4 A Plague of Angels

by P. F. Chisholm

  Pointedly, Carey held out his hand for the spoils which Barnabus handed over. Dodd was very reluctant to give up a purse full of money, even if it had blood and chips of bone mixed in, but wasn’t quite annoyed enough with the Courtier to hold onto it.

  Carey hefted the purses and frowned. ‘What wealthy little footpads,’ he said, and bent over the man he had shot, who was finally still. Staring eyes told him he’d get no information.

  ‘Hm,’ said Carey again, putting the purses into one of his saddle bags. ‘Come on, let’s get the horses watered and try and make it into London before nightfall.’

  ***

  As expected, Dodd’s nag was at the horsepond slurping up greenish water and swishing at flies with her tail. She made a great drama about shying when she saw him and trotting further round the pool. Dodd pretended he wasn’t interested in her, wandered up to the trampled banks of the pond, looked everywhere but at the horse and then when she put her wary head down again, nipped her bridle.

  ‘Got ye,’ he whispered to her and she snorted resignedly.

  Carey’s mount was still pulling on the reins and sidling stupidly until he caught the smell of water and then he lunged for it. Carey tied him to one of the posts and disappeared into a bramble bush a little way off. Simon came up from the Cut with Barnabus, leading the other two horses. They had no packponies and were riding strange southern horses because Carey had been in a hurry and they had been riding post. They were due to change mounts again at the Holly Tree in Hampstead, and Dodd, for one, couldn’t wait to be rid of the latest batch of useless knacker’s rejects. Also, he was thirsty, but he would have to be a great deal worse off to consider the stuff in the horsepond. What he wanted was a quart of ale, Bessie’s for preference, bread, cheese, a meat pie, pickled onions…Dodd sighed. Maybe the Holly Tree would have some food. Maybe Carey would let them stop for half an hour to drink.

  Maybe he wouldn’t. Dodd wasn’t very hopeful. Out of sheer habit, he stared out across the horsepond at the countryside around them and at the thatched roofs of the village which began a little way down the other side of the hill. His horse had finished and was looking at him expectantly, but he didn’t have a feedbag hidden anywhere on him, so he tied her to the hitching post near the pond. Then he wandered to the other side of the hilltop, to see if he could spy London town yet, even though the milestone had said they were five miles away still.

  His mouth fell open. It was a fine lookout spot, that hill, good siting for a pele tower, not that the soft southrons had thought of building one. They had a pathetic beacon on a raised bracket, that must have been put up in the Armada year from the rust on it, but there was no wood around to light it with. You could see for miles when it was clear, which it was, a pale golden evening with not a hint of autumn.

  And if you looked southwards, there it lay, a baleful brackish sea of houses, the foremost city in England. The craggy flotsam of church steeples poked up among the cluttered roofs, with smoke dirtying the sky above even on a warm day. Dodd had never seen such a thing. The day before he had been impressed with York, but this…A city that had burst its walls in all directions with so many people that came and stayed, as if the city ate them and got fatter each time. Dodd narrowed his eyes and pursed his lips. London might impress him, but eat him it would not.

  ‘Makes yer heart sing, don’t it?’ said a guttural voice beside him. Barnabus Cooke was standing there, squinting in the south-westering light of the sun. Either the light was stronger than Dodd thought, or the ferret-faced little man had tears in his eyes. ‘Seems a hundred years gone since I left,’ he sighed.

  ‘Hmphm,’ said Dodd noncommitally.

  Barnabus heard his lack of enthusiasm and waved an expressive arm. ‘That, Sergeant Dodd, is the greatest city in Christendom. Everything any sane man could ever want you can get right there, no trouble, money to be made, never any reason to be bored.’

  ‘Ay, and the streets are all paved wi’ gold,’ said Dodd straight-faced, ‘so I’ve heard tell.’

  ‘No, they ain’t,’ piped up Simon. ‘Don’t you listen to ’em, Sergeant. Me and my friend Tom, we dug down for two days solid, looking for gold paving stones and we never found nuffing except more paving stones.’

