2 A Season of Knives

by P. F. Chisholm

  ‘Oh.’ For the first time in his life it occurred to Carey to wonder if the way he spent money might have something to do with his debts.

  ‘It makes me curious, sir,’ said Dodd, quite loquacious now he’d been asked for his opinion. ‘I thought all courtiers were rolling in money. Are ye not rich?’

  Carey could not be offended with him, his curiosity was so naked. Instead he sighed again.

  ‘Dodd, do you recall me telling you that the last time I was out of debt was in ’89 after I walked from London to Berwick in twelve days for a bet of two thousand pounds.’

  ‘Ay sir. I remember. You were taking one of my faggots off me.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Carey. ‘That reminds me, we haven’t recruited anybody for that place yet, have we?’

  ‘No sir,’ said Dodd, dourly.

  ‘I expect I’ll get round to it. Well, that was the last time I paid my various creditors. Since then…I’m a younger son, Dodd, as you are yourself. I get nothing from my father except the occasional loan and a good lecture. I’ve got no land and no assets at all, except my relatives and the people I know in London and Berwick.’

  ‘How d’ye live at Court, sir?’

  ‘The Queen likes me and she gives me money occasionally. Sometimes I can help someone get an office, or they believe I can.’

  ‘Is that all? I heard it was very expensive, living at Court.’

  ‘Oh Lord, Dodd, it is, it is. It’s crippling.’

  ‘So ye must have some means of earning money, sir; it stands to reason.’

  ‘I’ll tell you if you promise not to tell anyone else.’

  ‘Ay. My word on it.’

  ‘Gambling.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I gamble. I play cards. Not dice, and I don’t bet on bears or dogs. Just cards.’

  Dodd was fascinated. ‘Can ye win enough that way, sir?’

  ‘Yes, usually. There are plenty of people with more money than sense at Court, and a lot of them want to play me because I’m the Queen’s cousin and they’re snobs and want to boast about it, or they’ve heard I’m…good, and they want to beat me.’

  ‘And you get enough that way, sir?’

  ‘Yes. I paid Sergeant Nixon out of my winnings on Sunday night. Most of it was originally Lowther’s money anyway.’

  Dodd laughed, an odd suppressed creaking noise. ‘No wonder he’s out for your blood.’

  ‘He would be anyway.’

  ‘No, but see, sir, he’s used to winning against your sister and my lord Scrope.’

  ‘Of course he is. They’re both appalling players.’

  ‘How about horses, sir? D’ye ever bet on them?’

  ‘What tournaments and suchlike? Yes, on myself to win, to try and cover the cost of it.’

  ‘Nay, racing.’

  ‘No. Cards are more reliable.’

  ‘That’s where I lose my money,’ confided Dodd. ‘At cards too, but on the horses as well. Will ye teach me to play, sir?’

  Carey looked at him, astonished that the stiff-necked Sergeant could admit that he needed to learn. But then the only other person who had done that had been the famously proud Sir Walter Raleigh.

  ‘I expect so, I learnt it myself from a book. I’m afraid I don’t play seriously with you and the men, though, because you can’t afford to lose enough.’

  ‘Och, I’m happy to hear it. Take yer living off Lowther by all means. So why did ye leave London, sir, if ye could support yourself at play?’

  ‘Well, unless you cheat, which I don’t unless somebody’s trying to cheat me, it’s still fairly precarious. You can always have a run of bad luck. And things were getting a little…tense.’

  Dodd had the tact not to ask directly. ‘Ye felt like a change?’

  The lymer bitch was nudging at Carey’s leg and whining again. ‘I felt like not going to the Fleet prison, which was looking more and more likely. I could finish there yet, if Lowther hangs Barnabus.’

  ‘Ay,’ said Dodd. ‘Ye couldna keep on as Deputy then.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Seems like ye’ll need to marry money or land, sir, like I did.’

  Carey sighed again, cracked his knuckles. ‘That’s what everybody keeps telling me.’

  But ye’ve lost your heart to Lady Widdrington, who’s married to someone else and not likely to inherit much either, thought Dodd sympathetically, though he didn’t say it.

  ‘So what do you think about who murdered Atkinson?’ Carey asked abruptly, obviously forcing his mind away from depressing thoughts and back to puzzles.

