Dodd thought of the barrel-shaped Captain with the loud laugh, and decided it wasn’t so unlikely as all that.
‘And if Wattie’s loose on Thirlwall Common with fifty men, there will be a pitched battle when he hits us on the road, with us at a disadvantage. We don’t know he’ll be at Chesterholm; there must be other places.’
‘What’s wrong wi’ a pitched battle?’ Dodd wanted to know, made confident by the beer. ‘Bloody murdering Grahams.’
‘With a woman in the middle of it.’
‘So?’ said Dodd, wondering if they were talking about the same Lady Widdrington. ‘She’d likely grab a pike and do for Wattie Graham herself.’
Carey sighed. ‘Listen, Henry. I’ve no quarrel with a pitched battle, I just like to choose my own ground. And getting to the Castle isn’t simply a case of dealing with some lads. You know what the ground around it is like; it’s horribly steep, there are earthworks everywhere. You could hold off an army if you placed your men right, that’s why they built it there. I can’t even be sure Wattie’s got no more than fifty riders. I only know what left Netherby, not what he might have picked up along the way.’
‘Ay,’ allowed Dodd, beginning to wonder if Carey had some other pressing reason for not wanting to meet Lady Widdrington face to face.
‘And there’s the question of authority,’ Carey added with a sigh. ‘Once Wattie’s over the Irthing and into the Middle March he’s supposedly out of my jurisdiction and into Sir John Forster’s. I don’t want to start up any inter-Wardenry feuding if I can help it and Sir John’s known to be difficult.’
Dodd nodded, appreciating the Deputy Warden’s talents at understatement. Sir John Forster was irascible, deeply corrupt, as old as the century and far into his dotage. Unfortunately, he also seemed to be indestructible.
‘Anyway,’ Carey went on, ‘I want to teach Wattie a lesson. Who the hell does he think he is, running a raid that size across the March at haymaking?’
He thinks he’s a Graham and one of the lords of creation, Dodd thought but didn’t bother to say. After all, Carey was convinced he was a lord of creation too, wasn’t he? That was half the trouble between him and Lowther who had the same opinion of himself. The other half was money and politics, of course, but there was plenty of room for the pure animosity of two bulls in the same field.
‘Well,’ said Dodd slowly after some more thought and a lot of cheese. ‘We could surely come up with twenty or thirty good men from hereabouts, especially if we went to Archibald Bell and warned him, and in any case the Bells are always willing to give the Grahams a bloody nose when they can. That’s all, I’m afraid, sir. Ye could get double the number inside the hour at a different time of year, but…’
‘I know, I know. It’ll have to do. All the more reason not to tangle with Wattie on the road.’
Dodd was thinking hard and sucking his teeth. ‘We should be able to get over to north of the road and maybe shadow them, but it’ll be a long ride and hard country, and the horses will be tired and…’
Carey shook his head. He swallowed one of Janet’s eyewatering pickled onions half-chewed and drank some beer.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not prancing about in Sir John Forster’s March with a mixed bunch of…of men, if I can help it. I want to stop Wattie quick and clean before he goes near Lady Widdrington. In fact I want to ambush him on the way and send him back to Netherby with his tail between his legs.’
Dodd’s heart started to warm to the Courtier a bit more. It seemed he had some sense after all.
‘Hm,’ he said. ‘Ay.’
‘What about when he’s crossing the Irthing? Where will he do that? There can’t be more than a couple of places, it’s too steep.’
‘Ay,’ said Dodd. ‘He’ll go over the ford at Horseholme and then there’s the Wou bog, so he’ll likely take the path that runs north of it round by Burn Divot and Whiteside. But then he’ll strike off eastwards away and there’s any number of roads he could go after that…Ay, the ford would be the place to find him for sure.’
A horrible thought struck him. ‘By God,’ growled Dodd, ‘He’ll be in among my own shielings as well. I’ve forty head of cattle at the summering up there, and nobbut a man and a boy to guard them. If that bastard bloody Graham…’
‘Absolutely,’ said Carey cheerfully. ‘I agree, we must stop them there.’ He was making messy puddles with his finger on the table. ‘Is this what the country looks like?’ he asked. Dodd squinted at the puddles and wondered what he was jabbering about. Carey explained patiently. ‘If this was the Irthing and that was the bog…’
‘Och,’ said Dodd, having difficulty converting his instinctive knowledge of the land into a picture. ‘Ah. Maybe,’ he allowed cautiously.
