Air of Treason, An: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (Sir Robert Carey Mysteries) Read online

  “Ehm…”

  “No matter. There’ll be a truckle bed or a pallet for you somewhere. Can you ride?”

  “Ay, sir, well enough.” He’d ridden before he could walk of course, but he’d also been in Edinburgh learning to sew at the time when most lads got their mastery on horseback.

  “You’ve used a pike, I expect. Sword and buckler work?”

  “Ay, sir, a little. Wi’ the Edinburgh trained band.”

  He’d loved the trained band as a lad, rushing off to the musters like an arrow from the bow to work off his pent-up energy, while his uncle complained at the loss of time. His uncle had been a hard man.…Too bad he’d—well, no reason to think about that. It hadn’t been his fault.

  “Of course. We’ll play a veney or two when we get to Rycote,” said Carey. “Come along. You can have my spare horse and we’ll be going. They should have recovered enough from getting here and we’ll take an easy pace now.”

  They had been heading all the while to the stables of the inn where two smart-looking horses stood ready, saddled and bridled, and the pack pony dozed stoically with one broad hoof tipped, the packs very badly stowed.

  Carey saw this, narrowed his eyes, and checked them. “Nothing stolen,” he said, opening a very fine leather pistol case. Hughie glimpsed two matched dags inside and his mouth almost watered at them. Were they snaphaunce locks? Wheel-locks? Would Carey let him fire one?

  Hughie and Carey between them took all the packs off and re-stowed them with a better balance. Naturally, Hughie got the smaller mount, but he was used to his legs dangling a bit. Carey was a tall man, too; Hughie wasn’t used to looking straight at anyone.

  Carey mounted in a way Hughie hadn’t seen since his childhood—hands on the saddlebow and leaping straight up, not touching the stirrups until he was seated. He looked pleased with himself at the trick. “Hmf,” he said, as he found the stirrups. “Come on Hughie, up you get.”

  Hughie tightened the girth a little to allow for his weight and climbed into the saddle the less showy way. Lack of practice made heavy weather of getting his leg over the beast’s back. He’d learnt the other way, but hadn’t done it for a long time and wasn’t about to risk landing on his back in the straw and dung of the inn stable.

  Carey nodded and clicked to his horse, took the pack pony’s leading rein and led the way forward into the High Street and eastward, over Magdalen Bridge and into the countryside.

  Carey put his heels in. “We’re going to Rycote, which is where the herald I talked to says she is at the moment. It belongs to Lord Norris, poor chap. I want to talk to my own lord, the Earl of Essex, very urgently so if you see anyone in tangerine-and-white livery, shout out to me. Same if you see anyone in black and yellow.”

  They went up to a canter as soon as they were clear of the large herd of pigs being brought into the city as components of porkpies, sausages, and spit roasts for the arrival of the Court. The smell was acrid, catching at the back of Hughie’s throat, and several of the pigs seemed up for a fight.

  Past them they were still heading upstream into a steady current of farm carts laden with fodder and wheat and apples and late raspberries and chickens in cages and, on one occasion, a cart laden with barrels of water that smelled horrible, probably containing crayfish for the Queen’s table. It was a flood tide of food, drawn in by the whirlpool of the Queen’s promised arrival.

  Saturday 16th September 1592, noon

  As he crested the brow of the hill, Sergeant Henry Dodd of Gilsland and Carlisle Castle, blinked and yawned. He had been up and very busy all the night before, getting even with Sir Thomas Heneage, and now he had been in the saddle since dawn. He thought he’d made good progress though the Oxford Road was terrible in some parts, great potholes where the winter rains had tunnelled between the rough stones laid by monks, laying bare the orderly even-sized cobbles that were the hallmark of the ancient giants that built the border wall as well. Or were they faeries? There were different tales that gave both possibilities and it stood to reason it couldn’t be both of them.

  The Courtier had insisted it was all done by ordinary men called Romans who spoke Latin like the Papists, and had come over with Brutus thousands of years ago. That made some sense of the slabs of stone you sometimes found with well-carved letters in foreign, though Dodd doubted that grinding them up and drinking them in wine would cure you of gout.

