The rocking carriage had settled down to a steady rhythm. Heneage watched, thinking of ways and means. After a while, he banged the flat of his hand on the carriage door.
‘That’s enough, open up,’ he ordered. After his henchman had swung down from the carriage, he climbed the steps and looked at the northerner who was on his knees on the narrow floor, hunched in a ball and making the soft pants and moans men make when they think they’re being stoically silent.
‘Get him on the bench, I want to talk to him again.’
Heneage’s man kicked the northerner. ‘Get up.’
The northerner stayed where he was, probably hadn’t heard. ‘You’ll have to help him.’
In the end it took both of them to heave the northerner back onto the bench, where he sat still hunched and wheezing.
‘You’re being very foolish, you know,’ Heneage said sadly. ‘I’d always thought Borderers were sensible folk who know when something is quite hopeless.’
The man lifted his head and made a coughing noise which Heneage realised was actually a breathless chuckle. He said something indistinct. Heneage reached across, took a handful of hair and lifted his head a bit more.
‘What did you say?’
‘Ah said…ye dinna ken any of us then.’
‘Edmund Carey,’ said Heneage. ‘Where is he? I know you know where he is. Tell me and this will stop.’
The Borderer showed his teeth in a grin and spat as copiously as he could in Heneage’s face.
***
Mistress Julie Granville had been sewing ruffs for a long time and quite enjoyed the work. Sitting in the shade of an awning with the other respectable women in the gaol, her fingers flew as she hemmed the narrow twelve yards of linen that would eventually decorate somebody’s neck. She didn’t even need to look at what she was doing any more, her fingers worked automatically making a very soft rhythmic sound, of the prick as the needle went in and out, the tap of her thimble pushing it, the drawing sound as the thread passed through. She was sitting where she could watch the gatehouse to see the return of the man who had promised to help her unfortunate gentleman in Bolton’s Ward. She was worried about him. The gaol servants had grabbed him in the way they used when they were about to give someone a beating. For all she knew he might be in the Hole already though generally Newton made a big production of it when he was ill-treating some poor creature, he would make sure everyone knew so they would fear him more.
Some people were at the gate, haggling with the guard there over the garnish he wanted to let them in to visit their friends, as they said. It was only about an hour after the northerner had been taken away, but her ears caught the different sound and rhythm from one of the servingmen, the same sound Henry Dodd’s voice had had.
She looked at him, hoping it was Dodd. It wasn’t. This was somebody taller, dressed country-style in a completely fashionless suit that didn’t fit him properly and a leather jerkin, somebody with wavy dark red hair. She blinked and squinted, catching her breath: he looked so like Edmund when he first came to the gaol, only younger and less stocky, so much the same swagger in his walk, the same humorous smile, the same…She knew she had gone pale and then flushed. Of course she had been lonely in the summer and she knew how wrong was the heady rush of feelings that had struck her like a summer storm when she talked to Edmund that first time, after her son had accidentally hit him with a flung stone meant for a rat…But he had been rueful and sympathetic, allowing her to bandage his ear where the stone had clipped it, even interceding to save the little boy from her anger. When he looked at her she felt he looked at her as if she were another man, not just a woman to be seduced or ignored. No, that was wrong: not another man, but as if she were his equal, as if he thought of her as a person and was prepared to like her. He had been gentlemanly, he had made none of the usual suggestions that the men in the gaol routinely tried on all the women not over the age of sixty nor deformed, he had been respectable and friendly. It had been the most seductive experience of her life. In her heart she had fallen into sin at once, without any coaxing from Edmund.
Now here it was again, unmistakeable: the same energy, the same flamboyance, though subtly different. After Edmund took sick with the gaol-fever and she had nursed him, he had raved in delirium about himself, his brothers, his father, his mother, as men do when they don’t know what they’re saying. That was when she had learned his true name and begged him to write to his father to bail him out and he had adamantly refused. He had spoken of his younger brother with a wistful, envious admiration and then as the fever disordered his brain more and more, with a touching concern, begging her not to let Robin or Philly see him in such a state…
Julie Granville put down her sewing carefully on the piece of canvas she used to wrap it in when she wasn’t working. Then she stood up, dusted off her skirt, adjusted her cap and ruff and walked across the courtyard to where Edmund’s brother was squatting, talking gently to some of the children playing knuckle bones in the dust.
‘…a man in a blackberry-coloured suit, a bit shorter than me and stronger-built with a very glum face and funny way o’ talking like this? Have you seen anyone like that? I might pay as much as a shilling to someone who could tell me about him…’
‘Yes, I seen ’im, sir,’ said one of the urchins. ‘’E was the one wot Mr Gaoler Newton’s men was going to give a leatherin’ to, they took ’im out of the courtyard an hour ago.’
‘Where did they take him?’
‘Mr Newton’s lodgings, and there was strangers here, a fat man in brocade and velvet wiv lots of servants…’
Ceremoniously Edmund’s brother handed over a sixpence. ‘I’ll give you the other half of the shilling if it turns out you’re telling the truth. Now have any of you seen another man, a gentleman who looks like me…’
She shouldn’t address him as Sir Robert. He was wearing a country farmer’s clothing and his face and hands were dirty, he must be in disguise, though his boots fitted him far too well to belong to a farmer. She coughed and held her hands tightly together over her apron. He looked up at her cautiously, smiled, stood, took off his hat and just stopped himself at the beginning of what would surely have been a very magnificent court bow.
‘Are you…are you called Robin?’ she asked.
The intensity of his blue gaze shook her. ‘What of it, mistress?’ he asked with a strong northern sound in his voice.
She must be careful. What if he was one of Edmund’s enemies, one of the men he was hiding from. Just because he looked so like Edmund didn’t necessarily mean they were brothers, and perhaps there was some other urgent reason why Edmund didn’t want his family told. Family members could hate each other more bitterly than mere enemies, as she knew to her cost.
How could she check? Inspiration came from one of the many nights she had spent sitting next to Edmund as he fought and raved, trying to cool him down with Thames water, fanning him with her apron.
‘Goodman, can you tell me who taught you to ride?’ she asked.
Blue eyes narrowed, the man frowned. ‘It was my brother, mistress, why?’
‘What was his name?’
‘Edmund.’
‘Can you tell me what…how you treated him at the first lesson?’
The frown got heavier. Oh God, what if she was wrong? What if this was Heneage’s man…
‘Why?’
‘Please, bear with me.’
‘Well…’ he grinned infectiously. ‘I’m afraid I bit him. I’d fallen off and he was making me get back on again, so I bit his ear. Drew blood too.’