‘So would I.’
‘Well, then, it’s nobbut a couple of miles to Thirlwall. We get the men together, we deal with Wattie’s lads and we warn the Castle what’s afoot. Then we escort her along the road to Hexham.’
‘Of course, there’s the possibility that Captain Carleton’s in on it as well.’
Dodd thought of the barrel-shaped Captain with the loud laugh, and decided it wasn’t so unlikely as all that.
‘And if Wattie’s loose on Thirlwall Common with fifty men, there will be a pitched battle when he hits us on the road, with us at a disadvantage. We don’t know he’ll be at Chesterholm; there must be other places.’
‘What’s wrong wi’ a pitched battle?’ Dodd wanted to know, made confident by the beer. ‘Bloody murdering Grahams.’
‘With a woman in the middle of it.’
‘So?’ said Dodd, wondering if they were talking about the same Lady Widdrington. ‘She’d likely grab a pike and do for Wattie Graham herself.’
Carey sighed. ‘Listen, Henry. I’ve no quarrel with a pitched battle, I just like to choose my own ground. And getting to the Castle isn’t simply a case of dealing with some lads. You know what the ground around it is like; it’s horribly steep, there are earthworks everywhere. You could hold off an army if you placed your men right, that’s why they built it there. I can’t even be sure Wattie’s got no more than fifty riders. I only know what left Netherby, not what he might have picked up along the way.’
‘Ay,’ allowed Dodd, beginning to wonder if Carey had some other pressing reason for not wanting to meet Lady Widdrington face to face.
‘And there’s the question of authority,’ Carey added with a sigh. ‘Once Wattie’s over the Irthing and into the Middle March he’s supposedly out of my jurisdiction and into Sir John Forster’s. I don’t want to start up any inter-Wardenry feuding if I can help it and Sir John’s known to be difficult.’
Dodd nodded, appreciating the Deputy Warden’s talents at understatement. Sir John Forster was irascible, deeply corrupt, as old as the century and far into his dotage. Unfortunately, he also seemed to be indestructible.
‘Anyway,’ Carey went on, ‘I want to teach Wattie a lesson. Who the hell does he think he is, running a raid that size across the March at haymaking?’
‘Well,’ said Dodd slowly after some more thought and a lot of cheese. ‘We could surely come up with twenty or thirty good men from hereabouts, especially if we went to Archibald Bell and warned him, and in any case the Bells are always willing to give the Grahams a bloody nose when they can. That’s all, I’m afraid, sir. Ye could get double the number inside the hour at a different time of year, but...’
‘I know, I know. It’ll have to do. All the more reason not to tangle with Wattie on the road.’
Dodd was thinking hard and sucking his teeth. ‘We should be able to get over to north of the road and maybe shadow them, but it’ll be a long ride and hard country, and the horses will be tired and...’
Carey shook his head. He swallowed one of Janet’s eyewatering pickled onions half-chewed and drank some beer.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not prancing about in Sir John Forster’s March with a mixed bunch of... of men, if I can help it. I want to stop Wattie quick and clean before he goes near Lady Widdrington. In fact I want to ambush him on the way and send him back to Netherby with his tail between his legs.’
Dodd’s heart started to warm to the Courtier a bit more. It seemed he had some sense after all.
‘Hm,’ he said. ‘Ay.’
‘What about when he’s crossing the Irthing? Where will he do that? There can’t be more than a couple of places, it’s too steep.’
A horrible thought struck him. ‘By God,’ growled Dodd, ‘he’ll be in among my own shielings as well. I’ve forty head of cattle at the summering up there, and nobbut a man and a boy to guard them. If that bastard bloody Graham...’
‘Absolutely,’ said Carey cheerfully. ‘I agree, we must stop them there.’ He was making messy puddles with his finger on the table. ‘Is this what the country looks like?’ he asked. Dodd squinted at the puddles and wondered what he was jabbering about. Carey explained patiently. ‘If this was the Irthing and that was the bog...’
‘Och,’ said Dodd, having difficulty converting his instinctive knowledge of the land into a picture. ‘Ah. Maybe,’ he allowed cautiously.
With the aid of some bits of bread, Carey explained what he wanted to do, and Dodd put in his notions to which Carey listened gravely. Although Dodd was being deprived of the dancing and the singing in order to go and fetch out the Bells, he didn’t mind as much as he would have thought. It was a pity really, that Carey had had the misfortune to be born on the right side of such a very high-class blanket; he had the makings of a decent reiver in him.
