‘Lizzy,’ called Dodd, and a freckled face under a mucky white cap peeked over. ‘Stop your brother from sleeping or he’ll fall off.’
‘Ay, Mr Dodd,’ she said, hiding a yawn. ‘Will ye be wanting us back again?’
He did really, but hadn’t the heart. ‘No, sweeting, get to your bed.’
Red Sandy touched up the oxen and the cart creaked away, a plaintive yell floating from the top as Lizzy obediently pinched her brother to wake him up.
The sun was down and there was another field to get in, but after that, it was done. Janet was coming towards him across the stubbly meadow with bits of hay stuck to her cap and a large earthenware jug on her hip. She smiled at him, and the back of his throat, which felt as if it had glazed over with the haydust stuck to it, opened a little involuntarily in anticipation. He put his hands behind the collar of his working shirt and eased the hemp cloth off the sunburn he’d collected a few days before while mowing this same field. He resisted the urge to have a go at the itchy bits of skin that were coming off because if he started scratching, all the little bits of dust that had got inside his clothes and stuck to his skin would start itching too and drive him insane.
Janet arrived where he stood leaning on his pitchfork, gave him the leather quart mug she had in her other hand and filled it with mild beer. He croaked his thanks, put it to his lips, tilted his head and forgot to swallow for a while. It almost hurt, it felt so good. He finished two-thirds of it before he came up for air.
‘Ahhh,’ he said, and leered at her. Janet had untied her smock and loosened the laces of her old blue bodice to free her arms for raking and there was a fine deep valley there, just begging for exploration. Not in a stubbly field though, and they were both too old and respectable now to bundle about in the haystack, but a marriage bed would do fine, later, if he wasn’t too tired. And if he was, well, there was the morning too before he had to set off for Carlisle. She leered back at him and took breath to say something that never was said.
‘Och, God damn him to hell,’ moaned Dodd, seeing movement, men on horseback breasting the hill in the distance over her shoulder, and instantly recognising the man in the fancy morion helmet at the head of the patrol riding towards them along the Roman road. ‘God rot his bloody bowels...’
‘Eh?’ said Janet, startled. She turned to look in the same direction as her husband, and her eyes narrowed.
‘But those are Lowther’s men he’s with.’
Dodd knew with awful clarity exactly what the thrice-damned Deputy Warden was doing out at Gilsland with Lowther’s Sergeant and Lowther’s bunch of hard bargains. Full of wordless ill-usage, he picked up his pitchfork and drove it tines first into the ground, narrowly missing his own foot.
‘Make yerself decent, woman,’ he growled unfairly at his wife, who had only been behaving as a good wife should to her hardworking husband. She gave him a glint of a stare and he handed her what was left of his beer by way of apology. Still, she tied her old smock again, pulled up her bodice lacings and the curves of her breasts went back into their secret armour.
Dodd folded his arms and waited for the Deputy to come to him. There was some satisfaction in the thought that he must be hot wearing a jack and morion in this weather, followed by a gloomier memory of just how miserable a jack could be in summer.
Carey left Lowther’s men at the wall and came trotting over.
‘Good evening, Sergeant. How’s the haymaking?’
The bloody Courtier had probably been sitting on his arse all afternoon, unlike Dodd, who could only bring himself to grunt.
‘Well enow.’
‘Have you finished yet?’
Resisting the urge to snarl that if he was finished he wouldna be standing in a field like a lummock, he’d be at table stuffing his face, Dodd gestured in the direction of a long triangle of land which still had its neat rows of gold. Carey’s face clouded over.
‘Ah,’ he said.
‘What’s the trouble, Sir Robert?’ asked Janet. ‘Is it a raid?’
Carey sighed and slid from his horse. ‘In a manner of speaking, Mrs Dodd,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you when you’re so busy, Sergeant; if I had any other choice I wouldn’t be here.’
Dodd grunted again, only slightly mollified, jerked his pitchfork out of the ground, straightened the bent tine with his clog heel, put it on his shoulder and set off for the last field. Janet picked his abandoned jerkin off the ground, and her own rake, and went with him. The Courtier went too, leading his horse.
As they went he talked, and in Dodd’s mind a picture formed of what was happening. At the end of it, he commented, ‘Wattie Graham must be fair annoyed to be risking a foray into the Middle March and so close to Tynedale. Who put him up to it?’
‘I’ve no idea, though I could guess.’
‘Well, ye canna take fifty assorted Grahams and broken men with that lot over there.’
Carey half-smiled. ‘I’m aware of it, Sergeant.’
‘What’s she... what’s Lady Widdrington worth at ransom, then?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea and I have no intention of paying it in any case.’
‘No,’ agreed Dodd. ‘That’d be for her husband to do.’
‘Dodd,’ said Carey with a certain amount of effort, ‘I am not going to allow her to be taken.’
That’s what being at Court and listening to all them poets did for you, Dodd thought savagely; it rotted your brain.
‘I dinna ken what ye can do about it, sir,’ said Dodd, looking about for the other cart which should have finished and come back by now. Oh yes, there it was, being driven by Willie’s Simon with his bandaged arm. Janet had already set down her jug and his jerkin and started in on the furthest row to pile it up. Two of the other girls came down off the wall where they had been waiting and drinking, and started on two other rows. The cart creaked in at the gate and lined up, ready for him. Normally Willie’s Simon would have been helping Dodd pitch the hay, but the wound from an arrow in his arm ten days before was still not healed enough so Dodd had it all to do himself. Janet raked ferociously, muttering under her breath; Dodd knew she was calculating how much more food Sergeant Nixon and the others would require, when she was already feeding too many mouths.
‘How long would this normally take?’ Carey asked fatuously, waving at the field.
‘I’d leave it till the morrow, but it looks like rain,’ said Dodd, driving his pitchfork into a bundle and twisting to lift and throw. ‘It’ll be fair dark by the time we finish.’
‘How many pitchforks have you got?’
What was the Courtier blethering about now?
‘Four. Three over by the barn.’
Carey waved his arm at the men still sitting like puddings and letting their hobbies crop wildflowers from the wall’s base.
‘Sergeant Nixon,’ he roared. ‘Over here!’
