‘Ay, had,’ said Jock, ‘I asked him, he admitted he hit Sweetmilk, he admitted Sweetmilk called him out. He denied shooting my son in the back, but he lied.’

‘Did he have a trial?’ demanded Carey, his voice shaking with a sudden surprising rage. ‘Did he get a chance at justice?’

‘Justice? There ye go again, Courtier, you’re ower impractical. What justice did he give my Sweetmilk? If he’d killed him honourably in a duel, ay well, it would have been sorrowful, but what he did... He’s had all the justice he deserves.’

It was on the tip of Carey’s tongue to tell Jock the truth about his daughter, but somehow the words stuck there. The silence broken by horse noises was all around him while he tried to decide: would justice truly be served by her hanging? Would Jock even believe him? Mary’s death would bring back neither Sweetmilk nor Hepburn. Perhaps Elizabeth was right; he remembered her anger, which had puzzled him. At last he said, ‘Where is Hepburn now?’

‘His soul’s in hell, but ye’ll find his body where he left Sweetmilk’s, if you’ve a mind to go fetch it. I wouldnae bother, myself. It’s no’ very pretty, ye follow.’

‘You could have waited, Jock,’ said Carey tightly, ‘I was planning to arrest the murderer. You could have waited for a trial and proper justice.’

Jock shrugged. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Ye’re begrudging an old man healing his heart? Besides Hepburn could likely buy his way clear—who cares about the killing of a reiver? This way Sweetmilk can rest quiet.’

‘Very neat,’ said Carey bitterly.

He turned his horse away to return to Dodd and start the long wearisome job of rounding up the horses, sorting them out by brand and knowledge, and take them back to their rightful owners. Jock called after him, ‘I’m in debt to ye, Courtier. I’ll mind ye if we meet in a fight and if ye need aid from the Grahams, ye’ve only to call on me.’

Carey turned back.

‘God forbid,’ he said, ‘that I should ever need help from the likes of you.’

Jock was not offended. ‘Ay, perhaps He will. But if He doesna, my offer stands. Good day to ye, Courtier.’

A Season of Knives

To Melanie, with many thanks

Foreword

P.F. CHISHOLM WRITES YOU-ARE-THERE! BOOKS.

A You-Are-THERE! book is a book that can make you feel the nap of Sir Robert Carey’s black velvet doublet beneath your fingertips. A You-Are-THERE! book can make you smell the sewer in the streets of Elizabethan Carlisle. A You-Are-THERE! book can make you taste the ale at Bessie Storey’s alehouse outside the Captain’s Gate at Berwick garrison, and a You-Are-THERE! book can make you hear the arquebuses firing at Netherby tower. A You-Are-THERE! book can make you feel like you’re ready to pack up and move THERE, if only you had a time machine.

THERE, in the case of P.F. Chisholm, is the nebulous and ever-changing border between Scotland and England in 1592, the thirty-fourth year of the reign of Good Queen Bess, five years after the Spanish Armada, fifty-one years after Henry VIII beheaded his last queen. Reivers with a high disregard for the allegiance or for that matter, the nationality of their victims roved freely back and forth across this border during this time, pillaging, plundering, assaulting and killing as they went.

Into this scene of mayhem and murder gallops Sir Robert Carey, the central figure of the mystery novels by P.F. Chisholm.

Sir Robert is the Deputy Warden of the West March, and his duty is to enforce the peace on the Border. Since everyone on the English side is first cousin once removed to everyone on the Scottish side, it is frequently difficult to tell his men which way to shoot. The first in the series, A Famine of Horses, begins with Sir Robert’s first day on the job and the murder of Sweetmilk Geordie Graham. In A Season of Knives Sir Robert is framed and tried for the murder of paymaster Jemmy Atkinson. On night patrol in A Surfeit of Guns, he uncovers a plot to smuggle arms across the Border.

Sir Robert is as delightful a character as any who ever thrust and parried his way into the pages of a work of fiction, in this century or out of it. He is handsome, intelligent, charming, capable, as quick with a laugh as he is with a sword. He puts the buckle into swash. He puts the court into courtier; in fact, his men’s nickname for him is the Courtier.

The ensemble surrounding him is equally engaging. There is Sergeant Henry Dodd, Sir Robert’s second-in-command, who does ‘his best to look honest but thick.’ There is Lord Scrope, Sir Robert’s brother-in law and feckless superior, who sits ‘hunched like a heron in his carved chair.’ There is Philadelphia, Sir Robert’s sister, ‘a pleasing small creature with black ringlets making ciphers on her white skin.’ There is Barnabus Cooke, Sir Robert’s manservant, who thinks longingly of the time when he ‘raked in fees from the unwary who thought, mistakenly, that the Queen’s favourite cousin might be able to put a good work in her ear.’ And there is the Lady Elizabeth Widdrington, Sir Robert’s love and the wife of another man, who is ‘hard put to it to keep her mind on her prayers: Philadelphia’s brother would keep marching into her thoughts.’ There is hand-to-hilt combat with villains rejoicing in names like Jock of the Peartree, and brushes with royalty in the appearance of King James of Scotland, who’s a little in love with Sir Robert himself.

And who can blame him? Sir Robert is imminently lovable, and these books are a rollicking, roistering revelation of a time long gone, recaptured for us in vivid and intense detail in this series.