  Dodd hesitated a moment longer and then answered slowly.

  ‘All I can say is, by my thinking there’s two kinds of murder. There’s the kind that happens in a right temper when ye go after a man that insulted you with a rock in yer hand and beat out his brains. Or there’s the kind where ye think about it beforehand and then do it when he’s not expecting ye. That’s the kind of murder that happened to Atkinson.’

  ‘Yes. Throat cut. I couldn’t see any signs on him that he’d fought at all.’

  ‘He wouldn’t know how any road. What about the man that got your glove off of Simon Barnet?’

  Carey nodded, scratching the lymer bitch around her ears. She moaned with pleasure and rubbed her chin on his leg. A couple of the Keep servants came in and began laying the tables ready for the second of the two meals they served daily.

  ‘Either the murderer or his servant.’

  ‘Arm in a sling and bruised face. Shouldna be too hard to find if he’s in Carlisle still.’

  ‘If.’ Carey yawned jaw-crackingly. ‘It’s no good Sergeant, I’ve simply got to get some rest or I’ll fall asleep in the saddle tonight.’

  ‘Did ye not sleep well last night, then?’ Dodd asked solicitously. Once they had returned from talking to the Bell and Musgrave headmen, he had given Carey the best bed and he himself had taken Rowan’s truckle bed with his wife. After waking her up for his marital rights, he had slept like the dead until Carey woke him in the dark before dawn.

  ‘Not really,’ Carey admitted, not intending to explain that Dodd and his wife had kept him awake for the first half hour and then sea-green envy and a miserable worried longing for Elizabeth had wound him up too tight to do much more than doze after that. He came to his feet and the lymer bitch gazed up at him hopefully so he bent down and patted her broad yellow flank. ‘I’ll snatch an hour now before it’s time to gather the men together.’

  ‘Ay sir,’ said Dodd cheerily. ‘I’ll have a wander round the town and see if I canna find this man wi’ his arm in a sling for ye.’

  Carey nodded, put his helmet under his arm and walked out of the Keep door, down the steps and across to the Queen Mary Tower where he was lodging. There was no Barnabus in his bedchamber to help him, and Simon Barnet was doubtless about to start stuffing his face with poor quality boiled salt beef and bread across in the Keep’s hall. The yellow lymer bitch had followed him all the way across and up the stairs and he hadn’t the heart to throw her out. He put his helmet and swordbelt on the top of his jackstand, wearily took his jack off, hung it up. He hadn’t the energy to struggle with his riding boots, so he drew the curtains of his bed to keep out the sunlight and threw himself full length on it as he was. The big lymer bitch whined a couple of times and lumbered up on to the bed next to him. Ancient strapping creaked alarmingly under their combined weights.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Carey moaned, and tried to push her off, but she licked his face lovingly, turned round a couple of times and settled down against his stomach. He shoved her a couple of times, but she became a warm furry lump of immovability. If he wanted her off his bed, he knew he would have to get up and haul her off by the collar and he couldn’t be bothered. ‘You are not the kind of woman I want in my bed,’ he told her severely and she yawned and panted and licked at his nose, so he held her muzzle with his hand and told her severely to be still. She put her nose down between her paws and watched him with her soulful brown ey
es until his own eyes blurred and he pitched into sleep.

  ***

  Dodd stepped out into the sunlit courtyard and walked whistling out through the Captain’s gate and the covered way into the town. He couldn’t have explained why, but the discovery that Carey the elegant courtier was only one step ahead of a warrant for debt in London made him like the man much more. Carey had the indefinable assets of birth and influence and the Queen’s favour; Dodd had a good solid tower, a hundred pounds’ worth of land at lease, and kin who would follow him if he asked them.

  For a while Dodd quartered the town and then changed direction and went back to Bessie’s. There, as he had expected, he found the rest of his men. He explained his quest to them and they were happy to join in.

  Eventually Bangtail came hurrying up, trailing a boy whom Dodd recognised as Ian Ogle, the steward’s young son.

  ‘Tell him,’ Bangtail encouraged the lad, who squinted up at Dodd and wanted to know what was in it for him.

  Feeling inspired, Dodd resisted the impulse to shake the information out of the boy, and instead handed over a penny. Ian Ogle squinted at it ungratefully.

