The road to Workington had been built by the Hochstetter family company. It had taken many cartloads of stone from the Giant’s Wall to build and Joachim had gone to watch the men mending it as a lad, listening to his father explaining how detail mattered in every enterprise and an unmended bad road to a port might end by costing you twice or three times as much as a good road. He had admired the way the miners worked—they found moving stones in the sunshine much easier than in the dark of a mine. The road wasn’t straight as Roman roads were, but wound up and around the brutal hills to ease the packponies’ work and make sure they could find water in the summer.
It wasn’t as good as it had been, he found; the road had been robbed of stones by farmers who wanted to build newfangled sheep pens, and the weather had broken up other parts. But it was still a lot better than most of the roads in the country, which dated back to the monasteries of two hundred years before, where they didn’t date back to the Romans themselves.
Their ponies could pick their way perfectly well and in fact knew the way better than Joachim did himself, insisting on a detour to avoid a place where it turned out that a mudslide had almost taken the whole road out where it was so steep by Whinlatter pass. He and Tom laughed about it and the weather was cold and grey but at least it didn’t snow again.
They stopped a little further on from there to have their bread and cheese, and Joachim offered Long Tom some spiced wine from his flask, then suggested they could climb up to the hill’s brow through the woods and look at the fells to the south and see how far they were from Workington. They toiled upwards, Joachim’s heart beating hard, until they stood on the edge and Long Tom swayed because of the belladonna in the flask, and Joachim stepped up behind him and pushed him off the cliff.
He shouted, slid to the edge, grabbed at Joachim’s boots and Joachim stamped down on his fingers so he fell two hundred feet, then slid head first, crashing into rocks and trees until he reached the road and lay still. Joachim scrambled down to him, found him still breathing and stove in his head with a rock so Long Tom stopped breathing. And then he rolled Long Tom on down the hill until he ended with his head in the Whinlatter Gill, hard to see from the bushes and trees round about.
Joachim looked at his handywork. He was panting and his hands were filthy with blood and brain from Tom’s crushed skull so he washed them in the Gill and then breathed deep, stood up and shook himself. There was no sign of anything except Tom Graham being unlucky in a fall from his horse, and that made him smile.
He untied Tom’s pony and drove him off into the woods, then climbed back to the road, mounted his own pony, and headed slowly back to Braithwaite and Keswick. So it was not true there was a simple way to kill somebody, just push them off a cliff. He had been advised that that was the best method by a lawyer, so he shouldn’t be surprised that it didn’t work. None of the methods he had tried were ever foolproof, no matter how simple or complicated he made them. People were both fragile and tough, they fought back. Look at Rosa—she had spotted what had happened to her husband when he really would have thought that that method was foolproof. Maybe he would try a pistol next time, despite their inaccuracy and noise. Or perhaps Hughie Tyndale had the best idea, a garotte. He thought he might offer him his old job back when he had finished being Carey’s valet de chambre.
Now that was a good idea, why not tell Hughie to get on and earn his thirty shillings by killing Carey? That was a very good idea. Joachim would give him the good news as soon as he turned up with Carey, as he surely would.
Joachim was whistling as he pottered down the road back into Keswick, past the made road leading to Newlands valley and the Goldscope mine, the jewel in the Hochstetters’ crown, or rather the crown itself. He paused there, wondering about going to visit his cave and do a bit of peaceful chiselling, and then decided against it because there was always a risk and the miners were all working, and the massive wooden machines too, the ore-stampers thundering and the ore-roasting putting plumes of bad-smelling smoke in his way. Some of the men would be glad to see him, some not. Best to keep his head down and pretend to be the dutiful son for his mother to find a nice wife for, best not to make too many waves until he had decided what to do next.
Also there was Carey to deal with, Carey who had made a fool of him and thwarted all his carefully laid plans. He needed to plan Carey’s death very carefully.
