The really damnable nuisance of it, Carey thought, as he rode out of Carlisle with Sergeant Nixon and the others (except for Mick the Crow) in a bunch behind him, was that this wasn’t even the raiding season. July was one of the few times of year when you could be fairly secure from raiding because the nights were too short and too light and any sensible man with a square foot of meadow was out getting his hay in. There was never enough hay for the number of horses on the borders, although the hobbies could get by on about half of what Thunder needed to survive. The Borderers sent cattle skins and salt beef and cheeses south and north to pay for the horsefeed they needed, but it was expensive bringing it in, so whatever you could grow was pure profit. Despite what he had said, even reivers made hay because while cows, sheep and horses had legs and could run, haystacks did not. All this activity in high summer was most irregular.

After deep consideration and with some worry, he had sent Young Hutchin Graham on a fast pony out ahead of him on the road with a letter for Captain Carleton in Thirlwall, telling him on no account to let Lady Widdrington out of the gates the next morning. He thought it very unlikely the boy would get through in time to stop her, assuming—which was highly unlikely—Hutchin’s Uncle Wattie hadn’t put fore riders in place around the castle to guard against such things. At least if the Grahams caught Young Hutchin, they wouldn’t kill him as they might Long George and certainly would Bessie’s Andrew Storey, with whose surname they had a feud. Young Hutchin could say convincingly that he had no idea what was in the letter he was carrying since he couldn’t read and would probably end up at Wattie’s side during the raid. That might even give Carey a card to play if everything went horribly wrong. He would have liked to send Long George off with a letter for the Middle March Warden, Sir John Forster, since the raid was actually due to happen on his ground, but he didn’t dare. Firstly, Long George was more than likely to end with his throat slit, and secondly, Carey didn’t like the thought of being alone on the road with Sergeant Nixon and his thugs and no one to guard his back but Bessie’s Andrew.

The situation was actually worse for him than it would have been for Lowther or Carleton because he didn’t know the ground well enough. He was beginning to get a rough shape of it in his mind from his hunting expeditions of the previous week, but nothing like the detailed knowledge of someone born there. He knew the land round Berwick far better from living there as a boy; in Carlisle he was a foreigner. As a result he didn’t know what route Wattie Graham would take from Netherby, nor where he would lie up for the night, nor where on the old road he might be planning to take Lady Widdrington.

Take Lady Widdrington. Damn it, how dare they! How dare Graham try to salve his wounded pride with a raid of fifty riders against one woman and five men? God damn them all for bloody cowards, if he could catch them red-handed he’d string them up on the nearest trees, by God he would, and to hell with giving them a fair trial...

He pulled his mind back from that train of thought, simply because he knew that if he followed it he would end up too enraged to think straight.

Sergeant Nixon was riding beside him with an ingratiating expression on his face. Carey looked sideways at him; he was a strongly built ugly man with bulging cheeks like a water-rat’s and a long pointed nose, and the blackest beard on a pale face Carey had ever seen. He was not a man you would willingly buy a horse from, nor anything else, and the surly competence in the way he rode and carried his lance implied that you would be wise not to fight him. Which made him probably near enough to Lowther’s ideal of a henchman.

‘Did you want to ask something, Sergeant?’

‘Ay, sir.’ Unlike Sergeant Dodd’s miserable drone, Sergeant Nixon’s voice was the most attractive part of him. ‘I was wonderin’ how ye got word of the twenty horses ye say are at Brampton.’

‘Ah,’ said Carey opaquely. ‘Now, that would be telling, wouldn’t it, Sergeant?’ He had in fact deduced it from the fact that nobody at Brampton had rendered a complaint about horses reived from them. He wasn’t sure there were twenty there, but it was as many as he thought their pasturage could stand.

‘Would we be getting any of your fee, sir?’

‘You might.’

‘Only we heard ye’d paid Dodd and his men their backwages...’

And you thought I might be a soft touch, Carey thought but didn’t say. ‘Perhaps you had better talk to Sir Richard Lowther about that.’

Sergeant Nixon sniffed. ‘Ay, sir.’

Sunset was coming, a slow beacon setting light to half the sky and turning the clouds to purple. There were still people working in the fields, which astonished Carey. He asked the Sergeant about it.

‘Well, sir,’ said Nixon, seeming surprised. ‘It’s going to rain soon; can ye not feel it hanging in the air?’

Now he mentioned it, the air was sultry and heavy and the warmth was oppressive. Carey had only his shirt on under his padded jack but was still feeling sticky. He sniffed the air. If it rained Wattie Graham’s trail would be a great deal harder to follow back... But then Lady Widdrington might even stay at Thirlwall for an extra day... No, she wouldn’t; he was fooling himself.

‘Yonder’s the road to Brampton,’ said Nixon after a long straight canter.

‘I know, Sergeant,’ said Carey. ‘We’re going to Gilsland first.’

‘Why?’

Carey stared at him for a while. Eventually Nixon got the message and coughed.

‘Why, sir?’

‘Because I want to talk to Dodd about something.’

Sergeant Nixon was frowning heavily, but then he shrugged. There was no love lost between him and Dodd, but neither were they enemies and nor were their families at feud.