  ‘Ay,’ he said. ‘He were in here yesterday askin’ which lad was it served the Deputy Warden, so I tellt him. Why’d ye want to know?’

  ‘Who was?’

  ‘Who was what?’

  ‘Who was asking which lad…?’

  ‘Andy Nixon, Mr Pennycook’s rent-collector,’ said Ian Ogle with a contemptuous sneer. ‘And he’d had an argument he lost with somebody, by my reckoning.’

  ‘Andy Nixon,’ breathed Dodd, who knew more about Mrs Atkinson’s private life from Janet than he had let on to Carey.

  ‘Ay.’

  ‘Have you seen him today?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well then, be off wi’ ye. By God, Andy Nixon. I wouldnae have thought it.’

  By the time Carey woke up to the sound of the yellow lymer bitch’s echoing snores, the light filtering through his curtains was as yellow as her coat. He got up, feeling irritable and aching, mainly the effect of being stupid enough to sleep in his hose and boots, but there was no point in taking them off now.

  Dodd knocked on the door just as Carey drank the remains of the beer in the jug and wished Barnabus was around to bring him food. He would have to talk to Scrope about finding another servant to look after him while Barnabus was in jail.

  Dodd’s face was unrecognisable because it had a broad grin on it. That faded when he saw the frowstiness of the Deputy.

  ‘I wouldna recommend sleeping in your boots,’ he said helpfully.

  ‘Thank you, Dodd.’

  Carey scratched his hair, smoothed it down again, put on his morion and finished buckling his swordbelt.

  ‘Well, we’ve got his name, sir,’ said Dodd, full of happiness and bonhomie.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The man that bribed Simon Barnet for your glove. We know his name.’

  That woke him up properly. ‘Do you, by God?’

  ‘Ay, sir. His name’s Andy Nixon.’

  Where had he heard that name before? He remembered the extremely pregnant Mrs Leigh with her nasty particles of gossip.

  ‘Andy Nixon?’

  ‘Ay. Mr Pennycook’s rent-collector.’

  That fitted. That all fitted nicely into place. Carey’s jaw set. ‘He’s Mrs Atkinson’s lover, isn’t he?’

  Dodd sighed regretfully. ‘Ay sir. They was childhood sweethearts, but Kate Coldale’s mother wouldna let her marry a man wi’ no land and no prospects, seeing she had a good dowry in property, and she was married off to Jemmy Atkinson instead. But I canna see Kate…’

  ‘It looks bad for her, though. If she conspired with her lover to kill her husband, that’s a wicked crime. It’s petty treason. She…’

  Dodd was looking at Carey with peculiar directness. Go on, thought Dodd, tell me you’ve never at least toyed with the notion of shooting Sir Henry Widdrington, tell me you haven’t.

  Carey’s voice did trail off and he looked at the floor. Up again. ‘It’s a crime,’ he said more quietly. ‘It has to be a crime. If it wasn’t, none of us could sleep easy in our beds.’

  ‘Depends how ye treat yer wife, though, sir,’ said Dodd with all the smugness of the happily married. ‘And what her lover thinks of it and what kind of a man he is.’

  Carey studiously ignored the personal implications of all this.

  ‘You think Andy Nixon’s capable of slitting Atkinson’s throat?’

  ‘Oh ay, sir. Andy Nixon wouldnae do the job he does if he couldnae use a blade.’

  ‘And Mrs Atkinson? Do you think she knew?’

  Dodd shrugged. ‘I dinna ken sir.’

  ‘Well, let’s go and find out.’

  ‘We need a warrant, sir…’

  ‘I’ll get the bloody warrant,’ Carey growled. ‘Fetch the men.’

  Kate Atkinson was just about to lock up her house for the night when there came an almighty hammering on her door. She opened it and was faced with a waking nightmare: the tall Deputy Warden with a piece of paper in his hand that gave him the right to search her house, and behind him six men to do it. At the tail of them all was Janet Armstrong’s bad-tempered husband looking very uneasy.

  They tramped their muddy boots up the stairs and into her bedroom; she hadn’t been sleeping on her marriage bed, but on the truckle bed beside it, as she told them. Two of them went out into the back yard and started gingerly raking through her midden heap. She didn’t go with them but sat on the window seat in the downstairs living room and looked at her clenched fists. When little Mary started to wail because she was frightened by the high comb of the Deputy’s helmet, she did nothing because there was really nothing comforting she could say to her. Occasionally wisps of thought would gust through her mind. I should have gone to Lowther. I should never have told Andy. What can I say?

