‘Indeed.’
‘We’ve the King after us wi’ blood in his eye for the Falkland raid, after all. We dinna want mither wi’ the Queen as well.’
‘Oh? That sounds very statesmanlike.’
‘Ay. And our friends the Johnstones shared the guns they got to keep after ye turned over the Armoury, and besides we wouldnae want to mix it with the Maxwells without all our men here.’
‘Astonishing. Borderers thinking before they fight.’
‘Ay, sir. We’re learning.’
The two surnames watched glowering from the other side of the Esk to be sure that neither one of them made a sudden attack. The ponies passed the ford and plodded on for the last eight miles of their journey, leaving them far behind. For the first time in his life, Carey felt quite weak with relief that there was not going to be a fight.
SUNDAY, 16TH JULY 1592, EVENING
Lord Scrope, Warden of the English West March, was of course delighted to see Carey return from his trip to Scotland at the head of a packtrain laden with guns, all of Tower-make, all of precisely the pattern that the Queen issued to the north, with only about ten missing. It was worrying to see he had somehow injured his left hand, which was bandaged and in a sling, and also from the evidence of his face he had been in at least one fistfight. Sergeant Dodd, Red Sandy and Sim’s Will Croser were looking uncharacteristically subdued, while a lad who had been missing from Carlisle had evidently tagged along with Carey unasked, and got into a fight as well. Heroically, Scrope suppressed his questions until they had dealt with the weapons. Those were stowed in the Armoury again while Richard Bell took a record of exactly what was there, Carey locked the door with a flourish and a suppressed wince and then turned to Scrope.
‘Um...’ said Scrope, bursting with curiosity to know what had happened to him. ‘Your report?’
‘To you, verbally, my lord,’ said Carey. ‘Now.’
That was worrying. They returned to Scrope’s dining-room cum council chamber and Carey sat down in one of the chairs with a sigh and blinked at him.
‘Will you call for beer, my lord?’
‘Of course.’
They waited, Carey tipping his head back against the chair and shutting his eyes. When the beer came, Carey reached out to take the nearest tankard and noticed he still had his gauntlet on. With his teeth he stripped the glove off. Scrope stared at his hand which was mottled purple and red, and missing two fingernails.
‘Good God, man, what happened to your...?’
‘Thumbscrews,’ said Carey shortly and drank most of his beer. ‘I’ll give you my interpretation of events as I go along, shall I, my lord?’
Scrope nodded, clearly finding it hard to look at his damaged fingers. Carey didn’t blame him. The empurpled nailbeds made him feel queasy in a way that a much worse wound would not.
Carey blinked again at the florid hunters on the tapestry hanging behind Scrope’s head, marshalling his thoughts with great effort. At last he spoke again in a flat tired voice.
‘Well, my lord, in my humble opinion we were dealing not only with two loads of firearms, but also with two separate plots. One load of firearms came from the Tower of London and was stolen on the road from Newcastle. The second load was swapped for them to hide the theft. They were the ones that ended up in our Armoury and every single weapon was faulty.
‘The first plot concerns Lord Spynie. He had been given the power to procure the King of Scotland’s handguns, but like most army contractors he spent much of the money on other things and was then in a quandary to buy the weapons he needed. Luckily there was a German in Edinburgh, newly arrived from Augsburg where they also make weapons, who offered to supply him the guns at a cut price. All would have been well if the German had in fact been a master gunsmith as he claimed, because to be honest, my lord, the German weapons are usually better than ours. Unfortunately he was not a master, nor even a journeyman. He had been expelled from a Hanseatic gunsmithing guild for shoddy workmanship and fraud. Spynie didn’t know this, or didn’t care, and accepted the deal happily.
‘The German, going by the name of Hans Schmidt, set up a gun foundry in Jedburgh where he simply turned out the guns as quickly as he could with untrained labour. I don’t believe he bothered to caseharden the lock parts and the forge-welding and beating out of the barrels was so badly done, they were bound to crack at the first firing and explode at the second.
‘Spynie had paid for them, taken delivery of them, when he found out—no doubt, the same way we did—that they were no better than scrap metal. Also the German had disappeared, the King’s procurement money was spent, and Spynie couldn’t make the weapons useable. The problem became more acute after Bothwell’s raid on Falkland Palace, when the King called out his levies for a justice raid.’
‘But didn’t he find his runaway German? You told me you had witnessed his arrest...’
‘Yes. Schmidt was hiding with a woman who sold him to Spynie once he ran out of money—I’m afraid he was as bad a fraudster as he was a gunsmith.’
‘Bloody man deserves to hang, for the maiming and deaths he caused.’
Carey shut his eyes again. ‘He’s dead,’ he said shortly. After a moment he carried on.
‘So then Spynie gets wind of our new delivery of weapons from London and with a little help from his English friends—most notably Sir Simon Musgrave, Sir Henry Widdrington and his kin, and the family of Littles—he carries out a daring swap a day or two out of Carlisle. He gets the good Tower weapons; we get the ones the German sold him and put them into our Armoury. Purely incidentally, while helping to swap the weapons over, Long George Little steals himself a new pistol. Which explodes in his hand when he’s on night patrol with me.’
Scrope had steepled his fingers and was looking through them like a child at a frightening sight.
‘Clear so far?’ prompted Carey.
‘Eh? Oh, yes, very clear. A model of clarity, my dear Robin. Would you prefer to continue with this tomorrow, after you’ve had some sleep? You can have had none at all last night—you must be exhausted.’
‘I am tired,’ Carey admitted in a wintry voice. ‘But I prefer to make my report while it’s fresh in my mind.’
Scrope inclined his head politely.
‘Now we must switch to another plot. Quite separately, Lord Maxwell was very anxious to lay hands on a good supply of firearms to continue and, he hoped, finish his feud with the Johnstones. He needed them because the Johnstones appear to be very well armed, again with guns corruptly acquired from the Carlisle Armoury.’
‘I wish one lot or the other would win,’ interrupted Scrope wistfully. ‘It would cut in half the amount of trouble from the West.’
‘Maxwell made contact with Sir Richard Lowther and asked for the longterm hire of the weapons in the Armoury, on the usual illegal and damnably corrupt terms. Not in any way realising that the guns were faulty—in fact they hadn’t arrived at this point—Sir Richard agreed.’
Scrope nodded.
‘But with me around and his pet Armoury clerk, Jemmy Atkinson, dead, he realised the old system could no longer work. At the same time, he wanted Maxwell’s money. And so Lowther arranged to break into the Armoury while we were at the muster and steal the guns out of Carlisle. The plan was he would eventually “find” them again once Maxwell had finished off the last Johnstone and no longer needed them. While he was about it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had found clear evidence that it was I stole ’em.’
Scrope let out a humourless little ‘Heh, heh, heh.’ Then he added anxiously, ‘Unfortunately you have no proof it was Lowther who organised the theft.’
‘No, my lord, I haven’t. There’s nothing you could call proof for any of this.’
