There was Mr Anricks again, eating some beef and mutton—most of the beef had gone to the senior men of the Burn clan who had large appetites. He was back near her again.
“Lady Widdrington,” he said, “I wonder if I could trouble you to let me into the manse? I lent Jamie a couple of books I’d like to get back.”
Interesting. She smiled brightly. “Of course,” she said, “I’ll come with you. I’m not really interested in who can throw someone else into the mud.”
The boys were already at it, gripping each other round the middle and trying to get their legs round between the other’s legs and then trying to lift and drop, red in the face and shouting insults. One went over on his back, squirmed and turned so the other one was down on his back. There was ironic cheering and clapping.
She walked with the barber surgeon across to the manse and found that it was indeed locked—wise with the number of reivers in the village but who had the key? She went back to the party and found Lady Hume chatting away to Young Henry about how funerals had been in her youth.
“I have a headache,” she said, which was actually true she realised. “I’d like to lie down. Do you have the key to the manse?”
“No,” said Lady Hume, “I’m sure I gave it to Kat…”
It took a little longer to find Kat who was in a circle of village women singing a long song about spinning while the younger girls danced something energetic. “Oh yes,” she said, “I thought it better to lock the place and Lady Hume usually gives keys to me, now where did I put it…?”
The key ring was a large one and must have been taken from Jamie Burn’s body. Elizabeth took it and went over to the manse where she found the tooth-drawer waiting patiently by the wall. She found the key to the kitchen door and they went in, through to the entrance hall, and then into the open study which was exactly the same as it had been.
Mr Anricks looked about him and sighed. “I enjoyed my conversations with the minister,” he said. “We disagreed about religion and never found it a hindrance. He was very strong for the new religion, for Calvinism, which I find…too logical. But we never quarreled over it. Or we did but not personally; we argued about it and ended as good friends as we had started.”
He looked about him at the wall of books and checked some of them, smiled ruefully. “I’m sorry, my lady, but he’s double rowed them.” It was true: the shelves were deep and there was a row of books behind the ones you could see. “This could take some time.”
She smiled, took a spill from the desk and went to get a light from the fire in the kitchen. She lit Jamie’s thrifty mutton fat rushdip and sat down in Jamie’s chair. “That’s all right, Mr Anricks. I’ll read some of his sermons—they’re excellent.”
“Yes, there was an Edinburgh printer interested in them—to publish them, I mean. I advised him to try it, send out some copies of his sermons to printers and see what happened—there are plenty of books of sermons but few that are as pithy as his. I believe none of them are more than an hour long, which is something of a miracle for a Calvinist pastor. If he made any money at it, he could have used it to help poor boys like himself go to university at St Andrews, which he thought was an excellent idea. It might also have got him preferment to another living in addition to this one which would have made his wife’s life a little easier with more money, only like the Reverend Gilpin, he didn’t approve of having more than one.”
Mr Anricks found a set of steps, took the other rushdip and started methodically at the far left top corner of the wall. Elizabeth took one of the italic sheets and found she was distracted by all the books. So many books. Who would have them now? Perhaps the next pastor who got the living, although it was likely he would have other parishes and would probably never come to Wendron. And the boys would forget how to read and become farmers as their fathers had been before.
It was all such a waste. She started to read the top sermon, just to have something to do as she had left her workbag in Widdrington and so couldn’t get on with the new shirt for Young Henry. She could hear Jamie’s voice as he gave it, the Scots even and musical but the voice deep enough to hold attention. It was about giving praise to God: how it was necessary and comfortable for the spirit to praise God, not because God needed flattery, no, but because it made us feel better. We should praise God always, both when we liked our life and when we hated it. She found herself held and warmed by it, as if he was preaching to her personally.
“Ma’am,” came a diffident voice.
“Yes Mr Anricks?”
“Do you know if the minister kept his books anywhere else? I’ve found one that I lent him but there’s another I can’t find.”
“No, I don’t. But we can look.”
