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  A Famine of Horses

  A Sir Robert Carey Mystery

  P. F. Chisholm

  www.Patricia-Finney.co.uk

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright © 1994, 1995 by P. F. Chisholm

  First Edition 1994

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-068774

  ISBN: 9781615954056 epub

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

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  Contents

  Contents

  Dedication

  Author Note

  Foreword

  Introduction

  A Famine of Horses

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Dedication

  To Melanie, with many thanks

  Author Note

  Anyone who wants to know the true history of the Anglo-Scottish Borders in the Sixteenth Century should read George MacDonald Fraser’s superbly lucid and entertaining account: “The Steel Bonnets” (1971). Those who wish to meet the real Sir Robert Carey can read his Memoirs (edited by F.H. Mares, 1972) and some of his letters in the Calendar of Border Papers.

  Foreword

  There are few joys in life as sweet as discovering a new author new in the sense of being hitherto unread. A friend put me onto the mysteries of Robert Crais. I became a fan of Dana’s Alaskan mysteries at the last Bouchercon Mystery Writers Convention. I found Janet Evanovich by lurking on an on-line mystery newsgroup. I began to read Laurence Shames after a fortuitous mention in a review of another writer’s novel. And I owe the Poisoned Pen’s Barbara Peters a huge debt for introducing me to P.F. Chisholm. I knew, of course, of her writing as Patricia Finney; writers of historical fiction sometimes seem like an endangered species and so we tend to keep track of one another.

  But I was unaware that she was writing Elizabethan mysteries under the name P.F. Chisholm until Barbara brought it to my attention. Once I started to read A Famine of Horses, my own life came to a screeching halt while I plunged wholeheartedly into Robert Carey’s. To me, it is an added bonus that he actually lived, an honest-to-God cousin and courtier of the Tudor Queen, Elizabeth. I can think of no more enjoyable way to learn history than to read one of Ms. Chisholm’s mysteries just be prepared to let dinners burn and bills go unpaid while you’re in Robert’s world, a world that is seductive and occasionally savage and always mesmerizing. Dana is absolutely right when she says these are You Are There books. A Chisholm mystery is the next best thing to time travel, and perhaps even better when we consider 16th century sanitation and flea-infested inns and wine so polluted that impurities had to be spat out before it could be safely swallowed. For those readers who are purists and believe a book will rise or fall upon the merits of the story line, rest assured that a Chisholm mystery will provide enough suspense and plot twists to satisfy even the most critical of audiences. For those who find the journey more compelling than the final destination, a Chisholm novel will offer an unforgettable Elizabethan pilgrimage. And for those who just enjoy good writing, a neat turn of phrase, again Ms. Chisholm delivers. Thanks to the Poisoned Pen Press, a door is opening upon the 16th century; I would urge you all to take advantage of the opportunity and cross over.

  Sharon Kay Penman

  email: [email protected]

  web site: http://www.sharonkaypenman.com

  Introduction

  Anyone who has read any history at all about the reign of Queen Elizabeth I has heard of at least one of Sir Robert Carey’s exploits—he was the man who rode 400 miles in two days from London to Edinburgh to tell King James of Scotland that Elizabeth was dead and that he was finally King of England. Carey’s affectionate and vivid description of the Queen in her last days is often quoted from his memoirs.

  However, I first met Sir Robert Carey by name in the pages of George MacDonald Fraser’s marvellous history of the Anglo-Scottish borders, “The Steel Bonnets.” GMF quoted Carey’s description of the tricky situation he got himself into when he had just come to the Border as Deputy Warden, while chasing some men who had killed a churchman in Scotland.

  “…about two o’clock in the morning I took horse in Carlisle, and not above twenty-five in my company, thinking to surprise the house on a sudden. Before I could surround the house, the two Scots were gotten into the strong tower, and I might see a boy riding from the house as fast as his horse would carry him, I little suspecting what it meant: but Thomas Carleton… told me that if I did not…prevent it, both myself and all my company would be either slain or taken prisoners.”

  Perhaps you need to have read as much turgid 16th century prose as I have to realise how marvellously fresh and frank this is, quite apart from it being a cracking tale involving a siege, a standoff, and some extremely fast talking by Carey. And it really happened, nobody made it up; references in the Calendar of Border Papers suggest that Carey made his name with his handling of the incident.

  It’s all the more surprising then that Robert Carey was the youngest son of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon. Hunsdon was Queen Elizabeth’s cousin because Ann Boleyn’s older sister Mary was his mother. He was also probably Elizabeth’s half-brother through Henry VIII, whose official mistress Mary Boleyn was before the King clapped eyes on young Ann. (I have to say that one of the attractions of history to me is the glorious soap opera plots it contains.)

  The nondescript William Carey who had supplied the family name by marrying the ex-official mistress, quite clearly did not supply the family genes. Lord Hunsdon was very much Henry VIII’s son—he was also, incidentally, Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain and patron to one William Shakespeare.

