Mr Pennycook had small brown watery eyes and a pale bony face gone very waxy. There was a pause while he seemed to be struggling for words. ‘Sir Robert?’ he said, drawing his rich brocade gown tight about him. ‘Surely ye canna be threatening me wi’ legal action?’
‘Threatening you, Mr Pennycook?’ Carey laughed artificially. ‘Nothing could be further from my mind. I was only agreeing that while we’re briefing lawyers to draw up the new wastage clauses in the victualling contracts, we should get our money’s worth and have them look at the contracts as a whole as well. Wasn’t that what you said?’
Mr Pennycook had in fact paid good money to the young lord Scrope’s father and Sir Richard Lowther to keep the contracts unexamined. He made a little rattle in his throat.
‘After all,’ Carey added confidingly, ‘clerical errors do creep in, don’t they, what with copying and recopying.’
For a horrible moment Mr Pennycook wondered if this strange creature had actually read the contracts, and then decided it was impossible. Nobody except a lawyer could understand a word of them. He fixed on high indignation as the only possible escape.
‘And now ye’re dooting ma word.’
‘Far from it, Mr Pennycook,’ Carey said affably. ‘Why would I do that? Have some more ale.’
‘I’ll not sit here and be insulted,’ Pennycook said, rising to his feet with dignity. ‘Good day to ye, my Lord Warden, Deputy.’ He fixed the thoughtful Michael Kerr with a glare and said, ‘Are ye with me, Michael?’
Kerr stood, made his own bows and followed Pennycook from the chamber in a rush of dark brocade and velvet. Scrope sat staring at the green meat before him and frowned worriedly.
‘Was that wise, Robin?’ he asked and began twiddling his knife in and out of his spidery fingers. ‘Our stores are nearly empty.’
‘Well, my lord,’ Carey said. ‘Sir Roger told me that until the contract’s signed, you have them at a disadvantage. They need you more than you need them. Pennycook has warehouses full of food that no one can sell anywhere else, bought dirt cheap, and harvests paid for in advance. If his contract is not renewed, then he’s a ruined man.’
‘Hm. I never thought of that. So you think he’ll come round?’
‘Definitely.’
‘There isn’t more in this, is there, Robin?’
I wish you wouldn’t call me by that name, Carey thought, but shrugged.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re not after the victualling contract yourself, are you? Or for somebody you…heh…know?’
Carey made a little shake of his head. He hadn’t in fact thought of it that way, but it was an interesting idea. Everyone knew victualling contracts were pure gold…
‘I don’t know, my lord,’ he said honestly. ‘But it’s a thought, isn’t it?’
Scrope beamed at him. ‘Get Simon to clear this dreadful rubbish away,’ he said. ‘I’m not at all hungry.’
Monday 3rd July 1592, morning
Pennycook walked speedily away from the Castle, trailing his factor and junior clerk, collected two further henchmen at the gate and went to his house.
‘How much d’ye think the new Deputy Warden wants?’ Pennycook asked Michael Kerr as they sat with spiced wine and wafers to settle their stomachs. Michael was his son-in-law and he valued the young man’s advice.
Kerr shook his head. ‘I don’t think it’s so simple as that,’ he said. ‘I heard Thomas the Merchant offered him the usual pension and he turned it down flat.’
Pennycook half choked on his wine. ‘Eh? But he’s a courtier, is he no’?’
Michael Kerr shrugged. ‘He is, but that’s what I heard.’
‘Good…Heavens.’
‘Perhaps it’s Lord Scrope putting him up to it. Perhaps he’s turning the screw on the price.’
Pennycook sat back in the carved chair, looking relieved. ‘Ay,’ he said. ‘That must be it. He’ll get the difference between what the Queen pays and what we ask, and he’ll have put his Deputy up to the game…I dinna like this talk of lawyers, though.’
‘Well, you started it,’ Kerr pointed out. He was pacing up and down, looking very worried. ‘I wish ye hadnae. That young Deputy’s mad…’
‘Don’t trouble your head, Michael. It’s Lord Scrope.’