  He knew he had to stop because he urgently needed to find a bush. Unfortunately the road was very straight and the brush had been recently cleared back from the verges. He also had to water his horses at some stage. Straight roads were giants’ work as well, or Romans’. He wondered how they had done it so far across country.

  Bushes had been rare among the great broad fields northwest of London, though he was coming into enclosed land now. At last he’d spotted a handy-looking small copse well back from the road a little way ahead.

  Dodd shifted in the saddle and hoped he hadn’t caught a flux in London. He was riding the soft-mouthed mare and leading the horse he had decided to name Whitesock, on the grounds that he had the one white sock on him. The mare had a nice gentle pace to her but something made him prefer Whitesock for his sturdy determined canter and lack of nonsense. You didn’t often meet a sensible horse, especially here in the South where so many of them had been ruined by overbreeding. Dodd clicked his tongue and moved the horses closer to the bushes. The mare pulled a little and her trot got choppy while Whitesock blew out his nostrils.

  Hmm. Dodd peered between the leaves to see if anyone was waiting there, sniffed hard, couldn’t smell anything except previous travellers’ leavings. And he couldn’t wait much longer, damn it.

  So he loosened his sword, pushed into the bushes, which were luckily not entirely composed of thorns, saw nothing too worrying, and hitched the horses to the sturdiest branch. Then he found a bare patch, dug a hole with his boot heel, and started undoing the stupid multiple points of his stupid gentleman’s doublet so he could get his stupid gentleman’s fine woollen breeks down to do his business.

  Just as he was about to drop them, he heard a stealthy movement behind him and turned around with his hand on his sword.

  A bony creature was standing there in rags, holding out a rusty knife.

  “Giss yer money!” hissed the creature that didn’t seem to have many teeth.

  Dodd blinked at him in puzzlement for a moment.

  “Whit?” he asked.

  “Giss yer money.”

  “Whit?” Dodd genuinely couldn’t work out what the creature was saying because the idea that something so pathetic might want to rob him was simply too unbelievable.

  The creature came closer with his dull knife high. “Money!”

  “Och,” said Dodd, pulling the breeks down, hoicking his shirt up and squatting anyway because he couldn’t wait any longer. “Whit d’ye want tae do that for?”

  “I don’t want yer ’osses, just yer money.”

  Dodd looked down and shook his head.

  “Yer interfering with me opening ma bowels,” he growled. “Could ye no’ ha’ the decency tae wait?”

  “What?” asked the creature, frowning with puzzlement and lowering the knife.

  “Wait!” snarled Dodd as the little grove of bushes filled with London’s fumes. The creature stepped back and lowered the knife a little more.

  “Now,” said Dodd, looking about for non-nettle leaves or even a stone so long as it was smooth, “Ah’ll gi’ ye a chance. If ye go now and pit yer silly dull blade awa’ Ah’ll no’ kill ye. Right? D’ye hear me?”

  “Money, I want yer money!” insisted the creature.

  “Och no, awa’ wi’ ye, Ah’ve better uses for it. I’m givin’ ye a chance, see ye?” Dodd was trying to be peaceful and gentlemanly, and it just wasn’t working.

  The creature was clearly deranged because he suddenly lunged closer.

  “I’ll cut yer then!” he shouted, “Giss yer money or…”

  “Och,” sighed Dodd
as he shifted his body slightly, straightened his knees, and punched the creature in the face with a nice smooth stone he’d just picked up.

  The poor creature was clearly a Southern weakling, for he folded up at once. Dodd picked up the rusty blade and threw it in the bushes, finished his business, covered up his leavings and went through the stupidly complicated fuss of the retying of points that gentlemen had to suffer every single time.

  Then he left a penny beside the man bleeding gently from the mouth, on the grounds it was gentlemanly and, in any case, Carey’s money not his. He shoved back out of the ill-starred bushes to find the horses watching gravely and chewing on some leaves. He mounted Whitesock for the next stage, took up the mare’s reins and put his heels in.

