“Mrs Dodd,” he said formally as he came near, “may I speak with ye privately, please?”
She looked up at his face once and she knew. So did Widow Ridley for she caught Janet’s hand and gripped it fiercely so she wouldn’t fall.
Silently she gathered her kirtle and stepped over the bench, helped Widow Ridley get to her feet as well, and Carey led them both out into the lesser courtyard where they stood in a patch of pale morning sunlight.
“Mrs Dodd…” Carey began and then stopped, not knowing how to go further.
“Was it the duel?” asked Janet, “Did he fight Wee Colin Elliot and lose?”
“No,” said Carey, puzzled. “Was there a challenge?”
“Ay,” said Widow Ridley, “Mrs Dodd was ta’en by Wee Colin so she could bring it to the Sergeant.”
“Wee Colin Elliot challenged Sergeant Dodd to a duel?” said Carey slowly.
“Ay,” whispered Janet, “to end the feud, one way or another. Did he lose? It was tae the death.”
Carey paused to get his thoughts together. You had to keep duels very quiet even on the Border, for the other party, the survivor if there was one, would be at the horn at least. For a while until everything quieted down.
“That’s where he were going,” amplified Mrs Ridley, “when he left the Court on New Year’s Eve, to find Wee Colin and fight him.”
Carey nodded. “Ah,” he said and explained what he had found, out on the lonely white moors.
Janet shut her eyes and clenched her fists. “He was shot wi’ a crossbow bolt from behind by Hughie Tyndale?”
“If the evidence of the blood and Dodd’s dagger stuck in Hughie’s calf is anything to go by.”
“How did Hughie die, then?”
“I think Dodd’s horse, Whitesock, killed him.”
“What? How d’ye make that out?”
“Hughie’s corpse had shod hoofprints on his chest and all his ribs broken.”
“Whitesock killed Hughie for killing my man?”
“I think so, yes.”
“So where’s Henry’s body, then, Sir Robert?”
“I don’t know. He was out on the moors, miles from anywhere. We looked as best we could and found nothing, no footprints, nothing. We’ll go back when it thaws, I think we’ll find him then. There was heavy snow that night.”
Janet stood ramrod straight, her fists in balls.
“He’s still oot there, in a ditch somewhere?”
Carey didn’t like to think of it either. “Or maybe he found shelter in a sheepfold.”
“It’s been gey cold,” said Janet. “Wounded, he’d not have gone very far.”
“Well, this is Henry Dodd we’re talking about.”
Janet put her fists together and clasped her hands tightly.
“Thank you, Sir Robert,” she said. “I’d be grateful if ye could bring his body in when ye find it, if ye find it, so I have something to bury.”
Carey nodded. “I’ll do my very best,” he promised. Janet walked like a blind woman back to the room she was sharing with Mrs Ridley and three dairymaids, at the back of another courtyard full of cows and cowdung.
Widow Ridley paused before following her. “Courtier,” she said to him, boldly using the name all the men called him by where he couldn’t hear. “Sergeant Dodd’s no’ dead. If ye havenae body, he’s still alive.”
“Well…”
“You mark my words. He’s still alive and he’ll turn up again like a bad penny. A tailor kill Henry Dodd? Tha’s funny, that is!”
Dodd sat in the still flames while Davidson and his parents watched him. He felt they were laughing at him and scowled all the harder—demons, they were demons.
After a bit he got bored, stood up, went over and shouted at all of them.
“Ah ken ye’re a’ demons,” he snarled, “so dinna try to talk me round. Where’s the pit? I’ll gae down maself.”
His Mam shook her head. “Oh, Henry,” she sighed.
“Ye’re no’ in Hell, Henry,” said his father patiently, “Ye’re in between. Ye can go back or stay.”
Dodd thought for a minute. “This isnae Hell?”
Davidson shook his head. “Unless you make it so. But then ye’ve made a Hell of Earth itself on a whim.”
