‘But if I find you some guns, I will never see you again,’ Carey protested, putting his hand to his brow sorrowfully. Emilia prodded him in a sensitive spot without warning and made him gasp.
‘You might. But if I have not guns in the next few weeks, the Signor and I shall be ruined and so you will never see us more at all.’
‘And if I can find you a few guns?’
‘We will pay you perhaps forty shillings each for them.’
Carey stared hard at her as she busied herself pulling on her stays. He was thinking and calculating and wondering how far he could trust his luck this time. Imperiously she ordered him to help her with her backlaces, and he obediently did the office of a lady’s maid, with a few additions of his own invention. Unfortunately, she was no longer in the mood and they didn’t work. The complex layers went over her inexorably, one after the other, and when she was fully dressed and pinning on her cap, she turned on him and frowned again.
‘And you are still disgraceful, why will you not put your shirt on?’
‘Hope,’ he said with mock despair and a lewd gesture.
She gave him his shirt and hose crushingly. ‘No, Monsieur le Deputé, I think not.’
‘And if I can find you some guns?’
Now she smiled. ‘Who knows?’
He laughed. ‘If I get you the guns you need, I’ll want more than kisses in recompense.’
‘A ten per centum finder’s fee?’
‘Twenty.’
‘Fifteen.’
‘Done,’ Carey said happily, drinking to it.
‘Now you must meet my husband.’
***
Giovanni Bonnetti was in a sorrowful state as he sat casting up his accounts. He was a small lightly built, swarthy man with a curled up waxed beard and moustache and very dark bright eyes. Three shirts and a knitted waistcoat under his fashionable orange and black taffeta doublet could not keep out the dank cold of the miserable joke that the Scots called summer. His legs were a perpetual mass of goose-pimples under his elegant black hose and, while the uproar in his bowels had calmed somewhat, he was not a well man. Cursed inefficient northerners, none of them knew what proper plumbing was.
And furthermore he had a stifling head-cold which caused his nose to drip all the time and a sore throat and hardly any of the illiterate savages of Scotland could speak Italian and many of them only spoke halting French with a nasal drawl that would have disgraced a Fleming. A generation ago they had been better cultured, when their alliance with France was strong and they had the wisdom of Mother Church to guide them. The foul heresy of Protestantism had sealed them up in their poor little country to stew in their own juices. And the King was no better than his nobles, though he at least had Italian and French.
But the worst of it, the absolute worst, was that here he was in Dumfries, the centre of gunmaking for the whole of Scotland, being placed in the area of highest demand, and nobody would sell him any handguns, not pistols, nor calivers, nor arquebuses. He might as well have been in London trying to buy munitions from the Tower. The locals looked at him and denied point blank that they owned any guns, ever had owned any guns, even knew what guns were. The gunsmiths he could persuade to talk to him in the first place said their order books were full for the next six months and they could barely keep up with demand. It had seemed such a fine idea from Antwerp. He would make use of his wife’s scandalous liaison with the Lord Maxwell to make contact with the Scottish Court. They would both travel to Scotland with Maxwell and there buy weapons and ammunition to ship on to the Irish rebels and thus help to destroy the Earl of Essex, Elizabeth’s general in Ireland. Perhaps with good weapons for the Irish thrown in the balance, he might be the means of dislodging the heretical English grip on Ireland completely. And Ireland, as the Queen of England and the King of Spain both knew very well, was the back door into England. His elaborate and painfully written proposal had gone through the many layers of Spanish bureaucrats and officials and finally returned with the tiny mincing script of the King of Spain in the top righthand corner: fiat, let this be done.
Their children had not exactly been taken in ward, only the officials had made it clear that they would come to Antwerp and remain there, as security for Philip II’s investment. Giovanni had triumphantly taken his Medici bank drafts and converted some into gold to defray his expenses and buy wine as samples. He had taken ship with his minx of a wife and her noble Scottish bandit of a lover, closing his eyes firmly to her antics and solacing himself with one of his maids, all within the last few months.
