A Clash of Spheres

by P. F. Chisholm

  He stared at it for a few seconds, wondering where it could have come from since most official correspondence (and there was a lot) was addressed to him as plain Sr Rbt Carey, Carlisle.

  He flipped the packet over and saw the red portcullis stamp on the back and sudden joy lifted him up and he nearly gave a little jig of triumph right there in front of Thomas the Merchant. He didn’t of course. He caught himself, bestowed an alarmingly sunny smile on the suspicious-faced old miser, and strode out into English Street which was crowded with people going out to work in the fields while the weather held.

  All the way back up to the castle, with Nixon at his back, he had to stop his feet from breaking into a volta and also stop himself sprinting up the covered passageway. Once he had left Nixon behind and gone into the keep, nobody was watching and so he ran laughing up the stairs of the Queen Mary tower and did his jig on a landing where there was nobody to see except a tabby cat, watching sparrows from the windowsill, who didn’t care. At the top of the narrow spiral staircase to his chambers he found his secretary, John Tovey, was still snoring and wasn’t at all offended. He was on the palliasse—the two of them, Hughie and John, had come to an agreement where each alternated between the truckle bed and the floor.

  He was still at a jog when he went through into his study and sat at the table that did duty as his desk, piled high as it always was with papers. Tovey’s clerk’s desk was in the corner with a candlestand next to it.

  He turned the packet over and over in his long fingers, excitement still rising in him. Was it? At last? The Tower mark and the address. Could it be? Had the old bat finally…?

  He pulled out his poinard from the scabbard at his back and slit the red stitching at one end, took out the inner packet and slit that stitching as well, which was yellow—which meant the Cecils. Inside were several sheets of paper.

  The first he saw was odd—a passport to go into Scotland, dated from a week ago and no expiry date. But the second…

  It was his warrant as Deputy Warden of Carlisle. It made him as official as illegibly small Secretary script and impressive seals could achieve and it was also signed and sealed with her Privy Seal by the Queen.

  With it there was a private letter from the Queen, written by a Secretary in Italic but signed by herself as his affectionate and loving cousin and aunt. He skimmed the letter, which was short and only filled half the paper—she had heard of his standoff with the Elliots and thoroughly approved of the way he had resolved it, and that there had been no effusion of blood between her aggressive Border subjects.

  “Yes!” he shouted, punching his fist into the air and kissing the letter. John Tovey woke up, groaned and turned over, then sat up looking embarrassed.

  “Sorry, sir…” he began.

  “Run and fetch me some wine if you can find any. Scrope may have some,” Carey said and punched the air again. Then he sat back down in his uncomfortable chair and shut his eyes. He suddenly realised that a knot of tension that had been in his stomach for a month or more had magically dissolved away. The Queen was a woman, you could never be sure how she would react to anything and there had been a part of him that thought exactly the same as Sergeant Dodd. Another part had insisted that if you wanted to make any headway with the Borderers, you had to get away from blood repaying blood through the years.

  It had been very hard to sit there and let more than five hundred Elliot reivers escape but he knew it was right. It was not just a clever or politic or Queen-pleasing thing to do, but the right thing. Dodd had violently disagreed and made his displeasure known, so now Carey felt he had lost the man. It was a pity. Andy Nixon was loyal and almost hero-worshipped him, he knew, while Nixon’s new wife was always bringing him pastries and pots of jam. Perhaps Nixon was as good a fighter as Dodd, and a better wrestler, but he didn’t have half the brains.

  He read the Queen’s letter again, more carefully, which was enough to delight any courtier, although typically it said nothing about the Deputy Warden’s fee. And it said nothing about the passport into Scotland either, which was a little odd. Perhaps the letter she had sent to Scrope confirming the choice of Carey for Deputy Warden would explain it. Carey did not plan to go into Scotland at all if he could help it, although he had recovered completely from the last time.

