Dodd stretched his eyes at that. Was coining treason? Did Richie Graham with his busy unofficial mint know about it? Did he care?
“…but it is not a direct attack upon her Majesty nor upon the Commonweal of England. And in point of fact, if what you have told me is correct, I believe that Mr. Heneage may be vulnerable to a charge of coining and uttering false coin himself, with your brother and the apothecary Mr. Cheke as witnesses against him.”
Carey whistled through his teeth. “I thought we couldn’t prove that?”
Enys shrugged. “Heneage will bring oath-swearers to disagree but it will depend on the judge. It’s arguable. At this stage it doesn’t have to be provable.”
They came to Westminster steps and jumped out-Enys seemed clumsy again and hesitant as he stepped onto the boat landing at just the wrong time. He might have wound up in the Thames without a quick shove from Dodd.
“Thank you, sir,” he muttered, looking embarassed. “I am still weakened by my sickness.”
“Ay, but your face is healed?” said Dodd, immediately worried because he had never had smallpox in his life.
“Oh it is, I am no longer sick of it. But the pocks attacked my eyes as well and my sight and balance are not what they were,” said the man, rubbing his hand on his face and jaw. Dodd could see the pits on the backs of his hands going up his wrist. Jesu, that was an ugly disease as well, worse than plague in some ways. Of course you were far more likely to die of the plague, but that was relatively quick and if your buboes burst you’d probably get better with no more than a couple of scars on your neck and groin and never be afraid of getting it again. You weren’t going to be hideous for the rest of your life. As for pocks on your eyes…Jesus God. At least there wasn’t much smallpox on the Borders, though Dodd had had a terrible fright when he was nine when his hands had got blistered from a cow with a blistered udder. Both his parents were alive then; it hadn’t been anything, and the blisters on both him and the cow got better soon enough.
They walked up through the muddy crowded alleys to the great old Hall of Westminster, hard by the Cathedral. The place was teeming with a flock in black robes, some wearing silk with soft flat square hats on their heads and followed by large numbers of young men carrying bags and papers.
“Lord above,” murmured Carey, “It gets worse every year. Michaelmas term hasn’t even started yet and look at them.”
Enys took a deep breath at the doorway into Westminster Hall, gripped his sword hilt lefthanded, and forged ahead into the crowd of lawyers around a desk who were shouting at the listing officers.
He came threading out again, his hat sideways. Just in time he grabbed it and clamped it back on his head.
“Sirs, we shall go before Mr. Justice Whitehead in an hour to swear out the pleadings and have the warrant granted.”
Dodd nodded as if this were all quite normal but he thought that it surely couldn’t be so simple. Normally it took months for a bill to be heard in Carlisle and years if it was a Border matter. Hunsdon had handed Carey a purseful of silver that morning to be sure the matter was well up the list which he had passed to Enys. Perhaps that had worked.
They ventured into Westminster Hall which was split into a dozen smaller sections by wooden partitions while the old fashioned ceiling full of angels and stone icicles echoed with the noise. You couldn’t see the floor at all because it was covered in straw and dung from the streets. Dodd rubbed with his boot and saw some pretty tiles under the muck.
It was indescribably noisy. Not all the partitions had judges sitting behind a wooden bench, but in the ones that did, red-faced men in black gowns were shouting at each other and waving papers. Bailiffs and court servants shouted at each other for the next cases to come to whichever court. There was a hurrying to and fro and an arguing and shouting between lawyers, between litigants, between lawyers and litigants. At every pillar it seemed, there was a huddle of mainly black-robed men engaged in some kind of argument at the top of their voices. It was exactly like a rookery.
Dodd was already starting to get a headache. Although lacking the clang of metal and the snort of horses, the row was as loud as a battlefield, or even louder.
Enys seemed to have spotted his judge and was beckoning them over to stand next to him by the partition.
“I wanted to see what kind of mood his honour is in.”
Dodd peered around the high wooden boards. The judge, sitting with his coif on his head and a pen in his fist, pince nez perched on his nose, was scowling at a shivering young lawyer in a rather new stuff gown.
This judge seemed a little different from the others: an astonishingly luxuriant but carefully barbered grey beard decorated his face and his grey eyes glittered with wintry distaste.
“Mr. Burnett,” he was saying witheringly, “have you in fact read your brief?”
The young lawyer facing him trembled like a leaf and gulped. Judge Whitehead threw his pen down.
“This matter, Mr. Burnett, clearly comes under the purview of the Court of Requests, not King’s Bench. Why you have seen fit to plead it in front of me is a mystery. Well?”
The young lawyer seemed to be choking on his words while behind him his clients looked at each other anxiously.
“God’s truth,” said the judge wearily, “Get out of my court and go and redraft your pleadings, paying due attention to the cases of Bray v. Kirk and the matter of the Abbot of Litchfield v. Habakkuk. Adjourned.”
The young lawyer scurried off, trembling. An older lawyer warily approached the bench, trailing his own clients. “Yes, Mr. Irvine, what is it now?” said the judge in a voice as devoid of welcome as a winter maypole.
Dodd glanced at Enys to see how this was affecting him. To his surprise he saw Enys was smiling quietly and his brown eyes sparkling.
“Disnae sound verra happy the day,” said Dodd, tilting his head at the judge who could be heard berating the unfortunate Mr. Irvine from the other side of the partition, his weary voice cutting through the hubbub like a knife.
“Shh,” warned Enys, with his pocked finger on his pitted lips, “Mr. Justice Whitehead has very good hearing.”
“Ay.”
“Mind you, he may not be able to understand you for all that.”
Dodd sniffed, offended. It was southerners who spoke funny, not him. Meanwhile Enys was listening to the judge’s comments with his head tilted as if listening to music. At one piece which seemed to be entirely in foreign, he chuckled quietly.
“Whit language are they speakin’?” Dodd wanted to know.
“Norman French,” said Enys. “Generally most cases are heard partly in English nowadays, but a great deal of the precedent is in Latin or French.”
“Jesu. And what’s sae funny?”
“His honour just made a rather learned pun.”
“Ay?”
Enys chuckled again in the aggravating way of someone enjoying a private joke. Carey had found a pillar he could lean languidly against and had crossed his arms while he surveyed the passing throngs through half-shut eyes.
“D’ye think he’ll be on my side?”
“Sergeant, his honour will find what is correct in law, you can be sure of that.”
“Ay, but will he be on ma side?”
“My father was wondering if a gift…?” said Carey delicately.
Enys shook his head. “Asolutely not, sir…It would guarantee the opposite decision.”
Carey looked surprised and worried. “Yes, but if we can’t buy him…”
“If we could buy him, then so could Mr. Vice-it would become not a court case but an auction,” said Enys. “I had rather deal with someone that gives justice without fear or favour.”
Carey’s eyebrows went up further. “I hadn’t thought that any judges did that.”
“Remarkably, sir, there are a few. In fact, I am in some hopes that Mr. Vice might make the mistake that we will not.”