3 A Surfeit of Guns: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (20 page)

“The guns,” he said aloud.

“Guns?” asked Maxwell, eyes like slits.

“The two hundred-odd mixed calivers and pistols you have in Lochmaben, along with ammunition and priming powder,” Carey enlarged coolly. “If you like, I’ll inspect them for you and tell you if they’re bad or not.”

It wasn’t how he had planned to find out for certain whether Maxwell had the guns from the Carlisle armoury, but springing it on him that way certainly got an answer. Maxwell was bug-eyed with surprise.

“How did ye ken…?”

Carey sighed. “Somebody bought them,” he said. “And you have the money.”

Maxwell leaned over the trestle table set up to feed the men, and cut a piece of cheese. “Why should I want so many guns?” he asked with a failed attempt at being casual.

Carey laughed. “To wipe out the Johnstones, of course, my lord, once King James has gone back to Edinburgh.”

Maxwell sniffed and examined his fingernails elaborately. His other hand drummed a beat on the table.

“How do ye know?”

“I didn’t know for sure, my lord,” Carey admitted, breaking open a penny loaf and throwing some crumbs to the doves from the cote on the roof who had come out cautiously in hopes of food. “Only, any man would like to end a feud in his favour if he could.”

Maxwell started examining the other fingernails now, while his right hand began stroking at his dagger hilt. Oh, not again, Dodd groaned inwardly. He had been too outraged at Carey’s question to speak, why can the bloody Courtier never let be? We’re in the Maxwell’s own townhouse and he’s March Warden forbye…

But Carey was grinning, sitting carefully down on a bench, leaning back and plunking his boots on the table with a heavy double thud.

“I don’t care what you do to the Johnstones, my lord,” he said, waving his bread. “It’s none of my concern, because it’s Scottish West March business entirely and the Johnstones are a thorn in our side as well. I’m only interested in guns.”

“And ye’d know if ye saw them whether they were faulty or not?”

“Yes,” said Carey simply. “And if somebody’s already been hurt by one, don’t you think that would be wise, before you take on the Johnstones?”

Maxwell stared at him for a moment longer, calculating. “My cousin,” he answered obliquely, “was blinded last night and may not live the week. When can you check them?”

“At your lordship’s convenience, after I’ve seen the King.”

***

The King of Scotland was hunting the deer. In the distance, he could hear the hounds at full cry and the beaters behind them with their drums and trumpets and clappers and in between the beating of hooves on the ground as the game the foresters had found in the days preceding were driven inexorably down through the valley to where the court waited, bows strung at the ready. Occasionally the King liked to stalk a single noble beast, perhaps a hart of twelve points, the King of the Forest, with only the help of a couple of lymer-dogs and foresters, spending perhaps a day or more to waylay the animal and take his life personally with a crossbow. Certainly that was the hunting which gave him the greatest personal satisfaction and he knew he was good at it, being as patient and cunning as a ghillie, but this was business. His court needed venison in quantity, which unfortunately eliminated finesse.

Their hides had been well-built and disguised with brush. Each of the nobles had their best-liked weapon, whether longbow, crossbow or lance. Some had boar spears in case some wild boar should have been put up. None had firearms, mainly because of the damage they did to the skins and also to reduce wastage in beaters. And it was well known King James didn’t like them.

The dawn was exquisite: pale peach and gold at the eastern horizon shading to royal blue overhead, and the nearer forest was quiet with anticipation, a breeze blowing which carried all the scents of greenery and earth, unreproduceable no matter how many perfumes you mixed. Only the sounds of the drive coming nearer gave tension, the lift and overhang of a wave before it broke…

The game burst milling from the forest: red deer and roe and fallow, all ages and sexes. The King took aim at the best animal: a stag of ten, shot it with a bolt through the neck, reached out his hand and was given another loaded crossbow in exchange for the discharged one and shot it again directly under the chin. The whup and twang of longbows and crossbows filled the air with a music that delighted the King’s ear, and beasts lurched and fell as they slowed and turned, leaped about in panic. King James laughed with pleasure at the sight: here was a true glory—to meet the bounty of the wild and conquer it.

