A Chorus of Innocents (14 page)

In the end it was quite easy to get Lady Hume to bed as she drank another cup of aqua vitae and passed out. Young Henry carried her up to bed and Kat and Elizabeth got her undressed down to her shift and put her into bed in the middle. Elizabeth wasn't looking forward to it and envied Mr Anricks his solitary state although it would be cold without a fire. Kat was too much the worse for wear to do more than get undressed herself, take her dose of medicine and fall asleep. The snoring started, Kat's was deep and rhythmical while Lady Hume made a succession of irregular little grunts and mews that was somehow more annoying.

Elizabeth heard Mr Anricks come back with his pack and go into his room. Outside the noise was starting to die down as people passed out or went home if they lived in the village. It had been a good send off for the minister. Tomorrow the village would start to empty of Burns and Taits and Pringles from the raiding families and turn back into the sleepy place it had been before.

Monday 16th October 1592

Carey was standing in the little kennelyard looking at the hounds with Scrope. He seemed distracted by something and he looked very tired, with bags under his eyes and he had clearly had brandy for breakfast. Dodd came into the yard in search of him and found him wearily agreeing with Scrope that the hounds needed a good run. Scrope wandered off to look at the latest four-month-old pups with the master of hounds.

A half-grown yellow lymer pup came trotting out of one of the sheds with a stick held proudly in his mouth. He brought it right over to the Courtier and dropped it at his feet in an unmistakable hint. Carey picked it up and threw it over to the other side of the yard, the pup galloped happily off to get it and then found a bit of cow bone that interested him more and forgot the stick. Carey went over to get the stick himself and this time when he threw it, the pup brought it back to Dodd, laying it at his feet with great pride.

Carey smiled at something that would have had him laughing a few weeks before and bent down to ruffle the pup's ears. At that exact moment, the pup jumped up to lick Carey in the face and the pup's nose collided with Carey's chin.

“Aargh, Jesus,” shouted Carey, and bent over with his hand to his jaw. “Jesus, you stupid dog.”

The dog tried to lick his face again and Carey fended him off. “No, get down, goddamn it!” he roared, and the pup plopped down on his back, peering anxiously at Carey.

The pup's nose hadn't hit him that hard and Dodd wondered what the hell was ailing the Courtier that he made such a fuss about it. The Courtier seemed a little sorry for his ill-temper and he squatted to pat the pup and check his paws. Another determined lick from the dog, still aimed at the lower part of Carey's face and Dodd suddenly understood.

“Sir, have ye a toothache?”

Carey half-looked up at him and nodded.

“It's my back tooth, been giving me trouble for years and now it's bloody killing me.”

It was, too. Carey was looking distinctly unhealthy and, come to think of it, his right jawline was swollen. He picked up the stick, threw it again and this time the pup galloped back with it and tripped over his large paws and rolled. Then he lay on his back and let Carey rub his tum, wriggling with ecstasy at it. Carey had his other hand cupped round his face and was still preoccupied.

“Ay, I see, will ye not get it drawn?”

“I suppose I'll have to but there isn't a tooth-drawer in Carlisle at the moment. I asked Mr Lugg but he says he doesn't do teeth, says they're too fiddly and nobody is ever satisfied.”

“I heard tell there's a new man who's good over in Scotland the day; will I try and see if I can get him here?”

“If you can, Sergeant.”

Dodd nodded. Teeth could be the very devil. He'd never had toothache himself, apart from when he was a wean and his new teeth were growing, oh and when his wisdom teeth were coming in when he was twenty, but he knew people who had. Apart from getting loose in spring and worn down when you were old, if they went seriously rotten they could actually kill you if your face swelled up and the sickness went into your blood. Since Carey was the only thing between Sir Richard Lowther and the West March, apart from the ineffectual Lord Scrope, Dodd wanted him alive and healthy and he sighed at the thought of tracking down a good tooth-drawer, or a tooth-drawer of any kind on the Marches.

They went out to the Eden meadows with all the lymer pups from Buttercup's litter that she had on Carey's bed in the summer, to see how they shaped. The yellow one with the big head was clearly not very bright but he was the friendliest and most willing dog Dodd or Carey had ever seen, and Carey had already decided to have him as his own in exchange for providing his bed for Buttercup's lying-in.

“I'll call him Jack,” he said, as they came back a couple of hours later with the five dogs milling around them on leashes. “I don't suppose he'll be much use as a lymer but he's a nice dog.”