With the aid of some bits of bread, Carey explained what he wanted to do, and Dodd put in his notions to which Carey listened gravely. Although Dodd was being deprived of the dancing and the singing in order to go and fetch out the Bells, he didn’t mind as much as he would have thought. It was a pity really, that Carey had had the misfortune to be born on the right side of such a very high-class blanket; he had the makings of a decent reiver in him.
Tuesday 4th July 1592, dawn
Wattie Graham was in the middle of an argument with the outlaw Skinabake Armstrong while they waited for the rest of their party to cross over the Irthing ford in the damp grey dawn. Skinabake wanted to hit a nearby Dodd for his cows; Wattie wanted to concentrate on taking Lady Widdrington first before indulging in private enterprise. He had a couple of foreriders out, from sheer habit, but nothing else. The land was empty of anything but a medium sized herd of likely-looking cattle and horses and a tumble-down shieling a few hundred yards away. They had another good eight miles to go before they came near the Stanegate road, and most of them had their helmets hanging on their saddles and their jacks open in the heat. The dawn sky was dull and stifling, armoured with cloud that promised ruin for anyone who hadn’t got his hay in. Not a single man among them had loaded a caliver; their bows were still unstrung across their backs.
The first he knew was when one of Skinabake’s broken men yelped and clutched his leg. Wattie Graham looked at the place and at first refused to believe what his eyes told him, that there was a feathered arrow shaft sticking out of it. Another arrow zipped by his nose and a third stuck in the hindquarters of one of the horses in the ford who promptly went berserk, reared up, stood kicking on its head and then crashed through the press of other horses and up the bank. Its rider was in the water, spitting mud and weed and looking astonished.
Wattie grabbed for his gun out of its case, pulled out the small ramrod, tried charging it, but more arrows were flying from the low hill. Men who had been lying down in the bracken on the slope were standing, shooting at them. They were at too great a range to do much damage, but the panic they were causing among the horses was bad enough. The cattle in the field lowed unhappily. Some of the broken men who had already come across trampled back down into the ford, trying to run away, and added to the thrashing, shouting, swearing confusion.
Wattie fumbled and dropped his ramrod, cursed, slammed the gun back in its case and drew his sword.
‘Come on, ye fools, get on out of the water,’ he roared. A few of them managed to do what he ordered and bunched around him looking scared, while the men on the hill continued to shoot judiciously. There was the sound of hooves from their right, men and horses boiling like bees from the little shieling, more men swinging themselves up onto their horses’ bare backs from where they had been hiding in amongst the cattle, joining with the riders pounding down from the shieling.
Wattie swung round to face the threat, saw lances, hobbies, and at the head of them a long man in a morion pointing a dag straight for his chest. Unthinkingly, he slid sideways clinging to his horse’s neck and actually heard the crack as the bullet passed through where he had been. Then the men hit them, and he found himself cutting and slicing against the press of bodies; it was all Bells at first,
Archibald Bell at their head roaring something obscene about blackrent. He glimpsed Sergeant Dodd in there, riding bareback, with a face like a winter’s day and blood on his sword, and then it was the man with the fancy morion battering at him with a bright new broadsword, and he recognised Sir Robert Carey.
‘Shame on you, Wattie,’ roared the Courtier. ‘Attacking a defenceless woman.’
Somebody backed a horse between them, and Wattie managed to collect himself. Half his men had scrambled back across the ford; he could see a few horses’ rumps galloping away in the distance. More broke from the right as they worked their way to the edges.
‘Skinabake!’ he yelled in a sudden breathing space, catching sight of the Armstrong reiver. ‘Back across the ford; we’ll have them if they follow.’
He felt something behind him, ducked; steel whistled over his shoulder and nicked his hobby which promptly squealed and tried to run away. He managed to turn about to face his attacker and found Carey must have been pursuing him because there he was again, sword in one hand, dag in the other and its wheel-lock spinning sparks. He froze, staring at death like a rabbit. It misfired. He swung his sword down on Carey, hoping he would be distracted by his gun, but the bastard Deputy parried and slashed sideways, still shouting something incomprehensible.
