A Chorus of Innocents

by P. F. Chisholm

  Dodd cleared his plate and leaned back himself to drink beer and keep an eye on Carey. Everybody else was in a good mood, shouting at each other, paying bets they had made on how many sheep there would be or similar, twitting Bangtail for twisting his ankle when he was running after a calf that had gone up the side of a hill. Not Carey. Carey was staring into space and pulling a sour expression with his mouth sideways.

  Dodd was on the point of asking the man what was wrong, when he scowled and stood up, stalked out of Bessie’s and away up through the orchard to the castle. Dodd thought of going after him, but then decided to finish up Carey’s black pudding for him.

  “What’s up wi’ the Courtier?” asked his brother, Red Sandy, who had taken seconds of the sausages since no one else was finishing them. “He’s gey grumpy.”

  “Ay,” said Sim’s Will Croser, who usually said very little. “He damned my eyes when we was fighting the Armstrongs and I knocked him accidentally and then he said nathing all the way home.”

  “He’s been like it for a week,” said Bessie’s Andrew Storey, “like me mam sometimes, says nothing and then shouts at ye for nothing.”

  “Ten days,” put in Bangtail, “after ye came back from the Southland, Sergeant.”

  Dodd nodded. “Ah dinna ken but ye’re right,” he said. “He wisnae so quiet on the road back fra London and Oxford town. He was in a good mood.”

  Dodd had been in a good mood himself. Carey, Dodd, and the two new servants had arrived in the late afternoon, down the road from Newcastle with a couple of extra lads on horseback with the dispatches to help out if someone thought it worthwhile to take the Grahams up on their offer of ten pounds for Carey’s head. It wasn’t worth taking more, despite the Borders being in a tickle state, what with the Earl of Bothwell still hanging around and the Maxwells and Johnstones at each other’s throats again. If you needed more, what you needed was an army and it was better to be inconspicuous. Carey kept his flashy morion in his saddle bag, wrapped up and just wore an old-fashioned velvet hat.

  The Earl of Essex’ quondam soldiers were on the way but they were walking and would take longer. Eight had already gone to John Carey in Berwick and the remaining eight could shape up or die in Carlisle. And little Kat Leman had been left with Lord Hunsdon’s household after Dodd had had a serious word with her to explain what it was like in the North and how hard it was for small maids. She had looked at him grimly, with her little face set.

  “I want to stay with you,” she insisted. “Could I come and be your maidservant in your tower in Gilling?”

  “Gilsland,” Dodd had corrected her automatically, and he’d thought about it. There were a few girls around the place, relatives of Janet’s, so it wasn’t half as impossible as Carlisle castle.

  “Mebbe,” he’d admitted, “that’s possible. But ye’re still too young for huswifery and my wife can be rough with the girls.” Kat had nodded. “In a year or two, perhaps, when ye’ve grown a bit. All right, Kat? Stay wi’ my Lord Hunsdon’s household, he’ll see ye right and then in a few years when ye’re grown a bit, ye can write tae me.”

  Her face had screwed up at that. “I don’t know how,” she said. “That’s priest’s work.”

  “Ye can learn,” Dodd told her. “And be a good girl for the Steward’s wife.”

  Kat nodded, her face very serious. “I like my Lord Hunsdon,” she said decidedly, “even though he shouts. He told Mrs Leigham to get me some new duds and these are wool and nice and warm.” She looked proudly at her cut down old blue kirtle and the different coloured sleeves. “I’ll do what you say, Sergeant Dodd, and I’ll see you in a few years.”

  He had left her with a slight feeling of uneasiness. Why was she so determined to come to Carlisle with him? Perhaps a few years in Hunsdon’s enormous household would convince her to stay in the South. He hoped so. By the time they got to Newcastle he had put her to the back of his mind.

  The Courtier seemed to be in funds again, which was all to the good. He had apparently played primero with the merchants of Oxford on their last night, and begged all of them, although Dodd knew better than to think that the money would last. He had already spent a horrible amount on secondhand doublets for Essex’ deserters to replace their tattered and impractical tangerine and white.

