P. Chisholm - A Plague of Angels

‘Sir John,’ he said. ‘Here is Sir Robert Carey who is to be in your ward tonight.’

Sir John stood and bowed elaborately to Dodd who felt embarrassed at his imposture, despite it not being his fault. He did his best to bow back.

‘Sir Robert is amusing himself by pretending to be a northerner,’ said Newton sarcastically. ‘See if you can bring him to his senses.’

Newton and his henchmen stumped off across the crowded courtyard and Dodd watched them go, wishing he could bring his kin all the way from Upper Tynedale and Gilsland, raid the man’s house, lift his kine, take his insight and beat him to a pulp for insolence. He sighed. God, it was hard to be a foreigner.

Sir John was squinting at him curiously.

‘Sir Robert,’ said the man in charge of the Knight’s Commons, whose doublet was velvet and his Venetians brocade but the whole outfit sadly worn. ‘I’m sorry to see you in this state. How may I be of assistance, sir?’

Well, that was polite at least. What would Carey have said? Something witty about Sir John helping him by giving him four hundred pounds, no doubt. But that was not Dodd’s style.

‘Sir,’ he said firmly, doing his best to copy the southern way of talking. ‘There’s been some kind of mistake. I am not Sir Robert. Ma right name is Henry Dodd an’ I dinna owe anybody in this town a penny. But I canna persuade Newton of it.’

Sir John nodded noncommittally, evidently not believing him.

‘That’s all right, sir,’ he said respectfully. ‘I can see you’re incognito.’

‘But I’m not incognito, whatever that means. I am what I am. I dinna want tae make any pretence at being what I’m not. D’ye follow me, sir? I’m no mair a gentleman than Newton, thank God.’

Sir John nodded again. ‘Well, sir,’ he said. ‘I myself have never met Sir Robert Carey before now, and so I cannot tell whether what you say is true or not. But Newton seems to think you are Carey and his word is law in this prison. So I suggest you go with what he says and be a gentleman until your friends can come and sort out the muddle.’

Dodd sighed again. It made him feel profoundly uneasy to have a gentleman calling him sir, it felt like he was sitting on top of a mountain and might fall off at any time. He couldn’t enjoy being respected for something he was not.

‘Is it right Newton can chain me if I make trouble, and me a gentleman an’ all?’

‘Oh yes, sir. I’m surprised he hasn’t done it already; he usually does for the first week to encourage you to pay him garnish to strike them off. Then he chains you again until you run out of money.’ Sir John gestured at one of the other primero players, a skinny man with a cavernous cough and an exhausted expression, whose damask doublet hung in folds on him and whose feet were chained.

‘What else can he do?’

Sir John pointed at a group of ominous wooden shapes in the other corner of the courtyard; Dodd narrowed his eyes and saw they were a set of stocks, a pillory and a whipping post.

‘Or,’ added Sir John, ‘he can throw you in the Hole which is six inches deep in water from the Fleet and has no light and not much air.’

‘Ay,’ said Dodd gloomily. ‘Well, nae doot he must keep order.’

‘He is heavily fined for escapes,’ continued Sir John. ‘And very vigilant since a notable and dangerous escape five years ago. If you spend a day in the pillory, you must spend a night in the Hole for he will not leave anyone out in the courtyard overnight as he did formerly. I beseech you sir, do not even consider escaping, no matter how unjust your imprisonment may seem; he has flogged gentlemen to the bone on a mere suspicion.’

‘Och, Christ. I thought he couldna do that to a man of worship?’

‘It is an iniquitous and barbarous tyranny, but as he has pointed out to me, he can see to it that a gentleman dies of ill usage, sickness and want before any suit can go to Star Chamber, and he will.’

‘Och,’ said Dodd, feeling more depressed by the minute. If being a gentleman couldn’t protect you from a flogging, what the hell was the point of all the bowing and scraping involved? At least in Jedburgh there had been no question of that, since the Armstrongs would have taken any bad treatment against Dodd very personally.

There was a shouting and a bell-clanging, at which the gentlemen sighed and gathered up their cards and winnings.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Sunday Service,’ said Sir John. ‘An excuse to muster the prisoners, in fact.’

Dodd followed and stood in a little group with the other inmates of the Knight’s Ward, answered to the name of Sir Robert Carey with a growled ‘If ye say so’, and found himself being pointed out and stared at by many of the other prisoners. He scowled back at them.

The sermon was long, read aloud by a sweating little priest with a red bulbous nose, and dwelling on the iniquities of luxurious clothing and the wickedness of starch. Dodd couldn’t quarrel with a word of it, but wished heartily it had been Carey listening to it instead of him. He still wasn’t used to the way his smart woollen suit constricted his arms and legs and forced him to pull his shoulders back.

At last the priest wound reedily to a close, blessed them and trotted off already drinking from a flask he had in his sleeve pocket. Somebody tentatively touched Dodd’s sleeve.

‘Sir. There is a little time before dinner.’ It was Sir John, smiling very friendlywise at him. ‘Would you care to play primero with us?’

What was it with Londoners? Why did they all want him to play cards? Well, there was one obvious answer. Dodd was tempted. He knew he was a lot better than he had ever been before. Also that proved Sir John could not have met Sir Robert Carey, since no one who actually knew the man would think he was a good mark for a primero game.

‘Ay. I’ll play. Though I’m verra rusty and ye might need to remind me of the rules.’

Sir John exchanged glances with the skinny gentleman, who moved round so that Dodd could squat down in their circle. He looked around him at the four gentlemen who were playing and thought that he could definitely undertake to throw any one of them a great deal further than he would trust them. Carey’s words paraded through his mind. ‘Play very cautiously with people you don’t know. If the odds are consistently wrong-whether you’re winning or losing-then you can be absolutely certain somebody is cheating.’ The odds were still something of a mystery to Dodd, though he had sweated to learn the numbers Carey told him were important. The Courtier had boiled it down by translating the numbers into fights: two to one against you, and you might fancy your chances, five to one and things were looking bleak, twenty to one and you might as well not bother. It had been a strange distraction against the griping misery of the Scotch flux but endless practice using pebbles for money had driven some of the ideas into his head.

An hour later he was pocketing a little pile of shillings and gloomily resisting the depressing certainty that the fine, if threadbare, gentlemen were clearly cheating, on Carey’s definition. Dodd wasn’t often lucky with the cards, which he supposed must mean Janet was a better wife than she sometimes seemed, but in that hour he had seen more flushes and choruses than he had seen before in all his adult life.

The bell went for dinner while he was wondering what to do about it and so he filed off with the others and his purse jingling, into the dining hall at one side of the courtyard, where the prisoners were carefully counted in by a gaol servant scowling with concentration.

The food wasn’t too bad. Tough, of course, and mostly covered in a sort of brown sauce, but none of it actually stank. Compared to the garrison rations it was really quite tasty. Dodd was too busy filling his belly to look around at first, but after a while he realised that one of the women sitting at the other end of the table was looking at him curiously.