Goodwife Little nodded.
‘Where did the exchange take place?’
‘East of here, in the Middle March, at a meeting place. I dinna ken where.’
‘Please, Goody, I will not say where I got the information, but where did the guns come from?’
She laughed a little. ‘Where all trouble comes, fra ower the Border, where else?’
Carey nodded, released her hand, gave her the purse he was carrying and the paper, then bowed in return to her curtsey and pushed his way out of the tiny smoky little hellhole. He was coughing and wheezing as he got back on his horse and when he wiped his face with his handkerchief he found a pale brown dinge on it.
‘Christ,’ he remarked to no one in particular. ‘How can anyone live in a place like that?’
‘It’s no’ sae bad, sir,’ sniffed Dodd, offended once again. ‘Ye stop crying and coughing in a week and then they’re snugger than a tower, believe me.’
‘Thank you, Dodd,’ said Carey, hawking and spitting mightily. ‘I’ll try and remember it.’ He put in his heels and led them at a fast trot back to the path, without looking back.
***
‘So tell me about the guns,’ the Courtier said conversationally to Henry Dodd as they turned their horses’ heads west and northwards.
‘The guns, sir?’
‘Yes, Sergeant. The guns in the armoury. What is it that everybody else knows about them and I don’t?’
Dodd’s face had taken on a stolidly stupid expression.
‘I’m sorry, sir...’
‘What I’d really like to know is what makes the armoury clerkship worth fifty pounds, since it seems that’s what Lowther and his cousin Ridley managed to bilk me out of. It can’t simply be a matter of selling all the guns as quickly as you can: even on the Border someone would notice, surely.’
There was the faintest flicker of Dodd’s eyelid.
‘For Christ’s sake, Dodd, have pity.’
Dodd coughed.
‘Well, sir, ye see, ye can loan the handguns out for a regular fee with a little care—and a deposit, of course—and get more in the long run than ye would by selling them.’
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.
