1 A Famine of Horses

by P. F. Chisholm

  Alison Graham looked him up and down suspiciously. “If ye’re trying…”

  “God curse me if I lie, missus, I only want to talk to her.”

  After a moment she nodded. As she took the buckets from the girl bringing them over on a yoke, lifted and poured them without visible effort, she said, “She only has to squeal and the crows’ll be feeding on you by midday.”

  Carey nodded, did his best to look harmless and went into the byre where Bluebell and two other cows were ready to be milked. Following the sound of retching, he came on Mary in the corner, being helplessly sick on an empty stomach. She had her fist clenched on a lace she wore about her neck. Carey watched silently for a moment, knowing perfectly well what was wrong since he had seen the malady before. At last Mary Stopped, spat, and sat down on her stool, with her head rested against the cow’s flank. As if nothing had happened she started milking away with her sleeves rolled up and the muscles in her white arms catching light off the lantern on the hook above as she worked, though she favoured her bandaged wrist.

  She jumped when he coughed.

  “Can I sit and talk with ye, missus,” he asked gently.

  She shrugged and carried on. Carey squatted down with his back to the wall. They watched the milk spurt in white streams, the round sweet smell of it mixing with the smell of hay from the cow’s breath.

  “When’s the babe due?” asked Carey after a while, deciding to bet his shirt on a guess.

  Mary Graham gave a little sigh and closed her eyes.

  “What babe?” she asked. Squersh, squersh, went the milk and the cow chewed contentedly on her fodder.

  Carey said nothing for a while. “I wish ye could help me, for then I might help you,” he said at last. “It’s a Christmas baby, is it no’?”

  She shrugged, turned her face away from him. Her head was bare like most of the maids in the north, and the straight red-gold hair knotted up tightly with wisps falling into her face as she worked.

  “What did Sweetmilk say?”

  That opened the dyke. Her fingers paused in their rhythm, her shoulders went up then down, and he saw water that was not sweat dripping off her chin.

  “He said…” she whispered, “he said he’d kill the father.”

  “Did he know who the father was?”

  No answer.

  “Can ye tell me?”

  “Why should I, if I didna tell my brother and my own father doesnae ken yet.”

  “Was it one of Bothwell’s men?”

  There was a telltale little gasp. “How did ye know?”

  “If it was one of the men from about here, ye could marry him and if he was married already he could take the bairn for you.”

  “I may lose it yet.”

  Carey said nothing. Privately he believed that only women who longed for babes ever lost them: the more embarrassing a child was likely to be, the more certain its survival. Unless the mother went to a witch, but he thought this girl not ruthless enough for that. And not brave enough.

  “They say pennyroyal mint will shift it. Do you have any about you, cadger?”

  “No,” said Carey, coldly. Mary Graham sneered at him and went on with the other two teats. The cow shifted experimentally and tipped her hoof. Mary banged unmercifully on the leg and the cow lowed in protest.

  “Would you marry the father if he asked?” pressed Carey, hoping she wouldn’t slap him.

  She didn’t quite: she scowled at him and turned her shoulder to him.

  “Not if he was the Earl himself,” she whispered fiercely.

  Carey nodded. That at least removed the prime suspect, but it confirmed that she must know who killed Sweetmilk. Not that she was likely to tell, even if her father beat her which he no doubt would. Poor lass.

  He let her finish milking the cow and when she rose from her stool and rubbed her back, he too rose to go.

  “Make yourself useful, peddler,” she said to him, “take this over to Mistress Graham for me.”

  Embarrassed into women’s work, Carey took the buckets and carried them out of the byre. Without a yoke to take the surprising weight and steady them he slopped some of the milk and Alison Graham sniffed at him, lifted each one and poured it out and sent him back to swill the buckets with water and take them in to Mary again. He knew perfectly well she’d tell him nothing more and he wasn’t her servant, so when he had done as he was bid, he walked out into the dawn again and yawned and stretched.

  “What will you do about Mary’s bairn?” he asked Mrs Graham when she snorted at him like an irritable horse.

  “Why? Are you offering for her hand?” demanded the mistress. “She’ll take it if ye do.”

