“Och,” Dodd was stricken. All that work, going down to the horrible alleys and dangerous women of London, all gone to waste and he’d have to start buttering up Lowther again. “Why not ye as acting Warden?”
Carey’s face was as grim as a crow at an execution. “Not senior enough, apparently,” he muttered, knocking back his third cup of brandy.
Seemingly there had been arguments and words exchanged between Scrope and his brother-in-law and Dodd now understood why Philadelphia was contemplating going to serve the Queen again. He sighed heavily.
“That’s bad news, is that,” he said as he finished the bag pudding and sauce and leaned back with his belly comfortably tight. “I didna ken.”
A half smile briefly crossed Carey’s face. “Well, I’m glad you’re on my side, Sergeant, but I may be out on my ear in a few weeks.”
“Ay,” said Dodd mournfully. “Well, I’ll get a nap before we go out on patrol the night.”
Carey nodded but stayed sitting in Bessie’s commonroom while Dodd set off back up to the castle. A fourth cup of brandy arrived to keep him company.
Tuesday, Before Dawn, 17th October 1592
Elizabeth woke in the dark and wondered why. She was awake and alert, as if someone had called her name. Had they? She had been dreaming of Robin again, but that was normal, the part of her that dreamt was carrying on with its ridiculous notion that she could ever marry him, just as if reality and Sir Henry did not exist. She hated the awakenings from those dreams because they made her feel so sad.
But that wasn’t what had awakened her. What had?
She lay on her side with Lady Hume fitted into her back and Kat Ridley lying on her back and giving a slow rolling grunt. That hadn’t awoken her either; she was too awake.
She listened in the dark, probably about two hours after midnight, the darkest part of the night. There was a Moon but it was clouded over. What was it?
Absolute silence pressed in on her. No sound at all, not even the barn owls and the occasional bark from a fox, protests of dreaming sheep, sometimes a snort from a horse. Nothing except loud snoring from drunks outside.
Well, that was it, of course. Why was everything else so silent?
She sat up and decided against lighting a taper from the watch candle. She didn’t have a dressing gown against the cold and it was very cold, perhaps not freezing yet but near it.
She found her riding kirtle by touch, missed out the petticoats and bumroll and pulled it on over her head, found her hobnailed boots by the bed and put them on as well.
There was a clink of metal on metal, and a couple of dull thuds, very near the house. Was someone trying to steal the horses? Goddamn it, if Jock Burn thought he could do that, he could think again.
Mind you, if it was Jock Burn then he was a better actor than she gave him credit for. He had been laughing and rolling drunk the last time she saw him and she had seen him pass out contentedly in a pile of hay.
She paused in the passageway to look out the window. Were there more horses in the stableyard than there should have been? It was hard to tell with the two wagons there and the empty barrels waiting to be loaded and taken back to Berwick. Even with her nightsight well in, it was very dark.
Her heart was beating hard and yet she wasn’t sure. She didn’t dare give the alarm for nothing because the village was full of drunken reivers who would likely wake and then fall to fighting each other if there was nobody else to fight.
She went down the stairs as quietly as she could, then stopped in the hall. She had barred the door herself so why was there a draught from the open window…?
She took breath to give the alarm and found a hard hand wrap itself round her mouth and pull her backwards off her feet. She fought then, fought for breath and to make a sound, was cuffed a couple of times across the ears and then when she managed a small yelp, punched hard in the side of the head with a dagger hilt so the world was turned into a whirligig and she couldn’t see at all, couldn’t hear anything except voices far away, hissing at each other. Somebody laughed, a thick sound that terrified her.
They laid her down and pawed at her skirts, kicking her legs apart, she closed them with enormous effort, they were kicked apart again and she was kicked in the privates as well. It hurt. Argument again, they were doing what? Tossing a coin? There was another harsh laugh and then a strange noise…A hissing noise like a snake or a burning slow match.
