If ever she had the advantage of surprise, she took herself out of his reach, but pride made her walk off unhurriedly as if continuing on some errand. The parson rarely followed if she had an escape route. For him the thrill lay in persuading women to give him kisses freely. Besides, he was sane enough to know that if he attempted pursuit and force, he could be brought before the church court, then the parish would send him back to Bedlam. Kinchin knew that he was recently released from the great London hospital for the insane, where he had been kept for twenty years. Now he had somehow found his way back to Birmingham, where new generations had ripened and Kinchin Tew was here to be preyed upon. Everyone knew his habits. A few women tolerated him. Generally he was thought to be safe, a mild nuisance who could be rebuffed quite easily. Many towns and villages harboured a similar pest, always had done, always would do.
'Ooh — has Mr Whitehall taken to Kinchin?' Her mother's speculative tone had been a shock. Kinchin heard the eager hope that someone of quality wanted something — and might pay for it. At once she saw that her family would never try to save her. Now she was fourteen, she had become useful. They would offer her wherever they could, to do whatever was asked. In their gruelling quest for survival, her parents wanted rewards for nurturing her. Doing whatever was necessary would be her duty. When she now tolerated Mr Whitehall touching and toying with her, she was aware that worse experiences lay ahead.
Life was harsh for the Tews. Kinchin remembered that it had not always been quite this bad. The family had once subsisted inefficiently on commonland at Lozells Heath. They were rag-pickers and tinkers, with harvest work every autumn, if they could be bothered to apply for it and if any farmers would put up with them. For generations they had scratched a living, inhabiting a decrepit hovel where scabby, tousled children snuffled five or six on the floor while their parents and associated adults squabbled over who would sleep in what passed for a bed. If it was winter and they were 'looking after' a cow, the cow took precedence in their shelter. Occasionally a handy Tew would concoct a lean-to byre in which to hide the stolen cow; then the children would have somewhere to skulk, plot, dream and, if the elder boys were obsessively curious that year, engage in mild incestuous activities. Pigs they claimed as their own roamed the scrubby heathland; chickens that answered their call pecked around outside the hovel. The Tews were masterless men. They were constantly at risk of being taken up for idleness, yet most were not completely idle and they all possessed a kind of freedom that was better to them than the bullied lives of servants or apprentices. As freedom went, it was dirty and cold, but for generations the Tews had managed to exist.
Then Sir Thomas Holte enclosed a third of Aston Manor to enlarge his park. The Tews were driven out.
The social gulf between the Tew family and that of 'Black Tom' Holte was vast. They had nothing. He had everything. Though his forebears had a long pedigree in the Midlands, his real social eminence developed with the Stuart kings. On the accession of King James, Holte had been knighted; later he pushed forward to be among the two hundred who paid a thousand pounds each for a baronetcy — a new rank, invented to create funds for the king. His red-handed badge then gave Sir Thomas Holte precedence over all except royalty and the peerage. He built himself a gem of Jacobean architecture, an ostentatious stately home to signify his importance. He sired sixteen well-fed children, by two wives. As lord of the manors of Aston, Duddeston and Nechells, Holte enjoyed an aristocratic idleness that was never made the subject of sermons or by-laws. He flourished, with the minimum of loyal service to the kingdom, while growing ever richer on the proceeds of brutal business methods. He hunted, quarrelled and counted his rents. He bought the extra manors of Lapworth and Bushwood; he acquired Erdington and Pipe. He became a Justice of the Peace for the county of Warwickshire and lay rector of Aston parish. With no opposition, or none that mattered, he then seized for himself the breezy open common. Some of it became his new deer park and the rest he parcelled out in tiny batches to local artisans. Their leases were short enough to keep the men craven, lest by displeasing their landlord they should lose their livelihoods.
With land in a commanding position astride the vital River Bourne, Holte controlled the necessary water supply for industry; he soon owned seven mills on the Bourne and two more on the River Rea, with dozens of one-man forges leased from him. Acquisitive, hot-tempered and vindictive, he had a reputation as well read and versed in languages, though this was not tested in Birmingham where the locals had their own curious intonation but only the Welsh drovers needed real interpreting. Velvet-suited Holte sons went to London as courtiers to the King. Pink-cheeked, pearl-bedecked Holte daughters played shuttlecock in the Long Gallery until they wed other landowners, their carefully negotiated marriages providing their father with more ample cash to adorn Aston Hall. The eldest son fell out with his father for twenty years and a daughter was reputedly locked up in a garret, but their father disdained to be called to account for either; he tried to ruin his son, who had married a girl with no dowry, even when pressed to forgive him by King Charles.
Aston lay a very short walk from Birmingham, where Sir Thomas Holte was disliked and insulted. Notoriously, he sued a local man for spreading rumours that Holte had struck his cook with a kitchen cleaver so violently that 'one part of the victim's head lay upon one shoulder and another part on the other'. Judges on appeal cleared the defendant of slander on the curious grounds that his claim did not say in so many words that the baronet had murdered the cook. The wry judgment stated, 'notwithstanding such wounding, the party may yet be living'. This lawsuit led locally to open animosity that increased in the civil war. Sir Thomas Holte naturally supported the King; the rebellious people of Birmingham did not.
The Tews took neither side. The war would not be fought for them. They owned nothing worth fighting for. Following the land enclosure, they were homeless and destitute, without trade or other income. They gravitated to the town, but found little charity there; they were too strong-bodied to win places in guild almshouses and, if approached, the Birmingham churchwardens would only move the Tews on — back to their home parish of Aston, where Sir Thomas Holte was master. Their plight might be his fault, but he influenced the Aston churchwardens when they gave or withheld poor relief, so the Tews were convinced their chances were hopeless. 'If he cared, he would never have thrust us off the common,' moaned Kinchin's father, Emmett Tew, a shiftless, shabby laggard to whom complaining had always come easier than making the best of it. He had a point. Many aristocrats claimed that giving alms to the poor only encouraged them to remain idle and beg for more relief. This opinion allowed people of high birth and low cunning to avoid paying conscience money. It worked too. The number of paupers diminished, as they died from starvation and disease.
Kinchin's mother was pregnant yet again, though she looked too old for it; the new child would probably die but if it survived birth, it might have to be sneaked into a church porch and abandoned. Idealists in England would soon debate the principle that all men came into the world equal — yet the Tews knew that from birth to death they were less than the rest. Hounded from their toehold amid the gorse and wild-flowers, they joined the tinkers, pedlars, gypsies, vagabonds, cut-purses, thieves, actors, wounded soldiers and sailors, idiots and sturdy beggars who bedevilled better-off society. Many were begging through no fault of their own, though that never earned them kindness. Few refuges existed. There were houses of correction where destitute young boys could be taught trades, but few girls entered apprenticeships; their only legitimate option was to become servants. For Kinchin, that option was pretty well closed. No respectable housewife would take in a starved, scab-encrusted runt, who was bound to steal. So Sir Thomas Holte had his portrait painted in green silk, tulip-bottomed britches braided with gold and a silver jacket, his black-bearded personage hung about with rosettes, bows, baldrics and expensive lace-trimmed gauntlets. Kinchin Tew grew up wearing a mildewed skirt she had filched from washerwomen who had laid laundry to dry on thorny bushes. She never had shoes. Now although she looked a child still, she was fourteen, and a tribe of Tews was expecting her to earn for them — in what filthy manner no one had yet specified.