He clattered down the spiral stairs and came down to the first floor hall, where a short man in a jack and falling band stood warming his hands at the fireplace.
Carey stealthily loosened his sword and then went forward and smiled.
“Mr Colin Elliot, isn’t it?”
Wee Colin turned and did the fighting man’s instant measuring up of Carey as a possible opponent.
“Ay,” he said and showed his teeth in a smile. “Sir Robert Carey, if I’m not mistaken, now officially Deputy Warden.”
“The same. I’m pleased to meet you at last and not behind a gun.”
“Ay.”
“Mr Elliot, are you responsible for seeing to it that my man, Sergeant Dodd, was cared for and his life saved?”
Wee Colin considered this for a moment. “Ay,” he said, “ma sister is chatelaine o’ this tower and took him in first. But I was happy she did it.”
“Even though you still have a blood feud with the Dodds?”
“Ay.”
“May I ask why?”
“Ay,” said Wee Colin, his face hardening. “I challenged Sergeant Dodd to a duel, man to man, body to body, to settle the old feud in a new way and pit an end tae it.”
“To the death?”
“Ay, o’ course. It wisnae the Sergeant’s fault that he didna come to meet me and it isna his fault that he canna fight me now. So as it wis my ain half-brother, bad cess tae him, that snuck up behind him wi’ a crossbow, I’ll see the Sergeant healed and well and in his strength again, and then we’ll fight.”
Carey tilted his head. “That’s very…chivalrous of you.”
“Nay, I canna be bothered wi’ sneaking up on the man, that’s a tailor’s game.”
“I’m afraid your half-brother is dead. We found his corpse on the hills where he shot Sergeant Dodd.”
Wee Colin lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “Guid riddance. When I kill Sergeant Dodd, it’ll be despite all he can do tae stop me.”
“Thank you, Mr Elliot. I have business to despatch for the Scotch King and Sir Robert Cecil. Would you please wait your duel with the Sergeant until I can get back and be his second?”
“Ay, Sir Robert, nae trouble,” said Wee Colin. “He’ll not be strong enough to have a chance agin me for months yet, mebbe not for a year. But when he’s ready, I’ll be there.”
Carey tipped his morion to the headman of the Elliots, who bent his neck slightly. Then he went out the door and down the creaking steps to the bailey, where he waited patiently by the water trough while Red Sandy went and visited his brother, his blue eyes fixed thoughtfully on the middle distance.
A couple of hours later they were cantering a bit less than thirty miles as the crow flies across country to Gilsland. Red Sandy jumped from his horse and fairly ran into the yard and found Janet spinning with her gossips and shouted the news to her.
“Janet, Mrs Dodd! Yer man’s found and he’s not dead, he’s wounded but he’s mending.” The Widow Ridley spinning wool in the same group just tossed her head.
Carey felt Janet’s eyes go to him once for a fraction of a second and then her face lit up and she rose and clasped Red Sandy and kissed him.
“The Elliots looked after him?” she said to Carey, once she had sorted out Red Sandy’s somewhat incoherent tale. “There’s a surprise.”
“No. It’s so Wee Colin can fight him when he’s better,” Carey explained. That caused a shadow to cross her face.
“Can ye take me to him?”
Carey gave a shallow bow. “That’s why I’m here, Mrs Dodd. We’ll take you tomorrow since it’s a good way into Scotland.”
Janet went and called together everyone there and told them the good news, ordered the last barrel of double double beer to be breached so they could drink the Sergeant’s health properly.
In the hall, Carey sipped his beer and watched her. She seemed genuinely delighted at the news, laughing, her face vivid with colour. Carey felt melancholy. He had enjoyed their trysts, he liked Janet’s uncomplicated lust and joy in their coupling which had been such a businesslike arrangement, could understand why the Sergeant loved her, although it was less clear to him why she loved the Sergeant.
