There were three at the door at curfew…

There were three at the door at curfew. They threw the door open.

Wotcheer, one said. Get the legs, the other said. I’ll do the dogs if there’s trouble, the third said.

Then they did it.

If she wasn’t good at her trade they wouldn’t have. They did it to her because she knows a lot more than how to make a knife.

The girl is in the ditch where they dumped her. Now that it’s morning she can see it’s a ditch she’s in.

Nails and then knives, they’re the earliest easiest, how to sharp, how to blade. Nails are common-easy, never a waste of time to make them, always worth it, heat the rod, hammer the sides of the softened end while you turn it, keep the rhythm, down goes the end to a point. For the rich decorate the head of a nail like an acorn or spiral, sun, moon, shell, fruit. For everyone else a nail’s a nail.

For a knife, if it’s an all metal knife, take a forearm-length piece of layered steel and iron. Mark it at the centre. One half the blade, the other the handle. Start with the handle, heat the end, beat the sides, taper till it’s as long as the beak of a long beaked bird, blunt its corners as you go so it won’t hurt or annoy the hand that’ll hold it. Draw it to a point. Hook the pointed end with soft hammer then round it into a closed loop, bend the whole handle into a soft V then gently into U. For the blade cut the metal away on the slant. Forge. Flatten and tease it. Forge. Back to the handle.

Forge. Close it for comfort. Forge. Grind it. Work the blade till bright. Bury the knife in white heat for some hours, to harden. Oil it. Heat a stone to temper the spine. Grind clean and sharp.

Her head is full of nails and blades and the fire it takes to make them, bright red, the blood colour.

Orange flame for forging. White flame for the weld where a thing becomes one with another.

Worse things happen.

Worse things happen.

She let them in. They’d thumped her in the stomach, taken her hammer and held it above her head though they were decent in the end and hadn’t

hit her with it. Instead one held her down over the anvil, one had her, and the third watched, the witness.

They could all have had her there and then but they didn’t. Because having her wasn’t the point and they wanted her to know it.

She knows it.

She knows them all. Everybody knows them.

Everybody will know what’s happened.

Worse things happen.

They killed the dogs first because the dogs were growling. While they did it nails and knives were what were in her head. Knives take more thought so she thought knives keenly for most of the being had. When they were finished she played as dead as the dogs and they put her in a sack and dumped her, now she knows it was the moorfield they dumped her on, the sacking is her bedding in this ditch. God knows where the dogs got dumped.

She has five years apprenticed. Two more years to go. Those years can’t happen now. It is law. Whether you chose to fuck or didn’t makes no difference to law and that was the point of the being had. That’s her brotherhood over.

Curfew. She was covering the fire, it’s law to, when they came in.

She is thirteen years.

She is thinking to die.

Why not? This ditch is as good as a grave. Its sides are good and high.

They go all the way up to what sky there is. It’s a cold bed but it’s soft enough. She could choose never to leave this ditch. She’ll heap earth over herself as a coverlet.

The earth in your hair and your mouth is kinder, than.

She could lie here till she’s what the weather will make of her one way or another one day soon enough whether she dies now or later. Weather will clean you well and creatures that are hungry will too and nothing wasted.

The sky and the earth and the rain and the teeth of creatures are kinder, than.

The filigree for the church door? never be finished now. Church doors need to be locked to keep the people both out and in, Ann Shaklock said.

Churches like to flaunt their closedness. Even though the church didn’t like Ann Shaklock it still gave the Shaklock forge the work. Then Ann Shaklock died, young to be dead people said, lung rot, the metal got into her, and a

week is all it took till they wanted the forge and wanted her out of it, well, were they ever going to leave it to a girl? Even if every person in the whole place knows how good with horses. So much so that people came from places which have their own forges to Shaklock’s instead to have Shaklock’s apprentice do their horse’s feet and health. And if a horse was particular and difficult they would still bring it miles.

Now that I’m down in this ditch am I still good with horses or not?

I’ll lie in this ditch till I join Ann Shaklock.

I’ll block my nose and mouth with moss and swallow moss till I stop breathing long enough to get me to her.

It’s when she reaches a hand to the top of the ditch to see if there’s mossy stuff on the surface that she senses the buzzard, the blink of cold through the weak warmth when it passes between her and the sun. She looks up, sees it hover then drop then come back up at an angle with something in its claws.

