Air of Treason, An: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (Sir Robert Carey Mysteries) (3 page)

However he had, no doubt, severely annoyed his father and infuriated his mother, quite apart from leaving Dodd in the lurch. He had done it because he had put together in his mind what had really been going on with the sale of Cornish lands and the Jesuit priest. And it had made a picture that appalled him.

The clue that had given him the whole plot had been that code name “Icarus.” If he was right about who Icarus really was…if…That was why he was here.

Unfortunately, he didn’t think the Earl would want to hear what he had to say, and if he did listen would probably be extremely angry as well. Carey sighed. And that would mean the Queen would be angry with him and so he’d have very little chance of coming away with his warrant or his fee. Particularly not the fee.

Carey scowled at his horse’s ears and pulled again at his regrown goatee as they carried on down the winding road to the village.

There had been a whole host of excellent reasons why he had grabbed at the chance to become deputy warden of the West March under his brother-in-law, Lord Scrope. One reason could be summed up as the
problem
of the Earl of Essex.

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was his second cousin via the scandalous and outrageous Lettice Knollys, the earl’s mother and his Aunt Katherine’s daughter. Carey was related to an awful lot of the Queen’s Court where the ties of blood were both useful and dangerous. With Robert Devereux it wasn’t just about family.

He had liked and admired the man. He still did. There was something about him. But what was it? Time and again the Earl had done something, said something so outrageously stupid or hotheaded that Carey had been on the verge of turning his back on his cousin. Always in the past he had kept faith with the man. But it was becoming more and more difficult.

Take the summer of 1591 for instance. The Earl of Essex had insisted on taking men to France to help the King of Navarre win the throne of France. Carey, up to his eyes in debt again, had gone with him, the first time since the Armada that he had gone to war.

There in the pinched, muddy, and ugly campaign with Henri of Navarre, he had found out many things about himself. One of them was that he was actually good at war. He had found that he was a good commander and could keep his men both alive and at his side. His desertion rate was half anybody else’s. He had hit it off well with Navarre, who was a very canny fighter indeed and had offered him a permanent place at his side.

Robert Devereux looked every inch the perfect leader—large, loud, magnificent, very good at hand-to-hand combat, chivalrous, honourable…

He was useless. He was sloppy. He didn’t send out scouts. He didn’t understand anything about artillery. He didn’t pay attention to the lie of the land. He didn’t see the lie of the man either—how the King of Navarre never really committed himself to the alliance. Sure enough, in the end, Navarre left Essex and the English to hold Sluys and then went off and raided fat countryside while they guarded his back.

Carey didn’t blame the man; he was doing what princes do, but why hadn’t Essex seen what was going to happen when Carey could so easily? They had all missed out on good plunder and got bogged down in the damp flux-ridden misery of a siege.

He shook his head and glanced back past the pack pony to young Hughie. The man must have been gangling a few years ago but had now filled out and probably didn’t realise how dangerous he looked with his broad shoulders, big limbs, and saturnine face. Like most Scots he always looked as if he was nursing a grievance until you spoke to him and then his face opened out with a smile and was almost pleasant. It remained to be seen if he knew one end of a needle from the other and Carey would wait a while before he trusted his face to the man’s razor.

Hughie was looking up the road past Carey. “Whit’s that?” He pointed, then blushed and added, “sir?”

It was a mummer’s cart, brightly decorated and full of costumes and scenery with a tent on top. At first Carey thought it was stuck, but then he caught sight of a very small personage in bright gold-and-black brocade with farthingale sleeves, sitting on a white pony looking very annoyed. Her tiny size and childish face made her anger funny. However, Carey knew that it would be most unwise to laugh at the Queen’s Senior Fool and muliercula, Thomasina de Paris. She had two women with her and two men in the livery of the Master of the Revels. They were all some way back from the cart.

There was a boy driving the cart, looking very hangdog.

“If you don’t know who I am,” shouted the tiny creature, “then I’ve got no further use for you. And in any case I heard you left one of your company behind in London, sick with plague.”

Carey reined in at once. An old man was climbing up clumsily from the depths of the cart, sweating heavily in the sudden sunlight, his face pale. He had a rash on the middle of his forehead, spreading down his nose.

