A Suspicion of Silver

by P. F. Chisholm

  The food was real, though, and smelled surprisingly good. There was pork and chicken and venison and potherbs and cheese and sweetmeats and a jam tart, and each dish was announced in a brazen voice by one of the Gentlemen of the Guard.

  Joachim let out a snort when a courtier laid an unused napkin beside the clean plate to indicate that the mad show was over. His mother shushed him.

  “Quiet, Joachim, show some respect. Did you think the Queen would be there herself every day for visitors? She has other things to do. I wonder what the recipe for that pork with apple and cider might be…”

  From there, as a special treat, according to the man, they were allowed into the actual Privy Gallery where the Queen lived when she was in residence. They were shown into the Queen’s Audience Chamber where there was a gilded throne with the Cloth of Estate over it like a little roof, bearing the arms of England. The French visitors raised their eyebrows at the fleur de lis quartered on it, in token of the Queen’s claims to French soil which King Henry V had so nearly conquered. This room was Radagunda’s favourite because it wasn’t big and impressive but small and intimate and she could see embroidered velvet cushions on the white rush mats for the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting and maids-of-honour to sit on, and the beautiful walls covered with white embroidered silk. The Queen met ambassadors and other important people in the room, explained the guide.

  Something shouted “God save the Queen!” in a strange croaky voice. She knew the phrase but was appalled when she saw that the speaker was a bird, grey and red, with a big beak, sitting on a perch in the corner.

  “That’s Jacob,” said their guide. “He’s a parrot. Would you like to feed him some apple, young sir?”

  Joachim translated this for her, though in fact she had understood, and asked her if he could. When she reluctantly said yes, he took the piece of apple, approached the bird and teased him with it, then threw it up and the bird caught it neatly in his beak.

  Little Rady started jumping up and down wanting to do the same. Radagunda didn’t like it; the parrot was worryingly clever for a bird. Was it infested with a demon?

  The guide took Rady to another bird, this one smaller, and green and red. He got it to perch on his finger and brought it close to the little girl’s face. Radagunda was terrified the bird would peck her or bite her but the guide looked up and said, “This is Sandy. He’s sad because his wife died last month. Do you want to stroke him, young mistress?” Joachim translated it for her.

  Little Rady’s small face was concerned. “Poor parrot,” she said in English, and actually dared to stroke the bird on his neck and he bowed a little and made a chirrup.

  “There,” said the guide, “you’ve made him feel a little better.” He put Sandy back on his perch and Little Rady smiled her beautiful sunny smile, though Joachim was sniggering again.

  Then they went into the Princes Lodgings, next to the old Stone Gallery and from the first room they could look at the Privy Garden with its formal short box hedges and winter rose trees and at the river on the other side.

  “Birds don’t get married,” Joachim sneered to the guide and the guide said quietly, “Parrots do, they marry for life and are faithful too.”

  Joachim shrugged and marched into the next room. That was where the gowns were, three of them, behind a wicker screen you had to peer through and they were on wicker stands so they looked as if the Queen had turned to twisted wood.

  Radagunda was fascinated by the gowns and peered through the screen which was presumably there to stop people stealing the pearls and jewels. She stared hard at the nearest gown and established to her satisfaction that all the gems were in fact paste, which made her snort. Little Rady was standing on tiptoe to look but couldn’t see past the screen and so their guide kindly picked her up.

  Of course Radagunda liked the green one best and admired the velvet and the forepart to the petticoat and then wondered why Joachim was being so quiet. She looked round and couldn’t see him.

  Where was he? She couldn’t see him! When had he gone? Where had he gone? Sweet Jesu and his Mother, what could she do?