With two men behind him rewinding his bows, the King had shot four of the deer by the time the forest’s harvest was lying down and flopping about, save a couple of wiser or luckier does who had jumped past the hides and disappeared into the undergrowth behind.

Sweating foresters began the work of turning the carcases on their sides. King James stepped from behind his hide and marched up to the stag he had killed first. He took the long heavy hunting knife from the gamewarden, who had been warned to be on bended knee, and waited impatiently for the musicians who were hidden off to one side to begin playing. He had heard that the Queen of England always unmade the first deer to the sweet strains of music.

One of the musicians popped his head up from the foliage, ruining the effect of faery music that had been planned. The musician’s velvet cap was askew.

“Your Highness, one of the deer fell on George Beaton’s viol.”

King James waved the hunting knife. “Get on with it,” he growled.

“Ay, sire.”

After a couple more moments, frenetic sawing began from the bushes, with pipes and drums at variance and the strings all at venture. King James sighed deeply, bent to make the first cut. Although he stabbed at the furry throat gingerly, a red tide burst out of the animal’s nostrils and washed over his boots, ruining his red pompoms.

King James dropped the knife in the mud and stepped stickily away from the small lake of blood. He sighed again. What was the saying? Make a silk purse of a sow’s ear? God knew it sometimes seemed to him that he had a better chance of making a lady’s veil of a sow’s pigbed than imitating the English court, but they had to learn ceremony, these mad battle-crazy nobles of his, or they would humiliate him when the old bitch in London died and he came into his own.

While the butchery was carried out in front of the hides and some of the professional huntsmen took lymers and crossbows to track down the deer that had been wounded but not killed in the confusion, King James remounted his white horse. It had been a successful drive and the court was now supplied with much of the meat it needed in Dumfries. He smiled and waved his hand at dear Alexander Lord Spynie’s compliments and then, for all his good temper, became grave again. A long fellow with odd hair in a nicely London-cut black velvet doublet was approaching, limping slightly as he threaded between the horses and the boasting nobles. He was carrying a goblet and a white towel. Well, were they learning at last?

The long fellow doffed his hat, genuflected gracefully twice and then after ceremoniously tasting the wine in the King’s sight and wiping the goblet’s lip with the towel, held it up to him so he only had to bend down and take it.

King James did so and finally recognised the man properly.

“Sir Robert Carey again, is it not?” he said as he drank. Spices hid the fact that the wine was as bad as all the wine in Godforsaken Dumfries, except for what he himself had brought. Yes, Carey was at Court, he remembered now, though as always his memory of the previous afternoon was somewhat wine-blurred. Carey had played well in the football match until the eye-watering foul that put him out of it. Even James had felt the urge to cross his legs.

“Are ye quite recovered now, Sir Robert?” he asked solicitously. “No ill-effects, I hope.”

“No, Your Majesty. I don’t think so.”

“I think the best remedy would be a piece of steak,” James went on ruminatively. “Externally rather than internally, ye follow. And an infusion of comfrey with perhaps a few ounces of blood from the arm.”

“Your Majesty is most kind in your concern. I tried the steak last night and it certainly…helped.”