“Why Jack?”

“Oh my first two dogs were called King and Queenie, but he isn't really a Knave, so I'll call him after the Jack in the All Fours game. It's appropriate.”

“Ay,” said Dodd. Thinking about it, it was too. Nobody would play cards with the Courtier in the West March now for more than penny stakes.

They let the dogs go off the leashes in the kennelyard and Sandy and Eric, the two dogboys, came out with buckets of bones and guts for them from the butcher's shambles and stale bread from the castle bakery and there was much snarling and gulping until all of it was finished in about ten seconds. The dogboys had brushes and they started the endless job of grooming the hairy dogs until they shone.

Dodd and Carey retired to Bessie's for a bite of lunch. Carey ate the pottage, a thick soupy mixture of pot-herbs, meat, and beans, but only when it was half-cold. He shook his head at the steak and kidney pie.

“I'm like a bloody Papist monk,” he said, “no women, soup every meal, wake up at two every morning.” He lifted a finger to the potboy and got a cup of brandy. He swilled the brandy round his mouth before swallowing it.

“Hmm,” said Dodd, deep in the pie and chewing on the bread he dipped in it. He was considering passing on a prime piece of information he'd heard from Janet that morning before she went back to Gilsland. The trouble was it was vague and Dodd knew Carey always wanted specifics before he would take action. On the other hand he clearly needed something to take his mind off his tooth for the moment.

“I heard tell,” he said as he reached for the bag pudding full of plums as his second cover, “that Jock Elliot and Wee Colin have bought theirselves new doublets.”

“Oh yes,” grunted Carey, ordering more brandy. “So what?”

There was an expensive hard sauce to go with the plum pudding, of sherry sack, butter and sugar, which even Dodd had to admit was delicious. He offered some to Carey who held up his hand palm out and shook his head.

“It'd kill me,” he said.

“Well, Jock Elliot and Wee Colin Elliot arenae the ones for fashion. And they may have kin and kine and towers, but they havenae money no more than I do. And I heard that Jock's been seen walking oot in Jedburgh in a tawny velvet doublet that's Edinburgh work and Wee Colin has one the same but in black currant colour.”

“Cramoisie,” corrected Carey, who knew about fashionable colour names. “So?”

It was obvious but Dodd made allowances for the tooth.

“They've made some siller, that's all. Somebody's paid them a lot of money, on top o' what they normally get from black-renting and kidnapping.”

“So they've had some successful raids. What are you suggesting?”

“A Warden rode on 'em,” said Dodd, “find out what they got paid for.” He didn't think Carey would really go for it, but it was worth a try.

“Nothing to do with the feud the Dodds have with the Elliots, is it?”

“Och no, that's composed now,” lied Dodd. “It was a' arranged back in 1581 wi' the Reverend Gilpin's help and your father presiding.” Well, that bit was true, but as for the feud being composed…The Elliots had killed Dodd's father, caused the death of his mother, and the deaths of two of his brothers and a sister. The fact that he had got lucky when he led the remnants of the Dodd surname in the final battle so the bastards had had to come to negotiate was neither here nor there. He still wanted to wipe the Elliots out. Of course they thought the same of him, and that was why he'd had to leave upper Tynedale and come to Carlisle Castle when he was twenty-one, it was part of the deal. Which had held so far, but not for want of his thinking how to break it to his advantage.

And weren't the Johnstones and the Maxwells at it hammer and tongs again in the Scots West March?

“I'm not running a Warden Rode so you can have at the Elliots again,” growled Carey at him. “Besides, it's Scrope you'd have to convince of that, not me. He's the bloody Warden.”

“Is he no' thinking of going back to his ain lands and his lady wife down to London to serve the Queen?”

“Well he is, but how the devil did you know that?”

Dodd didn't feel it necessary to explain that the men of the guard had been talking about little else since they came back and the bets on it had gone to stupid levels. At least Dodd's investment looked safe.

“When's he leaving?”

“You know Scrope, dithers over everything. Also Richard Lowther would likely be acting Warden in his place, not me.”

“Ay? What'll happen to you?”

“Well, that depends on the Queen. If she confirms me as Deputy Warden then there isn't a lot he can do about it, though it would make my life infernally difficult. If she doesn't…” Carey shrugged a shoulder and scowled. “Maybe I'll take up the King of Navarre's offer. I'm not going back to London.”