Dodd grunted. “Then I’ll go hame to Janet,” he said, “and ma tower of Gilsland, and ma brother, Red Sandy. I’ll waste nae more time on ye.”
And he broke through a skin and found himself lying on a bed on his stomach, with the fire still glowing in his back but his body covered in sweat dripping into his eyes. He was naked except for some clouts around his hips.
People were talking above him, daylight came through a narrow window, an arrow slit, in fact.
“Ah,” he said on an outbreath. At least there were no blazing roof timbers on him.
“The fever’s broken at last for the moment,” said the firm voice he had heard before. He craned his neck and saw a woman with a linen veil over her face. It left only one eye to look out, a green eye and wasn’t there something familiar about it too?
She moved and somebody else lifted him and she put a shirt over his head, pulled his arms through as if he were a wean. “There,” she said, “he’s decent now, ye can come in.”
He saw the man standing by the door in his jack and forgot about everything else.
“Wee Colin!” he gasped.
They had met before, although mostly in skirmishes at the other end of a lance. Wee Colin took his helmet off.
“Whit happened to ye, Sergeant, do ye recall?”
“Ye ken verra well what happened.”
Wee Colin looked honestly bewildered. “Whit?”
“Ah wis coming to fight ye and ye sent your wee brother Hughie to trick me, to lead me out on the moors and then put a bolt in ma back,” said Dodd, only his rage at the betrayal letting him speak so long.
“Ah did not!”
“Ye did so!” shouted Dodd, panting and trying to get up and punch him, only his arms and legs were like straw and wouldn’t obey him as he heaved himself up and then fell flat again.
“Go!” said the veiled woman to Wee Colin. “He’s started bleeding again.”
Wee Colin nodded once and then left the room, his brow full of thunder.
“Och, Henry,” said the woman, “now it’s all to dae again.”
Janet sat on the bed she shared with Widow Ridley with her hands still clenched round each other until the knuckles showed bone white. She could not cry. She didn’t know why, but she couldn’t. Henry Dodd had found the death he had certainly been seeking, not honourably in a duel that might end decades of deadly feud between the Elliots and the Dodds, but stupidly, sneakily of a crossbow bolt. She didn’t think even Henry could have survived the winter cold and heavy snow on top of a serious wound. She forbade herself to hope because that was soft. Everything was a disaster. She would lose Gilsland, that her father had won off Thomas Carleton at cards and made her dowry, though Carleton himself had only held it on a lease from the Earl of Cumberland. It had been given to Henry freehold by the Queen, but as Henry had no heirs of his body to inherit and no will, it would likely revert to the Crown or the Earl who would put in their own man. Maybe the new freeholder of Gilsland would let her stay, but more likely she would have to go back to her father’s tower, because she was childless. No son could inherit, no children for her to take care of and take her mind off Henry. Her heart had frozen into a dirty lump of snowy ice and she couldn’t cry.
Widow Ridley had got back in bed after breakfast since her joints were complaining at the cold, and she was sitting up against the bolster knitting socks. She had a long list of orders from the many young men at Court, so far from their mothers and not good at darning and was now charging ten shillings a pair. Scotch shillings so only worth a fifth of a real shilling, yet
still not to be sniffed at.
“Och, hinney,” said Widow Ridley, as she clicked her way down the new sock she had cast on the night before. Janet had been staring into space for an hour.
“Shh,” said Janet softly, “I’m thinking how I could mebbe keep Gilsland.”
“Ye canna.”
“No,” she said, and looked as if she was going to add something interesting but changed her mind. “I want his body.”
“Ay, o’ course ye do.”
“But I canna see how he could ha’ lived.”
“In that cold? Nay, he’s no’ one o’ the faery folk. But still, I think he might have.”
“No,” said Janet bleakly and with finality, “I’ll no’ think that way.”
