3 A Surfeit of Guns

by P. F. Chisholm

  “We have made sundry investigations into your case,” the King pronounced, “and we are quite satisfied that there was no treason by you, either committed or intended, to this realm or that of our dear cousin of England. And we are further of the opinion that ye should be congratulated and no’ condemned for your dealings with the Spanish agent in the guise of an Italian wine merchant that some of our nobles were harbouring unknown to us.”

  Carey’s head was bowed.

  “We have therefore ordered that all charges be dropped and your good self released from the Warrant.”

  Carey cleared his throat, looked up. “I am exceedingly grateful to Your Majesty for your mercy and justice.” Was there still a hint of wariness in the voice? Did the Englishman think there might be a price for it? Well, there would be, though not the one he feared. King James smiled.

  “Well now, so that’s out o’ the way. Off your knees, man, I’m tired of looking down on ye. This isnae the English court here.” Carey stood, watching him.

  King James tipped his chair back and put his boots comfortably on the tedious papers in front of him.

  “Oh, Sir Robert,” he said, “would ye fetch me the wine on the sideboard there?”

  Carey did so gracefully, though with some difficulty, without the offended hunch of the shoulders that King James often got from one of his own subjects. On occasion he was even read a lecture by one of the more Calvinistically inclined about the evils of drink. It would be so much more restful to rule the English; he was looking forward to it greatly, if the Queen would only oblige him by dying soon and if the Cecils could bring off a smooth succession for him.

  Carey was standing still again after refilling his goblet, silently, a couple of paces from him. On the other hand, it was very hard to know what the English were thinking. Sometimes James suspected that with them, the greater the flattery, the worse the contempt. Buchanan had said that the lot of them were dyed in the wool hypocrites, as well as being greedy and ambitious. Well, well, it would be interesting at least.

  “It’s a question of armaments, is it no’?” he said affably. “Ye canna tell the Queen that ye lost the weapons she sent ye and ye canna do without them.” He paused. “It seems,” he said slowly, “that I have a fair quantity of armament myself, more than I had thought. Lord Spynie was in charge of purveying my army’s handguns, and it seems he did a better job than I expected.”

  Carey’s eyes were narrowed down to bright blue slits. “Indeed, Your Majesty.”

  “Bonnetti is in the midst of lading his…ah…his purchases into his ship. He is still not aware of any…problems.” King James beamed. “I gave him some gunpowder I’d no use for.”

  “Your Majesty is most kind.”

  King James let out a shout of laughter. “I am that. Now,” he said again. “I’m no’ an unreasonable man. I see ye’re in a difficult position with the armaments and I would like to put a proposal to ye.”

  Carey’s eyebrows went up.

  “Oh?” he said.

  “Ay, I would. I…we would like to sell ye our…spare weapons for the price of twenty shillings a gun, it being wholesale, as it were.”

  Carey’s face was completely unreadable. There was a short silence.

  “I should hate to make a similar mistake to Lord Maxwell’s,” he said cautiously at last.

  King James nodded vigorously. “Of course ye can check them over, fire them off a few times, take them apart if ye like. Ye’ll find they’re right enough: most of them have the Tower maker’s mark on them which was a surprise to me.”

  Carey nodded, face completely straight. “Of course,” he murmured. “May I ask if Your Majesty has sufficient weapons to defend yourself against Bothwell?”

  “It’s kind o’ ye to be concerned for us, Sir Robert,” said the King. “But we have decided there is no need to burn Liddesdale since the headmen there have come in and composed with us so loyally. Richie Graham of Brackenhill has made a handsome payment, for instance. And we have it on excellent authority that Bothwell has gone to the Highlands. We had always rather make peace than war, as ye know. Besides, it often strikes us that when ye give a man a weapon ye dinna always ken what he’ll use it for.”

  If Carey disapproved of this reversal of policy, there was no sign of it in his face. He tilted his head politely, though he seemed very depressed about something.

  “Now,” said King James, who hated to see any man so sad. “I would have wanted to talk to ye in any case, Sir Robert, even without all this trouble.”