They did, in the three spare bedrooms, dark and cold and two of them unfurnished, one with just a small bed with a half-tester and a truckle for the servant. Anricks smiled at it.
“I used to stay there when I came to visit. It was very comfortable. Much better than a bench at the alehouse.”
“So did I, Mr Anricks, when I came to visit my friend Poppy. I’ll see if I can convince Lady Hume to let you stay in it tonight—I doubt you’ll get any sleep at all at the alehouse.”
“Well,” said Anricks, “I’ve slept in worse places, but yes, that would be very kind of you.”
“I can’t promise anything until I’ve spoken to Lady Hume,” she warned and he ducked his head.
At the end of it he looked baffled. “I can’t imagine he sold it, maybe he lent it to someone else. It’s a pity, it was an old friend of mine.”
“The book?”
“Yes. Ah well. Never mind, the Almighty giveth and He taketh away, blessed is the name of the Lord.”
He smiled at her and she smiled back, somehow liking him despite being near convinced he was in fact a Jesuit. So they had disputed on religion in a civilized way? Jamie was strong for the new religion as she was herself, which meant Anricks must be a Catholic, surely?
She kept her promise and spoke to Lady Hume who was sitting on a barrel clapping to the music from a fiddle and a couple of shawms while the couples swung each other round and jigged. From the look of her she’d had plenty of beer and some aqua vitae from Kat’s flask.
Everyone was red-faced and shouting. The cakes had come out and were sitting on the table for the bread, their elaborate marchpane covers shining in the torchlight. Lady Hume took a sharp knife and sliced it all up deftly and everyone got a bit, with the little children getting quite a lot of the marchpane. Mr Anricks nibbled a bit of the cake and smiled when Elizabeth accused him of keeping an eye on who winced when they ate the marchpane as they would be customers for his pliers.
“Have you tried luring the toothworms out with some marchpane?” she asked, and he smiled and admitted that he hadn’t but it was a good idea. She introduced him to Lady Hume who looked him up and down and asked him point blank if he was a Papist spy like the last tooth-drawer in these parts.
“No, my lady,” he answered, “I’m not, but I don’t expect you to believe me. Everyone hates tooth-drawers.”
“Nor a Jesuit?”
He smiled and shook his head. “I’m not nearly intelligent enough.”
“I willna have ye bothering God in Latin.”
“I never speak to God in Latin, my lady.”
As there were three women in the main bedroom to keep propriety and the spare bedroom was at the other end of the landing, Lady Hume graciously gave her permission for him to stay the night there, only a little spoiled by hiccups. Cousin William and Lord Hughie came by then, to pay their respects before they rode home. Lady Hume hugged the young lord tight for a moment, unexplained tears making her eyes glitter. The boy took it well, though you could see he was relieved to be away when he mounted up with a steed-leap that nearly took him over the horse’s back and down on the other side. He laughed at that, patted the horse for sta
ying still for him and followed after Cousin William.
In the end it was quite easy to get Lady Hume to bed as she drank another cup of aqua vitae and passed out. Young Henry carried her up to bed and Kat and Elizabeth got her undressed down to her shift and put her into bed in the middle. Elizabeth wasn’t looking forward to it and envied Mr Anricks his solitary state although it would be cold without a fire. Kat was too much the worse for wear to do more than get undressed herself, take her dose of medicine and fall asleep. The snoring started, Kat’s was deep and rhythmical while Lady Hume made a succession of irregular little grunts and mews that was somehow more annoying.
Elizabeth heard Mr Anricks come back with his pack and go into his room. Outside the noise was starting to die down as people passed out or went home if they lived in the village. It had been a good send off for the minister. Tomorrow the village would start to empty of Burns and Taits and Pringles from the raiding families and turn back into the sleepy place it had been before.
Monday 16th October 1592
Carey was standing in the little kennelyard looking at the hounds with Scrope. He seemed distracted by something and he looked very tired, with bags under his eyes and he had clearly had brandy for breakfast. Dodd came into the yard in search of him and found him wearily agreeing with Scrope that the hounds needed a good run. Scrope wandered off to look at the latest four-month-old pups with the master of hounds.