Was he doomed always to be a bachelor, always the bull, never the mate? With the persistence of a tongue seeking a hole in a tooth, he thought of Elizabeth Widdrington at Court, her face softened and pretty because Sir Henry wasn’t bullying her, how she had given him a lock of her infinitely precious red hair. He took his notebook out, hiding it, hoping no one would notice, looked at the small shout of colour lying on the prayer. He touched it delicately with his forefinger, tried to imagine Elizabeth in her smock, with her cap off and her hair down around her shoulders on their marriage night, how he would lift the shift off over her head like a priest unveiling something sacred, how he would kiss her mouth and then her cheek, and her chin and her throat and her collarbones and her chest and her breast…How much longer would the bloody man live, for God’s sake?
Carey spent some time on a further satisfying fantasy wherein he flogged Sir Henry until his back was bloody and killed him with a bullet to the head and then took Elizabeth up against a wall. He sighed and looked down at Janet’s face, come to pour him more beer.
“How is he, Courtier?”
Carey told her again about the crossbow bolt and Hughie Elliot also known as Tyndale and the horse as well and she smiled and said, “Ay, that’s my Henry, wounded and flat on his face in the mud and he still stuck his knife in the man.”
“It certainly is,” said Carey, praying he would never have to fight a duel with the Sergeant himself. “He’s weak and thin now but he’s still insisting he will not go home to Gilsland in a litter but on his own horse.”
“Huh!” grunted Janet, deep in her throat. “We’ll see about that.”
Carey smiled. It made him happier than he would ever have thought that Dodd was not a corpse, despite the dangerous complication with Janet. Dangerous for him certainly and quite possibly dangerous for her too, depending on how Dodd took the whole thing if he ever did find out. But of course Dodd would never hear the story from him. He was long experienced at adultery which was so much safer than seducing maids-of-honour like that arrogant idiot, Sir Walter Raleigh. He had got away with it before and surely he would again.
Sometimes now he thought of the young French aristocrats aged around ten who might possibly be his and wondered wistfully how they were shaping with their swordplay and whether any of them had telltale chestnut hair and blue eyes. And maybe there were others he had no idea about, that he would never meet, never know, all the children who called another man “father.” When he had been a heedless youth and a lusty young man full of vim and vigour, it had never occurred to him to wonder whether his widely sown wild oats would sprout. Now, for the first time, it did.
He ate supper with Janet Dodd and her household, good thick pottage enlivened with bacon in honour of the occasion. His eyes kept returning to Janet’s face, who ignored him studiously. She looked beautiful, her cheeks pink, her eyes sparkling and her summer freckles gone into hiding for the winter. She looked relaxed and happy, bountiful as a Queen.
Inside his chest, he felt it. Certainty that she was with child, his child, filled him up and spread through everything. Another child, another little stranger, as they all were, and not one to call him father. The melancholy overtook the happiness about Dodd suddenly and covered it with a black pall. What if Janet got an attack of conscience and told Dodd what she had done? Christ, he’d be in trouble then, the Netherlands wouldn’t be far enough, maybe even the New World wouldn’t be safe.
He drank more beer, wrestled with the melancholy and finally succeeded in clapping it in irons. What was the point in moping or melancholy? So he had sinned grievously with Janet, just as he had with so many other married women. He would simply have to rely on the mercy
and forgiveness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
He would have liked to try…Perhaps he still could…? No, don’t be ridiculous. He finished his beer and Janet refilled it for him with a smile that said nothing.
He slept the night in a spare room filled with spare weapons and a startling number of longbows and arrows, but then Dodd was old-fashioned about guns. He didn’t sleep well and Janet didn’t visit him, of course, for now it would be adultery. Well before dawn he gave up the struggle and left to climb the spiral steps to the top of the tower, where he hoped the rising sun might give him a boost, or the icy wind shake him out of his mood.
He found Red Sandy and Bangtail there, talking quietly and intently and wondered what they were about, if they knew about him and Janet…No, he didn’t think so. Neither was a good actor and he knew there would be grins and sly comments if they even suspected. They knuckled their foreheads and clattered down the stairs noisily in their hobnailed boots and pattens covered with sheepskin against the ice and snow.
