A Murder of Crows: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery

by P. F. Chisholm

  Dodd breathed hard through his nose: a few months ago he might have been offended enough to call Carey out on it, but now he was prepared to give the Courtier benefit of doubt although it came hard to him. After all, Heneage’s nosebleed had been very messy.

  “Ay sir,” he said. “Ay, Ah ken what he is.” For a moment, Dodd considered explaining to Carey some of the things he’d done in the course of his family’s bloodfeud with the Elliots, then thought better of it. Wouldn’t do to shock the Courtier, now would it? The corners of Dodd’s mouth twitched briefly at the thought.

  “But?” asked Carey, waving for more beer.

  “Ah dinna think Heneage kens what I am.”

  There was a pause.

  “You won’t take his offer?”

  It had been paltry, offered the previous Wednesday by a defensively written letter carried by a servant. A mere apology and ten pounds. Where was the satisfaction in that? Dodd hadn’t bothered to answer it.

  “Nay sir. I’ve talked tae yer dad about it and he says he’ll gie me whatever lawyers I want, all the paper in London for ma powder and shot…”

  “Yes, father’s very irritated at what happened to Edmund,” said Carey with his usual breezy understatement.

  “Ay sir,” said Dodd, “And I’m verra irritated at what happened tae me.” Dodd was trying to match Carey with understatement. “Irritated” didn’t really describe the dull thunderous rage settled permanently in Dodd’s bowels.

  Carey nodded, looked away, opened his mouth, shut it, rubbed his fingers again, coughed, took a gulp of his new cup of brandy, coughed again.

  “I feel I owe you an apology over that, Sergeant,” said the Courtier, finally getting to the point of what had been making him so annoying for the last couple of days. He wasn’t looking at Dodd now, he was staring at the sawdust scattered floorboards of the boozing ken.

  “Ah dinna recall ye ever striking me,” Dodd said slowly.

  “You know what I mean. I used you as a decoy which is why you ended up in the Fleet instead of me and why Heneage got his paws on you in the first place.”

  Dodd nodded. “Ay, Ah ken that. So?”

  “So it’s my fault you got involved…”

  While a penitent Carey was both an amusing and a rare sight, Dodd thought he was talking nonsense. Besides which it was done now and Dodd had a feud with one of the most powerful men in the kingdom. It wasn’t a bloodfeud yet but it probably would be by the end. Which reminded him, he needed some information about the size of Heneage’s surname. But first he had to clear away Carey’s daft scruples.

  “So it would ha’ bin better if thon teuchter had taken ye instead? Got what he wanted right off, eh?”

  Carey frowned. “Well, no…”

  “Listen, Sir Robert,” said Dodd, leaning forward and setting his tankard down very firmly, “I’ve done ma time as surety in Jedburgh jail for nae better reason than I wis Janet’s husband and the Armstrong headman could spare me for it.” And Janet had been very angry with him at the time, of course, a detail he left out. “It wisnae exactly fun but it was fair enough. Same here. Ye used what ye had and what ye had wis me—there’s nae offence in that, ye follow? Ah might take offence if ye go on greetin’ about what a fearful fellow Heneage is and all, but at the moment Ah’m lettin ye off since ye dinna really ken me either or ma kin.”

  Carey frowned. “You’re not accepting my apology?”

  Dodd reached for patience. “Nay sir, I’ll accept it. It’s just I dinna see a reason for it in the first place.”

  Carey smiled sunnily at him and stripped off the glove on his right hand. Dodd had to squash his automatic wince at the thought of touching the nasty-looking nailbeds so he could shake hands with good grace.

  “Now, sir,” he added, “since ye’ve not had the advantage of partakin’ in a feud before, will ye be guided by me?”

  Dodd was trying hard to talk like a Courtier, his best ever impersonation of Carey’s drawl, and Carey sniggered at the mangled vowels.

  “Good God, Ah niver sound like that, do I?” he asked in his Berwick voice, which almost had Dodd smiling back since it sounded so utterly out of place coming from the creature in the elaborately slashed cramoisie velvet doublet and black damask trunk hose.

  “Ay, ye do, sir. But nae matter. It’s nae yer fault, is it?”

  Carey made the harumph noise he had got from his father, thumped his tankard down and stood up.