Widow Ridley started turning the heel, knitting the backflap. Janet had asked her once how she always made the socks the right size for the young man, and she had looked at her in puzzlement and said, “I look at his feet and then I know.”
“Ay,” said Janet, quietly, to herself. “Ay, it’s worth a try.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Widow Ridley shrugged and went on knitting, checking on her from the corner of her eye occasionally. Janet continued to stare into space, her face hardening under its winter pale scattering of freckles.
Joachim went to bed early and slept till the next dawn, by which time everybody else in the house was up and working. He lay there and listened to them moving around downstairs, enjoying the sounds of industry that he was not a part of.
But soon enough the worry came back, the worry about the messenger. Where was Sir David’s man? It was impossible that his two carefully laid plans could both have failed, but…He needed confirmation before he could put the next part of his overarching plan into action: recruit soldiers here and in the rest of Cumberland—miners made excellent soldiers—and then go north to meet the first Spanish ships putting into Dumfries in the spring, to take advantage of the assassination and the civil war that would follow it. The Spanish King had approved his plan and promised him gold and land in New Spain if he succeeded in killing the Scottish King and leaving both England and Scotland without an heir. He thought he could do better than that: in the empty hole left by the death of James Stuart, he would be the most powerful man in the kingdom, if he could grasp the opportunity.
He also wanted to build at least one of the battle-carts he had in mind so that the Spanish King’s general could see how brilliant they were. It was an idea he had got from an account of the Hussites in Bohemia a hundred years before, but much more possible now gunnery had advanced so much. Guns were lighter, balls were heavier thanks to better gunpowder. The battle-cart concept was no longer just a cart with a cannon on it, well though even those primitive carts had worked for Jan Zizka during the Hussite rebellion against the Holy Roman Empire.
He could see it now, a closed-in armoured cart with a gun sticking out of the front and arquebuses along the sides. The difficulty was with the wheels and the weight. If only there was a way of dealing with the inevitable mud of battle…? Unfortunately, with the cannon at the front pointing forwards, where it would do the most good, you had to be careful you didn’t kill the draft horses. The recoil was a problem too but he thought he could modify the sailors’ flail, the ropes and pulleys that controlled guns on board English ships and had given them their advantage against the Spanish ships during the Armada. The whole point was that the gun should fire while it was going into battle, not only when it stayed still.
There were creaking footsteps up the spiral stairs and somebody knocked and came in. It was Maria—all his mother’s maidservants were always called Maria, no matter what their given name might have been. This one was shy, carrying a tray of bread, cheese, butter, and beer for his breakfast, and she was standing there, trembling slightly. He looked at her and found a wide pink face, with whispy blonde hair and a terrible number of spots on her cheeks, so there was no point in trying to get her into bed, which would be a much better way to wake up than just breakfast.
“Put it on the chest,” he told her and then realised he had spoken in Scots, which was why she was looking at him bewildered. “Entschuldige, Maria. Stell es einfach auf die Truhe.”
“Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”
She stumbled at the threshold from which Joachim surmised she was short-sighted. How absolutely typical of his mother that she would pick such a shortsighted, clumsy, spotty numbskull for her maid. Mind you, she was almost certainly still a virgin which made her more interesting. Still, the spots were offputting.
Joachim got out of bed in just his shirt and looked through the dormer window which had ice flowers on the inside, opened it so he could see out. Thank God for his mother’s insistence on a proper ceramic stove that warmed the whole core of the house. Its warm chimney passing through the floor to the roofridge stopped the attic from being damp and miserable though it was still quite chilly.
He looked to the north and saw nothing, no horsemen, no people waiting near the Derwentwater landing stage. Had Sir David played him false? What was going on in Edinburgh? It was enraging and terrifying to be here in provincial Keswick and know nothing. He should have stayed nearer Edinburgh. Was the King dead yet? Were they keeping it secret while they chose one of the nobility to be king? That was possible, although the first of his plans had been public enough to make it difficult. Did that mean it had failed?
