Carey greeted this with a shout of laughter. ‘By God, that’s ingenious. I hope the clerks at the Tower never get to hear of it, the Spaniards would end up better armed with our ordnance than we are. So generally when there was an inspection, the guns would all be there?’

‘Ay, sir. It fair queered Atkinson’s pitch, you rousting the place out without warning like that.’

‘Did Scrope get a cut?’

‘I dinna ken, sir,’ said Dodd carefully. ‘But ye see, it had the benefit that the surnames would kill more of each other’s men wi’ the guns and save us the bother.’

‘I wonder if that sort of thing goes on in Berwick. I must tell my brother.’

‘I dinna ken, sir,’ said Dodd again, having heard some of the stories about Sir John Carey.

Carey caught his tone. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said cynically. ‘So I’m the only innocent who doesn’t know about it.’

Dodd grunted and thought it more tactful not to answer.

‘What about the risk that the surnames would be better armed in a fight than the garrison?’

‘Wi’ Lowther leading the trods, sir?’

‘No. Plainly the situation wouldn’t arise. I tell you, Sergeant, I’m not bloody surprised this March is gone to rack and ruin and there’s been no justice out of Liddesdale for sixteen years.’

‘Rack and ruin, sir?’

Carey turned his horse and waved an arm expansively.

‘Look at it, Sergeant. Look at that.’

It was only a huddle of burned cottages and a broken-down pele-tower, plus some overgrown fields. Hardly surprising, so close to the predatory Grahams of Esk and the assorted wild men of the Debateable Land. Dodd thought the place might have been Routledge lands once.

‘Ay, sir?’

‘It’s tragic. This is beautiful country, rich, fertile, wonderful for livestock, and there’s more waste ground than field, more forest than pasture. And what do you see? Pele-towers and such for the robbers to live in, or burned-out places like that. How can anyone till the ground or plant hedges or orchards or anything useful if they never know from one day to the next if they’re going to be burned out of house and home?’

Dodd looked at the burned huts. Like Long George’s children, he had lived in places like that in his youth, they weren’t so bad, usually warm and dry if you built them right. And why would anyone want to plant an orchard, with all the trouble that was, when a cow would give you milk inside three years and mainly feed herself?

‘And this thing about blackrent, it’s a scandal and a disgrace.’

Dodd stared at him. Blackrent was traditional. Carey made an impatient gesture.

‘You’re only supposed to pay one lot of rent, Dodd, to your actual landlord, plus tithes to the church, of course,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be paying another lot of rents to a bunch of thieving ruffians to stop them raiding you.’

‘Well, it’s worth it if they protect you,’ protested Dodd.

‘Do you pay blackrent, Dodd?’

‘Ay, of course I do. I dinna need to pay off the Armstrongs and I willna pay the bloody Elliots nor Lowther neither, but I pay Graham of Brackenhill like everyone else and I pay a bit to the Nixons and the Kerrs to keep them sweet.’

‘Did you know it’s against the law to pay it? Did you know you could hang for paying it?’

Dodd was speechless. His jaw dropped.

‘Who in the hell made that law?’ he demanded when he could speak again. ‘Some bloody Southerner, I’ll be bound.’

‘So who pays you blackrent in turn, Dodd?’

‘Naebody.’

Carey’s eyebrows did their little leap.

‘It’s no crime to take blackrent,’ he said sourly. ‘Only pay it. And yes, it was a bloody Southerner made that law, and he was an idiot.’

‘Well, it’s no’ precisely blackrent, see ye,’ Dodd began to explain. ‘But some of the Routledges give me a bit and what the wife collects on my behalf I dinna ken and...’

‘Oh, never mind. Look over there. Do those look like hobbies to you?’

Dodd looked and saw to his relief that the horses were on English Graham land. The water-bailiff was at the back of their small party and hadn’t noticed Carey’s interest.

‘Nay, sir, they do not.’ Let Bangtail’s dad talk his way out of this.

‘Six of them, and very nice they are too, if a little short of food.’

‘Och, them fancy French horses eat their heads off...’ Dodd began and stopped. ‘...Or so I’ve heard.’

‘Hmm.’ Carey looked sideways at him and Dodd wondered what it was about Carey that caused Dodd’s own tongue to become so loose. He made his face go blank and stared severely at the foreign horses trotting about in the field ahead of them.

Carey did nothing much about the horses: simply pulled out a leather notebook and a pen and little bottle of ink and scribbled down the descriptions of each one of the horses in the field, resting the book on his saddle bow. They carried on, noting eight more horses of suspiciously fine breeding in lands owned by Musgraves and Carletons.

At last, to Henry Dodd’s relief, Carey picked up his heels a bit as they approached the Border country itself. They crossed at the Longtown ford and then covered the five miles of Debateable Land at a good clip. They took the horse-smugglers’ path by the old battlefield and followed it into the Johnstone lands north of Gretna, where Carey had them slow down to bate the horses.

We have thirty-five miles to ride to Dumfries before night, Dodd thought sourly, through some of the wildest robber country in the world, and hardly a man with us, just a bloody Graham water-bailiff and a Deputy Warden who thinks he’s immune to bullets.

To Dodd’s mind, Carey rode like a man going to a wedding with a cess of two hundred behind him. He took his time, never doing more than a canter, and stared around with interest at what he called the lie of the land, which looked like rocks and hills to Dodd, asked the few people in the villages they passed through what surname they were and generally behaved as if he was somewhere in soft and silly Yorkshire, where no one was likely to attack him at all.

When Dodd tactfully tried to reason with him, he got nowhere.

‘Dodd, Dodd,’ Carey said with that tinge of tolerant amusement in his voice that Dodd found intensely irritating, ‘nobody is going to attack us at this time of all times. King James is on the Border with three thousand men and he would just love to suck up to the Queen by hanging anyone who attacked me.’

Ye think ye’re very important, Courtier, thought Dodd, but heroically didn’t say. Has it crossed your mind that there are broken men all over the place here and not a one of them that gives a year-old cowpat for King James and all his men? He glanced across at the leathery water-bailiff, with the telltale long bony Graham face and cold grey eyes. He was riding along on his tough little pony looking as if he was half-asleep. No help from there.

‘Ay, sir,’ said Dodd, still trying to rotate his head on his neck like an owl. ‘I’m verra glad to hear it. Will we be there by nightfall at this pace, sir?’

He paused, stark horror chilling his blood like winter. ‘And what’s that, sir?’

There was movement in the distance, the characteristic purposeful movement of a man riding towards them at speed. They sat and watched for a few seconds and then Carey was quietly loading his dags, and Red Sandy and Sim’s Will Croser drawing their swords. Dodd spun his horse about, staring suspiciously at the farmlands and waste ground about them. Nothing. The land was empty save for the inevitable women weeding gardens and harvesting peas. Only there was the lone horseman riding like the clappers.

Man? He seemed small and light, and there was a smear of gold above his face, beneath his dark woollen cap.

‘Och,’ said the Graham water-bailiff, visibly relaxing. ‘I ken who that is.’ He shook his head and tutted.