‘Lord above, Sir Henry, I wouldn’t put anything past you.’ Carey was still holding out his left hand for the warrant, his sword en garde between them. Sir Henry reddened and swelled like a frog, then shrugged and gave it to him, the dag’s muzzle not moving an inch from the direction of Carey’s heart. Carey wondered how much insolence it would take from him for the weapon to go off unexpectedly and shoot him dead. Also the seal was genuine.

Carey handed back the warrant and laid his sword down on the truckle bed. He was immediately grabbed by four of Widdrington’s henchmen and his arms twisted painfully up behind his back, which started to make him angry as well as afraid.

‘I’ve surrendered to you, Sir Henry,’ he managed to say through his teeth. ‘There’s no need for this.’

Sir Henry answered with a punch in Carey’s belly which almost had him spewing up the sour remains of the aqua vitae he had drunk earlier.

‘Ye chose the wrong man to put the horns on, boy,’ hissed Sir Henry in his ear as he tried to straighten up. ‘Any more lip from ye an’ I’ll send ye to the King with your tackle mashed to pulp.’

Carey didn’t answer because he hadn’t got the breath. Somebody was putting wooden manacles on his wrists behind him, some kind of primitive portable stocks.

They propelled him downstairs and through the parlour where Maxwell was standing with his men, watching impassively. Over his shoulder, Carey called to him, ‘I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this from you, my lord Warden.’

Maxwell shrugged and looked away, which was not worth the further fist in the gut administered by Sir Henry.

Widdrington’s keeping away from my face, Carey thought, when he could think again, which means he’s been ordered to bring me in unharmed. That’s good. Or is it? Perhaps King James just wants a fresh field for his interrogators to start work on. No, they’re not that subtle.

It was hard to keep his feet as they shoved him along, through the hall, through the courtyard now filled with sleepy watchers, and out into the Town Head. One of the Widdringtons held him up when he missed his footing on the cobbles and would have sprawled full length. Carey caught a glimpse of looming breadth and heroic spottiness and recognised young Henry, Widdrington’s eldest son. Henry was wearing a steady flush and a sullen expression and kept his head turned away from Carey’s as he helped him.

They were hustling him on foot down towards the Mercat Cross and the town lock-up, but that was not where they were going. Instead, before they reached it, Sir Henry and his men turned and went under the arcades of the Mayor’s house, through the side door and into the broad kitchen. There a baker was firing his oven and woodmen beginning the work of relighting the fires on the hearths for cooking, while the older scullery boys still slept near the heat and the flagstones gleamed from washing by the yawning younger ones.

Next to the massive table in the centre, under the hams and strings of onions dangling from the roof, Carey tried to slow down, turn, demand to know what the hell was going on here. Somebody, not young Henry, grabbed his shirt and shoved him forwards, causing him to skid on the wet stones and land on his side, which winded him once more. Until his eyes unblurred it was confusing: a whirl of flames from the main hearth and the bread-oven, and men with hard faces, but at least nobody had kicked him while he was on the ground. He got his feet under him and stood up with some difficulty.

‘Keep yer mouth shut,’ hissed Sir Henry Widdrington, dag at the ready once more.

And yet, Carey still had the feeling that this was cautious handling: certainly they had not been so gentle with the German. Once more he was grabbed by the shoulders and hurried across the kitchen and into a dark passageway. Yes, there was a sense of furtiveness and hurry, definitely. Surely this was far less official than it appeared? Or why use an English gentleman for the dirty work? King James might be short of loyal soldiers, but any one of his nobles would have been highly delighted to arrest and ill-treat an English official.

They went down stairs echoing with the clatter of boots and his own heavy breathing, into another narrow corridor that smelled headily of wine. A massive iron-bound door was unlocked, swung briefly open and somebody, Sir Henry no doubt, booted him into the opening. He stumbled on the slippery bits of straw on the floor and barked his shoulder as he rammed into the opposite wall. The door slammed shut immediately to a clashing of keys and bolts, leaving him in a darkness that put him in doubt whether his eyes were open or shut. The smell of wine permeated everything, so strong it made his head reel almost at once, though there was another less pleasant smell mixed in with it.

Carey set his back against the wall he had hit and caught his breath. For a while all he could hear was the beating of his own heart and the air in his own throat. Then gradually his nose told him what the other smell was: there was someone else in the wine cellar, someone who had been there for some time. For a moment he was afraid it was a corpse and then he made out the other man’s harsh breathing.

‘Who’s there?’ he asked tentatively.

A kind of moan, nothing more.

‘Well, where are you?’

This time, a kind of grunt. How badly injured was he? Had the other man been tortured? Or was he a plant of the kind that Walsingham had used to get information from Catholics in prison?