  “Er…no…”

  “Then leave her alone. She’s enough to contend with.”

  “Yes missus,” said Carey meekly.

  Friday, 23rd June, dawn

  Dodd was sitting glumly in the cell recently vacated by Bangtail, looking at the neat pile of turds in the corner. He had worn out his fury kicking the stout door and now his toes were sore as well as his stomach and his face and he hadn’t had breakfast.

  The rattle of keys did not make him look up, since he expected it was Lowther come to gloat.

  “Wake up, Dodd,” snapped his wife’s voice, “unless ye want to bide there until your hanging.”

  Looking up produced the extraordinary sight of three very angry women. If Dodd had been classically trained, he would have thought of the three Fates or possibly the Furies. His wife was holding a small loaf and a leather bottle, and the other two, Lady Scrope and Lady Widdrington, were neat, pale and grim-faced.

  “Lowther’s put one of his men at the gate,” said Lady Widdrington, “but Lady Scrope tells me there’s another way out of the castle, some secret passage to the Tile Tower.”

  This was the first Dodd had heard of it, but he supposed it wasn’t the kind of thing generally bandied around. Lady Widdrington put a purse into his hand, and when he got into the passage, he found his wife had piled his jack and sword and helmet into a corner. He drank the ale from the bottle she handed him and gave her a kiss.

  “We haven’t much time,” said Lady Scrope. “My husband says he’s got an ague and won’t do anything, and Lowther’s got the whole castle locked up tight.”

  “It’s too late to stop the Grahams getting to Netherby even on foot,” said Dodd gloomily.

  Janet was helping him into his jack, Lady Widdrington handed him his helmet and sword, even Lady Scrope was helping with the lacings. It was an extraordinary situation to be in.

  “I know that,” said Lady Widdrington impatiently. “All we can do now is stop Bothwell from hanging him when he finds out.”

  “How can we do that?” asked Dodd. “He’s an unchancy bastard to meddle with, that Earl and I dinna…”

  “Dodd, be quiet and listen,” snapped his wife, which annoyed him since she was supposed to listen to him. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to tell her off since she was breaking him out of jail.

  They seemingly had a plan. Surrounding him with their skirts and selves, and with one of Lady Scrope’s velvet cloaks over his head, they simply walked him quickly round to the empty inside of the keep, through the servants’ quarters and to the place in the wall where the well was enclosed, supplying independent water to all the keep. Janet unbolted and pulled down the shutter.

  “Through there,” said Lady Scrope.

  “What?” asked Dodd, appalled.

  “If you climb through the gap,” said Lady Scrope brightly, “and feel about with your feet, you’ll find the rungs of a ladder set into the wall. Climb down until you find another hole in the wall on the opposite side. That’s the entrance to the tunnel that goes to the Tile Tower.”

  Dodd peered through the hole, which was black and smelled very wet and mouldy.

  “Christ Jesus,” he said. To his surprise, no one told him not to swear. He would have thought there would be a chorus.

  “When you get to the Tile Tower,” continue
d Elizabeth Widdrington coldly, “it’s up to you how you get out of the city, but I doubt Lowther knows of this since it’s knowledge passed from Warden to Warden. So he’ll expect you to try for the gate. I’ll have Bangtail try and make the attempt, and no doubt he’ll wind up in here which will serve him right.”

  “What for?”

  “For existing,” said Janet.

  Dodd wasn’t sure if it had been Bangtail who punched him in the kidneys when he was arguing with the Grahams about being locked up in his own jail, but wasn’t inclined to give anybody the benefit of the doubt.

  “What then?” he asked. “If it’s too late to warn Carey to be out of Netherby and Scrope willna move, what can I do?”

  They told him. He hated the sound of it, but he had to agree there didn’t seem anything else to be done. Lady Widdrington gave him one of Carey’s rings in case he needed to produce proof. Janet produced a rope which she passed around his middle and then kissed his face.

  “God keep you, husband,” she said.

