A Chorus of Innocents (29 page)

Carey nodded seriously at them. “We'll do our best to catch them and hang them,” he said. “That's a promise.”

“When ye catch them, ye willna compose with them?” asked Andy anxiously, “not even if their friend the courtier asks ye?”

“Especially not if Lord Spynie asks me,” said Carey.

***

Bangtail came back an hour and a half later to say that the two of them had gone to ground at a small tower owned by the Grahams, a mere five miles out of town. He didn't think they had noticed that they were being followed for he and Red Sandy had kept well back and well apart. Red Sandy had stayed by the tower in case they moved or went anywhere else.

Carey smiled at that and said, “Well then, let's try and catch them unawares.”

They called out the guard quietly, all of them, not just the ones that were supposed to go out on patrol who happened to be Thomas Carleton's lot, but all of them, even the ones in bed at the castle. Thomas Carleton roused himself out as well, jack on his back and his tarnished morion helmet on his head, chuckling quietly at something.

At two in the morning, the Courtier inspected the men lined up in the castle courtyard. Scrope and Sir Richard Lowther were at Gretna, last he heard, before they went into the Debateable Land and met with some of the Grahams and Armstrongs there. Perhaps they would also meet the Maxwell, the current Scottish West March Warden who was being elusive about a Warden's Day, although it had been years since the last one. And so, as acting Deputy Warden, he had the authority to call on all of them and he did.

They didn't bother with remounts because the tower was so close to Carlisle and rode out with muffled hooves and harness, with a turf carried in Carey's saddlebag ready to light if necessary. None of the slow matches on the guns were lit, but Dodd and Carleton had firepots for them when the time came.

Thursday Night 19th October to Friday 20th October 1592

The Jedburgh inn's parlour door opened and young Lord Hughie came in, walked and sat opposite Elizabeth while she dozed in the blessed warmth of the fire. She opened her eyes and saw him but sat there quietly. His young and beautiful face looked peaceful again.

“I just came to say good-bye,” he told her. “I'm going back to my grandam in the morning.”

“How did you get here?”

“I have feet, ma'am, though they're sore. I followed you and Brother Aurelius down from the abbey.”

She looked at him carefully. “You aren't going to 'prentice to the Cathedral?”

Slowly he shook his head. “You're right,” he said, “they won't have me. I was going to lie about who I was but with Jimmy Tait's father there, that won't work. And they'll be afraid of my Lord Spynie. I'll go home tomorrow.”

She sat up. There was something wrong here, he seemed too calm.

“How will you find the way?”

“I'm sure one of your men can see me right back to Wendron. Perhaps I could borrow a hobby from Mr Widdrington since I've blisters on my feet.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh yes. I'll wait until Cuddy, Archie, and Jimmy are away—they're leaving before dawn tomorrow with Jock Tait—and then I'll go. It's for the best.”

She couldn't put her finger on what was wrong but she nodded and smiled.

“The King of Elfland's collar was payment from an English archer for services rendered by my grandam, I realise that now.”

Elizabeth nodded. She didn't see any point in arguing otherwise.

“You know Cousin William?” asked Lord Hughie. “You know how old he is?” Elizabeth shook her head. “Well he was born in 1545,” said the boy quietly, “because he's forty-seven now. I only just worked it out. My Lord my grandfather claimed him as a byblow, said his mother died giving birth. Of course my grandfather loved my grandmother dearly, always did.”

Elizabeth took a deep breath. “He was your grandmother's?”

“Yes. Everything was confused in those years with the destruction and the burning, and I know she stayed at a convent for a while. We still had them in Scotland then. Humes are blond not brown.”

“Ah.” Elizabeth felt somehow satisfied, as if she had suspected this without knowing.

“The other half of the necklace is probably still in Norwood Castle,” he added, “since my Lord Spynie isn't dead, unfortunately.”

“He's here, you know,” she said anxiously, in case it was a surprise to him.

“I know that, ma'am,” he told her gently. “I've met him now and I'll be going to Court as his page next month.”

“No, you can't.”

“Why not, ma'am, who's going to stop him?”

“I will.”