James smiled at Carey. Lacking it conspicuously himself, he had always found a strange fascination about male beauty: a wonder and a miracle in the way big bones and hard muscles produced something powerful and cleanly exciting, utterly different from the cloying softness and vapidity of women. Carey, at the age of twenty-three when King James had first seen him in Walsingham’s ambassadorial train, had truly been beautiful, with sophistication and fluent French from his recent stay in Paris, and the glorious arrogance of youth. James had been a few years younger in years, a few centuries older in experience and had delighted in him. Poor d’Aubigny would have approved James’s tall base-born cousin as well, but by that time poor d’Aubigny had been thrown out of Scotland by the Ruthven Raiders and was dead. After Walsingham went south again, King James had sent several warm letters and spent considerable time trying to persuade the Queen of England and Carey’s father, Lord Hunsdon, to let Carey come back to the Scottish court for a longer stay. Unfortunately, the old lord had blocked him for some reason and James had turned to find other friends for his loneliness. Carey had carried some messages to Edinburgh for the Queen of England, had even been the man rash enough to bring the news of Mary Queen of Scots’ execution—not that James had let him set foot in Scotland that time. Now, many years after their first meeting, Carey was back once more. His shoulders had broadened as you would expect of the son of one of King Henry VIII’s byblows. But he had lost none of his charm and, from the look of him, none of his arrogance either.

King James felt the heat rising in him again, decided to prolong the conversation.

“And what did ye think to the sport, Sir Robert?”

“I marked a kingly shot at the highest ranked deer present,” said Sir Robert smoothly. “Was it Your Majesty’s?”

Ay, it was lovely the way the English could flatter. Carey had been at Queen Elizabeth’s court for ten years, the best school of courtesy in the world. Still, it
had
been a good shot. King James allowed himself to preen a little.

“I think it was. I had the benefit of a clean view.”

“In the best run of hunts, a man may always miss if his hand be not steady,” said Sir Robert. “I saw Your Majesty kill at least five.”

“Is a King but a man?” James asked, wondering if philosophy would make the Englishman sweat at all. No; he was smiling.

“In the sight of God we are all but men,” said he. “But in the sight of men, I believe that a king must be, as it were, a god.”

James was enjoying this immensely. He finished the wine. “Did ye have a particular god in mind, Sir Robert?”

Carey hesitated not at all, which confirmed King James’s suspicion that he was rerunning a good workmanlike arselick that had already seen service up Queen Elizabeth’s metaphorical petticoats.

“Apollo sprang to mind, Your Majesty.”

“Not Diana, mistress of the hunt?”

Carey almost grinned, but not quite. “No, Your Majesty, saving your grace’s pardon, I would reserve the figure of the pale virgin of the moon for my liege and Queen, Your Majesty’s good cousin.”

“And so I should hope. Well, Apollo will do for the present.” It was nice that Carey remembered the courtly games and masques they had played years ago, with King James taking the role of Apollo the Sun God and much ribaldry on the subject of that Virgin Moon as well.

Having emptied the goblet, King James made a move to hand it back, but Carey stepped away and spread his hands gracefully.

“How dare mere mortal lips touch that which has refreshed the Sun God?” he said with a fine rhetoric. Over behind his left shoulder in the pressing knot of courtiers, James heard someone mutter that if every fucking Englishman was as prosy as this one, it was no fucking wonder their Queen could never be brought to decide on anything.

King James sighed again, and examined the silver goblet, which was nicely chased and inlaid with enamel and a couple of reasonable garnets. There was no question but that his court could do with some polish.

“Ay,” he said. “It’s a mite melted round about the rim. I’ll keep it and have my silversmith mend it for me.”

“Your Majesty, may I ask a boon?” added Carey, once more with his knee crunching in the leaf-litter. No doubt all the fucking Englishmen would have terrible rheumatism of the kneejoints with all the bending and scraping they must do at the Queen’s court, continued the commentary behind the King.

“Ay, what can I do for ye, Sir Robert?”

“Would Your Majesty favour me with a few minutes of your time?”

So he wanted audience and knew how to ask for it prettily. Lord, it was a lot easier on the nerves than some of the earls about the King who tended to march up to him and begin haranguing him at the least opportunity. And perhaps…who knew? Perhaps they could be friends? Or more? King James positively beamed at his cousin.

“Ay, of course, Sir Robert. It would be a pleasure. This afternoon, I think, when I have refreshed myself after the hunting.”

“Your Majesty does me the greatest conceivable honour.”

“Ay, nae doubt of it. Farewell, Sir Robert.”