Wishing he had the use of his hands, Carey began shuffling cautiously across the wine cellar from one wall to the other, trying to learn its geography. The huge wine tuns were in a row by the furthest wall, with smaller barrels set at random on the floor, lying in wait so he could stub his toes and bark his shins on them. Sawdust and straw on the floor to soak up spillage, cool dampness and that maddening Dionysian smell. At last his feet struck something soft and he squatted down. More incomprehensible muttering. What the Devil was wrong with the man?

On impulse Carey tried the few words of High Dutch that he knew: ‘Wie sind sie?’

Silence and then the sound of soft sobbing. ‘Oh, Christ,’ said Carey, suddenly understanding almost everything. ‘You’re the German—what was it—you’re Hans Schmidt? Das ist Ihre Name, ja?’

‘Jawohl.’

‘What the hell did they do to you?’

A high whining, choked with sobs.

For a while, Carey was too sickened and depressed to do more than sit uncomfortably on the damp straw beside the German. Somewhere at the back of his mind a large and complicated structure was forming to explain all that had been going on, but what he was mainly conscious of was the fact that the chill of the wine cellar was cutting through his shirt and giving him goosepimples, he was already dizzy from the fumes, his stomach hurt and so did his shoulder, and that whatever was left of the man beside him was weeping its heart out.

‘All right,’ said Carey awkwardly at last, as if talking to a horse gone lame. ‘All right now. Ich... er... ich help sie.’

Sniffling, coughing, thick swallowing, well, there was at least enough of the German’s pride for him to try and get a grip on himself. And this was no plant: none of that kind of crew were good enough actors. Carey deliberately pulled his thoughts away from what might have happened to the unfortunate foreigner. He couldn’t find out anyway, with his hands bolted behind him. The rough wooden shackle hanging on his wristbones was already causing his fingers to prickle and tingle painfully.

‘All right,’ he said pointlessly again. ‘I’m Sir Robert Carey, Deputy Warden of Carlisle. It seems we share an enemy. I want to talk to you. Ich will mit sie sprache.’

There was something a little like a bitter laugh. ‘Nonsense,’ Carey snapped. ‘If it’s too hard to talk, just grunt. Give one grunt for yes, two grunts for no and three for I don’t know. Eins fur ja, swei fur nein, drei fur ich kenne nicht. Ja?’

‘Ja.’

So far, so good, thought Carey, shifting his back up against the wall again and trying to get his legs comfortable. He wished with all his heart he spoke more German, or the German more English. Though from the mushy sounds next to him he suspected the man was having to talk out of a mouthful of broken teeth. ‘Now, do you understand French? Sprechen sie Franzosich?’

‘Oui. Meilleur qu’anglais.’

‘Thank God,’ said Carey, mentally switching gears into that language. ‘Alors, parlons nous.’

***

Young Hutchin sat in Maxwell’s loft with his arms wrapped round his knees and watched the rats watching him in the light squeezing up through the ceiling boards from the candles and lanterns below. The cold heavy belt wrapped round his waist was warming up. In his imagination he saw the gold there, thick heavy roundels of it, straight from Spain, stamped with letters he could not read and, no doubt, a few with bite marks in them. He had seen gold when his father had had a good raid, he knew what it looked like and what it could buy.

Below him and to the right there were bangs and thumps and talk. Sir Henry and his men were searching Carey’s sleeping place for the gold, but although Hutchin could feel his heart beating hard and slow, he was less afraid than excited. Hiding from searchers was something he had done many times after thieving; it was only a matter of staying still and silent. He had already taken the precaution of putting one of the main roof beams between himself and the trapdoor, in case someone should come up for a look, treading softly and carefully over the narrow boards while Carey argued with Sir Henry below. He could see an escape route where the slates were loose on one side. Picturing the building in his mind, he thought it was at a point on the roof where there was a way down to the roof of the bowling alley and from there to the ground. Or he could go down through the trapdoor when the men below had given up and gone. After that, once out of Maxwell’s Castle—there were horses aplenty in the town, or he could find his cousins on foot, an unremarked boy among dozens in Dumfries. And then...

Young Hutchin shook his head with exasperation. The Courtier had somehow caught him neatly in a trap of words and loyalty. What had he said, after outlining precisely the things Hutchin could do? He had said the choice was Hutchin’s. No hint there of which he should choose, only the bald stating of it. And yet, Young Hutchin knew perfectly well that the Deputy Warden would be hoping he would find Dodd or Lady Widdrington and get him out of whatever dungeon the Scottish King had thrown him in. What could they do? Ransom him perhaps with the gold around Hutchin’s middle. Jesus, what a waste of a fortune.