  Tovey came back with wine and Carey poured him some, explained why and they toasted the Queen. Tovey was pleased once he understood the importance of the warrant. It was official. Nobody could turn him out without the Queen’s permission. God, it would be fun to watch Lowther’s face when he showed the warrant to Scrope. Maybe Lowther would fall into a conniption fit with rage and die and save Carey a lot of trouble. He hoped so.

  He read the letter again, folded the whole packet back up and put it in his doublet pocket where it warmed him like a hand-warmer full of coals.

  Autumn 1592

  Sir David Graham was in a terrible state, a state he had been in before with his first wife, and he knew of only one way to feel better. And yet he felt utterly horrified by the idea and at the same time grimly vengeful, because hadn’t the King betrayed him first?

  He was sure that Marguerite had a lover now, he had found lovebites on her shoulder and he never gave her lovebites. He had said nothing. She seemed to have no idea she had them and continued prattling away about the beauty of her new kirtle with its Spanish farthingale and the pink velvet and the white damask until he could have screamed. But that was not his way. He had always been a quiet man, not given to displays of temper. That did not mean he had no feelings, only that he chose not to wave them around in public.

  Finally he got Hepburn to himself on the links opposite the port of Leith. The weather was bad, blustery and raining, but he had needed to get out of the Court and blow the cobwebs out of his ears and Hepburn had agreed to come with him and play a little golf. Not a proper game, only practising.

  He teed off and struck the ball well, it flew away, avoiding the trees, and landed in some long grass. Hepburn had hit his ball well too, but shorter.

  They ended closer together on the green and while Hepburn lined up his putt, Sir David struggled with himself and finally burst out, “If he were not the King, he would already be dead.”

  Hepburn stopped for a moment. “Sir David?”

  “The man who debauched my Marguerite. If he were just a man, even an earl, I would have killed him by now.”

  Hepburn looked straight up at him. “How? In a duel?”

  Sir David snorted. “No, why should I honour him by fighting him? He’s scum. He laughed at me yesterday morning, asked me if I was well, and all the time…all the time…”

  Hepburn sighed. Then he straightened up and leaned on his golf club, the wind blowing his falling band sideways. There was no one else on the links and they hadn’t brought a boy to find the balls.

  “You believe it truly is the King?”

  “Yes,” ground out Sir David. “He can go to the Queen’s apartments any time he chooses and swive anyone he likes. And Marguerite has a lover’s bite and the kirtle…I’m sure it’s the King.”

  “It could be some other man. It could even be me.”

  Sir David laughed indulgently at that. “No, no, Jonathan,” he said. “You’re not a God-rotted sodomite, but you are more interested in your alchemy and engineering than you are in women. I can tell.”

  “Ah,” said Hepburn. “Well then, perhaps it is the King. But what can you do about it? I have said this before, he may be a coward but he is clever. You can’t carry so much as an eating knife in his private apartments where being a Groom of the Bedchamber might help you, as there are always at least five other people with you…”

  “Poison, in his first cup of wine in the morning. He’s always thirsty in the morning, knocks it straight back.”

  “They will know who gave him the cup.”

  Sir David smiled wolfishly. “Not if I don’t gi
ve it to him. I serve it out, taste it, and sometimes he takes it from me, sometimes a chamberer gives it to him, sometimes the Groom of the Stool gives it to him…”

  “Who is that at the moment?”

  “Sir George Kerr does the office at the moment, but I don’t want him to give the cup because he is also one of our Catholic association.”

  “Yes,” said Hepburn, “the association with Huntly and Erroll?”

  “Of course. It’s a very good idea from your Jesuit, Crichton, about bringing in Spanish troops to the west coast.”

  “I had heard something about it.”

  “Well, I’m not supposed to tell anyone. Anyway, sometimes, if a petitioner pays a lot of money, sometimes he can give the King his cup of morning wine. So we find someone who wants something big and he can come into the King’s levée and as he will give the cup, everyone will blame him.”

  Hepburn looked at Sir David with real respect. “That’s ingenious, Sir David. Brilliant.”

