There’s only one thing that old Master Chalmers knew how to grow in the family garden: puzzlement. When he dies in 1511, his two grandchildren can’t believe their ears when they have old Chalmers’ will read out to them: Elizabeth receives an iron padlock, while Thomas inherits the family prayer book with the silver clasp decorated with the Chalmers coat of arms.

            Elizabeth sits for a long time with the padlock and fidgets with its key. The lock fits in the palm of her hand. It’s rounded and decorated with a wavy pattern, like lighting, while the key is unadorned. Her grandfather must have imagined her growing up and wanting her jewellery box securely sealed. Is this my legacy? she wonders. Locking things away to never be seen? Was it not I who read from that very prayer book to my grandfather and little brother every night? Is it because I’m a girl that he assumes I want to keep secrets more than I want to read and pray?

            Thomas sits in his own corner of the room, mindlessly turning from page to page. The roaring lion on the coat of arms is reaching out its paws to catch him. A family heirloom, entrusted to him. As usual, the letters get mixed up before his eyes and he can feel a headache coming on. I must be a grown man now, he thinks, if I’m supposed to learn all the things my sister does, and do them better. He sighs.

            As if brought together by a pair of invisible hands, the siblings get up and meet in the middle of the room. Still silent, they exchange the goods so that the prayer book is in Elizabeth’s hands and the padlock and key in Thomas’. They nod at each other. No one will know.

Coral beads on a silver chain. Two rings, one her mother’s wedding ring, forged with the letters MM and TP for Marjorie Marr and Thomas Prat. A brooch in the shape of a circle with a sword inside. Every piece made of shining silver. Also, a wool mantle lined with rabbit fur. Agnes imagines these items in Uncle Ninian’s home, hidden away in a box under his bed until he needs them. She remembers how he’d come to her house over the years, trying to do all the things that a legal guardian is supposed to do: petting her on the head and asking if she was being fed and clothed properly, sitting down with her to teach her how to read and do accounts, only to get up from the table in the next moment. And she’d follow him like a puppy, playing the game with him of entering each room and locating valuables that she’d help him carry to his horse. He’d take anything from woven tapestries to sets of silver spoons.

            ‘You’re a good girl, ’ he’d say, quickly looking away as he climbed into the saddle. ‘God bless you, Agnes.’

            Slowly but surely, he’d emptied her deceased parents’ house of books, jewellery, kitchen utensils, even furniture. In the final years before Agnes turned twenty-one, her nurse had to use a single pot to cook their meals. They shared between them one pillow to sleep on. What Ninian needed the money for, she didn’t know then. Orphans don’t get to ask their guardians what they use their inheritance for. It was assumed by the town officials that he, being her father’s brother, would act in the interest of the family estate. A young heiress was to listen, obey, and eventually learn. So she did.

            Only her mother’s goods did Ninian leave untouched over the years, as though the striking red colour of the coral beads were keeping him away. They invoked the mysteries of God Almighty – Agnes had thought so herself when as a young girl she’d seen them first on her grandmother’s wrist, then on her mother’s. That’s why she, now twenty-one and a week old, is surprised to come home and find these items gone. Ninian’s key is on the table.

            ‘Very well, ’ Agnes says to her nurse, who’s clasping her heart at the loss of the goods, ‘soon my pockets will be overflowing with the rents from my tenants, now they pay me and not him. You’ll see, when I find the most expensive lawyer in town, it’s not you that will be crying for help.’

            In court, Uncle Ninian is a pale shadow of who he was when he first became her guardian. He was self-important then, the legal representative of one of the richest girls in town, a head full of hair and words dancing on his lips like a poet. Whenever someone trespassed onto her estates, he went straight to court, and took her with him, as if he needed a tender girl to witness him act the hero part. Now, they sit opposite each other in the court room, him bald, thin and nervous, her red-cheeked and calm. Her lawyer speaks a language of carefully calculated blame:

            ‘Ninian Prat has owed a debt to every single one of us at one point or another. We all know the state of his repute in the burgh. We all know he’s a drunk and a gambler. We all know Agnes Prat will have to spend the coming years restoring her parental home to the state it was before her parents’ death, God have mercy on their souls. So I ask you, do you trust this man when he claims that Marjorie Marr’s treasures rightfully belong to him?’