  “Your Majesty does me too much honour,” said Carey, mechanically, as if he were thinking about something else.

  “Not a bit of it,” said King James, leaning forward to pat the man’s shoulder. “It’s the horse.”

  “The horse?”

  “Ay. That big black beast o’ yours.”

  “Thunder?”

  “That’s the one. Now it seems to me ye’ll hardly be doing much tilting whilst ye’re Deputy Warden, and he’s the finest charger I’ve seen in a long weary while, myself. What would you say to selling him to me for, say, half the gold finder’s fee ye got from the Italian, at the same time as you sign over to me all the bank drafts in payment for the guns. Eh?”

  Carey paused and then spoke carefully. “Let me be sure I’ve understood Your Majesty. You will give me the guns Lord Spynie reived from the Newcastle convoy to Carlisle…”

  “I never said they were the same, only that they were originally from the Tower of London.”

  “Of course, Your Majesty. You will give me your spare guns, release my men Red Sandy Dodd and Sim’s Will Croser from the Dumfries lock-up, give me all my gear back including my pair of dags…”

  “They’re waiting for ye downstairs,” put in the King helpfully.

  “…in exchange for Thunder, several hundred pounds English of banker’s drafts and half my liquid cash.”

  “Only half.”

  “Your Majesty, I am overwhelmed.”

  “Is it a done deal?” asked King James.

  “If the weapons have not been tampered with by…any ill-affected persons, then yes, Your Majesty, it is a deal.”

  “Excellent,” beamed King James. “Have some wine, Sir Robert. Oh, and what would ye like me to do with Sir Henry Widdrington?”

  Carey compressed his lips together and looked down.

  “May I think about it, Your Majesty?”

  “Ye can, but not for long. He’s an Englishman, given leave to enter the realm, I must charge him and have him extradited or let him go. An’ I’m no’ so certain what the charge should be, neither.”

  In fact this was another of King James’s games. He liked to tempt people; as usual he had already decided to release Sir Henry since it would save him a mountain of tedious letter-writing to the Marshal of Berwick, but he was interested to see what kind of revenge Carey would want.

  He met the bright blue eyes and wondered uneasily if Carey had somehow penetrated his game. Carey still had his lips tight shut. At last he spoke.

  “If you still have him here, Your Majesty, I want to talk to him in private.”

  “Why?”

  “I am afraid for his wife. I know she was the one who came to you with the information on her husband’s doings, and he may…be angry with her for her betrayal.”

  And small blame to him, thought King James, a typical woman to do such a thing.

  “Is she your mistress?” King James asked nosily.

  Carey’s face went red like a little boy’s. At first the King thought it was embarrassment, but then he realised that Carey was pale skinned enough to go red with anger as well. Perhaps he had been a little tactless.

  “No, Your Majesty,” Carey said quietly enough, and then smiled tightly. “Though not for want of my trying.”

  “Ay well,” said the King comfortably. “They’re odd creatures, sure enough. I dinna understand my Queen at all and it’s not as if she’s been over-educated and addled her poor brains, she seems naturally
perverse.”

  Carey coughed and smiled more naturally. “Lady Widdrington is a woman of very strong character,” he said. “If I could make her my wife, I would be the happiest man in the Kingdom.”

  “Oh ay?” said the King, sorry to hear it and wondering if Carey was about to ask him to do away with his rival somehow.

  “Although to be honest,” Carey continued, “what I would like is to petition Your Gracious Majesty to string her husband up and make an end of him, unfortunately I am completely certain that if I did, she would marry any man in the world except me.”

  King James shook his head sympathetically. “There’s no pleasing them, is there?” he said. “Ay well, I’m glad ye didna ask me to do it because I canna string him up in any case, our cousin the Queen would be highly offended if I took such liberties with any of her subjects.”

  He caught Carey’s narrow look: that was as close as a King could come to an apology and he was glad that Carey had taken the hint.

  “It would be a shame,” Carey said obligingly, “if Her Majesty were to be disturbed with any of these…er…problems.”

  “It would,” agreed the King heartily.