  Sir David twirled his golf club roguishly. “I think so. Of course it’s not just any levée that petitioners can actually take part in. Usually they stand and watch at the other end of the bedchamber and come forward after His Highness is dressed. The next is the New Year’s morning, but I can wait for my satisfaction if I have to.”

  “Yes,” said Hepburn, chipping his putt and missing the hole by a mile. “We will need to choose the man to do it very carefully.”

  They talked for a while about who could do it, came to no conclusion. Hepburn rode back to Edinburgh with Sir David Graham who was now somehow happy, as if making the decision had helped settle his uneasy soul.

  Hepburn was awed at how well his plan was going: he had hardly had a plan when he started, only he had heard something about Sir David and his first wife, how jealous he was, how the lover and the wife had both died quite suspiciously, how there had been a man-at-arms that had fallen for Marguerite and who had died also in mysterious circumstances in which he had somehow stabbed himself in the kidneys.

  Hepburn knew he himself was a killer, although generally he didn’t do the actual killing, he…facilitated it. He could see through people so easily, their jealousies and their ugliness, he felt he was providing a vermin-killing service. Sir David did not know what he was, which made him easy to control. Spynie was another one like Hepburn, they got on well and Hepburn facilitated him as well. He was even making friends with the King he had come to kill on behalf of the Spanish Most Catholic Majesty, and he could do it while still looking for the best way to end him. It was exciting and satisfying. It excited him to fool everybody into thinking he was a helpful respectful man with engineering skills and good address, when in fact he was so much more. He felt he was looking at the Court from a great height and laughing as the ants below him ran around excitedly while he pushed them one way and another with twigs and bits of paper and carefully killed some here and some there. Out of policy he normally liked to have two different and separate attempts running at the same time, one a little earlier. Then, if the proposed victim discovered or fought off one, he would relax and be easy meat for the second attempt.

  It had taken so little to get the King to give Marguerite the pink velvet and the white damask; a mention of how mean her husband was, a wink, the idea planted in the King’s mind that he could somehow shame Sir David into treating his wife better through royal largesse. The King was always clumsily trying to get the courtiers around him to treat each other better, as if they were not there through greed and ambition, as if they were all friends really. It was ridiculous but very useful. Then a couple of careful lovebites on Marguerite during one of their trysts in the storerooms at the back of the court and the thing was done.

  Hepburn shook his head. He had made his peace with the demiurge of this World, with the Aeon who ruled everything. You had to choose: either the Demiurge, the Power of the World, or the Christ who had foolishly tried to oppose him and been crushed. Some called the Demiurge, the Devil. He called him God and felt the power run through him when he called on him. Fools called them Anabaptists: he had taken the trouble to read some of the difficult sacred texts in Latin and his conclusions had been rational, not emotional. He had no interest in the Sophia, the female expression of God. Women could worship her under the guise of Mary the Mother of God, the Theotokos, if they wanted. He thought they were fools of a different kind, but they were women and inferior. Sure, the Albigensians had tried to bring the Christ into the World by what they did and they had been crushed as well, by Saint Dominic, the Demiurge’s servant. He chose not to be crushed. He would follow the Power of the World and when he died, he would go to His side to serve him more.

  In the meantime he would obediently go to Mass and confess what he chose because as far as he was concerned, the Catholic Church was clearly the main tool of the Demiurge, not at all His enemy. He had travelled through the Netherlands, making himself useful wherever and whenever he could, and he had been recommended at last to San Lorenzo where he had actually met the Spanish King and talked to him of his ideas. He had the precious copy of the paper outlining his ideas with Philip’s Fiat written on it and he thought that when Scotland descended into chaos with the death of the King, he would certainly become a lord at least, possibly a King. The Spanish King didn’t know about that part of it, but thought Hepburn was another Catholic fanatic, as he was himself. Another fool.

  He was careful and he was clever. He would survive and conquer and perhaps in a year or two, he would be running Scotland.

  Late Autumn 1592

  Janet Dodd née Armstrong was wondering if it would really be such a sin to murder her husband. It would be a sin, obviously, and petty treason moreover, but surely she had justification?