After leaving the King, Carey went to the Queen’s suite of chambers and found that all the ladies were walking in the snowy garden and enjoying the sugared twigs and frosty hedges. Carey watched them through the window of the passage. Elizabeth was talking to the other women in what sounded like a mixture of Scots and dreadful Danish, colour in her cheeks and a sparkle in her eye. Her cap was pinned as firmly as usual with a new tall-crowned beaver hat on top and she walked quickly with the younger and more vigorous women.
James came up behind Carey and laughed. “Ye look like a mooncalf,” he said. “God’s sake, Sir Robert, go out and tek yer leave of her.”
Carey bowed and went out through a garden door and found himself picking his way straight across the formal box hedges and dead flowerbeds to get to her sooner, rather then wending his way along the gravel paths. He came to the knot of ladies and bowed low to Queen Anne, slightly less low to the other ladies, including Lady Widdrington in that group. She coloured when she saw him and smiled back at him.
“It rejoices my heart to see you so well, my lady,” he said, bowing again over her hand and suppressing the unwelcome memory of last night and Mrs Dodd. James had gone to greet his Queen and was giving her a smacking kiss on the cheek.
“I like the Court, and Her Highness is very kind to me,” said Lady Widdrington. “Are you going to Keswick now?”
“Not immediately,” he said with a rueful smile since it seemed James’ Court was even more porous as to information than the Queen’s. “First I have to take Janet Dodd back to Gilsland.” He felt his ears redden and really hoped that Elizabeth couldn’t read his mind. She didn’t look as if she had noticed.
“Of course,” she said with concern. “How is she?”
What could he say? “She’s as well as you might expect. There was a duel arranged between the Sergeant and Wee Colin Elliot which was why he left the Court, but why Hughie Tyndale should have taken it into his head to kill Dodd is still a mystery. I’m hoping Mr Secretary Cecil can cast light on it, since he was paying him for news of me.”
“Hm,” she frowned a little at that. “Tell Mrs Dodd that I’m sure Sergeant Dodd is still alive,” she said. “I simply can’t believe he is dead, and you haven’t found his body yet, have you? The King said he might send some men out to see if they can find him when the thaw comes, since you’ll be inspecting the mines in Keswick.”
“Well.…”
“Frankly, I wouldn’t be sure Dodd was dead if I were looking straight at his headless corpse.”
He laughed. “Death comes to us all, my lady.”
“True. Tell her I’m sorry, for I am. And not just because without Dodd to guard your back, you’re in even more danger from the Grahams.”
Carey answered this with a shallow bow because he was quite unreasonably certain that the Grahams would not manage to kill him, even though Ritchie Graham of Brackenhill was now apparently offering fifteen pounds English for his head.
Obviously they could not kiss in full sunlight in the open garden, although King James was kissing his Queen, but it was a near thing. Elizabeth, rested and not tense, was not nearly so forbidding as usual. She smiled at him as he bent over her hand again and then whispered, “I wish I could give you my ring, my mother’s handfasting ring, and take yours, but I can’t for Sir Henry would spot it, even if I split it and just gave you the man’s hand…”
“Oh, my lady,” he whispered back, “I will marry you, come what may and all the demons of Hell against us.”
She laughed. “I’d watch ou
t for the Widdringtons.”
“Them too.”
It was so hard not to kiss her, especially with King James a few paces from him, kissing his Queen in a way that boded optimistically for the succession. He moved away with a sigh and then stopped because Elizabeth had put her hand on his arm and thrilled his skin even through the velvet of his doublet sleeve.
“Wait!” she said, and she was smiling. She ran over to Lady Schevengen, talked quickly to her and the lady gave a disapproving frown but handed her a small embroidered pouch full of sewing things. Elizabeth took a pair of snips out of it, ducked behind a round bush with a hat of snow balanced on it, and after a minute came back to him looking mischievous but no different.
“Here,” she said. “You can make a ring of this or just spend your last penny on a locket to contain it—or keep it in a bit of paper.”