TUESDAY, 4TH JULY 1592, DAWN
The first he knew was when one of Skinabake’s broken men yelped and clutched his leg. Wattie Graham looked at the place and at first refused to believe what his eyes told him, that there was a feathered arrow shaft sticking out of it. Another arrow zipped by his nose and a third stuck in the hindquarters of one of the horses in the ford who promptly went berserk, reared up, stood kicking on its head and then crashed through the press of other horses and up the bank. Its rider was in the water, spitting mud and weed and looking astonished.
Wattie grabbed for his gun out of its case, pulled out the small ramrod, tried charging it, but more arrows were flying from the low hill. Men who had been lying down in the bracken on the slope were standing, shooting at them. They were at too great a range to do much damage, but the panic they were causing among the horses was bad enough. The cattle in the field lowed unhappily. Some of the broken men who had already come across trampled back down into the ford, trying to run away, and added to the thrashing, shouting, swearing confusion.
Wattie fumbled and dropped his ramrod, cursed, slammed the gun back in its case and drew his sword.
‘Come on, ye fools, get on out of the water,’ he roared. A few of them managed to do what he ordered and bunched around him looking scared, while the men on the hill continued to shoot judiciously. There was the sound of hooves from their right, men and horses boiling like bees from the little shieling, more men swinging themselves up onto their horses’ bare backs from where they had been hiding in amongst the cattle, joining with the riders pounding down from the shieling.
Wattie swung round to face the threat, saw lances, hobbies, and at the head of them a long man in a morion pointing a dag straight for his chest. Unthinkingly, he slid sideways clinging to his horse’s neck and actually heard the crack as the bullet passed through where he had been. Then the men hit them, and he found himself cutting and slicing against the press of bodies; it was all Bells at first, Archibald Bell at their head roaring something obscene about blackrent. He glimpsed Sergeant Dodd in there, riding bareback, with a face like a winter’s day and blood on his sword, and then it was the man with the fancy morion battering at him with a bright new broadsword, and he recognised Sir Robert Carey.
‘Shame on you, Wattie,’ roared the Courtier. ‘Attacking a defenceless woman.’
Somebody backed a horse between them, and Wattie managed to collect himself. Half his men had scrambled back across the ford; he could see a few horses’ rumps galloping away in the distance. More broke from the right as they worked their way to the edges.
‘Skinabake!’ he yelled in a sudden breathing space, catching sight of the Armstrong reiver. ‘Back across the ford; we’ll have them if they follow.’
He felt something behind him, ducked; steel whistled over his shoulder and nicked his hobby which promptly squealed and tried to run away. He managed to turn about to face his attacker and found Carey must have been pursuing him because there he was again, sword in one hand, dag in the other and its wheel-lock spinning sparks. He froze, staring at death like a rabbit. It misfired. He swung his sword down on Carey, hoping he would be distracted by his gun, but the bastard Deputy parried and slashed sideways, still shouting something incomprehensible.
Another plunging riderless horse banged into the other side of Wattie, bruising his leg against his own mount. Carey was coping with another rider on his other side, crossed swords a couple of times and knocked that man out of the saddle. Wattie disentangled himself from the terror-crazed nag, just in time to face the Deputy as he turned again and came after Wattie.
‘Liddesdale, to me!’ yelled Wattie, standing up in his stirrups. When as many as could were around him he launched his horse down the bank again, through the water, up the other side and turned about, breathing hard.
Let them follow us and we’ll have them the way they had us, he thought, but Dodd and Archibald Bell were wise to that and so were the others with them, too wise to try crossing a ford opposed. Only the lunatic Deputy Warden seemed eager to try, but Dodd caught his horse’s bridle and snarled at him and he seemed to calm down.
The two sides stared at each other, those of the Grahams who had bows stringing them frantically on their stirrups and awkwardly nocking arrows. It was very hard to use a longbow on horseback, but it could be done if you twisted sideways and leaned over a little. The bowmen on the hill came jogging across and lined up facing them over the water.
Wattie looked about at his men. A number of them were bleeding somewhere, there were five still shapes over on the other bank and three men surrounded. A couple of the ones who had fallen off during the mêlée in the water were climbing out again as fast as they could, cursing. Several horses were down, others galloping away squealing.