Thomasina instantly backed her pony away from the cart. “Stay there!” she shouted. “No nearer.”

Carey opened his pistol case.

The old man got down unsteadily from the cart and stood there, holding onto it with one hand. He coughed.

“How long since you left London?”

“A few days…” started the hangdog boy.

“Last spring,” shouted the man hoarsely. “We’ve not been in London since…April.”

“And where’s your Fool?”

The boy started to cry. “Left us!” shouted the man. “Went his own way.”

“How dare you!” shrieked Thomasina. “How dare you bring plague near the Queen’s Court? Get away! Go back to London at once and stay there until you’ve got better or died.” The high voice was tinged with the London stews and the mummer stepped back at her fury.

The old mummer swayed by his cart, his mouth opening and shutting, bright blood on his lips.

Carey began loading his pistol. Sometimes men went crazy in the first onset of plague, as their fever rose and they became delirious. That’s why they had to be shut up in their houses, cruel though it was, because if you came within ten feet of them you could catch it and die and all your family with you. Half the purpose of the Queen’s summer progresses was to get her out of London and away from the plague.

“We’ve got no money,” sniffled the boy. “He said we had to come because we haven’t got no money what with the theatres all shut and Mr. Byrd wanted singers.”

Thomasina pulled a small purse from her saddlebag and threw it to the boy. “Get yourselves back to London,” she said to him more gently. “Keep away from people. If any of you are alive in six weeks’ time, you may apply to the Master of the Revels again.”

The old man was shouting hoarsely again, making no sense at all, about how he was owed money and he had a new play and the rest would catch up with them. The boy started crying again. Neither of the Master of the Revels’ men had firearms and were standing there looking as if they were about to bolt.

Carey rode up beside Thomasina and aimed his pistol at the man. It was a long shot and he hadn’t wound his other dag, so he rested the gun’s barrel on his left wrist and breathed out to steady his pounding heart. With those death-tokens on him, shooting the old man would be doing him a kindness.

Another lad, with bandages round his neck, climbed trembling out of the cart and persuaded the old man back into it. Thomasina had acknowledged Carey’s backing with a quick glance and a lift of her shoulder. He saw she had a throwing knife in her right hand, from the sheaf she kept under her wide sleeves. Although she was only three-and-a-half-foot tall, her childlike round face had a few lines on it. She could still pass as a child if she wanted to, and perhaps she did. She had begun as a tumbler at Paris Garden and was as good with throwing knives as Carey’s previous servant, Barnabus.

They took their mounts widely around the stricken cart, Carey keeping his pistol pointed at the mummers all the way. One of the Master of the Revels’ men stayed on the road to be sure the mummers didn’t try coming into Rycote again. No doubt all of them would die out there in the field.

Thomasina was shaking her head and puffing out her breath as she slipped her knife back under her brocade sleeve. Once they had put some distance between themselves and the plague, Carey bowed to Thomasina from the saddle. “Mistress Thomasina,” he said to her, “what an unexpected pleasure!”

“Ha! You’re not sickening for anyfing yourself, are you?” she snapped at him, “I heard your servant got plague and died of it.”

“Mistress,” said Carey reproachfully, “do you think I would be coming to Court if I had knowingly been near the plague? That wasn’t what he died of.” And how the devil did she know that?

“What about
him
? Is that Sergeant Henry Dodd that I hear so much about?”

Hughie’s mount pecked suddenly. “Er…no, that’s Hughie Tyndale, my new manservant.”

Hughie’s mouth was half-open and he looked shocked. Perhaps he was recovering from his new master treating someone who looked like an overdressed little girl with such respect. Or maybe he was frightened by the plague.

“Oh, ’e got plague then?” asked Thomasina.

“Not as far as I know, mistress. There hasn’t been plague at Court, surely?”

She shook her head. “We’ve been on progress since before it started to spread in London. If I had my way, I’d let nobody come near the Queen what hadn’t been in quarantine at least forty days and scrubbed with vinegar as well.”