  ***

  Lawyers being the scum they were, most of them tended to clog together in the shambolic clusters of houses and crumbling monastery buildings around the old Templar Church. Nearby were the Inns of Court, new a-building out of the ruins of the Whitefriars abbey. In the long time the Dominicans had been gone, bribed, evicted, or burned at the stake in the Forties, the reign of the much-married Henry VIII, something like what happens to a treetrunk had happened to the old abbey. Small creatures taking up residence, large ones raising broods there, huts and houses like fungus erupting in elaborate ramparts that ate the old walls to build themselves. There was a long area of weedy waste ground stretching down to the river and inevitably filling with the huts, vegetable gardens, chickens, pigs, goats and dirty children of the endless thousands of peasants flooding into London to make their fortune. They were not impressed by the lawyers’ writs of eviction. However the writing they didn’t know how to read was very clearly on the wall for them in the shape of scaffolding, sawdust, wagons full of blocks of stone, and builders finishing the two magnificent halls for the rich lawyers to take their Commons.

  Dodd had almost enjoyed the short walk of a couple of miles along the Oxford Road from Tyburn to the Whitefriars liberties where Carey was more comfortable even though his father had (yet again) paid his creditors. Most of them. The ones he could remember or who had served him with writs at any rate.

  He had to admit, it was interesting to see the different styles of working in London and the numberless throngs in the streets and the settled solidity of the overhanging houses. He also had to admit that despite the pathetic lack of decent walls or fortifications, London was impressive. Dodd was still tinkering with his plans for the greatest raid of all time, even though he knew it was hopeless. Where would you sell that much gold and insight? How would you even carry it all back to the Debateable Land?

  Very near the round Temple church with its wonderful coloured glass, Carey swung off down an alleyway and up some stairs into a luxurious set of chambers, lined with leatherbound books and with painted cloths of Nimrod the Hunter on the walls. Two haughty-looking clerks surrounded by piles of paper and books looked up briefly as they came in, announced by a spotty page boy with a headcold.

  There was a pause. The clerks continued to write away. Carey looked mildly surprised and then leaned on the mantel over the luxury of a small fireplace and hummed a tune. Dodd put his hands behind his back and waited stolidly.

  Nothing happened. Surprisingly, Carey cracked first. “Is Mr. Fleetwood available?” he asked coldly, and the haughtiest clerk ignored the magnificence of his embroidered trunk-hose and raised a withering eyebrow.

  “Do you have an appointment, Mr…er…” intoned the clerk down his nose. The pageboy had announced them correctly and clearly.

  Carey’s eyebrow headed for his hairline as well. Dodd leaned back slightly and prepared to watch the fun: would the two pairs of eyebrows fight a little duel, perhaps?

  “Robert Carey,” he drawled, “Sir Robert Carey.”

  The clerk held his ground. “Do you have an appointment, Sir Robert?”

  “I believe my worshipful father, m’lord Baron Hunsdon, mentioned that we might be coming here this afternoon.” Carey paused. “To see Fleetwood. Your master.” He added as to a child, “About a legal matter.”

  “Ah yes,” sneered the clerk, “The assault at Fleet Prison.”

  The other clerk glanced up nervously from his copying, then down again. The page boy was hiding on the landing, listening busily.

  “An
d unlawful imprisonment of my man, Sergeant Dodd,” said Carey, “and sundry other matters of a legal nature.”

  The clerk sprang his trap. “Mr. Fleetwood is not available.”

  One Carey eyebrow climbed, the other dropped. Did he know he was doing it, wondered Dodd who was not in the slightest bit surprised at what was happening. It seemed from his face that Carey was surprised. Now the left eyebrow was mounting Carey’s forehead again to join his brother in chilly wonder. Did he practise? In front of a mirror?

  “How unfortunate,” said Carey. “Perhaps tomorrow…”

  “Mr. Fleetwood is very busy,” said the clerk with magnificent contempt, “for the foreseeable future. A year at least.”

  “My lord Hunsdon had assured me that Mr. Fleetwood could represent Sergeant Dodd in this matter.” Carey was losing ground here.

  “My lord was mistaken. Mr. Fleetwood had not first consulted me,” sniffed the clerk. “His daybook is full.”

  “Hm,” said Carey, eyebrows now down in a frown.

  Dodd stepped forward and leaned his hands not too threateningly on the clerk’s desk. “Is Mr. Vice Chamberlain Heneage payin’ ye?”