  Whitesock changed smoothly and started pounding stolidly along, followed in a scramble by the mare. Dodd laughed for a moment, a rare indulgence as no one was looking.

  It seemed all the terrible tales you heard about southern footpads and sturdy beggars were just those—tall tales to frighten southron weans. The rest of the journey would be easy, even though his head had that oddly fixed metallic feeling in it of not having slept.

  He could be in Oxford by the evening if he pushed it, he thought, but what was the point of that? He could use some more of Carey’s money to stay at a proper inn, get some sleep, and then come into Oxford city nice and leisurely on Sunday morning. That would get him out of having to go to church with the Courtier and listening to some boring sermon about turning the other cheek. That thought made him laugh again.

  He slowed down to a walk and looked about him, taking in the sunshine and berries in the hedges and the peaceful fields being cropped by fat cows before the autumn ploughing for winter wheat or barley. There was no hurry. He was enjoying himself.

  Saturday 16th September 1592, noon

  As Carey the Courtier and his new servant Hughie Tryndale trotted along the rutted road that led to Rycote, he was keeping his eyes open for the unmistakeable signs of the Queen’s progress.

  He saw some on the other side of a hill where men were busy mending the disgraceful road, trundling wheelbarrows full of rocks to fill in the potholes and hammering down a corduroy of logs into the slopes to give the Queen’s carts somewhere to grip in the soft earth they would soon turn to slurry.

  He took a turn off the main road that led in that direction and rose in the stirrups to peer over the hedges—not a lot of stock in the fields, where a boy was leading the cows in.

  As they came alongside the road menders, he found the master who was sitting on a rock, criticising.

  “Which way is the Queen’s Court?” He got a laconic thumb pointing further along the road.

  He shifted the pack pony to the middle, so Hughie was behind and he was in front. You could think of the Queen’s Court as a kind of army or a very large and disorderly herd of sheep with some sheepdogs in the centre and a few wolves around the outside. Generally, as with armies, the further out you were, the more disorderly it got.

  There had clearly been some riders crossing hillsides, presumably the Queen’s regular messengers taking shortcuts to avoid the no doubt thoroughly overwhelmed village of Rycote. Lord Norris was entertaining Her Majesty for a few days while she prepared to descend on the university city itself.

  They followed the muddy track across pasture covered in molehills until they crested a hill and looked down into the valley of Rycote.

  Carey could see at once that not all of the Court was there. He supposed some of them must still be packing up at Sudley or unpacking at Woodstock and a lot of them would have gone straight on to Oxford to grab the best camping and sleeping places. That suited him.

  Carey was sure that his father’s household would be setting up in one of the colleges. He could probably have found out where if he’d bothered to ask, but he didn’t want to have to explain to anyone why he had bolted from London on Friday morning. Firstly he had to find his own lord, Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, who would certainly be in Rycote Manor and as close to the Queen’s majesty as he could get. Therefore, to find his lord, all he had to do was find the Queen.

  Carey stared down at the swollen village, frowning with worry. He had deliberately escaped from his parents, particularly his mother, leaving the best of his men, Sergeant Henry Dodd, behind him in a very ticklish situation. On Friday morning he had faked a large hawking expedition after redeeming his Court suit from pawn at Snr Gomes’ shop. The plan had worked brilliantly and he had been away from the falconers and beaters and dogs by an hour after dawn on Friday, thundering along at a messenger’s pace as he had done so often before, changing horses regularly. He enjoyed doing that, loved the sense of distance destroyed by his horse’s legs. Even having to keep to a slower pace because of the pack pony, he’d made good enough time to get to Oxford by evening.

  However he had, no doubt, severely annoyed his father and infuriated his mother, quite apart from leaving Dodd in the lurch. He had done it because he had put together in his mind what had really been going on with the sale of Cornish lands and the Jesuit priest. And it had made a picture that appalled him.

