1 A Famine of Horses

by P. F. Chisholm

  “Er…” Thomas the Merchant was staring wildly at Carey as if at a chimaera, which indeed Robert Carey was, thought Barnabus bitterly, being the only man ever at Court capable of turning down a bribe.

  Carey leaned over him threateningly. Thomas the Merchant made a feeble swipe for his ledger, but Carey skimmed it across the room to Barnabus who scrambled and caught it.

  “Now then,” said Carey with his hand suggestively on the hilt of his sword, “let’s hear the tale.”

  Thomas the Merchant sat down on his high stool again and blinked at the fine set of plate he displayed every day on the chest in his room.

  “A cadger brought the horse to me,” he admitted at last, “and I refused him because I had…er…seen him before, ridden by Sweetmilk. I wanted no trouble with the Grahams…”

  “I thought they were clients of yours.”

  “Sir!” protested Thomas. “The accusation was found clean six months ago and…”

  “Never mind. When did you see the horse being ridden by Sweetmilk?”

  “Oh. Er…on Saturday.”

  “Where?”

  “Where what? Oh, ay sir, he was riding out the gate on the nag.”

  “Who with?”

  Thomas the Merchant was sweating, gazing sincerely into Carey’s eyes. “Alone.”

  “And when was the horse offered to you?”

  “On Sunday. Naturally I refused to do business on the Sabbath.”

  “Naturally,” agreed Carey drily. “But you were suspicious?”

  Thomas the Merchant smiled. “A little,” he admitted. “It was a coincidence. I wanted nothing to do with any criminal proceedings.”

  “Of course.”

  Carey moved to the door, motioned his servant to give him the precious ledger and walked out of the door—simply took it in his hand and walked out of the door. Thomas the Merchant was appalled at such high-handedness.

  “Sir, sir,” he protested, rushing after him, “my ledger, I must have it…”

  “No, no, Mr Hetherington,” said Carey, with a smile and a familiar patting of the calfskin binding, “I’m taking your ledger as a pledge for your good behaviour, as my hostage, Mr Hetherington.”

  “But…”

  The rat-faced servant barred his passage.

  “I wouldn’t if I was you, sir,” said Barnabus, sympathetically, “I know, he’s a little high-handed at times. It comes of being so closely related to Her Majesty, you know. His father is her half-brother, or so they say.”

  Thomas wasn’t interested in Carey’s ancestry.

  “My ledger…What shall I do…”

  “Amazing how memory can serve you, sir, if you let it. I’d bet good money that if you sat down and rewrote it, you’d end up with exactly the same ledger.”

  “But…”

  “Also, I might as well warn you, Sir Robert is wary of taking regular money, but he might be persuaded to accept a gift.” The servant grinned widely, showing a very black set of teeth. “I can usually convince him if I set my mind to it.”

  This Thomas understood. He nodded sadly. “But my ledger…”

  “Well, you’ve lost it for the moment, sir, you might as well…”

  Carey poked his head back round the door.

  “I forgot to ask. What was the name of the peddler you didn’t buy the horse from?”

  “Daniel Swanders.”

  Carey’s face lit up.

  “Splendid. At least that’s the truth,” he said. “Do you know where he is?”

  “No sir.”

  “Let me know if you find out. Goodbye to you.”

  The servant was looking transfixed. Without another word, he hurried after his master and when Thomas the Merchant looked down into the street, he saw the two men conferring together, before Carey laughed and set off purposefully towards Scotch Street.

  Thursday, 22nd June 11 a.m.

  Barnabus had run back to the castle, stored the ledger in Carey’s lock-up chest, and run back again to find Carey drinking ale at a small boozing ken on the corner of Scotch Street.

  “You know the establishment, do you?” said Carey, nodding at Barnabus to sit down and refresh himself.

  “Of course, sir.”

  Carey smiled. “Tell me about it.”

  “There’s a backdoor leading into a courtyard and then into another alley and it’s backed onto the castle wall. Madam Hetherington…”

  “Good God, another one?”

  “Yes sir, I believe she’s a distant cousin.”