Hutchin bit his lip, weighing up his choices. If he ran off, he was as good as killing the Deputy, or worse. He had heard the words of the warrant through the ceiling boards, the ugly frightening phrase ‘high treason’. Sir Henry Widdrington had read it out loudly enough. They did worse than hang you for high treason, he knew, though he had never seen it done. They hanged you first, then they took you down while you were still alive, cut off your cods and burned them in your face and slit your belly and pulled out your guts and then cut you in four bits like a woman making a chicken stew. He had heard tell that if the hangman wasn’t bribed beforehand, he’d let you down before you were more than a little blue and then... Hutchin had seen hangings and more than his share of men dying, but his imagination balked at this. It was true, he had a morbid curiosity to see it done at least once, and envied the apprentice boys in Edinburgh who had more of a chance, but not to the Courtier. He liked the Courtier, soft southerner though he was, and after all, Carey had come after Hutchin when he had been inveigled away from the stables by the young man in tawny taffeta. Carey had appeared at the upstairs window like an avenging angel, while Hutchin was fighting and dodging for his life, had climbed through, punched one of the men and kicked another, giving Hutchin the chance to bite the other man holding him and head-butt a fourth. That had been a good fight, though Hutchin personally would have liked to see Carey’s sword bloodied instead of merely used as a threat.

Never mind, the fact was he had been there as if he were an uncle or an elder brother or something, not just a southern courtier. And Young Hutchin had repaid him by spying for his enemy, Sir Henry Widdrington. That annoyed Hutchin profoundly. He had been taken like a wean by Roger Widdrington, he had naïvely believed the tale about Lady Widdrington, him—Hutchin Graham, most promising son of the canniest surname on the Border. It was infuriating and shaming. And hardly a word had Carey said to curse him for it, though he was facing arrest by the very man he had no doubt horned, and plainly due to Hutchin’s treason. And now Young Hutchin had the means of freeing him. Or not.

God damn it, thought Hutchin, they were still turning over Carey’s room, what the Devil’s taking them so long? Do they not know how to find good loot in a room? Stupid bastards. He started to pick his teeth with his fingernail. Perhaps he’d be here all night. Perhaps by the time they had finished, the King’s men would have broken Carey’s long legs in the Boot and put him out of hope of ever walking again. Perhaps after a session with Scottish torturers, he would prefer to die, even by hanging, drawing and quartering?

Young Hutchin was getting tired of thinking. He realised that at last the thumps and bangs had stopped. Still moving cautiously, he picked his way through rat droppings and ancient clothes chests to the loose slates and pulled a few out. There was a gutter that seemed firm enough. The curve of the roof hid him from the yard where Widdrington’s men were gathering. With painful slowness he eeled his way out through the small hole and lay full length on the roof, gripping with the toes of his boots and his fingers. He inched his way down until his foot met the edge of the leads, and he could rest his weight on it a little and go sideways to the place where the roof of the bowling alley joined the main building. Although this was a fortified town house, there was no roof platform here for standing siege, only some crenellations and elaborate chimneys, more for show than for use, and a nuisance to climb over.

The bowling alley roof was newer and had no crenellations. At least it was at a flatter pitch and by lying full length and gripping the ridge with his arms at full stretch he could inch himself along and so gain the change from shingle to thatch where the stables began. Arm muscles bulging at the extra weight round his middle, Hutchin let himself down off the bowling alley roof by means of the gutter, watching the pinnings creak and pop. He dropped onto the thatch before the whole lot could come away. The thatch was rotten and he actually went part way through, his feet dangling sickeningly in space, his hands grabbing at one of the cross-ties. A couple of horses whinnied and snorted below.

‘Och, the hell with it,’ Young Hutchin said to himself, knowing the stables were only one storey high, and he let go of the cross-tie and let himself slide through and rolled into the thick straw between two alarmed horses. Brushing straw and reeds off himself he calmed the animals down, patting them and swearing at them gently under his breath, until he felt the iron prod of a sword in his back and stopped dead.

‘Stealing horses again, eh, Young Hutchin?’

‘Sergeant Dodd,’ said Young Hutchin, his stomach lurching back from his throat with relief.

‘Ay. And ye woke me up, ye little bastard.’

The sound of a yawn followed this, so Hutchin cautiously turned about. Sergeant Dodd had bits of straw in his hair and his eyes full of sleep. The hand not holding a sword was scratching fleabites on his stomach and his foul temper in the mornings was legendary.

‘It’s a pity the men in the yard didnae do the like then,’ Hutchin said in a triumphant hiss. ‘Sir Henry Widdrington just came with a Royal Warrant and arrested the Deputy Warden.’