It was a burning slow match. Someone was coming into the minister’s study in his shirt and breeches, but with a thing that had a small red light that lit up his mouth and jaw, which were set firm. She part-sat up, shook her head slowly against the dripping stuff going into her eyes, tried to make it out.
“It’s true,” said the man with the gun coldly, “that I can only shoot one of you and the other can likely kill me. So which one will it be, gentlemen? Which of you shall I shoot?”
At last Elizabeth knew who it was for the London vowels and West Country sounds, it was the barber surgeon, Mr Anricks. He was standing in the doorway, oddly hunched, a dag rested on his left wrist, gripped by his right hand and the slow match hissing in the lock.
The two muffled-up men were backing away from her and Anricks came forward slowly. Suddenly the two made a break for the window, one leapt through, the other followed and the gun bellowed in the confined space.
Anricks was following up, grasping the dag by the muzzle and wielding the heavy ball on the grip like a club but by that time both were through the window and he missed again. The ball connected with the window frame and left a dent. Next moment there was the sound of two horses with muffled unshod hooves and muffled tack riding off into the night. And the moment after that the shouting starting as Jock Burn and the Taits and Pringles came to and started looking for people to fight.
Elizabeth found the world went away and came back again and she was surrounded by anxious faces in the light of several candles as Kat Ridley mopped the side of her head with a cloth. There was shouting outside, Young Henry’s voice, bellowing with anger, then hooves galloping.…You won’t find them that way, she thought muzzily, they’re too clever for that.
Mr Anricks was there, too, decently dressed now in his black wool suit and his hat on.
“I heard Lady Widdrington go down the stairs,” he was saying. “I had been woken by something and so I loaded my dag and lit the match off the watch candle, came down with it and by the Almighty’s help was able to chase them away.”
Elizabeth tried to get up and deal with events and found her limbs go to water and her head whirling when she started to sit up. Behind the crowd, Lady Hume was in her shift and the fur coverlet, watching everything beadily.
She tried again and found it worse, her body refusing to obey her and her head pounding away like a rock-crushing hammer at Keswick.
She was frightened she might die, as you did sometimes from being hit on the head. She beckoned Anricks closer while an argument broke out between Kat Ridley and two of the village women as to how to get her back to bed. “They were Jamie Burn’s murderers,” she whispered when he squatted down to her.
“How do you know, ma’am?”
Suddenly she realised she couldn’t say it was because one or both of them had raped Poppy and had been about to rape her as well. She simply couldn’t.
“I…” she started and found she had nothing more to say. His pale brown eyes narrowed shrewdly at her expression. He had seen how she lay, where the men were. And then a miracle happened, he understood.
“Was Mrs Burn also…?” he asked very softly, while making a small gesture at her legs. She nodded and wished she hadn’t for the movement made her head hurt and unloosed the bandage so that blood started leaking again into her hair.
“Only…he did it. You did it to her. You came in time for me.”
His mouth twisted a little. “I see,” he said softly. There wa
s a sudden sense of boiling fury within him and yet none of it was visible on the outside. “I’m glad I was here.”
Her tongue wasn’t working properly. “I am, too,” she managed finally as the cloth on her head fell off. “Ach,” she said, and put her hand to the wound there. He brought the candle closer and tutted.
With Kat’s help she staggered to her feet, knees feeling like they were made of hanks of wool and bending all the time, was supported into the kitchen and sat on the chair. Mr Anricks was the nearest approach to a medical man there and he brought up all three of the candles so it felt hot. Gently he parted her hair. She hadn’t her cap and her hair was plaited for sleep so it could have been worse but it seemed there was a nasty cut where the man had punched her and as head wounds will, it was bleeding again.
Later Elizabeth only remembered little flashes because most of it was the pain in her head and the nuisance of the blood and keeping a cloth wrapped around her neck so it wouldn’t mark her kirtle. Lady Hume came trotting in with a pair of sewing shears and a small bottle of aqua vitae and Kat Ridley produced more linen cloths and a bowl of cold water.