  “Bloody hell,” said Dodd, blinking at the hole he was supposed to climb through. Would his shoulders go, or would he be left stuck and kicking? He poked his head through, eased his shoulders, and found that with some wriggling, they fitted. Some bits of stone slipped and fell: there was an awfully long wait, it seemed, before the splash. The place was pitch black. He spread his arms wide, feeling about, and sure enough there were rungs in the wall a little to the side.

  Pulling back with long streaks of mould on his back and chest, he found a lantern being lit by Elizabeth Widdrington. As he was about to snarl he couldn’t be expected to do anything without light, he was nonplussed by this. They really expected him to do it.

  Oh God, what would they do if he refused? He looked at their soft white faces, set like saints’ faces in an unreformed church, and decided he didn’t want to find out. And besides, he wouldn’t put it past Janet to go herself, she was in such a rage and what she would say to him afterwards, he hated to think. A short life and a miserable one, whatever I do, thought Henry Dodd glumly.

  He brought up a stool, climbed on it, poked his shoulders through again and felt for the rungs of the ladder. The first one he found and tested for its strength, promptly came out of the wall at one side.

  “The mortar’s rotten,” he said, thinking maybe he could survive Janet’s fury.

  “Get on with it,” hissed Lady Widdrington, “someone’s coming.”

  It was all very well for her, she wasn’t risking her neck in some horrible deep well…The second rung seemed firm enough to take his weight. He swallowed hard, got a grip on it with both hands and heaved himself through the little hole, the sword on his belt catching and scraping.

  Almost at once, Lady Widdrington put the lantern on the ledge and fitted the shutter back in the hole. He heard the bolts going home as he hung by his hands from the top rung. That was when he thought of taking off his jack, sword and helmet and lowering them down on the rope, but it was too late to do it. Scrabbling desperately with his toes for one below him, he thought that all except the top rungs had fallen out, but at last he found a foothold and could distribute his weight.

  He passed the end of the rope round the top rung and felt down gingerly for the next rung. That one held, he went down a little further, gasping a bit with fear. The rung after that was rotten but the three below it were firm enough.

  It might have taken him two minutes or half an hour to climb down to the little ledge he could dimly see in the light of the lantern above. He couldn’t bring it with him, he didn’t have the hands. Once on the ledge he got his breath back and looked about. There were some rotten wooden boards propped up against the wall, and then he saw the opening of the tunnel on the other side, just as Lady Widdrington had said.

  It wasn’t badly planned, he thought to distract himself as he inched round the ledge towards it. Any besiegers who found the passage would have to reverse what he was doing to get in and it would be a simple matter for the defenders to drop things down on them from above and knock them off. And the ledge was deliberately made too narrow to stand and use a bow. God, it was narrow, and the well was still too deep to see the water. And then, if the garrison wanted to use the passage to make a foray, or get food, they would have control of the well shaft and they could put down planks across the yawning hold so it wasn’t so dangerous.

  Dodd crouched down by the opening, put his head into it and banged his nose on something metal. Cursing and feeling with his hand, he discovered an iron grill, firmly set in the rock.

  “Oh Christ, it’s been blocked up…”

  Sense told him otherwise. If the passage was to be blocked up, they would have done it properly with bricks and mortar, this was a defence. Which meant it could be lifted, perhaps like a portcullis. The light from the lantern high above him was guttering, but he couldn’t bring himself to climb and fetch it and trim the wick. Somewhere by the opening there had to be a…His hand fell onto a lever, and he pulled it down. It was stuck.

  “Come on,” he muttered, wrenching at it. At last it creaked and groaned and the iron grill lifted a little. Just like a portcullis. Sweating freely and feeling sick from the smell of mould, Dodd pulled at the lever again, heard a crunching of gears as the ratchet within the mechanism caught its teeth, and the iron grill lifted up a little higher, and then suddenly something worked and it pulled right out of the way. There were long sharp spikes along the bottom.

  Terrified of being spitted like an animal in a trap, Dodd looked around for something to wedge it with, pulled one of the rotten planks towards him and jammed it in the groove.

  The passage was tiny and slimy and horrible. He didn’t want to go in. On the other hand, he couldn’t climb back up either.

