Air of Treason, An: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (Sir Robert Carey Mysteries) (28 page)

After some more thought he sat up again and looked at his feet. They were a sad sight, bruised, muddy, still bleeding in a couple of places. He pulled the thorns out with his fingernails and as he didn’t have any water to wash them with, he carefully pissed on them which stung but at least left them cleaner. Then he strapped the splints on again. After that there was no sound from the old woman so he might as well go back to sleep as there was no chance she would feed him.

Yet she did. She woke him with more thrown pebbles and then let down a pail with bread, cheese, and a quart of ale which Dodd assumed would be full of valerian and wild lettuce. He was thirsty from all the running around and needed his rest, so he drank half of it. And had to admit that the old woman’s green goat cheese was excellent, maybe better than Janet’s.

Ay, Janet. He’d have some tales to tell her of the south. She’d laugh her spots off, his freckled leopard of a wife and then he’d see to her, ay, he’d see to her well and perhaps he’d plant a child in her this time.

He was dozing in the middle of a particularly pleasant daydream of something unusual he could do with fine goat’s cheese if his wife would only cooperate, when the branch he’d dragged behind him to hide his tracks came over the edge of the pit and landed in front of him.

He’d hidden the stolen knife by driving it into the earth between two stones and so he stood and moved closer to it.

A man in a morion was standing near the dressed stones at the edge of the pit, idly pointing a loaded and cocked crossbow down at him one handed. His other sleeve was folded up short.

“Señor Elliot,” said the Spanish accented voice.

“Ay,” Dodd said after a moment. The man had him cold, nothing he could do about it, so he sat down on the pile of bracken and crossed his legs.

“Last night,” said the Spaniard, hissing in through his teeth like a man hiding that he was wounded, “it was very
divertido
, eh? An excellent
camisado
attack.”

Dodd shrugged. “It wasnae me, whatever it was,” he said, more for form’s sake than anything else, as he didn’t expect this one to believe him. “What’s a camisado attack?”

The bony hawk face smiled briefly. “A night attack. We call it camisado because the attackers have shirts over his armours so they look equal as the sleepers.”

“Ay?” said Dodd, interested. You wouldn’t call a night attack that in the Borders, of course, because everyone would be wearing jacks, whether they’d been asleep or no. These Southerners were pitiful, really.

“The thing is strange,” said the Spaniard, “No deaths. None killed. Why not, Señor Elliot?”

Dodd shrugged again

“I watched with admiration,” said the Spaniard, “one man against twenty-five idiots, what a chaos!”

Dodd said nothing, didn’t see the point.

“My name, Señor Elliot, is Don Jeronimo de la Quadra de Jimena.”

He said it as if it should mean something to Dodd, as if he was stating his surname, but of course Dodd didn’t know anything about Spanish surnames.

“You are Don Roberto Carey his man, yes?”

Did don mean sir in foreign? “Ay,” said Dodd.

“He send you find me?”

Dodd almost said no, but then he thought it might be more interesting if he lied. So he did that. “Ay sir,” he said, “but he didna tell me why. I was tae bring ye to him.”

The man frowned so Dodd sighed and said it again more Southern. He knew Carey would back him, whatever this was about. The grizzled soldier nodded slowly. Then he took out the bolt and released the crossbow string, squatted down at the edge of the pit. Dodd watched with interest as he filled his clay pipe one-handed with Dodd’s expensive medicinal tobacco and started smoking.

“I like this herb,” said the Spaniard, “very good. Did Don Roberto tell you anything?”

“Why would he?”

“No. What do you intend tonight?”

Dodd had never heard such a cheeky question in his life. What did the foreigner think he’d say?

“Sleep,” he said coldly, “as I did last night.” He was watching the Spaniard from below so the shape of the face was different, but then as Jeronimo turned his face away and winced for some reason, he suddenly knew him. It was the man who had stared at him at the Oxford road inn. He almost said something about it but then he decided it could wait. If Jeronimo was the one responsible for all the pain and aggravation he’d suffered since Saturday night, Dodd didn’t want him alerted to his doom. And when Dodd caught a whiff of the smoke from his pipe, he could have killed him just for the tobacco.

“Señor, let us tell a little tale. Shall we say that some…yes, some
diablito
creeps into the burned monastery and cause chaos, what is his purpose?” Dodd shrugged. “You could have slit some throats, taken back your sword. But no. So what was your purpose?”

