P. Chisholm - A Season of Knives

‘You might.’

‘Only we heard ye’d paid Dodd and his men their backwages…’

And you thought I might be a soft touch, Carey thought but didn’t say. ‘Perhaps you had better talk to Sir Richard Lowther about that.’

Sergeant Nixon sniffed. ‘Ay, sir.’

Sunset was coming, a slow beacon setting light to half the sky and turning the clouds to purple. There were still people working in the fields, which astonished Carey. He asked the Sergeant about it.

‘Well, sir,’ said Nixon, seeming surprised. ‘It’s going to rain soon; can ye not feel it hanging in the air?’

Now he mentioned it, the air was sultry and heavy and the warmth was oppressive. Carey had only his shirt on under his padded jack but was still feeling sticky. He sniffed the air. If it rained Wattie Graham’s trail would be a great deal harder to follow back…But then Lady Widdrington might even stay at Thirlwall for an extra day…No, she wouldn’t; he was fooling himself.

‘Yonder’s the road to Brampton,’ said Nixon after a long straight canter.

‘I know, Sergeant,’ said Carey. ‘We’re going to Gilsland first.’

‘Why?’

Carey stared at him for a while. Eventually Nixon got the message and coughed.

‘Why, sir?’

‘Because I want to talk to Dodd about something.’

Sergeant Nixon was frowning heavily, but then he shrugged. There was no love lost between him and Dodd, but neither were they enemies and nor were their families at feud.

Even so, Carey nodded at Long George and Bessie’s Andrew. Long George let his horse fall behind until he was at the rear of the men, while Bessie’s Andrew came up to Carey’s left shoulder and looked thoroughly nervous. God help me if Sergeant Nixon gets suspicious, Carey thought, then dismissed the thought from his mind. Sergeant Nixon wouldn’t get suspicious, that was all there was to it.

As Carey’s body swung rhythmically with the horse’s stride, he turned over and over in his mind the various loose combinations of ideas he was trying to form into a sensible plan. Scrope had been willing enough to let him try and deal with Wattie Graham’s raid, but was as hamstrung by lack of men as he was himself. He had barely ten men in the place and all of them were needed. He hadn’t even let Carey send off his clerk, Richard Bell, with a message to Forster because, as he pointed out, the Bells were yet another surname at feud with the Grahams and he didn’t want to lose the one man in the West March who had a thorough grasp of March Law. He had promised to send for a few of the gentlemen to the south of Carlisle, but had opined that they were unlikely to be reliable in a fight against the Grahams.

‘Most of ‘em pay blackrent to Richard Graham of Brackenhill,’ Scrope had said, looking tired. ‘None of them want any trouble with that family.’ Brackenhill was the acknowledged Graham headman and wealthy enough to arm most of his own men with guns.

What I need in this Godforsaken country is at least a hundred men I can trust and some decent ordnance, Carey thought bitterly. And pigs will fly before the Queen gives me the money to find them.

Sergeant Henry Dodd nodded at his brother Red Sandy, and the laden cart creaked off towards their main hay barn. The two small English Armstrongs, cousins of Janet, who had been helping him load, sat quietly together on top. One of the sandy heads was nodding.

‘Lizzy,’ called Dodd, and a freckled face under a mucky white cap peeked over. ‘Stop your brother from sleeping or he’ll fall off.’

‘Ay, Mr Dodd,’ she said, hiding a yawn. ‘Will ye be wanting us back again?’

He did really, but hadn’t the heart. ‘No, sweeting, get to your bed.’

Red Sandy touched up the oxen and the cart creaked away, a plaintive yell floating from the top as Lizzy obediently pinched her brother to wake him up.

The sun was down and there was another field to get in, but after that, it was done. Janet was coming towards him across the stubbly meadow with bits of hay stuck to her cap and a large earthenware jug on her hip. She smiled at him, and the back of his throat, which felt as if it had glazed over with the haydust stuck to it, opened a little involuntarily in anticipation. He put his hands behind the collar of his working shirt and eased the hemp cloth off the sunburn he’d collected a few days before while mowing this same field. He resisted the urge to have a go at the itchy bits of skin that were coming off because if he started scratching, all the little bits of dust that had got inside his clothes and stuck to his skin would start itching too and drive him insane.

Janet arrived where he stood leaning on his pitchfork, gave him the leather quart mug she had in her other hand and filled it with mild beer. He croaked his thanks, put it to his lips, tilted his head and forgot to swallow for a while. It almost hurt, it felt so good. He finished two thirds of it before he came up for air.

‘Ahhh,’ he said, and leered at her. Janet had untied her smock and loosened the laces of her old blue bodice to free her arms for raking and there was a fine deep valley there, just begging for exploration. Not in a stubbly field though, and they were both too old and respectable now to bundle about in the haystack, but a marriage bed would do fine, later, if he wasn’t too tired. And if he was, well, there was the morning too before he had to set off for Carlisle. She leered back at him and took breath to say something that never was said.

‘Och, God damn him to hell,’ moaned Dodd, seeing movement, men on horseback breasting the hill in the distance over her shoulder, and instantly recognising the man in the fancy morion helmet at the head of the patrol riding towards them along the Roman road. ‘God rot his bloody bowels…’

‘Eh?’ said Janet, startled. She turned to look in the same direction as her husband, and her eyes narrowed.

‘But those are Lowther’s men he’s with.’

Dodd knew with awful clarity exactly what the thrice damned Deputy Warden was doing out at Gilsland with Lowther’s Sergeant and Lowther’s bunch of hard bargains. Full of wordless ill-usage, he picked up his pitchfork and drove it tines first into the ground, narrowly missing his own foot.

‘Make yerself decent, woman,’ he growled unfairly at his wife, who had only been behaving as a good wife should to her hardworking husband. She gave him a glint of a stare and he handed her what was left of his beer by way of apology. Still, she tied her old smock again, pulled up her bodice lacings and the curves of her breasts went back into their secret armour.

Dodd folded his arms and waited for the Deputy to come to him. There was some satisfaction in the thought that he must be hot wearing a jack and morion in this weather, followed by a gloomier memory of just how miserable a jack could be in summer.

Carey left Lowther’s men at the wall and came trotting over.

‘Good evening, Sergeant. How’s the haymaking?’

The bloody Courtier had probably been sitting on his arse all afternoon, unlike Dodd, who could only bring himself to grunt.

‘Well enow.’

‘Have you finished yet?’

Resisting the urge to snarl that if he was finished he wouldna be standing in a field like a lummock, he’d be at table stuffing his face, Dodd gestured in the direction of a long triangle of land which still had its neat rows of gold. Carey’s face clouded over.

‘Ah,’ he said.

‘What’s the trouble, Sir Robert?’ asked Janet. ‘Is it a raid?’

Carey sighed and slid from his horse. ‘In a manner of speaking, Mrs Dodd,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you when you’re so busy, Sergeant; if I had any other choice I wouldn’t be here.’