Sim’s Will Croser was a stocky and phlegmatic man who saddled up without complaint as if he were doing no more than taking a dispatch to Newcastle. Carey had left orders that they were to bring a week’s supply of hard-tack and horse fodder with them, and so they also had to load up four packponies with food and a fifth with blankets and a bag that clanked when shaken.

Carey chose that moment to come striding into the yard, followed by the English Graham water-bailiff. Dodd noticed that the Courtier was broader by the thickness of a money belt around his middle under his jack and black velvet doublet and that he had two rings fewer on his long fingers. ‘Are we running a raid intae the fair Highlands?’ Red Sandy wondered, shaking his head at the preparations. Carey smiled at him.

‘Plagues of locusts and looting Tartar hordes have nothing on a Court for stripping a place bare,’ he said. ‘And that’s only the English court I’m thinking about; God alone knows what King James’s gentle followers are doing to Dumfries.’

He went over to the stables and led out Thunder, who was already tacked up, hitched him to the big horse called Sorrel that was Carey’s normal Border mount. Thunder whickered in protest at the indignity of being led, and pulled at the reins as Carey swung into the saddle.

He led them at a brisk pace out of the crowded town, nodding to some of the local gentry he had met at the old Lord’s funeral, and headed north towards the Border. They would have about five miles of the southern end of the Debateable Land to cross in order to go over the Border and Carey obviously needed to do it as quickly as possible, before word could get to any broken men about Thunder and their packponies.

He was in a hurry but to Dodd’s surprise, Carey did not immediately take the route across the Esk and past Solway Field that led mostly directly to the Dumfries road. Instead, after a conversation with the Graham water-bailiff, he turned aside to Lanercost, until he came to the little huddle of huts where Long George’s family lived. The half-tanned hide across the entrance of the living hut still hung down unwelcomingly, although there was movement within. There was also a fresh grave a little way from the place, under an apple tree. Dodd looked at it and wondered nervously about ghosts.

Carey dismounted, went over and knocked on the wattle wall and poked his head around the leather, immediately to start coughing at the smell of woodsmoke and porridge. All the four children he had seen before were piled up asleep like puppies in the bundle of bracken and skins and blankets where Long George had died and Goodwife Little was stirring at the pot hanging over the central fire.

To Goody Little the Deputy’s sudden appearance like that was a nightmare come true again, and she shrieked softly at the horned appearance of his morion before recognising the face.

‘Cuddy,’ she shouted. ‘Get up and stir the pot.’

The boy fell blinking out of bed, scratching himself under his shirt and shambled obediently over to the pot. Goodwife Little wiped her hands on her apron and came to the Deputy, where she curtseyed.

‘Ay, sir?’ she said, looking up at him, her hard thin face steely with hope firmly squashed and sat upon so it could not sour on disappointment.

‘May I come in, Goodwife?’

She gestured and Carey stepped around the hide.

‘Long George was owed sixty shillings and sevenpence back pay, of which I have fifteen shillings and sevenpence here.’ Goody Little took breath to speak but subsided when Carey raised his hand, palm towards her. ‘I have also arranged a pension which is only threepence a day, but which I have the word of the Lord Warden will be paid on any day of the month that you choose to collect it. You may collect the rest of his back pay at the same time, in instalments, or as a lump sum, and you must present yourself in person with this paper here at the Carlisle Keep.’

Goody Little had gone pale and put her hand against the wall. She smelled sourly female and as well-smoked as a bacon haunch, and as far as Carey could make out she had no breasts and no hips to speak of.

Was she going to faint, blast her? ‘Goodwife? Are you well?’

‘Yes, sir,’ she whispered. ‘Only I was... I was relieved. I can pay Richie Graham what we owe him now, ye follow. I hadnae expected to see ye again, sir.’

Carey said nothing for a moment. He took her scrawny rough hand between his two long-fingered hard ones.

‘Goodwife, this will not affect your pension, but I greatly desire to know the answer. It could help avenge your husband.’

She looked at him warily.

‘What were Long George and his kin up to on the Wednesday before he was hurt? Don’t tell me lies: if it’s over dangerous for you to tell me, then I won’t press it, but please, it would help me. What was he doing?’

‘Why, sir?’ she asked shrewdly. ‘Why is it so important to you to know?’

‘He got a gun in payment for it, right? A pistol?’

After a moment she nodded at him.

‘Well, Goodwife, whoever it was gave him the weapon was the man that killed him. That pistol was faulty: it burst in his hand when he fired it the second time, and that was how he came to lose his life.’

Her mouth opened slightly and her eyes narrowed. She was not a fool, Carey could see, only very wary and weary also.

‘Are all of the guns bad?’ she asked. ‘All the guns that was in the armoury?’

Carefully, not revealing what she had let slip, Carey nodded.

Goodwife Little thought for a moment longer while Carey held his breath because he desperately wanted to cough. ‘My man was out wi’ his uncle and cousins,’ she said finally. ‘Taking a load of guns from carts and loading them on a string of packponies.’

‘And, I suppose,’ said Carey quietly, ‘putting another load of guns into the carts that went on to Carlisle?’

Goodwife Little nodded.

‘Where did the exchange take place?’

‘East of here, in the Middle March, at a meeting place. I dinna ken where.’

‘Please, Goody, I will not say where I got the information, but where did the guns come from?’

She laughed a little. ‘Where all trouble comes, fra ower the Border, where else?’

Carey nodded, released her hand, gave her the purse he was carrying and the paper, then bowed in return to her curtsey and pushed his way out of the tiny smoky little hellhole. He was coughing and wheezing as he got back on his horse and when he wiped his face with his handkerchief he found a pale brown dinge on it.

‘Christ,’ he remarked to no one in particular. ‘How can anyone live in a place like that?’

‘It’s no’ sae bad, sir,’ sniffed Dodd, offended once again. ‘Ye stop crying and coughing in a week and then they’re snugger than a tower, believe me.’

‘Thank you, Dodd,’ said Carey, hawking and spitting mightily. ‘I’ll try and remember it.’ He put in his heels and led them at a fast trot back to the path, without looking back.

***

‘So tell me about the guns,’ the Courtier said conversationally to Henry Dodd as they turned their horses’ heads west and northwards.

‘The guns, sir?’

‘Yes, Sergeant. The guns in the armoury. What is it that everybody else knows about them and I don’t?’

Dodd’s face had taken on a stolidly stupid expression.

‘I’m sorry, sir...’

‘What I’d really like to know is what makes the armoury clerkship worth fifty pounds, since it seems that’s what Lowther and his cousin Ridley managed to bilk me out of. It can’t simply be a matter of selling all the guns as quickly as you can: even on the Border someone would notice, surely.’

There was the faintest flicker of Dodd’s eyelid.

‘For Christ’s sake, Dodd, have pity.’

Dodd coughed.

‘Well, sir, ye see, ye can loan the handguns out for a regular fee with a little care—and a deposit, of course—and get more in the long run than ye would by selling them.’