She held out something that shone red, was springy with curls, quite wiry…Good God, it was a lock of hair. Her hair? He stared at it and then at her. “Your hair is red?”
“Embarrassingly so, carrots,” she said. “If it weren’t for the Queen I couldn’t bear it!”
“But your eyebrows…”
“I know, brown. I colour them a little.”
“Oh.” Carey shut his mouth and stared down at Elizabeth’s hair, which he had never seen because she always kept it tidily under her married woman’s cap. He took the lock of hair carefully, between his fingers, and twisted it to knot it. “Thank you, my lady,” he said, taking his notebook from his doublet pocket and putting it between the first pages, where he had copied out a prayer. It shone there, a vigorous bookmark. “Thank you,” he said again, quite unable to think of anything courtly to say, and put it away in his breast pocket.
“How I used to pray for brown locks when I was young,” she said, her eyes laughing, her face straight, “despite the Queen’s fiery hair. But Sir Henry won’t notice that a bit is missing, he’s always complaining about my ugly hair and how much of it there is.”
There was another reason to kill Sir Henry Widdrington, piled on the top of a teetering heap, that he was rude about Elizabeth’s hair.
As the Queen had come out of her clinch with the King, he bowed low to her again, to Elizabeth and the other ladies, and walked away as fast as he could, feeling the lock of hair glowing and burning in his notebook like an ember. He wished and wished he could do as Dodd had often suggested, to wit, raid the Widdringtons, kill Sir Henry, put her in front of him on his horse (though he’d need something bigger than a hobby since Elizabeth was tall and well-built) and carry her away with him. He didn’t, not because he was frightened of the Widdringtons or Sir Henry, which he wasn’t, but because he was genuinely terrified of the Queen’s wrath.
Maybe the Queen would understand…No. She wouldn’t. Queen Anne might, but Queen Elizabeth would be fatally offended and angry: he would lose his office, he would have no chance of another, he would never be received at Court again and his only means of living would be by his sword in the Netherlands or Ireland, neither of which were places he could take Elizabeth.
It was so hard.
To take his mind off his disastrous love life, he went into Edinburgh to John Napier’s house where he found Simon Anricks stuffing his smart brocades into his toothdrawer’s pack, with the lurid picture of a worm emerging from a tooth painted on the wooden top that always put Carey off his dinner.
“Mr Anricks,” said Carey, midway between laughing and horror, “I fear I must return your compliment of rating me for sleeping in an unlocked room and rate you for treating your duds so ill.”
“Oh?” said Anricks, looking at him in surprise. “Why?”
“They are silk brocades, sir, and cost you a pretty penny. You should at least shake them out and fold them and wrap them in something to keep the damp away which might make the colour run and besides make them smell of mildew, and so be able to wear them again if you should so desire, or perhaps sell them at not too much loss if you should be tired of them.”
“Ah,” said Anricks, and pulled them out again. “I have had a valet de chambre in the past but still know not how to proceed, sir, for I never paid attention to what he did.”
“Fortunately, I have been a penniless courtier and can demonstrate at least something of the proper care of doublets and hose…I suppose you have not hung them up and burned incense inside to clean them a little?”
Anricks’ blank look was very funny but Carey managed not to laugh.
“My wife usually takes care of that sort of thing, if there’s no valet,” he explained with a helpless gesture. “Or one of her women.”
“Well, let’s see if we can do something to the purpose,” Carey said, and emptied the pack out. He found a snarl of shirts, underbreeks and stiff socks and hose, wrapped around something luridly green which turned out to be a forgotten half loaf of bread, and a leather wallet holding Anricks’ toothdrawing tools.
“Hm,” said Anricks, “They need cleaning. I wonder why it is that tools stored with blood on them rust much sooner than tools cleaned and oiled?”
“I have no idea,” Carey answered, “but I would be very unhappy if any of my men put his sword in its scabbard with blood on it because the next time he tried to draw it, the rust would stick. Maybe it’s something to do with rust having the colour of blood and so the blood changing its nature to rust in its turn?”