  “Go on.”

  “Madam Hetherington is from London and it’s a very well-ordered house: she has six girls, one Irish, two Scots, one French and two English…”

  “Pox?”

  “Not as far as I could see,” Carey grunted and drank. “It’s expensive, a shilling a room, not including food or drink or clean sheets…”

  Carey was surprised. “She provides clean sheets, does she?”

  “Only if you pay for it,” said Barnabus, who hadn’t bothered. “There’s a man called Arthur Musgrave acts as her henchman and this man Daniel Swanders…”

  “Late of Berwick town…”

  “…was playing dice there when I went yesterday.”

  “Any good?”

  “He had a couple of bales of crooked dice, a highman and a lowman and one with a bristle on the pip, but he hasn’t the way of using them properly yet. I was going to give him lessons.”

  Carey laughed. “I’m sure you’ll make a fine teacher.”

  “Well, it offends me, sir. I like to see a craft practised well and he was trying but it was no good. Madam Hetherington says she’ll pay me for the teaching, if you take my meaning, sir.”

  “I have no intention of offending Madam Hetherington,” said Carey. “She might well object to me arresting someone in her house. On the other hand, I want a quiet chat with Swanders.”

  By the light in his eyes and the impatient tapping of his fingers on his swordhilt, Barnabus was beginning to suspect that his master was cooking up some dangerous scheme. He had looked very much the same when he was planning to escape from the Queen’s suffocating care of him with the Earl of Cumberland and go and serve against the Armada. That adventure had very nearly been the death of him, though not, oddly enough, from Spanish steel nor even English provisions, but rather a jail fever picked up on board ship. He had collapsed at Tilbury after leaving the fleet when the Armada was safely fleeing northwards, and had had to be brought back to Westminster in a litter.

  Suddenly he leaned forward.

  “This is what we’ll do.”

  Thursday, 22nd June, noon

  Daniel Swanders had only just crawled blearily out of a tangle of blankets next to the fire in the kitchen of Madam Hetherington’s. The girls were all at their meal at the big table, laughing and chatting and making occasional snide comments to each other. The curling tongs were heating up on the hearth and a couple of pints of ointment, guaranteed to help a man’s prowess, were being strained into little pots by Madam Hetherington’s cook. The smell was awful: rendered lard and lavender, rosemary and pepper.

  Daniel Swanders liked where he was: he was a strongly made young man with long hair to hide one ragged ear. Women usually took to his laughing face, and he was a peddler by choice and nature. He was never so happy as when he was persuading maidens to part with more than they planned for more ribbons, laces and beads than they needed, and if possible, with rather more than money later. His idea of heaven had been taking refuge in a bawdy house, rather than doing the obvious thing and running away. The only trouble was that none of the girls saw fit to give away what they normally sold and he knew Madam Hetherington would geld him personally if he tried to force one of them.

  “Good morning, ladies,” he yawned as he pulled on his jerkin and shambled to the table. “Any room for a little one.”

  Madam Hetherington was sitting in splendour in a carved chair with arms at the head of the table, almost as if she was the paterfamilias of the ho
usehold. Which she was, really, thought Daniel, touching his forehead to her in respect. As usual the meal was Scots porridge with salt and very mild beer. Daniel Swanders wished he could get tobacco in Carlisle, but the nearest place for that was Edinburgh where he was not welcome at the moment. Or rather he would be a bit too welcome, but he hated the whole idea of his ear being nailed to the pillory and having to pull free because it had hurt so much the last time.

  The girls shoved up for him, packing their petticoat-covered bumrolls together and making an enchanting sight with their hair pinned roughly and their breasts pushed up by their corsets. Two of them were magnificent that way and with typical female perversity, Madam Hetherington insisted that they wore high-necked smocks, the better to entice the customer into wanting to undress them.