Mr Anricks had gentle fingers: he sheared some of the hair short on that side of her head and used the cold water on the cut and then put brandy on it so Elizabeth had to bite her lip to stop herself from yelling. By that time it was dawn and the men were back from their ridiculous chasing across the countryside after two clever men who had crept in among a large number of snoring reivers to raid the manse itself.
Jock Burn was loud in his fury at it, louder because of his hangover. Just as Anricks was wrapping more linen bandages round her head Young Henry came stamping into the kitchen, grabbed her and hugged her.
“Are you all right, mam, did you get shot?”
She hugged him back, feeling the little boy inside the large-shouldered large young man and loving him as she had since she first met him, when he was ten and desperately trying to be brave about his mother. “I’m all right, Harry, truly I am. Just a little bump on the head…”
“Mr Widdrington, one of them hit her on the side of the head and also kicked her a number of times in the legs,” said Anricks. “She must go back to bed.”
“It was you fired the dag at them, sir?”
“Yes, though I think I missed. At least there’s no blood from anyone except Lady Widdrington.”
“No matter, sir, no matter. Thank you. Thank you very much.” Young Henry was shaking Anricks’ hand, pumping it up and down.
“Lady Widdrington must go back to bed,” said Anricks very loud and distinctly as to one wandering in his wits, “She has been struck on the head and kicked while on the ground.”
“I’m sure I can ride…” Elizabeth started though she wondered how she would get back to Widdrington with her legs like hanks of wool.
“I’m sure she can’t,” said Anricks.
Young Henry then picked up Elizabeth easily in his arms and carried her up the stairs with no more ado than he had Lady Hume the night before, although she was twice the old lady’s size. When did he get so strong? she wondered muzzily. I knew he was large but I didn’t know he could lift me.
Young Henry put her into the bed and she lay back on the pillows and felt deeply grateful she hadn’t had to get up the stairs.
“Thank you, Harry,” she said, and found he was hugging her again.
“We’ll catch them,” he said into her neck. “We’ll catch them, mam, and kill them. They’ll be sorry they tangled wi’ the Widdringtons.”
“Listen Harry, I think they were the men that killed Jamie Burn.”
“Ay,” said Young Henry, “I’m thinking the same. But where ha’ they gone?”
“I’m more interested in why they came back. They’d got clean away and nobody any the wiser, why the devil did they come back? What for?”
Young Henry was feeling the large spot on the end of his nose that Elizabeth privately thought of as his thinking spot. “Hm, yes, why?”
She was suddenly dizzy again and found it hard to speak. She wanted to tell them that there must be something in the house they wanted and it was possible the tooth-drawer, Mr Anricks, wanted it too although he had saved her. She slowly got her tongue and lips to say all that.
“We’ll go out with lymers today and try to find them,” Young Henry explained because he wasn’t listening properly. “William Hume is lending me a couple of his hunting dogs, he’s furious as well.”
Young Henry’s voice faded as he told Elizabeth what good dogs they were and how Cousin William was also bringing along his forester who was an excellent tracker. She was suddenly exhausted and sleepy. She laid her sore head back on the pillow and let the world disappear again.
***
She woke to the sound of rain and the certain knowledge that she had forgotten something important. She was only in her shift again, her velvet gown hung up and her kirtle likewise. She lay there feeling the old fur coverlet over the bed, it was deer fur and well-cured so it was soft and supple and hardly shed at all. Perhaps it was noon though she didn’t feel hungry.