She heaves herself out of the ditch to look for moss.

She checks beneath her clothes.

She isn’t bleeding now. She’s sore though now. To move a limb, to breathe upright, hurts.

Then she forgets she’s sore when she hears the call, something small somewhere over there in that longer grass.

In a hollowed bowl formed in it she finds a very young bird, duckling-like. But ungainly, pointy beak longer than duckling, falling over itself with its head too heavy for its body, and its feet, though they’re big enough, not mastered yet.

She knows not to touch it.

She moves off and waits in the grass a far enough distance away.

But all morning there are no parent birds who come back to guard it.

We’re the same, then, bird.

Bird pie for sale in the market square. That’s your mother. Or foxes.

Some foxcubs have eaten well. Did the hawk take your sister or brother? It took something. It’s seen you too. It’ll be back for you.

The bird is a little baby. It looks at her with a lit black eye, bright, a happy eye, eyes that have no fear in them at all. It is smiling though it doesn’t know it is. Its head is a dark down cap and its downy body is so small that its feet are broader than its whole self.

It stops the chup-chupping noise when she settles next to it. It is so small she could cover it with just one hand, say a fox comes looking, or a kite, or that hawk comes back.

I can just as easily lie next to this hollow as I can lie in a ditch.

I don’t have to join Ann Shaklock presently

I can do this small guarding first.

She falls asleep in the sun.

When she opens her eyes the bird is deep in her armpit sleeping.

You’re a rogue, bird, she tells the sleeping bird. Have you a trade?

Have you any land that belongs to you? I’m richer than you now. Before, I had nothing. Now I have you.

She checks the nest for any eggs. There are no more eggs. This kind of bird lays big eggs worth good money and if it is the kind of bird she thinks it is, a find of this bird, egg or hatched, can mean very good money. Its flesh, everyone knows, is pure and clean because this bird is known to eat nothing but air and is also known to be a bird that comes as a gift from God to befriend the pilgrims and it exists, the story goes, to weld the heaven to the earth. There are so many stories about this bird if it’s what she thinks it is. The stories say it is a bird that likes books and even brings them in its beak to saints if the saints have dropped their holy books in water and they need retrieving or if the saints are short of something to say to people then this bird will be the messenger that brings them books full of things God would like them to say.

I could’ve turned over asleep, not known what I was doing and lain on it and crushed it.

Although she thought she already hurt all over this thought makes a different pain happen in her chest.

The bird wakes up.

It sits by her face with its beak wide.

Eats air is a lie. The bird wants fed and it wants more than air.

I’m not a bird, she tells it. I can’t feed you.

What do they eat?

She stands up. The bird does too. It falls forward on to its chin over her feet.

She scrabbles about in the earth under the hedge. She unearths a red worm. She holds it out to the bird.

The bird waits. Then it takes it!

She goes back to look for another.

I’ll need to eat too.

I could eat this bird. I could sell it for food.

She stands up again. The bird flurries about at her foot. She looks round the moorfield. She sees the smoke from the houses in the far distance.

She turns to put that smoke behind her and she sets off walking.

But the bird she’s left behind starts cheeping like a thief is stealing its purse. She hears herself laugh.

She comes back to the hollow, picks the bird up and puts it in the pocket of her apron.

Her hand coming out of her pocket again smells of metal.

That night she will creep back, climb the shade tree and go through the place in the roof that Ann Shaklock showed her that isn’t known to anyone and is always easily opened. She’ll tuck her own things into the apron pocket then put the baby bird back in, couched on top of them.

With her own tools she can journeyman if the places she goes or the people who might have food have any work that needs done.

—

The bird, she’ll find out in the weeks to come, eats berries, all kinds. It eats soft things she can prise out of the shells stuck to the rocks at the shore. It eats all small life. It likes worms. It will eat grass if it has to, and grit and sand. It likes to eat a beetle and loves big-winged flies and little biting flies.

Little fish, if she can catch them, it loves.

Soon it can catch all these creatures itself with its beak-tip, can break the living things out of their own shells, de-leg a crab and eat the legs last.

One day it brings her a very small fish and drops it by her foot.

The first time it meets with its own kind of bird she sees it disappear.

She thinks she’ll never see it again.

But it comes back, runs back to her out of a group of its kind with its knees bent backward on its legs that look thin enough to be snapped by a wind with any force in it and its beak that looks like God kept going with the pen to see how long a beak He could get away with.

