3 A Surfeit of Guns

by P. F. Chisholm

  “Where did the exchange take place?”

  “East of here, in the Middle March, at a meeting place. I dinna ken where.”

  “Please, Goody, I will not say where I got the information, but where did the guns come from?”

  She laughed a little. “Where all trouble comes, fra ower the Border, where else?”

  Carey nodded, released her hand, gave her the purse he was carrying and the paper, then bowed in return to her curtsey and pushed his way out of the tiny smoky little hellhole. He was coughing and wheezing as he got back on his horse and when he wiped his face with his handkerchief he found a pale brown dinge on it.

  “Christ,” he remarked to no one in particular. “How can anyone live in a place like that?”

  “It’s no’ sae bad, sir,” sniffed Dodd, offended once again. “Ye stop crying and coughing in a week and then they’re snugger than a tower, believe me.”

  “Thank you, Dodd,” said Carey, hawking and spitting mightily. “I’ll try and remember it.” He put in his heels and led them at a fast trot back to the path, without looking back.

  ***

  “So tell me about the guns,” the Courtier said conversationally to Henry Dodd as they turned their horses’ heads west and northwards.

  “The guns, sir?”

  “Yes, Sergeant. The guns in the armoury. What is it that everybody else knows about them and I don’t?”

  Dodd’s face had taken on a stolidly stupid expression.

  “I’m sorry, sir…”

  “What I’d really like to know is what makes the armoury clerkship worth fifty pounds, since it seems that’s what Lowther and his cousin Ridley managed to bilk me out of. It can’t simply be a matter of selling all the guns as quickly as you can: even on the Border someone would notice, surely.”

  There was the faintest flicker of Dodd’s eyelid.

  “For Christ’s sake, Dodd, have pity.”

  Dodd coughed.

  “Well, sir, ye see, ye can loan the handguns out for a regular fee with a little care—and a deposit, of course—and get more in the long run than ye would by selling them.”

  Carey greeted this with a shout of laughter. “By God, that’s ingenious. I hope the clerks at the Tower never get to hear of it, the Spaniards would end up better armed with our ordnance than we are. So generally when there was an inspection, the guns would all be there?”

  “Ay, sir. It fair queered Atkinson’s pitch, you rousting the place out without warning like that.”

  “Did Scrope get a cut?”

  “I dinna ken, sir,” said Dodd carefully. “But ye see, it had the benefit that the surnames would kill more of each others’ men wi’ the guns and save us the bother.”

  “I wonder if that sort of thing goes on in Berwick. I must tell my brother.”

  “I dinna ken, sir,” said Dodd again, having heard some of the stories about Sir John Carey.

  Carey caught his tone. “Oh, I see,” he said cynically. “So I’m the only innocent who doesn’t know about it.”

  Dodd grunted and thought it more tactful not to answer.

  “What about the risk that the surnames would be better armed in a fight than the garrison?”

  “Wi’ Lowther leading the trods, sir?”

  “No. Plainly the situation wouldn’t arise. I tell you, Sergeant, I’m not bloody surprised this March is gone to rack and ruin and there’s been no justice out of Liddesdale for sixteen years.”

  “Rack and ruin, sir?”

  Carey turned his horse and waved an arm expansively.

  “Look at it, Sergeant. Look at that.”

  It was only a huddle of burned cottages and a broken down pele-tower, plus some overgrown fields. Hardly surprising, so close to the predatory Grahams of Esk and the assorted wild men of the Debateable Land. Dodd thought the place might have been Routledge lands once.

  “Ay, sir?”

  “It’s tragic. This is beautiful country, rich, fertile, wonderful for livestock, and there’s more waste ground than field, more forest than pasture. And what do you see? Pele-towers and such for the robbers to live in, or burned-out places like that. How can anyone till the ground or plant hedges or orchards or anything useful if they never know from one day to the next if they’re going to be burned out of house and home?”

  Dodd looked at the burned huts. Like Long George’s children, he had lived in places like that in his youth, they weren’t so bad, usually warm and dry if you built them right. And why would anyone want to plant an orchard, with all the trouble that was, when a cow would give you milk inside three years and mainly feed herself?

