“Now,” she said, turning to the Scot as businesslike as she could manage, considering that she was trembling and close to tears. “What’s your name?”
“Archie Hamilton, ma’am.”
“Well, Archie, do you think you could act as Sir Robert’s valet de chambre?”
A short pause and then, “Ay, ma’am, I could.”
“Excellent. Clear the table, lay the food. I shall leave while you help him to dress. Be very careful of his hands.”
She walked out with the boys carrying the bowls of dirty water, waited in the little passageway and fought to get control of herself. At last Archie re-emerged and she went in again, quickly made a sling for his arm. They had laid the table for two and she sat herself down again at the other end of the bed, so the table was between them, and dipped some bread in the soup.
Carey was in a plain black wool suit of good quality though a little small for him, with a plain shirt and falling band, a short-crowned black felt hat on his head. He was still pale and moved his left arm as little as possible, but somehow, despite it all, he was in good spirits. He ate and drank as if he were not facing another dangerous interview with the King of Scotland. Elizabeth could only nibble and sip.
“What’s wrong, my lady?” he said. “This is good; it’s from the King’s table, I think. Are you very offended with me?”
She shook her head, but she could see he had thought up something amorous and courtly to say by way of apology and further invitation.
“If I burn with love…” he began and she interrupted him brusquely.
“You’re still a prisoner,” she said. “I can’t think how to get you out.”
He smiled, winced and touched his lip, drank his ale very carefully. Sometimes he was so easy to read: there went the courtly phrases back into the cupboard in his mind marked ‘For soothing offended females (young)’.
“Never you worry about it,” he said, switching to irritating cheeriness. “I know the King and he’s a decent man. It’s hardly treason to sell your enemy eighteen dozen booby traps.”
“Who were they for?”
“The Wild Irish, I expect, poor sods.”
“Don’t you feel sorry for them?”
“Yes. I also feel sorry for Bonnetti if he hangs around in Ireland long enough for them to find out what he’s brought. I’ll ask the King to make sure he gets away with them.”
“And the real guns?”
Carey’s eyes were dancing, though he was careful not to smile again.
“We’ll see what we can do.”
They finished their meal, talking amiably and distantly about young Henry and his awkwardness, and the Grahams. Robin said nothing more about Elizabeth leaving her husband and coming to live with him. It was impossible anyway, and always had been. If news of any such behaviour came to the Queen’s ears, which it would, she would strip Carey of his office and call in all the loans she had made him. He would be bankrupt, on the run from his creditors and with no prospect of ever being able to satisfy them because the Queen would never allow him back at court again. Frankly, unless he turned raider, they would starve.
When they had finished, Carey wandered to the locked door, kicked it and shouted out for the Earl of Mar. It opened and the Earl was standing there, his face as austere as before.
“Ye’ll be wanting to see His Highness again.”
“If he wants to see me, my lord.”
“Ay, he’s cleared an hour for ye.”
“Excellent. And thank him for sending Lady Widdrington to tend to me, she is unparalleled as a nurse and far better than any drunken surgeon.”
“Hmf. Ay.”
“My lord Earl,” said Elizabeth. “May I ask what’s happening to my husband?”
The Earl sniffed. “That’s for the King to decide, seeing he’s under arrest.”
“And Lord Spynie?”
Another much longer sniff. “Ay, well,” said the Earl. “The King’s verra fond of him, ye ken.”
“Yes,” she said with freezing politeness. “So it seems. Sir Robert, what would you suggest I do now? May I serve you further or should I tend to my husband?”
“Tend to your husband by all means, my lady,” Carey said very gravely. “I am greatly beholden to you.”
She curtseyed, he bowed. She walked away from him, refusing to look back, refusing to think of anything but dealing with her husband.
“Lady Widdrington.” She stopped and turned, felt a touch from him on her shoulder where it was most tender and automatically shied away. Carey was there, smiling at her.
“May I have my ring back?”
She blushed, embarrassed to have forgotten, wondering at the sudden hardness in his eyes. She fished the ring out of her purse under her kirtle and put it into his hand. He fumbled it onto his undamaged little finger, bowed once more and turned back to the patiently waiting Earl and his escort.
***
The King of Scotland had often enjoyed the use of the secret watching places he had ordered built into many of his castles. Through holes cunningly hidden by the swirling patterns of tapestries brought from France, he found the truth of many who swore they loved him and learned many things to his advantage about his nobles. It was something of a quest for him: he never stopped hoping for one man who could genuinely love him as d’Aubigny had, in despite of his Kingship, not because of it. And like a boy picking at a scab, he generally got more pain than satisfaction from his curiosity.
At the Mayor’s house in Dumfries he had lacked such conveniences. But in the little rooms on the third storey there had been a few with interconnecting doors and it had not been difficult to set up some with tapestries hung to hide those doors. Thus he need only leave his room quietly, nip up the back stairs and into the next door chamber to the one where he had told Mar to put Carey. Sitting at his ease, with the connecting door open, he had quietly eavesdropped on Carey and his ladylove, as he had before on Lord Spynie and on some of his pages and others of the Border nobility. Some might have found it undignified in a monarch: James held that nothing a monarch did could be undignified, since his dignity came from God’s appointment.
This time, as he descended the narrow backstairs and stepped to his own suite of rooms, he wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or pleased. That Carey turned out to be a lecherous sinner was not a surprise to him; that Lady Widdrington was a virtuous wife astounded him. He was saddened that Carey was clearly a hopeless prospect for his own bed, but he did not want to make the mistake with him that he had as a younger and more impatient King with the Earl of Bothwell. And Carey had called him ‘a decent man’. It was a casual appraisal, something James had been taught to think of almost as blasphemous, but the accolade pleased him oddly because it was spoken innocently, in private and could not be self-interested. And further, it seemed that both of them were honest. Yes, there was disappointment that his suspicions were wrong; but on the other hand, honest men and women were not common in his life, they had all the charm of rarity.
He was sitting at the head of a long table, reading tedious papers, when Carey at last made his appearance in the chamber, having been kept waiting for a while outside. He paced in, genuflected twice and then the third time stayed down on one knee looking up at the King and waiting for him to speak. King James watched him for a while, searching for signs of guilt or uneasiness. He was nervous and paler than was natural for him, his arm in a sling, but he was vastly more self-possessed than the bedraggled battered creature that the King had seen in the morning.
“Well, Sir Robert, how are ye now?” he asked jovially.
“Very much better, thank you, Your Majesty.”
“We have made sundry investigations into your case,” the King pronounced, “and we are quite satisfied that there was no treason by you, either committed or intended, to this realm or that of our dear cousin of England. And we are further of the opinion that ye should be congratulated and no’ condemned for your dealings with the Spanish agent in the guise of an Italian wine merchant that some of our nobles were harbouring unknown to us.”