He looked over the parapet and saw Janet and her gossips heading into the bailey to milk the cows. There wouldn’t be much milk but it was worth getting what they could to turn into cheese, with dearth on the way unless the next harvest was wonderful.
He watched Janet and then turned away deliberately because he must never think of her again if he wanted to make old bones. He wondered if he would be able to command Dodd as he should, once Dodd came back to the castle guard, given that he was now so full of complicated feelings of jealousy, of envy, of sadness. What he needed was his own wife, Elizabeth Widdrington nee Trevannion, that would settle him. Why could he not just take her from her husband, why couldn’t he just…?
Janet and some of her women came back to the dairy, carrying the heavy buckets on yokes. It was far too early to tell, of course, but still Carey was more than ever sure that there would be a bastard boy or a girl in nine months who would grow up to call Henry Dodd father. And would he be a batchelor still or married or dead? Would he ever be able to marry Elizabeth or would she die herself? Killed by her God-damned husband’s cruelty or some chance fever? He didn’t think he could bear that, just the thought made his stomach clench as if at a blow. He would go to the Netherlands for sure if that happened and either drink himself to death or fall pointlessly in some pointless sordid skirmish.
On impulse he knelt on one knee, facing the watery sun as it rose, praying incoherently for Janet, for Elizabeth, for himself, even for Dodd, stubborn bastard that he was.
As happened sometimes, he felt something, the warm pressure of hands close around his; a workman’s hands, callused in the places that a carpenter’s hands were and quite different from fighting calluses like the ones he had. Somehow that made him feel better, as if he had been heard by the Lord Jesus, as if the Lord Jesus had received his fealty as a lord receives it from his man or a king from his vassal.
He stood up, his heart unaccountably lighter, and saw Janet’s head coming up the wooden ladder and the rest of her following like the rising of a human sun. She was pinning her married woman’s cap on again because it tended to be pushed off by the wiriness of her springy hair.
He took out his notebook, opened it at the beginning, touched the lock of hair with his forefinger. The colour was a little darker than Janet’s hair. Then he closed the book with a snap and put it back in his doublet pocket.
Then because there was no one there to see, he bowed to Janet as he would have to Lady Widdrington or a lady of the Court and was rewarded by her pleased flush as she dropped her curtsey.
“I’m ready to go now. Where is he exactly?”
“In Stobbs tower.”
Janet laughed. “That’s where Wee Colin took me at Christmastide. There’s a veiled woman there—I think it was Wee Colin’s sister—though it was his wife, Mrs Elliot, who received me.”
He went down the stairs first with habitual chivalry, though there was very unlikely to be danger there in Janet’s own tower. Shilling and two packponies were waiting in the inner courtyard. One was loaded up with grain, the other with mysterious packages and Red Sandy and Bangtail were standing nearby drinking their morning beer.
“You’re planning to stay, Mrs Dodd?”
“Ay. I know Henry. I’m the only one that can keep him in his bed till he’s well enough to travel.”
“I think you are. I certainly couldn’t keep him from riding after he took a bad beating in London from Sir Thomas Heneage and his men.”
Her nostrils flared. Clearly she had heard the story from Dodd, and Carey suspected she was only mollified by the very satisfactory revenge Dodd had taken for the insult, of which Whitesock had been a part.
An idea came to him. “Mrs Dodd, I’ll keep Whitesock at Carlisle for the moment and when you tell us that Dodd is ready to ride, I’ll have Whitesock sent up to Stobbs. You can tell him that the horse needs to recover, not him.”
Her smile struck him in the chest, because all of its fondness was for Dodd.
“Ay,” she said, “that’ll dae it. He’ll spare the horse when he willna spare hisself.”
They rode out and went northwards and without a cart, made much better time and reached Stobbs by evening. The veiled woman came out to welcome Mrs Dodd and put them up for the night, though Carey and his men had to doss down in the hall on the rushes since the guest chamber was occupied by Dodd and his wife.