  “And this thing about blackrent, it’s a scandal and a disgrace.”

  Dodd stared at him. Blackrent was traditional. Carey made an impatient gesture.

  “You’re only supposed to pay one lot of rent, Dodd, to your actual landlord, plus tithes to the church, of course,” he said. “You shouldn’t be paying another lot of rents to a bunch of thieving ruffians to stop them raiding you.”

  “Well, it’s worth it if they protect you,” protested Dodd.

  “Do you pay blackrent, Dodd?”

  “Ay, of course I do. I dinna need to pay off the Armstrongs and I willna pay the bloody Elliots nor Lowther neither, but I pay Graham of Brackenhill like everyone else and I pay a bit to the Nixons and the Kerrs to keep them sweet.”

  “Did you know it’s against the law to pay it? Did you know you could hang for paying it?”

  Dodd was speechless. His jaw dropped.

  “Who in the hell made that law?” he demanded when he could speak again. “Some bloody Southerner, I’ll be bound.”

  “So who pays you blackrent in turn, Dodd?”

  “Naebody.”

  Carey’s eyebrows did their little leap.

  “It’s no crime to take blackrent,” he said sourly. “Only pay it. And yes, it was a bloody Southerner made that law, and he was an idiot.”

  “Well, it’s no’ precisely blackrent, see ye,” Dodd began to explain. “But some of the Routledges give me a bit and what the wife collects on my behalf I dinna ken and…”

  “Oh, never mind. Look over there. Do those look like hobbies to you?”

  Dodd looked and saw to his relief that the horses were on English Graham land. The water-bailiff was at the back of their small party and hadn’t noticed Carey’s interest.

  “Nay, sir, they do not.” Let Bangtail’s dad talk his way out of this.

  “Six of them, and very nice they are too, if a little short of food.”

  “Och, them fancy French horses eat their heads off…” Dodd began and stopped. “…Or so I’ve heard.”

  “Hmm.” Carey looked sideways at him and Dodd wondered what it was about Carey that caused Dodd’s own tongue to become so loose. He made his face go blank and stared severely at the foreign horses trotting about in the field ahead of them.

  Carey did nothing much about the horses: simply pulled out a leather notebook and a pen and little bottle of ink and scribbled down the descriptions of each one of the horses in the field, resting the book on his saddle bow. They carried on, noting eight more horses of suspiciously fine breeding in lands owned by Musgraves and Carletons.

  At last, to Henry Dodd’s relief, Carey picked up his heels a bit as they approached the Border country itself. They crossed at the Longtown ford and then covered the five miles of Debateable Land at a good clip. They took the horse-smugglers’ path by the old battlefield and followed it into the Johnstone lands north of Gretna, where Carey had them slow down to bate the horses.

  We have thirty-five miles to ride to Dumfries before night, Dodd thought sourly, through some of the wildest robber country in the world, and hardly a man with us, just a bloody Graham water-bailiff and a Deputy Warden who thinks he’s immune to bullets.

  To Dodd’s mind, Carey rode like a man going to a wedding with a cess of two hundred behind him. He took his time, never doing more than a canter, and stared around with interest at what he called
the lie of the land, which looked like rocks and hills to Dodd, asked the few people in the villages they passed through what surname they were and generally behaved as if he was somewhere in soft and silly Yorkshire, where no one was likely to attack him at all.

  When Dodd tactfully tried to reason with him, he got nowhere.

  “Dodd, Dodd,” Carey said with that tinge of tolerant amusement in his voice that Dodd found intensely irritating, “nobody is going to attack us at this time of all times. King James is on the Border with three thousand men and he would just love to suck up to the Queen by hanging anyone who attacked me.”

  Ye think ye’re very important, Courtier, thought Dodd, but heroically didn’t say. Has it crossed your mind that there are broken men all over the place here and not a one of them that gives a year-old cowpat for King James and all his men? He glanced across at the leathery water-bailiff, with the telltale long bony Graham face and cold grey eyes. He was riding along on his tough little pony looking as if he was half-asleep. No help from there.

  “Ay, sir,” said Dodd, still trying to rotate his head on his neck like an owl. “I’m verra glad to hear it. Will we be there by nightfall at this pace, sir?”

