It was Mary who had bought a packet of extra-long staylaces as Carey was sure Mrs Graham had noticed. She was mopping her eyes again: Carey saw her fingernails were bitten down to the quick.
‘It’s a sad thing to lose a brother,’ added Jeanie briskly, ‘but God knows, it’s worse to lose a wean, and she’s a fancy man here too, if I’m any judge.’
‘Is she not married yet?’ added Carey in surprise.
‘Nay, she’s only sixteen, she’s but a flighty maid with her head full of stories. Jock has her betrothed to an Elliot but she doesna want him. She’ll change her tune in time.’
‘Better to marry than burn, the preachers say,’ said Carey meaningfully.
Jeanie Scott eyed him. ‘Ay,’ she said at last, ‘that’s the way of it.’
‘Do you know who killed Sweetmilk?’
Jeanie shrugged and patted her stomach. ‘Save for the way it was done, it could have been a Storey or a Bell or a Maxwell or anyone that found him with cows that didna belong to him.’
‘Hey, pedlar,’ sang out another Mary, ‘how much for the whalebone?’
There was a little more selling and then the girl called Susan came in with a large wobbling junket, sweetened with rosewater and honey. They served it to him, laughing at his expression and told him a fine figure of a man like himself needed better feeding than what they were getting downstairs and it would settle his stomach nicely. Three of them had messages for friends in Carlisle, Jeanie Scott wanted him to tell the midwife Mrs Croser that the babe was head down at last, and a fifth wanted to know what a roll of green velvet would cost and if he could get it for her from Edinburgh next time he went. Carey promised he would find out from Thomas the Merchant, which seemed to please them.
At last with his pack a good bit lighter than before and his purse considerably heavier, Carey went to the door. Mrs Graham followed him with a roll of cloth.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘ye dinna want to jingle among that lot downstairs, roll your money in this.’
He did as she suggested and behind the door, he slipped it down inside his shirt and tied it round his waist. At the bottom of the stairs he found Wattie Graham, frowning.
‘Ye took your time.’
Carey shrugged. ‘I canna rush the ladies when they canna make up their minds,’ he said reasonably. ‘Who won the cockfight?’
‘The Duke of Guise, Old Wat of Harden’s best cock,’ said Wattie Graham dourly, ‘and if ye ask me, it was fixed.’
Carey went over to One-Lug and Jemmie to collect his winnings, and then agreed to join a game of primero with them. As soon as he took the cards in his hands, he knew they had been marked with pin pricks on the back and had to hide a smile. With a quick shuffle, he had the system worked out, and it was one that the London card-sharps had abandoned five years before.
It was quite pleasant to let himself slip into a card-playing frame of mind, finding a clearer colder self as he watched the cards and the play and calculated the odds according to the Italian book he had read ten years before and which had saved his life. At Court it could sometimes be far more dangerous to win than to lose: he won steadily but had never taken more than he lost off the Earl of Leicester, nor from his successor at Court, the Earl of Essex. Sir Walter Raleigh was a different matter: he had spotted Carey’s careful odds playing at once and had insisted on learning it from him.
Carey ended the evening by paying back to Old Wat’s Clemmie and One-Lug and Jemmie exactly what he had won off them at the cockfight, which made them feel they were somehow one up on him. There was music as well: a scrawny old man with a plaited beard took up a little harp like the ones they had in Ireland and strummed and sang a whining ugly song about a fight of some sort. There followed a scurrilous and probably truthful ballad about Scrope and his personal habits and a wistful lament for Sweetmilk Graham that had Jock of the Peartree dabbing his eyes and nodding and sighing.
It hardly seemed possible for the number of men they had fed there to be able to sleep, even after some of them had been set to watch the horses and guard the Longtown ford. And to Carey’s frustration, there was still no word on where the raid was headed. But there was no help for it, and so with his pack pillowing his head and a thread from it wound round his thumb, his dagger in his hand and Daniel’s thin greasy cloak wrapped round him, he lay down to sleep, with One-Lug’s boots by his head and Jemmie’s backside wedging him into the wall. Which hardly seemed a coincidence, though if they were watching him they were doing it in their sleep. For a long time he was too tight-strung to shut his eyes as he lay in the smoky darkness listening to an orchestra of snores and grunts and farting. In the end, even he slept.
FRIDAY 23RD JUNE, BEFORE DAWN
All her life Elizabeth Widdrington had risen well before dawn to dress herself and pray in the quiet pale time before the world sprang to life. It calmed her and gave her space to breathe before she must plunge into managing her husband’s house and lands and nursing her husband himself. It was a precious thing to be able to speak to God without interruption by maidservants wanting to know if the linen should be washed despite the rain and menservants needing the tools out of the lockup.
Of course, sometimes she was hard put to it to keep her mind on her prayers: Philadelphia’s brother would keep marching into her thoughts. It had been a long time since her lawfully arranged husband Sir Henry had been well enough for the marriage bed and sometimes she despaired of ever having children. At twenty-eight she was getting on for childbearing... And there was the memory of Robert Carey again, courteously determined, blue eyes smoky and intent, whispering his desire to her in the little garden at the palace, while the rain of that stormy summer fell and the whole land held its breath and waited for the Armada. And afterwards... No, she wouldn’t think of it.
She rose and started to dress. On this particular morning she was in one of the little apartments in the Carlisle Keep, since Lady Scrope refused to hear of her lodging in the town. As always she padded silently about in her shift, not needing a tiring woman since her stays laced unfashionably at the front, and once she was into her grey-woollen gown and her ruff tied at her neck, she crept out through Philadelphia and Thomas Scrope’s chamber with her boots in her hand. The two of them were invisible behind the curtains of their bed and the maidservant snoring at a high pitch by the wall. None of them woke as she opened the heavy door and went down the stair.
It was a little more difficult to pick her way amongst the servants asleep in the rushes in the main room, but she managed it with no more than a few grunts and a feeble grope after her by one of the men. She was on the point of opening the heavy main door, when she heard stealthy footsteps and whispered conversation, and the rattle of keys.
She froze, then as she heard them open the iron door to the jail and go in directly beneath her, she pulled on her boots, opened the door a little, to peer out.
Sir Richard Lowther was emerging from under the wooden steps that led to the door she was hiding behind. At his back were five tousled bearded men—no, six. The last she knew was Bangtail Graham and the others must be the raiders Sir Robert Carey had captured the day before yesterday.
Lowther beckoned them to stand around him.
‘He’s gone to Netherby,’ he explained, ‘dressed as a pedlar, by name Daniel Swanders. Now you’d know him again, wouldn’t you Young Jock.’
‘Oh ay,’ said Young Jock, ‘I’d know him.’
‘I can’t spare you more than one horse, so Young Jock will have to ride and the rest will have to follow, but...’
Elizabeth Widdrington opened the door, walked out onto the steps and stopped, looking down at them.
Richard Lowther looked up at her, not at all worried.
‘Good morning, Sir Richard,’ she said.
‘Good morning, Lady Widdrington,’ he said.
‘What are you doing?’
‘These men have got bail, Lady Widdrington,’ he said, ‘I’m letting them go home to their families.’
‘Bail?’ she asked archly.
‘My lord Scrope agreed it last night.’
Damn the man for his vagueness. Even when he was sick, Scrope’s father would have wanted to know the reason for Lowther’s interest.