Another plunging riderless horse banged into the other side of Wattie, bruising his leg against his own mount. Carey was coping with another rider on his other side, crossed swords a couple of times and knocked that man out of the saddle. Wattie disentangled himself from the terror-crazed nag, just in time to face the Deputy as he turned again and came after Wattie.
Nobody would dare call any Graham a coward, but it was unnerving to see Carey dismissing all the dangerous mayhem around him while he tried to attack only Wattie. Skinabake was already across the ford, shouting at him. There were a few Grahams left on this side and in a second they would be surrounded, perhaps captured. The Deputy Warden looked to be in a hanging mood.
‘Liddesdale, to me!’ yelled Wattie, standing up in his stirrups. When as many as could were around him he launched his horse down the bank again, through the water, up the other side and turned about, breathing hard.
Let them follow us and we’ll have them the way they had us, he thought, but Dodd and Archibald Bell were wise to that and so were the others with them, too wise to try crossing a ford opposed. Only the lunatic Deputy Warden seemed eager to try, but Dodd caught his horse’s bridle and snarled at him and he seemed to calm down.
The two sides stared at each other, those of the Grahams who had bows stringing them frantically on their stirrups and awkwardly nocking arrows. It was very hard to use a longbow on horseback, but it could be done if you twisted sideways and leaned over a little. The bowmen on the hill came jogging across and lined up facing them over the water.
Wattie looked about at his men. A number of them were bleeding somewhere, there were five still shapes over on the other bank and three men surrounded. A couple of the ones who had fallen off during the melee in the water were climbing out again as fast as they could, cursing. Several horses were down, others galloping away squealing.
Skinabake came up beside him, shaking his head.
‘We’re out of it,’ he said without preamble.
‘Ay,’ said Wattie heavily, knowing a lost cause when he saw it. He shook his fist impotently at the Deputy Warden. ‘Ye’ll regret this, Carey,’ he shouted. ‘I’m no’ forgetting this.’
‘Ah, go home and cry, Wattie,’ sneered the Courtier. ‘I’ll give you a long neck one of these days, you bloody coward.’
Wattie’s neck swelled and his eyes almost bugged out of his head. He took a firm grip on his sword, kicked his horse forward to the water.
Skinabake got in his way and the hobby was anyway not inclined to go near the blood-tinged water.
‘Come on, Wattie,’ said Skinabake, highly amused. ‘Put a lance through him some other time.’
Wattie was shaking with rage. ‘Did you hear…’ he sputtered. ‘Did ye hear what he called me?’
‘Och,’ said Skinabake negligently, in a voice that carried. ‘He only said it to bring ye back in range of the bowmen there.’
Carey’s head went up. He had heard, as he was meant to. But Dodd had already shifted his horse in front of the Deputy Warden’s nag and had changed grip on his lance to bar his path.
‘Any time!’ Carey bellowed, his horse backing and prancing under him. ‘Any time, Graham, I’ll meet you. Any weapons, any time.’
Wattie spat over his shoulder, and began riding away north west, his men lightly gathered around him, the ones who had lost their mounts running at their friends’ stirrups. Skinabake’s outlaws were already breaking northwards for the Debateable Land.
The men who had come out for Carey were shaking hands and congratulating each other. They had gained the loose horses who were trotting about shaking themselves, if they could catch them. Some were wounded, but hobbies were notoriously hard to kill. They had three reivers as captives, who could be ransomed once Sergeant Dodd had talked some sense into the hotheaded Deputy Warden who wanted to hang them immediately. They had what could be got from the five corpses, which included some nice swords and a good new jack or two. Also their cows were safe. They agreed with the Deputy Warden that it would be as well for them to stay by the ford and make sure Wattie didn’t return, though it wasn’t any reiver’s way to keep on after something had gone wrong.