  Joachim had found a little unlocked door in a corner that looked like the panelling on the walls. Looking back at his mother who was hypnotised by the boring gowns, he slipped through and shut the door behind him, found himself in a roughly boarded servants’ passageway. There was a smell of mildew and mice. He trotted along it and came out in an orchard with bare trees, crossed it and went in through the first unlocked door he came to and found a small yard there surrounded by higgledy piggledy houses. Some boys a bit larger than him were standing around drinking beer and playing dice. He could smell it was the terrible English beer and lifted his lip in a sneer.

  One boy was squatting by a watertrough. Respectably dressed in a woollen doublet and hose of blue that looked as if it was only secondhand, he didn’t look like a stable lad, but maybe he was. He stood up and bowed quite low to Joachim who touched his velvet cap in response. The boy said something in English which was too quick and strongly accented for Joachim to understand. He smiled a little at the boy who said something like “parlyvu fronsays.”

  “Entschuldigung,” said Joachim and turned to go, but the boy grabbed his arm.

  “Want see Queen?” said the boy loudly and slowly. “SEE THE QUEEN?”

  Joachim wondered why he was saying that when the Queen wasn’t there—but maybe she was? The boy gestured for him to follow and ducked down a small alleyway between the houses. Behind him, Joachim heard a snigger and that warned him, made the world go slow for him.

  He already had his dagger out when the boy suddenly turned and struck out at him with a stick he had picked up. Instinctively Joachim ducked and stabbed with the knife, missed and the boy put his hands out, said something about only joking. But the world was still slow, so Joachim stepped towards him, caught his shoulder and stabbed as hard as he could. It felt just like stabbing a dog or a cat, which was interesting.

  Red flowered suddenly on the boy’s doublet and when the boy lurched towards him, Joachim backed, tripped, and sat down hard in the mud of the alley. That pulled his dagger out of the boy with a slurp, so he got up and ran back the way he had come. His last sight was of the boy staring in disbelief at the blood pouring out of his stomach.

  He sprinted up the alley, through the yard where the boys laughed at him and shouted catcalls, across the orchard, up the servants’ passage. Just in time he stopped and looked at his knife which was still in his hand and bloody. So he pulled out his handkerchief and wiped it off carefully before sheathing it, then cleaned his hands too and tucked the dirty hanky into a mousehole. He paused to exult in what had happened. He had killed dogs before, they were so stupid, they just let him do it once he had convinced them he was their friend with a bone or two. He had killed a cat by wrapping it in a sack and bashing it with a rock. But this was the first time he had killed a person. And he had got away with it. And it had been utterly correct because the boy was trying to rob him. Joachim conscientiously thanked God for the chance to kill and hugged the deed to himself, replaying his quickness and ferocity and the blood in his mind’s eye.

  Then when his breathing had quieted, he went through the door into the room with the incredibly boring gowns.

  Henry Dodd was burning, burning. The flames in the church rose higher and higher, licking everything wooden, the old wormrotten roodscreen, the benches for the old folk by the walls. People were screaming and shouting, running around, most of them women and children. Flames everywhere. Hoofbeats outside, thumping in his heart.

  He was lying on the floor on his face, pinned by a fallen rafter that was burning its way into his back, feet running past every now and again. The roar of the flames beat in his ears, as he tried to move but couldn’t. He wasn’t chained, he was just too weak, like a newborn kitten.

  He panted for breath, everything was too hot, everything inside him w
as burning too. He tried to put his elbows under his shoulders and lift himself up. Pain ran in molten leaden streams up his back and down again. He heard an annoying noise, whimpering like a beaten dog. Was that his voice? He clamped his teeth, tried to stop the noise but couldn’t, the sounds trickled out between his lips, dripped on the straw under him.

  He got one elbow under. Panted. More burning. And the other. He had to wait and pant a minute. He tried to move away from the fire, but he could not. He was stuck.

  He hunched his shoulders, strained every muscle. He knew which church this was. This was the old church filled with hiding Elliot women and children, and he had set light to it himself all those years ago. Now he was trapped in the fire in the church, that he had set. There were hoofbeats in the distance…he had to get away.