  Robert Carey was (probably) born in 1560, given the normal education of a gentleman from which he says he did not much benefit, went to France for polishing in his teens, and then served at Court for ten years as a well-connected but landless sprig of the aristocracy might be expected to do.

  Then in 1592 something made him decide to switch to full-time soldiering. Perhaps he was bored. Perhaps the moneylenders were getting impatient.

  Perhaps he had personal reasons for wanting to be in the north. At any rate, Carey accepted the offer from his brother-in-law, Lord Scrope, Warden of the English West March, to be his Deputy Warden.

  This was irresistable to me. In anachronistic terms, here was this fancy-dressing, fancy-talking Court dude turning up in England’s Wild West. The Anglo-Scottish Border at that time made Dodge City look like a health farm. It was the most chaotic part of the kingdom and was full of cattle-rustlers, murderers, arsonists, horse-thieves, kidnappers and general all-purpose outlaws. This was where they invented the word “gang”—or the men “ye gang oot wi’ “—and also the word “blackmail” which then simply meant protection money.

  Carey was the Sheriff and Her Majesty’s Marshall rolled into one—of course, I had to give him a pair of pistols or dags, but they only fired one shot at a time. He was expected to enforce the law with a handful of horsemen and very little official co-operation. About the only thing he had going for him was that he could hang men on his own authority if he caught them raiding—something he seems to have done remarkably rarely considering the rough justice normall
y meted out on the feud-happy Border.

  Even more fascinating, he seems to have done extremely well—and here I rely on reports and letters written by men who hated his guts. By 1603 he had spent ten years on the Border in various capacities, and got it quiet enough so he could take a trip down to London to see how his cousin the Queen was doing. Unfortunately for him, Carey also seems to have been too busy doing his job to rake in the cash the way most Elizabethan office-holders did.

  So when Carey made his famous ride, he was a man of 42 with a wife and three kids, no assets or resources, facing immediate redundancy and possible bankruptcy. As he puts it himself with disarming honesty, “I could not but think in what a wretched estate I should be left… I did assure myself it was neither unjust nor unhonest for me to do for myself…. Hereupon I wrote to the King of Scots.”

  What Carey did after his ride will have to wait for future books—or you could read his memoirs, of course. As GMF says, “Later generations of writers who had never heard of Carey found it necessary to invent him… for he was the living image of the gallant young Elizabethan.”

  Based on a few portraits, I think he was quite good-looking—as he had to be to serve at Court at all, since Queen Elizabeth had firm views on the sort of human scenery she wanted around her. As he admits himself, he was a serious fashion victim. Nobody wears a satin doublet AND a sash of pearls unless that’s what they are, which is how he’s peacocking it in one of his portraits. Most remarkable of all, he married for love not money—and was evidently thought very odd for it, since he was perpetually broke.

  And that’s it, the original man, an absolute charmer I have lifted practically undiluted from his own writings. The various stories I tell are mostly made up, though all are based on actual incidents in the history of the Borders. About half of the characters (and most of the bad guys) really lived and were often even worse than I have described. As I say in most of the historical talks I give, we like to think we’re terribly violent and dangerous people but really we’re a bunch of wusses. The murder rate has dropped to a tenth of what it was in the Middle Ages—and they didn’t have automatic pistols. It took real work to kill somebody then.

  And yes, I’m afraid I have fallen, hook, line and sinker, for the elegant and charming Sir Robert Carey. I hope you do too.

  A Famine of Horses

  Sunday, 18th June 1592, noon

  Henry Dodd let the water drip off the end of his nose as he stared at a trail in the long sodden grasses. It was simple enough: two horses, both burdened, though from a long slide mark by a little hump he thought the bigger of the two was carrying a pack rather than being ridden by a man who could have avoided it. The prints kept close enough for the one to be leading the other.

  He looked up and squinted at the low hills north of the border where the Picts’ Wall ran. They melted into the grey sky so it seemed there was no difference between the earth and the cloud and a lesser man might have made comparisons between them and the area of moss and waste between, where the purely theoretical change between England and Scotland took place.

  Sergeant Henry Dodd, however, had no time for such fancyings. He was mortally certain that the two men, or possibly one and a packhorse, had been where they had no business to be, and he wanted to know why.

  Blinking intently at the traces, he turned his horse and let her find her own path amongst tussocks and rabbit holes, following the trail before it was washed into mud.

  Behind him his six patrolmen muttered into their chests and followed in sodden misery. They had been on their way home to Carlisle from a dull inspection of the fords on the River Sark when the Sergeant had seen the trail and taken it into his head to follow it. By the time they got to the guardroom, Lowther’s men would have taken the best beer and the least stale loaves and if there was cheese or meat left, it would be a wonder.

  Dodd crested a small rise and paused. Ahead of him three crows yarped in alarm and flapped into the sky from a little stand of gorse, to which the trail led directly.

  “Sergeant…” began Red Sandy Dodd, nervously.

  “We’re still in England.”

  “We could send some men out this afternoon…”

  Dodd twisted in the saddle and looked gravely at his brother, who shrugged, smiled and subsided. The sergeant turned and kicked his reluctant mare down the slope towards the gorse.

