P. Chisholm - A Famine of Horses

“Jesus, does everyone in Carlisle want to spoil my beauty…” muttered Carey, holding the cat out in front of him. A little girl’s face swung into his vision, with her eyes full of tears and her arms out, so instead of simply wringing the cat’s neck as he was tempted, he jumped off his horse, rammed the aggressive bundle of fur into her hands and vaulted back into the saddle again. As he settled and found the stirrups, he suddenly knew that his girth strap was either loose or cut.

Thunder side-stepped slightly, Carey had him lengthen his stride and came up alongside Dodd again.

“My girthstrap’s been cut,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth at Dodd, whose long face blinked in incomprehension and then rage. “I know, I know. Take a look at it.”

Dodd looked. “It’s hanging by a thread.”

“Wonderful. Let me check yours.”

Dodd’s was also half-severed. All the rest of his six men had half-cut girthstraps. Clearly, the men Lowther had left to guard the horses had spent a happy hour of sabotage. If he hadn’t been so furious with them and himself for not thinking of it first, Carey would have found the situation funny. Dodd’s expression was a picture.

“Straighten your face, Dodd,” he hissed, “don’t let Lowther know we’ve spotted it. We’re supposed to fall off when we mount up after the burial.”

“God rot the bastard…”

“Shut up. This is what we do…”

At the grave side he listened as the words of the burial service were intoned by the bishop, dropping like pebbles of mortality before them. The coffin was lowered into the grave, Scrope and his brother scooped earth on top of it.

Carey backed away from the grave immediately, followed quietly by his men. At the edge of the graveyard were the horses with their reins looped around the fence posts. Choosing their mounts carefully, Carey had his men in the saddle, lined up just outside the gate in two rows, with their helmets off. As they left the burial, Scrope and the gentlemen of the March would pass between them. He kept his own head covered. When Scrope went by, he took his hat off and bowed gravely in the saddle. Scrope beamed with pleasure.

Carey looked through the lychgate to see Lowther furiously trying to stop his men from mounting.

“The Lord hath delivered him into my hands,” he intoned piously to Dodd opposite him, who snorted. In the graveyard there was a sequence of thuds, yells and complaint as eight of Lowther’s men discovered what had happened to the girthstraps of the horses that were left. Thunder was there, over by the fence, neighing at him reproachfully while the lad who had taken him slid slowly sideways into the mud.

“Tch,” said Dodd, “nae discipline.”

“Now follow.”

The gentlemen’s horses were on the other side of the gate, with grooms waiting to help the ladies into the saddle. There was a flurry of mounting. As the cavalcade rode off back up English Street to the waiting funeral feast, Carey and his men followed meekly, leaving confusion behind them.

Carlisle castle was packed with gentlemen and attendants: the common folk got their meat and bread and ale in the barracks, while the gentlemen and their ladies filled the hall of the keep and attacked the carved beef, mutton, kid, venison and pork with gusto. In the centre of the main table was Philadelphia’s artistic subtlety of a marzipan peel tower under siege, only made more realistic by patching here and there where kitchen boys’ fingers had explored it.

The various headmen of riding surnames south of the Border were shouting and talking: lines of tension sprang when the heads of two families at deadly feud happened to cross each other’s paths, and Richard Graham of Brackenhill and William Armstrong of Mangerton were moving among the throngs, not overtly unwelcome, but watched covertly wherever they went. There was, of course, an official truce until sunset the following day to let everyone get fairly home.

Scrope came up to Carey busily.

“Robin,” he said, clearing his throat and hunching his shoulders under his black silk gown, “that was well-done at the churchyard, quite a compliment, eh? Whose idea was it?”

“Mine, my lord.”

Scrope looked sideways at him and smiled nervously. “Well, thank you. Very graceful. Er…Lowther seems to think there was some kind of mischief, but I’m not clear what.”

Does he indeed, thought Carey, who had felt honour was satisfied by swapping the horses and hadn’t planned to make any more of it.

“Yes, my lord,” he said blandly, “despite Lowther’s guard on the horses outside the church, somehow our girthstraps were half-slit.”

“Oh dear. Very difficult for you. Any idea who did it?”

“No my lord,” lied Carey. “Perhaps Lowther had a better notion. It was his men who were supposed to be guarding the beasts, after all.”

“Ah. Whose girths, exactly?”

“Mine and those of my men.”

“Ah. Oh.” Scrope sidled a bit, then reached past Carey’s elbow to grab a sweetmeat off a tray as it went by. The boy holding it skidded to a halt, and stood waiting respectfully, one cheek bulging. “Wonderful comfits Philadelphia made, do try one.”

“No thanks, my lord. My teeth won’t stand it.”

Scrope was full of sympathy. “Dear me, was it Jock…”

Carey smiled. “No, they survived Jock well enough. It was the Queen feeding me sugar plums and suckets every time she thought I looked peaky that ruined them.”

Scrope laughed and then caught sight of someone over Carey’s shoulder, hurried away to speak to another gentleman.

Carey spoke to everyone once, even passed the time of day with Mangerton and Brackenhill. Armstrong of Mangerton was a tall quiet man whose carrotty head had faded into grey. Graham of Brackenhill could not have been anything except a Graham, with his long face and grey eyes, though he was twice the width of Jock of the Peartree his brother.

“Brought your pack, eh, peddler?” he asked and guffawed.

“It’s still in Netherby,” said Carey equably. “Would you go and fetch it for me, Mr Graham?”

Graham laughed louder. “God’s truth, Sir Robert,” he said, wiping his eyes and munching a heroic piece of game pie. “Ah niver laughed so much in my life when I heard what ye did tae Jock. Wattie still hasnae forgiven ye for the damage to his peel tower. Bit of a tradition in your family, eh, damaging peel towers?”

“I hope so,” said Carey with a little edge, “I’d like to think I could be as good as my father at it if I had to.”

Graham of Brackenhill stopped laughing. “Ay, he burnt mine an’ all in ’69. Took fifteen kine and four horses too. But it’s a good variation, eh, having us break ‘em down ourselves?”

Carey smiled at him. “You may speak truer than you know.”

“Eh?”

“If I had my way, I’d make you cast down every tower in the March.”

“Nae doubt ye would, but we canna do that with the Scots ower the border. Even the Queen must ken that.”

“Have you thought, Mr Graham,” said Carey softly, “of what will happen when the Queen dies, as she must eventually, God save her?”

Clearly he hadn’t. Carey left him with the thought and decided he needed some fresh air. The London fashion for drinking tobacco smoke hadn’t travelled this far north yet, but still the air in the keep was thick enough to stick a pike in it.

Out in the castle yard you might have thought it was a wedding, not a funeral, with the folk milling about and the queue for beer at the buttery. By the castle gate was a table, guarded by four men, piled high with weapons.

On an impulse, Carey wandered over to it. There was a hideous array of death-dealing tools, most of them well-worn and extremely clean and sharp. In a neat pile over to one side was a collection of dags and calivers.