P. Chisholm - A Season of Knives

‘There’s something wrong here,’ he said.

Dodd frowned and looked closer. ‘Ay,’ he said. ‘She’s havin’ difficulty.’

He put out his hand to touch her and the bitch snapped at him warningly. Carey came close and tried as well, but she only sniffed at him and whined heartrendingly.

‘There, there,’ he muttered. ‘It’s all right, sweeting.’

Dodd brought a lit taper and put it on the watch-light shelf in the bedhead.

‘Bring me another taper, an unlit one,’ Carey said, kneeling down and peering at the bitch’s rear end. That was another counterpane ruined, he thought absently-would Philadelphia have a replacement?

He could see something in her birth passage, but another heaving effort from the bitch moved it no further out. Dodd gave him the unlit taper and had a cautious look.

‘It’s stuck,’ he said.

Carey nodded. He had seen what you did when that happened because he had spent a great deal of his boyhood in Berwick earning beatings for running away from his tutor to play with his father’s hunting dogs in the kennels.

‘Shell I fetch the kennelman?’ Dodd asked.

Carey was using the tallow from the taper to grease his fingers. He yawned and shook his head to try and wake himself up a bit more.

‘I’ll have a try. She looks as if she’s been straining for hours,’ he said. ‘Would you hold her head in case she snaps at me?’

Dodd did as he was asked. Carey lifted her tail and gently put his fingers in. The pup had a big head which was the reason for the trouble. Very carefully, he slid his fingers round the head, waited for the next straining heave from the bitch, and pulled. For a moment his fingers were being crushed and then the pup’s nose came free and straight, and the little body shot out onto the bed. The bitch panted and sighed and licked Dodd’s hand, then turned and started licking the puppy. It looked dead. Carey felt in its mouth, cleared out the bits of caul and the pup hiccupped and started to breathe. Its mother carried on licking it firmly while Carey had another feel in her birth passage.

‘I think that was the last one,’ he said, standing up and wiping his hands on his mucky shirt which he dropped in the rushes. ‘Bring the taper out and shut the curtains for her; she can stay there and I’ll have the truckle bed.’

Dodd had shut the curtains; now he went and brought the food to Carey.

‘Eat,’ he said.

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Ay, well, I canna make ye,’ said Dodd, putting the trencher on the chest again. ‘Never mind. I’ll see ye in the morning, sir, and we can talk to Andy Nixon. Good night.’

Dodd walked to the door looking mightily offended.

‘Er…Dodd,’ said Carey, ashamed of himself. ‘Thank you.’

‘Iphm.’ Dodd nodded and clattered down the stairs.

Wondering what on earth had given Dodd the idea he needed cosseting like a baby, Carey put his clean shirt on, absent-mindedly drank some of the beer and munched down most of the bread and cheese. Barnabus’s truckle bed was too short for him by several inches, and smelled pungently of Barnabus, but Carey finished undressing and climbed in anyway. Seconds later he was fast asleep.

When the light in his chamber began to change with dawn, Carey’s eyes opened and he looked straight up at the ceiling beams, instead of the tester of a four-post bed. His legs were sticking unrestfully over the end of a musty straw mattress. For a moment he was confused, wondering if he was at Court or on progress, and then he remembered the dreamlike incident of the puppies. Although he could hear the shouts of the stable boys as they began work, the bedchamber was quiet. How peculiar to be the only person sleeping in it. He got up, scratching at a lot of new flea bites, yawned jaw-crackingly, finished the beer from last night and padded across the rushes in his bare feet to have a look between the bedcurtains at the bitch. She was fast asleep with her tumble of four puppies, the biggest one lying on his back with his paws in the air. As Carey watched he whined and twitched.

‘You’re mine,’ Carey told him. ‘As rent.’

‘Eh, sir?’ came a boy’s voice from the door. It was Ian Ogle, the steward’s eldest son, standing with a tray and looking alarmed.

‘It’s all right,’ Carey said to the boy. ‘Where’s Simon Barnet?’

‘He’s coming, sir, only I was up before and he asked me.’

‘Well, go and get him; I want him to help me dress.’

‘Ay sir.’

Simon, when he arrived, had to be told what to do, which was irritating since he had watched his uncle attend Carey so many times before. It appeared he had paid no attention, and he fumbled maddeningly with the points at the back of Carey’s green velvet doublet until Carey pushed him away with a growl and did them up himself. Neither the doublet nor the wide padded green brocade Venetians were quite fashionable, being a year and a half old, but as they hadn’t been paid for yet, Carey felt obliged to wear them. When they were finished, Carey gave him a long list of things to do which included taking his shirt to the laundry and his leather fighting breeches to be brushed, finding sponges and cloths to dry and clean his jack and polish his helmet after he’d taken it to the armoury for a new chinstrap, and further bringing the kennelman in to inspect the bitch and her puppies and also making sure there was food and water for her.

Carey listened patiently while Simon falteringly repeated his list. ‘Simon,’ he said gently. ‘You weren’t paying attention. What would you do if I asked you to take a message for me? You’d forget it. You missed out cleaning my jack and morion, which is one of your jobs anyway.’

‘Sorry, sir,’ said Simon, still looking longingly at the rising sunlight outside.

‘Go through it again.’

Screwing up his face with the effort, Simon managed to repeat it correctly.

‘That’s better. Off you go then.’

Carey went into the second room he used as his office and sat down. He had to write the report for Scrope about his actions against the Graham raid the day before. And that was before he even began to deal with the sudden muster asked for by King James of Scotland. The depressing prospect daunted him far more than a mere half-hundred armed Grahams. Considering the amount of paperwork generated by a simple muster, Carey’s heart failed him at the thought of how much might be involved in a full Day of Truce. There was food and beer to be organised, although Philly and Ogle, Scrope’s steward, did most of that, lodgings urgently needed for the more prominent and remote gentlemen, the Carlisle racecourse made ready for the purpose and a few races arranged as entertainment, horsefeed and troughs to be provided. Someone also had to sort out the keeping of order, which meant careful attention paid to the sequence in which surnames were mustered to make sure no two families at feud were too close to each other. He hoped there was no question of keeping the men there overnight; it beggared belief what could happen in the dark between all those long-experienced and accomplished reivers.

He picked up his pen, wondered self-pityingly how much longer Richard Bell would take to find him a suitable clerk to be his secretary, and began writing his report.

He was halfway into his second paragraph when someone lumbered into the bed chamber and sneezed fruitily. He looked up in irritation. Long George was peering behind Carey’s bed curtains at the lymer bitch.

‘What the devil do you want?’ Carey snapped.

Long George leapt back guiltily and touched his forelock, wiped his streaming nose on his sleeve, then took his blue statute cap off his round head and plumped it back and forth in his hands.