  Dodd nodded at Simon. At some time on the long weary journey, a mystery had happened to the lad’s speech again. From sounding quite Christian really, at least as comprehensible as the Carlisle stable lads, Simon had turned back into the guttural creature with hiccups for ‘t’s that he had been when he first came north. God save me, Dodd thought, feeling for the little lump of his wife’s amulet under his shirt, alien men with alien notions and words like cobblestones.

  ‘Nay lad,’ he said gravely to Simon. ‘I never thought it were, or why are the Grahams no’ laying siege to it.’

  ‘Figures of speech, Sergeant,’ said Barnabus patronisingly. ‘Only true in a manner of speaking. Like what you get at the playhouse? You ever seen a play?’

  ‘I’ve seen the players that come to Carlisle some years,’ said Dodd, who hadn’t thought much of them. ‘Garish folk, and ay arguing.’

  Barnabus tutted. ‘Nah. Plays. At a playhouse. With guns for thunder and the boys tricked out in velvets and satin and trumpets and a jig at the end. Best bit, the jig, I’ve always thought. Worf waiting for.’

  ‘Why?’

  Barnabus grinned knowingly and tapped his bulbous nose. ‘You’ll see.’

  Dodd grunted and looked around for the cause of this whole stupid expedition into foreign parts. Carey came striding impatiently out of his sorry-looking stand of thorns, his good humour after a fight obviously destroyed by what had sent him hurrying into it. Dodd was quite recovered from the vicious Scottish flux they had both picked up in Dumfries, but Carey’s bowels were clearly made of weaker stuff. He saw them gazing into the distance and turned to look as well, scowling at the view of London before turning back to scowl at all of them. To his clear dissatisfaction, the horses were all drinking nicely, none of them was lame for a change, and there was nothing to complain about. God, but he was in a nasty temper and had been all the way south, starting with an eyeblinking explosion of profanity when he first got the letter from his father. Dodd had heard it in the new barracks building while Carey was in the Carlisle castle yard.

  It had been very wearying, riding with a man as chancy as a bad gun, all the way to Newcastle and every step of the Roman road south. They had changed horses luxuriously twice a day and pressed on at a pace that Dodd thought indecent, even with the Courtier having to stop and find cover every couple of hours. It wasn’t the length of time it took—Dodd was no stranger to long rides and three days was not the longest he’d been on by several days—it was the sheer dullness of the business. Hour after hour of cavalry pace, walk a mile, trot a mile, canter for two, then lead the horses again, and never a familiar face to greet nor a known tower to sight by. Dodd felt marooned. Even with the straight dusty Roman road, he doubted he could find his way back home again from so far away, though Carey knew the way well enough. After all, he was used to flinging himself across the entire country on the Queen’s account.

  The countryside had changed around them as they went, so you might think they were still and the country moving, changing itself magically from rocky to flat and back to hills, fat and golden with straw after the harvest, the gleaners still combing painstakingly through the fields. They passed orchards—Dodd had not been certain what the little woods full of fruit trees might be, but had found out from Simon; they passed fields full of sheep and kine and only children guarding them, so it made you sad to think how many you could reive if only the distances weren’t so great. Even the size of the fields changed, from small and stone-walled to vast striped prairies and then back to small squares quilted with hedges. The road was generally full of strangers as well, crowded with packponies, carriers’ wagons, even newfangled coaches jolting along with silkclad green-faced women suffering inside them. Once a courier carrying the Queen’s dispatc
hes had galloped down the grassy verge, shouting for them to make room, and leaving the rest of the travellers bathed in dust. Carey had coughed and brightened up a little, and they had talked for an hour about the technicalities of riding post. They had agreed that the key to speed was in making the change of horses every ten miles as fast as possible and paradoxically in taking the first half mile slowly so the animal had a chance to warm up.

  Once a trotting train carrying fish from Norwich went past them, little light carts pulled by perkily trotting ponies, trailing a smell of the ocean behind the smart clatter. Once they had passed a band of beggars and Dodd had loosened his sword, but the upright man at the head of them had not liked the look of three men and a boy, well-armed and with the gentleman at the head of them ostentatiously opening his dag case before him. Dodd had thought it was a pity, really, he’d heard tell of southern beggars and a fight would at least have broken the monotony. Dodd was also short of sleep, thanks to Carey’s efforts at economising. At each inn they stayed at, Carey had put them all in the one room so Dodd could get the full benefit of Carey and Barnabus’s outrageous snoring. In desperation he had offered to sleep with the horses in the stables, but Carey had turned the idea down.