Even so, Carey nodded at Long George and Bessie’s Andrew. Long George let his horse fall behind until he was at the rear of the men, while Bessie’s Andrew came up to Carey’s left shoulder and looked thoroughly nervous. God help me if Sergeant Nixon gets suspicious, Carey thought, then dismissed the thought from his mind. Sergeant Nixon wouldn’t get suspicious, that was all there was to it.

As Carey’s body swung rhythmically with the horse’s stride, he turned over and over in his mind the various loose combinations of ideas he was trying to form into a sensible plan. Scrope had been willing enough to let him try and deal with Wattie Graham’s raid, but was as hamstrung by lack of men as he was himself. He had barely ten men in the place and all of them were needed. He hadn’t even let Carey send off his clerk, Richard Bell, with a message to Forster because, as he pointed out, the Bells were yet another surname at feud with the Grahams and he didn’t want to lose the one man in the West March who had a thorough grasp of March Law. He had promised to send for a few of the gentlemen to the south of Carlisle, but had opined that they were unlikely to be reliable in a fight against the Grahams.

‘Most of ’em pay blackrent to Richard Graham of Brackenhill,’ Scrope had said, looking tired. ‘None of them want any trouble with that family.’ Brackenhill was the acknowledged Graham headman and wealthy enough to arm most of his own men with guns.

What I need in this Godforsaken country is at least a hundred men I can trust and some decent ordnance, Carey thought bitterly. And pigs will fly before the Queen gives me the money to find them.

MONDAY, 3RD JULY 1592, EVENING

Sergeant Henry Dodd nodded at his brother Red Sandy, and the laden cart creaked off towards their main hay barn. The two small English Armstrongs, cousins of Janet, who had been helping him load, sat quietly together on top. One of the sandy heads was nodding.

‘Lizzy,’ called Dodd, and a freckled face under a mucky white cap peeked over. ‘Stop your brother from sleeping or he’ll fall off.’

‘Ay, Mr Dodd,’ she said, hiding a yawn. ‘Will ye be wanting us back again?’

He did really, but hadn’t the heart. ‘No, sweeting, get to your bed.’

Red Sandy touched up the oxen and the cart creaked away, a plaintive yell floating from the top as Lizzy obediently pinched her brother to wake him up.

The sun was down and there was another field to get in, but after that, it was done. Janet was coming towards him across the stubbly meadow with bits of hay stuck to her cap and a large earthenware jug on her hip. She smiled at him, and the back of his throat, which felt as if it had glazed over with the haydust stuck to it, opened a little involuntarily in anticipation. He put his hands behind the collar of his working shirt and eased the hemp cloth off the sunburn he’d collected a few days before while mowing this same field. He resisted the urge to have a go at the itchy bits of skin that were coming off because if he started scratching, all the little bits of dust that had got inside his clothes and stuck to his skin would start itching too and drive him insane.

Janet arrived where he stood leaning on his pitchfork, gave him the leather quart mug she had in her other hand and filled it with mild beer. He croaked his thanks, put it to his lips, tilted his head and forgot to swallow for a while. It almost hurt, it felt so good. He finished two-thirds of it before he came up for air.

‘Ahhh,’ he said, and leered at her. Janet had untied her smock and loosened the laces of her old blue bodice to free her arms for raking and there was a fine deep valley there, just begging for exploration. Not in a stubbly field though, and they were both too old and respectable now to bundle about in the haystack, but a marriage bed would do fine, later, if he wasn’t too tired. And if he was, well, there was the morning too before he had to set off for Carlisle. She leered back at him and took breath to say something that never was said.

‘Och, God damn him to hell,’ moaned Dodd, seeing movement, men on horseback breasting the hill in the distance over her shoulder, and instantly recognising the man in the fancy morion helmet at the head of the patrol riding towards them along the Roman road. ‘God rot his bloody bowels...’

‘Eh?’ said Janet, startled. She turned to look in the same direction as her husband, and her eyes narrowed.

‘But those are Lowther’s men he’s with.’

Dodd knew with awful clarity exactly what the thrice-damned Deputy Warden was doing out at Gilsland with Lowther’s Sergeant and Lowther’s bunch of hard bargains. Full of wordless ill-usage, he picked up his pitchfork and drove it tines first into the ground, narrowly missing his own foot.

‘Make yerself decent, woman,’ he growled unfairly at his wife, who had only been behaving as a good wife should to her hardworking husband. She gave him a glint of a stare and he handed her what was left of his beer by way of apology. Still, she tied her old smock again, pulled up her bodice lacings and the curves of her breasts went back into their secret armour.

Dodd folded his arms and waited for the Deputy to come to him. There was some satisfaction in the thought that he must be hot wearing a jack and morion in this weather, followed by a gloomier memory of just how miserable a jack could be in summer.

Carey left Lowther’s men at the wall and came trotting over.

‘Good evening, Sergeant. How’s the haymaking?’

The bloody Courtier had probably been sitting on his arse all afternoon, unlike Dodd, who could only bring himself to grunt.

‘Well enow.’

‘Have you finished yet?’

Resisting the urge to snarl that if he was finished he wouldna be standing in a field like a lummock, he’d be at table stuffing his face, Dodd gestured in the direction of a long triangle of land which still had its neat rows of gold. Carey’s face clouded over.

‘Ah,’ he said.