“It’s ay hopeless,” said Dodd disgustedly. “If ye willnae attack me when I’m open nor when I strike ye…”
For a moment he thought there were tears in Enys’s eyes, but then at last the man made a kind of low moaning growl and came into the attack properly. Dodd actually had to parry a couple of times and even dodge sideways away from a very good strike to his head. There was a flurry when Enys came charging in close trying for a knee in Dodd’s groin and Dodd trapped his arm, shifted his weight, and dropped the man on his back on the hard-trampled ground in a Cumbrian wrestling throw he hadn’t used for ten years because everyone in Carlisle knew it too well. Enys was still struggling, mouth clamped, face white, so Dodd twisted his arm until he yelped again.
“Will ye bide still so I dinna have to hurt ye?” shouted Dodd in his ear, and Enys gradually stopped. He was heaving for breath and even Dodd was a little breathless, which annoyed him. “Now then. That was a lot better. Ye had some nice blows in there and ye came at me wi’ yer knee when ye couldnae touch me wi’ yer weapon, that’s a good thing to see. Ah like a man that isnae hampered by foolish notions.”
“What?” Enys was still gasping.
“Ye’ll need tae watch yer temper,” added Dodd, helping the man up and dusting him down. “Ye cannae lose it just because ye got thumped on the chest.”
“You deliberately made me lose my temper?”
“Ay. Ah cannae teach nothing to a man that willnae attack and if ye’ve the bollocks to attack when Ah touch ye up, then there’s something to work wi’? Ye follow?”
Dodd was aware that Enys’s eyes were squinting slightly as he tried to follow this and so Dodd said it again, less Cumbrian. He was getting better at that, he thought. Enys laughed shortly.
“So should I get angry or not?” he asked, still rubbing the bruise on his chest. “Lose my temper or not?”
Dodd shrugged and took the en garde position again. “It depends. If ye cannae kill wi’out losing yer temper, then lose it. But if ye can get angry and stay cold enough to think-that’s the best for a fighting man. Not that ye’re a fighting man, ye’re a lawyer, but still…There’s nae harm in being able to kill if ye need to.”
Enys nodded, and guarded himself. Dodd attacked again. He was still as careful as he could be and pulled most of his blows, but Enys was at least taking a shot at him every so often, even if he generally missed or was stopped. He lost his stick half a dozen times before he learnt not to get into a lock against the hilt since he wasn’t strong enough for it. And on one glorious occasion, he caught Dodd on the hip with a nice combination of feint and thrust. Dodd put his hand up at the hit and grinned.
“Ay,” he said, “that’s it. Well done.”
Dodd decided to stop when he saw that Enys was alarmingly red in the face and puffing for breath again, even though they had only been practising for an hour or two. Dodd had taken his doublet off and was in his shirtsleeves, but Enys seemed too shy to do it.
He seemed relieved when Dodd lifted his stick in salute. “Ah’m for a quart of ale,” he said. “Will ye bear me company, Mr. Enys?”
“God, yes.”
Over two quarts of ale at the Cock Inn, hard by the Smithfield stock market so rank with the smell of livestock, and a very fine fish pie and pickles, Dodd lifted his tankard to Enys with an approving nod.
“Ye’re a lot better than ye were,” he said, “though I’d not fight any duels yet.”
Enys smiled and flushed. “I never thought I could be able to fight.”
“But did ye no’ fight any battles wi’ yer friends when ye were breeched and got yer ain dagger?” Dodd asked with curiosity. He remembered with clarity the great day when he had been given his first pair of breeches made for him by his mother and his dad strapped his very own dagger round his waist. He must have been about six or seven and very relieved to get away from baby’s petticoats and being bullied into playing house all the time with his sisters’ friends. After that he spent most of his time play-fighting with his brothers, cousins, and friends when he wasn’t having to go to the Reverend for schooling. Within months he had lost a front tooth in a fistfight over football and got a birching from Reverend Gilpin and several thick ears from other outraged adults for damaging things by carving them with his dagger. He still liked to whittle when he could.
Enys looked down modestly. “I was a sickly child,” he said. “I don’t think I did.”
The ale tasted wonderful when you were so dry, Dodd finished his quart in one and called for more. He shook his head. “Well, if ye keep on wi’ it and hire yerself a good swordmaster, there’s nae reason ye couldna fight yer corner if need be.”
“It’s interesting,” said Enys after he’d found a bone in a large lump of herring from the pie. “The manner of thinking for a fight that you explained to me is very similar to that needed for a courtroom-being angry without losing your temper, so you can think. Only in the case of a courtroom, of course, the weapons are words.”
“Ay?” Dodd thought Carey had said something similar about legal battles. “Surely ye need to be verra patient as well.”
“That too,” Enys agreed, “and also well-organised and thorough. But there is very little to equal the joy of disputing with a fellow lawyer and beating him to win the point. I used to greatly enjoy mooting at Gray’s Inn.”
“Ah.” The second quart was going down a treat and all Dodd’s worries about what would happen that evening started to fade away. Not his fury with Carey, though. That still nested in his gut. He could find out what mooting was later. “A man I met the day said I should give ye his compliments-he had very much the look of ye and I thocht he was ye at first, but his voice is deeper, and he’s taller and broader as well.” Enys had stopped chewing and was staring at Dodd. “Could it be yer brother that ye thought Heneage had taken?”
Enys swallowed the piece of pie whole and nodded vigorously. “Yes sir, it could indeed. May I ask where you met him?”
“He denied his name was Enys, said it was Vent, James Vent.”
Enys smiled at that. “Even so. Where was he?”
“He were at Pickering’s game, playing cards and losing.”
Enys banged his tankard down. “Almost certainly it was my brother,” he said. “I never met a man who was worse at cards nor more addicted to playing.”
Dodd nodded. “Would ye like to meet him? Ah ken where Pickering’s game is at the moment and Vent said he’d welcome a meeting wi’ the man that wis insulting him by impersonating him to be a lawyer.”
To Dodd’s surprise Enys laughed. “That’s my brother. Yes, I would. Thank God he’s not dead. I had given him up and thought he was surely at the bottom of the Thames like poor Jackson whose corpse you showed me.”
“Ay.”
“How much had he lost and was he playing for notes of debt?”
“Nay, Pickering willnae allow it, he was playing for good coin and a lot of it.”
“Oh,” Enys frowned. “How unusual for my brother.”
He looked thoughtful and pushed away the remains of his pie so Dodd polished it off and washed it down with the rest of his ale. He checked the sky for the time.
“It’s too early for Pickering’s game to start. I wantae go back to Somerset House now to…ah…do something. I can meet ye at sunset by Temple steps and we’ll take a boat?”
Enys put down the money for his part of the bill and Dodd put down his. They went companionably enough out of the alehouse and headed across London. Enys went down one of the little alleys off Fleet Street to his chambers whilst Dodd ambled along Fleet Street to the Strand, thinking hard about the damnable book code that Carey must have broken the night before. It was the only thing that explained his actions today. And Dodd didn’t have much time to solve the thing either. He had to be out of Somerset House before the trouble started.
What had Marlowe said? A commonly printed book but not predictable, therefore not the Bible. Obviously to make a code from it, you had to have it to hand…Now what was the book that Richard Tregian had had on the shelf where Dodd found the paper? Something quite common, as Dodd recalled, but a little surprising. What the hell had it been? He couldn’t quite remember it.