  “Such a thing would only be necessary if there was a further…er…problem with the guns. Or if my Lady Widdrington were to die unexpectedly for any reason whatever.”

  King James sniffed in irritation at this piece of barefaced cheek, justified though it was. “We are quite sure that the guns are as they should be.”

  “Lady Widdrington?”

  “I’ll speak with Sir Henry, if ye like. He’ll understand where his true interests lie.”

  “Of course, Your Majesty. There is also the practical problem of getting the guns back to Carlisle, since I brought hardly any men with me. And as I said, two of them are in the Dumfries lock-up for fighting.”

  The King waved a hand. “Speak to the Earl of Mar and we’ll bail your men and find ye an escort. Can ye lay your hands on the money?”

  “I think so, Your Majesty,” said Carey resignedly, no doubt thinking of what the funds could have bought him if he had managed to keep them. “I hope so.” Still, you’ve no cause for complaint, Sir Robert, thought the King comfortably; I could have taken the lot of it for all the trouble you’ve caused me.

  “Speak to the Earl of Mar to fetch your gear. Ye can make the exchange today if ye move quickly.”

  Friday 14th July 1592, afternoon

  Sir John Carmichael had only just heard the latest gossip about the doings at the King’s court when the subject of it breezed into the alehouse in the late afternoon, free, armed and with his left hand bandaged and in a sling. At his heels trotted his Graham pageboy. Sir John was not quite sure how to treat the hero of such melodramatic stories but, for the sake of his father, led him into a private room and sent for wine.

  It turned out that all Carey wanted to do was borrow the services of a trustworthy clerk and dictate an exact account of what had been going on in Dumfries and Carlisle over the past couple of weeks, particularly in relation to no less than two loads of mixed calivers and pistols which seemed to have had the most exciting time of all.

  By the end of it, Sir John was calling for more wine and damning Lord Spynie’s eyes and limbs impartially. He was particularly shocked at the idea of a gentleman and cousin of the Queen being tortured by some jumped-up lad of a favourite as if he were a bloody peasant. Carey agreed with him, read over the fair copy and then took a pen in his purple fingers and painfully wrote a further paragraph in a numerical cipher, topping and tailing the whole with the conventional phrases of a son to his father. Sir John privately doubted that Sir Robert was in fact as humbly obedient to Lord Hunsdon, the absentee Warden of the East March, as he professed to be or indeed should have been.

  “My father’s in London,” Carey said. “Would you make sure this reaches him without going near either Lord Scrope or Sir John Forster, nor even my brother in Berwick?”

  Sir John Carmichael nodded sympathetically.

  “Will he show it to the Queen?”

  “Only if I die…er…unexpectedly in office, or that’s what I told him to do.”

  “Mphm. Ye’ll stay the night here, of course, since ye can hardly go back to Maxwell.”

  Carey coughed. “Hardly. Thank you. Now, Sir John, I wonder if I could ask you another favour?”

  “Ye can always ask and I can always listen.”

  “I talked to Sir Henry Widdrington before I left the Court and the King promised to hold him for me until tomorrow evening, but I have a packtrain of armaments to get back to Carlisle. Even if I leave before dawn that won’t give me much of a start.”

  “Ay,” agreed Carmichael, having got there long before him. “I canna lend you men, but I can give ye some information. Someone stirred up the Johnstones this morning: the laird and his kin moved out of Dumfries in a body. My esteemed successor went hammering out of town in the direction of Lochmaben shortly after, wi’ every one of his men.”

  Carey frowned.

  “The Maxwells and Johnstones are massing for battle?”

  Sir John tipped his head. “Maxwell blames you.”

  “Oh, Christ. What the hell has he got against me?” demanded Carey, clearly not feeling as blithely confident as he looked. “I saved his life.”

  “Och, but that was days ago,” said Carmichael. “Wi’ the like of him, it’s a hundred years back. And he wants your guns.”

  “To wipe out the Johnstones?”

