by K T Findlay
The Queen’s jaw dropped, but Marwig wasn’t finished yet.
‘There’s more Your Majesty. Those two men were Radley and Ward, Grimketil’s right hands. Both were fine swordsmen in their own right, and she bested the pair of them, on her own.’
Cynethryth’s excitement finally bubbled out of her.
‘Really! Those two? You’re certain? That’s wonderful… if it’s true.’ she concluded, caution reasserting itself once more.
‘It is true Your Majesty. I identified them myself, and their horses, and their swords. It was definitely them. So Grimketil is down two of his best men, two horses, and two fine blades, which I am sure your son will find a use for!’
A cold realisation struck Cynethryth.
‘Then Grimketil ordered this raid! He struck at my son before he was ready, before the day of the bet! He must be brought to heel! I shall speak to the King about this!’
Marwig waited for her fury to abate.
‘I fear Grimketil will dissemble, or, not to put too fine a point on it, lie. All he need do is to say that Ward acted on his own out of misplaced loyalty, and that will put an end to it.’
She glowered at him.
‘So you suggest we do nothing about this at all?’
‘Challenging Grimketil now will achieve nothing. I propose we let things lie. Your son was fortifying the village as I left. There is no hope of another attack succeeding. I believe the King asked him if he would be able to hold a manor against all comers? Well that tough fight has already delivered a resounding yes, and the fortifications will make it an absolute certainty in the future. It would need an army to take that village now.’
Cynethryth frowned.
‘I’m not happy about letting this matter ride, but based on your confidence, I’ll take your advice. I just hope you’re right.’
Marwig grinned a most undiplomatic grin.
‘I have never been more certain of anything Your Majesty!’
✽✽✽
Thomas was constantly busy now, splitting his time between running the school, training with the coterie, teaching Hengist and Alfred about the four crop rotation, building his clocks, and developing more equipment for the glass blowing enterprise.
Wulfstan followed along for most of it. The moat and ramparts had significantly reduced the need for him to do frequent patrols, so he was able to focus more on what Thomas was doing. Of course he’d occasionally get frustrated that he wasn’t able to be more actively involved, but a quick flight into the countryside, or to the bottom of the river usually reminded him of what he’d gained in exchange. But there was so much to learn, he didn’t have that much time for frustration!
The glassworks he found particularly interesting. Smith had built a different kind of furnace to Thomas’s specifications. It was more accessible than the steel furnace, with a small door which could be opened and closed at will so the glassblower could collect and replace the glass from the large crucible fixed in place at its centre.
When it was up and running, and the bellows connected to the water wheel, Thomas taught Fulton the core principles of glass making, and how to use the blowpipes which Smith had made for him, then left him to play and grow his skills through experience.
A few days later Wulfstan was watching Thomas cooking wood in a glorified kettle just outside the glass works. The smoke coming from the spout got less and less until it seemed to stop altogether, at which point Thomas connected a pipe to it that ran underneath a large upturned cast iron vessel sitting inside an even larger one.
Wulfstan had earlier watched in puzzlement as Thomas filled both of these containers to the brim with water, then stretched a piece of flexible leather across the top of the smaller one, secured it in place, and tipped the vessel upside down into the larger one.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ asked Wulfstan.
‘Watch what happens now!’ said Thomas, as he pulled the leather free.
The water rushed out from the upper vessel into the lower one, but nowhere near as much as Wulfstan was expecting.
‘Where’s the rest of the water?’’ he asked.
‘It’s still in the vessel. You can tell how far up if you gently tap on the side and listen.’ Thomas demonstrated.
‘So how did the air get in there? I didn’t see or hear any bubbles?’
‘There isn’t any.’ said Thomas.
‘There must be! There can’t be nothing!’ complained Wulfstan.
‘Why not? If it had water in it, and the water gets taken away, and air can’t get in, what must be left is nothing. It’s called a vacuum.’ said Thomas.