  ‘Mrs Atkinson,’ came a powerful voice from upstairs. ‘Will you come here, please?’

  She went and found the Deputy Warden and Henry Dodd staring at the mattress of her marriage bed. They had stripped the clean sheet off it and turned it up the other way again. The Deputy reached down a long glittering hand, prodded the large brown stain. It was still a little sticky, and he sniffed his fingers.

  ‘Where are the other sheets to this bed?’ he demanded.

  ‘Downstairs, in the yard,’ she said. ‘Hanging out to dry.’

  ‘And the blankets?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘The hangings?’

  ‘Ay.’

  ‘Did all the blood come off?’

  She looked down at her apron, which was greasy, and twisted her hands together.

  ‘This is blood. You won’t tell me, I hope, that you’ve been killing a chicken in your marriage bed?’

  If he was making a joke, she didn’t find it funny.

  ‘Mrs Atkinson, look at me.’ The Deputy’s voice had an impersonal sound: not angry at all, which surprised her for Lowther would have been bellowing at her by now. She looked at him and oh, the bonny blue eyes he had; it was hard to concentrate, the way they looked into you.

  ‘Mrs Atkinson, did you murder your husband?’

  At least she could answer that question honestly and yet she didn’t. She said nothing.

  ‘Do you know who did?’

  She shook her head.

  The blue eyes narrowed; a little surprise, a lot of cynicism, more contempt.

  ‘I think you do know.’

  ‘I dinna, sir.’

  Janet Armstrong’s husband was staring at her in plain astonishment. Also suspicion. She must seem like every married man’s nightmare, she supposed, as they were hers.

  ‘I think either you or your lover Andy Nixon slit your husband’s throat. You and he then conspired to dump the body in an alley and lay the blame on me, for whatever reason, though heaven knows I’ve done nothing against you that I know of.’ The Deputy’s voice was heavy with authority.

  Yes, that was the sin o
f it, to lay the blame on an innocent man. But Pennycook had said somebody had to be blamed, and it might as well be the upstart southerner who was interfering with business and had no kin around Carlisle to back him up.

  ‘We…er…’ She stopped speaking. How could she possibly explain? She didn’t even know for certain that Andy Nixon hadn’t done it. And she had helped to dump the body. Which made her guilty of something, she supposed. She couldn’t speak for the number of things she needed to say.

  ‘You know what happens if ye refuse to plead, Kate,’ said Dodd anxiously. ‘Ye must answer.’

  At least she was able to speak to him, if not to the terrifying Deputy. ‘Ay,’ she whispered. ‘Pressing to death. Well, I didna kill my husband and nor did I plot with anybody to kill him. I dinna ken how he came to be dead. So now.’ There, it was done. When they found her guilty, she would burn.

  Carey took a deep breath. ‘I’m afraid I must arrest you, Mrs Atkinson, for the crime of petty treason.’ he said formally. ‘Come with us.’

  ‘No, wait.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘The children,’ she said wildly. ‘I must get someone in to see after the children.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Deputy with the surprise of the bachelor. ‘Yes, I suppose you must.’

  The next half hour passed in more chaos than the worst night terrors, Mary howling as her mother tried to explain, and the boys’ faces white and scared; this was a terrible thing for them on top of their father’s death. The Deputy Warden and his men stood around like lumps, getting in her way while she tried to sort things out. Of course, she couldn’t go to her sister-in-law, Mrs Leigh next door, so Sergeant Dodd accompanied her to her sister, Maggie Mulcaster over the road, who came bustling across, full of excited goodwill. Telling her what was happening was akin to using the Carlisle town crier, but it couldn’t be helped. Julia had gone home but she would go across to Mrs Mulcaster as well when she arrived in the morning to find the house shut. She could get in at the wynd to milk the cow and deal with the cream put to rise for today in the tiny dairy. Kate had to leave the plate-chest where it was under the bed and hope no one would find it. She closed and bolted the shutters. While they were all downstairs two of the men came in triumphantly from the midden heap, carrying sticky clumps of rushes that she had swept out of the bedroom, dropping bits of them on the new clean rushes.