“I didna do it,” Dodd told him. “I was asleep.”

Jeronimo sighed. “Señor,” he said, “I know you are a man of virtue, I know you are more than you say. Perhaps I talk to Captain Leigh of what I see and you not play your game again. Perhaps I hamstring you.”

Dodd had to hide a flinch. Cut the cords at the backs of his legs so he couldn’t walk? Christ, please, no. But Jeronimo could do it, if he had enough men on his side. Dodd had no doubt that he would be willing to do it.

“Or you cure my childish curiosity,” said the Spaniard with another hiss of pain, adding more of Dodd’s tobacco to his pipe and puffing. No more of the smoke was coming into the pit, it was all going upwards, damn it.

The maddest part of his plan came back to him. Maybe? Dodd stood up. “Whit d’ye think to the Captain, Don Jeronimo?” he asked.

The Spaniard shrugged. “He is adequate though not very bright. He is
flojo
. Lazy. I come to England with him for protection, company. There must be a captain and I do not want it. I was many things, Señor, a musician, an assassin, a soldier, a Courtier, a captain, a hero, a cripple, many many things. I have no desire for being a captain again. I have other business here. And I will die soon.”

“How d’ye know?”

Jeronimo sighed, put down his pipe on a stone and pulled up one of his canion breeches to show his thigh. His leg was covered with ugly black spots and sores. Dodd felt sick. Was it plague? No. Couldn’t be. He’d be lying down, not walking around waving a crossbow.

“It is a canker. I asked a physician in France, a good one, though a Jew. He had seen such things. It was first one mole, it bled, it itched. Then it grew, it had children. Some become sores. Now I have pain and stones in my
estomago
, now I have a thing like a rock in my liver and I bleed sometime like a woman.”

“Och,” said Dodd, because he couldn’t help it. His legs felt wobbly. He hated sickness, hated it. Men with swords you could fight. What could you do against black spots or a rock in your belly? Bleed like a woman? From his arse? Och God.

Jeronimo smiled slightly. “So, all men die and I will die soon. I hoped once it would be bravely, in battle. It makes no matter. But I have a business in England now. When I was young and clever and very stupid, I try to please my natural father with a great deed—but it went badly. Later I lose my arm and my music, I think this pays for it, but when I make confession to a priest last Easter, he say no. I must make it right.”

Jeronimo shrugged and grimaced. “I should go to a more easy priest. But he was right so I set off to do it, and here I am.”

“Ay,” said Dodd, cautiously, wondering what was coming next.

“Don Roberto is son of el conde Hunsdon, no?”

“Ay.”

“Hunsdon is a bastard and so I am too. He is bastard of the King, me…Less important. I must see his sister, the Queen,” said the Spaniard, “That is all.”

Dodd’s jaw dropped. “See the Queen?” he repeated.

“Si, Señor, Her Majesty the Queen Isabella of England.”

“Why?”

“My business, Señor. Can your master manage such a thing?”

“Ay, he could,” Dodd said instantly, seeing no call to disappoint the old madman. “But why should he? Men pay hundreds of pounds for a chance just tae talk to the Queen.” Jeronimo nodded.

“It is sure,” he said. “She will wish to see me. All I need is the man to…ah…to connect.”

“But…” Madman, assassin? Why else would a foreigner want to speak directly to the Queen? Dodd set his jaw. “Why?”

Jeronimo tutted. “Only give me your word of honour you will speak to your lord, Señor Elliot.”

Dodd folded his arms and looked up narrow-eyed at the man. “And?”

“I will let you go, free you.”

“No,” he said.

“Why no?”

“Ah dinna ken who ye are nor why ye might wantae see the Queen, but I can guess since you’re Spanish. So ye can go to hell.”

“I will not harm her, not a hair of her head.”

“No.”

“I swear it on my soul.”

“No.”

“Why so much trouble, so much chaos and no killings, Señor Elliot? How can we agree?”

Don’t threaten my hamstrings, Dodd thought, don’t put me at risk of hanging, drawing and quartering. Instead he showed his teeth. “Let’s call vada and I’ll see your prime,” he said, a phrase he had picked up from Carey. “Help me and I’ll think about it.”

“I will bring the ladder.”

“Och,” Dodd shook his head at the man’s ignorance. Still he was nobbut a foreigner, he couldn’t help it. “Nay, I’ll want more than that.”

“Indeed? What, Señor?”