Wulfstan was highly dubious about this idea, but was beginning to come around to it as he watched the kettle pumping its gas into the vessel. At first nothing much seemed to happen, but gradually, as more and more kettles of wood were cooked, the vessel began to rise off the bottom, and float higher and higher inside the larger vessel.
‘We’re collecting gas from the wood, and storing it in what I’m going to call a gasometer.’ explained Thomas. ‘We’ll be able to burn it later, and don’t ask why just yet. You’ll see very shortly.’
The gasometer had a copper pipe and tap coming out of the top, to which Thomas affixed a finely made leather tube. It had been coated in pitch, a thick, gooey kind of tar collected from inside the bottom of the kettle after it had cooked the wood, and then been wrapped in another strip of leather in an attempt to make it as airtight as possible.
The tube ran all the way into the glass works hut onto a table where it was connected to another copper tap, which in turn was connected via another leather tube to an iron pipe set in a frame.
‘This is a Bunsen burner.’ explained Thomas. ‘I just have to turn the gas taps on, bring in a flame on a stick from the furnace, and voila!’
A flickering yellow flame flashed into existence at the top of the iron pipe.
‘It works!’ cried Wulfstan. ‘You burn the wood and you can burn it again! Magic!’
‘Ah, but here’s the really great thing about it. Watch this!’ Thomas turned a sleeve sitting around the bottom of the iron pipe. It had a hole in it, and as the sleeve turned, that hole opened out across another hole in the iron tube itself. The more the two holes overlapped, the more air was allowed to rush into the tube, until the flame turned blue and began to roar.
‘Now that my friend, is hot enough to melt glass! It’s going to be very useful.’
He got down to demonstrating just how useful without delay. Following Thomas’s instructions, Fulton used his blow pipe to pull a lump of glass, called a gather, out of the large crucible mounted inside the furnace, and set about the end of it with pliers.
He went right around the edge of the gather, making a series of bites, and then went around again, pulling each of those bites a little more out from the gather. Very quickly he created what looked a bit like a fluted glass with a hollow space in the middle of it. Then Thomas made him grab one side of the flute and pull the whole thing slowly away from the rest of the gather. Fulton gently worked the pliers and the blowpipe to allow the glass to flow more evenly, until the glass hardened too much to pull anymore. Once he’d broken off the two ends, he had a glass tube about an inch thick in diameter.
‘But I can do this already with the blowpipe.’ said Fulton.
‘Agreed,’ said Thomas, ‘but now we’re going to do it again.’
This time he had Fulton pull the flute away from the gather much more rapidly, and a very fine tube resulted, less than a millimetre wide inside.
‘Oh wow!’ exclaimed Fulton.
‘Try doing that with a blow pipe!’ laughed Thomas. ‘Now, bring it over to the table here and I’ll show you what we can do with the Bunsen burner.
He lit it, and set it to the hot blue flame setting.
‘Now, put one end of the tube into the very tip of that blue flame, and rotate it slowly, making sure it gets an even heat all the way around. See the sharp broken ends are softening, and rounding
off in shape? If you look really carefully, you can see the hole at the end of the tube slowly closing up.’
Once it was completely closed, Thomas had him stick the end of the tube back into the flame until the whole end became visibly soft. Then Fulton blew gently into the other, still cool, open end, and a graceful bulb shape formed in the hot part of the glass.
‘That’s beautiful!’ whispered Wulfstan in awe.
‘Fabulous!’ said Fulton. ‘But how do we put anything into such a small hole to fill it?’
‘Ah.’ said Thomas. ‘With a tube this size, we have to be a bit sneaky. Let’s make another one.’
This time, when Fulton was melting the end, Thomas stopped him just before the hole closed completely. It was small enough to allow Fulton to build sufficient pressure to blow a bulb in the end, and just large enough to allow liquid in and out.
‘Now it’s still open at both ends, so we can drop it into a liquid, bulb end down, the liquid will enter the tube, and the air can escape out the other end.’ said Thomas.
