Nixon’s lip lifted. ‘Some whore’s get trod on it in an alley, Sunday night,’ he said. He looked down and shifted his feet; Archie was putting leg irons round his boots.

Carey took the keys from Barker in the passage by the wine cellar, opened up the heavy door to the outer dungeon and Nixon shuffled clankingly inside, sat down on the stone bench. He looked at Carey hopelessly.

‘Where’s Kate?’ he asked.

‘In the Gatehouse prison,’ Carey said as he swung the door shut and locked it. ‘You can’t see her.’

Leaving Barker in charge, Carey and Archie Give-it-Them changed horses and hurried back to the gate which was just closing. They cantered out of Carlisle and over the Eden bridge to catch up with Dodd for the patrol. Carey squinted up at the sky as he rode. The roof of clouds had an ugly grey bulbous look and the sun’s last rays squeezed under its lower fringes.

‘More rain, Archie,’ he said conversationally.

‘Ye’ll not be sleepin’ in yer boots again,’ nagged Dodd’s voice from the door. He was standing there, stinking only slightly now, holding a trencher of bread and cheese and a jug of beer and looking embarrassed.

‘Er... no, Sergeant,’ said Carey, starting to undo his laces slowly.

‘Ay,’ said Dodd dubiously. ‘Well, I brung ye some vittles, seeing ye dinna have the sense of a child that way.’

‘Well, I...’

‘Nobbut a fool sleeps in his boots if he doesnae have to,’ continued Dodd in an aggressively sulky tone. ‘And even a fool will eat occasionally.’

He put the food on the largest chest, came over and helped Carey take off his armour, shook it and hung it on the jackstand to drip. The feeling of lightness and freedom that came with the sudden removal from his body of about fifty pounds’ weight of iron plates and leather padding, almost made Carey’s head spin. With the dour expression that said he was a free man doing favours, Dodd helped Carey pull off his riding boots, always a two-man job if they fitted properly. Then he lit a couple of tapers off the watch-light, went to the bed and started to draw the still shut curtains aside.

‘Och,’ he said in a strangled tone of voice.

Carey was pulling off his smelly dank shirt streaked with brown from his wet jack. He went to look at what Dodd had found. Could it be worse than the corpse of Sweetmilk Graham which had welcomed him to Carlisle a couple of weeks ago?

It could. The yellow lymer bitch who had been his bedfellow earlier lifted her head and growled softly in her throat. She had pupped on the bed; there were three yellow naked ratlings squirming in the curve of her belly.

Carey looked at her and blinked. ‘Oh God,’ he sighed.

‘Shall I have her off there?’ asked Dodd, obviously working hard not to laugh.

Carey had to smile. It was funny, in a perverse sort of way.

‘No. Leave her.’

He turned to put on his fresh shirt and then paused, looked again, having difficulty focusing his eyes. The bitch was whining softly, nosing at her tail end. Her flanks heaved, but nothing happened.

‘There’s something wrong here,’ he said.

Dodd frowned and looked closer. ‘Ay,’ he said. ‘She’s havin’ difficulty.’

He put out his hand to touch her and the bitch snapped at him warningly. Carey came close and tried as well, but she only sniffed at him and whined heartrendingly.

‘There, there,’ he muttered. ‘It’s all right, sweeting.’

Dodd brought a lit taper and put it on the watch-light shelf in the bedhead.

‘Bring me another taper, an unlit one,’ Carey said, kneeling down and peering at the bitch’s rear end. That was another counterpane ruined, he thought absently—would Philadelphia have a replacement?

He could see something in her birth passage, but another heaving effort from the bitch moved it no further out. Dodd gave him the unlit taper and had a cautious look.

‘It’s stuck,’ he said.

Carey nodded. He had seen what you did when that happened because he had spent a great deal of his boyhood in Berwick earning beatings for running away from his tutor to play with his father’s hunting dogs in the kennels.

‘Shall I fetch the kennelman?’ Dodd asked.

Carey was using the tallow from the taper to grease his fingers. He yawned and shook his head to try and wake himself up a bit more.

‘I’ll have a try. She looks as if she’s been straining for hours,’ he said. ‘Would you hold her head in case she snaps at me?’

Dodd did as he was asked. Carey lifted her tail and gently put his fingers in. The pup had a big head which was the reason for the trouble. Very carefully, he slid his fingers round the head, waited for the next straining heave from the bitch, and pulled. For a moment his fingers were being crushed and then the pup’s nose came free and straight, and the little body shot out onto the bed. The bitch panted and sighed and licked Dodd’s hand, then turned and started licking the puppy. It looked dead. Carey felt in its mouth, cleared out the bits of caul and the pup hiccuped and started to breathe. Its mother carried on licking it firmly while Carey had another feel in her birth passage.

‘I think that was the last one,’ he said, standing up and wiping his hands on his mucky shirt which he dropped in the rushes. ‘Bring the taper out and shut the curtains for her; she can stay there and I’ll have the truckle bed.’

Dodd had shut the curtains; now he went and brought the food to Carey.

‘Eat,’ he said.

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Ay, well, I canna make ye,’ said Dodd, putting the trencher on the chest again. ‘Never mind. I’ll see ye in the morning, sir, and we can talk to Andy Nixon. Good night.’

Dodd walked to the door looking mightily offended.

‘Er... Dodd,’ said Carey, ashamed of himself. ‘Thank you.’

‘Iphm.’ Dodd nodded and clattered down the stairs.

WEDNESDAY, 5TH JULY 1592, DAWN

When the light in his chamber began to change with dawn, Carey’s eyes opened and he looked straight up at the ceiling beams, instead of the tester of a four-post bed. His legs were sticking unrestfully over the end of a musty straw mattress. For a moment he was confused, wondering if he was at Court or on progress, and then he remembered the dreamlike incident of the puppies. Although he could hear the shouts of the stable boys as they began work, the bedchamber was quiet. How peculiar to be the only person sleeping in it. He got up, scratching at a lot of new flea bites, yawned jaw-crackingly, finished the beer from last night and padded across the rushes in his bare feet to have a look between the bedcurtains at the bitch. She was fast asleep with her tumble of four puppies, the biggest one lying on his back with his paws in the air. As Carey watched he whined and twitched.

‘You’re mine,’ Carey told him. ‘As rent.’

‘Eh, sir?’ came a boy’s voice from the door. It was Ian Ogle, the steward’s eldest son, standing with a tray and looking alarmed.

‘It’s all right,’ Carey said to the boy. ‘Where’s Simon Barnet?’

‘He’s coming, sir, only I was up before and he asked me.’

‘Well, go and get him; I want him to help me dress.’

‘Ay sir.’

Simon, when he arrived, had to be told what to do, which was irritating since he had watched his uncle attend Carey so many times before. It appeared he had paid no attention, and he fumbled maddeningly with the points at the back of Carey’s green velvet doublet until Carey pushed him away with a growl and did them up himself. Neither the doublet nor the wide padded green brocade Venetians were quite fashionable, being a year and a half old, but as they hadn’t been paid for yet, Carey felt obliged to wear them. When they were finished, Carey gave him a long list of things to do which included taking his shirt to the laundry and his leather fighting breeches to be brushed, finding sponges and cloths to dry and clean his jack and polish his helmet after he’d taken it to the armoury for a new chinstrap, and further bringing the kennelman in to inspect the bitch and her puppies and also making sure there was food and water for her.