3 A Surfeit of Guns: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (13 page)

Carey dismounted, went over and knocked on the wattle wall and poked his head around the leather, immediately to start coughing at the smell of woodsmoke and porridge. All the four children he had seen before were piled up asleep like puppies in the bundle of bracken and skins and blankets where Long George had died and Goodwife Little was stirring at the pot hanging over the central fire.

To Goody Little the Deputy’s sudden appearance like that was a nightmare come true again, and she shrieked softly at the horned appearance of his morion before recognising the face.

“Cuddy,” she shouted. “Get up and stir the pot.”

The boy fell blinking out of bed, scratching himself under his shirt and shambled obediently over to the pot. Goodwife Little wiped her hands on her apron and came to the Deputy, where she curtseyed.

“Ay, sir?” she said, looking up at him, her hard thin face steely with hope firmly squashed and sat upon so it could not sour on disappointment.

“May I come in, Goodwife?”

She gestured and Carey stepped around the hide.

“Long George was owed sixty shillings and sevenpence back pay, of which I have fifteen shillings and sevenpence here.” Goody Little took breath to speak but subsided when Carey raised his hand, palm towards her. “I have also arranged a pension which is only threepence a day, but which I have the word of the Lord Warden will be paid on any day of the month that you choose to collect it. You may collect the rest of his back pay at the same time, in instalments, or as a lump sum, and you must present yourself in person with this paper here at the Carlisle Keep.”

Goody Little had gone pale and put her hand against the wall. She smelled sourly female and as well-smoked as a bacon haunch, and as far as Carey could make out she had no breasts and no hips to speak of.

Was she going to faint, blast her? “Goodwife? Are you well?”

“Yes, sir,” she whispered. “Only I was…I was relieved. I can pay Richie Graham what we owe him now, ye follow. I hadnae expected to see ye again, sir.”

Carey said nothing for a moment. He took her scrawny rough hand between his two long-fingered hard ones.

“Goodwife, this will not affect your pension, but I greatly desire to know the answer. It could help avenge your husband.”

She looked at him warily.

“What were Long George and his kin up to on the Wednesday before he was hurt? Don’t tell me lies: if it’s over dangerous for you to tell me, then I won’t press it, but please, it would help me. What was he doing?”

“Why, sir?” she asked shrewdly. “Why is it so important to you to know?”

“He got a gun in payment for it, right? A pistol?”

After a moment she nodded at him.

“Well, Goodwife, whoever it was gave him the weapon was the man that killed him. That pistol was faulty: it burst in his hand when he fired it the second time, and that was how he came to lose his life.”

Her mouth opened slightly and her eyes narrowed. She was not a fool, Carey could see, only very wary and weary also.

“Are all of the guns bad?” she asked. “All the guns that was in the armoury?”

Carefully, not revealing what she had let slip, Carey nodded.

Goodwife Little thought for a moment longer while Carey held his breath because he desperately wanted to cough. “My man was out wi’ his uncle and cousins,” she said finally. “Taking a load of guns from carts and loading them on a string of packponies.”

“And, I suppose,” said Carey quietly, “putting another load of guns into the carts that went on to Carlisle?”

Goodwife Little nodded.

“Where did the exchange take place?”

“East of here, in the Middle March, at a meeting place. I dinna ken where.”

“Please, Goody, I will not say where I got the information, but where did the guns come from?”

She laughed a little. “Where all trouble comes, fra ower the Border, where else?”

Carey nodded, released her hand, gave her the purse he was carrying and the paper, then bowed in return to her curtsey and pushed his way out of the tiny smoky little hellhole. He was coughing and wheezing as he got back on his horse and when he wiped his face with his handkerchief he found a pale brown dinge on it.

“Christ,” he remarked to no one in particular. “How can anyone live in a place like that?”

“It’s no’ sae bad, sir,” sniffed Dodd, offended once again. “Ye stop crying and coughing in a week and then they’re snugger than a tower, believe me.”

