P. Chisholm - A Famine of Horses

Ice trickling down his spine, Carey looked as interested as he could.

“What with, a cannon?” asked One-Lug.

“A sword. Mind you, it was to stop Dodd going out after his horses, when Jock of the Peartree was all set to catch him at the Strength of Liddesdale, lying out in the cold wood all night for nothing, thanks to the damned Courtier. They say he’s a sodomite…”

“Ye canna be a courtier without ye sell your bum,” agreed Jemmie wisely. “He must have annoyed the old Queen something powerful.”

“If ye ask me,” said Old Wat’s Clemmie, “he was short of money to pay his tailor’s bills, if ye looked at him with his great fat hose and his little doublet, ye never saw such a pretty suit.”

“Ye canna pay a London tailor with a cow.”

“What do ye know about it, the Edinburgh tailors take horses.”

While the argument raged across him, Carey scraped the last of the porridge off his bowl with his finger and put it away in his pack. He looked around the room idly and froze still.

Bothwell was talking to one of the lesser Grahams who had acted as servants to bring in the meal, gesturing in Carey’s direction. The boy came struggling down to Carey just as he was helping to clear the trestle tables. The middle of the floor was being swept clean of rushes and sprinkled with sand.

Bothwell had moved: he had the laird’s own carved armchair, was drinking wine from a goblet and beside him sat a sinewy grey-bearded man with a broken nose. The Graham boy who had come for Carey, threaded past the men who were now rearranging the benches ready for the evening’s entertainment, which was a cockfight. Carey saw the combatants being brought in, still in their cages, crowing defiance and fluttering aggressively and concluded that at least one of them had been got at.

Remembering Bothwell’s vanity, when he came up onto the dais, he bobbed his knee to the Earl and stood holding his cap and successfully looking scared.

“There’s the man, Jock,” said Bothwell, “he must have left Carlisle but a few hours gone.”

Jock of the Peartree spent a good minute examining Carey, who smiled ingratiatingly and hoped the walnut juice wouldn’t dissolve in his sweat. The keep was infernally hot with all the bodies packed into it.

“I heard,” said Jock of the Peartree in a very level voice, “That you was the man sold Sergeant Dodd’s wife Sweetmilk’s horse.”

With a swooping in his gut, Carey remembered that she had in fact bought it from the Reverend Turnbull and that some sort of Reverend had said grace. He wanted to turn and look for him but didn’t. In any case, he didn’t know what Turnbull looked like.

“No, master,” he said, bringing his voice down from a squeak, “I didnae.”

“That’s the word,” said Jock. “You say you know nothing about it?”

“Nowt, sir.”

Jock watched him at his leisure for a while. Carey thought frantically. Surely to God, if Turnbull was here, he wouldn’t have admitted to his part in the trafficking in that thrice damned nag. Had he? Had he bought his own safety by selling them an intruder? Turnbull was the book-a-bosom priest Daniel sometimes travelled with, he must have known Carey wasn’t Daniel Swanders…Why should he? Carey had given the name only to Wat of Harden… Don’t speculate, ask.

“Sir, who was it said it was me had the animal?”

Jock and the Earl exchanged glances. “That was the word in Carlisle, last we heard,” said the Earl. “Do ye tell me on your honour that you never had the horse?”

“Never clapped eyes on him, on my honour, my lord,” said Carey, only slightly mendaciously.

Jock snorted slightly. “Do ye know aught ye could tell us about Sweetmilk’s killing?” he asked.

“No sir,” said Carey, “but it wasnae Sergeant Dodd.”

“How do ye know that?”

“If what I’ve heard is right, sir, he wouldna make such a bodge of it.”

The Earl laughed. “Any other news out of Carlisle?”

“Er…they postponed the funeral of the old lord.”

“I know that. They think we’re riding into England,” said Bothwell.

“Are ye not?” asked Carey guilelessly, heart hammering again.

Bothwell smiled, a little coldly. “That’s for me to know and you to learn in due course, Daniel.”

“Yes sir.”

“Are you riding with us, Daniel?”

No help for it. “Yes sir, though I’m not a right fighting man if I’m honest with ye.”

Bothwell clapped him on the shoulder again and grinned: he had remarkably good, even teeth and it gave his smile an odd glaring quality. Carey smiled back.

“If ye want custom, wait about a bit and Wattie Graham will take you to see the women, they’re all agog for whatever’s in your pack.”

Wattie Graham was as good as his word: as the betting round the makeshift cockpit reached manic proportions, Carey followed the laird up the winding stair to the next floor, where his womenfolk were hiding from the untrustworthy men down below.

There was a crowd of them, perhaps ten or eleven, and a bewildering number of Jeans and Marys with an occasional Maud and one Susan, sitting on little stools at a trestle table eating their own meal which looked even worse than the one still rattling about Carey’s stomach. There was no sign of even a speck of bacon in it.

Wattie’s wife, Alison Graham, came to meet them at the door. Her broad, lined face lit up at sight of him and she took his hand in her own small rough one and led him into the feminine billow of skirts and aprons.

Surrounded by them, Carey opened the pack, laid out what it contained in the way Daniel had shown him and gave tongue like a London stallman.

“Ribbons, silks, beads and bracelets, laces, creams, garters and needles, what d’ye lack ladies, come buy.”

They giggled and elbowed each other. Mrs Graham fingered the ribbons and another girl picked up a packet of hairpins.

“How much for these?” she asked, and Carey told her.

It was bedlam for a while after that, as Carey told prices, held bargaining sessions over quantities of needles and some perfumed soap direct from Castile, as he insisted, although he knew perfectly well it was boiled up in York, and so did they.

At the end of the hour he had made Daniel a profit of about five shillings, and despite a throbbing head and a dry throat, he was feeling well-pleased with himself.

Mrs Graham brought him a goblet of sour wine well-watered, which he drank gratefully and then told him to sit down and he’d shortly get better fare than he would downstairs.

“Unless you want to go and watch the cockfighting?” said another girl, Jeanie Scott, extremely pregnant and glowing with it.

Carey grinned and decided to risk it. “Nay, mistress,” he said, “I laid my bets before I came up.”

“Don’t you want to see which wins?”

“I know which cock’ll win,” said Carey, “it’s the one that wasna given beer beforehand to slow him down.”

They all laughed knowingly at that. “What’s the news from Carlisle?” asked Alison Graham.

“I wasna there but ten days,” said Carey, “I don’t know the doings yet.”

“Is it right Jock of the Peartree raided the Dodds?” asked Jeanie Scott.

“Och, you know he did,” said another woman impatiently, “He was a’ full of it when he came back.”

“I heard Janet Dodd say her Cousin Willie’s Simon had an arrow in his arm during the raid,” ventured Carey. “And a woman called Margaret lost her bairn with the excitement.”

Jeanie Scott tutted sadly. “That would be Margaret Pringle, Clem Pringle’s sister, poor lass. I hope she’s not poorly with it. D’ye know how she fares, cadger?”

Carey shook his head.

“How’s Young Jock?” asked another girl, a thin, small pale creature, with a startling head of burnished gold hair. One of her wrists was tightly bandaged.