Air of Treason, An: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (Sir Robert Carey Mysteries) (27 page)

“Ay sir,” he said. So this was the man who was supposed to be his contact in England. A rich hunchback. Well, so be it.

“What were you to do for me?” asked the man.

“Nobbut send ye tidings of Carey’s doings in the West March,” Hughie told him and the rich hunchback nodded gravely. “And then after a year and a day, when I’ve killt him, let ye know so ye can warn the goldsmith to give me ma gold.”

The shadow of something that might have been amusement crossed the hunchback’s face.

“Indeed? Can you cipher, Hughie?”

“I can read and write, if that’s yer meaning, sir?”

The rich hunchback brought out paper and some pieces of graphite and showed him what ciphering meant. It was a way of putting signs or numbers instead of letters in a system which meant you could still read it. Hughie was impressed at the cleverness of it.

“How do I send ye messages, sir? In the dispatch bag to Berwick?”

“Certainly not,” said the hunchback. “Do you know Carlisle at all? No? Well there’s a man there called Thomas the Merchant Hetherington that will do anything at all for money. Go to him when you get to Carlisle and show him this token.”

It was a blood jasper, carved with the image of a snake. A nice piece.

“That’s the Serpent Wisdom. He’ll know then that he’s to take your letters and send them south with his own letters to London. They’ll reach me.”

“Ay, sir.”

“Oh and Hughie, please hold off on killing Carey, would you? Remember your pension stops when he dies.”

“Ma pension?”

“Certainly. I’ll instruct Thomas the Merchant to pay a shilling to you for every letter I receive.”

“Och.” It would take a great many letters to equal the £30 in gold he was owed for Carey’s head. Six hundred in fact. But still…It was money in the hand not the bush, as it were.

“Ay, sir,” said Hughie, carefully tipping his cap to the hunchback. “Thank ye, sir.”

“I’ll look forward to your reports with interest,” said the hunchback.

“Ehm…Who should they be addressed to?”

“Mr. Philpotts at the Belle Sauvage inn, Ludgate Hill.”

“Ay? What shall I do till I get yer money, sir?”

“See if Carey will pay you,” said Mr. Philpotts lightly. “You’d better go now, he wants you to help him with his doublet.”

As Hughie turned the corner and saw the chequered Cumberland flags he thought to himself, “I’ll kill him when I choose, not when ye say so, Mr. Hunchback Philpotts.” It was exciting to be earning money for letters though. He’d come a long way since the bastard Dodds burnt out his whole family when he was but a wean, a long, long way.

Tuesday 19th September 1592, 2 a.m.

Captain Leigh struggled awake in the black night before dawn, heart thumping, his sword already grabbed from its usual place by the side of his bed. He stood there, listening for a moment.

A horrific shriek rang out that was neither an owl nor any creature being eaten by a fox. Then there was a thunder of running feet and shouting then horses…

He already had his hose on and he pulled his buff jerkin over the top of his shirt, drew the sword and ran outside into the burned monastery’s cloister. A large shape galloped past him and nearly knocked him over. Another shape cannoned into him in the dark and tried to punch him. The smell of booze told him who it was.

“Goddamn it, I’m the captain!” he shouted at John Arden who sheepishly let him up. A man in a shirt ran past screaming blue murder, another couple of men were scrambling up onto a lookout place like milkmaids chased by a mouse.

The horse in the cloister reared and kicked, another galloped past neighing with panic. Leigh grabbed for its mane and it tried to bite him. Both nags galloped out the gate into the forest.

In the murk, more men appeared groggily, some with their buff jerkins on, most without their boots. One was hopping on one leg with a nasty gash in his toe.

Finally someone got the lantern alight again which only helped a little as the night was so dark.

“It…it’s ghosts, sir. Burnt monks.”

“
Al infierno con esos capullos
,” hissed somebody behind him. Leigh spun to see Jeronimo stamping across the flagstones with a loaded crossbow clamped under his shortened arm, a torch in the other, his buffcoat and boots on and his morion on his head. At that moment Leigh knew the man was not lying about having been a
terceiro
of the third Imperial Spanish legion as he boasted.

They checked the carrels below the monks’ dorter which was in use as their stable. Three of the horses had bolted, leaving only the Northerner’s Whitesock still there, pulling at his tether. Leigh went to him and managed to calm the animal down, gave him some hay to eat. The doors had been broken outwards.

