3 A Surfeit of Guns

by P. F. Chisholm

  “Keep yer mouth shut,” hissed Sir Henry Widdrington, dag at the ready once more.

  And yet, Carey still had the feeling that this was cautious handling: certainly they had not been so gentle with the German. Once more he was grabbed by the shoulders and hurried across the kitchen and into a dark passageway. Yes, there was a sense of furtiveness and hurry, definitely. Surely this was far less official than it appeared? Or why use an English gentleman for the dirty work? King James might be short of loyal soldiers, but any one of his nobles would have been highly delighted to arrest and ill-treat an English official.

  They went down stairs echoing with the clatter of boots and his own heavy breathing, into another narrow corridor that smelled headily of wine. A massive iron-bound door was unlocked, swung briefly open and somebody, Sir Henry no doubt, booted him into the opening. He stumbled on the slippery bits of straw on the floor and barked his shoulder as he rammed into the opposite wall. The door slammed shut immediately to a clashing of keys and bolts, leaving him in a darkness that put him in doubt whether his eyes were open or shut. The smell of wine permeated everything, so strong it made his head reel almost at once, though there was another less pleasant smell mixed in with it.

  Carey set his back against the wall he had hit and caught his breath. For a while all he could hear was the beating of his own heart and the air in his own throat. Then gradually his nose told him what the other smell was: there was someone else in the wine cellar, someone who had been there for some time. For a moment he was afraid it was a corpse and then he made out the other man’s harsh breathing.

  “Who’s there?” he asked tentatively.

  A kind of moan, nothing more.

  “Well, where are you?”

  This time, a kind of grunt. How badly injured was he? Had the other man been tortured? Or was he a plant of the kind that Walsingham had used to get information from Catholics in prison?

  Wishing he had the use of his hands, Carey began shuffling cautiously across the wine cellar from one wall to the other, trying to learn its geography. The huge wine tuns were in a row by the furthest wall, with smaller barrels set at random on the floor, lying in wait so he could stub his toes and bark his shins on them. Sawdust and straw on the floor to soak up spillage, cool dampness and that maddening Dionysian smell. At last his feet struck something soft and he squatted down. More incomprehensible muttering. What the Devil was wrong with the man?

  On impulse Carey tried the few words of High Dutch that he knew: “Wie sind sie?”

  Silence and then the sound of soft sobbing. “Oh, Christ,” said Carey, suddenly understanding almost everything. “You’re the German—what was it—you’re Hans Schmidt? Das ist Ihre Name, ja?”

  “Jawohl.”

  “What the hell did they do to you?”

  A high whining, choked with sobs.

  For a while, Carey was too sickened and depressed to do more than sit uncomfortably on the damp straw beside the German. Somewhere at the back of his mind a large and complicated structure was forming to explain all that had been going on, but what he was mainly conscious of was the fact that the chill of the wine cellar was cutting through his shirt and giving him goosepimples, he was already dizzy from the fumes, his stomach hurt and so did his shoulder, and that whatever was left of the man beside him was weeping its heart out.

  “All right,” said Carey awkwardly at last, as if talking to a horse gone lame. “All right now. Ich…er…ich help sie.”

  Sniffling, coughing, thick swallowing, well, there was at least enough of the German’s pride for him to try and get a grip on himself. And this was no plant: none of that kind of crew were good enough actors. Carey deliberately pulled his thoughts away from what might have happened to the unfortunate foreigner. He couldn’t find out anyway, with his hands bolted behind him. The rough wooden shackle hanging on his wristbones was already causing his fingers to prickle and tingle painfully.

  “All right,” he said pointlessly again. “I’m Sir Robert Carey, Deputy Warden of Carlisle. It seems we share an enemy. I want to talk to you. Ich will mit sie sprache.”

  There was something a little like a bitter laugh. “Nonsense,” Carey snapped. “If it’s too hard to talk, just grunt. Give one grunt for yes, two grunts for no and three for I don’t know. Eins fur ja, swei fur nein, drei fur ich kenne nicht. Ja?”

  “Ja.”

