The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [84]
The fire had burned low but they built it back up, drinking and talking and smiling at one another, Monique occasionally pinching or throwing her arm around Awa. Late in the evening Monique withdrew one of her matchlock pistols at Awa’s request and passed her the weapon. “Aye, I ’ad the same look in my eye, Lord’ll vouch, first time I got close enough ta see what they was an’ what they was bout. See, ta tell it right it went like this …”
The girl grew up amidst the estuaries of what had been the Groote Waard before the Flood of Saint Elizabeth transformed fertile countryside and village alike into an inland sea of sweet, brown water. On the newly formed banks willows grew, and on the islands that had once been hillocks many leagues from any stream or pond more willows grew, and the girl grew up on these banks, on these islands. They cut the willows, the girl and her mother and father and brothers and sisters, and they sold the willow bark, which was good for doctors, who ground it up with their mortars and pestles for their medicines, and they sold the willow wood, which was good for everyone else, as it smelled sweet and burned slow and hot, and they sold the baskets they wove from the willow boughs, which were good for doctor and farmer alike, being light but strong and sturdy.
The girl was named Monique, and her parents sold the willow, and when times grew lean they sold Monique. She was stronger than all her brothers and sisters, and so the man who needed bellows worked thought himself fortunate, for in addition to being an ox Monique was also a woman, and so there would be no risk of her pursuing more recompense than her master gave her. This man was a smith of small arms, and he knew the family because he found the willow ash to be the best for making powder, and like any good smith he tested everything before selling it, and testing guns meant using powder, and that meant either buying it or making it, and there was nothing the smith would buy if he could make it himself—that both his wife and would-be heir died in childbirth was the only reason he sought outside help in working his works.
Monique worked very, very hard for the smith in his shop in Rotterdam, and guarded his forge when he went off to broker deals or simply get out for a little while, and being far from stupid she paid much mind to what the smith did to build his guns. When he was out she examined the castings, the tools, and the pictures in the manuals she could not read, and as years passed and the smith grew older she unobtrusively began helping more and more with finer and finer details of the smithing process, until quite without his knowing it she was as good an apprentice as any craftsman could seek.
When the smith decided to sell his shop, having made enough coin from the French sojourns into Lombardy politics and the accompanying need for lots and lots of guns and powder, he tearfully dismissed Monique with a few coins and the clothes on her back. When her request for a letter certifying her skill at smithing was laughingly rebuked, she asked what exactly she was meant to do with her life, and he suggested whoring. The guns she took with her would have afforded her a comfortable purse had she sold them, but Monique had no intention of parting with them, especially as they might prove useful if the smith recovered from the drubbing she had given him and sent men after her.
She knew the guns she had helped make had always gone south, and so did she, hoping to find one willing to overlook her gender and employ her in a smithy. None did, not in Burgundy and not in France and certainly not in northern Spain and not in the Empire and not in the Swiss Confederacy, but there at last she found some work that enabled her to earn coin while working with guns. During the years of