It learns from being with its own kind of bird how to swallow things, especially as the tip of its beak gets further away from the place in its head where its mouth is. It learns how to search and find things to eat not visible

on the surfaces of the sand, grass, mud, water. It learns to speak bird words with its family and to fly by itself and with them.

She should chase it and be rough to it so it goes and has the life it should be having. She should tell it to be wild.

But it will hog her armpit till it gets too big for in there and then hog her pocket till its beak is too long and then, the size of a cat but thank God not as heavy as a cat would be on a neck all the time, it’ll sit on her shoulder under her hair through which, like through the gap in a rich house’s hanging silks, it will point its beak, its fishing rod, its trident, tool of its trade, narrow as a finely beaten curved and tapering line of iron and maybe as strong.

But when she holds it in her arms she can feel its bones so thin that the pain that’s unlike any other pain happens in her chest. This is the pain of the thought of something painful happening to another being. This is pain sensed or the thought of it happening in another body by the body of the person not feeling that same pain but feeling this thing that’s both pain and unlike pain instead.

The bird’s feathers will now be beautiful. They’ll have the shape as if drawn on, on each of the longer wing feathers, of the branches of a shrunken pine tree or a set of arrow quills. On its head, holding each eye, there’s a slight mark, a > as if inked then faded. It is very fetching.

The bird’s family members will be wary of her.

They’ll rush away from her.

But they’ll learn she’s not going to do them harm, that she doesn’t move much, that when she does move it’s slowly and never a threat to them.

They’ll grow to ignore her.

When they ignore her she is filled with pride because they are clever birds about what threatens them, like they’re clever about the tides, they know when the water’s coming in and going out and what good it’ll do them either way. They know a richness in the muddy spaces.

But their trust has to be won by the hour. They’re wise to people.

Like she is now too.

When they go wherever they’re going in the sky together it’s the shape of a V they make.

Her bird will watch them go, listening to them calling out their words.

The words that this kind of bird calls are said to be the calls of all the souls waiting in heaven to be born all shouting how keen they are to come to life. They sound like human words. What. What. What. Pearly. Pearly.

Early. They don’t mean those things. They aren’t human words. So they can’t un-mean either like human words can. The life in human words can be taken and beaten by careless working into badly made shapes averse to the life that’s in them. Anything badly made or badly meant or badly given to another, she knows from her learning, will lead to common dishonour and deep shame.

In knowing this and in knowing the bird and its ways, she’s privy to an everyday other life, one she didn’t have to die in a ditch to get to know. This other life is happening by itself alongside what people think life is. It has its own ways that like tendrils of an ivy form and thrive and layer and cloak themselves over themselves for safe keeping.

Privy to. Tendrils.

She writes these words in the sand now with a piece of stick because she can write her letters and do numbers as well as has learned the trade.

All because of a flake of light. Ann Shaklock’s husband Jack Shaklock had a boy working the forge with him when a spark from the forge flew out into the boy’s eye and the boy missed the spike with the hammer, hit Jack Shaklock’s right hand instead and crushed it past any healing.

Ann Shaklock took over the forge.

The local men were angry.

But Ann Shaklock knew it all already, she was good at it, her father’d been the smith, she’d been apprenticed to him, worked this place herself in the plague years when she couldn’t be at school and then she’d married the smith Jack Shaklock on purpose to keep her father’s forge.

One day the girl was standing in the street hoping for food but not out loud because if you ask for food and have no one to vouch for you it means jailed and branded and sent to sea to work tobacco.

A man saw her.

He asked her to hold his horse for him while Ann Shaklock shod it. He promised her a coin if she would.

This man was afraid of his own horse.

This was because the horse was trouble, everyone knew it. Everyone who had any money put a bet on that the horse would kick the little girl from the dead house to kingdom gone.

The girl, who was small, shorter than the length of the horse’s legs, stood alongside the fine horse when the man took her to it and reached up and put her hands as high as they’d go. She touched where the horse’s chest met its underneath.

The horse ignored her.

Then she stood alongside it up on the mounting block and reached to its shoulder. The horse turned its nose and nudged her head but gently and blew its grass breath into her hair, it was sweet, the breath, the mouth and nostrils soft.

She got down off the block and went towards its rear and the crowd in the marketplace shuffled away from the back legs when she went there because bucking and kicking were coming.

She stretched up and patted its flank.

