P. Chisholm - A Season of Knives

‘Who sent you?’

Mick licked his lips again. ‘Er…who, sir?’

‘Yes,’ said Carey with dangerous patience. ‘Who sent you?’

Mick’s face twisted in panic. ‘I canna say, sir.’

‘Why not?’

‘Ah…’ Inspiration struck him. ‘I didna ken who he was, sir. It were dark.’

‘You took a message into the Debateable Land, for a man you don’t know?’

‘Ay, sir. He give me a shilling for it.’

There was an awful pause while Carey considered this. Mick was shaking like a mouse in a cat’s mouth.

‘Give me the message,’ Carey said at last.

Mick shook harder. ‘It was writing and Wattie burnt it.’

‘What was in it?’

‘I dinna ken, sir. I canna read.’

Carey was tossing the dagger again. ‘You carried a letter to Netherby for a man you don’t know.’

‘Ay, sir.’ Mick the Crow was sweating.

Carey squinted at him in the light from the open top door and the poignard flashed and slapped hilt-first back in his hand. ‘If it makes you feel happier, I’ll regard any obscenity dealing with my Lady Widdrington as being of other authorship.’

Mick’s eyes bulged again with bewilderment.

‘He’s saying, he won’t kill you for being rude about the lady; he’ll kill the man what sent you,’ translated Barnabus helpfully.

‘But I canna tell ye what was in it, I dinna…’ There was a rising note of panic in Mick’s voice.

‘You knew they were planning to take Lady Widdrington,’ snapped Carey.

‘Ay, sir, he let it slip an’…an’ they could call in on Archibald Bell by the way, sir, for he hasnae paid his blackrent. That’s all. As God’s my witness.’

Carey stared coldly at the shaking sweating creature before him, and his mouth made a small twitch of distaste.

‘You’re very frightened of this man, aren’t you, Mick? The one you don’t know.’

‘Ay, sir,’ said Mick hoarsely, licking blood off his lip again. ‘I’m a married man, see ye, and I’ve three small weans.’

‘It seems to me,’ said Carey remotely, ‘that entirely too many of you are married men. Will you tell the Lord Warden what you’ve just told me?’

Mick closed his eyes and moaned softly. ‘They’re ainly little, sir,’ he said pleadingly.

Carey sighed and put his poignard back in its sheath.

‘Would it help if I put you in gaol for refusing to tell me the man’s name?’

Mick opened his eyes again.

‘Oh, ay,’ he said pathetically. ‘It would so. Only not the Lickingstone cell, please, sir. It’s sae dark in there.’

‘Come along,’ said Carey sadly. ‘We’ll do it before I see the Warden.

***

The really damnable nuisance of it, Carey thought, as he rode out of Carlisle with Sergeant Nixon and the others (except for Mick the Crow) in a bunch behind him, was that this wasn’t even the raiding season. July was one of the few times of year when you could be fairly secure from raiding because the nights were too short and too light and any sensible man with a square foot of meadow was out getting his hay in. There was never enough hay for the number of horses on the borders, although the hobbies could get by on about half of what Thunder needed to survive. The Borderers sent cattle skins and salt beef and cheeses south and north to pay for the horsefeed they needed, but it was expensive bringing it in, so whatever you could grow was pure profit. Despite what he had said, even reivers made hay because while cows, sheep and horses had legs and could run, haystacks did not. All this activity in high summer was most irregular.

The result of the unseasonable nature of Wattie Graham’s raid was that Carey had practically no men to meet it with and not enough horses. Carlisle was almost a ghost town. Carleton’s troop of men were with Carleton and his relatives in Thirlwall; they certainly weren’t in Carlisle. Carey’s men were scattered to the four winds, on condition they turned up at the Keep by tomorrow night when he was officially due to take a patrol out. Lowther’s men…well, they were at least with him and might possibly fight for him, but he had a private bet with himself that Sergeant Ill-Willit Daniel had been given strict instructions to put a lance through his spine if he ever turned his back on the man for long enough.

After deep consideration and with some worry, he had sent Young Hutchin Graham on a fast pony out ahead of him on the road with a letter for Captain Carleton in Thirlwall, telling him on no account to let Lady Widdrington out of the gates the next morning. He thought it very unlikely the boy would get through in time to stop her, assuming-which was highly unlikely-Hutchin’s Uncle Wattie hadn’t put fore riders in place around the castle to guard against such things. At least if the Grahams caught Young Hutchin, they wouldn’t kill him as they might Long George and certainly would Bessie’s Andrew Storey, with whose surname they had a feud. Young Hutchin could say convincingly that he had no idea what was in the letter he was carrying since he couldn’t read and would probably end up at Wattie’s side during the raid. That might even give Carey a card to play if everything went horribly wrong. He would have liked to send Long George off with a letter for the Middle March Warden, Sir John Forster, since the raid was actually due to happen on his ground, but he didn’t dare. Firstly, Long George was more than likely to end with his throat slit, and secondly, Carey didn’t like the thought of being alone on the road with Sergeant Nixon and his thugs and no one to guard his back but Bessie’s Andrew.

The situation was actually worse for him than it would have been for Lowther or Carleton because he didn’t know the ground well enough. He was beginning to get a rough shape of it in his mind from his hunting expeditions of the previous week, but nothing like the detailed knowledge of someone born there. He knew the land round Berwick far better from living there as a boy; in Carlisle he was a foreigner. As a result he didn’t know what route Wattie Graham would take from Netherby, nor where he would lie up for the night, nor where on the old road he might be planning to take Lady Widdrington.

Take Lady Widdrington. Damn it, how dare they! How dare Graham try to salve his wounded pride with a raid of fifty riders against one woman and five men? God damn them all for bloody cowards, if he could catch them red-handed he’d string them up on the nearest trees, by God he would, and to hell with giving them a fair trial…

He pulled his mind back from that train of thought, simply because he knew that if he followed it he would end up too enraged to think straight.

Sergeant Nixon was riding beside him with an ingratiating expression on his face. Carey looked sideways at him; he was a strongly built ugly man with bulging cheeks like a water-rat’s and a long pointed nose, and the blackest beard on a pale face Carey had ever seen. He was not a man you would willingly buy a horse from, nor anything else, and the surly competence in the way he rode and carried his lance implied that you would be wise not to fight him. Which made him probably near enough to Lowther’s ideal of a henchman.

‘Did you want to ask something, Sergeant?’

‘Ay, sir.’ Unlike Sergeant Dodd’s miserable drone, Sergeant Nixon’s voice was the most attractive part of him. ‘I was wonderin’ how ye got word of the twenty horses ye say are at Brampton.’

‘Ah,’ said Carey opaquely. ‘Now, that would be telling, wouldn’t it, Sergeant?’ He had in fact deduced it from the fact that nobody at Brampton had rendered a complaint about horses reived from them. He wasn’t sure there were twenty there, but it was as many as he thought their pasturage could stand.

‘Would we be getting any of your fee, sir?’