Eventually under Leigh’s bellowing and Jeronimo’s withering scorn, the men gathered together, sheepish and cold. Harry Hunks was there, blinking, looking witless and still in his shirt.

“God’s teeth!” shouted Leigh in disgust, “Christ save us if we ever do find ourselves attacked in the night. None of you will. The only man among you that wouldn’t be dead right now is Don Jeronimo.”

Jeronimo flourished a bow. The men didn’t like being compared unfavourably to a foreigner and one of them muttered rebelliously.

“Speak up, Smithson,” Leigh snapped.

“It was ghosts, sir, I heard ’em singing.”

“I saw one, it was white, sir, and it moaned.”

A gabble of frightened stories broke out. Allegedly the burned monks had been singing the Papist hymn for the dead.

“For God’s sake, it was probably just another one of you idiots, blundering about screaming in the dark.”

“All the watchlights went out, sir, all at the same time. And then there was Papist singing. It’s the burned monks, sir.”

Leigh rolled his eyes. Nothing annoyed him more than superstitious nonsense about ghosts. He should have seen ghosts by now if they existed and he hadn’t. So they didn’t. It was clean contrary to good religion in any case—the dead slept until judgement when most of them would be damned. It didn’t matter whether you buried them or not, they slept. How many piles of bodies from battles or camp fevers had he supervised being burned or buried? If ghosts walked, there should be troops of them following him and following the men he led, ghosts of innocent people they had killed or burned. He shivered for a second. Of course, he would be among the damned.

“Look,” he said, trying to get them to think, “The old monks are dead and gone fifty years ago at least.”

Somebody muttered. “Don’t matter to ghosts.”

“I saw it, sir, it was white and moaning, sir.”

“I expect that was Mr. Arden, hungover, trying to stop you killing each other in your fright.” Arden smiled a little.

Leigh was thinking hard. He sent some men out to catch the bolted horses again, beckoned Smithson over and they walked quickly down to the old witch’s cottage in the ruins of the monastery gatehouse. If that bloody northerner wasn’t in the monk’s pit, he’d flog the bastard.

The dog was snoozing in the yard, lifted an ear and one eyelid at the sound of their feet, gave a short lazy “Woof!” and went back to sleep.

They found the turfed wickerwork roof over the mouth of the pit and peered in.

The man was asleep there, curled up in a rough old blanket and snoring. The light from their lantern woke him and he lifted his head and put up his hand against the dazzle.

“Ay, whit d’ye want?” he snarled. “Can Ah no’ get ma sleep?”

“Was it you causing trouble?” Leigh demanded.

The Northerner propped himself on his elbow and scratched his brown hair vigorously.

“Ay,” he sneered, “Ah’ve wings to fly and Ah flew over ye and shat upon ye for entertainment.”

Leigh let the hurdle drop again. They went back to the old monastery and tried to clear up and sort out the mess. Leigh decided he had to run some proper exercises for his men. They’d got soft sitting around here. In France they would never have let a couple of bolted horses and a few shrieks from an owl spook them so badly.

But nobody was dead. That was what finally convinced Leigh he was only dealing with superstition and stupidity. If the Northerner had done it, surely he’d have slit a few throats, it stood to reason?

It was past sunrise before he was in the Northerner’s respectable suit which was tight at the waist, the Northerner’s fat purse full of gold angels in the crotch and some counted out into the front pocket. Whitesock was in perfectly good health despite the night, though the saddle from one of the other horses didn’t fit him properly. The other three were no doubt out in the forest eating yew and whatever else they could find that would poison them. The men would have to find them, he didn’t want to delay any longer.

The Oxford road was only a mile away, near Cumnor Place. As he prepared to leave he beckoned John Arden to his stirrup. Jeronimo was sitting slumped on a stone bench, his crossbow discharged now, his face grey and unreadable.

“Listen, John,” he hissed at his old friend, “stay sober, stay in charge, make sure nothing else happens. If that Northerner gives trouble, knock him out but don’t kill him. This is our one chance for our pay, you understand?”

Arden was clearly already drunk. He blinked owlishly up at Leigh.

“I know that, Captain,” he slurred, “I won’t get drunk.”

Leigh shook his head and put his heels in.

Tuesday 19th September 1592, morning

Dodd had gone to sleep again after the excitement of the early morning and he only woke when the old woman heaved the hurdle off the top of the pit and threw pebbles on him.

