situation himself, so he confided in no one which meant nobody ever joshed him, 'What looks and charm?'
'Ask yourself what she wants,' Lambert's wife Anne alerted him, after she sensed tensions between the girl