What is a You-Are-THERE! book?

It’s a book by P.F. Chisholm.

Dana Stabenow

stabenow.com

A Season of Knives

SUNDAY, 2ND JULY 1592, EVENING

If he had been doing his duty as a husband and a father, Long George Little would not have been in Carlisle town at all that evening. All the other men of his troop were out on their family farms, frantically trying to get the hay made while the good weather lasted. Some of them were also taking delivery of very tall handsome-looking horses recently raided by their less respectable relatives from the King of Scotland’s stables.

Long George hated haymaking. It wasn’t his fault, he reflected gloomily, as he came out of the alehouse by the castle wall and ambled down through the orchards and into Castlegate Street in the warm and shining dusk. There was something in hay which disagreed with him. It was fine while the grass was growing, and he could even mow with impunity, but put him in a hayfield among neat rows of drying grass, and within minutes he was wheezing and sneezing, his eyes had swollen, his nose was running and his chest felt tight. His wife refused to believe in these summer colds. It stood to reason, she would snap, that you got colds in the cold weather, not the hot. That was logic. It didn’t matter; whatever the logic of it, haymaking made him ill and if he started pitchforking the hay onto a wagon, he would also come up in a bright red rash that made his life a misery for another week at least.

On the other hand, his wife was going to make his life a misery as well because there were two fields to mow, and none of the children were old enough to do more than bind and stack. Without her man the whole weight of it fell on her alone since she had no brothers and Long George’s family were busy with their own fields.

Long George didn’t even want to leave the town. His nose was running already: if he went out into the countryside, it wouldn’t be as awful as if he were haymaking, but it would be bad enough. Life was unfair. He didn’t want to be a bad husband...

He paused, his hair prickling upright on the back of his neck. Perhaps unwisely he had been taking a shortcut through an alleyway called St. Alban’s vennel between Fisher Street and Scotch Street. The thatched rooves hung over, within an easy arm’s reach of each other and although it was light enough outside, in the alley night had already fallen. A tabby cat was watching with interest from a yard wall.

And he could smell sweat and leather and just make out the ominous shapes of three men hiding in various doorways.

Long George drew his dagger and picked up a half-brick, began backing away. His heart was pounding and he wished he had on better protection than a leather jerkin and his blue wool statute cap. He took a glance over his shoulder to check if there was someone coming up behind him, tensed himself ready to make a dash for Fisher Street.

‘Andy Nixon, is that you?’ came a low growl.

‘No. No, it’s not. It’s me, Long George Little.’

‘Och,’ said someone else in a mixture of relief and disgust. Long George recognised the voice and let his breath out again.

His brother detached himself from the shadows and came towards him. He had a cloth wrapped round the bottom half of his face.

‘What’s going on?’ Long George asked.

The cat blinked and sat up. The smell of an imminent fight faded as the three other men came out of their hiding places and joined Long George. Their voices growled and muttered for a while, arguing at first and then gradually came to some agreement. Long George grinned and wiped his nose triumphantly on his shirt sleeve. All four of them went back into hiding, with Long George putting his knife away and climbing over the cat’s wall, to hide behind the rainbarrel there.

On a warm Sunday night, a little the worse for drink, Andy Nixon was in a good mood as he turned into St. Alban’s vennel, thinking of his bed and the various jobs he had to do in the morning. He still had bits of hay in his hair from his usual Sunday-night tryst with his mistress and the smug warmth that came from making the two of them happy. He savoured the memory of her again as he ambled along the alley, picking his way instinctively between the small piles of dung left by a neighbour’s pig and the old broken henhouse quietly rotting against a wall, replaying the feel of his woman’s thighs entwined with his own and...

Two heavy shadows jumped out behind him, grabbed for his arms. Andy tried to dodge them, managed to punch one on the nose and knock him over, swung about and tried to run back into Fisher Street.

Another shape vaulted the wall and got in his way as he ran, both of them went over, wrestling against the henhouse and breaking it. Andy tried a headbutt and missed, almost got free from the other man’s grip and then felt his arms caught again and locked painfully behind him. He took breath to yell but one of the attackers clamped a large horny palm over his mouth.

‘We’ve a message for ye fra Mr Jemmy Atkinson, Andy,’ said the muffled voice. ‘Ye’re to leave his wife alone. Understand?’

Andy’s eyes widened as he realised what was coming. He heaved convulsively, throwing one man into the wall and almost getting away, but by then the one whose nose was bleeding had picked himself up, waiting his moment, and punched Andy vengefully several times in the stomach.

Andy doubled over and fought to breathe, but before he could, somebody else drove the toe of a boot deep into his groin and he toppled over into a black pit of pain. More pain exploded in his right hand as someone trod on it; he put his arms up to protect his head and his knees up to protect his stomach. He was walled in by boots that thudded into his back and shins and pounded his bones to jelly and faded the world into a distant island in a sea of hurt.

From far away he realised one of the men was pulling the others off, spoiling their fun. He could just make out the words of the man who had given him the reason for the beating.

‘He isnae supposed to be deid,’ snarled the man. ‘So leave off when I tell ye. Ay, and ye, for God’s sake, what d’ye think ye’re doin’ wi’ a rock? Mr Atkinson said to warn him, no’ kill him.’