  The clue that had given him the whole plot had been that code name “Icarus.” If he was right about who Icarus really was…if…That was why he was here.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t think the Earl would want to hear what he had to say, and if he did listen would probably be extremely angry as well. Carey sighed. And that would mean the Queen would be angry with him and so he’d have very little chance of coming away with his warrant or his fee. Particularly not the fee.

  Carey scowled at his horse’s ears and pulled again at his regrown goatee as they carried on down the winding road to the village.

  There had been a whole host of excellent reasons why he had grabbed at the chance to become deputy warden of the West March under his brother-in-law, Lord Scrope. One reason could be summed up as the problem of the Earl of Essex.

  Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was his second cousin via the scandalous and outrageous Lettice Knollys, the earl’s mother and his Aunt Katherine’s daughter. Carey was related to an awful lot of the Queen’s Court where the ties of blood were both useful and dangerous. With Robert Devereux it wasn’t just about family.

  He had liked and admired the man. He still did. There was something about him. But what was it? Time and again the Earl had done something, said something so outrageously stupid or hotheaded that Carey had been on the verge of turning his back on his cousin. Always in the past he had kept faith with the man. But it was becoming more and more difficult.

  Take the summer of 1591 for instance. The Earl of Essex had insisted on taking men to France to help the King of Navarre win the throne of France. Carey, up to his eyes in debt again, had gone with him, the first time since the Armada that he had gone to war.

  There in the pinched, muddy, and ugly campaign with Henri of Navarre, he had found out many things about himself. One of them was that he was actually good at war. He had found that he was a good commander and could keep his men both alive and at his side. His desertion rate was half anybody else’s. He had hit it off well with Navarre, who was a very canny fighter indeed and had offered him a permanent place at his side.

  Robert Devereux looked every inch the perfect leader—large, loud, magnificent, very good at hand-to-hand combat, chivalrous, honourable…

  He was useless. He was sloppy. He didn’t send out scouts. He didn’t understand anything about artillery. He didn’t pay attention to the lie of the land. He didn’t see the lie of the man either—how the King of Navarre never really committed himself to the alliance. Sure enough, in the end, Navarre left Essex and the English to hold Sluys and then went off and raided fat countryside while they guarded his back.

  Carey didn’t blame the man; he was doing what princes do, but why hadn’t Essex seen what was going to happen when Carey could so easily? They had all missed out on good plunder and got bogged down in the damp flux-ridden misery of a siege.

/>   He shook his head and glanced back past the pack pony to young Hughie. The man must have been gangling a few years ago but had now filled out and probably didn’t realise how dangerous he looked with his broad shoulders, big limbs, and saturnine face. Like most Scots he always looked as if he was nursing a grievance until you spoke to him and then his face opened out with a smile and was almost pleasant. It remained to be seen if he knew one end of a needle from the other and Carey would wait a while before he trusted his face to the man’s razor.

  Hughie was looking up the road past Carey. “Whit’s that?” He pointed, then blushed and added, “sir?”

  It was a mummer’s cart, brightly decorated and full of costumes and scenery with a tent on top. At first Carey thought it was stuck, but then he caught sight of a very small personage in bright gold-and-black brocade with farthingale sleeves, sitting on a white pony looking very annoyed. Her tiny size and childish face made her anger funny. However, Carey knew that it would be most unwise to laugh at the Queen’s Senior Fool and muliercula, Thomasina de Paris. She had two women with her and two men in the livery of the Master of the Revels. They were all some way back from the cart.

  There was a boy driving the cart, looking very hangdog.

  “If you don’t know who I am,” shouted the tiny creature, “then I’ve got no further use for you. And in any case I heard you left one of your company behind in London, sick with plague.”

  Carey reined in at once. An old man was climbing up clumsily from the depths of the cart, sweating heavily in the sudden sunlight, his face pale. He had a rash on the middle of his forehead, spreading down his nose.

  Thomasina instantly backed her pony away from the cart. “Stay there!” she shouted. “No nearer.”

  Carey opened his pistol case.

  The old man got down unsteadily from the cart and stood there, holding onto it with one hand. He coughed.

  “How long since you left London?”