The boy shook his head, still gently, bowed to her and left the parlour.

She sat up and gripped her hands together until the knuckles went white, put her chin on her fists and thought harder than she ever had before. Then she ordered paper and pens, since she had left her satchel with the Burns, and wrote a letter to Chancellor Maitland of Lethington the like of which he had probably never received before nor would receive again. Then she went in search of the landlord and found Lord Hugh already had a bedroom and had locked the door. She found a young man from the Widdrington surname and sent him off to Maitland with the letter.

Saturday Night 21st October to Sunday 22nd October 1592

They didn't ride fast, with Bangtail showing the way and when Red Sandy rose up from the bank of bracken where he'd been keeping an eye on things, they were within half a mile of the castle and everything was quiet.

“Are they still there?”

“Ay, they're in the farmhouse but there's a tower there and it's all open,” whispered Red Sandy, “If we can…”

Somebody's gun went off, the boom from it cracked around the valley. Carey's head whipped round.

“Who the hell…?”

Somebody was on watch at the farmhouse. There were torches and lights; they could make out men running into the tower and a boy on a fast pony galloping away northwards.

“Ay,” said Carleton blandly, “there he goes. They're Grahams in there and if ye dinna prevent it we'll all be taken prisoner.”

“Why?” asked Carey with interest as if they were talking about a horse race.

“The lad's gone tae the Debateable Land to fetch out the Elliots. So now.”

And Carleton leaned on his saddlebow and watched him.

Dodd was expecting fireworks; he got none. “Andy Nixon,” said Carey evenly, “I want you to go back to Carlisle, rouse out Mayor Aglionby and ask him to lend me all the Trained Bands of men immediately. Bring them out here to me as fast as ye can.”

“Ay sir,” said Nixon, turning his horse and riding back down the road.

“Ridley, Little, Hodgson.”

“Ay sir.”

“Rouse out your surnames, gentlemen, bring them here to me, Warden's quarters on it.” The three men headed down the road at a gallop while Carey looked oddly at Carleton who had his brows raised.

“I'd ask you to fetch your surname, Captain Carleton,” he said, “But I'm thinking they might be busy, eh? Come with me.”

He drew his sword, turned his horse and smiled at the twenty men remaining. “Come on,” he said, “let's see if there's any insight left at the farmhouse.”

Whatever the men in the tower expected, with their door locked and men on the roof with long bows, crossbows, and a couple of guns as well, they did not expect the twenty men of the guard to come close to the tower. The men took turns ducking and firing until Carey sprinted to the farmhouse, kicked through the door, ran inside and found, as he expected, no women and practically no furniture.

“It's a trap!” said Dodd furiously, behind him. “The Elliots will be here in an hour…”

“Yes,” said Carey, “it's a trap. What did you think? And bloody Carleton's in it up to his neck as well.”

“Goddamn it…”

“Do you want to go back to Carlisle?”

Dodd stared at him in puzzlement. “No, why?”

Carey grinned at him and actually laughed. “So let's see what a bit of modern siegework can do, eh?”

Carey hurried outside, and wandered near the tower. A gun fired and two crossbows loosed, missing him and he retreated. He had all the men off their hobbies, with the animals kept to the back. The men in the tower were shouting insults at them and one showed his arse to Carey.

“Tut tut,” said Carey mildly. “Such language.”

He had the men ring the tower just out of range with instructions to try and draw their fire but do their best not to get hit.

Then he spent a while drawing patterns in the mud and counting under his breath. Dodd took a squint at them: a triangle with square boxes on each of the sides, that was all.

“We need two beams, twenty-five feet long,” Carey said after a moment, “or fruitpicking ladders. Nothing less than twenty-five feet long.”

“Why?”asked a bewildered Dodd, “The tower's only twenty feet high, it's a short one.”

“Ladders are always too short, aren't they?”

“Ay sir.”

“No, they're not. Not when I'm doing the besieging.”

They looked about for anything long enough but there was nothing. So Carey sent another man all the way back to Carlisle to bring back one of the ladders to the castle walls which he thought might be right. Also ropes, picks, and axes, as quickly as he could, don't wait for the Trained Bands. At least he told the man to hurry. By that time the bells were tolling from the farms and pele towers in the area, and Carleton and a couple of his cronies had found firewood and started a fire.

