P. Chisholm - A Season of Knives

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Carey moaned, and tried to push her off, but she licked his face lovingly, turned round a couple of times and settled down against his stomach. He shoved her a couple of times, but she became a warm furry lump of immovability. If he wanted her off his bed, he knew he would have to get up and haul her off by the collar and he couldn’t be bothered. ‘You are not the kind of woman I want in my bed,’ he told her severely and she yawned and panted and licked at his nose, so he held her muzzle with his hand and told her severely to be still. She put her nose down between her paws and watched him with her soulful brown eyes until his own eyes blurred and he pitched into sleep.

***

Dodd stepped out into the sunlit courtyard and walked whistling out through the Captain’s gate and the covered way into the town. He couldn’t have explained why, but the discovery that Carey the elegant courtier was only one step ahead of a warrant for debt in London made him like the man much more. Carey had the indefinable assets of birth and influence and the Queen’s favour; Dodd had a good solid tower, a hundred pounds’ worth of land at lease, and kin who would follow him if he asked them.

For a while Dodd quartered the town and then changed direction and went back to Bessie’s. There, as he had expected, he found the rest of his men. He explained his quest to them and they were happy to join in.

Eventually Bangtail came hurrying up, trailing a boy whom Dodd recognised as Ian Ogle, the steward’s young son.

‘Tell him,’ Bangtail encouraged the lad, who squinted up at Dodd and wanted to know what was in it for him.

Feeling inspired, Dodd resisted the impulse to shake the information out of the boy, and instead handed over a penny. Ian Ogle squinted at it ungratefully.

‘Ay,’ he said. ‘He were in here yesterday askin’ which lad was it served the Deputy Warden, so I tellt him. Why’d ye want to know?’

‘Who was?’

‘Who was what?’

‘Who was asking which lad…?’

‘Andy Nixon, Mr Pennycook’s rent-collector,’ said Ian Ogle with a contemptuous sneer. ‘And he’d had an argument he lost with somebody, by my reckoning.’

‘Andy Nixon,’ breathed Dodd, who knew more about Mrs Atkinson’s private life from Janet than he had let on to Carey.

‘Ay.’

‘Have you seen him today?’

‘No.’

‘Well then, be off wi’ ye. By God, Andy Nixon. I wouldnae have thought it.’

By the time Carey woke up to the sound of the yellow lymer bitch’s echoing snores, the light filtering through his curtains was as yellow as her coat. He got up, feeling irritable and aching, mainly the effect of being stupid enough to sleep in his hose and boots, but there was no point in taking them off now.

Dodd knocked on the door just as Carey drank the remains of the beer in the jug and wished Barnabus was around to bring him food. He would have to talk to Scrope about finding another servant to look after him while Barnabus was in jail.

Dodd’s face was unrecognisable because it had a broad grin on it. That faded when he saw the frowstiness of the Deputy.

‘I wouldna recommend sleeping in your boots,’ he said helpfully.

‘Thank you, Dodd.’

Carey scratched his hair, smoothed it down again, put on his morion and finished buckling his swordbelt.

‘Well, we’ve got his name, sir,’ said Dodd, full of happiness and bonhomie.

‘Eh?’

‘The man that bribed Simon Barnet for your glove. We know his name.’

That woke him up properly. ‘Do you, by God?’

‘Ay, sir. His name’s Andy Nixon.’

Where had he heard that name before? He remembered the extremely pregnant Mrs Leigh with her nasty particles of gossip.

‘Andy Nixon?’

‘Ay. Mr Pennycook’s rent-collector.’

That fitted. That all fitted nicely into place. Carey’s jaw set. ‘He’s Mrs Atkinson’s lover, isn’t he?’

Dodd sighed regretfully. ‘Ay sir. They was childhood sweethearts, but Kate Coldale’s mother wouldna let her marry a man wi’ no land and no prospects, seeing she had a good dowry in property, and she was married off to Jemmy Atkinson instead. But I canna see Kate…’

‘It looks bad for her, though. If she conspired with her lover to kill her husband, that’s a wicked crime. It’s petty treason. She…’

Dodd was looking at Carey with peculiar directness. Go on, thought Dodd, tell me you’ve never at least toyed with the notion of shooting Sir Henry Widdrington, tell me you haven’t.

Carey’s voice did trail off and he looked at the floor. Up again. ‘It’s a crime,’ he said more quietly. ‘It has to be a crime. If it wasn’t, none of us could sleep easy in our beds.’

‘Depends how ye treat yer wife, though, sir,’ said Dodd with all the smugness of the happily married. ‘And what her lover thinks of it and what kind of a man he is.’

Carey studiously ignored the personal implications of all this.

‘You think Andy Nixon’s capable of slitting Atkinson’s throat?’

‘Oh ay, sir. Andy Nixon wouldnae do the job he does if he couldnae use a blade.’

‘And Mrs Atkinson? Do you think she knew?’

Dodd shrugged. ‘I dinna ken sir.’

‘Well, let’s go and find out.’

‘We need a warrant, sir…’

‘I’ll get the bloody warrant,’ Carey growled. ‘Fetch the men.’

Kate Atkinson was just about to lock up her house for the night when there came an almighty hammering on her door. She opened it and was faced with a waking nightmare: the tall Deputy Warden with a piece of paper in his hand that gave him the right to search her house, and behind him six men to do it. At the tail of them all was Janet Armstrong’s bad-tempered husband looking very uneasy.

They tramped their muddy boots up the stairs and into her bedroom; she hadn’t been sleeping on her marriage bed, but on the truckle bed beside it, as she told them. Two of them went out into the back yard and started gingerly raking through her midden heap. She didn’t go with them but sat on the window seat in the downstairs living room and looked at her clenched fists. When little Mary started to wail because she was frightened by the high comb of the Deputy’s helmet, she did nothing because there was really nothing comforting she could say to her. Occasionally wisps of thought would gust through her mind. I should have gone to Lowther. I should never have told Andy. What can I say?

‘Mrs Atkinson,’ came a powerful voice from upstairs. ‘Will you come here, please?’

She went and found the Deputy Warden and Henry Dodd staring at the mattress of her marriage bed. They had stripped the clean sheet off it and turned it up the other way again. The Deputy reached down a long glittering hand, prodded the large brown stain. It was still a little sticky, and he sniffed his fingers.

‘Where are the other sheets to this bed?’ he demanded.

‘Downstairs, in the yard,’ she said. ‘Hanging out to dry.’

‘And the blankets?’

‘The same.’

‘The hangings?’

‘Ay.’

‘Did all the blood come off?’

She looked down at her apron, which was greasy, and twisted her hands together.

‘This is blood. You won’t tell me, I hope, that you’ve been killing a chicken in your marriage bed?’

If he was making a joke, she didn’t find it funny.

‘Mrs Atkinson, look at me.’ The Deputy’s voice had an impersonal sound: not angry at all, which surprised her for Lowther would have been bellowing at her by now. She looked at him and oh, the bonny blue eyes he had; it was hard to concentrate, the way they looked into you.

‘Mrs Atkinson, did you murder your husband?’

At least she could answer that question honestly and yet she didn’t. She said nothing.