“Whit?” he asked, annoyed.

“Where’s my granddaughter?” she demanded shrilly, “What have you done with her?”

“Eh?” he blinked as stupidly as he could, “What could I do wi’ her, missus, I’ve bin in this pit all night? D’ye see her here?”

The carlin set her toothless jaw. “Then what was all that shouting? Did that frighten her?”

“Mebbe, missus.” Even if she hadn’t known all about it, Dodd would have bet that it wouldn’t frighten young Kat. “I dinna ken.”

“Well you can stay there today, I don’t trust you.”

Dodd shrugged, spotted his feet and pulled them cautiously under the rough blanket he’d been very grateful for last night. “Suits me, missus,” he said and she stamped away. He could hear the goats protesting as she milked them and led them out to feed, muttering all the while.

Then he lay back with his head on his arms, blinked at the sheep’s wool clouds caught on the cold blue sky and smiled quietly to himself. It had been fun last night. Getting out of the pit had not been easy, but he had once raided gulls nests on the cliffs by the sea when they were starving and had learnt how to climb with his toes and wedge billets of wood between gaps in the stone. The poles of his splint had come in useful, tied together at the ends, to push the hurdle-roof off the top of the pit. Little Kat had been waiting for him in the blackness and cold before dawn, snuggled next to the snoring dog and he had taken her on his shoulders and had her tell him the way to the main Oxford road so he’d know it later. Once she was off, trotting up the road determinedly in her clogs in a way that reassured him, he’d turned back to the old monastery and set about seeing to it that Leigh didn’t beat her to Oxford city.

In the days when his feet had leathery soles and he was smaller and lighter, he could move like a shadow. He was no longer a boy but he could still put his feet down softly and he did that, slipping through the clearer parts of the undergrowth in his loose woollen breeks, the shirt and the blanket under his arm, mud smeared in stripes and splotches over his face and chest.

There were only two guards set, chatting in the darkness by their watchlight at the bend in the road, smoking his tobacco. Getting past them had been almost insultingly easy. And then he had free rein over the sleeping men in the monastery. After he had taken a knife out of the boy’s scabbard, hanging by his bed in the dorter, he carefully trimmed the wicks on the watch candles so they’d go out a few minutes later. He broke the tethers of the horses that weren’t Whitesock by scorching the rope first with a watchlight and then he broke the bolts open by levering with one of the halberds. And then he’d cracked the nags over the backside with the pole of the halberd and let out a good Tyneside yell. His throat still hurt from it. He had the shirt over his head and the blanket round his shoulders and he’d spent a happy few minutes running through the shadowy dorter shrieking about the burned monk, singing the one piece of plainchant he knew which was some nonsense his mother used to sing to get them to sleep. “Dee is eery, dee is iller, solve it sigh clum in far viller!” he’d intoned, finishing by howling and then shouting “Alarm!” and “Ghosts!” for good measure. Once the darkness was full of frightened men in their shirts running about and punching each other, he’d pulled the shirt down properly and tied the blanket round his waist under it and done a bit of running and punching himself.

As a final flourish he’d run directly across the cloister screaming and out the gate while the dimwitted Captain stood there blinking with his sword in one hand and the lantern in the other. The old Spaniard came out then with his crossbow on his shoulder and Dodd picked up speed into the darkness.

Then came the hard part. As he ran he stripped his shirt off again and picked up a branch to drag behind him and pounded through the woods as fast as he could back to the old carlin’s pit, doing his best not to shout when he bruised his foot on a stone or trampled through brambles.

At the edge of the pit he’d used the blanket to wipe the mud off his sweating body and face, dropped it and the shirt into the pit, let himself down on the wedged billets of wood and the stone he’d propped against the wall, pulled them out and used the two poles from his splint to manoeuvre the hurdle back over the top of the pit, leaving it dark. And then he’d groped about, found the shirt and blanket, pulled the shirt over him, dropped onto the bracken and wrapped the blanket round him, panting hard as he heard Leigh’s boots approaching.

He hadn’t had time to put the splints back on his leg for effect but he hoped they wouldn’t notice. It seemed they hadn’t and they’d been fooled by his imitation of the noises Carey normally made at night. He’d stay meekly in the pit now and hope like hell young Kat would get to Oxford in time. He’d done all he could, mind, he couldn’t think of anything else he could do for the moment.