Air of Treason, An: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (Sir Robert Carey Mysteries) (23 page)

Leigh sighed as he looked at his troop, all of them bony and bearded, grubby and ragged, very different from the strong brave young men who had followed him from their villages. Four of them, including Jeronimo, were strangers he’d picked up in France. A couple of them had persistent coughs that wouldn’t go away, several of the boniest also had squits that wouldn’t stop. All of them had a harder look in their eye than he liked to see. He sighed again. He had changed too. An older man looked back at him when he trimmed his beard and he knew he was going bald on top. War hadn’t been anything like that glorious adventure the Earl of Essex had so eloquently convinced him to expect.

“Gentlemen,” he said quietly, “is any of you hiding a letter that the Northerner was carrying? A letter to Captain Carey? Some of you may remember him from France?”

Nobody said anything.

“You know I need to see anything of the kind.” Silence. Nobody was blushing, some of them were looking suspiciously at each other.

Leigh felt the stirring of the angry unhappiness that had settled around his gut sometime during the first months in France, felt it twist around his entrails. Just in time, Nick Gorman who had got the Northerner’s suit to replace his remnants of Essex’s livery, he stepped forward.

“There was this in the doublet pocket, sir,” he said, holding out a stained bit of paper. “I didn’t know it was important.”

Leigh took the paper, glanced at it but it was all numbers. A cipher of some kind.

“Jeronimo, can you break codes?”

The Spaniard shrugged, stepped out of his place ahead of the line and took the paper. “I don’t know, Señor,” he said, squinting at it, “Perhaps in Espanish, but…I can try.”

“Thank you.” For a moment Leigh stared worried at Jeronimo. “It turns out you were right about the Northerner. Do you know anything about Captain Carey yourself?”

“The son of Henry Carey, milord Hunsdon?”

“Yes.” The Spaniard smiled radiantly at him, quite shocking in his normally tense face and said something that sounded like
Gracias a Dios
.

“Why? Do you know him too?”

“No Señor, I know of hees family. From when I play lute for the Queen.”

A likely story. Leigh had instantly dismissed Jeronimo’s colourful past as the usual nonsense old soldiers spouted. He thought about the problem. Whom should he send to Oxford with the all-important letter? He could go himself and also try and buy the ribbons they needed, but that meant leaving the men without a leader and that always meant trouble. He could send John Arden but with Arden there was a good chance that he might pop into an alehouse for half a quart and not come out again until all their money was spent. On the other hand, Arden was probably the best second-in-command he had, though he was standing there with his hip cocked, one hand on his sword and a bleary expression on his puffy once-handsome face. He was certainly better than Leigh at planning a fight, should probably have been the captain, but didn’t want the office. He preferred to get drunk every afternoon rather than worry about supplies and getting the men paid. Although it beat Leigh completely where he was getting his drink from.

Leigh sighed again. He couldn’t rely on any of the others and besides it would be better for Carey to be contacted by someone he knew, so it had to be him. He would leave Arden in charge along with Jeronimo and hope for the best.

“Nick,” he said, “I’m afraid we’ll have to swap clothes so I look more respectable and nobody realises what we are. You can have the suit again when I come back. And in the meantime I want you, Tarrant, and Clockface to go and find the Northerner’s remount, a good gelding with a white sock. As it came from the South it’s probably heading back in that direction, trying to find its home and we don’t want that, do we?”

Gorman nodded philosophically and then remembered and tipped his hat. “Yes, sir.”

Meantime Leigh had to make sure the Northerner didn’t take it into his head to make for Oxford on his own, barefoot as he was. He would have to be locked in at night, possibly chained, only they didn’t have any such things, of course. He’d just have to send Harry Hunks down to the carlin again and tell her to keep the man in the pit at night.

Monday 18th September 1592

Kat was munching stolidly through one of the crusts from the bread she brought back from the soldiers while Dodd did the same more cautiously because some of his teeth still felt loose. She had just finished counting up on her fingers.

“There’s twenty-one of ’em,” she said, scowling with the effort. “Then there’s Captain Leigh and John Arden and Jeronimo and Harry Hunks.”

Even Dodd had heard of Harry Hunks. “A bear?” he asked.

“What?”

He explained about the famous London fighting bear of the Eighties that could still be found engraved on horn cups and plates and in stories told on ballad sheets, though he’d died nearly ten years ago. Barnabus had told him all about the star of the bearbaiting.

