‘Ye can always ask and I can always listen.’

‘I talked to Sir Henry Widdrington before I left the Court and the King promised to hold him for me until tomorrow evening, but I have a packtrain of armaments to get back to Carlisle. Even if I leave before dawn that won’t give me much of a start.’

‘Ay,’ agreed Carmichael, having got there long before him. ‘I canna lend you men, but I can give ye some information. Someone stirred up the Johnstones this morning: the laird and his kin moved out of Dumfries in a body. My esteemed successor went hammering out of town in the direction of Lochmaben shortly after, wi’ every one of his men.’

Carey frowned.

‘The Maxwells and Johnstones are massing for battle?’

Sir John tipped his head. ‘Maxwell blames you.’

‘Oh, Christ. What the hell has he got against me?’ demanded Carey, clearly not feeling as blithely confident as he looked. ‘I saved his life.’

‘Och, but that was days ago,’ said Carmichael. ‘Wi’ the like of him, it’s a hundred years back. And he wants your guns.’

‘To wipe out the Johnstones?’

‘Ay. See ye, the Johnstones had just taken delivery of a surprising number of guns fra Carlisle, through the usual... er... system, ye ken, when ye arrived in the north and made yer surprise inspection of the Armoury. After that, they got to keep them and that had Maxwell awfy worried, so he put in a large bid to Thomas the Merchant Hetherington to get some for himself, which went, I believe, through your ain predecessor in office, Sir Richard Lowther.’

‘Why can’t any of these idiots buy guns in Dumfries?’ asked Carey wearily. ‘Why does Carlisle have to supply their every want?’

Carmichael shrugged. ‘It’s cheaper, mostly, the Dumfries armourers are very pricey men, and slow if ye want a lot in a hurry, and o’ course it’s more fun that way. Now, ye may have saved Maxwell’s life, but ye also diddled him out of a fortune and spoiled his plan for catching the Johnstones unawares, which he resents and so...’

Carey knuckled at his eyes and then shook his head.

‘And I haven’t even kept the bloody money. What about the King? I’ve got twenty lancers from him already to see me through the Debateable Land. Would he give me more troops as protection, do you think?’

‘Ay, the King,’ said Carmichael carefully. ‘They do say he kens an awful lot more than he lets on.’

Carey looked straight at him, considering. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s what I thought.’

SATURDAY, 15TH JULY 1592, DAWN

When dawn came up the next day Carey and his packtrain were already heading eastwards into its bronze light, with a royal escort of twenty lancers and a Royal Warrant in Carey’s belt pouch commanding safeconduct for him to the Border. Young Hutchin was not at his side, having been sent ahead with an urgent message on the fastest pony Carey could find.

He was not at all his usual self that morning. He already felt weary and a night of poor sleep made fitful by the throbbing pain in his hands had not helped. He was nervous because he knew perfectly well he could not even hold a sword, let alone wield it, and if he tried to shoot one of his dags, he would drop it. It was hateful to be so weak and defenceless, and the knowledge of his incapacity shortened his temper even further and filled him with ugly suspicions. He was quite sure that many of the lancers escorting his convoy were privately wondering just how annoyed their King would be if they simply stole some of the weapons and slipped back to their families. He very much doubted if they would lift a finger for him if the Maxwells showed up.

When the Maxwells showed up, he corrected himself, because they were guaranteed to do so. Lord Maxwell was a Border baron, descended from a long line of successful robbers; what he wanted, generally speaking, he took. And Carey was alone apart from the battered and subdued Red Sandy and Sim’s Will, and made very nearly helpless by Lord Spynie.

He kicked his horse to a canter alongside the line of patiently plodding ponies, up to their leader which was being ridden by a dour-faced Scottish drover.

‘Is this the fastest pace you can take?’ he demanded of the man.

The drover stared at him for a moment, then spat into a tussock of grass.

‘Ay,’ he said. ‘There’s thirty-five mile to cover. Ye canna do it in less than two days and if ye have no fresh beasts waiting at Annan, ye canna do it at all wi’out care, the way they’re laden.’

That was unanswerable. Carey harrumphed impatiently and rode a little ahead where he had put the least villainous-looking of King James’s inadequate troops. No wonder the King didn’t want to take them into Liddesdale on a foray. Then he rode back to the rear of the train to take a look at the others there. He was wasting time and effort, he knew. The ponies plodded on in their infuriatingly patient way and all he had to do was look at their tails and pray silently.

It was almost a relief to him as they climbed on what passed for a path along the sides of the hills, when he began to see armed men notching the skyline to their left and heard the plovers being put up in the distance.

‘Here they come, sir,’ said Red Sandy, loosening his sword and taking a firm grip on his lance.

‘Do you know who they are?’ he demanded.

‘Ay,’ said Sim’s Will. ‘By the look of their jacks, they’re Maxwells.’

‘God damn it,’ muttered Carey. ‘Where the hell is Dodd?’

‘Ah’m here, sir.’

‘Not you, Red Sandy; your brother.’

Red Sandy looked puzzled and Carey stood in his stirrups and looked around. Ahead of them on the road was the golden flash of sun on a polished breastplate and the flourish of feathers in a hat.

Carey pressed his horse to a canter again. ‘Keep going no matter what happens,’ he snarled at the chief drover as he passed.

Lord Maxwell’s saturnine face was aggravatingly relaxed as Carey approached.

‘Good day to ye, Sir Robert,’ he called out.

‘Good day, my lord,’ said Carey, tipping his hat with the very barest minimum of civility.

‘We’ll escort ye to Lochmaben now.’

For a moment Carey thought of a variety of responses, ranging from the reproachful to the courteous. In the end he ditched them all in favour of honesty.

‘In a pig’s arse, my lord.’

This was not how Maxwell was accustomed to being addressed. He blinked and his heavy eyebrows came down.

‘What?’

‘I said, in a pig’s arse, my lord,’ repeated Carey with the distinctness usually reserved for the imbecilic or deaf.

‘I’ll have my guns one way or the other, Carey.’

‘To begin with, my lord, they are not your guns, they are guns belonging to the Queen’s Majesty of England.’

‘They’re mine now,’ said Maxwell with a shrug.

‘No,’ said Carey. ‘They’re not.’

‘Ye’re not in yer ain March now, Carey. If ye give me no trouble, I’ll let you and yer men go free without even asking ransom.’

The sound of a single gun firing boomed out like the crack of doom in the quiet hills and danced between them. Carey looked over to his right and saw the distant lanky figure of Sergeant Dodd standing on a low ridge to the south of the road, with a smoking caliver. He lowered it, handed it to the Johnstone standing beside him who began the process of swabbing and reloading, and took another caliver that also had its match lit, blew carefully on the end to make it hot and took painstaking aim at Lord Maxwell.

Maxwell knew that breastplates do not stop bullets and that where one Johnstone was visible there were likely to be plenty more. He darkened with fury.