‘Ye’ll be wanting to see His Highness again.’

‘If he wants to see me, my lord.’

‘Ay, he’s cleared an hour for ye.’

‘Excellent. And thank him for sending Lady Widdrington to tend to me, she is unparalleled as a nurse and far better than any drunken surgeon.’

‘Hmf. Ay.’

‘My lord Earl,’ said Elizabeth. ‘May I ask what’s happening to my husband?’

The Earl sniffed. ‘That’s for the King to decide, seeing he’s under arrest.’

‘And Lord Spynie?’

Another much longer sniff. ‘Ay, well,’ said the Earl. ‘The King’s verra fond of him, ye ken.’

‘Yes,’ she said with freezing politeness. ‘So it seems. Sir Robert, what would you suggest I do now? May I serve you further or should I tend to my husband?’

‘Tend to your husband by all means, my lady,’ Carey said very gravely. ‘I am greatly beholden to you.’

She curtseyed, he bowed. She walked away from him, refusing to look back, refusing to think of anything but dealing with her husband.

‘Lady Widdrington.’ She stopped and turned, felt a touch from him on her shoulder where it was most tender and automatically shied away. Carey was there, smiling at her.

‘May I have my ring back?’

She blushed, embarrassed to have forgotten, wondering at the sudden hardness in his eyes. She fished the ring out of her purse under her kirtle and put it into his hand. He fumbled it onto his undamaged little finger, bowed once more and turned back to the patiently waiting Earl and his escort.

***

The King of Scotland had often enjoyed the use of the secret watching places he had ordered built into many of his castles. Through holes cunningly hidden by the swirling patterns of tapestries brought from France, he found the truth of many who swore they loved him and learned many things to his advantage about his nobles. It was something of a quest for him: he never stopped hoping for one man who could genuinely love him as d’Aubigny had, in despite of his Kingship, not because of it. And like a boy picking at a scab, he generally got more pain than satisfaction from his curiosity.

At the Mayor’s house in Dumfries he had lacked such conveniences. But in the little rooms on the third storey there had been a few with interconnecting doors and it had not been difficult to set up some with tapestries hung to hide those doors. Thus he need only leave his room quietly, nip up the back stairs and into the next-door chamber to the one where he had told Mar to put Carey. Sitting at his ease, with the connecting door open, he had quietly eavesdropped on Carey and his ladylove, as he had before on Lord Spynie and on some of his pages and others of the Border nobility. Some might have found it undignified in a monarch: James held that nothing a monarch did could be undignified, since his dignity came from God’s appointment.

This time, as he descended the narrow backstairs and stepped to his own suite of rooms, he wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or pleased. That Carey turned out to be a lecherous sinner was not a surprise to him; that Lady Widdrington was a virtuous wife astounded him. He was saddened that Carey was clearly a hopeless prospect for his own bed, but he did not want to make the mistake with him that he had as a younger and more impatient King with the Earl of Bothwell. And Carey had called him ‘a decent man’. It was a casual appraisal, something James had been taught to think of almost as blasphemous, but the accolade pleased him oddly because it was spoken innocently, in private and could not be self-interested. And further, it seemed that both of them were honest. Yes, there was disappointment that his suspicions were wrong; but on the other hand, honest men and women were not common in his life, they had all the charm of rarity.

He was sitting at the head of a long table, reading tedious papers, when Carey at last made his appearance in the chamber, having been kept waiting for a while outside. He paced in, genuflected twice and then the third time stayed down on one knee looking up at the King and waiting for him to speak. King James watched him for a while, searching for signs of guilt or uneasiness. He was nervous and paler than was natural for him, his arm in a sling, but he was vastly more self-possessed than the bedraggled battered creature that the King had seen in the morning.

‘Well, Sir Robert, how are ye now?’ he asked jovially.

‘Very much better, thank you, Your Majesty.’

‘We have made sundry investigations into your case,’ the King pronounced, ‘and we are quite satisfied that there was no treason by you, either committed or intended, to this realm or that of our dear cousin of England. And we are further of the opinion that ye should be congratulated and no’ condemned for your dealings with the Spanish agent in the guise of an Italian wine merchant that some of our nobles were harbouring unknown to us.’