  The clerk quivered slightly and then answered with fake indignation, “Of course not, Sergeant, the very idea is outrageous.”

  Dodd looked around at the other clerk, industriously copying, and nodded. “Ay, so he’s threatened ye.”

  It was satisfying to see the haughty clerk now reading very carefully in Mr. Fleetwood’s daybook which seemed to be empty as far as Dodd could see. Nobody said anything.

  “Thank ye,” said Dodd, remembering a little late some of Carey’s lectures about London manners. “Nae doubt it’s just as well, Ah wouldna want a man wi’ nae blood tae his liver standing up for me in court.”

  He clattered down the stairs followed by a Carey who was smiling now.

  “Well, I never saw that before,” he mused. “A lawyer turning down a fat fee. Amazing.”

  “I have,” said Dodd.

  Carey wanted to try other lawyers he knew of, Dodd said it wasn’t worth the bother. They had an argument about it in the arched old cloister next to the round church.

  “See ye,” Dodd said, “if it ha’ been nobbut a bribe, then maybe, but if Heneage is threatening ‘em, he’s threatened the lot of them. Threats are cheap.”

  “I know that, Sergeant,” said Carey. “I just want to check.”

  Sighing Dodd followed Carey on his route through the dens of lawyers and found he was right. No serjeant, utter barrister, attorney, nor even humble solicitor would touch Dodd’s case on the end of a polearm. Not that any one of them could have lifted such a weapon.

  Frustrated, they sat on a bench facing a small duck pond next to the other shiny new hall, still having its windows installed. Carey had to lean awkwardly with his legs out because of the idiocy of his clothes and their tight fashionable fit.

  He pulled out the long clay pipe and started filling it with the mixture of tobacco and expensive Moroccan resin that Dr. Nunez had prescribed for them the previous week. Carey liked it enough to have made enquiries about importing some to Carlisle but it was eyewateringly expensive.

  Despite the fact that the practise of drinking herbal smoke was a highly fashionable London vice, Dodd rather liked it too. He took the pipe and drew some of the aromatic white smoke into his lungs and after a moment was blinking peacefully at the tumble of huts going down to the water.

  Carey chuckled. “It’s a mess, isn’t it? Last time I saw him, Sir Robert Cecil was talking about planting gardens down to the river. Of course you’d have to get the riffraff thrown out first.”

  “What? The lawyers?” Dodd said deadpan, and Carey grinned.

  “Good idea, as they won’t bloody work for us.”

  “Ye canna blame them. Heneage will have said to a few of them, tsk tsk, d’ye think the Careys’ll take care of yer kine and yer tower while you’re lawyering for that Dodd, tsk tsk, and the word will have gone round,” Dodd said knowledgeably.

  “Metaphorically speaking, but yes. Shortage of Readerships, strange famine of appointments to the serjeantcy, etcetera, etcetera. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

  “Ay. So. Will we do it ourselves?”

  “What, go to court? Certainly not.”

  “Why not? It canna be so hard if lawyers can do it.”

  Carey snorted with giggles and Dodd almost giggled as well, feeling pleasantly drunk from the smoke.

  “Sergeant, you’ve run wood. How long does it normally take you to draft one bill? An afternoon? And I’m certainly not studying the law at my age.”

  “Other young gentlemen study at the Inns of Court,” Dodd pointed out. One of the young gentlemen happened to be standing nearby wrapped in his black cloth robe, very like a crow, blinking at the ducks on the pond. For a moment Dodd thought he was familiar, but couldn’t place him at all.

  Carey took the pipe back from Dodd who had forgotten he was holding it. “Not me. I went to France and wapped a lot of French ladies,” said Carey coarsely. “We need a lawyer.”

  “All Heneage has done is reive our horses,” Dodd said.

  “Metaphorically speaking,” Carey corrected, waggling the end of the pipe at him.

  “So then we go after him on foot. We do it ourselves. Ay, so it’s slower but…”

  Carey shook his head and passed the pipe back to Dodd. “I keep telling you, this is not a Border feud, we do things differently in London. Perhaps Father could twist some arms, raise the fees…Maybe one of the Bacon brothers would take it pro bono if I asked nicely.”

  Dodd shook his head firmly and opened his mouth to argue but there was a soft cough which interrupted him.

  “Excuse me, sirs, but I couldn’t help hearing your discourse.”