Kat scowled even more. “I hate him,” she said. “He’s like a bear but he’s bad. He’s horrible. John Arden is nice and gives Granny nice things he finds in the monastery and she gives him her apple aquavitae. Captain Leigh is stupid and stingy and mean and I hate him too.”

“Jeronimo?”

“He’s a furriner,” Kat said dismissively, “a Spaniard who’s dark and skinny and hisses through his teeth sometimes.”

“Ay,” said Dodd.

“So there’s too many of ’em. What can
you
do?”

Dodd contemplated telling her, but decided not to in case she changed her mind again and went back to the soldiers.

Kat had come to him as he awkwardly dug a trench from a sitting position, using a small wooden trowel, for the old grandam to plant more winter cabbages in. Kat was still carrying her bag with the bread in it and her cheeks were flushed with fury and her eyes steely slits.

“If I tell you about the men at the old monastery, will you promise to kill them?” she had demanded. “Especially Captain Leigh?”

Well that was easy enough. “Ah cannae promise I’ll do it,” Dodd told her, “but I promise I’ll try.”

She paused, thinking about it.

“Yes well,” she said after a moment, “you don’t have to do all of them, just Captain Leigh.”

“Ay.”

“He promised me a shilling for what I could find out and didn’t pay me last time and he didn’t pay me this time so he owes me two shillings for my dowry and I hate him.”

You’ve a cousin in Carlisle, Dodd thought, highly amused and wishing the Courtier was there to manage the conversation with an angry little maid. She cocked her head on one side.

“So I’ll tell you everything the captain told me not to tell anyone and then you can decide how to kill him.”

Dodd had listened carefully while the child spilled out her fierce heart to him. It seemed the tale of the broken men was a disgraceful one of noble promises unkept, but common enough. You hardly ever got paid for soldiering, bar what you could steal or kill for, everyone knew that. It seemed that the unfortunate Captain Leigh still hadn’t worked it out.

“What happened to the last messenger they caught?”

“Oh, he was all right. They just knocked him out and took his stuff and then when he was a bit better, Captain Leigh came along and said they’d got his duds and message back from the robbers and off he went again, on foot of course, as they had his horse. They got some wagons a while ago too and they were pleased with that and the men guarding it didn’t fancy a fight and ran off back to London.”

“So Leigh will use me to get hisself an audience with the Earl of Essex?”

“I suppose so. He thinks he can talk his lord into paying him.”

Dodd laughed once at this and then clamped down again. It was a serious matter. The men of Leigh’s troop had put a brave on him but they hadn’t killed him when it would have been easy to do it. At first he had taken this as an insult like Heneage’s, that they thought him some nithing that need not be feared for vengeance. But perhaps it hadn’t occurred to them that he might be a man of parts, even if he was in a foreign county. On the other hand, he intended to get his gear back, particularly his sword, his knife, and his boots. His hip felt very strange without the weight of a weapon on it and his feet were already cold and sore.

Who would go to put the bite on Carey? He hadn’t seen the Spaniard, but had seen the drunken walk of John Arden and the large shaggy man with a slight limp that had looked coldly at him. Probably Leigh would go himself as he already knew Carey from France. Hmm. That would be good.

“Whit happened to the monks in the monastery when the King’s men came?” Dodd asked.

Kat shrugged. “My grandam said they were just a few stupid old men and boys by then and they tried to fight so they all got killed and they burnt some of the monastery. So it’s haunted, of course.”

“Ay, do the soldiers ken that?”

“Grandam told Captain Leigh when he came but he laughed at her and said he didn’t think so. But it
is
haunted.”

“Ay.” Dodd rubbed his bottom lip with his thumb. The glimmerings of an idea was coming to him. For complexity and madness it was one nearly worthy of Carey himself, perhaps being near the Courtier was causing him to catch courtierlike ways of thinking. Still.

“Grandam told the boy Nick Gorman when he came to get cheese from us, she warned him about the ghosts of the burnt monks and he didn’t laugh. Captain Leigh came and told her off, he said no good Protestant believed in superstition like that and Papists couldn’t hurt Godly men like them anyway.”

Dodd tutted. He’d never heard of a ghost that cared about such things.

“Kat,” he said, “I want ye to go back to Captain Leigh and act verra nice tae him. Can ye do that?” She frowned, opened her mouth to say something. “Not to be friends again but to find things out from him. I want ye to find oot who he’s sending tae my master and what he’s doing next. And get me some paper.”