  Henry Dodd had never been the happiest of men but there was something solid and dependable about him. Yet since the Deputy Warden had let the Elliots escape from Dick of Dryhope’s tower without a battle, he had gone from taciturn but essentially friendly to a stone-faced silent man she did not know. Even love-making didn’t help, which it always had before; he seemed somehow abstracted as if his thoughts were far away and nowhere pleasant, until their tussling under the bedclothes while Bridget snored in the truckle bed became more like a fight. Not once since the Elliots had he asked to count her freckles, not once had she shucked her shift so he could admire her and love her breasts and hips, not once had she felt that blessed sensation halfway between a sneeze and utter joy that made her feel warm and happy all the next day. Not once. It was as if a stranger got into bed with her wearing Henry’s shirt and Henry’s face and tupped her as if she was an ewe.

  She was seeing to the vegetable garden and she dug angrily. She had got a couple of her English Armstrong cousins to come and dig in two ponyloads of manure which she had obtained for nothing from the Carlisle stables. Henry was off on his precious big horse, Whitesock, checking the northern boundaries of Gilsland for moving marker stones. Gilsland was now theirs but she couldn’t feel happy about it any more. She felt lonely, despite being surrounded by people, most of them some sort of cousin and one, Bridget, her half sister.

  Suddenly one of the women holding poles for the men fixing the fencing over by the infield, clapped her hand to her side and doubled up. Janet dropped her spade and ran over.

  “What is it?” she asked, “When is the baby due?”

  It was Goody Ellen, a cousin, married for five years to Willie’s Simon and proudly pregnant, but not fully gone yet. Was it six months?

  “Not till Candlemas,” gasped Ellen, tears of fright in her eyes. “Och it’s bad.”

  Ellen hadn’t had a baby before. Maybe these were ghost pains and she was just making a fuss…

  “Oh…Oh, God, I canna hold it…” gasped Ellen, trying to grab her crotch round her belly. Janet lifted her wool kirtle and saw her petticoat was suddenly wet and stained, mainly water but blood and brown stuff there as well.

 
“Ekie!” she shrieked to one of the boys tidying beanvines. “Ride for Mrs Hogg, off ye go now. Say Ellen’s gey early and her waters have broken.”

  Ekie was quite a young boy, maybe eight, but had a good head on him. He stood and stared for only a second before he sprinted for the tower and the stables.

  “Take Angel,” she shouted after him. “He’s a good galloper and ye’ve ten miles to go.”

  Mrs Hogg lived near Carlisle and was the best midwife hereabouts, a tough flinty woman who had faced down drunken husbands and, it was rumoured, raiding Grahams.

  “Och, God!” shrieked Ellen again, “Oh God!” Janet got Ellen’s arm over her shoulder and helped her over the ruts in the field, onto the path, waiting for another set of shrieks to quiet, urged her along. “Willie’s Simon, fetch me my aqua vitae, quick as ye can, lad.” Ellen’s husband had been running towards them from the wall at the far end of the infield but Janet had never heard good of husbands at a birthing and in any case he knew where she hid the stillroom key.

  Janet found Rowan Leaholm on the other side of Ellen and they helped her along until they saw Big Clem the blacksmith come running up the path from his forge. He caught Ellen up and held her in his arms like a baby while she twisted and clutched her belly and cried out. His face was sad: his own wife had lost a wean in the upset of a raid that summer.

  Janet saw young Ekie come trotting out of the courtyard and, good lad, he had tacked up Angel properly and was giving the horse a chance to warm up before his gallop, that was good sense and nice to see. The lad was cantering as he went over the hill in the direction of Carlisle.

  They got Ellen up into the tower and into the little room Janet used as an infirmary and still-room, laid her on the bed where she sat up and shrieked again. Willie’s Simon was there with a horn cup of brandy which she gulped and then gasped again. Clem thundered downstairs in silence with his broad kindly face troubled and sad.