  So far, so good, thought Carey, shifting his back up against the wall again and trying to get his legs comfortable. He wished with all his heart he spoke more German, or the German more English. Though from the mushy sounds next to him he suspected the man was having to talk out of a mouthful of broken teeth. “Now, do you understand French? Sprechen sie Franzosich?”

  “Oui. Meilleur qu’anglais.”

  “Thank God,” said Carey, mentally switching gears into that language. “Alors, parlons nous.”

  ***

  Young Hutchin sat in Maxwell’s loft with his arms wrapped round his knees and watched the rats watching him in the light squeezing up through the ceiling boards from the candles and lanterns below. The cold heavy belt wrapped round his waist was warming up. In his imagination he saw the gold there, thick heavy roundels of it, straight from Spain, stamped with letters he could not read and, no doubt, a few with bite marks in them. He had seen gold when his father had had a good raid, he knew what it looked like and what it could buy.

  Below him and to the right there were bangs and thumps and talk. Sir Henry and his men were searching Carey’s sleeping place for the gold, but although Hutchin could feel his heart beating hard and slow, he was less afraid than excited. Hiding from searchers was something he had done many times after thieving; it was only a matter of staying still and silent. He had already taken the precaution of putting one of the main roof beams between himself and the trapdoor, in case someone should come up for a look, treading softly and carefully over the narrow boards while Carey argued with Sir Henry below. He could see an escape route where the slates were loose on one side. Picturing the building in his mind, he thought it was at a point on the roof where there was a way down to the roof of the bowling alley and from there to the ground. Or he could go down through the trapdoor when the men below had given up and gone. After that, once out of Maxwell’s Castle—there were horses aplenty in the town, or he could find his cousins on foot, an unremarked boy among dozens in Dumfries. And then…

  Young Hutchin shook his head with exasperation. The Courtier had somehow caught him neatly in a trap of words and loyalty. What had he said, after outlining precisely the things Hutchin could do? He had said the choice was Hutchin’s. No hint there of which he should choose, only the bald stating of it. And yet, Young Hutchin knew perfectly well that the Deputy Warden would be hoping he would find Dodd or Lady Widdrington and get him out of whatever dungeon the Scottish King had thrown him in. What could they do? Ransom him perhaps with the gold around Hutchin’s middle. Jesus, what a waste of a fortune.

  Hutchin bit his lip, weighing up his choices. If he ran off, he was as good as killing the Deputy, or worse. He had heard the words of the warrant through the ceiling boards, the ugly frightening phrase ‘high treason’. Sir Henry Widdrington had read it out loudly enough. They did worse than hang you for high treason, he knew, though he had never seen it done. They hanged you first, then they took you down while you were still alive, cut off your cods and burned them in your face and slit your belly and pulled out your guts and then cut you in four bits like a woman making a chicken stew. He had heard tell that if the hangman wasn’t bribed beforehand, he’d let you down before you were more than a little blue and then…Hutchin had seen hangings and more than his share of men dying, but his imagination balked at this. It was true, he had a morbid curiosity to see it done at least once, and envied the apprentice boys in Edinburgh who had more of a chance, but not to the Courtier. He liked the Courtier, soft southerner though he was, and after all, Carey had come after Hutchin when he had been inveigled away from the stables
by the young man in tawny taffeta. Carey had appeared at the upstairs window like an avenging angel, while Hutchin was fighting and dodging for his life, had climbed through, punched one of the men and kicked another, giving Hutchin the chance to bite the other man holding him and head-butt a fourth. That had been a good fight, though Hutchin personally would have liked to see Carey’s sword bloodied instead of merely used as a threat.

  Never mind, the fact was he had been there as if he were an uncle or an elder brother or something, not just a southern courtier. And Young Hutchin had repaid him by spying for his enemy, Sir Henry Widdrington. That annoyed Hutchin profoundly. He had been taken like a wean by Roger Widdrington, he had naively believed the tale about Lady Widdrington, him—Hutchin Graham, most promising son of the canniest surname on the Border. It was infuriating and shaming. And hardly a word had Carey said to curse him for it, though he was facing arrest by the very man he had no doubt horned, and plainly due to Hutchin’s treason. And now Young Hutchin had the means of freeing him. Or not.