  The south was a dreamworld where all the familiar normal animals had suddenly turned fat and handsome and he could only understand one word in three that was spoken to him. Dodd felt naked without his jack and morion, and thought wistfully that it would have been nice if his brother could have come too so he could have had someone to talk to. But Carey had refused to pay for any more followers than he had to on the grounds that it was Dodd himself that the Lord Chamberlain, his father, wanted to speak to, not Red Sandy.

  ‘What do you make of it, Sergeant?’ Carey asked him, nodding at the ambush of houses ahead of them.

  ‘Ah dinna ken, sir,’ said Dodd at his most stolid. ‘I’ve no’ been there yet.’ Was Carey actually planning to keep all the spoils for himself? Damn him for a selfish grasping miser; he’d only killed one of the footpads and if it hadn’t been for Dodd, they would have been helpless in the Cut when the robbers attacked…

  As if reading Dodd’s mind, Carey had squatted down and was emptying out the gold and silver coins onto a flat stone, sorting them briskly into shillings and crowns and angels, and then into three piles which he then doled out. The few pennies left over he gave to Simon.

  ‘Will we get to see the Queen, sir?’ asked Simon as he stowed his money away.

  Carey shrugged. ‘We might, if she’s in London. She’s more likely to be on progress.’

  ‘Will yer father no’ be with her then, sir?’ Dodd said, having picked up the vague notion that Lord Chamberlains were supposed to look after courtiers and the court and such. ‘How will we tell him our tale if he isnae there?’

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ snapped Carey. ‘Father’s brains have addled, I expect. Bloody London. What the devil’s the point of making me come back to London now?’

  ‘Ay, the Grahams will be riding, and the Armstrongs forbye,’ said Dodd dolefully. ‘Once the Assize judge has gone home after Lammas torches, and the horses are strong and the kine are fat, that’s when we run our rodes.’

  Carey snorted. Dodd, who was tired of treating Carey with tact, decided to live dangerously. ‘Ah, that’ll be it, sir,’ he said comfortably. ‘Your father will have got wind the Grahams have a price on yer head and he’ll want ye safe in the south again.’

  Lord, Carey could glare fit to split a stone when he wanted. ‘I very much doubt it,’ he said frostily, ‘seeing he knows perfectly well I’d rather be in Carlisle and take my chances with the Grahams.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Barnabus. ‘Not an easy choice, is it, sir? With all the people wanting to see you in London.’

  Carey didn’t answer, but went to his horse and started turning up hooves looking for stones. The animal nickered and licked at his neck, searching for salt and knocking his hat off in the process. Uncharacteristically, Carey elbowed the enquiring muzzle away with a growled ‘Get over, you stupid animal.’

  ‘Mr Skeres will want to talk to you, won’t he, sir?’ Barnabus went on, sucking his teeth and scratching his bum. ‘And Mr Barnet and Mr Palavicino’s agent and Mr Bullard and then there’s Mr Pickering’s men…’

  Involuntarily, Carey winced.

  ‘Got some feuds waiting for ye, have ye, sir?’ asked Dodd with interest. It didn’t surprise him at all, knowing Carey by now, but he wouldn’t have thought southerners would have the spirit.

  ‘No,’ Carey admitted as he checked the girth and mounted. ‘Not feuds. Much worse.’

  ‘Och ay?’

  ‘Much much worse,’ Barnabus explained gloomily, using the mounting stone to clamber into the saddle.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Creditors,’ Carey said hollowly. ‘London’s bloody crawling with my creditors.’

  ***

  The nags supplied by the Holly Tree were, if anything, worse than the ones they had been riding before and true to Dodd’s gloomy expectation, Carey refused even to pause long enough for a quart of beer. Nor would he roust out the village Watch to go and find the footpads, though that was sensible enough since they were more than likely the same people or at least their relatives.

  As they clopped briskly down Haverstock Hill, Carey’s face got longer and longer. He looked just like a man whose blackrent to the Grahams was late, waiting for the torch in his thatch.