  Carey hadn’t sent anyone ahead and so the first the garrison knew about their arrival was when they clopped through the gate of the city and two of Lowther’s bad bargains had called out to them. A boy was sent running up to the castle to tell Lady Scrope and they had carried on up English street and past Bessie’s, up the covered passage, and into the castleyard itself. Dodd had felt very self-conscious in his fancy wool suit, which wasn’t as fancy as the previous wool suit he had lost, but fancy enough since it wasn’t homespun like everybody else’s. Hardly anyone in Carlisle had anything like it. Thomas the Merchant Hetherington wore black brocade and the headmen of the big surnames would have their finery from Edinburgh, maybe a few of the merchants or the mayor would have something like it.

  “Where’s ma brother, and whit have ye done wi’ him?” demanded Red Sandy with a fake scowl. He’d come hurrying into the yard almost before Dodd had dismounted and there was the usual commotion and fuss with the horses.

  “Ah killt him and left him in a ditch,” said Dodd dryly, because he did feel a completely different man from the one who had ridden South some weeks before.

  “I know that’s a lie, ye musta poisoned him,” said Sandy and clapped Dodd on the back. “Who did ye kill for the clothes, brother? Ye look like the mayor.”

  “I’m no’ as broad as him, and the man give me the clothes nice as ye like and I didna even ask him,” Dodd said, which was true because his fine new duds had been Hunsdon’s under-steward’s and the man had been perfectly willing to give them up in exchange for a new suit from Hunsdon. That made the other men laugh, though, as they crowded round him and they were all asking the usual questions about London such as: Was it as big as they said? And did Londoners have tails like Frenchmen? Dodd allowed as how London was far bigger than it had any business to be and no, as far as he could tell, Londoners didn’t have tails like Frenchmen, though their hose were so fat they might. Certainly the women didn’t.

  “Ay, I told you,” said Bangtail knowingly.

  Carey’s sister had come running from the sausage-making and he’d embraced her and swung her round as he always did. Scrope wasn’t there; he’d gone hunting and Philadelphia was furious with him for some reason, possibly connected to Madam Hetherington’s bawdy house.

  Bessie’s Andrew was the one who told Dodd about the mysterious package that had arrived by way of the carter from York a few days before. They went in a body to Dodd’s cubbyhole next to the door of the barracks and found it sitting on the bed—which someone, probably Janet, had seen to having the sheets changed. There it sat with the label on it in Dodd’s handwriting which only Sim’s Will had been able to read. Red Sandy had been too young to go to the Reverend Gilpin and then there had been the feud with the Elliots so he never got the chance to learn to read.

  Dodd looked at the package and remembered sending it and felt utterly estranged from the man who had done that, and he almost couldn’t think what was in it—his homespun doublet and breeches, to be sure, dyed dark red with madder by Janet, the breeches made of wool from a black sheep so they didn’t need dying and wouldn’t run in the wet either. And the hat.

  He batted the men back from the package and started undoing the painstaking hessian wrappings and lifted the wicker lid to find his doublet there. He unpacked his clothes from round the hat and then unwrapped the linen folds from around it and held it up.

  “This is for Janet,” he said, thinking how Barnabus had told him she’d forgive him anything when she had a hat like that and wondering if it was true. Not that he planned to tell her some of the things that had happened in London, but still.

 
There was a silence from the men. They may never have been south of Carlisle in their lives but you could see the London fashion almost glowing in that hat: dark green, high crowned, and with a long pheasant’s feather in it. It looked as out of place there as Carey; more so because at his roots, Carey was in fact a Berwick man. That hat was all London.

  “Och,” said Bangtail, “what did ye pay for it?”

  “Ye ken the infield at Gilsland?”

  “Ay.”

  “More than ye’d pay for that.”

  “Twenty shillings?”

  “Twenty-five shillings.”

  More silence. Come to think of it, he wasn’t quite sure why he had done it now, especially as he had lost the rest of the bribe shortly after. But the Queen had made that up to him and more. He wasn’t going to mention that, though, until he had talked to Janet about it.

  “Er…where did ye rob sae much cash from?” Red Sandy asked tactfully.

