‘You will not be,’ I said firmly.
‘Fair enough. So … however you get your metal, you have to cut and stamp it. The shears are harder to make than anything, as you need a blacksmith and he has to be one who won’t ask no questions. You need good iron, though, or they won’t cut. Now, the proper mints have one side of the coin set below and the other held in the hand. They put the sheet in and down comes the hammer – and there’s both sides struck at the same moment. Most of my trade makes one side at a time, which is easier but slower. You can spot those if one side is cut deeper than the other, but it takes a good eye like mine. If I were set free to work as your faithful servant, I’d ferret out those rabbits like a good ’un. If I took an oath as a king’s man, with the boy here, we’d find and stop every forger in the realm, I swear to God.’
‘That will not happen,’ I said. ‘What else?’
He chewed his lip for a moment.
‘Sweating? That’s when a merchant takes a bag of silver coins, of wool, see? He shakes them or he gives it to a boy like mine to do it. They all rub alongside each other and the dust that comes off is good silver. No one can tell it’s been done – the coins look cleaner, if anything. Do that with every coin that comes through and you’ll have enough metal dust to make a few spare pennies.’
He sat back and folded his arms across his stomach. The animation faded from his face and when I raised an eyebrow at him, he just shook his head.
‘I’m sorry, father. I think I’ve done enough now. Maybe I hoped to convince you that me and the lad would be useful. You being a believer in forgiveness and all. All I wanted was a second chance for my boy – and maybe to put right some of what I done wrong, by closing all the forgers in Winchester and London and round the country. It’s a small world and we all know each other, see? They’d be gone if king’s soldiers came knocking, but I could tell you … Ah, it doesn’t matter. I’m done, as you say. The boy and me will be hanged. I’ll ask you to hear my sins now and not take any more time tormenting those who are to die.’
I sat and thought for a long time, using my second and third fingers to pick at the broken nail of my thumb. The guards hovered when they saw the talking had ended, though none of them dared approach.
‘I can’t take you out,’ I said firmly, cutting the air with my hand.
‘We ain’t murderers, son,’ Skinner murmured. ‘You can bring a great triumph to the king if you give me a second chance.’
‘I know far more than you realise, Master Skinner!’ I retorted, stung. ‘I have heard testimony and seen more mints and mines than you can possibly know.’
‘I don’t doubt it, father. You seem a thorough man and a clever one. Though my world ain’t in the mines or the king’s mints. I’ll bet they have a hundred ways of robbing the Crown, ones that me and my boy ain’t even dreamed of. That’s your world, maybe.’
He leaned forward then, fixing me with his gaze.
‘This is mine. I’ve offered you my fair service and you won’t know it, but my word is good. I want to walk out of this yard with my son, to give him the chance he should have had. If you pardon us, I swear I am your man for ever. That is my oath to you, father, by Christ and my eternal hereafter.’
I stood and made the sign of the cross over them both.
‘Are you sorry for your sins?’
Skinner nodded, though I saw the despair in him.
‘Very well.’ I raised my hand once more in benediction. ‘Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.’
They crossed themselves as they heard the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, just as they had in every service of the Church all their lives. I could see resignation in Skinner’s eyes as I called the guards over to me once more.
‘All done, father?’ one of them asked.
‘I believe so,’ I said. Without making a decision, without changing my mind, I simply went on speaking, so that I was almost as surprised as the guard helping them to their feet. ‘These two have knowledge that is valuable to me. I will not leave them to be hanged, but instead I will take them as thralls. I am a king’s officer. See who you wish to see. Summon … whomever you must summon. I will speak to the magistrate who condemned them.’
It took the rest of the day until those chains were struck off. Skinner said not a single word except to confirm his name to the judge who came out and demanded to know what I thought I was doing. Only the royal warrant smoothed his hackles, though he took me aside as man to man to persuade me against such madness. I was half-inclined to agree with him, but I’d gone too far to turn back and I was as stubborn as any one of them.
‘I answer to the king,’ I said. ‘Pray direct your complaints about his royal treasurer to King Eadred. I wish you luck of it.’
In the end, they could not refuse me, though the rest of the men behind bars howled and entreated as they saw Skinner and the boy Jones would not be returned to them. I do not know what they thought I was about, but they screeched and wailed and pleaded as I led my two new thralls across the yard to the gate of oak and iron.
I watched Skinner as the gate opened and he saw the city beyond.
‘You are mine, Master Skinner, you and your son. Your labour is mine until I choose to free you, or until I sell you in the great market at Bristol. If you run, it will be at the expense of your immortal soul and your honour – and I will hunt you down and see you broken to get the rest of what you know. Your son too will suffer greatly before I am satisfied. Is that understood, Master Skinner? You gave me your word and now I will give you mine. If you run, I will find you and you will wish I had left you to hang today.’
He looked across at me and, to my surprise, he put out his hand to shake. I took it, and for the first time he felt the strength of my grip, so that his eyebrows went up.
‘I understand, father. The boy and me have been given a second chance. You will not regret it – and we will not run.’