            It’s almost too easy. Uncle Ninian has made so many enemies in the burgh, boasting too widely of his influence over the town’s wealthiest child, and making too many promises he’s not kept. In the bustling street outside the tollbooth, Agnes ends up walking home behind her uncle. The crowd at the Market Cross parts to let him through, like he’s a leper among saints. He keeps his head down until he disappears behind a corner.

            The following Friday, Ninian doesn’t come to court to hand over the goods or provide evidence for why he should have them. The case is postponed another week, but with the same result. Agnes sends her nurse to his home, suddenly unwilling to send the lawyer to insult her uncle further. But the nurse returns with a report of an empty house where there’s not so much as a pillow to sleep on, save for a single item, left on the threshold wrapped in cloth: Marjorie Marr’s coral beads.

            ‘Where do you suppose he’s gone?’ Agnes rotates the beads around her wrist.

            ‘To Hell, if there’s justice, ’ her nurse says. ‘And there’ll always be justice, the court has shown us this.’

            Agnes agrees, but when she goes to sit by the window with her mother’s beads, she’s uncertain. Each bead that she touches with her fingers is a reminder of something men of the law rarely speak of. Mercy. Compassion. Redemption. She feels at once too young to understand these words, and far too old.

On a cold November morning in 1501, Cristina Smith comes to the Aberdeen Burgh Court, followed by a line of men. Teeth clenched, nails digging into her palms, Cristina approaches the bailies in the great hall of the tollbooth.

Like most people appearing before the bailies, she has something to prove. After her father’s death, Cristina followed his advice and claimed his workshop as her own. Spacious and bright, its one large window faces south onto the busy street at Green Gate. The workshop had been Cristina’s playground since childhood. As she grew, her father introduced her to the workshop tools and their uses: the anvils of differing sizes, surfaces against which to mould any piece of metal into shape; the forehammer and the hand hammer, too large for her child-sized hand at first but soon enough she used them with ease; and the many tongs hanging in a neat row along the wall. Her father was always well-organised. She’s not about to prove herself to be somebody else’s daughter.

Unlike most people coming to court, Cristina is flanked by a group of twelve men. Despite her simple grey dress, her black overcoat, and the modest wimple covering her hair and neck, being surrounded by such a large group of supporters makes her seem noble. Important. Powerful.

‘The daughter of Andrew Smith?’ the scribe asks her before the bailies speak, ensuring he knows what to put down on the parchment before him.

‘Cristina, ’ she replies. ‘I’m Cristina Smith.’

‘Tell us your issue, ’ one of the bailies requests, though he knows well why she’s come.

Cristina speaks in a voice loud and clear, for the bailies, the scribe, the men behind her – for the entire town – to hear: ‘There’s been murmurs in the community of this town, ’ she says, ‘that I’ve no right to my father’s workshop and the tools there. That I’m no proper heir of his, that my womanhood keeps me from inheriting my father’s tools and his sword that has hung in our house since before I was born. So, revered bailies of this town, I’ve brought you evidence to the contrary. No writs, no documents to go over, but the testimony of the best and most worthy of the smiths of this town.’

One by one, hat in hand, the smiths step forward. Their testimonies are unanimous:

‘Cristina Smith was trained by her father as a blacksmith from girlhood.’

‘She’s as good as a member of our guild, woman or not.’

‘Cristina ought to have the tools and the sword that her father left for her. She’s his only rightful heir.’

The bailies must accept a testimony as united as this. They must accept that a woman, small as she is, has harnessed the support of the town’s most important tradesmen. The blacksmiths, who forge the weapons that defend the town as well as the tools that sustain its daily life, must be kept happy at any cost. Cristina lowers her eyes with a smile as her ownership of her father’s goods is put on paper. She almost wishes she’d brought her sword to court. Its curved handguard, shaped a clamshell, was made by her grandfather, a man with an eye for elegance. The blade itself is so heavy, only a handful of boys were able to lift it when her father invited them into his workshop to play soldiers for a day. They all gasped when she, then fifteen, swung it over her head with all the strength her hard work had built in her arms.

Once back in her workshop, she’ll take the sword from its sheath and hang it on the wall behind her worktable. It’ll be the first thing anyone entering her shop sees. Perhaps this time, the townspeople who’ve complained about her assertiveness will whisper: By God, she seems about ready to forge the world anew.