Chapter Two
Minny Banfield carefully laid down the scalding hot chisel as a tall, broad figure stumbled into the forge.
Well, this was a strange to-do. A stranger. Not someone from the village. She had lived here all her life and knew every family, every face.
“What do you want?” she asked briskly, looking carefully at him.
The man’s jaw fell open in a surprisingly slipshod manner.
A small smile crept across Minny’s face. It happened fairly regularly. The road to London had been improved awhile back. Every now and again, you’d find a soul wander in after having a few drinks at the King’s Head.
Just looking, they would say, curiosity gleaming in their eyes. Townies, never seen a smithy before in their lives.
And then there were ones like these. Fools, the lot of them, come to gawp at her. Likely as not he’d heard tell of her in the pub, Minny thought darkly, her smile disappearing as the idiot just kept staring.
“Well?” she snapped, pushing back her hair. “I said, what do you want?”
The least he could do was ask her a question—or give her a commission, all the better, Minny thought wearily. Trade hadn’t been what it was. The world preferred to buy new now, rather than mend the tools which had served them for so long.
Minny pushed back her hair again and wished she had not been working so carefully on a delicate piece of work, still lying on the anvil. It would be cooling now, and it had taken her almost twenty minutes to get the thing to the right temperature.
Worse, the man’s gaze was starting to play merry havoc with her heart.
He was handsome. Oh, she tried not to notice, but even poor clothes could not hide the strength beneath that coat or the handsome cut of his jaw.
Minny ignored it as best she could, the sticky glistening of her skin, skin that had worked hard all morning—far earlier than this man had been up, she’d be bound—and wondered whether he was just planning to stand there forever.
She waited another minute, then glanced at the belt buckle on the anvil. She’d need to start again. Oh, this was ridiculous!
“Sir?” she said testily.
“Y-Yes?” The man blinked a few times, as though he had never seen a woman before in his life. Then he seemed to pull himself together. “Yes, I…I wish to see Banfield.”
Ah, one who hadn’t heard then. Minny was going to enjoy this. There was a dark pleasure in proving to the world at large and to a man in particular that she was the one who worked the bellows here.
Doing her best to ape the imperious tone of a lady she had once seen, Minny said, “Well?”
The man swallowed. Minny watched his Adam’s apple bob, drawing her attention back to his taut jawline and the mere hint of stubble that had grown overnight.
“Mr. Banfield. The blacksmith, the owner of this place.”
Minny grinned. Oh, this was perfect. One day, she thought, a man would not say such things, expect such things, presume to know what belonged to a woman.
He hadn’t learned so far, but she would teach him.
“The blacksmith?” she said archly. “You’ve found her.”
It was unfortunate that the man looked so utterly flabbergasted.
Was it not obvious, Minny thought irritably as she turned to pump up the bellows, not wishing to lose any of the blaze’s heat, that she was the owner?
Who else would be here, standing over the anvil?
But she did not have time to worry about handsome—about tiresome men, Minny corrected in the privacy of her mind. She had work to do, precious work she had almost begged for at the neighboring farms and the big house.
If she wanted to keep her reputation, keep the forge blazing, then she did not wish to deliver her work late.
“Now, if you’ll excuse—”
“No, I meant the owner of the forge,” said the man slowly, as though she was hard of thinking as well as hard of hearing. “The blacksmith.”
Minny permitted herself a tight grin. “Yes, I understood you perfectly.”
“Then where is he?” The man looked around, eyes curious.
It took all her self-control merely to take in a slow, deep breath, and fix her smile even though she wished to scowl.
Being interrupted was one thing. Being interrupted by handsome men, well, that was another. But to be interrupted by a damned fool who would not listen to a word she said?
Oh, that would not be born.
“I meant,” Minny said as calmly as she could manage, “that I am the owner. Is that so difficult to understand?”
Of course it was. She was being ridiculous, she knew, but that knowledge did little to quiet the bitter rage rushing through her.
It was so unfair. The world expected a man in such a field. The world expected a man in every field, Minny thought darkly. The idea of a woman doing a man’s job…well, it was unthinkable.
One only had to look at the incredulity on the man’s face before her to see that.
It was a shame, too. Minny was not usually one to have her head turned by a handsome face—though that could be because she knew all the handsome faces in Pathstow, and they were all either spoken for or terrible womanizers.