The horse came all the way out to the smithy with her, following her like a lamb, Ann Shaklock shod it there without any trouble while the girl spoke to it and it listened with one ear cocked towards her.

The crowd, who’d followed at a distance, was full of people cheated.

The ones who’d bet on the girl getting hurt wanted their money back. The ones who hadn’t spent any money on anything also acted like they wanted money back.

Their noise didn’t bother the horse.

Then the crowd went, the horse and his man were gone too, that horse bucking and kicking because he didn’t like the man on his back. The girl hadn’t been given a coin. The promise of a coin had been a lie. Then Ann Shaklock standing smoking her pipe at the door called the girl over and told her she had some work for her. The girl thought maybe Ann Shaklock would want her to look after the new baby. But the first thing Ann Shaklock did was take the girl to the heart of the forge, hand her the poker and pincers and stand her square on very close to the heat.

You know what clinker is? she said. No? It’s the stuff in there that’s lighter than coal and it sticks together under it and hinders the fire doing what you ask it to. A fire hates its clinker. Clinker hates its fire. Now. Here.

See if you can find the hatred in there and hook it out for me so we can throw it away.

The girl poked the fire, looked deep into it, felt for the what might be clinker and fished the big and then the small bits of it out.

That’s good, Ann Shaklock said. Those tools I gave you are yours now.

They’re your new hands.

Ann Shaklock was as strong as the tree next to the forge and sometimes even seemed as tall as it. She was beautiful with her hair roped at the back and hanging stuck to itself in clumps round her forehead at the front, all the skin hard and burned rough on her arms and hands and face.

She apprenticed the girl.

She went to see the overseer and signed the paper.

What happened to your father? she said. Your mother?

The girl told her how they were first sick then both dead in the bed together.

Were you sick too? Ann Shaklock said.

I sickened but am not dead, the girl said.

It’s true, Ann Shaklock said. You’re not!

Ann Shaklock gave her a pencil, a knife, and a thin piece of wood to start to learn on.

Letters and numbers come before the hammer or you’ll ruin your hands and never be able to do them, she said.

Then she said, how do you know your numbers so well? You might be a scholar or musician already the way you know them. Who taught you them?

I don’t know.

There was music in numbers, Ann Shaklock told her. You could unlock numbers and music was hidden in them like there was hammer music in where and how and when to hit a thing you’re making and when to hit the anvil as you turn the thing. There were hammers and anvils deep in human ears, she said, because smithing is a kind of listening, and she told the girl about Pythagor who was the first to notice that a heavy hammer made one sound and a lighter a different sound and that all music might be to do with lightness and heaviness.

They keep us at our distance from their houses because of our music, Ann Shaklock said, and because we’re a fearful people to them, dealing in fire as we do and in the changing of substances from one thing to another.

They love us for our magic, and then when they forget their good sense they think we’re doing black magic and they get scared and angry. But when my father played the anvil he was good enough to dance to. I don’t have the gift like he did, but you I can hear it in. I’ll train you like he trained me. The

people might stop their complaining. They might welcome their houses shaking and their air full of the sound of us. But take care. They get angry at anything, everything. They think we have powers we don’t. They need us so much for the making and the mending of things that them needing us makes them angry too. And be doubly careful, being what you are. They shout all the time it was a woman that made the nails for the crucifixion when her husband the smith refused to. As if a story’s proof that we’re fearful creations full of badness so they can burn us on our own forge if they choose. Take care what you make. Beauty can anger as well as please.

Take care to keep things plain. Unless someone’s paying you well to do different.

Every year Ann Shaklock remade her own clothes to fit the girl growing and there was an uncracked apron every season.

You have to be free in your movement or you’ll hurt yourself. You have to be able to be quick. Leather makes you sweat. Linen is better for movement but it’s costly.

She taught her how to read fire, how to deepen it, lessen it, make it right for what you’re making, the fade and the growth of the glow, when to put what you’re working back into the heat and when it’s ready to take out, how to shift its temperature up or down with the bellows. How to work the bellows by foot on the pedal so that the baby in the basket hanging on the other side of the room from the heat and the smoke will be rocked to sleep by the ropes Ann Shaklock had tied across the roof like rigging, or be rocked into stopping crying anyway and either way work won’t be interrupted.