  Someone moved near him, dumped something on him, soft but burning cold. The cold ran through cracks in his body, between the lumps of fire. He screamed, he didn’t want to, and the sound came out as a groan.

  He looked up and over his shoulder at a terrifying gargoyle’s face, lit by a candle, a face which might have been a woman’s once but was now melted and destroyed. He cried out at it, and the fire enveloped him.

  He understood. The church was Hell. He was in Hell, where he deserved to go.

  In the afternoon of the 2nd January, Carey rode the two miles to Leith, carrying a warrant for the arrest of Jonathan Hepburn and his servants, signed by my Lord Maitland of Thirlstane, the Lord Chancellor of Scotland, because King James had decided to go hunting. He took with him ten men of King James’ bodyguard, Leamus, the Irish kern, who happened to be hanging around the stables and a procurator fiscal, on general principles, a lawyer friend of Maitland’s. At Leith Carey found that three ships had left the port early on New Year’s Day: a Danish ship, a French ship, and a Dutch Protestant Sea Beggar, which had sailed for Holland when the Court was still at sixes and sevens, and had probably already reached Amsterdam. The other ships were still in harbour because the weather was awful, with the sleet and a bone-chilling wind bringing more snow from the north-east. Again, on general principles, he nevertheless searched the few ships in the main harbour from nose to tail, including rummaging in the holds, and found in a French ship some contraband barrels marked as brandy, which he confiscated.

  The objections from the captains were silenced by a blizzard of legalese from the lawyer and the arquebuses of the King’s Gentlemen. Mr Anricks joined him, having received a note of invitation at John Napier’s house where he was staying to entertain himself with the Ars Mathematika, however you did that.

  Together they went with the procurator fiscal and the King’s Gentlemen and knocked on the gate of the little steelyard. When eventually it was opened by a young man, Carey said coldly, “I wish to see Herr Kaufmann Hochstetter, immediately.”

  “The Herr Kaufmann is at home and…”

  Carey produced his warrant from Maitland which had some firm words about the King requiring assistance from any and all aliens or foreigners to catch evildoers, on pain of instant ejection from the realm. The young man took it, read it, and swallowed.

  “Jawohl, Herr Ritter,” he said. “Would you care to come in and wait somewhere warm?”

  “Thank you,” said Carey, “however last time I found your hospitality a trifle hot for me so I prefer to wait here.”

  The young man coughed, and shut the gate. A few minutes later a messenger boy came out, took off his cap to them, and set off at a firm jogtrot in the direction of some houses set back from the road. Carey stood with his back to the gate, his cloak billowing, and the Gentlemen lined up on either side and prepared for a long wait. Anricks already had a notebook in his hand and some blacklead making his fingers filthy and seemed to be calculating, while Leamus was looking with interest at some hoofprints in the snow.

  “Sir Robert,” said the procurator fiscal, with his hands behind his back and his comfortable stomach straining his beltbuckle. “may I ask whit ye think tae our legal system here?”

  “Mr Menzies,” said Carey, “I cannot tell you how happy I am that I have not yet enjoyed the experience of litigating or appearing in your courts.” Mr Menzies gave a dry little laugh. “All I know is that the whole is based on Roman law rather than the Common law, which might have given me a clue about it, had I not been so idle as a boy and learned a little Latin rather than playing football.”

  Mr Menzies smiled and shook his head. “My tutor broke several birches on me wi’ the effort of trying to instill the Latin.”

  “Mine couldn’t run as fast as I could. How did you become a lawyer then?”

  “I found Virgil’s Aeneid and decided to read it for my own pleasure, which I fear embittered him further because at the end I knew more classical Latin than he did. I read Justinian’s work on Justice as well and was inspired by it, and also by the fact that I am a younger son.”

  “Ah,” said Carey, “me too. But I took the soldier’s path to wealth, which is why I’m the Deputy Warden in Carlisle.”