  The others followed, sighing.

  Beside the stand of gorse was a stone marked about by the prints of hooves where horses had stood. From there into the gorse there was a swathe of flattened and rubbed grass, stained here and there by smears of brown almost completely turned back to mud now. None of the horses wanted to approach, they neighed and sidled at the smell. The Sergeant’s mare tipped her hip and snorted long and liquidly in warning.

  Dodd leaned on his saddle crupper and nodded at the youngest of them.

  “Right, Storey, go and fetch it out.”

  Bessie’s Andrew Storey had a pleasant round face with a few carefully nurtured brown whiskers about the upper lip and he looked denser than he was.

  “In there, sir?”

  You’re struggling against fate, said the Sergeant’s dour look.

  “Ay,” he answered.

  Dodd turned away to inspect the marks in the ground again. Bessie’s Andrew looked at the gorse and knew his horse had more sense than to venture in. He slid down from his saddle, knocking his helmet from its hook as he went and muttered as it landed in a puddle.

  “Bessie’ll have your guts if yon man’s got plague,” said Bangtail Graham cheerily. Dodd grunted at him.

  Nobody else spoke as Storey squelched through the scrub, following the trail, pushing spines aside with his elbows and sidling through the gaps as best he could. His sword caught on a low branch and another spined branch whipped back as he let go of it and caught him round the back of the head. Still cursing he disappeared from sight.

  “There’s a body here, Sergeant,” he called at last.

  “Is there now,” said Dodd in tones of sarcastic wonder. “Whose?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. The face…” There was a pause and a sound of swallowing. “The face is pecked, sir.”

  “Guess.”

  “I dunno, sir. From the look of his jack, I’d say it might be a Graham.”

  There was a general shifting in saddles. Dodd sighed deeply as Bangtail Graham came up beside him looking worried and intent. The other men looked covertly at the two of them from under their lashes.

  “Which Graham?”

  “Dunno, sir. He was shot in the back.”

  More silence.

  “Fetch him out then, man,” said Dodd gently, “it’s wet out here.”

  Sunday, 18th June 1592, noon

  Barnabus Cooke had bruises and blisters on his backside and was filled with loathing for his master. The rain fell without cease, as it had since they left Newcastle, the horses were sulky and unwilling, two of the packs had been so ill-stowed by the grooms at their last inn that they forever threatened to break loose. In the meantime the expensive brocade trim on his cloak (that his master had told him not to bring) was ruined, and his velvet doublet would need an hour of brushing if it was not to dry to a lumpish roughness and his ruff was a choking wad of soaked linen that he had not the heart to take off and squeeze dry.

  His master came trotting up to ride beside him and smiled.

  “Only another ten miles, Barnabus, and we’ll be in Carlisle.”

  Ten more miles, only ten, thought Barnabus in despair, what’s sir’s bum made of then, cured leather? “Yes, Sir Robert,” he said. “Any chance of a rest?”

  “Not around here, Barnabus,” said Sir Robert Carey, looking about as if he was in some dubious alley in London. “Best keep going and rest once we’re inside the castle.”

  Barnabus looked about as well, seeing nothing but disgusting empty green hills, close-packed small farms, coppices of trees, rain, sky, rain. No sign of civilisation except the miserable stone walls th
e barbarian northerners used in place of proper hedges, and the occasional ominous tower in the distance.

  Behind him trailed the four garrison men from Berwick that Sir Robert’s brother had sent to meet them at Newcastle, and behind that Barnabus’s nephew Simon whose mother had terrorised him into taking her baby to learn him gentle ways. That was while he and Sir Robert had been at Court, serving Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, eating palace food and standing about in anterooms and galleries while Barnabus raked in fees from the unwary who thought, mistakenly, that the Queen’s favourite cousin might be able to put a good word in her ear. That was in the happy profitable time before the letter came for Sir Robert via the Carlisle Warden’s messenger riding post. Barnabus had been sent out to buy black velvet and see if Mr Bullard would give Carey a bit more credit and make a new suit in two days flat.

  To be fair Sir Robert had offered to get Barnabus a job with his friend the Earl of Cumberland if he didn’t want to go into foreign northern parts. He’d even offered to pay some of the back wages he owed, but Barnabus Cooke had been too much of a fool to grab the offer and stay in London where he could understand what men said.

  The four Berwick men were muttering incomprehensibly to each other again. One came cantering past Barnabus, spraying him with mud, to talk urgently to Sir Robert.

  Barnabus hunched his back and shifted forwards a little to try and take the weight off the worst worn parts of him. Sir Robert was talking quickly with the soldier, his voice suddenly tinged with an ugly northern harshness, so Barnabus could no longer understand him either.

  There were men with lances on one of the hills nearby, he could see that now. Sir Robert was staring at them, narrowing his eyes, peering north, then south.

  Barnabus began to feel a little sick. Everyone was behaving exactly as if they were in Blackfriars coming out of a primero game and the alley was blocked by armed men.