“Hm, on the doctrine of like-signatures? Perhaps.”
Anricks went out with the wallet and came back a half hour later with his tools gleaming and covered in beef tallow of which Napier’s household had a good store for tapers. Meanwhile Carey had shaken out the shirts, thrown the green bread into the street where an urchin had delightedly picked it up at once, and carefully folded the doublet inside one shirt, the hose and stockings inside another and put them into the bottom of the pack. The sleeves he rolled up and put down the sides and the small falling band he wrapped in a kerchief donated by Napier’s housekeeper and slid into the front.
Anricks was wearing his lamentable old wool suit with the motheaten gown and the frankly disgusting twenty-year-old greasy tawny velvet cap on his balding head. His tools went into the pack next and on top were his collection of clotted rags for stopping the blood when he’d drawn the tooth, wrapped round two bottles of the magic sweet oil of vitriol that made men fall asleep so he could pull their teeth more easily. They might provide some defence against the rain.
Anricks tried the pack on his back then and nodded approval. “It’s much less lumpy,” he said. “Thank you, sir.”
They went out into the watery sunlight and sat on the bench outside the front door where Anricks took out a clay pipe and filled it with tobacco, started drawing the smoke into his lungs and coughing occasionally as the medicine drew out the phlegm, of which, he explained, he had an excess.
Carey shared the pipe and took a draw of it carefully, enjoying the lightheadedness it gave. Edinburgh clattered by on wooden pattens against the mud, pert maidservants with white aprons and caps, severe-looking ministers in sombre greys and blacks, a few yards of woad-blue sky showing between the clouds.
“Well, Mr Anricks,” he said, “I’m returning to Carlisle by way of Gilsland with Mrs…with the Widow Dodd.”
“I had heard that the Sergeant had been killed, but not how.”
Carey told the tale as he had deduced it and Anricks nodded, blew smoke through his nose, made no comment on the likelihood of Dodd actually being killed by a tailor.
“I’m for Widdrington,” Anricks said. “As I promised Mrs Burn I would do when once she was lightened of her babe and had been churched, I will accompany her and her woman to her hometown of Keswick in Cumberland. I should think we will get there sometime around the middle of February, depending on how well she is after her childbed.”
“I will go there as well because the King thinks Hepburn will head for his hometown.”
“From your tone, you do not.”
Carey shrugged. “I’ll go to Keswick, investigate as best I can, and try to find him. Now the trail’s cold he could go anywhere, change his name again. Why should he go to Keswick to make my work easier? But still, he might, and so I’ll do my best. At least Cecil is also doing his best to help, he’s sent me written orders to go and investigate the possibility of sedition among the Deutschers and a warrant that gives me the right to inspect all the mine workings, smelthouses, and machinery.”
“And if you find him, you’ll arrest him?”
“No, probably not, especially since his family are likely to back him up. I’ll kill him, if I can.”
Anricks did not object to this way of proceeding, only nodded and tapped his underlip with the mouthpiece of his pipe.
“Then I will probably see you in Keswick,” he said. “And then from Keswick I will go home to Bristol and see the new son my wife has presented me with.”
“My hearty congratulations, Mr Anricks.”
Anricks smiled. “I truly hope that Mr Secretary will not find a new conspiracy against the Crown that I must lollop over hill and dale to find out about, although I may well come north to Scotland again to visit Mr Napier and his magical Bones. But I may use a coach next time.”
Carey grinned. “How are you with seasickness, Mr Anricks? The Queen says she is always stricken with it any time she goes in her coach.”
For an instant there was an iron look on Anricks’ face but then he relaxed. “I do not suffer from it,” he said simply and Carey remembered the scars on the palms of his hands. “In fact, now I think about it, I think the best way to come north would be in a ship, a coastal trader. With the right winds that would also be very much the quickest route.”
A Suspicion of Silver Page 10