“Och,” Dodd was stricken. All that work, going down to the horrible alleys and dangerous women of London, all gone to waste and he'd have to start buttering up Lowther again. “Why not ye as acting Warden?”

Carey's face was as grim as a crow at an execution. “Not senior enough, apparently,” he muttered, knocking back his third cup of brandy.

Seemingly there had been arguments and words exchanged between Scrope and his brother-in-law and Dodd now understood why Philadelphia was contemplating going to serve the Queen again. He sighed heavily.

“That's bad news, is that,” he said as he finished the bag pudding and sauce and leaned back with his belly comfortably tight. “I didna ken.”

A half smile briefly crossed Carey's face. “Well, I'm glad you're on my side, Sergeant, but I may be out on my ear in a few weeks.”

“Ay,” said Dodd mournfully. “Well, I'll get a nap before we go out on patrol the night.”

Carey nodded but stayed sitting in Bessie's commonroom while Dodd set off back up to the castle. A fourth cup of brandy arrived to keep him company.

Tuesday, Before Dawn, 17th October 1592

Elizabeth woke in the dark and wondered why. She was awake and alert, as if someone had called her name. Had they? She had been dreaming of Robin again, but that was normal, the part of her that dreamt was carrying on with its ridiculous notion that she could ever marry him, just as if reality and Sir Henry did not exist. She hated the awakenings from those dreams because they made her feel so sad.

But that wasn't what had awakened her. What had?

She lay on her side with Lady Hume fitted into her back and Kat Ridley lying on her back and giving a slow rolling grunt. That hadn't awoken her either; she was too awake.

She listened in the dark, probably about two hours after midnight, the darkest part of the night. There was a Moon but it was clouded over. What was it?

Absolute silence pressed in on her. No sound at all, not even the barn owls and the occasional bark from a fox, protests of dreaming sheep, sometimes a snort from a horse. Nothing except loud snoring from drunks outside.

Well, that was it, of course. Why was everything else so silent?

She sat up and decided against lighting a taper from the watch candle. She didn't have a dressing gown against the cold and it was very cold, perhaps not freezing yet but near it.

She found her riding kirtle by touch, missed out the petticoats and bumroll and pulled it on over her head, found her hobnailed boots by the bed and put them on as well.

There was a clink of metal on metal, and a couple of dull thuds, very near the house. Was someone trying to steal the horses? Goddamn it, if Jock Burn thought he could do that, he could think again.

Mind you, if it was Jock Burn then he was a better actor than she gave him credit for. He had been laughing and rolling drunk the last time she saw him and she had seen him pass out contentedly in a pile of hay.

She paused in the passageway to look out the window. Were there more horses in the stableyard than there should have been? It was hard to tell with the two wagons there and the empty barrels waiting to be loaded and taken back to Berwick. Even with her nightsight well in, it was very dark.

Her heart was beating hard and yet she wasn't sure. She didn't dare give the alarm for nothing because the village was full of drunken reivers who would likely wake and then fall to fighting each other if there was nobody else to fight.

She went down the stairs as quietly as she could, then stopped in the hall. She had barred the door herself so why was there a draught from the open window…?

She took breath to give the alarm and found a hard hand wrap itself round her mouth and pull her backwards off her feet. She fought then, fought for breath and to make a sound, was cuffed a couple of times across the ears and then when she managed a small yelp, punched hard in the side of the head with a dagger hilt so the world was turned into a whirligig and she couldn't see at all, couldn't hear anything except voices far away, hissing at each other. Somebody laughed, a thick sound that terrified her.

They laid her down and pawed at her skirts, kicking her legs apart, she closed them with enormous effort, they were kicked apart again and she was kicked in the privates as well. It hurt. Argument again, they were doing what? Tossing a coin? There was another harsh laugh and then a strange noise…A hissing noise like a snake or a burning slow match.

It was a burning slow match. Someone was coming into the minister's study in his shirt and breeches, but with a thing that had a small red light that lit up his mouth and jaw, which were set firm. She part-sat up, shook her head slowly against the dripping stuff going into her eyes, tried to make it out.

“It's true,” said the man with the gun coldly, “that I can only shoot one of you and the other can likely kill me. So which one will it be, gentlemen? Which of you shall I shoot?”

