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  A Season of Knives

  A Sir Robert Carey Mystery

  P. F. Chisholm

  www.Patricia-Finney.co.uk

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright © 2000 by P. F. Chisholm

  First Trade Paperback Edition 2000

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-068784

  ISBN: 9781615954087 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.

  Poisoned Pen Press

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  Contents

  Contents

  Dedication

  Author Note

  Foreword

  Introduction

  A Season of Knives

  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

  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, including A Famine of Horses, A Season of Knives, A Surfeit of Guns and A Plague of Angels, brought to America (at last!) in paperback by Barbara Peters and the Poisoned Pen Press.

  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. In the fourth book (and why hasn’t there been a fifth since, pray tell?), A Plague of Angels, Chisholm removes Sir Robert to London, where he encounters a bit player named Will Shakespeare involved in a plot that gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “bad actor.”

  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 four 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

  email: [email protected]

  web site: http://www.stabenow.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 wa
s 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 normally 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.

  —Patricia Finney

  Cornwall, 1999

  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.

  The cat blinked again, licked a paw. Her ears swivelled to the familiar sound of whistling from the other end of the alley and her whiskers twitched as all four of the waiting men tensed to attack.

  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 trys
t 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.