P. Chisholm - A Murder of Crows

Bewildered, Dodd sat on the edge of his bed since Carey had his chair.

“Ay?”

“As for my father…Why the devil doesn’t he keep her under control? Privateering at her age. Dodgy land-deals with God knows what bloody Papists. He should bloody well assert his authority and make her behave!”

Dodd was open-mouthed at this notion as he rather thought Hunsdon would be. He decided not to say anything since Carey was evidently spoiling for a fight with someone, and if he didn’t dare fight his parents combined, might well pick on Dodd. Who hadn’t the energy for it.

Carey drank some wine and then seemed to remember his manners, poured another gobletfull and handed it to Dodd, who had really drunk enough but didn’t feel like arguing either. Would he never get to his bed?

“Don’t you understand, Sergeant?” Carey said more quietly. “My mother doesn’t like the Court and doesn’t really know how it works. You know my father is the Queen’s half-brother through Mary Boleyn, Anne Boleyn’s older sister? Who was King Henry’s official mistress before Anne.”

Dodd had heard something about it, but discounted it as the usual overblown nonsense. His eyes stretched but he nodded once.

“Now if King Henry had married Mary instead of Anne, my father would have been king and I would have been a Prince of the Blood Royal.” He shuddered briefly. “And my ghastly elder brother would have been the heir to the throne, Heaven help us. But the bastardy means that can’t ever happen, thank God, which means my father is her Majesty’s closest kin and also her most trusted man at court. As Lord Chamberlain he runs the entire domus providenciae of the Court. The…ah…I suppose you’d translate it ‘the House of Supplies’ which is to say, the servants, supplies, kitchens, laundries, and what-have-you. Courtiers are generally part of the domus magnficenciae , the House of Magnificence, and very much worse treated. My father also guards her Majesty against assassinations. Everyone thinks of him as no more than a knight of the carpet, a courtier and patron, never mind what he did during the Northern Earls rebellion. And never mind that he’s kept the Queen safe all this time. Heneage wants to destroy him and take his job-he thinks he could have enormous influence with the Queen which my father, on the whole, rarely uses.”

Dodd nodded again, still not sure where this was going.

“That means that if my mother has been indulging in some half-baked scheme involving Cornish lands and Papist priests and Heneage gets wind of it and goes to the Queen, my father could be in the Tower on a charge of treason by the end of the year.”

“Ay,” said Dodd, wondering if it was too late to steal a horse from Hunsdon’s stable and head north as fast as he could.

“That’s the thing about the Court. Nothing is steady, nothing is certain. People plot and lie and scheme for power. My father has never been very interested in political power which is one reason why the Queen trusts him. He’s also seen to it that she stays alive, with God’s help. But if Heneage can convince her he’s turning Papist or has been dealing with them in some way, no matter how ridiculous the charge would be, the Queen would turn on my father. And her anger can be as terrible as my grandfather’s.”

“Ay.”

“And as lethal.”

“Ay.”

“Then there’s the fact that the Cecils have intervened on Heneage’s behalf. Generally speaking they’re at loggerheads because Sir Robert Cecil wants to run Walsingham’s legacy instead of Heneage. So why would he organize the adjournment of our case for Heneage? Either it’s some kind of trick to lull him along or Heneage blackmailed him. Or Cecil’s after something else entirely and this is just byplay…” Carey’s voice trailed off leaving Dodd feeling he was a very small pawn on a very large chessboard full of extremely dangerous, heavily armed chessmen. Carey had a wary, calculating look on his face. After a moment he began again.

“My father wants me to find out what’s going on, in case my mother hasn’t told him everything. Meanwhile my mother wants me to find out how Richard Tregian was swapped for a priest and what happened to the priest-although I think we know-and how. And in all of it I must ask questions, but if I don’t know what they’re up to, how can I be sure to ask the right questions and still protect them?”

“Ay.”

“So that’s it. I’m not doing any more. I think I’ll go hawking tomorrow.”

Carey smiled tightly and finally, thanks be to God, headed for the door. He paused.

“We’ll probably be on the road north in a day or two,” he said.

It was while Dodd was fighting his way out of his suit that he found it. A piece of paper which had been slipped into the little pocket in his sleeve. When he opened it, he found a short and imperious note.

“Please be so good as to meet me in the main courtyard at dawn.”

The thing was signed with Lady Hunsdon’s initials. Dodd groaned aloud. Dawn? It was past midnight now. He’d get hardly any sleep at all.

Feeling hard-used, he shucked the rest of his stupid clothes, dumped them on the chest, and climbed into bed, closing the curtains around him against the foul ague-producing airs of the Thames.

Dawn found the courtyard full of horses. It seemed that when Carey went hawking near London, he couldn’t possibly do it the way he did near Carlisle, which was to ride out with only Dodd or another man of the castle guard and a tercel falcon on his fist, a couple of dogs at the heels of his horse. That was fun.

This kind of hawking involved the dog-boy and the Master of the Kennels plus two or three dogs including the lugubrious lymer that had hurt his paw but was much better now, half a dozen mounted servingmen, the Baron’s Falconer, and at least five birds with their hoods on and a couple of boys to climb trees for the falcons in case they didn’t come back. Dodd saw Marlowe for the first time in days: he was looking out of a second-storey window smoking a long clay pipe while everyone mounted up and lengthened stirrup leathers and argued. They were seemingly headed for Farringdon Fields.

Carey raised his hand in salute to Dodd as the whole cavalcade clenched and gathered itself around him and waited for the main gate to be opened to let them pass.

“Off we go now,” said a firm voice at Dodd’s elbow, and he looked down to see Lady Hunsdon in a respectable but ordinary tawny woollen kirtle, holding a walking stick and wearing a very determined expression.

“Ah…” Dodd began.

“We’ll take a boat and you can explain it all to me,” she said. Dodd looked about for her normal gang of Cornish wreckers and found only the wide and freckled Captain Trevasker standing behind her, looking highly amused.

“Ay m’lady,” said Dodd, since there was evidently no help for it.

They walked down through the gardens with their polite boxtree knot designs and orchard at the end, hedged with raspberry and gooseberry bushes and a row of hazels. Lady Hunsdon didn’t lean much on her walking stick since she had her hand laced into the crook of Dodd’s elbow, not quite a jailer. They got to the boatlanding, where Dodd found that Captain Trevasker had already hopped into the smaller of the two Hunsdon boats, and handed Lady Hunsdon down to the cushioned seat at the end. The rowers were waiting there in their headache-producing black and yellow stripes. Once Lady Hunsdon was settled and had nodded to the chief of them, they set off.

In the middle of the river, Lady Hunsdon leaned over and tapped him on the knee.

“Now then, Sergeant Dodd,” she said, and her eyes had a roguish twinkle in them which went some way to explaining why the bastard son of Henry VIII had married a West Country maiden with only a small dowry. “Let’s find out what that scallywag son of mine has been up to. Tell me everything you’ve been doing.”