“Surely with the Court around her…”

“It’s the idiot players and musicians all coming up from London to make their fortunes. As if there weren’t enough of them in Oxford already.” Her voice was changing back to the way courtiers spoke but she turned and fixed him with gimlet eyes. “So what are you doing here?”

Carey almost coughed but stopped himself. “Really I’m on my way north for the raiding season after my father very inconveniently ordered me south,” he said. “I want to speak to my lord Earl of Essex urgently. After that I’ll be on my…”

Thomasina snorted. “So you won’t want to talk to the Queen?”

“Of course,” Carey continued smoothly, “I would be utterly delighted if you could arrange an audience for me, Mistress Thomasina, but I know what it’s like on progress and…”

Thomasina’s brown eyes were narrowed. “Hmm. Well, there might be something you could do for me. I can’t promise, but…”

Heart hammering again with the hope that he might actually be able to talk to the Queen directly and even (please God!) get his wardenry fee and warrant, Carey took off his hat, held it against his heart and bowed low in the saddle.

“Mistress, if you can bring me to the Queen, I will forever be in your debt…”

“Yes, yes, Sir Robert, I know all about you and your debts, no need to add to them. You can do me a small service first and then we’ll see, eh?”

“Whatever you want, mistress.”

He couldn’t leave his dag shotted and wound when he put it back in the case and he didn’t like the thought of trying to unload it while riding—always a ticklish business which could take your hand off if the powder exploded at the wrong moment. He aimed at a crow sitting on a branch ahead and pulled the trigger.

He missed. The crow flew off the branch in a puff of feathers and the other crows rose up into the sky cawing and diving. Thomasina’s pony skittered, the pack pony came to a dead stop, and Hughie’s horse pirouetted for a moment before he got it under control again. Carey’s own horse was a hunter and not at all concerned. Thomasina’s two women were walking and one of them jumped and clutched the other, while the Master of the Revels man looked near fainting. He smiled at the thought of what Dodd would likely think of such jumpiness at gunfire.

“Where are you planning to stay?” Thomasina wanted to know. “With your elder brother? Your father’s already in Oxford, I think.”

“Er…no.”

“Suing him, are you?”

“No, that’s my brother Henry who stole my legacy. But George thinks he can still order me around.”

“You won’t find space with his grace the Earl of Essex. He’s just sent most of his men ahead to find a good place for his pavilions at Oxford, so he’s in the manor house with the Queen and Lord Norris.”

“I would very much like to see him…”

“Don’t push it, Sir Robert. I have no pull at all with Essex.” Her face was wry with distaste. “How’s your reverend father?”

“Very well, mistress, thank you…in good health.”

She smiled then. “Now he’s a good lord, keeps the old-fashioned ways.” Once upon a time, Thomasina had been one of his creatures on display at Paris Garden stews, bought from Gypsies. She had learned her tumbling there and Lord Hunsdon had been the person who showed her to the Queen at a masque.

“In trouble with him again, are you?” she asked, seeing through him as usual.

“Er…possibly.”

“Well, try the Master of the Revels then.” She tapped the white palfrey onward with a whip decorated with crystal beads that flashed in the sun. “You could make yourself useful there.”

“How? My tumbling is middling to poor and my acting…”

She sniffed at his sarcasm. “You can sing, Sir Robert, and he now has a desperate need for good tenors ’cos one of ’em’s dead of plague and the other’s dying on that cart. I’ll find you later.”

She gestured for Carey to go past her and so he went to a canter up the path.

Saturday 16th September 1592, afternoon

They had to rein in well before they got to the church, the place was such a bedlam of tents, carts, fashionable carriages bogged in the mud, servingmen, people generally. You could hardly move at all. No women under the age of thirty were visible, but boys were running about everywhere because this was the Queen’s Court, not the King of Scotland’s, and propriety was usually observed.

All the main barns were guarded by the Queen’s Gentlemen Pensioners in the red-and-black livery from her father’s Court that they wore on ordinary days, no doubt because the harbingers and heralds would have stockpiled food in them for the progress, bought on treasury tickets in advance. They were oases of order.

The rest of the village was essentially a fair. At the back of the church some large makeshift clay ovens stood surrounded by faggots of wood with more being brought in on the backs of trudging peasants.