The Ridleys were the first to come in, fifteen men and another twenty-seven on their way from farms further south. Carey thanked them all for coming out for him, promised that if anything came of it they would get first chance at the loot because they were there first, and placed them around the tower and some in the farmhouse itself with arquebuses to point through the windows. When the Littles and a lot of Hodgsons came in later, he did the same. There were two rings around the tower, one facing inward, the other facing outward.

If Carey was worried about the Elliots, he didn't show it. He sat down by Carleton's fire and talked affably about various sieges he had been at in France and asked courteously about Carleton's experience with seigework. Carleton admitted he hadn't much, and he wondered what Carey was doing. The Elliots would be here soon, did he know that?

Then Carey took a spade from the farmhouse and started digging a ditch parallel to the tower while the men inside jeered at him and threw lumps of shit.

“It shouldn't be very needful this time,” he explained to the fascinated men whilst ducking flying turds, “but this is the right way to dig a ditch so the men you're besieging can't shoot you.”

At that point the man Carey had sent to Carlisle for the ladder turned up with four men on horseback, carrying two ladders between them. Carey stopped digging, laid them on the ground, and measured them by pacing along them and then grinned again.

Dodd found his relaxed attitude alarming. What insanity was he planning now? He soon found out. Carey started anyone with a bow or gun shooting as steadily as they could—the clear superiority of longbows over guns showing now, in Dodd's opinion. He explained to Dodd exactly what he wanted him to do, which Dodd found first appalling and then funny. But he could do it. He knew he could.

Friday 20th October 1592

Elizabeth was offered a bed in one of the better guest rooms by the innkeeper, with his own daughter to keep her company. He refused her money, said that the abbey would see to it. She even had a nice fresh linen shift from the innkeeper's wife for a shilling, which she thought was money well spent. While she was undressing she found the book of “The Schoolmaster” still in her petticoat pocket where she had put it and forgotten it. The small book was well-thumbed—she looked at it and then put it back. She'd give it to Poppy when she got home.

She slept well in the big bed with the polite innkeeper's daughter. And then, in the early morning she heard a scraping and then a bellowing and a shouting, dull thuds, and then someone light came running along the corridor full pelt, jumped out of the window.

She got the innkeeper's daughter to stop clutching her and got dressed in record time. When she came out of the room she found the place was a bedlam with Lord Spynie's young men stamping around and shouting.

She looked out of the window, saw a dung heap with a deep imprint in it and tracks in the mud running away, uphill toward the abbey. She trotted downstairs and asked the landlord what was going on.

“That boy, Lord Hugh, he tried to stab my Lord Spynie and got away.”

“Ah,” said Elizabeth, “I see.”

“Bide there ma'am and dinna be afraid. Your husband has gone out with my lord to take the young murtherer.”

“He succeeded?”

“No, he couldna get past my Lord Spynie's men, but he could have…”

“A pity,” she said coldly. “Thank you.”

With all the stamping about and shouting, nobody was interested in a woman. She needed a horse and she took one with a Widdrington brand, sighed at the man's saddle and mounted carefully.

She put her heels in and drove the animal up the path to the abbey where she could already hear her husband having a good loud argument with Brother Aurelius about where Lord Hugh might be. Lord Spynie and his men and some of the Widdringtons were searching the abbey, the Widdringtons notably unenthusiastic about it.

She knew where he was because she knew he had a plan. She went straight for the church, leaving the hobby to mill about with the others. At the back of the church she found the little door that led up to the tower and it was shut but not locked. She went through it and barred the door on the inside. She went up the narrow spiral stair, round and round and up and up in the dark, moving by feel except when part of a huge window let some light in.

The last part was all in darkness and she was breathless. Maybe she was wrong…?

She opened the door at the top which led to the tower's roof and the fine view north and south across all the Border country. Lord Hugh was looking at her anxiously from where he was perched in his breeches and shirt, sitting on the battlements, kicking his bare heels above a drop of hundreds of feet. He was smeared with dung from the dung heap.