It couldn’t have. The two plans together were too ingenious, too well thought out.
It was time to go and find his messenger, Sir David Graham’s man, a respectable Graham, Long Tom was his nickname. Joachim got up and looked through his old clothes chest, found breeches, socks, hemp shirt, a jerkin that a miner might wear under his miner’s coat, and a blue statute cap to finish it. As a precaution he took his flask with him, because you never knew. His mother didn’t keep a stable on the island, although they had an entire string of packponies kept very busy between Bolton, Keswick, Workington and…Scotland. So he would have to walk and he felt nervous of being seen…just in case something had gone terribly wrong in Edinburgh. He felt more comfortable as just one of many young men in the town, not exactly disguised but less conspicuous. It had done very well years ago, before he left home, for Keswick was just big enough that not everybody knew everybody by sight and it was easier to chase and catch girls if they didn’t know immediately that he was one of the Hochstetter boys and it was also much easier if his mother didn’t find out either.
Mark Steinberger had found out about one of the girls because she was his niece, at which point his miners’ clothes hadn’t really helped. However he had been too clever for the Schmelzmeister. Throttling her and then setting her body up to look as if she had hanged herself had been a brilliant idea.
He smiled reminiscently and dodged carefully out of the kitchen door when there was nobody there. He went to the boat-landing and took one of the family boats, was hailed by the miller who was new and found himself being paid 2d to carry some sacks of flour to the Keswick boat landing which amused him, though he took the money.
Once over the water, he started walking quickly towards the smelthouses, keeping his head down and his back bent, looking out for anybody new who might also be Sir David’s messenger. It had occurred to him a little late that any messenger would know him as Mr Jonathan Hepburn which would mean nothing to anybody in Keswick, and that might well account for the lack of sign of him. He really hoped the man hadn’t decided to head home, but also hoped that the five shillings Long Tom was expecting for the message would encourage him to try hard to deliver it.
Joachim walked swiftly to the northeast part of the town, where the Penrith road led away from the town alongside the usefully fast Greta River, and the smoke clung tight to the lower slopes of the hills. Once he was out of the main part, on the scrubby common land between the houses and the northern part of the river, he relaxed a littl
e. His ludicrous mother had been upset as he expected at his refusal to pray, but he was so tired of pretending to be pious. Lip service was never enough for her, she insisted that you had to believe exactly as she did, that you had to be an Anabaptist as she was, that you had to be baptised as an adult in a cold river that was stupidly renamed the Jordan for the occasion, that you had to pray to the Lord Jesus all the time, whining and nagging Him for help, that you had to pray to His Mother as well, the Theotokos, which wasn’t very Protestant at all and much more like the Catholics his mother hated so well, that you had to pray all the bloody time and listen to endless sermons from people less clever than you, who had clearly not even read the obscure texts they quoted and generally preached complete nonsense.
He remembered the endless irritation throughout his teens, like a physical pain it was, under his breastbone. Why did everybody he knew insist on praying and listening to long stories about God and Jesus? What was the point of it? In his experience, God never answered back and if you asked Him for something, sometimes you got it and sometimes you didn’t, so why bother?
And then there was his cave. He had found it by accident, the year after the family came to Keswick. He was exploring the west bank of Derwentwater, parallel to Goldscope mine at Newlands, but on the other side of Cat Bells fell. He had found an opening in the rock and gone in, for the same reason he had gone through the unlocked door, long ago at Whitehall. He had climbed up through a narrow crack in the rock to something extraordinary, a huge cave. He had shouted and thousands of alarmed bats went past him into the daylight, and the echoes told him the size of it.
He had come back that night with lanterns and a stolen pickaxe and as soon as he had lit the lanterns and looked up, he had stood, stunned and astonished at what he had found. There was a crowd of painted animals above him, all shapes and sizes, all running towards a flat piece of rock where something else was painted.
A Suspicion of Silver Page 7