  He paused, stark horror chilling his blood like winter. “And what’s that, sir?”

  There was movement in the distance, the characteristic purposeful movement of a man riding towards them at speed. They sat and watched for a few seconds and then Carey was quietly loading his dags, and Red Sandy and Sim’s Will Croser drawing their swords. Dodd spun his horse about, staring suspiciously at the farmlands and waste ground about them. Nothing. The land was empty save for the inevitable women weeding gardens and harvesting peas. Only there was the lone horseman riding like the clappers.

  Man? He seemed small and light, and there was a smear of gold above his face, beneath his dark woollen cap.

  “Och,” said the Graham water-bailiff, visibly relaxing. “I ken who that is.” He shook his head and tutted.

  “Well?” said Carey impatiently.

  “That wild boy, Young Hutchin.”

  It was. As the figure came closer he resolved into Young Hutchin, wearing the black livery he had worn for Scrope’s funeral, bending low over his hobby’s neck and riding like one demented.

  As he came up to them at last, he reined in and grinned. “Do you have a message for me?” Carey demanded, tension showing in his voice. Young Hutchin looked surprised.

  “Nay, sir. Your lady sister said I wis to serve ye for page if I could catch up to ye, sir. That’s why I’m here.”

  The boy had a very guileless blue stare and for a moment even Dodd believed him.

  “You’re lying,” said Carey with emphasis. “My sister would no more send you to be my page at King James’s court than parade ten naked virgins mounted on milkwhite mares through the Debateable Land at night.”

  Hutchin’s face fell slightly. “She did so,” he muttered. “I’m to be yer page.”

  “She did not. Go back to Carlisle.”

  “Ah willna.”

  “Young Hutchin,” said Carey through his teeth. “I have enough to do without nursemaiding you through the Scotch court. Go back to Carlisle.”

  “Ye canna make me.”

  “I can tan your impudent arse for you, if you don’t do as you’re damned well told!” roared Carey.

  The water-bailiff tutted and rode forward. “Sir,” he murmured modestly. “A word wi’ ye.”

  “Yes, what is it, Mr Graham?”

  “The lad’s my cousin’s child and he’s three parts gone to the bad already.”

  “Do you want King James’s court to complete the job?”

  “Ye canna make him go back if he doesnae want to. He’ll only ride out o’ sight and then trail us intae Dumfries alone.”

  Carey growled under his breath. “Are you telling me I have to take him as my page and under my protection or risk him coming to Dumfries on his own anyway?”

  “Ay, sir. That’s the size of it.”

  “God damn it to hell and perdition. What the Devil possessed you, Young Hutchin? I don’t need a bloody page.”

  “Ye do sir, at court. Ye canna be at court without a servant to attend ye. What would the Scottish lords think?”

  “Who gives a damn what the Scottish lords think? And anyway, that’s not why you came.”

  Hutchin grinned knowingly. “Nay, sir. I had a fancy to see the Scotch court for maself.”

  Carey stared at him narrow-eyed for a moment, as if trying to size up exactly how much he understood of the world. Eventually he shrugged.

  “On your own head be it,” he said. “I don’t want you and if you’ve a particle of sense you’ll turn around and head back to Carlisle.”

  Young Hutchin sat and waited Carey out. Carefully, the Courtier discharged his dags into the air, causing Young Hutchin’s horse to pirouette and rear. If Carey thought that would make Young Hutchin think twice, he was mistaken: the lad was a Borderer born and bred and had heard gunfire since babyhood. He waited until Carey had gestured his small party onwards with an impatient hand, and fell in at the back looking as meek and prim as a maiden. Although if what Dodd had heard about the Scottish court was true, one of Carey’s fanciful virgins on horseback would have been safer there.

  They ate late of the food they had brought with them by the side of the track in Annan, after being refused point blank when they offered to buy anything the womenfolk happened to have around. The women claimed bitterly that there was not a scrap of food left anywhere since the King’s harbingers had been through and they had seen nothing but forest berries and fresh peas for two days. The water-bailiff was known there and got some guarded nods.

