FRIDAY, 14TH JULY 1592, AFTERNOON
Sir John Carmichael had only just heard the latest gossip about the doings at the King’s court when the subject of it breezed into the alehouse in the late afternoon, free, armed and with his left hand bandaged and in a sling. At his heels trotted his Graham pageboy. Sir John was not quite sure how to treat the hero of such melodramatic stories but, for the sake of his father, led him into a private room and sent for wine.
It turned out that all Carey wanted to do was borrow the services of a trustworthy clerk and dictate an exact account of what had been going on in Dumfries and Carlisle over the past couple of weeks, particularly in relation to no less than two loads of mixed calivers and pistols which seemed to have had the most exciting time of all.
By the end of it, Sir John was calling for more wine and damning Lord Spynie’s eyes and limbs impartially. He was particularly shocked at the idea of a gentleman and cousin of the Queen being tortured by some jumped-up lad of a favourite as if he were a bloody peasant. Carey agreed with him, read over the fair copy and then took a pen in his purple fingers and painfully wrote a further paragraph in a numerical cipher, topping and tailing the whole with the conventional phrases of a son to his father. Sir John privately doubted that Sir Robert was in fact as humbly obedient to Lord Hunsdon, the absentee Warden of the East March, as he professed to be or indeed should have been.
‘My father’s in London,’ Carey said. ‘Would you make sure this reaches him without going near either Lord Scrope or Sir John Forster, nor even my brother in Berwick?’
Sir John Carmichael nodded sympathetically.
‘Will he show it to the Queen?’
‘Only if I die... er... unexpectedly in office, or that’s what I told him to do.’
‘Mphm. Ye’ll stay the night here, of course, since ye can hardly go back to Maxwell.’
Carey coughed. ‘Hardly. Thank you. Now, Sir John, I wonder if I could ask you another favour?’
‘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?’