At last Elizabeth knew who it was for the London vowels and West Country sounds, it was the barber surgeon, Mr Anricks. He was standing in the doorway, oddly hunched, a dag rested on his left wrist, gripped by his right hand and the slow match hissing in the lock.

The two muffled-up men were backing away from her and Anricks came forward slowly. Suddenly the two made a break for the window, one leapt through, the other followed and the gun bellowed in the confined space.

Anricks was following up, grasping the dag by the muzzle and wielding the heavy ball on the grip like a club but by that time both were through the window and he missed again. The ball connected with the window frame and left a dent. Next moment there was the sound of two horses with muffled unshod hooves and muffled tack riding off into the night. And the moment after that the shouting starting as Jock Burn and the Taits and Pringles came to and started looking for people to fight.

Elizabeth found the world went away and came back again and she was surrounded by anxious faces in the light of several candles as Kat Ridley mopped the side of her head with a cloth. There was shouting outside, Young Henry's voice, bellowing with anger, then hooves galloping.…
You won't find them that way
, she thought muzzily,
they're too clever for that
.

Mr Anricks was there, too, decently dressed now in his black wool suit and his hat on.

“I heard Lady Widdrington go down the stairs,” he was saying. “I had been woken by something and so I loaded my dag and lit the match off the watch candle, came down with it and by the Almighty's help was able to chase them away.”

Elizabeth tried to get up and deal with events and found her limbs go to water and her head whirling when she started to sit up. Behind the crowd, Lady Hume was in her shift and the fur coverlet, watching everything beadily.

She tried again and found it worse, her body refusing to obey her and her head pounding away like a rock-crushing hammer at Keswick.

She was frightened she might die, as you did sometimes from being hit on the head. She beckoned Anricks closer while an argument broke out between Kat Ridley and two of the village women as to how to get her back to bed. “They were Jamie Burn's murderers,” she whispered when he squatted down to her.

“How do you know, ma'am?”

Suddenly she realised she couldn't say it was because one or both of them had raped Poppy and had been about to rape her as well. She simply couldn't.

“I…” she started and found she had nothing more to say. His pale brown eyes narrowed shrewdly at her expression. He had seen how she lay, where the men were. And then a miracle happened, he understood.

“Was Mrs Burn also…?” he asked very softly, while making a small gesture at her legs. She nodded and wished she hadn't for the movement made her head hurt and unloosed the bandage so that blood started leaking again into her hair.

“Only…he did it. You did it to her. You came in time for me.”

His mouth twisted a little. “I see,” he said softly. There was a sudden sense of boiling fury within him and yet none of it was visible on the outside. “I'm glad I was here.”

Her tongue wasn't working properly. “I am, too,” she managed finally as the cloth on her head fell off. “Ach,” she said, and put her hand to the wound there. He brought the candle closer and tutted.

With Kat's help she staggered to her feet, knees feeling like they were made of hanks of wool and bending all the time, was supported into the kitchen and sat on the chair. Mr Anricks was the nearest approach to a medical man there and he brought up all three of the candles so it felt hot. Gently he parted her hair. She hadn't her cap and her hair was plaited for sleep so it could have been worse but it seemed there was a nasty cut where the man had punched her and as head wounds will, it was bleeding again.

Later Elizabeth only remembered little flashes because most of it was the pain in her head and the nuisance of the blood and keeping a cloth wrapped around her neck so it wouldn't mark her kirtle. Lady Hume came trotting in with a pair of sewing shears and a small bottle of aqua vitae and Kat Ridley produced more linen cloths and a bowl of cold water.

Mr Anricks had gentle fingers: he sheared some of the hair short on that side of her head and used the cold water on the cut and then put brandy on it so Elizabeth had to bite her lip to stop herself from yelling. By that time it was dawn and the men were back from their ridiculous chasing across the countryside after two clever men who had crept in among a large number of snoring reivers to raid the manse itself.

Jock Burn was loud in his fury at it, louder because of his hangover. Just as Anricks was wrapping more linen bandages round her head Young Henry came stamping into the kitchen, grabbed her and hugged her.

“Are you all right, mam, did you get shot?”

She hugged him back, feeling the little boy inside the large-shouldered large young man and loving him as she had since she first met him, when he was ten and desperately trying to be brave about his mother. “I'm all right, Harry, truly I am. Just a little bump on the head…”

“Mr Widdrington, one of them hit her on the side of the head and also kicked her a number of times in the legs,” said Anricks. “She must go back to bed.”

