P. Chisholm - A Surfeit of Guns

“Sit at the top of the stairs and shout if someone tries to come in,” said Carey and Young Hutchin grinned with understanding beyond his years. “And if I catch you listening or peeping at the latch-hole, I’ll leather you, understand?”

“Ay, sir,” said Hutchin.

In fact, Hutchin managed to restrain his curiosity for nearly twenty minutes until the muffled noises coming through the door told him he was safe enough. He put his eye to the latch-hole and was rewarded by the sight of two pairs of legs on a bed playing the old game of the two-backed beast. For all his efforts at squinting and seeing through wood, he could see nothing else and had to use his imagination. Fortunately he had more than most.

The red feather mask had flattered Signora Emilia Bonnetti because it had hidden the fine tracery of lines around her magnificent dark eyes. Carey no longer doubted that she had borne children, for she had the marks of it on her belly and her deliciously dark and pointed nipples. He didn’t care. He had always preferred older married women for dalliance and not simply because, at the Queen’s Court in London, to meddle with the virgin Maids of Honour was to risk the Queen’s fury and a ruinous stay in the Tower. His first woman had been a much older and more experienced French lady in Paris, and he had never got over his awed pleasure at finding the truth in the saying that women burned hotter the older they got.

Now he lay full length in the little half-curtained bed and watched sleepy-eyed as Emilia, full of vigour and mischief, poured him wine and chatted to him in French and Italian mixed.

It seemed he could do her some great service, if he chose. Ah, he thought, we’re coming to the point at last now. Ten years before he might have been disappointed that sheer desire for him had not been Emilia’s motive after all. No more. He had long ago decided that women rarely had fewer than four different motives for anything they did.

He took the goblet of wine and drank as Emilia pulled a white smock over her head and disappeared briefly, still talking.

At first he wasn’t certain he had heard right. “I beg your pardon?”

“I want to buy firearms,” repeated the Signora. “You know, guns.” She said the word in English to be sure he could understand.

Mind working furiously, he watched her and waited for her to explain herself.

“Signor Bonnetti has a commission to buy at least twelve dozen calivers and twelve dozen pistols, with perhaps more later. It has been very difficult, we came to Dumfries full of hope to buy them here where so many are made, but now we find that so many are used here as well the gunsmiths are fat and lazy, and they will not sell to us.”

“Who are the guns for?”

She shrugged her creamy shoulders and made a moue of disdain. “I do not know; for the Netherlanders perhaps, or the Swedes. Even the French Huguenots might want them; Signor Bonnetti has not told me.”

She’s lying, Carey thought to himself, every one of those people have better sources nearer home than Dumfries.

“Have you any money to pay for them?”

“We have gold and banker’s drafts,” she said. “But none will take them. Or they will take them, but they will give us nothing but promises in exchange. Where can I find guns to buy, Robin cheri, so that I may leave this cold and uncivilized place and go back to my beautiful Roma?” She sat next to him on the bed and put her head down on his chest. “We have sold all the wine, but we cannot leave without the guns, and we are both miserable.”

“Why are you asking me?” Carey wondered, twiddling his fingers in her black ringlets. “Why do you think I have guns?”

“Well, the Scots all say it. If you canna get guns here, they say, try the Deputy Warden of Carlisle. And then they laugh.”

Carey smiled and stroked her cheek. “Hmm,” he said. “And why do they laugh?”

She shrugged and sat up, tidying her hair with a busy pulling out and pushing in of hairpins. “Because many of them have very beautiful firearms from Carlisle and are proud of it. The laird Johnstone has many of the finest Tower-made, which is why my lord Maxwell is so worried.”

“Have you tried asking Maxwell?”

Her face screwed up with distaste. “He was the first one I tried and he said he might be able to help me in a little while, but he is untrue and a liar and he will not speak to me any more. The laird Johnstone says he needs his guns against the Maxwells. The Earl of Mar has been very kind…”

“Lucky Earl of Mar.”

She sniffed. “But he is only trying to delay me because I think he takes money from the English. And the King, of course, is not very approachable and the Queen has no influence with him. Huntly is in too much disgrace and poor beautiful Moray is dead. I have no one to turn to.”

“Poor darling,” said Carey not entirely listening to her sad tale. He gave her an inquiring squeeze. She disentwined his arms and frowned at him.

“You must get up and dress,” she scolded. “You have already been here a very long time.”

“But if I find you some guns, I will never see you again,” Carey protested, putting his hand to his brow sorrowfully. Emilia prodded him in a sensitive spot without warning and made him gasp.

“You might. But if I have not guns in the next few weeks, the Signor and I shall be ruined and so you will never see us more at all.”

“And if I can find you a few guns?”

“We will pay you perhaps forty shillings each for them.”

Carey stared hard at her as she busied herself pulling on her stays. He was thinking and calculating and wondering how far he could trust his luck this time. Imperiously she ordered him to help her with her backlaces, and he obediently did the office of a lady’s maid, with a few additions of his own invention. Unfortunately, she was no longer in the mood and they didn’t work. The complex layers went over her inexorably, one after the other, and when she was fully dressed and pinning on her cap, she turned on him and frowned again.

“And you are still disgraceful, why will you not put your shirt on?”

“Hope,” he said with mock despair and a lewd gesture.

She gave him his shirt and hose crushingly. “No, Monsieur le Depute, I think not.”

“And if I can find you some guns?”

Now she smiled. “Who knows?”

He laughed. “If I get you the guns you need, I’ll want more than kisses in recompense.”

“A ten per centum finder’s fee?”

“Twenty.”

“Fifteen.”

“Done,” Carey said happily, drinking to it.

“Now you must meet my husband.”

***

Giovanni Bonnetti was in a sorrowful state as he sat casting up his accounts. He was a small lightly built, swarthy man with a curled up waxed beard and moustache and very dark bright eyes. Three shirts and a knitted waistcoat under his fashionable orange and black taffeta doublet could not keep out the dank cold of the miserable joke that the Scots called summer. His legs were a perpetual mass of goose-pimples under his elegant black hose and, while the uproar in his bowels had calmed somewhat, he was not a well man. Cursed inefficient northerners, none of them knew what proper plumbing was.

And furthermore he had a stifling head-cold which caused his nose to drip all the time and a sore throat and hardly any of the illiterate savages of Scotland could speak Italian and many of them only spoke halting French with a nasal drawl that would have disgraced a Fleming. A generation ago they had been better cultured, when their alliance with France was strong and they had the wisdom of Mother Church to guide them. The foul heresy of Protestantism had sealed them up in their poor little country to stew in their own juices. And the King was no better than his nobles, though he at least had Italian and French.