Dodd told him, leaving out some important details in case this was all some elaborate ploy of Leigh’s to interrogate him. Jeronimo started to laugh which got a sour look from the old woman as she came past with her small flock of goats. Then the Spaniard took his hat off to Dodd and walked away, leaving Dodd with nothing to do but worry that he’d been coney-catched himself and that Leigh would come back from Oxford and slice his hamstrings so his legs would be like a broken puppet’s, unable to stand. And Christ, bleeding like a woman from a rock in your belly. It made his skin shiver just thinking about things like that.

Tuesday 19th September 1592, morning

Somebody was shaking Carey awake. It was Ross. Carey sat up, feeling groggy which was a very strange experience because normally he was awake before dawn and out of bed immediately. Was this how Dodd felt every morning? Poor man. The night had been full of complicated incomprehensible dreams about Elizabeth Widdrington.

“You’ve a lady visitor, Sir Robert,” said Ross, looking amused. “Best get up and look tidy.”

Carey rubbed his face, wondered who it was. Couldn’t be the Queen, she was at Woodstock palace by now, resting, and she’d roust him out to visit her, not the other way round. Couldn’t be his mother, please God, she should be on the high seas on her way back to Cornwall. Couldn’t be Emilia as she had been such a hit with the Earl of Essex. God, he was stupid this morning. If only there was some potion you could drink which would wake you up.

“Who is it?”

“M’Lady Blount, sir.”

“Who?”

“The ex-Dowager Lady Leicester.”

Jesus Christ, Lettice Knollys as was, his cousin. The woman who had snaffled the Earl of Leicester from the Queen. It came back to him slowly that Thomas Blount, one of her son’s hangers-on, had scandalously become her third husband.

“What? What’s she doing here? She’s not supposed to come to Court, the Queen can’t stand her.”

Ross managed not to smile. “Well sir, the Court’s not arrived yet officially and nor has the Queen so she’s here to see her son, I expect.”

“Oorgh. What time is it?”

“Half past eight o’the clock, sir. My lord Earl of Cumberland said not to wake you.”

“That late?”

Carey swung his legs to the floor as the camp bed creaked its straps under him. How on earth had he slept so long? Normally he was awake the minute dawn came, no matter what time he went to bed. Was he hungover?

Hmm. Perhaps still a bit poisoned. But at least his eyes weren’t as bad as they had been. The light coming through the tent walls wasn’t actually hurting him. He rubbed his face again, felt bristles around his goatee.

“Do you know how to shave a man, Mr. Ross?”

“Not really, sir. I’ll send for some hot water and a razor.”

“Please apologise to Lady Blount and explain that I’m not in a fit state to see her yet but I’ll be as quick as I can. Get her sweet wine and some wafers and sweetmeats if you can find any.”

Twenty minutes later, wearing a fresh shirt belonging to the Earl of Cumberland (who owed him at least five from the abortive
camisado
attack in France a year before), beard trimmed, cheeks shaved, hair combed, hat pulled down low against the grey daylight, clean falling band and his forest green hunting doublet unbuttoned at the top in the fashionable melancholy style, Carey breezed into the marquee where Lady Blount was sitting, magnificent on a cushioned stool which was entirely drowned by her large wheel farthingale.

“My lady cousin,” he said making a full Court bow with a flourish of his hat, “how delightful to see you here!”

She was the daughter of his aunt, Katherine Knollys, she of the lost riding habit, and the mother of the Earl of Essex by her first husband Walter Devereux. She had earned the Queen’s undying hatred because, after her husband, the first Earl of Essex died conveniently in an Irish bog of a flux, she had firmly set her cap at and succeeded in stealing the Queen’s only real love, to wit, one Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. She had been a beautiful woman in her youth, flame-haired, white skin, blue eyes, but had got quite stout recently. She made no concessions to this and creaked in a low cut pointed bodice plunging into her vast farthingale in eye-watering yellow brocade and emerald-green velvet. Her feathered hat was tilted on her white cap and her famous red curls peeked out under it, quite possibly helped by alchemical magic. Her face was well made-up so she looked like a child’s poppet with her white skin and red cheeks, and her hands were heavy with rings. She no longer looked so similar to the Queen as she had in her youth because the Queen was still slender and she was not.

“Well Robin, what have you been doing to yourself?” she cooed maliciously. “Are you hungover again? You really shouldn’t drink so much.…”