  By the time Daniel had finished his porridge and beer, Arthur Musgrave had gone into the courtyard to chop firewood and the girls were fluttering about in a complication of underwear, hairbrushes, make-up and pins, making ready for the day’s trade. Daniel sat back on the bench and watched them with admiration: perhaps if he did well with the ugly Londoner and learnt better dice play, Madam Hetherington would let him take Grainne or possibly Maria to bed, or perhaps, if he was very successful, both of them. Lost in happy dreams, he only noticed the Londoner had turned up when Madam Hetherington spoke to him sharply.

  “This is Barnabus Cooke, Daniel,” she said, “Are you listening?”

  “Yes mistress,” said Daniel humbly, “I’m sorry, I was only admiring Maria.”

  “Maria, cover yourself, you’re not working now. I want you to pay attention to what Barnabus teaches you, since he’s a master craftsman at this game.”

  “Yes mistress.”

  Barnabus Cooke gave him a considering look and then said, “Madam Hetherington, I’m happy to teach Swanders some of my secrets but they’re worthless if everyone knows them, so…”

  “Of course,” agreed Madam Hetherington, “you may use the private banqueting room at the back, no one is using it.”

  Arthur Musgrave came struggling in with his arms full of firewood and glowered at Barnabus who smiled back and raised his hat.

  “I was going to suggest the courtyard, but the private room is even better,” he said. “Come on, Daniel.”

  The smell of roast beef and wine always clung to the walls of the private room which occasionally saw some very strange behaviour. Barnabus carefully cleared the rushes away from the floor at one end of the big table and then went to the glass-paned window and opened it.

  “Well, here we are,” he said loudly, breathing deeply. “Let’s begin with the basics of palming dice. After all, it’s no good using highmen if you can’t swap them for lowmen when your opponent is playing, is it?”

  Daniel nodded and sat down next to Barnabus on the bench. Barnabus brought out half a dozen dice from his own purse and separated them into their various families, asking Daniel to identify them. He then began a game with three pewter beakers taken from the sideboard, and one of the dice where he switched them round and magically moved the die from one to the other.

  “This is called Find the Lady,” said Barnabus wisely, “and it’s not much good for catching coneys in London now, since even the coneys have heard of it, but you might find it worthwhile here or in Scotland. The idea is they bet on where the Lady—the die—is going to end up. See it’s all done with the fingers, like that. All right? Now you try.”

  Daniel tried and found it much harder than he had thought at first and very different from the way he usually palmed dice. For ten minutes he moved the beakers and tried to shift the dice without being spotted by Barnabus’s beady eye, and although Barnabus said he was improving, he felt a little the way he had when his father had first begun teaching him the ways of persuading people to buy. There was so much to learn, so little time, and so many men who were better at it than him, he became quite depressed. Though that could have been the effect of living with so many beautiful girls and no money to pay them.

  He was trying again to move a die from his sleeve to the table and back again without being spotted, when he heard the sound of someone at the window. He turned to look and saw to his horror that Robert Carey was sitting on the sill with one knee drawn up, ready to jump down.

  Barnabus had drawn a knife, but Daniel was in too much of a panic to be afraid of it. He simply fell backwards off the bench, scattering dice in all directions, rolled, headed for the door. By some miracle, he got through it first, slammed it, tried to lock it, dropped the key in his haste and ran up the stairs to the bedrooms, with Carey hot on his heels.

  It was Maria’s room they barged into, and she already had her first client of the day. Daniel dodged, tried to hide behind the bed, but Carey skidded to a halt and stared.

  “What the Devil…” wailed the man on the bed, whose shirt had tangled round his armpits as Maria worked on him. He sat up, throwing Maria aside and tried desperately to pull down his shirt.

  Carey had turned his back.

  “I’m very sorry, my lord,” he said in a strangled voice, “I was chasing a horse-thief…I had no idea.”

  Barnabus, who had seen Burghley’s hunchbacked son Robert Cecil in circumstances too wonderful to tell and was not at all concerned, went behind the bed like a ferret and hauled out Daniel, with a knife at his neck.

  “You’ve caused a lot of trouble, you,” he hissed into Daniel’s ear as he twisted Daniel’s arm behind him very painfully. “That’s the Lord Warden of the West March you’ve offended. What did you think you was doing, running like that, we only wanted a little chat. Guilty conscience, that’s what it is. Come on.”