Sergeant Dodd decided he might as well go to Carlisle with Carey and they all rode back to his tower where most people, including Sergeant Nixon and Lowther’s other men, were just waking up with sore heads. Carey collected them together, paid them, then insisted on returning by way of Brampton where Dodd’s father-in-law lived. Dodd might have worried about this if Janet were not such a jewel of a woman. He knew she would send to her father to warn him that the Deputy had somehow got wind of the stolen horses he was keeping. Sure enough, the only horses left in Will the Tod’s paddocks were stumpy rough-coated animals that had every right in the world to be there. Afterwards Carey seemed morose, which was natural enough since he had got very little sleep that night and about halfway back to Carlisle the heavens finally opened with a rolling cannonade of thunder and a downpour of fat grey drops.
Behind them, the heavy-laden packtrain owned by Edward Aglionby paced northwest along the road, miraculously unmolested.
Tuesday 4th July 1592, morning
The roofbeams of the Carlisle Castle stables vibrated with the already legendary Carey roar.
‘He’s what?’
Bangtail winced and stepped back a few paces. All the horses stamped and shifted and some of them neighed protestingly. Dodd had to hold the headstall of the hobby he was rubbing down, to stop himself being knocked over.
‘He…he’s in the dungeon, sir,’ Bangtail repeated. ‘Lowther put him there on a charge of murder.’
Carey advanced on him, still in his sodden jack and wet morion. His fists were clenched tight and two spots of colour flamed below the incipient bags under his eyes.
‘It wasna me, sir,’ yelled Bangtail, dodging behind one of the stall posts. ‘It was Lowther.’
Carey seemed to catch himself and stop. He breathed deeply, carefully unfisted his hands and folded them across his chest.
‘Start at the beginning, Bangtail, and tell me exactly what happened.’
‘Ay, well. It were Atkinson, ye see, sir, Jemmy Atkinson, the Armoury clerk, that used to be paymaster until you…’
‘I think I remember him.’
‘Well, what I heard was, he was found deid this morning, in an alley, with his gizzard slit, see ye, and so his wife sent for Lowther because he’s known to be Lowther’s man.
‘Clear so far.’
‘An’ Lowther’s up to the Castle in a fearful bate just afore ye come in, sir, and I’d just arrived, see, and he says, it’s bound to be ye that did him in, because ye didna want him fer armoury clerk, but ye werena there and nor wa
s Dodd, so then he says, ye must have set the thief that serves ye on to dae it, and so he’s gone up to the Queen Mary Tower and haled yer man out and thrown him in the dungeon and he’s making a complaint out against ye now, forbye.’
‘Is that it, that’s the full tale?’
‘Ay, sir, so far as I know.’
‘Well then, thank you for coming to tell me of it so promptly.’
Bangtail smiled. ‘We drew straws for it, sir, an’ I got the short one.’
Carey coughed. ‘Where’s Lowther now?’
‘He’s still in with the Lord Warden.’
‘Is he, by God! Well, go and keep an eye on him and try and see he doesn’t find out that I’m back yet. Go on, off with you.’
‘Ay, sir.’
As Bangtail trotted off on his mission, Dodd wondered what the Deputy Warden would do. For a moment as his colour faded he looked tired and thoughtful, and to be sure, his position was bad. Dodd knew that it wasn’t so much the question of whether or not Barnabus had actually slit Atkinson’s throat, it was whether Lowther could get the bill fouled against him and so hang him. Barnabus might even decide to turn Queen’s evidence to save his own neck and say that Carey had ordered him to do the killing. In London or in Berwick, Dodd didn’t doubt that Carey could muster enough influence to clear himself of such an accusation, but they were in Carlisle where his only important relative was Lord Scrope. And Lord Scrope was notoriously easy to persuade if got at right. It was unlikely but not completely beyond the bounds of possibility that Lowther might see Carey swing for the death of Atkinson, despite the Queen’s liking for him, whether he had anything to do with it or not. Or no: as a nobleman, he would face the axe. At best, with his servant hanged for murder, the blow to his prestige meant Carey would have very little chance of commanding obedience in the March.
Carey set his back against the loose-box wall, one leg bent, took his helmet off and with his eyes shut, rubbed the red marks left by the leather padding and the chin strap.
‘What’ll ye do, sir?’ asked Dodd morbidly, wondering if he should begin making overtures to Lowther. No, it would be a waste of time.
2 A Season of Knives Page 10