  ‘Could ye not pay ’em off with the spoils fra the footpads?’ Dodd asked solicitously.

  Carey blinked at him, as if checking to see whether he was making fun, and then laughed hollowly.

  ‘Christ, Dodd, you’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘I wish I could. The only thing I’ve got going for me is the fact they don’t know I’m coming.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be too sure of that, sir,’ said Barnabus from behind them.

  Carey had been in a tearing hurry all the way south, but now he slowed to a walk.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What do you think, Barnabus?’ I was hoping to come down Gray’s Inn Road and into Holborn just about the time when the law students come out of dinner and use them as cover, but we’re too late for that.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Barnabus thoughtfully. ‘I shouldn’t think there’ll be too many duns out on Holborn—why bother? If I was trying to catch you, I’d hang around Somerset House, wiv a boat on the river. After all, they don’t know which way you’re coming.’

  ‘If they know I’m coming at all.’

  ‘You’re planning to rely on that, are you, sir?’

  Carey shook his head. ‘It’s the Strand that’s the problem then.’ He nibbled the stitching on the thumb of his glove. ‘I simply can’t afford to wind up in the Fleet.’

  ‘What’s that, sir?’

  ‘A debtor’s prison,’ said Carey in a voice of doom.

  ‘Och,’ said Dodd and considered. ‘Have ye kin in London? Yer father’s there, is he no’?’

  ‘I hope so, since he’s forced me to ride a couple of hundred miles just to talk to him face to face and do business that could be perfectly well done by letter.’

  ‘Ay. It’s no’ difficult, then. They willnae ken ma face as one o’ yourn, so ye tell me the lie of the land and where your father’s castle is, I ride hell fer leather intae it, he calls out yer kin and comes out to meet ye and none o’ yer enemies can do a thing about it.’

  A short silence greeted this excellent plan which Dodd realised was not the silence of admiration. Carey cleared his throat in a way which Dodd knew meant he was trying hard not to laugh and Simon sniggered behind his hand.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Dodd truculently. ‘What’s wrong with that idea?’ He could feel his neck reddening.

  ‘Among other things, the fact that Somerset House is only one of the palaces on the Strand and I doubt you could find it,’ said Carey. ‘Not to mention the fact that the Queen is highly averse to pitched battles being fought on the streets of London.’

 
‘You could let ’em take you, we talk to your dad and he bails you tomorrow,’ suggested Barnabus. ‘You’d only need to spend one night inside…’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ snapped Carey, and his face was pale.

  Dodd thought he was being overdramatic and called his bluff. ‘Ye can allus change clothes wi’ me, sir, if ye’re so feart o’ being seen; none will know you in my clothes,’ he offered. Perhaps it was cruel to tease the Courtier; Dodd knew perfectly well that Carey would probably rather die than enter even London’s suburbs wearing Dodd’s sturdy best suit of homespun russet. Certainly he would hang before going into his father’s house like that.

  Carey’s blue glare narrowed again but it seemed he was learning to know when Dodd was pulling his leg. He coughed.

  ‘Thank you for your offer, Dodd,’ he said, ‘but I doubt your duds would fit me.’

  ‘Ay, they would,’ said Dodd, who was only a couple of inches shorter than Carey and not far off the same build. Though he thought no one would actually confuse them in a thousand years since Carey had dark chestnut hair, hooded blue eyes, a striking family resemblance to the Queen along his cheekbones and slightly hooked nose, and a breezy swagger that breathed of the court. Dodd knew he was no beauty though he felt it was unfair the way his wife sometimes compared his usual expression to a wet winter’s day. The best you could say about his brown hair was that it was quite clean and he still had all of it.

  ‘We dinna have to go straight in,’ Dodd pointed out. ‘There’s surely no shortage of fine inns. Ye could stay at one o’ them, Barnabus could scout out yer dad’s castle for ye, see was the approaches laid wi’ ambush, and then we could bring out a covered litter for ye and take ye in that way.’

  ‘That might work,’ said Barnabus. ‘At least we could bring out some of your father’s liverymen for cover.’ Dodd forebore to point out that this was exactly the plan he had first suggested and they had laughed at.

  For once Carey looked as if he was being tempted to act sensibly but as Dodd expected, it didn’t last.