He walked to the far corner of the glass works and brought back a glass vessel shaped like a candlestick holder, which Fulton had blown earlier. It had a broad circular base about six inches in diameter for stability, and a cylinder of glass roughly two inches thick up to a height of around eighteen inches. It was almost completely filled with mercury.
Very carefully, Thomas lowered the glass tube, bulb end first, into the silvery liquid, and held it there until it was completely filled except for the bit he was holding above the surface. Then he dipped his fingers into the mercury to allow the last bit to fill, placed his finger over the top, and withdrew it.
‘Okay, the mercury can’t fall out the bottom because I’ve got my finger over the top hole here. All we have to do is to heat the bulb in the Bunsen burner to melt closed that little hole, and this bit of the job is done, but before we do that, let’s make sure we’ve got the best breeze we can get going through the glassworks. Mercury is dangerous stuff, especially in vapour form. We absolutely do not want to breath it in if we can help it.’
Two minutes later Thomas had his prototype thermometer. The only remaining problems were that it was still completely full of mercury, still open at one end, there was no scale, and it was made from a dark green glass which wasn’t the easiest stuff to see through.
Clear glass models replaced the green when the white sand arrived at the end of October. Once Fulton had made ten new thermometers, Thomas filled them with mercury and set about making them usable.
For each one he gripped the centre of the thermometer with a pair of pliers, and carefully warmed the whole glass by moving it back and forth in the flame of the burner. As he brought the temperature up to what he estimated was about two hundred degrees Celsius the mercury expanded, the excess pouring out of the open top to be caught in a bowl below. The tricky bit was then maintaining it at that temperature, so the mercury still completely filled the tube while the open end was melted shut. Then, as the thermometer cooled, the mercury dropped back down the tube, leaving a vacuum at the top. One easy to read thermometer.
All it needed now was a scale, which was why Thomas was to be found down at the coast by the mouth of the Dee in mid December. He’d brought with him a pot of rain water from the manor, which had been left out the previous night so it was half frozen when he rested it on the beach.
Much to his travelling companions’ displeasure, he allowed the thermometers to sit in the icy water for a full two hours, before using a file to grind a notch in the glass where the top of the mercury column was sitting. Zero degrees Celsius, the freezing point of pure water at sea level, was finally locked in.
From there it was an easy matter to put the pot on the fire by which they were warming themselves, bring it to boiling point and mark off the new mercury levels. That gave him one hundred degrees Celsius. All he needed to do now was to divide up the bits in between to get the right scale for each thermometer, mark it up from minus ten to two hundred, and it was job done.
Thomas was ready for market.
18 A last meal
Apart from Thomas’s oddball trip to the seaside, the winter months saw much activity despite the sleet and snow.
Lynette really had the bit between her teeth musically speaking, and with no other live entertainment available, she had few problems enticing pretty much everyone in the village into the new sophisticated style of singing. As they got better and better, it gave Thomas an idea for the upcoming battle.
Entertainment aside, the villagers were having the warmest winter in their lives, thanks to three more of the Prince’s ideas.
The first of these was the humble button. Everybody’s clothes in the dark ages tended to be tubular, or at least loose fitting, and tied in place with laces or belts. The button changed all that, allowing a wide variety of shapes and styles, and most importantly of all, they kept out the drafts! A mini fashion industry was born as the womenfolk explored the possibilities.
The second was a lot less glamorous, but if anything, more important in the chill of winter. The string vest would never be anything other than utilitarian underwear, but wear it underneath something else, and by heavens it kept you warm! Just exactly how a bunch of holes was able to do that, kept the villagers chattering until spring.
The third was another fashion item, knitting. All the cloth in this world was woven, so turning half of that year’s wool clip into yarn and teaching them how to knit, had created a whole world of new clothes, fabulous to look at, warm to wear, and fun to make. When they mixed the new buttons idea into the mix, it was probably the only time in history the cardigan was considered the acme of style!