Elizabeth came through the door and bolted it behind her. Parts of the tower were blackened with smoke and in one corner the leading had melted and was letting rain in to do damage to the timbers.

She came and stood by Lord Hughie and looked all the hundreds of feet down. It gave her a sick and dizzy feeling in her stomach but also a tempting thought. She could sit on a battlement like Hughie, swing her legs over the drop and then…Oops. And all her troubles would be over. Wouldn't they?

It was a terrible sin, the sin of despair which denied the goodness of God. Yet she felt it would be a relief to end the constant sadness, the constant pulling of her heart toward someone she couldn't have. And what if God wasn't good, what if He really was a vicious old man like the Bible showed Him in the parts every fire-eating minister quoted?

She looked at Lord Hughie.

“Lord Hugh Hume,” he said thoughtfully. “What a stupid name. Typical of my grandam. I'd rather be an Ian.”

Elizabeth nodded. “Trying to get the tombstone right?”

Lord Hughie looked sideways at her and smiled.

“I like it up here, it's just like climbing a tree,” he said.

“No, a tree's much safer. Look how smooth the stone is.”

“He was planning something, I knew he was, from how nice he was. I slept in my breeches and when I woke at dawn and heard the scratching at the lock, I drew my dagger, and got behind the door.”

Elizabeth nodded. Son and grandson of reivers, what did Spynie expect?

“When they came in I tried to stab him but I couldn't get through the padding and his men stopped me so I left the dagger and ran. It doesn't matter. At least I tried.”

“You planned to come up here, anyway.”

“Yes ma'am, I did. But how did you know? I even made sure the window above the dung heap was open.”

Elizabeth smiled and didn't answer.

“Yes, I planned to come up here, high up where it's clear…well, a little bit clear…” The weather was closing in after a bright sunrise, it would be raining soon. “I'd sing a song and then I'd jump.”

“And your grandam?”

“She won't know,” said Lord Hughie gently. “And she'll see me dancing with her other dead at the faery fort.”

“I think she'd know. In fact I think it will kill her.”

Hughie shrugged. “She's old. I'm sorry for it, but I willna be Spynie's bumboy.”

Play for time, she thought, even while a part of her longed for the simplicity of it. Only you couldn't do that. You would end in Hell for sure.

“Aren't you letting him off lightly?” she asked. “Just jumping off? Why not tell all of them why you're doing it? Why not tell him?”

“He'd just laugh. Or lie. Or both.” Still Hughie was looking thoughtful.

“I tell you what,” she said, impulsively. “I've a mind to come with ye.”

“What?”

“Yes, when you jump, perhaps I'll jump too.”

“But…why?”

“My husband beats me. I can't have the man I love,” she told him recklessly, not even feeling the shame of it that she couldn't make Sir Henry happy, that she had fallen in love with another man. “I try and try to do what God wants, and nothing changes. And I'm tired of it. So maybe I'll jump too.”

“No, my lady, you can't do that, they'll bury you at the crossroads with a stake through you…”

“I'll be dead, I won't feel it.” She leaned forward and looked down, half to frighten the boy, half in earnest. “That's how they'll bury you too, my lord.”

“No, I'll make it look like an accident.”

“God will know.”

“My lady, do you think God cares? I thought maybe He did but when the minister was killed…He doesna give a fig for you or me. If He did, my dad wouldna be dead and I wouldna be in this fix. I don't want to die but I canna see an alternative. Sooner or later Lord Spynie and his friends will get me where they want me. That's why I tried to stab him before I ran.”

“How do you know so much, Lord Hughie?”

“I've watched the dogs doing it though they dinna seem to mind. And my cousin Christie tellt me about it a lot when I was younger, how Christie would try and hide but it did no good.”

“Where's Christie now?”

“Oh, he drowned in the summer in a river. It was an accident. He was drunk, they say.” Lord Hughie's voice was bleak.

Elizabeth couldn't think of any answer to that.

“If God cared, my mam wouldnae be dead,” said Hughie. “If God cared, my grandam wouldna be away with the faeries either. And my father wouldna be dead forebye. That's the one that matters.”