  It was the young man in the lawyer’s robe. As the man made his bow, Dodd stared at him suspiciously, assuming this must be one of Heneage’s spies you heard so much about. The young man was average height, narrow built, with sandy hair under one of the newly fashionable beaver hats. Sharp blue eyes peered out of a face ruined by smallpox, worse even than Barnabus. His attempt at a friendly smile was actually twisted by the scarring. There was a shocking pit right next to his mouth, the size of a farthing.

  “Is it true that you are in need of a lawyer?”

  “Possibly,” said Carey, eyeing the man.

  He bowed again to both of them, making Dodd feel uncomfortable. “I am James Enys, at your service, sirs, barrister-at-law.”

  “And yer daybook is no’ full?” asked Dodd cynically.

  “Empty, sirs.” The man laughed without humour and spread his soft white hands. One of the fingers was dented by a ring newly taken off. “I have just hocked my last ring, sirs, and turned off my clerk.”

  “Are ye no’ rich then?” Dodd asked curiously, “I thought all lawyers was rich.”

  “Potentially, yes. But generally not when they start, and especially not if Mr. Vice Chancellor Heneage has taken a dislike to them.”

  This was too pat for either Carey or Dodd’s liking. They exchanged glances.

  Enys coughed and held up one hand.

  “Gentlemen, I know you are trying to launch a civil suit for damages and a criminal charge of assault, battery, and false imprisonment against Mr. Vice, and that Mr. Vice has forestalled you by frightening off all the courageous men of law in this place.”

  “Ay,” said Dodd, putting his elbows on his knees and leaning forwards, despite the damage this made his chokingly high collar do to his adam’s apple. “But whit can ye dae to show us ye’re no’ one o’ his kinship come tae trap us in ambush?”

  Carey coughed as Enys frowned in puzzlement. “My friend is from Cumberland,” he explained, and translated Dodd’s challenge.

  Enys inclined his head slightly. “Quite right, Sergeant,” he said, “you have a point there. Yet the same could be said of any lawyer you hired—if not already a spy, turned into one the minute Heneage found out who he was.”

&n
bsp; “So?”

  Enys shrugged. “Make enquiries, sir. Ask about me. You will find I am a little notorious. I still have chambers in my lord of Essex’s court. My…um…my sister keeps house for me there although she does not…um like to keep company. You may find me there any time from ten in the morning.”

  “Not at Westminster Hall?” Carey asked.

  Again the stiff smile. “Frequently, in hopes of a brief. However, Mr. Vice has made it clear that he prefers my room to my company there and the Court officials often oblige him. Please—at least consider my offer.”

  “Do you know who I am?” Carey was crossing his legs at the ankle, leaning back and tapping his gloved fingers on his teeth. Dodd nipped the pipe from his other hand and smoked the last of the tobacco in the bowl, then tapped it out, his head spinning. Not only did the smoke ease his kidneys, it also seemed to do something to the dull ball of rage in his gut against Heneage.

  “I believe you are the son of my lord Baron Hunsdon.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “When I heard you enquiring of one of my brothers-at-law, I asked him and he told me. Also, sir, with respect, you and your family are not entirely unknown to the legal profession.”

  Carey ignored that. “Well, you’ll know then that I’m the youngest and utterly penniless at the moment, so it’s my worshipful Father you must convince, not me. He’ll be paying you.”

  Enys bowed. “I should be delighted at the chance to try.”

  “Hm,” said Carey again, “Very well, come to Somerset House tomorrow afternoon.”

  The young man bowed again and his robe swirled as he walked away, whistling softly to himself. Dodd watched him go. “I dinna trust him.”

  “Quite right too,” said Carey, putting the pipe away again. “Even if he’s not Heneage’s spy, he’s still a bloody lawyer.”

  ***

  When they got back to Somerset House they found that Hunsdon was not there. He had gone upriver to Whitehall Palace in a matter for the Queen and required his son and his son’s henchman to join him there immediately.

  They got into one of the Hunsdon boats, still munching some hurried bread and cheese. Dodd leaned back and idly watched the flapping standard at the prow. Certainly there were aspects to being a gentleman he could well get used to—such as not being one of the men in blinding yellow and black livery sweating to propel them to Westminster against the tide. Carey sat opposite, upright, tapping his fingers on the gunwale and looking thoughtfully into the distance.