“Can you write then?”

“Ay, but dinna let on.”

It was a useful test. If she came back with paper as he hoped, then he’d know he might trust her which was important for the most complicated part of his plan. If she came back alongside Leigh demanding to know why he’d lied about his ability to read, then he might be in for another leathering but he’d know what he needed to about Kat. Her face had suddenly fallen.

“But what about your leg? How can you kill Captain Leigh with that?”

“Whit about it?”

She looked at the splint and then stopped. He put his finger on his lips and winked and got from her the first real smile he’d ever seen on her face.

Then she dusted crumbs from her greasy kirtle and jumped to her feet and trotted determinedly away with her wooden clogs clacking on the cobblestones of the path.

The old woman came out later and watched him at his digging with her hands on her hips.

“Will ye have that ready by this evening, Goodman?” she demanded.

“Ay,” he said, “the dog’s helping.”

The dog had done some digging and found a greenish bone which he was gnawing on quite happily. Suddenly he lifted his head and sniffed the air, then whined nervously, pawed the bone back into the earth and skulked round to hide behind Dodd.

The carlin went out to the front of the cottage and Dodd could hear the big bearlike man called Harry Hunks tramping to the front door in Dodd’s own boots. The sound of talking came to him. Quick as he could, he hopped over to listen by the path and caught Harry Hunks’ last sentence.

“…and make sure he sleeps, we don’t want him getting out.”

“The pit will hold him, Harry, he’s broken his leg.”

“Make sure he don’t get out or I’ll burn your cottage.”

“Captain Leigh wouldn’t like that.”

“Then I’ll kill your dog.”

Nothing more, so Dodd hopped back and sat down by his trench just in time. Harry Hunks loured round the side of the cottage and pointed at him.

“You!” he shouted. “You stay put or I’ll break your other leg.”

Dodd did his best to look cowed, touched his capless head and quavered “Yes, sir!” at the big lout. Harry Hunks turned about and stamped away, damaging Dodd’s good boots by kicking a hole in the hurdles of the goat pen as he went.

Dodd’s belly gave a great growl and grumble then which wasn’t surprising since he hadn’t eaten all day. He went over and shoved back the inquiring goat’s head that instantly came through the gap.

“Missus,” he called, “ye’ll need tae move yer goats.”

The grandam came out the back of the cottage, saw the damage and shook her head. Then she hobbled over and put a halter round the billy kid’s neck. There was a nanny kid as well that she haltered and the two others were nannies with still-heavy udders.

The grandam dragged the two half-grown kids back toward the cottage, both protesting at being separated from their mothers. The nannies pushed through the gate to follow.

“You can herd the nannies, if you’re minded to, Goodman,” shouted the carlin.

“Ay missus,” said Dodd, who caught the nannies by a horn each and looked them in the long-pupilled eyes. One said “Neh!” in a testy way, so she was the one he led ahead of the others and they came quietly enough. It was as well to respect rank among goats as well as men.

Kat had joined them by the time the goats were in their tumbledown shed beside the cottage and Dodd had already mended the hurdle. She was looking smug and she whispered at him,

“Can you milk goats?”

The question irritated him. Of course he could milk goats, he could milk anything with teats and had once milked a sow for a bet and nearly got his nose bitten off. “Ay,” he said.

“Can Mr. Elliot help me with the milking, Grandam?” asked Kat artlessly and the old woman nodded. The day was cooling and Dodd wondered where the pit was where he’d sleep that night. He hadn’t expected that there would be room for all three of them in the bothy with its yard-high walls, quite apart from the propriety of it.

The child brought a stool and two good big earthenware bowls to the shed, sat down and started on the younger nanny’s udder, pulling at the teats roughly and impatiently. Dodd squatted by the older one, rubbed her flanks, butted his head a couple of times where a kid would nuzzle and made a quiet goat noise. Then he licked his fingers and wibbled the teats, rubbed the spit on. As soon as the first few drops had oozed out, he started the rhythmic work with his hands which he hadn’t done since he went to Carlisle. It took him right back to his boyhood when he’d had four goats to milk every morning and evening. The goat let down her milk almost at once and he soon filled the bowl with warm milk to the brim. Then because his stomach was griping him something terrible and he wasn’t convinced the carlin would waste any supper on him, he ducked his head and milked a stream of warm creamy milk straight into his mouth.