Carey’s head was bowed.

‘We have therefore ordered that all charges be dropped and your good self released from the Warrant.’

Carey cleared his throat, looked up. ‘I am exceedingly grateful to Your Majesty for your mercy and justice.’ Was there still a hint of wariness in the voice? Did the Englishman think there might be a price for it? Well, there would be, though not the one he feared. King James smiled.

‘Well now, so that’s out o’ the way. Off your knees, man, I’m tired of looking down on ye. This isnae the English court here.’ Carey stood, watching him.

King James tipped his chair back and put his boots comfortably on the tedious papers in front of him.

‘Oh, Sir Robert,’ he said, ‘would ye fetch me the wine on the sideboard there?’

Carey did so gracefully, though with some difficulty, without the offended hunch of the shoulders that King James often got from one of his own subjects. On occasion he was even read a lecture by one of the more Calvinistically inclined about the evils of drink. It would be so much more restful to rule the English; he was looking forward to it greatly, if the Queen would only oblige him by dying soon and if the Cecils could bring off a smooth succession for him.

Carey was standing still again after refilling his goblet, silently, a couple of paces from him. On the other hand, it was very hard to know what the English were thinking. Sometimes James suspected that with them, the greater the flattery, the worse the contempt. Buchanan had said that the lot of them were dyed in the wool hypocrites, as well as being greedy and ambitious. Well, well, it would be interesting at least.

‘It’s a question of armaments, is it no’?’ he said affably. ‘Ye canna tell the Queen that ye lost the weapons she sent ye and ye canna do without them.’ He paused. ‘It seems,’ he said slowly, ‘that I have a fair quantity of armament myself, more than I had thought. Lord Spynie was in charge of purveying my army’s handguns, and it seems he did a better job than I expected.’

Carey’s eyes were narrowed down to bright blue slits. ‘Indeed, Your Majesty.’

‘Bonnetti is in the midst of lading his... ah... his purchases into his ship. He is still not aware of any... problems.’ King James beamed. ‘I gave him some gunpowder I’d no use for.’

‘Your Majesty is most kind.’

King James let out a shout of laughter. ‘I am that. Now,’ he said again. ‘I’m no’ an unreasonable man. I see ye’re in a difficult position with the armaments and I would like to put a proposal to ye.’

Carey’s eyebrows went up.

‘Oh?’ he said.

‘Ay, I would. I... we would like to sell ye our... spare weapons for the price of twenty shillings a gun, it being wholesale, as it were.’

Carey’s face was completely unreadable. There was a short silence.

‘I should hate to make a similar mistake to Lord Maxwell’s,’ he said cautiously at last.

King James nodded vigorously. ‘Of course ye can check them over, fire them off a few times, take them apart if ye like. Ye’ll find they’re right enough: most of them have the Tower maker’s mark on them which was a surprise to me.’

Carey nodded, face completely straight. ‘Of course,’ he murmured. ‘May I ask if Your Majesty has sufficient weapons to defend yourself against Bothwell?’

‘It’s kind o’ ye to be concerned for us, Sir Robert,’ said the King. ‘But we have decided there is no need to burn Liddesdale since the headmen there have come in and composed with us so loyally. Richie Graham of Brackenhill has made a handsome payment, for instance. And we have it on excellent authority that Bothwell has gone to the Highlands. We had always rather make peace than war, as ye know. Besides, it often strikes us that when ye give a man a weapon ye dinna always ken what he’ll use it for.’

If Carey disapproved of this reversal of policy, there was no sign of it in his face. He tilted his head politely, though he seemed very depressed about something.

‘Now,’ said King James, who hated to see any man so sad. ‘I would have wanted to talk to ye in any case, Sir Robert, even without all this trouble.’

‘Your Majesty does me too much honour,’ said Carey, mechanically, as if he were thinking about something else.

‘Not a bit of it,’ said King James, leaning forward to pat the man’s shoulder. ‘It’s the horse.’

‘The horse?’

‘Ay. That big black beast o’ yours.’