  “I know,” said the lawyer. “I wanted to ask you about the Border law and how it differs, but…”

  “A complex subject, Mr Menzies. I suggest you ask the Lord Warden’s clerk, Mr Bell at Carlisle, since he knows far more about it than I do.” Carey spotted the heavyset merchant Hochstetter coming towards him, trailed by a secretary and, yes, his own lawyer. Carey repressed a sigh and then took thought of his warrant which he produced again. Menzies and Hochstetter’s lawyer immediately began arguing over whether so general a document as a general warrant could be held to apply in this case to the very particular circumstances of a Hansa Steelyard with its very specific privileges and if, which was not admitted, it could, then exactly how far could the warrant be said to extend…

  After he had had about as much as he could stand of sentences so long they seemed to disappear up their own arses, he said, “Jonathan Hepburn.” Both lawyers were in full flow but Hochstetter looked uneasy.

  “You know the name,” Carey said. “All I want to know is whether the man is here.”

  “He iss not,” said the Kaufmann.

  “Was he here early yesterday, on New Year’s Day?”

  A hesitation. “He voss.”

  “We shall have to search the Steelyard to be sure he isn’t hiding here, although I am sure he isn’t, Herr Kaufmann, since that would be remarkably foolish of both you and him, and I am betting neither of you is a stupid man.”

  Herr Kaufmann Hochstetter said nothing.

  “How did he leave? Which ship did he take?”

  The Kaufmann made a circular gesture. “Off all the ships in Leith harbour, only the Sea Beggar has gone to Amsterdam.”

  Carey was staring at the man with interest. “Are you telling me that Hepburn left on the Sea Beggar along with his assistants?”

  Herr Kaufmann Hochstetter shrugged and was silent again.

  “Mr Menzies,” said Carey, “can we execute the warrant to search the whole Steelyard now just for the fugitive Jonathan Hepburn, suspected of being in the pay of the King of Spain, of plotting with the Maxwell, the earls Huntly and Angus, to bring Spanish troops to Scotland and also suspected of so hideous and outrageous an attempt at Court that I am not at liberty to describe it? Just one word, please.”

  “Ay,” said Menzies.

  “I assume, Herr Kaufmann, that you have no objection to such a limited search by warrant of the King, despite the privileges of the Hansa?”

  Herr Kaufmann Hochstetter bowed shallowly and then nodded at the young man to open the gate fully. The Gentlemen marched in and split up to search the buildings and storehouses and even the two cranes which were still at the moment.

  Anricks looked up from his calculations. “Obviously, he has long run from here,” he said abstractly in French to Carey.

  “Obviously,” said Carey, mindful that Menzies and the other lawyer probably spoke
French and quite possibly the Herr Kaufmann too. He sauntered into the compound, not sure what he was looking for but knowing he would recognise it when he saw it, followed by Leamus, who was tracking something in the snow.

  Leamus squatted and examined some fresh hoofprints, heading for the stables, frowning over them as if they were a chess problem. Carey went and stood behind Leamus, careful not to disturb the shod prints.

  “What have you found?” he asked.

  Leamus said something in Irish and then paused as though he was calculating like Anricks. “There’s something awry with these tracks,” he said. “See, the front part of the hoof should be deeper, but it’s the back part that’s deeper.”

  “Hm,” said Carey, wishing Dodd was with him instead of gallivanting around the Border, up to no good. “Yes. Where do they come from?”

  The prints came over unmarked snow from the gate and beyond the gate they came along the Leith Road, often in the fresh snow to the side of the trampled road.

  “From Edinburgh,” Carey offered, “perhaps Hepburn…”

  “Sorr, why would he take such trouble to ride on fresh snow?”

  “Good question.” Both of them looked at the prints and then Carey and Leamus both said it together. “The horse was shod backwards.”

  Leamus laughed and loped along the trail a little. “See sorr, the beast stumbled here and put his back hooves down first, not likely, I’m thinking.”

  Carey was grinning. “It could be someone else…”