Worse things happen at sea and in Virginia, Ann Shaklock told her when she burned herself. Say it after me, say it. Hold the burn in water, keep it there, lap water over it, that’s even better, pour water on a bad burn, keep pouring it. Say it slowly as you pour it or lap it a hundred times, worse things happen, worse things happen, worse things happen at sea and in Virginia.

She taught the melting of the ore to get the sand out of the iron. The acrid smell was iron, the sweeter smell the steel. The best steel came from Flemland. Forest of Dean was iron. She taught her the persuading hit needed for decoratives and the hard hit for clean cutting. She taught her how to do the dawn fire and how to do the curfew.

One day a vagrant rogue was to be branded in the market. They came to Ann Shaklock to make the new brand. Ann Shaklock had the girl make it herself. She watched her fix the wooden handle well on the rod and showed her how to prepare and form the relief lettering and taught her how to make the sides of that lettering as clean as they could be made. That way less pain later, she said, and a cleaner heal for the poor person, and may the disgrace they’ve been made to suffer heal as cleanly.

As the girl made it Ann Shaklock told a story about how the letter they were making was born. It began as a bird. An Egyptian scriber drew a bird, its head, its wings, its body, its feet, like you look at a bird if it has its side turned towards you. Then that bird shape tempered, became a circle with a line straight down from it. Then it changed to a letter more like Y with a body below and arms held towards heaven. Then it purified itself down even further, it didn’t need a body, just its arms supplicating.

That two divided things will come together and make just one thing.

That all closed things will open to the sky.

And that, Ann Shaklock said as she dipped the brand in the oil to finish it, is what the letter V means, and this brand, whomsoever it will burn, will mark as different from the others a wanderer, a vagabond, a person more free in this life than most of us can be and though they pay dear for their freedom God help them they walk free for all of us who can’t.

Ann Shaklock knew the words from the other countries. Cur was short for cover, few was a word for fire. She knew because the nuns taught her, she’d been sent to them when she wasn’t working the forge because her father had no son and thought her clever, and she was schooled by them till she was fourteen. Then she’d come back to work with him until he died, his arms and his face went blue black with the blood and bruises. He turned as black as iron in the forge, Ann Shaklock said. That was the plague tempering him.

Ann Shaklock smoked the pipe all day to keep the plague away.

—

She told the girl the stories about St Eloi and his cleverness with horses, his canniness at stretching his metals further than possible. That’s how we eat, she said, and you’re already good with both these things, horses and metals.

What we do, she told the girl, is tend to the feet of horses and make coarse

metal shine like precious metal. The foot of a horse is precious and the coarse can shine, d’you hear me? Anything unbending, send heat through it.

The ungiving nature can be made to give. The fiercest earth, air, water, fire, all four, can be persuaded to work with us, like the horses do, if we’re respectful of their powers and learn their languages.

When the girl was younger and settled in the dogs’ bed with the dogs happed round her for sleep Ann Shaklock sat on the floor next to her and told tales of Vulcan, the god of all forges. She told her how he took earth and clay and heat and made a girl and how that girl went and opened the box that had all the world’s evil in it and the evil flew out like hornets out of a smashed nest into the world and after she did this the box seemed empty but it wasn’t because there was still the world’s goodness in it down in the dregs of the badness.

There was not a good enough lock on that box, the girl said shaking her head.

Ann Shaklock laughed when she said this and so did Jack Shaklock who was across the house in the wall-bed, their laughing woke the baby, woke the dogs, one dog jumped in the air and another jumped out of the bed and stood bewildered in the middle of the room.

That was one story.

There was another about how Vulcan’s mother was a goddess called June and though the month of June can be temperate the goddess really wasn’t and she hated the baby Vulcan, she must’ve had her reasons to, I don’t know what they were, but she did, so much so that she threw him off the top of her mountain. Her mountain was so high that the baby Vulcan fell down the side of it for three months, God knows how he didn’t starve, he must’ve grabbed at herbs as he fell and when he finally hit the sea hot steam rose off it like hot metal in the cooling bucket. The fall into the sea had broken his leg when he hit it so hard but when he sank down to the bottom of the sea a broken leg wasn’t such a hindrance and he rode a dolphin like a horse.

The girl liked this story.