  God damn it, thought Hutchin, they were still turning over Carey’s room, what the Devil’s taking them so long? Do they not know how to find good loot in a room? Stupid bastards. He started to pick his teeth with his fingernail. Perhaps he’d be here all night. Perhaps by the time they had finished, the King’s men would have broken Carey’s long legs in the Boot and put him out of hope of ever walking again. Perhaps after a session with Scottish torturers, he would prefer to die, even by hanging, drawing and quartering?

  Young Hutchin was getting tired of thinking. He realised that at last the thumps and bangs had stopped. Still moving cautiously, he picked his way through rat droppings and ancient clothes chests to the loose slates and pulled a few out. There was a gutter that seemed firm enough. The curve of the roof hid him from the yard where Widdrington’s men were gathering. With painful slowness he eeled his way out through the small hole and lay full length on the roof, gripping with the toes of his boots and his fingers. He inched his way down until his foot met the edge of the leads, and he could rest his weight on it a little and go sideways to the place where the roof of the bowling alley joined the main building. Although this was a fortified town house, there was no roof platform here for standing siege, only some crenellations and elaborate chimneys, more for show than for use, and a nuisance to climb over.

  The bowling alley roof was newer and had no crenellations. At least it was at a flatter pitch and by lying full length and gripping the ridge with his arms at full stretch he could inch himself along and so gain the change from shingle to thatch where the stables began. Arm muscles bulging at the extra weight round his middle, Hutchin let himself down off the bowling alley roof by means of the gutter, watching the pinnings creak and pop. He dropped onto the thatch before the whole lot could come away. The thatch was rotten and he actually went part way through, his feet dangling sickeningly in space, his hands grabbing at one of the cross-ties. A couple of horses whinnied and snorted below.

  “Och, the hell with it,” Young Hutchin said to himself, knowing the stables were only one storey high, and he let go of the cross-tie and let himself slide through and rolled into the thick straw between two alarmed horses. Brushing straw and reeds off himself he calmed the animals down, patting them and swearing at them gently under his breath, until he felt the iron prod of a sword in his back and stopped dead.

  “Stealing horses again, eh, Young Hutchin?”

  “Sergeant Dodd,” said Young Hutchin, his stomach lurching back from his throat with relief.

  “Ay. And ye woke me up, ye little bastard.”

  The sound of a yawn followed this, so Hutchin cautiously turned about. Sergeant Dodd had bits of straw in his hair and his eyes full of sleep. The hand not holding a sword was scratching fleabites on his stomach and his foul temper in the mornings was legendary.

  “It’s a pity the men in the yard didnae do the like then,” Hutchin said in a triumphant hiss. “Sir Henry Widdrington just came with a Royal Warrant and arrested the Deputy Warden.”

  The sword didn’t move, but Dodd blinked slightly. He moved to one of the half doors, still keeping his sword pointed at Hutchin, opened it a fraction and looked out. He was just in time to see the last Widdringtons leave the yard and the Maxwells on guard shut the gate behind them.

  “What was the charge?” asked Dodd after a moment’s pause.

  “High treason and…er…trafficking with enemies.”

  Dodd whitened and looked out into the empty yard again.

  “I told him,” he muttered. “I told the fool.”

  “Ye mean it’s true?” asked Hutchin, impressed. “Is the bill foul then?”

  “Near enough.”

  “Jesus. What shall we do, Sergeant?”

  Dodd appeared to be thinking while he stared at Hutchin. Hutchin hoped very much that the Sergeant wouldn’t notice the thickening round his middle.

  “Well, we canna rescue the Courtier this time by calling out the Dodds or even the Grahams,” he said with finality. “This is official business. Who was it came to arrest him?”

  “Sir Henry Widdrington and his kin.”

  “Was it now? That’s odd.”

  Hutchin Graham nodded. “And they were in an awful hurry and it didn’t sound like they knocked him about much.”

