‘Christ!’ yelled Dodd and made a wild swipe with his arm which knocked the weapon out of Carey’s hands. It clattered to the ground and the match fizzed on the spilled powder.

‘What the Devil do you think you’re doing...?’ Carey demanded, cold and furious.

Dodd stamped on the match end with the toe of his boot and then picked up the caliver gingerly. He could feel his knees shaking and his stomach turning.

‘Look, sir,’ he said, trying not to stammer. ‘There’s a crack in the barrel.’

Carey looked and his face went white. He took the caliver out of Dodd’s hands, and turned it, traced the death-dealing weakness all along the underside of the gun.

‘Thank you, Henry,’ he said at last, in the whisper of someone whose mouth has gone completely dry. ‘I see it.’

Dodd turned, aimed the dag he was still holding and discharged it, this time at least hitting the target now he wasn’t trying. Carey was staring at the caliver which had nearly blown his hands and face to shreds. It was still charged. Dodd put the dags back in their case on Carey’s horse, as Carey began very carefully using the ramrod to scrape out the wad and bullet and shake the gunpowder onto the ground. When it was empty he blew out his breath gustily and small blame to him if he had been holding it in.

‘And that’s something else ye have nae fear of wi’ longbows,’ Dodd added, unable to resist making the point.

‘True,’ admitted Carey very softly. ‘True enough.’

Dodd met the piercing blue eyes and knew that both of them were thinking of Long George and his mysterious pistol.

They rode back to the castle in silence. Carey went straight up to the Queen Mary Tower, still holding the caliver and also taking the one that hadn’t been fired. When Dodd came up to fetch him, ready for duty at the muster, he found the Deputy Warden still in his doublet and bent over his desk.

‘What are ye doing, sir?’ asked Dodd cautiously, wondering if Carey had gone mad. The desk was covered over with bits of metal and various tools.

Carey was muttering to himself. ‘Look at this,’ he said eventually. ‘The barrel metal’s not thick enough and it’s not been hammered out straight. And the forge-welding of the underseam is appalling. Look, it’s got a hairline crack along its length, see, where the wood can hide it.’

‘Is that the one that was faulty, sir?’

‘No. This has never been fired.’

Never mind Carey, Henry Dodd himself might have pulled its trigger and ended up worse off than Long George. He felt queasy again.

‘Ay.’

Carey was peering squint-eyed at another piece of metal. ‘This is very cheap and nasty,’ he said, prodding it with one of his little tools. ‘See how it scratches. I doubt it was case-hardened at all. I can’t believe they ever came from the Tower. Nor even Newcastle.’

‘Nor Dumfries, sir,’ added Dodd, puzzling his poor aching head.

‘Eh?’ said Carey.

‘Dumfries,’ Dodd repeated for him. ‘Where the best guns in all Scotland are made, though ye’ll pay through the nose for them.’

Carey was staring into the middle distance, at the painted hanging of a siege which warmed the stone wall of his chambers.

‘Interesting,’ was all he said as he piled the bits into a cloth and wrapped it up, put it in a drawer of the desk.

‘Are ye coming to the muster at all, sir?’ asked Dodd hintingly.

‘Hm? Oh yes. Barnabus!’

Dodd went to wait at the foot of the tower while Carey speedily changed out of his black velvet and into his second best cramoisie suit, plus his newly cleaned jack and straightened morion helmet. He came down the stairs two at a time and Dodd fell in beside him as he strode across the yard to where their troop was lining up.

‘Do ye think they’re all alike, sir?’ Dodd asked in a mutter.

‘Almost certainly. I didn’t even look at which calivers I was taking.’

‘The pistols too?’

‘I think so.’

‘But who could have done it?’

‘I’ve no idea. Never my brother, nor anyone at court. Maybe not Lowther either.’

‘Why not, sir, seeing how he’d laugh if ye was maimed?’

‘Because he was so quick to put his man in as acting armoury clerk. If it was him got at the guns, he would have made sure I appointed the clerk.’

‘Your man might have spotted the difference.’

‘I doubt it. I didn’t. On the outside they look fine.’

‘What shall we do?’

‘Nothing for the moment, since we’ll be late for church if we don’t move ourselves.’