‘No, but…’ Michael Kerr was rethinking his own theory. ‘It must have been a surprise to him, when he saw the…the…er, vittles brought in. I saw his face. He’s not that good an actor, and he was angry wi’ his little wife as well. No. It’s the Deputy. And I know what he’s up to.’
‘What?’
‘See, if it was just a bribe he was after, he would have come to you privately and said, this is what I’ll do unless…And you would have argued a bit and then paid it. This was too public. If he suddenly changed his tune, him or Scrope, and says the vittles is fine, well, it’s an embarrassment.’
‘So?’ asked Pennycook warily.
Michael Kerr drank some wine.
‘He’s after the victualling contract himself,’ Kerr said grimly. ‘Or he’s doing it for some big London merchant.’
Pennycook screwed up his face in horror. ‘But they canna supply from London…’
‘Or in Newcastle or where he grew up in Berwick. Anyway, they only back him. He insists on the wastage clauses and that gives him the way out of renewing. Then Scrope will give him the contract and then…’
He didn’t have to explain it. The two of them were as deep in the business as they could be. There were ships already on their way from further down the coast and packtrains from Scotland, all of which would need paying soon-and with what, if not the Queen’s money?
Pennycook’s face was a bony mask and Kerr felt sick.
A servingman knocked at the door and then slid round it.
‘Mr Pennycook, sir,’ he said, cap in hand, ‘Andy Nixon’s waiting downstairs. He’s desperate to see ye, sir.’
‘What does he want?’
‘Willna say, sir. Only he has to see ye now.’
***
Elizabeth Widdrington regretted having to leave Carlisle, in a way, but in another way it was a relief to have the decision taken from her. She would have liked to give her poor horses more rest-after all they had been from Netherby to Falkland Palace and back in a week-but she would take the journey to Widdrington very gently and spend four days on it, rather than the two it had taken her coming the other way.
She sighed, signalled for her menservants to carry the packs down from her chamber in the Keep, and followed after them hoping she would find the two men-at-arms Scrope was lending her, but not Philadelphia’s persistent brother.
Like them, he was waiting for her at the stables. She paused by the muck heap before he saw her, and watched him for a while. It was likely to be her last good stare at him, so she took her time. Cramoisie wool for his suit was a dangerous colour for him, but this was the right shade of purple red: his hose were paned and padded but not foolishly so, and made his long legs very elegant; his doublet had a slight peascod belly for fashion’s sake, the kind a man could only get away with if his own stomach was as flat as a pancake. The fit was perfect across his broad shoulders. It was trimmed with black braid and had a row of carved jet buttons down the front that caught the light. She found it horrifying to think what the buttons alone might have cost, never mind the London tailoring that shrieked from every line of his clothes. He was wearing a plain linen collar on his shirt, rather than a ruff.
She smiled a little. There was no question he was vain, but she couldn’t help forgiving him for it. He had evidently changed his mind about regrowing his little Court beard because he had shaved that morning. His hair was still dyed black though showing dark chestnut at the roots. She had saved his face quite consciously for last, his long mobile face with that jutting Tudor nose, his blue eyes which could make her laugh only by dancing and quirking an eyebrow…Oh, for goodness sake, he was only flesh and blood and she was mooning like a lovelorn girl.
She ignored those tediously sensible thoughts and stayed where she was, watching. At the moment he was talking to one of the grooms; now he went and greeted his charger, a large black beautiful creature completely out of place among the scrawny tough little hobbies. He smiled, patted the shining arched neck affectionately, gave him some salt from his hand. It hurt her deep inside her chest-where her heart was, she assumed-to see the casualness of that affection. If only he knew it, she valued that in him far more than his unconcealed passion for her. Passion, she believed, could only be fleeting, no matter what silly poets might say, but kindness…That was built into a man, or it wasn’t. She had never seen her husband show kindness to any creature: from his horses, his dogs, his servants, his son, his wife, from all of them he simply expected obedience, in exchange for not beating them or humiliating them.