  “For God’s sake,” said Thomas Lord Scrope, realising he looked worse standing up than he did in bed, sat down again and pulled the covers up to hide his embarrassment, “Robin. You won’t tell Philly, please. I know she’s your sister, but…”

  Carey still had his back turned, but his fists were clenched. At last he turned with a perfectly calm expression on his face.

  “Don’t worry, my lord,” he said, “I would never do anything to hurt her.”

  Scrope winced and looked at the floor. “She’s a good woman,” he said lamely, “she’d never…well, you know. I’m only flesh and blood…”

  Carey had got a proper grip on himself. “I think we should both forget that this happened, my lord,” he said.

  Scrope’s face was full of relief. “Er…yes, forget it, absolutely right, of course.”

  Barnabus was at the door with Daniel, not being too careful with his knife point either. Daniel squawked and struggled as he nearly lost his earlobe but the pain from his arm stopped him. Carey took a step closer to the bed.

  “One thing, though, my lord,” he said very quietly.

  “Er, yes, Robin,” said Scrope vaguely. He was being distracted by Maria’s busy fingers under the covers, Daniel saw jealously.

  “If you pox my sister, I will personally see to it that you never have the opportunity again. Do you understand me?”

  “Well…er…”

  “I’ll make a woman of you, my lord, is that clear?”

  Thomas Lord Scrope quivered and shrank back under the bedclothes.

  Carey didn’t wait to see his reaction, but waved Barnabus on and walked out of the room, shutting it very carefully behind him.

  They processed down the passage, where they met Madam Hetherington, with her dag.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded. “And who are you?”

  “I am the Deputy Warden of the West March and I am arresting your man Daniel Swanders, for horse theft and murder.”

  “He’s not my man, he’s only staying here,” said Madam Hetherington quickly.

  “So we are absolutely clear, madam, I have…ahem…checked the matter with the Lord Warden, who is in agreement. I apologise for the disruption to your establishment, but I had hoped to take him quietly out of the courtyard, without bothering you at all. Circumstances…”

&n
bsp; Madam Hetherington’s eyes narrowed. “Are you taking him to the castle, sir?”

  “Not yet. I would like to use your private room, if that’s possible.”

  Madam Hetherington nodded curtly, led the way down the passage and handed him the key to the room.

  “Please make sure he only bleeds into the rushes,” she said curtly, opened the door for them courteously, and left them. Barnabus kicked Daniel into the room, Carey shut the door and locked it. Barnabus shut the window and stood with his arms folded.

  Carey was staring into space, his face working oddly. Barnabus wondered if there was going to be an explosion, and there was. It was Carey roaring with laughter.

  “Oh Barnabus, did you see his face…Jesus, I nearly died.”

  “I think so did he, sir,” said Barnabus primly. “Very unhealthy for any man, that sort of shock.” Carey creased up again.

  “Oh…oh…God, I must stop this, it’s a very serious matter…with his shirt up and his prick all covered with lard…” Carey bent over and howled.

  Daniel had picked himself up off the floor, felt his ear where blood was oozing and rubbed his arm and shoulder. He smiled at them uncertainly, took two of the dice from the floor near his feet and tossed them from hand to hand.

  Carey was recovering himself, wiping his eyes with his hankerchief, blowing his nose and coughing. “Oh Lord, oh Lord, I wish I could tell Philly. No, Barnabus, I know I can’t, but…All right. Enough. To business.”

  Carey hitched the padding of his trunkhose onto the table and stared down its length at him. Daniel sat on the bench and continued to juggle, staring back guilelessly.

  The silence suddenly became very thick, a little decorated round the edges by sounds of chatter from the kitchen and the creaking of beds upstairs.

  “Get on, Robin,” Daniel said at last, “ye know me. I take it, you’re saying was it me killed Sweetmilk Graham and stole his horse? You know I’d never be mad enough to do such a thing.”

  Carey sighed. Barnabus had at first stared at his impudence in using Carey’s nickname, then narrowed his eyes suspiciously.