  “How did you get away?”

  “The Courtier put me up under the roof through the trapdoor when he heard them and gave me this to take to Lady Widdrington.” Hutchin showed him the ring on his thumb which he had been admiring for the size of its red stone and the letters of some kind carved in it. “Is it a ruby, d’ye think?”

  “Ay, no doubt.”

  “What are the letters?”

  “RC for Robert Carey,” answered Dodd at once, impressing Young Hutchin for the first time with his clerkly knowledge. “Did he give ye anything else?” Dodd asked casually. Hutchin shook his head. “They’ve got it then,” he said sadly.

  “Got what?” asked Hutchin with artful ignorance.

  “Nothing to concern ye, lad. Come on.”

  “Where to?”

  “Out of here first, and out of the town too. I dinna want to end up in the Dumfries hole with the Courtier.”

  Hutchin shook his head. “I’m for going to Lady Widdrington,” he heard himself say. “That’s what the Courtier wanted me to do, and that’s what I’ll do.”

  “Ye’ll come with me, lad.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Dodd thought for a moment. “If the Maxwells are agin ye, who’s most like to back ye?” he asked rhetorically. Hutchin nodded. It made sense to try the Johnstones. “Do you know a good way out of this place? Is there a garden gate?”

  Hutchin thought about this professionally. “I heard tell from one of the other boys there’s a way by the new bowling alley, that Maxwell had built from the old monastery stone. The wall there’s nobbut the monastery wall and they werenae too choosy how they treated it.”

  Dodd nodded. “If I can make it back to Carlisle, we’ll get the Warden to write to the King and see if we can ransom him out of there.”

  Hutchin’s face twisted. “That’s nae good,” he said. “Once it goes to the Warden, then he’s done for one way or the other, for the Queen will hear of it.”

  Dodd had put on his jack and his helmet, giving him the familiar comforting silhouette of a fighting man, though the quilting on the leather was different from the Graham pattern. Now he was busy bundling up the shape of a man in the corner where he had been sleeping, out of straw and his cloak.

  “Lad,” said Dodd gravely, almost kindly, “we cannae spring the Courtier out of the King’s prison.”

  “Why not? Ye saved him from my uncle when he was trapped on Netherby tower.”

  “That was different. Your uncle’s one thing, the King’s another.”

  “I dinnae see why,” said Hutchin stubbornly. “They’re both men that have other men to do their bidding, only the King’s got more.”

  “T
hat’s enough, Young Hutchin. We canna rescue the Courtier again because…Anyway, what can a woman do about it?”

  “He wanted me to take the ring to Lady Widdrington, so he must think she can do something. And that…” said Hutchin virtuously, the decision somehow made for him by Dodd’s opposition, “…is what I’ll do, come ye or any man agin me.”

  He slipped under the horse’s belly and whisked to the rear door that led to the midden heap. Sword still in his hand, Dodd didn’t try to stop him, so Hutchin checked that the backyard was clear and the Maxwells were watching outwards, and then turned again to the Sergeant with an impish grin.

  “He gets in a powerful lot of trouble, doesn’t he?” he said. “For a Deputy Warden.”

  “Ay.”

  Friday 14th July 1592, dawn

  Elizabeth Widdrington always woke well before dawn to rise in the darkness and say her prayers. In the tiny Dumfries alehouse where they were lodging, it was easier for her to do it: firstly her husband had been out much of the night and had not been there to disturb her sleep with his snoring and moaning and occasional ineffectual fumbling. Secondly the new belting he had given her on top of the old ones the night before had kept her from sleeping very well in any case.

  Fastening her stays was always the hardest part, as she pulled the laces up tight and the whalebone bit into the welts and bruises, but once that was done they paradoxically gave her support and armour. None of her clothes fastened fashionably at the back, since she did not like to be dependent on a lady’s maid, and so it was the work of a few minutes to tie on her bumroll, step into her kirtle and hook up the side of her bodice. She had changed the sleeves the night before and half-pinned her best embroidered stomacher to it and so once her cap was on her head she was respectable enough to meet the King if necessary.