Not something she was interested in.
The spectacle of a handsome man she did not know was rather a surprise. It altered the monotony of heat, hard work, and exhaustion.
Though if he did not swiftly reassess his statements, he was going to find himself out on his ear…
The expression of astonishment had not disappeared from the man’s face. “My name is Henry Everleigh, and I demand to see the blacksmith.”
Minny sighed and turned her back on the man to work up the bellows again. A hopeless case, then. One of these days, she told herself, she would discover a man willing to suspend his disbelief for more than five minutes. Then they would see just what she could do.
Until then, she would simply have to put up with these nincompoops.
“If you don’t mind, I am incredibly busy,” she said sharply, turning back to the anvil and picking up a hammer.
Bending over the solid iron, Minny narrowed her eyes at the part of the broken buckle. You saw it all the time with this weak London work, you needed something far more hardwearing if you wished to hand it down to your daughter.
True, she would admit that the lattice work was rather fine. Nothing to what she could create of course, but that would make it all the easier to mend.
Was the furnace hot enough yet?
“But—but you cannot possibly be the owner!”
Minny sighed and glanced at the man who was showing no sign of leaving or learning. “And why is that?”
Mr. Everleigh opened his mouth, closed it again, then spluttered, “B-But you can’t be?”
“Why?” Minny asked as sweetly as she could manage.
Her attention returned to the belt buckle as she rammed the hammer into the furnace to heat up. No, it wouldn’t take long to mend this, perhaps another hour? Then she could move onto the three sickles old Mr.—
“You just can’t,” said Mr. Everleigh helplessly, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Minny sighed as she pulled the hammer from the fire and leaned over the belt buckle. “Are women forbidden to own property?”
It appeared the handsome—no, the irritating, she corrected herself—man had not expected that.
“Well of course they can—”
“And women can work,” Minny interrupted, carefully beating out the breakage in the belt as she allowed the metal to soften. Delicate work at the best of times, and she did not need a blundering idiot—
“Yes, I suppose so—”
“And I am the one working, right now, in the forge, at the anvil, in the smithy,” Minny said as calmly as she could manage. “Like a blacksmith.”
Irritation was blossoming through her body, growing hotter with each passing moment.
The forge was always boiling, always unbearably hot, especially in the summer.
Which was why it did not help that when she grew irritated—when that Banfield temper threatened to rear its head—she grew even hotter.
Every moment that passed, she could feel her temper starting to loosen its chains.
She needed to concentrate. Minny dropped her gaze to her work. That was what she should be thinking of.
That was the trouble with smithing; when one had intricate work, one’s own breath could warm or cool the metal to an intolerable temperature. Concentration was absolutely—
“It does not follow, my good woman, that you are the—”
“I am not,” Minny snapped, pushed beyond all endurance, “your good woman!”
She straightened, fiercely glaring at the man who had stepped forward, seemingly unconsciously, to see what she was working on.
She had also pointed at Mr. Everleigh in her anger. This would have been quite acceptable in most circles—well, if not acceptable, at least expected.
He was abominably rude, after all.
The trouble was, this was not most circles. This was a smithy. And she was holding—
“Good God, woman!”
“Sorry,” Minny said hastily, placing the white hot hammer back on the anvil. “I did not mean—”
“You could have had my eye out with that!”
“Only,” said Minny with a dark grin, “with very great care.”
For a moment, silence hung in the air.
Well. Other than the thundering of her own pulse in her ears, the roaring of the furnace, and the quiet crackle of the metal on the anvil cooling.
Mr. Everleigh was staring. Minny could feel his gaze burning into her just as fiercely as if she had dropped the hammer on her skin.
No man had ever looked at her like that, as though he was prodding through her mind in an attempt to eke out a secret.
As though attempting to make a decision.
Minny sighed. Well, she was not about to permit a potential customer to walk through that door thinking she had intended to hurt him, no matter how it had looked.
“I am sorry,” she said stiffly. “I…forgot I was holding the hammer.”
Mr. Everleigh frowned. “I thought you said you were a blacksmith?”
Minny’s hands trembled by her sides, but she did not permit herself to sink into the temper she had languished in when a child. Fighting in scraps was all very well for a chit of eight years old, but a woman of more than twenty should know better.
Probably.