Elizabeth said nothing. What was there to say? It was true. After a little she asked, “What about Cuddy and Archie and Jimmy?”

“Yes, they'll do what they want, go to the cathedral school and be clerks. I can't do that. I have to be a laird because I'm the heir.”

“Do you think they'll be sad about you?”

“Ay, a little, but not for long. They'll be too busy learning music and singing and learning Latin.”

“What do you want, my lord?”

“I don't want to be a laird. I want to go to school and learn Latin and then I want to study all the poems and the stories. I want to read Virgil. I want to read Juvenal and Catullus. I don't want to go hunting, it's boring, though Cousin William keeps taking me with him and explaining it to me again. I want tae study.”

“Have you told your grandam?”

“Ay, of course, but she disnae understand, she cannae even read or write.”

There were shouts and far below a banging on the door, people were looking up at them from the ground and pointing.

Hughie stood on the battlement, balancing easily.

“I'll jump,” he shouted. “I'll jump because of Lord Spynie. I dinna want to be his bumboy nor anyone's bumboy, d'ye hear? Not his, not Sir Henry's, nor anybody's bumboy! I willna do it!”

Elizabeth stood still, turned to stone like one of the gargoyles. The blood roared in her ears. Was that why she couldn't please her husband? Was that it? Dear God, she had never thought of it. It hadn't crossed her mind. And yet she had no part of the marriage bed with him after he consummated their marriage. And was that why he was so close to Lord Spynie?

She felt sick.

“What are you saying?” she heard herself gasp.

Hughie looked down with damning pity on his face. “Och missus, did ye not know? He's in love with Lord Spynie, allus has been and Lord Spynie uses it. Christie told me about it, even said he felt sorry for the old man. Everyone knows except his family.”

Her head was spinning. She put her hand on the battlement to steady herself.

“Are ye all right, my lady?” he asked, bending down to her. “Are ye well?”

“Yes, I am,” she said firmly, taking a breath and holding it. Well that made sense of everything. If her husband was a lover of men…like the King? She understood now why he had hated her so from the start, especially if he had lost his heart to someone vicious like Lord Spynie. Robin was worthy of her love; Spynie was not worthy of anything. To have your heart dragging after someone like that…It was horrible and against the law of God, but it made sense. It made sense and suddenly she could feel compassion for the old man whose heart yearned after a spoiled Royal minion.

“Good my lord,” she said formally to the boy, “please don't jump. Please.”

“I canna see another way out.”

“Yes, but I can. I will take you into my fosterage—I don't think my husband will want you for…for a catamite…”

“Nay,” agreed Hughie, “he's not like Spynie that way. But he allus does what Spynie wants.”

“And I will send you to school in Carlisle, to the cathedral.”

“What about the wardship?”

“I've already written to Chancellor Maitland, who is in charge of the Scottish Court of Wards…”

There was a sudden crashing and the door popped open as the bolts broke. Lord Spynie stepped through delicately, holding a dag with a fancy lock and no slow match, followed by three of his bully boys and three of the five Widdringtons that Young Henry had left behind when he went after Archie and Jemmy Burn. At least the Widdringtons were looking very unhappy.

She stepped between Lord Spynie and the boy. Spynie scowled and tried to sight past her but she moved. Hughie was poised for flight like a bird on the battlements, a wingless bird who wouldn't soar but would drop.

“Get out of my way,” sneered the King's favourite.

“No,” she said brightly, “let's discuss this. You are going to return my Lord Hugh's wardship to Chancellor Maitland for what you paid for it. He will hold it until my lord is of age. My Lord Hugh will not go to Court and will not be your catamite, sir, do you understand?”

“Out of my way, ye stupid bitch.”

She walked forward feeling light as a feather and quite happy. She walked right up to the gun and put her left forefinger over the hole that the bullet came out of.

“Now,” she said, “I'm not at all sure what happens if you fire your gun. I expect I'll lose my left hand. But maybe you'll lose your right hand. Maybe the gun will explode. I don't know. Shall we find out?”

And she smiled long and slow at him.