29
I cannot say exactly why I freed Skinner and his lad. His sentence of execution was right and just, and yet perhaps I heard his entreaties even as I denied them. I have always liked a rogue, for some reason. Some men are cruel and thick with it, but if they can smile as they sin, there is a part of me that admires them, just a little.
I had judged one thing correctly, at least. Skinner did not run the first time I left him alone, though I wonder now if he knew I had guards waiting to snatch him up if he had done. As far as I know, he hardly looked up from his labour creating a forger’s workshop in the king’s private stables, near the smithy. We built a secret room with its own forge, joining it to the chimney off the blacksmith. It was the only way to show the tricks of Skinner’s trade, though I was very careful about those I allowed to speak to him.
I made my plans and, for a time, King Eadred resumed his duties hearing the cases of poor men and overseeing the works and ports and trade of his battered realm. I saw him only once in Winchester the following Christmas, when he appeared suddenly in the petition hall and stalked down the aisle. Wulfric and I were there with the king’s steward, arranging to withdraw the royal licences from the main mints, so that they all had to reapply or be closed down. The steward had either been dropped on his head as a child, or he’d been bribed, but whatever the cause, he refused to understand what we insisted had to be done.
In the middle of that furious argument, the door came open and Eadred entered, clasping and unclasping his left hand. An axe swung idly in the other. He wore a mail shirt that covered his head, leaving his face bare. I don’t think he saw or heard us as he reached the great table where the Witan sat for their meetings. We had fallen silent, of course, while the king breathed over that table, swept up in some emotion. I was ready to speak when he swung the axe in a great arc and hammered the blade into the oak, leaving it stuck deeper than I would have believed possible. He stood back then, with a wince at the damage he had done.
He looked over at three gaping men and saw I was one o
f them.
‘I just wanted to destroy something, father,’ he said.
Whatever temper had controlled him before seemed to resurface and he wrestled the blade out, heaving at it, then swinging it again. The table broke, its main plank snapping right through. I saw it afterwards and noted the tiny holes of woodworm that had stolen some of its strength, but still, it was a fine blow.
I heard later that Eric Bloodaxe had returned to the north – and those men who had sworn their submission to the house of Wessex had not fought as they had promised they would, but instead run to their Viking lover the very moment he landed ships on their coast.
Eadred, who was not the warrior either of his brothers had been, who coughed and had perforce to suck the juices from his meat, would spend more years in the field than Æthelstan or Edmund together. It fell to Eadred to chase raiders across the land, to see trails of smoke in their wake, that script in the air that said he was a ruler who could not protect his people.
It was not what most men meant when they thought of a crown. Eadred grew stern and harsher than I remembered. He came home once with a thick red line across his broken nose and two snapped fingers. I tended those for him, as it was a hurt I knew well.
I could not give that young man the gentle life he might have had. I could not stop the raids, or lend strength to those who bent for each breeze and had no honour. I knew it cost rivers of coin to provide for an army on the march. I recalled the axes and shields at Brunanburh, ready for any man who wanted them, the blacksmiths and the leatherworkers, the lines for food at every stop. War means the king and his lords turning the world on its head. No more do their tenants pay them. Instead, Eadred and his thanes bled silver for them all. To save his father’s kingdom, I knew Eadred would need more silver and more gold than had ever come in before. In that way, I could be of use to my king.
I came to accept that Skinner was as good as his word. I do not believe he ever truly saw himself as a thrall, and I understand it was too much to expect him to act like a servant. He had been a free man all his life, as he said. It would be a cruel master who punished a man for the manners of freedom, when we all aspired to it.
I took Skinner and the boy Jones to my mother’s shop in London, where Wulfric and Justin examined him for hours on what he knew. Master Justin came out looking a little pale, I remember, at everything he had heard. When I asked him if he was well, he gave a great sigh.
‘It is a wicked, wicked world,’ he said.
We set Skinner up with a new workshop and once more I built the forge to my own design. I was pleased to have Skinner asking questions at my elbow as I worked mortar and stone. He exclaimed at every new thing, at the angles and the iron sheathing. I am afraid I left him rather more able to make a high-temperature bloomer on his own than he had been before. I do like to talk and he was a very good audience.
His boy said nothing and I assumed he was a simpleton of some poor union, or one damaged as a child. There are so many rashes and ailments that leave the poor mites deaf or slow. Yet he was loyal to his father and he was silent. I remarked on that to Wulfric as a wonder in a young lad.
We began our great task in London, as it was a place where we were strong. Skinner had argued for Lincoln, and he wasn’t wrong to want to practise. Yet the king’s treasury was empty. I’d seen it. From that moment, Eadred was going to war on loans alone, which meant the moneylenders could ask for almost anything and he would have to grant it or lose the crown. I would not let that happen while I lived.
We struck the first blow in the smaller workshops, the forgers that had no licence from the king, who made their coins from tin or clippings and never paid a penny to the royal treasury. I will not say it began well, as Skinner had warned it might not. We had enough men to close down six different places. Any more and we would have been spread too thin. Yet as soon as the first couple of doors were kicked in, boys yelled a warning from the rooftops and there were men scrambling everywhere to get away – in places we hadn’t even spotted before. It seemed for a while that half the city was forging coins, though some of them were just ordinary thieves and criminals, believing the law had found them at last.