And now here he was, on the verge of the biggest coup of his life, and nobody would sell him guns. The King was no help, insisted that he hadn’t enough firearms himself, though he bought and drank every drop of the wine Bonnetti had brought as his cover-story: the powder he had been promised at a swingeing price would, no doubt, be bad and his time was running out before the autumn gales closed the seas between Scotland and Ireland. Also the wine that the Scottish nobility drank was appalling. If he could only pull off his coup, he might indeed set up as a vintner, supplying the barbarians with something a little better. He drank some more, the cloves and nutmeg completely failing to hide the fact that it had been pressed from the last sweepings of third-rate Gascony vineyards, watered, adulterated and brought in foul leaky barrels.
There was a knock at the door of the miserable back room of the alehouse he had rented as a makeshift office to take orders for wine.
‘Prego,’ said Bonnetti, gulping down the rest of his vinegar.
His wife appeared at the door with a man behind her, though not, unfortunately, the Lord Maxwell. He had been furious with her when she had quarrelled with her Scottish lover; her wilfulness had brought their whole enterprise in danger. He had known what she was doing to find another contact and it made him no happier.
This one was a new barbarian, elegantly dressed in black, with dyed hair. Extremely tall, even for the Scots, and with the national tendency to loom menacingly.
‘Bonjour, monsieur,’ said the barbarian in excellent French, making the merest fraction of a bow. ‘I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance.’
‘Votre nom, monsieur?’
‘Sir Robert Carey, Deputy Warden of Carlisle.’
Every ounce of self-control Bonnetti possessed was needed to stop him from leaping out of his seat and jumping from the window. He stared and croaked for a moment with his heart thumping and his hand behind the table, stroking the hilt of the little knife he had strapped to his wrist for emergencies. Meanwhile his wife smiled sweetly and triumphantly at him, and modestly withdrew. The Englishman stood at ease with his left hand tilting the pommel of his sword and his right propped on his fashionable paned hose. He said nothing, simply smiled and waited for Bonnetti to recover. As Bonnetti became capable of thought again, he realised he had actually heard something of the Careys from his brother in London: the nearest thing to Princes of the Blood Royal that the feeble Tudor line possessed, much favoured cousins of the Queen. This particular one he had not come across by name, but the fact that he was Deputy Warden of the English West March was bad enough. Nothing of their mission could possibly be accomplished if the infernal English knew about it: they might not have been able to stop him buying weapons in Scotland, but they could and would send ships to prevent him transporting them to Ireland.
‘Please, don’t be afraid,’ continued the Englishman softly. ‘I came because I heard you were interested in buying firearms.’
Deny it? No, the man was too sure of himself. No doubt his little whore of a wife had been blabbing.
‘I might be,’ Bonnetti admitted cagily. ‘Please sit down.’
The Englishman sat on the chair for potential customers, stretched out his long legs and crossed them at the ankle.
‘Excellent,’ said Carey. ‘I have eighteen dozen handguns, mainly calivers with some pistols, that I might be willing to sell to you. If you happen to be buying.’
It must be a trap. This was too extraordinary. An English official selling him weapons to fight the English in Ireland? It was certainly a trap.
‘I am not buying weapons,’ said Bonnetti. ‘I am not even interested in weapons. I am here to negotiate for the sale of Italian wine with the Scottish court.’
‘Oh,’ said the Englishman, without a trace of discomfiture. ‘Have you any samples? I might be interested in buying some myself.’
‘The Scottish court has drunk them all.’
Carey grinned. ‘Isn’t that a surprise? Well, Signor Bonnetti, I’m sorry to hear you aren’t interested in my suggestion, since the Signora was quite sure you would be. You must know that nobody in Dumfries or anywhere in Scotland will sell weapons to you because you are a Papist and a foreigner. The King of Scotland will very soon lose patience with you, take your money anyway and probably you will end up with a dagger in your back. Never mind. Not my affair. Good day to you.’