A half-grown yellow lymer pup came trotting out of one of the sheds with a stick held proudly in his mouth. He brought it right over to the Courtier and dropped it at his feet in an unmistakable hint. Carey picked it up and threw it over to the other side of the yard, the pup galloped happily off to get it and then found a bit of cow bone that interested him more and forgot the stick. Carey went over to get the stick himself and this time when he threw it, the pup brought it back to Dodd, laying it at his feet with great pride.
Carey smiled at something that would have had him laughing a few weeks before and bent down to ruffle the pup’s ears. At that exact moment, the pup jumped up to lick Carey in the face and the pup’s nose collided with Carey’s chin.
“Aargh, Jesus,” shouted Carey, and bent over with his hand to his jaw. “Jesus, you stupid dog.”
The dog tried to lick his face again and Carey fended him off. “No, get down, goddamn it!” he roared, and the pup plopped down on his back, peering anxiously at Carey.
The pup’s nose hadn’t hit him that hard and Dodd wondered what the hell was ailing the Courtier that he made such a fuss about it. The Courtier seemed a little sorry for his ill-temper and he squatted to pat the pup and check his paws. Another determined lick from the dog, still aimed at the lower part of Carey’s face and Dodd suddenly understood.
“Sir, have ye a toothache?”
Carey half-looked up at him and nodded.
“It’s my back tooth, been giving me trouble for years and now it’s bloody killing me.”
It was, too. Carey was looking distinctly unhealthy and, come to think of it, his right jawline was swollen. He picked up the stick, threw it again and this time the pup galloped back with it and tripped over his large paws and rolled. Then he lay on his back and let Carey rub his tum, wriggling with ecstasy at it. Carey had his other hand cupped round his face and was still preoccupied.
“Ay, I see, will ye not get it drawn?”
“I suppose I’ll have to but there isn’t a tooth-drawer in Carlisle at the moment. I asked Mr Lugg but he says he doesn’t do teeth, says they’re too fiddly and nobody is ever satisfied.”
“I heard tell there’s a new man who’s good over in Scotland the day; will I try and see if I can get him here?”
“If you can, Sergeant.”
Dodd nodded. Teeth could be the very devil. He’d never had toothache himself, apart from when he was a wean and his new teeth were growing, oh and when his wisdom teeth were coming in when he was twenty, but he knew people who had. Apart from getting loose in spring and worn down when you were old, if they went seriously rotten they could actually kill you if your face swelled up and the sickness went into your blood. Since Carey was the only thing between Sir Richard Lowther and the West March, apart from the ineffectual Lord Scrope, Dodd wanted him alive and healthy and he sighed at the thought of tracking down a good tooth-drawer, or a tooth-drawer of any kind on the Marches.
They went out to the Eden meadows with all the lymer pups from Buttercup’s litter that she had on Carey’s bed in the summer, to see how they shaped. The yellow one with the big head was clearly not very bright but he was the friendliest and most willing dog Dodd or Carey had ever seen, and Carey had already decided to have him as his own in exchange for providing his bed for Buttercup’s lying-in.
“I’ll call him Jack,” he said, as they came back a couple of hours later with the five dogs milling around them on leashes. “I don’t suppose he’ll be much use as a lymer but he’s a nice dog.”
“Why Jack?”
“Oh my first two dogs were called King and Queenie, but he isn’t really a Knave, so I’ll call him after the Jack in the All Fours game. It’s appropriate.”
“Ay,” said Dodd. Thinking about it, it was too. Nobody would play cards with the Courtier in the West March now for more than penny stakes.
They let the dogs go off the leashes in the kennelyard and Sandy and Eric, the two dogboys, came out with buckets of bones and guts for them from the butcher’s shambles and stale bread from the castle bakery and there was much snarling and gulping until all of it was finished in about ten seconds. The dogboys had brushes and they started the endless job of grooming the hairy dogs until they shone.