Still, I saw some thirty men bound in good chains I’d made myself. Most of them were just workmen, but I wanted the ones with a touch of wealth to their clothes, who wore rings of silver or a fine belt buckle.
Those men struggled and raved until we showed them the hangman’s nooses we’d strung in the open street. It was a brutal business, but then so was war and so was the survival of the kingdom. We lined them up and we all watched a few kicking their last, back and forth like children on a swing until they fell limp. One of them held up his hand and said he’d talk if we swore we wouldn’t hang him. The sight of it had stolen his nerve.
‘Any others?’ I asked.
One of the rest cupped his hand and muttered, as if he could not understand my accent. The rest of them laughed until I had him hanged next. They were surly after that, but we did get two more volunteers.
We hanged sixteen men that first day. Some of their friends came out and I thought we might be overwhelmed. Stones were thrown, but our lads took up cudgels and rushed the crowd, driving all before them. Before they returned, we broke the forges and took away the tools to a local smithy. I watched as all the carved cedar dies, the shears, all the little punches and even wool bags for sweating were thrown into the furnace to become ash. It occurred to us that the local blacksmith would hardly be innocent. Yet he claimed to know nothing and he did a vital trade. I may have been a little too merciful with blacksmiths.
The one thing that did not go into the fire was the silver. I had no use for tin or lead, but some of the shops used clippings and dust and had true silver coins already stamped and still waiting to be cut out. It was not a fortune – no more than a few hundred coins that had to be melted down once more into ingots by weight – but it felt like a victory.
The following days were harder as word had gone round the city. I worried news of our raids had spread further, but we were too few to do more. Our results began to dwindle as forgers across London dismantled their own places and waited for us to pass like any other storm. The men we had taken told us whatever they knew once they had been leaned on a little. Yet time and again, we found empty rooms and storehouses. At first it looked as if we’d missed them by just hours, with the bricks still warm. As the days wore on, we found them all cold and I began to worry. We had collected barely enough silver to cover our costs and spent almost half of that to feed the lads.
I was dejected when our little group came together for an ale that evening.
‘I can feel it slipping away,’ I said. ‘They’ve all shut up, or gone somewhere else. I can’t walk down a street without eyes following me now, paid to watch us.’
Skinner seemed unworried as he downed his ale. I suppose a thrall should have eaten later and served us at table, but I felt as if we served the same cause and he was more the expert than any of us.
‘We should touch the mint, then. Get all the lads in mail and with swords and that. Take the whole place down.’
I wanted to. The London mint master was one of my father’s generation, name of Unmere. He was one of those who had refused to accept my authority, though I’d shown him the seals. He’d known I was not lying, but he had closed iron gates in my face even so, waving me away like some clerk. I had intended to visit him last, to enjoy kicking him onto the cobbles while we searched his accounts. Yet as I looked around at the others, they slowly grinned at me.
‘It’s not slipping away,’ Justin said. ‘It’s just getting started.’
Iron is the strongest metal. Yet it must be anchored, and that had not been properly understood by Unmere at the mint. Two brawny lads went through his gate with hammers in as long as it takes to describe it. They broke the stone sills and smashed the locks, so that we were facing an appalled mint master in his private office in just moments. He called for help, but I showed my royal app
ointment to the guards who came trundling up to challenge us. They saw the sheer number of armed men and just bowed and scraped their way right back out again.
‘I don’t know if you remember me, Master Unmere,’ I began.
He was swollen up, brick red and bristling. He still thought he could bully and shout over us.
‘Get out! Get out of this office!’
He had a good voice and I wearied of it.
‘Be quiet. I gave you a chance before to let me see your books. I did not trust you then. I do not trust you now.’ I turned to the men watching. ‘Take him into another room and ask him if he wishes to tell us anything before we find out.’
‘How do you mean, “ask him”?’ Skinner said.
I turned back to Master Unmere, by then watching our exchange in horror.
‘I mean first treat him like a man of good estate and ask. If he will not answer every question with perfect clarity, come and find me. I will tell you how to ask him then.’
Unmere shouted for help as he was bundled out of the room. By then the noise of the mint had gone silent.
I sat at the desk and looked up when a clerk was brought before me. He stood shivering and wide-eyed as Wulfric prodded him forward and inclined his head to me where the man could not see. Someone of use.
‘Ah. Your name?’
‘Bayliss, sir.’
‘You work for Unmere?’
‘I do, my lord, for ten years now, yes, my lord.’ He was laying the titles on thick, but I could understand his desire not to offend.
‘I am an abbot, Master Bayliss. You may address me as “father”.’
‘Thank you, father. God bless you, sir.’
‘Yes. So, Master Bayliss, would you say you are loyal to this fellow Unmere, even as he goes to his deserved retirement?’
It took a moment. The fellow thought it through and looked around at what the new day had brought. I made sure my royal warrant was in sight on the desk. He came to the right conclusion.