There was the one about how that poor vagabond branded in the square here last year was on the beach next to the sea one day and he’d lit a fire and left it burning while he went to clean the meat to cook on it. That day Vulcan came up out of the sea to have a look around, he was pulled to the surface by a hundred horses of the sea which are much much smaller

than our horses which is why he needed a hundred of them. They have white manes, you can see their manes in the waves. They don’t need shoes, they use their tails for feet and you can’t shoe a tail. Vulcan was on the shore limping along and he saw the fire. It was the first time he ever saw fire and he fell in love with the red in the embers.

So he found a big shell whose creature had moved on and he tucked a coal ember and a wood ember into the shell and took both back under the sea with him to a cave he knew where he could keep a fire going, I know it sounds unlikely but he did. And under the sea in his cave he learned how to read fire like you can, like I can, like Mr Shaklock can and like my father could.

First he made nails and spikes and knives. Then he made a sword.

Then he made a plough and furrowed the sand on the seabed and grew sea corn and sea oats. He made a pony-trap out of gold and he collected his hundred horses round it and they pulled him up and down the long road at the bottom of the sea. Then he made necklaces and rings and bracelets and head-dresses and little charms on dainty chains, and he gave them to the mermaids who were very delighted with them.

Ann Shaklock told how Vulcan is to blame for all the vanity in mermaids and how one of the vain mermaids, who’d fallen for a man she’d met on the shore and left the sea behind for him, met June the mother of Vulcan in the upper world of gods and people and when June saw what beautiful frippery the mermaid was wearing she wanted some the same. So she sent an ambassador under the sea to find this master metalworker.

Vulcan laughed when he heard who it was who wanted his decoratives.

He set to work making a throne out of the world’s most precious metals and he presented this beauty of a throne to the lord ambassador and the ambassador had it heaved up out of the sea on to the land then made five hundred duty boys and duty girls carry it to the top of the mountain. That goddess thought it was the finest furniture she’d ever seen. She ran across the room to sit in it – and when she did that the throne’s arms came alive, its legs came alive and the arms pinned her in it so she couldn’t move and the legs did a dance with her in the throne, tossing her about in the palace for days like she was tied to a horse gone mad.

June’s husband, the overseer of the gods, was so angry that he dashed all the duty boys and girls who’d brought it back down the mountain and right down into the sea where they would’ve drowned if they hadn’t been

picked up by our own overseer and put on the boat to the Americas to be set to work in the tobacco fields and to be honest, girl, drowning might’ve been better luck. Then he sent a message down to Vulcan under the sea. If Vulcan would free June from the throne, he’d give Vulcan another goddess, the goddess of love, to be his wife. And in an instant he –

Jack Shaklock called from the wall-bed.

Ann. For Jesus sake. It’s well past curfew. Let the girl sleep. Let the dogs sleep. Let Vulcan sleep. I need to sleep. Come to bed now.

The girl lay in the dark and thanked St Eloi and Vulcan and the church-God and all the gods and stars.

She had had no family and no home. But now she had this new-beaten likeness of both.

When you hammer a lit place on metal it’s light itself that comes off it in flakes. Each flake as it moves is time moving on the power of its own waning.

That’s what I want, the girl thought. Time taking the shape of air, only alive till it’s gone. Like when a star travels like an arrow across a sky in summer.

Precious stone is mud, compared.

A star can be an arrow.

One thing can become another.

They say a soul is a fixed thing and can’t be changed.

But all things can change or be changed, by hands and elements. Old horseshoes will be melted to make new horseshoes. Weapons into tools for the fields instead. Tools for the field into weapons again.

It was the difference between the ore and the iron, the old life and the new life, pig iron and wrought. She was not a duty girl like the poor orphaned jailed girls swapped for money or tobacco then sent off in the ships into the endless.

She had a bed that was warm even in winter and dogs to warm her in it. She had food, a roof, a trade.

She had a friend who smiled at her in church, Christine Gross from the farm, they went walking one Sunday, Christine Gross was older, very pretty, had a way of slipping an arm through the girl’s arm as they were walking through the empty marketplace so that the girl felt known, more, she felt seen, and liked.

She had a mistress-master.

She was good not just with horses.

When Ann Shaklock first saw what she could do with filigree she ran across the yard and woke Jack Shaklock from his midday sleep to come out to the forge and see it too.

After that she set her to do all the decoratives, the high orders, rich hinges, rich nails, church doors.

Then the baby died of coughing.

Then Jack Shaklock died.

Then Ann Shaklock died.

Then there was a week in which the men who wanted the forge for themselves were biding their time before they came to take it.

Then it was curfew.