Dodd and Carey retired to Bessie’s for a bite of lunch. Carey ate the pottage, a thick soupy mixture of pot-herbs, meat, and beans, but only when it was half-cold. He shook his head at the steak and kidney pie.
“I’m like a bloody Papist monk,” he said, “no women, soup every meal, wake up at two every morning.” He lifted a finger to the potboy and got a cup of brandy. He swilled the brandy round his mouth before swallowing it.
“Hmm,” said Dodd, deep in the pie and chewing on the bread he dipped in it. He was considering passing on a prime piece of information he’d heard from Janet that morning before she went back to Gilsland. The trouble was it was vague and Dodd knew Carey always wanted specifics before he would take action. On the other hand he clearly needed something to take his mind off his tooth for the moment.
“I heard tell,” he said as he reached for the bag pudding full of plums as his second cover, “that Jock Elliot and Wee Colin have bought theirselves new doublets.”
“Oh yes,” grunted Carey, ordering more brandy. “So what?”
There was an expensive hard sauce to go with the plum pudding, of sherry sack, butter and sugar, which even Dodd had to admit was delicious. He offered some to Carey who held up his hand palm out and shook his head.
“It’d kill me,” he said.
“Well, Jock Elliot and Wee Colin Elliot arenae the ones for fashion. And they may have kin and kine and towers, but they havenae money no more than I do. And I heard that Jock’s been seen walking oot in Jedburgh in a tawny velvet doublet that’s Edinburgh work and Wee Colin has one the same but in black currant colour.”
“Cramoisie,” corrected Carey, who knew about fashionable colour names. “So?”
It was obvious but Dodd made allowances for the tooth.
“They’ve made some siller, that’s all. Somebody’s paid them a lot of money, on top o’ what they normally get from black-renting and kidnapping.”
“So they’ve had some successful raids. What are you suggesting?”
“A Warden rode on ’em,” said Dodd, “find out what they got paid for.” He didn’t think Carey would really go for it, but it was worth a try.
“Nothing to do with the feud the Dodds have with the Elliots, is it?”
“Och no, that’s composed now,” lied Dodd. “It was a’ arranged back in 1581 wi’ the Reverend Gilpin’s help and your father presiding.” Well, that bit was true, but as for the feud being composed…The Elliots had killed Dodd’s father, caused the death of his mother, and the deaths of two of his brothers and a sister. The fact that he had got lucky when he led the remnants of the Dodd surname in the final battle so the bastards had had to come to negotiate was neither here nor there. He still wanted to wipe the Elliots out. Of course they thought the same of him, and that was why he’d had to leave upper Tynedale and come to Carlisle Castle when he was twenty-one, it was part of the deal. Which had held so far, but not for want of his thinking how to break it to his advantage.
And weren’t the Johnstones and the Maxwells at it hammer and tongs again in the Scots West March?
“I’m not running a Warden Rode so you can have at the Elliots again,” growled Carey at him. “Besides, it’s Scrope you’d have to convince of that, not me. He’s the bloody Warden.”
“Is he no’ thinking of going back to his ain lands and his lady wife down to London to serve the Queen?”
“Well he is, but how the devil did you know that?”
Dodd didn’t feel it necessary to explain that the men of the guard had been talking about little else since they came back and the bets on it had gone to stupid levels. At least Dodd’s investment looked safe.
“When’s he leaving?”
“You know Scrope, dithers over everything. Also Richard Lowther would likely be acting Warden in his place, not me.”
“Ay? What’ll happen to you?”
“Well, that depends on the Queen. If she confirms me as Deputy Warden then there isn’t a lot he can do about it, though it would make my life infernally difficult. If she doesn’t…” Carey shrugged a shoulder and scowled. “Maybe I’ll take up the King of Navarre’s offer. I’m not going back to London.”
A Chorus of Innocents Page 13