  “Carey, you bastard,” he moaned, pushed his sword in its scabbard in front, put his head in and scraped his shoulders through. There was an ominous creak and whine from the iron gate. Dodd whimpered and crawled forwards on his elbows as fast as he could, heard the rattle and cracking as the rusty chain broke and the wood splintered, and brought his feet up under him just in time, scraping a long hole in his hose and grazing his knees. The iron grill slammed into the holes behind him, and he wanted to be sick.

  He didn’t, it was too unpleasant a thought, having to crawl through it. The passage was bad enough as it was, slimy and stinking of rats and excrement, with little spines of limestone sticking up and hurting his hands and spines of limestone hanging down to bang his head. Why the hell was he doing this for Carey, he didn’t even like the man, what the devil did he care…

  The passage opened out a bit after a few yards of eeling along on his belly, so he could crawl on hands and knees, feeling ahead of himself with his sword, in terror that the roof might have fallen in. There was one place where some stones had fallen down, but he managed to slither through there as well, to find a puddle on the other side.

  He splashed through that, crawled for another age, cursing Carey, Lowther and both Scropes comprehensively, and then the point of his sword rammed into solid stone blocking the way. Not knowing whether his eyes were open or shut, except by the way his sweat was stinging them, he felt the stones. Masonry, tightly packed. He must be at the Tile Tower by now, surely. And surely to God, there was a way out. He felt around, found a small slimy drain that was producing a stink to fell an ox. He thought he must suffocate from it and his head was starting to spin.

  The wall in front of him stayed obstinately immovable. Dodd pushed and heaved with his neck muscles cramping and his knees giving him hell, almost weeping with frustration. He finally lay down flat to rest, and happened to look upwards.

  Either something was wrong with his eyes or there was a tiny squeeze of daylight up there. Above him was no tunnel roof, only a shaft and beside him, now he had calmed down, he could feel some more metal rungs. He sniffed. He thought at last that he knew where he was: this was the garderobe shaft for the Tile Tower, which was one of the lookout towers on the north wall of C
arlisle. It was still in use, clearly, by sentries. God, no wonder the tunnel stank and what exactly was it he’d crawled through…

  “Bastard, bastard, bastard,” he muttered in a litany of ill-usage, as he strapped his sword on again and set himself to climb. The rungs were slippery but they seemed firmer than the ones in the well. At last he found the light coming from a little window above a small stone platform. At that point, he could get his bearings. He was in the outer wall where it was at its thickest, seven or eight yards thick, he thought and couldn’t remember. There must be a way to the outside, or why bother with a passage?

  There was. Part of the wall swivelled and he passed through it. The passage was as narrow as the one from the well, but this one was at least dry. At the end it dipped down where it joined a gutter and when Dodd lowered himself experimentally, he found himself sitting on a ledge about ten feet off the ground to the north of Carlisle, looking out on the Sauceries and the racetrack and the Eden bridge.

  Now afraid of twisting his ankle when he had ten miles to run, Dodd lowered himself down on his arms and fingers, dropped into the soft earth and brambles of the ditch and then sat there for five minutes, gasping and shuddering and swearing all sorts of desperate reformations if God would never make him do that again. At last, with his knees killing him and his legs still rubbery, he scrambled up the other side of the ditch and walked across the rough grass to the river.

  Once he got to the Eden he mopped off some of the green streaks and filth that covered him from head to foot. There were a few curious stares from some of the women washing linen at the rapids, but none of them saw fit to comment. Then he set off along the old Roman road at a fast jog trot, past the banks and ditch of the old Pict’s Wall, heading for Brampton nine miles away where Janet’s father lived with his kin, the first of the men on Carey’s list of those who disliked Lowther. Nobody enjoyed paying blackrent for protection against raiders Lowther brought in himself, but some resented it more than others. Will the Tod Armstrong, Janet’s father, had bent his ear often enough on the subject, God knew.

  The day was hot for the first time in weeks, and Dodd thought seriously about hiding his jack in a bush and coming back for it later. In the end he simply couldn’t bring himself to do it and risk losing an old friend.