What had Jamie Burn been mixed up in and where did Simon Anricks come in all this? Two strangers had come into the village and killed the minister, then ridden away again after raping Poppy. Two strangers had come into the village again the night before to find something they presumably hadn’t got the first time, knocked her down and ridden away again, and given the searchers the slip as well. Simon Anricks had missed at point-blank range but then you often did with a dag; they were hopelessly inaccurate. Was he a Jesuit? To be sure he had carte blanche now that he was inside the manse. If he wanted to find something he didn’t need to be elaborate about it. So was there something in the house that two parties wanted, was that it? And what was it? Why was it important? Was it a book? Why would a book be important? Was it a seditious book, perhaps something printed by the Catholics at Rheims to lead folk astray?
She pressed her lips together and scowled. If it was seditious then why would a Jesuit want it? Surely it would be better to leave it where it was and deny all knowledge?
She started to doze off again and there was Robin again, half in her dreams and half out of them, telling her about the different kinds of coding Sir Francis Walsingham had taught him when he was a very good-looking young man and in Scotland with him. He had told her about them in the North, in fact, before she even knew she loved him, way back in 1585, when he had been staying at Sir Henry’s house in Berwick, waiting to find out if the Scotch king would let him into the realm with the impossible dangerous message about the Queen of Scots. The one that said that Her Majesty of England had somehow, unaccountably and accidentally and due to her wicked courtiers and in particular one Mr Davison, sent the King of Scotland’s sovereign and mother to the block.
Scotland had been a tinderbox and most of the surnames had been united for once in their fury: so what if they had tried to kill the Queen twenty years before? She was their Queen and theirs to kill. How dare the Queen of England lop her head off on the specious grounds of treason when she was a sovereign queen and certainly not Elizabeth I’s subject? It was outrageous. The Maxwell had sworn to kill Carey for carrying the message, as had Buccleuch and Ferniehurst and most of the headmen of the Marches.
She still remembered the first time she had seen him, wearing a forest-green hunting suit, rings on his fingers, his hat on his head, sweeping it off in a Court bow to her when her husband, of all people, introduced them. She had curtseyed wondering why her heart was suddenly thumping inside her stays and why her knees were knocking. Her body had known him before she did, she thought.
It had taken months for the careful messages to go to and fro to Edinburgh and back, and all that time, Elizabeth had found plain Mr Robert Carey, as he was then, a terrible distraction and worry to her. He had gone hunting a couple of times but stopped when he was chased back to Berwick by a large group of
men who had also shot arrows at him. Apparently he had put his head down beside the horse’s neck in the true Border style he’d learned when he was a boy in Berwick and galloped into Sir Henry’s stableyard with an arrow actually through his smart London hat. He had laughed uproariously at it and worn the hat with a hole in it until he bought a newer higher-crowned one a couple of years later.
“The easiest method for coding for someone who isn’t able to figure and calculate the numbers is to make your code another book and refer to the page and line and letter. If you use the Bible, which you shouldn’t because it’s the first book anyone checks, then page 1, line 1a, word 3 is ‘beginning.’”
“1a?”
“That’s another reason for not using the Bible because there are often two columns on a page and you have to call them a and b—gives the game away at once.”
That had been after a fashionably late dinner in Berwick with two covers of food and a large salmon for the cheapness, as it was a fish day. They had been discussing other ways of getting messages to people. It was not relevant since the point of Mr Carey was that someone had to carry the message and apologise on his knees to the Scottish King, and Robin had volunteered for the dangerous job as he tended to do for any dangerous job that happened to be lying around and looked interesting.
Carey had sung the praises of Mr Phelippes who was Walsingham’s chief code breaker. Mr Phelippes had once taken a despatch that had just come in, looked at it and immediately held it to the candle to find the invisible writing on it in orange juice. He had also broken the codes painstakingly used by the Queen of Scots in her imprisonment so as to catch her red-handed plotting against Queen Elizabeth. After the meal, Carey had sung for them from memory several of the Italian madrigals that were so fashionable at Court and taught them a complicated round that Young Henry could manage and Elizabeth could sing as well, while Sir Henry drank sack and watched them.
A Chorus of Innocents Page 14