“Thank you, Dodd,” said Carey, hawking and spitting mightily. “I’ll try and remember it.” He put in his heels and led them at a fast trot back to the path, without looking back.

***

“So tell me about the guns,” the Courtier said conversationally to Henry Dodd as they turned their horses’ heads west and northwards.

“The guns, sir?”

“Yes, Sergeant. The guns in the armoury. What is it that everybody else knows about them and I don’t?”

Dodd’s face had taken on a stolidly stupid expression.

“I’m sorry, sir…”

“What I’d really like to know is what makes the armoury clerkship worth fifty pounds, since it seems that’s what Lowther and his cousin Ridley managed to bilk me out of. It can’t simply be a matter of selling all the guns as quickly as you can: even on the Border someone would notice, surely.”

There was the faintest flicker of Dodd’s eyelid.

“For Christ’s sake, Dodd, have pity.”

Dodd coughed.

“Well, sir, ye see, ye can loan the handguns out for a regular fee with a little care—and a deposit, of course—and get more in the long run than ye would by selling them.”

Carey greeted this with a shout of laughter. “By God, that’s ingenious. I hope the clerks at the Tower never get to hear of it, the Spaniards would end up better armed with our ordnance than we are. So generally when there was an inspection, the guns would all be there?”

“Ay, sir. It fair queered Atkinson’s pitch, you rousting the place out without warning like that.”

“Did Scrope get a cut?”

“I dinna ken, sir,” said Dodd carefully. “But ye see, it had the benefit that the surnames would kill more of each others’ men wi’ the guns and save us the bother.”

“I wonder if that sort of thing goes on in Berwick. I must tell my brother.”

“I dinna ken, sir,” said Dodd again, having heard some of the stories about Sir John Carey.

Carey caught his tone. “Oh, I see,” he said cynically. “So I’m the only innocent who doesn’t know about it.”

Dodd grunted and thought it more tactful not to answer.

“What about the risk that the surnames would be better armed in a fight than the garrison?”

“Wi’ Lowther leading the trods, sir?”

“No. Plainly the situation wouldn’t arise. I tell you, Sergeant, I’m not bloody surprised this March is gone to rack and ruin and there’s been no justice out of Liddesdale for sixteen years.”

“Rack and ruin, sir?”

Carey turned his horse and waved an arm expansively.

“Look at it, Sergeant. Look at that.”

It was only a huddle of burned cottages and a broken down pele-tower, plus some overgrown fields. Hardly surprising, so close to the predatory Grahams of Esk and the assorted wild men of the Debateable Land. Dodd thought the place might have been Routledge lands once.

“Ay, sir?”

“It’s tragic. This is beautiful country, rich, fertile, wonderful for livestock, and there’s more waste ground than field, more forest than pasture. And what do you see? Pele-towers and such for the robbers to live in, or burned-out places like that. How can anyone till the ground or plant hedges or orchards or anything useful if they never know from one day to the next if they’re going to be burned out of house and home?”

Dodd looked at the burned huts. Like Long George’s children, he had lived in places like that in his youth, they weren’t so bad, usually warm and dry if you built them right. And why would anyone want to plant an orchard, with all the trouble that was, when a cow would give you milk inside three years and mainly feed herself?

“And this thing about blackrent, it’s a scandal and a disgrace.”

Dodd stared at him. Blackrent was traditional. Carey made an impatient gesture.

“You’re only supposed to pay one lot of rent, Dodd, to your actual landlord, plus tithes to the church, of course,” he said. “You shouldn’t be paying another lot of rents to a bunch of thieving ruffians to stop them raiding you.”

“Well, it’s worth it if they protect you,” protested Dodd.

“Do you pay blackrent, Dodd?”

“Ay, of course I do. I dinna need to pay off the Armstrongs and I willna pay the bloody Elliots nor Lowther neither, but I pay Graham of Brackenhill like everyone else and I pay a bit to the Nixons and the Kerrs to keep them sweet.”