There had been good news on the archery front too. The wood kettle that provided gas for the Bunsen burner in the glassworks, also provided pitch which was used to seal the gasometer’s leather pipes to make them airtight. Ashlin and Thomas applied the same technique to create waterproof leather covers for the arms of the bows, which worked even when the bow was being shot.
‘Good news team.’ announced Thomas to the coterie. ‘The first of the bows is ready for you to try out.’
‘Excellent!’ said Berthilda, who’d been looking forward to this moment for months. ‘Where shall we try it?’
‘In here, in the hall.’ said Thomas. ‘Not much of a range I’ll admit, but that way we won’t lose too many arrows in the snow while we get our eye in.’
Berthilda begrudgingly agreed, and was first up to try Ashlin’s creation. She’d kept a close eye on his developments throughout the year, but she was still surprised at the bow’s size when sat in her hand.
‘It’s so tiny!’ mused Scarlett.
Berthilda drew back the string and let fly the first arrow. It landed on the extreme left of the target. She pursed her lips in displeasure, then loaded and shot again, this time high and to the right. It took her a full ten shots before she hit the bullseye.
She shook her head. ‘Well, it’s different! Either that or I’ve completely lost my touch! Here Melody, you have a go.’
Melody had been watching Berthilda carefully, and applied what she’d learnt to her own technique. Her first five arrows were all outside the bullseye, but after that she was consistently in the centre.
‘It doesn’t have the wide range of tension that our normal bows have. Its small length means I’m pulling it harder, and earlier than I’m used to and that’s throwing me off. It’s also more twitchy to aim. I think it’ll be amazing when we’ve learnt to use it, but Berthilda’s right. It really is different to what we’re used to.’ she said.
One by one the others tried the bow, and all of them struggled to some degree or another. Predictably, Deena and Deana’s light builds gave them the most difficulty, but they too persevered, and after a month everyone had achieved the same level of skill that they had with the normal bow.
‘I can’t wait for spring, to try it on horseback!’ said Berthilda, grinning like a loon.
✽✽✽
>
Grimketil and his men arrived first at Tamworth, laughing and joking with the populace.
‘Hello Winston old friend!’ he called out to the inn keeper. ‘I hope you’ve placed a bet on me winning!’
‘Oh course my Lord!’ Winston shouted back. ‘How could I do otherwise for such a reliable customer?’
‘Right answer!’ laughed Grimketil.
The crowd tittered at the badinage but the inn keeper’s wife knew the truth of the matter. How could Winston have said otherwise when the thegn’s bar tab stood at over two shillings? Vile as he was, the man had to be humoured, at least until he’d paid his bill! Then her attention was stolen away by the nasty, smug expression on Cuthbert’s face, bringing up the rear on a handsome grey, and she had to remind herself that he was supposedly a priest.
Thomas and his coterie arrived an hour later, along with Hengist, Kelsey, half the village, and a number of carts. The sheer novelty of ten young women dressed as men, brought out the whole of Tamworth to see them, a point well noted by Grimketil.
‘Ha! Foolish people, stirred by nothing more than the perverse!’ he spat.
‘It’s a larger crowd than that which greeted us my Lord.’ observed Sigwulf with his usual lack of intelligence and tact.
Grimketil’s eyes flicked heavenward in a silent beseech to the Almighty.
‘All the more reason to relish the brat’s head being separated from his shoulders!’ he snarled, looking around the room in distaste.
The Queen had made the accommodation arrangements, and her deep distrust of Grimketil was on open display.
‘But we can’t ask him to stay in the guest accommodation!’ Offa had argued. He’s always stayed in the hall before now. He’ll be greatly offended!’
The Queen had been firm however.
‘He can be offended all he likes. He’ll still be nowhere near as offended as I am by his raid on our son’s village! I won’t have him or his men in the hall, except for the feast. Wulfstan and his people will have a night free from interference. I insist!’ she said.