“It was you fired the dag at them, sir?”

“Yes, though I think I missed. At least there's no blood from anyone except Lady Widdrington.”

“No matter, sir, no matter. Thank you. Thank you very much.” Young Henry was shaking Anricks' hand, pumping it up and down.

“Lady Widdrington must go back to bed,” said Anricks very loud and distinctly as to one wandering in his wits, “She has been struck on the head and kicked while on the ground.”

“I'm sure I can ride…” Elizabeth started though she wondered how she would get back to Widdrington with her legs like hanks of wool.

“I'm sure she can't,” said Anricks.

Young Henry then picked up Elizabeth easily in his arms and carried her up the stairs with no more ado than he had Lady Hume the night before, although she was twice the old lady's size.
When did he get so strong?
she wondered muzzily.
I knew he was large but I didn't know he could lift me
.

Young Henry put her into the bed and she lay back on the pillows and felt deeply grateful she hadn't had to get up the stairs.

“Thank you, Harry,” she said, and found he was hugging her again.

“We'll catch them,” he said into her neck. “We'll catch them, mam, and kill them. They'll be sorry they tangled wi' the Widdringtons.”

“Listen Harry, I think they were the men that killed Jamie Burn.”

“Ay,” said Young Henry, “I'm thinking the same. But where ha' they gone?”

“I'm more interested in why they came back. They'd got clean away and nobody any the wiser, why the devil did they come back? What for?”

Young Henry was feeling the large spot on the end of his nose that Elizabeth privately thought of as his thinking spot. “Hm, yes, why?”

She was suddenly dizzy again and found it hard to speak. She wanted to tell them that there must be something in the house they wanted and it was possible the tooth-drawer, Mr Anricks, wanted it too although he had saved her. She slowly got her tongue and lips to say all that.

“We'll go out with lymers today and try to find them,” Young Henry explained because he wasn't listening properly. “William Hume is lending me a couple of his hunting dogs, he's furious as well.”

Young Henry's voice faded as he told Elizabeth what good dogs they were and how Cousin William was also bringing along his forester who was an excellent tracker. She was suddenly exhausted and sleepy. She laid her sore head back on the pillow and let the world disappear again.

***

She woke to the sound of rain and the certain knowledge that she had forgotten something important. She was only in her shift again, her velvet gown hung up and her kirtle likewise. She lay there feeling the old fur coverlet over the bed, it was deer fur and well-cured so it was soft and supple and hardly shed at all. Perhaps it was noon though she didn't feel hungry.

What had Jamie Burn been mixed up in and where did Simon Anricks come in all this? Two strangers had come into the village and killed the minister, then ridden away again after raping Poppy. Two strangers had come into the village again the night before to find something they presumably hadn't got the first time, knocked her down and ridden away again, and given the searchers the slip as well. Simon Anricks had missed at point-blank range but then you often did with a dag; they were hopelessly inaccurate. Was he a Jesuit? To be sure he had carte blanche now that he was inside the manse. If he wanted to find something he didn't need to be elaborate about it. So was there something in the house that two parties wanted, was that it? And what was it? Why was it important? Was it a book? Why would a book be important? Was it a seditious book, perhaps something printed by the Catholics at Rheims to lead folk astray?

She pressed her lips together and scowled. If it was seditious then why would a Jesuit want it? Surely it would be better to leave it where it was and deny all knowledge?

She started to doze off again and there was Robin again, half in her dreams and half out of them, telling her about the different kinds of coding Sir Francis Walsingham had taught him when he was a very good-looking young man and in Scotland with him. He had told her about them in the North, in fact, before she even knew she loved him, way back in 1585, when he had been staying at Sir Henry's house in Berwick, waiting to find out if the Scotch king would let him into the realm with the impossible dangerous message about the Queen of Scots. The one that said that Her Majesty of England had somehow, unaccountably and accidentally and due to her wicked courtiers and in particular one Mr Davison, sent the King of Scotland's sovereign and mother to the block.

Scotland had been a tinderbox and most of the surnames had been united for once in their fury: so what if they had tried to kill the Queen twenty years before? She was their Queen and theirs to kill. How
dare
the Queen of England lop her head off on the specious grounds of treason when she was a sovereign queen and certainly not Elizabeth I's subject? It was outrageous. The Maxwell had sworn to kill Carey for carrying the message, as had Buccleuch and Ferniehurst and most of the headmen of the Marches.