“Did you know it’s against the law to pay it? Did you know you could hang for paying it?”

Dodd was speechless. His jaw dropped.

“Who in the hell made that law?” he demanded when he could speak again. “Some bloody Southerner, I’ll be bound.”

“So who pays you blackrent in turn, Dodd?”

“Naebody.”

Carey’s eyebrows did their little leap.

“It’s no crime to take blackrent,” he said sourly. “Only pay it. And yes, it was a bloody Southerner made that law, and he was an idiot.”

“Well, it’s no’ precisely blackrent, see ye,” Dodd began to explain. “But some of the Routledges give me a bit and what the wife collects on my behalf I dinna ken and…”

“Oh, never mind. Look over there. Do those look like hobbies to you?”

Dodd looked and saw to his relief that the horses were on English Graham land. The water-bailiff was at the back of their small party and hadn’t noticed Carey’s interest.

“Nay, sir, they do not.” Let Bangtail’s dad talk his way out of this.

“Six of them, and very nice they are too, if a little short of food.”

“Och, them fancy French horses eat their heads off…” Dodd began and stopped. “…Or so I’ve heard.”

“Hmm.” Carey looked sideways at him and Dodd wondered what it was about Carey that caused Dodd’s own tongue to become so loose. He made his face go blank and stared severely at the foreign horses trotting about in the field ahead of them.

Carey did nothing much about the horses: simply pulled out a leather notebook and a pen and little bottle of ink and scribbled down the descriptions of each one of the horses in the field, resting the book on his saddle bow. They carried on, noting eight more horses of suspiciously fine breeding in lands owned by Musgraves and Carletons.

At last, to Henry Dodd’s relief, Carey picked up his heels a bit as they approached the Border country itself. They crossed at the Longtown ford and then covered the five miles of Debateable Land at a good clip. They took the horse-smugglers’ path by the old battlefield and followed it into the Johnstone lands north of Gretna, where Carey had them slow down to bate the horses.

We have thirty-five miles to ride to Dumfries before night, Dodd thought sourly, through some of the wildest robber country in the world, and hardly a man with us, just a bloody Graham water-bailiff and a Deputy Warden who thinks he’s immune to bullets.

To Dodd’s mind, Carey rode like a man going to a wedding with a cess of two hundred behind him. He took his time, never doing more than a canter, and stared around with interest at what he called the lie of the land, which looked like rocks and hills to Dodd, asked the few people in the villages they passed through what surname they were and generally behaved as if he was somewhere in soft and silly Yorkshire, where no one was likely to attack him at all.

When Dodd tactfully tried to reason with him, he got nowhere.

“Dodd, Dodd,” Carey said with that tinge of tolerant amusement in his voice that Dodd found intensely irritating, “nobody is going to attack us at this time of all times. King James is on the Border with three thousand men and he would just love to suck up to the Queen by hanging anyone who attacked me.”

Ye think ye’re very important, Courtier, thought Dodd, but heroically didn’t say. Has it crossed your mind that there are broken men all over the place here and not a one of them that gives a year-old cowpat for King James and all his men? He glanced across at the leathery water-bailiff, with the telltale long bony Graham face and cold grey eyes. He was riding along on his tough little pony looking as if he was half-asleep. No help from there.

“Ay, sir,” said Dodd, still trying to rotate his head on his neck like an owl. “I’m verra glad to hear it. Will we be there by nightfall at this pace, sir?”

He paused, stark horror chilling his blood like winter. “And what’s that, sir?”

There was movement in the distance, the characteristic purposeful movement of a man riding towards them at speed. They sat and watched for a few seconds and then Carey was quietly loading his dags, and Red Sandy and Sim’s Will Croser drawing their swords. Dodd spun his horse about, staring suspiciously at the farmlands and waste ground about them. Nothing. The land was empty save for the inevitable women weeding gardens and harvesting peas. Only there was the lone horseman riding like the clappers.