  The afternoon passed wearily for Dodd in the long complex climb up and through low hills and bogs to Dumfries. Carey was enjoying himself again. Some of the way he was whistling one of the repetitive complicated ditties he and his brother-in-law seemed to set such store by, to Dodd’s mystification. What was the point of a song that had no story? Finally Dodd rode a little ahead, to get away from the wheedling little tune. The countryside gave him a bad feeling in his gut all the way: true, he was legal this time, and riding with the water-bailiff. It didn’t help. Every time previously that he had passed into Scotland, except for the occasional message to Edinburgh when he was a lad, had been at dead of night and very very quietly. He did know the area somewhat, different though it looked in daylight, although the Johnstones and the Maxwells were both a little spry to be stealing cows off too regularly. A few years back there had been some pickings when the two surnames had been at each other’s throats. They were quiet at the moment and Dodd wondered gloomily what they were brewing. There were plentiful signs of devastation about: broken walls, burnt cottages, even a roofless pele-tower here and there, many fields going out of cultivation. The Courtier seemed less morally outraged by it, though, presumably because the sufferers were only Scots.

  Nearer Dumfries there was less waste, more fertile farmed land, but still it looked bad. Some of the farmers had taken their harvest in early, no doubt to take advantage of the King’s Court. But that meant the oats and wheat that was left over would be subject to rot later on. Oh, there was a famine brewing for next year and no mistake: first Bothwell and his men and then this, the Court and the Scottish army. Nowhere in the world could hope to feed so many people so suddenly and not suffer. Not to mention the horses. Dodd thought he would mention it to his wife, so she would keep any surplus from their harvest and not sell it.

  Monday 10th July 1592, evening

  They came into Dumfries at the southwesternmost end of the town, on the path from Bankend that splashed through the Goosedub bogs by the Catstrand burn, past the evil green of the Watslacks on their right before passing into the town itself at the Kirkgate Port. Dumfries had no walls. It was amply defended by being built on a soggy bend of the River Nith with river on two sides and bog on the other two.

  To Dodd and Young Hutchin the town was a howling maze o
f chaos, full of people with strange ways of speaking and strange cuts and patterns to their jacks. The water-bailiff said he would go and stay with a woman of the town that he happened to know and disappeared among the beer-drinking crowds before either Carey or Dodd could find out where. Carey shrugged and began threading through the eternal evening twilight of July, patiently asking in his fluent Scots at the three inns and five alehouses if anyone had room for them. Mostly the Dumfries citizens laughed in his face and Dodd began to wonder if cobbles were as bad to sleep on as they looked. Typically, as the sky darkened a roof of cloud formed and it was coming on to rain a fine mizzle. Tents had ominously mushroomed in the Market Place itself, huddles of pavilions pitched between the Tolbooth and the Fish Cross, and rows of better quality, some of them painted and coloured with badges, behind the Mercat Cross. Crowds of men streamed in and out of the best house they had seen in Dumfries, a large solid stone building with pillared arches at its ground floor entrance, and more were sheltering under them, richly dressed and leaning against the stone or playing dice like men who were used to waiting.

  Carey dismounted and led his horse to one group, spoke softly and handed over some coins. The Dodd brothers, Sim’s Will Croser and Young Hutchin watched hopefully until they saw the sneers.

  Carey came back to them shaking his head.

  “Sir?” asked Dodd, mentally girding his loins for a night in the open.

  “I am reliably informed that the lad might have some chance of lodging,” Carey replied drily, “but none of us do.” If Young Hutchin understood what the Courtier meant by that, he gave no sign of it.

  “If we go out of town a little way there might be a dry place we could light a fire…” Dodd said, preparing to make the best of it and hoping Carey would not sleep a wink on the hard cold ground.

  Carey smiled. “One more place to try.”

  They trailed back through the crowds and tents and horses, picking their way over the dung that already lay in heaps at street corners, to one of the smaller inns at the corner of Cavart’s Vennel.

  Again Carey dismounted and spoke to one of the men lolling by the door picking his teeth, handed over some more money. They waited while the ponies behind stamped their feet tiredly, and ugly-looking men in jacks passed by eyeing the supplies and livestock. Dodd eyed them right back.