  “I didna,” said Dodd. “It was a bribe, fair and square.”

  The men looked at each other. “A bribe?” squeaked Bessie’s Andrew. “Who did ye have to kill for it?”

  “I didna. It was what they call a sweetener. There’s sae much money in London, it just flows around. The serving maids have velvet ribbons to their sleeves and golden pins to their hair. The serving men wear brocade some of them, secondhand, but rich as Thomas the Merchant’s. Ye have no idea…There’s a street called Cheapside where they have shops with great plates and goblets and bowls of gold and siller in the windows and nought but a couple of bullyboys and some bars to keep them.”

  The men were exchanging looks again.

  “The Bridge…the Bridge has got shops full of silks and velvets.…The armourers, oh, the armourers…” Dodd felt overwhelmed at the task of telling them what he had seen in the South. “They have armourers that sell nought but swords and some that sell guns and ay, they cost a lot but…”

  “Where’s London exactly?” asked Bangtail, with the slitty-eyed look of a Graham with a plan.

  “Hundreds of miles south. Three hundred at least.” Dodd smiled at him. “D’ye think I didna think what you’re thinking now, how could I raid it?”

  Bangtail nodded and so did Red Sandy. “It’s a long way,” said Bessie’s Andrew, “and wi’ the cattle to drive…”

  “Cattle, sheep, all out in the fields with naebody bar a boy to keep them,” Dodd amplified. “Ah’ve thought and thought and I canna think how to bring the loot back. Go there, ay, get it—ay, though they’ve Trained Bands in London. But bring it back—that’s yer problem.”

  More silence as seven highly honed reivers’ brains considered the problem of bringing your loot all the way from London with the hot trod after you.

  “Anyway, I bought it and I’m fer Gilsland tomorrow to give it to Janet…”

  “Nae need, brother, she’s in town.”

  ***

  Dodd had waited right there by the hat while someone went to fetch Janet, his heart suddenly beating hard and fast. He heard her voice in the doorway.

  “What are ye doing, Bangtail? I’ve no need to check the bed, I changed it last week and I’ll thank ye…”

  Red Sandy ceremonially opened the little door and Dodd stood up and there she was, in her second-best homespun kirtle, coloured dark green with moss and nothing like the London fashions, and her shift open at the top and her cap and old hat over her blazing red Armstrong hair. She paused as if she didn’t know him.

  “Henry Dodd, is that you?” she asked, looking him up and down as if they were at a harvest dinner and he was asking would she like to dance.

  “Ay, wife, it’s me.”

  “Well, look at ye,” she said with a slow smile. “Look at ye,” and she gave him a nice curtsey. Not to be outdone he did a bow which was getting better, he knew, and then he stepped one step across the narrow floor and grabbed her and held her.

  “Och Janet,” he heard himself say. “Ah missed ye,” which was true, he had, worse than he would ever have believed he could miss his woman. She had been there in his imagination but now that he was holding her tight, he knew the difference.

  “Well, Henry…” she started and he stopped her mouth with his and Bangtail ceremoniously shut the door on them and Red Sandy sat down next to it to make sure nobody barged in on them.

  They were lying in a breathless heap on the bed when Janet said, “What’s that?” and pointed at the linen-wrapped item they had somehow moved to the floor and then somebody had put a pair of breeches over the top of. Dodd retrieved his breeches and put them on again, while Janet had less to do, she only needed to do her stays up at the top again and rearrange her petticoats.

  Suddenly Dodd felt worried and embarrassed at his extravagance. Surely she would prefer the money to the hat, to buy a field with, but then he remembered he had got most of his bribe back, less the forged coins, and it was still a substantial sum as you reckoned things in the North. But still. Would she like it? Maybe he could sell it to Lady Scrope if she didn’t, though the colour was wrong for my lady.

  Janet was up off the bed and picking it up. She looked narrow-eyed at Dodd and when he nodded gravely, she started unwinding the linen. Before she’d finished unwrapping it he had decided she wouldn’t like it and would call him a fool and his mouth turned down.

