“Money, I want yer money!” insisted the creature.
“Och no, awa’ wi’ ye, Ah’ve better uses for it. I’m givin’ ye a chance, see ye?” Dodd was trying to be peaceful and gentlemanly, and it just wasn’t working.
The creature was clearly deranged because he suddenly lunged closer.
“I’ll cut yer then!” he shouted, “Giss yer money or…”
“Och,” sighed Dodd as he shifted his body slightly, straightened his knees, and punched the creature in the face with a nice smooth stone he’d just picked up.
The poor creature was clearly a Southern weakling, for he folded up at once. Dodd picked up the rusty blade and threw it in the bushes, finished his business, covered up his leavings and went through the stupidly complicated fuss of the retying of points that gentlemen had to suffer every single time.
Then he left a penny beside the man bleeding gently from the mouth, on the grounds it was gentlemanly and, in any case, Carey’s money not his. He shoved back out of the ill-starred bushes to find the horses watching gravely and chewing on some leaves. He mounted Whitesock for the next stage, took up the mare’s reins and put his heels in.
Whitesock changed smoothly and started pounding stolidly along, followed in a scramble by the mare. Dodd laughed for a moment, a rare indulgence as no one was looking.
It seemed all the terrible tales you heard about southern footpads and sturdy beggars were just those-tall tales to frighten southron weans. The rest of the journey would be easy, even though his head had that oddly fixed metallic feeling in it of not having slept.
He could be in Oxford by the evening if he pushed it, he thought, but what was the point of that? He could use some more of Carey’s money to stay at a proper inn, get some sleep, and then come into Oxford city nice and leisurely on Sunday morning. That would get him out of having to go to church with the Courtier and listening to some boring sermon about turning the other cheek. That thought made him laugh again.
He slowed down to a walk and looked about him, taking in the sunshine and berries in the hedges and the peaceful fields being cropped by fat cows before the autumn ploughing for winter wheat or barley. There was no hurry. He was enjoying himself.
Saturday 16th September 1592, noon
As Carey the Courtier and his new servant Hughie Tryndale trotted along the rutted road that led to Rycote, he was keeping his eyes open for the unmistakeable signs of the Queen’s progress.
He saw some on the other side of a hill where men were busy mending the disgraceful road, trundling wheelbarrows full of rocks to fill in the potholes and hammering down a corduroy of logs into the slopes to give the Queen’s carts somewhere to grip in the soft earth they would soon turn to slurry.
He took a turn off the main road that led in that direction and rose in the stirrups to peer over the hedges-not a lot of stock in the fields, where a boy was leading the cows in.
As they came alongside the road menders, he found the master who was sitting on a rock, criticising.
“Which way is the Queen’s Court?” He got a laconic thumb pointing further along the road.
He shifted the pack pony to the middle, so Hughie was behind and he was in front. You could think of the Queen’s Court as a kind of army or a very large and disorderly herd of sheep with some sheepdogs in the centre and a few wolves around the outside. Generally, as with armies, the further out you were, the more disorderly it got.
There had clearly been some riders crossing hillsides, presumably the Queen’s regular messengers taking shortcuts to avoid the no doubt thoroughly overwhelmed village of Rycote. Lord Norris was entertaining Her Majesty for a few days while she prepared to descend on the university city itself.
They followed the muddy track across pasture covered in molehills until they crested a hill and looked down into the valley of Rycote.
Carey could see at once that not all of the Court was there. He supposed some of them must still be packing up at Sudley or unpacking at Woodstock and a lot of them would have gone straight on to Oxford to grab the best camping and sleeping places. That suited him.
Carey was sure that his father’s household would be setting up in one of the colleges. He could probably have found out where if he’d bothered to ask, but he didn’t want to have to explain to anyone why he had bolted from London on Friday morning. Firstly he had to find his own lord, Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, who would certainly be in Rycote Manor and as close to the Queen’s majesty as he could get. Therefore, to find his lord, all he had to do was find the Queen.
Carey stared down at the swollen village, frowning with worry. He had deliberately escaped from his parents, particularly his mother, leaving the best of his men, Sergeant Henry Dodd, behind him in a very ticklish situation. On Friday morning he had faked a large hawking expedition after redeeming his Court suit from pawn at Snr Gomes’ shop. The plan had worked brilliantly and he had been away from the falconers and beaters and dogs by an hour after dawn on Friday, thundering along at a messenger’s pace as he had done so often before, changing horses regularly. He enjoyed doing that, loved the sense of distance destroyed by his horse’s legs. Even having to keep to a slower pace because of the pack pony, he’d made good enough time to get to Oxford by evening.
However he had, no doubt, severely annoyed his father and infuriated his mother, quite apart from leaving Dodd in the lurch. He had done it because he had put together in his mind what had really been going on with the sale of Cornish lands and the Jesuit priest. And it had made a picture that appalled him.
The clue that had given him the whole plot had been that code name “Icarus.” If he was right about who Icarus really was…if…That was why he was here.
Unfortunately, he didn’t think the Earl would want to hear what he had to say, and if he did listen would probably be extremely angry as well. Carey sighed. And that would mean the Queen would be angry with him and so he’d have very little chance of coming away with his warrant or his fee. Particularly not the fee.
Carey scowled at his horse’s ears and pulled again at his regrown goatee as they carried on down the winding road to the village.
There had been a whole host of excellent reasons why he had grabbed at the chance to become deputy warden of the West March under his brother-in-law, Lord Scrope. One reason could be summed up as the problem of the Earl of Essex.
Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was his second cousin via the scandalous and outrageous Lettice Knollys, the earl’s mother and his Aunt Katherine’s daughter. Carey was related to an awful lot of the Queen’s Court where the ties of blood were both useful and dangerous. With Robert Devereux it wasn’t just about family.
He had liked and admired the man. He still did. There was something about him. But what was it? Time and again the Earl had done something, said something so outrageously stupid or hotheaded that Carey had been on the verge of turning his back on his cousin. Always in the past he had kept faith with the man. But it was becoming more and more difficult.
Take the summer of 1591 for instance. The Earl of Essex had insisted on taking men to France to help the King of Navarre win the throne of France. Carey, up to his eyes in debt again, had gone with him, the first time since the Armada that he had gone to war.
There in the pinched, muddy, and ugly campaign with Henri of Navarre, he had found out many things about himself. One of them was that he was actually good at war. He had found that he was a good commander and could keep his men both alive and at his side. His desertion rate was half anybody else’s. He had hit it off well with Navarre, who was a very canny fighter indeed and had offered him a permanent place at his side.
Robert Devereux looked every inch the perfect leader-large, loud, magnificent, very good at hand-to-hand combat, chivalrous, honourable…