‘Well?’ he asked.
‘I couldnae get through to Thirlwall Castle, sir, for my uncle had put too many men about it, and they had dogs forbye. So I slept under a bush and when she came out on the road, I went along wi’ her, to the north a bit.’
‘I thought you’d been caught by your relatives.’
‘Nay sir,’ said Hutchin, cheekily. ‘Not me, sir.’
At the end of that day’s travelling, Lady Widdrington and her small party had come in sight of Hexham without any incident, which had rather surprised Hutchin.
‘I stopped your uncle at the Irthing ford,’ Carey said shortly. ‘Sent him back to Netherby with his tail between his legs.’
‘Ay, I thought something like that had happened. So I rode down and joined Lady Widdrington and told her all about it and she went red but she didnae say nothing. Then she had me ride behind, and when she got to Hexham, there was the Middle March Warden and he had...’
‘Sir John Forster?’
‘Ay sir.’
‘How is he?’
‘Very old and a mite forgetful, but well enough. Anyway, he was there and so was her husband.’
‘What?’
‘Ay, Sir Henry Widdrington.’
Carey’s mouth had gone dry. ‘How did he greet her?’
Young Hutchin shrugged. ‘She curtseyed, he nodded at her. They went in. A while later, I was called for and gi’en a letter for ye. Then I come back wi’ the dispatch rider from Newcastle. The ordnance carts from Newcastle was there too, sir, and we passed a powerful lot of packtrains by the road. The Newcastle man said that Sir Henry was for Scotland, although he didna ken why.’
Silently Carey put out his hand and Hutchin laid the letter on it. If I don’t open it, he found himself thinking, then I won’t know what it says and can ignore it.
Meanwhile his fingers were breaking the seal and unfolding the paper. It was Lady Widdrington’s handwriting, her spelling as wild as most women’s.
‘From Lady Elizabeth Widdrington, to Sir Robert Carey.
Sir, I must ask you to have no more dealings with me in any shape or form and what friendship we may have had is now at an end.
Please honour my request as a knight of the Queen should.’
That was simple enough. Impossible to tell whose brain had framed the words: was it Elizabeth herself, or had she written at her husband’s dictation? She had made it plain enough she thought his courtship of her was foolish.
Carey looked up unseeingly. He was amazed to find he could not feel anything. Perhaps it wasn’t so amazing: after a fight or a football match he often found bruises and grazes he had not felt at the time.
‘Sir,’ came a boy’s alien voice.
‘What? You still there, Young Hutchin?’
‘Ay sir. She had a verbal message. She whispered it to me when she give me the letter, sir, under cover of straightening my jerkin.’
Young Hutchin shut his eyes tight and frowned. ‘It was in foreign, sir. She said to tell ye, ah mow tay, Robin, ah mah bow simper.’
Carey thought hard to rearrange the sounds. ‘Amo te, Robin, amabo semper?’ he asked.
Young Hutchin nodded vigorously. ‘Ay,’ he said. ‘That was it. Is it French?’
‘No. Latin. Please forget it, if you like Lady Widdrington.’
Young Hutchin nodded again, a mixture of cunning and an attempt at forthright honesty on his face.
Simon came back with the small beer and some pieces of ox-tongue pie. Carey had lost his appetite. He told the boys to strip the ruined counterpane off the bed and see if they could find Goodwife Biltock to get another one for him. Then he wandered unseeingly down the stairs again.
By a kind of habit, he found himself in the stable yard where the Head Groom was at evening stables with Scrope. Carey went to Thunder’s stall, went in and started picking up Thunder’s feet to see how the farrier had done his work. Not bad. Not bad at all. But Thunder should go back to London. He had no use for a tournament charger here in the West March.
Amo te, Robin, amabo semper. She didn’t know much Latin. Perhaps she had persuaded Young Henry to tell her the words, or a tiny bit of schooling had stuck as it had with him. She had obediently written her letter cutting off their friendship at her husband’s dictation and then, being as honest as she was, she had quietly defied him. The words were curt but sufficient.
I love you, Robin, she had said, promising no more than that, risking God knew what kind of persecution, I will love you always.
A Surfeit of Guns
To Rosie, with thanks
R is for... Extraordinary
The number of ‘R’ words that come to mind when describing P.F. Chisholm’s rousing Elizabethan detections is remarkable. Filled with rakish, ruthless, reckless, rapacious, rough-riding, ruffianly, rascally, reprobative, roguish, occasionally rueful rapscallions, raiders, and reivers, they are rich, ribald, rowdy, riveting, riotous, robust, rollicking, rambunctious, randy, roistering, racy, and rattling good reads. What makes them so?
It is, of course, their blend of those basic components of fiction—plot, characters, setting—plus content, all washed with the sort of prose that turns such elements into literary gold. Rare is the novel in which the reader finds each building block to be of high quality, rarer still when a real balance is achieved. In my book, the Robert Carey novels, A Famine of Horses, A Season of Knives and A Surfeit of Guns reach that plateau.
As P.F. Chisholm, nom de plume of author Patricia Finney, has previously noted, Carey is a real historical character whose life was itself the stuff of fiction. He’s a natural to be the hero of a book, or books, that flesh out the bones of the historical record and embrace not only what we actually know of Carey, but imagine what could have been the truth of his life and character.