  “Ay. See ye, the Johnstones had just taken delivery of a surprising number of guns fra Carlisle, through the usual…er… system, ye ken, when ye arrived in the north and made yer surprise inspection of the Armoury. After that, they got to keep them and that had Maxwell awfy worried, so he put in a large bid to Thomas the Merchant Hetherington to get some for himself, which went, I believe, through your ain predecessor in office, Sir Richard Lowther.”

  “Why can’t any of these idiots buy guns in Dumfries?” asked Carey wearily. “Why does Carlisle have to supply their every want?”

  Carmichael shrugged. “It’s cheaper, mostly, the Dumfries armourers are very pricey men, and slow if ye want a lot in a hurry, and o’ course it’s more fun that way. Now, ye may have saved Maxwell’s life, but ye also diddled him out of a fortune and spoiled his plan for catching the Johnstones unawares, which he resents and so…”

  Carey knuckled at his eyes and then shook his head.

  “And I haven’t even kept the bloody money. What about the King? I’ve got twenty lancers from him already to see me through the Debateable Land. Would he give me more troops as protection, do you think?”

  “Ay, the King,” said Carmichael carefully. “They do say he kens an awful lot more than he lets on.”

  Carey looked straight at him, considering. “Yes,” he said. “That’s what I thought.”

  Saturday 15th July 1592, dawn

  When dawn came up the next day Carey and his packtrain were already heading eastwards into its bronze light, with a royal escort of twenty lancers and a Royal Warrant in Carey’s belt pouch commanding safeconduct for him to the Border. Young Hutchin was not at his side, having been sent ahead with an urgent message on the fastest pony Carey could find.

  He was not at all his usual self that morning. He already felt weary and a night of poor sleep made fitful by the throbbing pain in his hands had not helped. He was nervous because he knew perfectly well he could not even hold a sword, let alone wield it, and if he tried to shoot one of his dags, he would drop it. It was hateful to be so weak and defenceless, and the knowledge of his incapacity shortened his temper even further and filled him with ugly suspicions. He was quite sure that many of the lancers escorting his convoy were privately wondering just how annoyed their King would be if they simply stole some of the weapons and slipped back to their families. He very much doubted if they would lift a finger for him if the Maxwells showed up.

  When the Maxwells showed up, he corrected himself, because they were guaranteed to do
so. Lord Maxwell was a Border baron, descended from a long line of successful robbers; what he wanted, generally speaking, he took. And Carey was alone apart from the battered and subdued Red Sandy and Sim’s Will, and made very nearly helpless by Lord Spynie.

  He kicked his horse to a canter alongside the line of patiently plodding ponies, up to their leader which was being ridden by a dourfaced Scottish drover.

  “Is this the fastest pace you can take?” he demanded of the man.

  The drover stared at him for a moment, then spat into a tussock of grass.

  “Ay,” he said. “There’s thirty-five mile to cover. Ye canna do it in less than two days and if ye have no fresh beasts waiting at Annan, ye canna do it at all wi’ out care, the way they’re laden.”

  That was unanswerable. Carey harumphed impatiently and rode a little ahead where he had put the least-villainous looking of King James’s inadequate troops. No wonder the King didn’t want to take them into Liddesdale on a foray. Then he rode back to the rear of the train to take a look at the others there. He was wasting time and effort, he knew. The ponies plodded on in their infuriatingly patient way and all he had to do was look at their tails and pray silently.

  It was almost a relief to him as they climbed on what passed for a path along the sides of the hills, when he began to see armed men notching the skyline to their left and heard the plovers being put up in the distance.

  “Here they come, sir,” said Red Sandy, loosening his sword and taking a firm grip on his lance.

  “Do you know who they are?” he demanded.

  “Ay,” said Sim’s Will. “By the look of their jacks, they’re Maxwells.”

  “God damn it,” muttered Carey. “Where the hell is Dodd?”

  “Ah’m here, sir.”

  “Not you, Red Sandy; your brother.”

  Red Sandy looked puzzled and Carey stood in his stirrups and looked around. Ahead of them on the road was the golden flash of sun on a polished breastplate and the flourish of feathers in a hat.

  Carey pressed his horse to a canter again. “Keep going no matter what happens,” he snarled at the chief drover as he passed.