Most of the men were hungover but relatively clean, their horses groomed and their lances and helmets polished. Dodd still didn’t see what the connection was between good soldiering and the state of your jack, providing it kept off swords, but had to admit it pleased him to see that his troop easily outshone Lowther’s and Carleton’s men who were dingy by comparison. Carey had them line up, checked them over, told one that his tack was a disgrace and so were his boots, complimented their latest recruit on the fact that he already had a morion and a jack and led them down early to the cathedral for Sunday service.

SUNDAY, 9TH JULY 1562, MORNING

The young King of Scotland rode into the West March town of Dumfries by the Lochmaben Gate at about eight in the morning, to be met by the old Warden, the mayor, the corporation and both major local headmen, Lord Maxwell and young James Johnstone. There was tension in the air between the headmen that would have given good resistance to a battleaxe, mainly because their two families had been at feud for generations and both their fathers had been murdered by the other’s relatives. At the moment, the Maxwells were ahead in the feud, the most powerful and wealthy surname in the West March of Scotland. For this reason, the Maxwell was wearing a brocade doublet slashed with bright red taffeta, a lace-trimmed falling band and a shining back-and-breast-plate, chased with gold. Behind him were a hundred of his largest men, in their jacks, mounted in two rows of fifty, their highly businesslike lances tricked out with blue pennants.

The young laird of Johnstone was wearing a pale buff jack, a plain red woollen suit, and an anxious expression on his face, mainly because he had only fifty men behind him. The white pennants on their lances fluttered merrily enough, but fifty against a hundred is poor odds at the best of times, never mind what Maxwell could call on from his friends and followers in Dumfries, a town that he owned. At least, thought the Johnstone, most of my lads have good handguns and balls and powder to go with them. And surely even a Maxwell will not plan trickery when he’s to be made March Warden and the King is about, though God help us when the King is gone back to Edinburgh.

Naturally, neither of the two surname-headmen had admitted to knowing anything about the Earl of Bothwell’s raid on Falkland Palace which was the main reason for their sovereign’s sudden arrival with three thousand soldiers behind him. However, both had come in and composed with him, promising in writing to behave themselves, not raid, not feud and not intrigue. Both of them were hoping very much that King James would not find out what they had really been up to.

Trumpets rang out a fanfare for the third time as the cavalcade came up to the gate, led by five hundred footmen from Edinburgh. Behind them on a prime white French-bred horse, came the King. As to his dress, he was not at all a martial sight, wearing a high-crowned black hat with a feather and a multiply slashed and embroidered purple doublet. His linen was somewhat grey. Hats and caps came off raggedly as he passed, a few sorry souls actually bent their knees as if he were the Queen of England. Most bowed dourly.

James Stuart, sixth of that name, was twenty-nine years old, a small man the shape of a tadpole, with powerful shoulders and short, very bandy legs. Luckily he was an excellent horseman. His face had never looked anything other than cautious, canny and slightly self-satisfied. He was the son of Mary Queen of Scots, but had last seen his mother when he was a baby. Certainly he had not remembered her well enough to intervene when Queen Elizabeth of England had decided to execute her five years back. Having been a king since babyhood he was accustomed to deference; having been a king of Scotland, he was well-inured to powerlessness, poverty, kidnapping, ferocious court faction fights and the suicidal lunacy of many of his most prominent nobles.

Everyone in the cavalcade was sweating freely into their fine linen, since the day was dull and heavy with moisture. Ever since the king’s harbingers had arrived in Dumfries in search of lodging, provisioning and entertainment for the King, his court and the three thousand men, the town had been in a ferment, wagons and packtrains of provisions arriving every day, barns being cleared, pretty sons, daughters and cattle being driven up into the hills round about. Food prices had become farcical, what with the bad harvest weather and the press of people into the area.

The desperate trumpeters excelled themselves as the King stopped at the Lochmaben gate, escorted by the outgoing Warden, Sir John Carmichael. The King was feeling the heat as well, the sweat making runnels down the grease on his face. All his clothes were heavily padded because he was, rightly, afraid of daggers. Behind him his courtiers affected the same portly, soft-edged style, not because they themselves were in the least afraid of daggers, but because he was the King.

The King’s heavy-lidded eyes flickered from the Johnstone to the Maxwell and back again. He was waiting, very patiently, for something.

Lord Maxwell came to himself with a start, dismounted, stepped to the King’s stirrup and kissed the long heavily-ringed hand that was stretched down to him.

‘Welcome to the West March, Your Highness,’ he said.