The next day he, Red Sandy, and Bangtail took their horses and remounts and went south and west thirty miles to Carlisle. Carey upped the pace and upped the pace as if he was escaping from something, until they were galloping across the snowy moors and risking death. He wanted to take a shortcut through the Debateable Land, but for some reason Red Sandy and Bangtail refused to contemplate any such madness with only the two of them there and so they got to Carlisle late at night.
Carey waited a few days to see if the snow would melt, but the cold was still bonechilling and it got dirtier and more worn, but stayed obstinately where it was. In that time he received another letter from Sir Robert Cecil, this time coded by Mr Phelippes, explaining who Mr Philpotts was with an elaborate apology in bad verse which at least made him laugh. With it was another fuller warrant, which authorised him to inspect the mining works and all machinery and warehouses appertaining thereto in Keswick or any other mine worked by the Deutschers, their agents or assigns, and also a very welcome banker’s draft to provide him with money. It seemed Cecil too wanted the death of the man who had so nearly succeeded in killing the Scottish King.
He appointed Andy Nixon his Acting Sergeant and rode out of Carlisle immediately after church service on Sunday with Red Sandy, Bangtail, Leamus, and Tovey his clerk. He didn’t need more men than that for peaceful Keswick and it was the raiding season and the Maxwells and Johnstones at each other’s throats over the Border, and Scrope was shorthanded as it was. He still had no valet. All the young men he had interviewed for the post were unable to tell a pair of hosen from a woman’s cap and utterly cackhanded at tying up laces. Of course not one of them could sew. He was annoyed about it. Would he have to send to London to find a valet? Did Cecil really expect him to manage without one? Surely not. Well, maybe he would find somebody to keep his clothes and jack and boots in order in Keswick.
It was sixty miles to Keswick as the crow flies and further by road, rolling country and a road in very poor condition. So they took it slowly and stayed the night at a tiny inn at Penrith. The next day they got lost and then luckily found a shepherd who pointed out the pathway leading up into the hills that shouldered their way through the mist, their flanks covered by fur gowns of winter forest. They picked their way through the woodmen’s paths through the trees that were at all stages of growth from being cut for charcoal, slender stalks protected by deerfences and thicker withies and then branches as thick as your wrists. But then they crested a rise and looked down towards Keswick and saw that there was some disease of the tre
es, for many of them were sick or dead, some still holding onto their leaves as though they had forgotten to drop them in the autumn, with bare branches and trunks naked of lichens. Some of the mountains were bald and ugly too.
At least it was easier to navigate through the sick forest and they could see the smoke of Keswick ahead where some of the fields had already been plowed and there were orchards that looked sick and sorry for themselves as well. Red Sandy and Bangtail were looking around in wonder and Leamus had his hand on something hanging round his neck inside his buffcoat, muttering in Irish.
Carey had seen something like it before and was racking his brains to think where and when. Finally he got it—the place was like the Forest of Dean, where most of the English cannon were cast. Interesting—was there some tree-sickness that came from metals, perhaps? Nobody hailed them on the road, though there were peasants trudging along. They came into Keswick along the road that followed beside a river busy with weirs and mills. There was a lot of sour-smelling smoke coming from a number of large buildings behind a fence. They left that behind and crossed the town meadows, finally coming to the town with a scatter of cottages first, and then the tightly packed townhouses, built into the gardens of older houses. Bangtail and Red Sandy were shocked again when they realised that Keswick had no walls, being protected by its hills and distance from the Borders. They reached the main inn, the Oak, and went into the small courtyard. The innkeeper came out, a skinny man with a settled cautious expression on his face.
“I am Sir Robert Carey, and I am here on the Queen’s Warrant,” he explained blandly to the innkeeper’s questions. Their horses were stabled and Carey given a small guestroom to share with Tovey while Red Sandy, Bangtail, and Leamus went into the dormitory downstairs.
The supper was dispiriting, an oatmeal pottage with too much salt to disguise the fact that it was on the turn and a piece of salt beef floating in it which Carey suspected of having been condemned before the Armada.
A Suspicion of Silver Page 14