  The glory of London fashion glowed in the tiny room, smaller in fact than the inside of the four-poster bed Dodd had slept in down in London. In silence Janet put it carefully on the bed and folded up the linen wrapping, then she lifted it up and held it out at arm’s length.

  “For me?” she asked, in a thunderstruck voice. “From…you, Henry?”

  “Ay, Ah’m sorry, it cost a lot but I looked at it down in London and I thought, that’ll look fine on Janet to go to church, that green on your red hair, that’ll look finer than all the fine ladies down in London and their powders and paints and their gowns, and so I bought it.” That wasn’t exactly what had happened, but it was indeed how he had thought. “Barnabus helped,” he added, lamely, though the man was dead and couldn’t call him out, “I didn’t want to at first because of the cost of it and then…”

  He couldn’t speak anymore and he saw something glittering in her eyes before they reeled backwards onto the bed again and the hat was nearly crushed.

  Outside Red Sandy tipped his head at the closed door. “Is Sergeant Dodd no’ finished yet?” Bessie’s Andrew was saying. “Ah wanted tae ask him about Blackie…”

  “Ye’ve no style at all,” said Red Sandy, “Get oot of it, the man’s back fra London and discussing matters wi’ his wife and ye want tae bother him about a hobby?”

  Bessie’s Andrew looked bewildered for a moment and then looked sly. “Och,” he said, “Is he no’ finished yet?”

  Both of them listened. “No,” said Red Sandy, raising his voice slightly. “Ah think he’s still busy.”

  Bessie’s Andrew was standing there like a lummock with his mouth slightly open.

  “Oot!” said Red Sandy and he went, while Red Sandy went back to his whittling on a bit of firewood.

  After the hat had been rescued and dusted off, Dodd watched while Janet tried it on in front of the piece of mirror she had found. She wasn’t a woman who liked fripperies and yet there she was, tilting it one way and then the other to see which looked better.

  “Ye like it?” Dodd was surprised. What Barnabus had said looked like it was true. “Even though it cost twenty-five shillings?”

  She shook her head and grinned. “Well,” she said, “I’d like it more if ye’d reived it o’ course, but I like it fine as it is. What else did ye get down South? A pot o’ gold?”

  Was now the time to tell her or should he keep it quiet still? It was a serious business and changed everything and nothing.

  “Ay, I did. In a way.”

  She sat down next to him on the be
d. “Och, what?”

  He thought he should tell her the story of how he came by it and then he thought it would be simpler to tell her after, and so he reached in his smart wool doublet front and pulled out a leather packet, opened it, and took out the legal document. Gilsland had come to him from her after Will the Tod, her father, had acquired the leasehold in a mysterious way from the Carletons. Come to him—but he was a tenant-at-will, who owed rent. Or he had been.

  “What’s this?” Janet asked. “I can read the letters but not the words.”

  She was an amazing woman, he thought, learning to read and all. “Nay, nor can I. It’s in Latin. See that word there, it’s “dedo” which means “I give.”

  “And who gives what?” she was frowning now.

  “Gilsland. That paper there is the deed to Gilsland. I…we own it now, freehold. There’s ma name in Latin, see, Henricius Doddus.”

  It suddenly struck him that he could even vote in an election for parliament now, or better still sell his vote to the highest bidder. Janet was staring at him, open-mouthed.

  “We already own Gilsland…”

  “Ay, but no’ legally. We’re tenants, we should pay rent.” She paused and then nodded slowly. “Tae the Earl of Cumberland, ay?”

  “Ay. I think ma dad paid him something in the seventies.”

  “Now we don’t owe rent. We own it. We could sell it, we could…mortgage it, we can pass it to our children. The Courtier tellt me it doesnae matter so much now but when the old Queen dies and James of Scotland comes in, it could matter a lot that we own it.”

  She looked down at it and spotted the signatures. The Earl of Cumberland’s scrawl was there and next to it the graceful sweeping tropes of the Queen’s signature.

  “The Queen gave you this, Henry?”

  “Ay,” he said, thinking of the Queen’s red hair and snapping black eyes and how he hadn’t known who she was. “I met her twice and the second time she give me that.”