“Mistress, if you can bring me to the Queen, I will forever be in your debt…”
“Yes, yes, Sir Robert, I know all about you and your debts, no need to add to them. You can do me a small service first and then we’ll see, eh?”
“Whatever you want, mistress.”
He couldn’t leave his dag shotted and wound when he put it back in the case and he didn’t like the thought of trying to unload it while riding-always a ticklish business which could take your hand off if the powder exploded at the wrong moment. He aimed at a crow sitting on a branch ahead and pulled the trigger.
He missed. The crow flew off the branch in a puff of feathers and the other crows rose up into the sky cawing and diving. Thomasina’s pony skittered, the pack pony came to a dead stop, and Hughie’s horse pirouetted for a moment before he got it under control again. Carey’s own horse was a hunter and not at all concerned. Thomasina’s two women were walking and one of them jumped and clutched the other, while the Master of the Revels man looked near fainting. He smiled at the thought of what Dodd would likely think of such jumpiness at gunfire.
“Where are you planning to stay?” Thomasina wanted to know. “With your elder brother? Your father’s already in Oxford, I think.”
“Er…no.”
“Suing him, are you?”
“No, that’s my brother Henry who stole my legacy. But George thinks he can still order me around.”
“You won’t find space with his grace the Earl of Essex. He’s just sent most of his men ahead to find a good place for his pavilions at Oxford, so he’s in the manor house with the Queen and Lord Norris.”
“I would very much like to see him…”
“Don’t push it, Sir Robert. I have no pull at all with Essex.” Her face was wry with distaste. “How’s your reverend father?”
“Very well, mistress, thank you…in good health.”
She smiled then. “Now he’s a good lord, keeps the old-fashioned ways.” Once upon a time, Thomasina had been one of his creatures on display at Paris Garden stews, bought from Gypsies. She had learned her tumbling there and Lord Hunsdon had been the person who showed her to the Queen at a masque.
“In trouble with him again, are you?” she asked, seeing through him as usual.
“Er…possibly.”
“Well, try the Master of the Revels then.” She tapped the white palfrey onward with a whip decorated with crystal beads that flashed in the sun. “You could make yourself useful there.”
“How? My tumbling is middling to poor and my acting…”
She sniffed at his sarcasm. “You can sing, Sir Robert, and he now has a desperate need for good tenors ’cos one of ’em’s dead of plague and the other’s dying on that cart. I’ll find you later.”
She gestured for Carey to go past her and so he went to a canter up the path.
Saturday 16th September 1592, afternoon
They had to rein in well before they got to the church, the place was such a bedlam of tents, carts, fashionable carriages bogged in the mud, servingmen, people generally. You could hardly move at all. No women under the age of thirty were visible, but boys were running about everywhere because this was the Queen’s Court, not the King of Scotland’s, and propriety was usually observed.
All the main barns were guarded by the Queen’s Gentlemen Pensioners in the red-and-black livery from her father’s Court that they wore on ordinary days, no doubt because the harbingers and heralds would have stockpiled food in them for the progress, bought on treasury tickets in advance. They were oases of order.
The rest of the village was essentially a fair. At the back of the church some large makeshift clay ovens stood surrounded by faggots of wood with more being brought in on the backs of trudging peasants.
Carey took one look at the only alehouse in the place, where a skinny middle-aged woman with a hectic look in her eyes was raking in cash. He didn’t fancy his chances with the queue.
Still the smell of pies was making his mouth water. He’d eaten the pie he was buying when he heard Hughie’s Scotch accent; he’d had bread and ale as usual when he got up but that was all. Now he was starving. So he did what he often did on progress, and come to think of it, at war. He turned his horse to the left and rode slowly around the mass of humanity.
At last he saw what he was looking for-the Earl of Cumberland’s blue-and-yellow-chequered flags around a small cottage surround by a mushroom ring of tents.
Carey immediately rode toward the cluster, followed by Hughie, who was looking nervous, and by the pony which was busily taking mouthfuls of everything green and poisonous it could find in its path.
A large henchman in a Clifford jack barred his way.
“What’s yer name and what’s yer business?” he demanded, his voice from the Clifford lands in Chester.
“Sir Robert Carey, come to see my lord, one follower, two horses, and a pack pony,” said Carey, looking around for the Earl. There was a table set up in a muddy orchard behind the cottage and sitting there was definitely none other than Sir George Clifford, third Earl of Cumberland, known as the Pirate Earl. Only now he was standing up and playing a veney with his opponent, a man in the buff coat of a master at arms.
A yell announced a hit by the earl on his opponent. They saluted each other, then dropped their veney sticks and sat down at the table again. Carey wasn’t sure what was on the table, but it didn’t look like playing cards.
The henchman had sent a lad to talk to the earl. Carey watched with a smile.
Next moment, Cumberland had bounced to his feet and was striding across what remained of the vegetable garden to where Carey was waiting. He slid down from the saddle, prodded Hughie to do the same, and bowed as Cumberland came up to them, wreathed in smiles.
“My Lord Earl,” Carey said formally.
“By God, Sir Robert,” laughed Cumberland, “where the devil have you been? How’s Carell Castle treating you? What’s this I hear about the Grahams and the King of Scotland and…?”
Cumberland pumped his hand and clapped him round the shoulders.
“My new servingman, Hughie Tyndale,” Carey said. Hughie managed a reasonable bow, then reconsidered and went on one knee to the Earl.
“Tyndale? Are you from there?” the Earl asked with interest, waving him up again.
“Ah…ma family…is…was…m’lord,” Hughie stuttered, “I think…”
“Ran away to Edinburgh, did they?” asked Cumberland. “What’s your trade then?”
“Ay sir, Ah wis prenticed tae a tailor sir but it didnae suit and…”
Cumberland bellowed with laughter.
“Don’t tell me you’ve got yourself the perfect combination at last?” he shouted. “I thought that was your little thief Barnabus. Where’s he gone?”
“I’m afraid he died of the flux in London.” No point in going into details.
“Not plague?”
“What do you take me for, my lord?”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear it. I was hoping he could teach me knife-throwing one of these days. Speaking of which, come and look at this.”
Carey told Hughie to find somewhere to put the horses and fetch some food for them, and to make sure the baggage stayed with them and not to unload the pony until they were under cover. Then he went over to the orchard with Cumberland.
“Now then. D’ye see what we’re doing here?”
The master at arms was standing four square by the table, arms folded. Carey looked down at the very nicely carved ivory and ebony chess set on a gold and silver board that Cumberland had robbed out of a Spanish ship a season before. It looked as if Cumberland was losing as usual, but Carey thought he could see some useful opportunities for the queen, possibly.
“Now then…” said Cumberland, his dark face beaming. He was sporting a gold earring in his right earlobe like the Spanish grandee he took it from, and Carey thought it looked better on him than on Sir Walter Raleigh. None of his portraits showed that he had a piratical crooked smile with a tooth missing that somehow caused devastation among the ladies of the Queen’s bedchamber and worse than that amongst the Maids of Honour. However, like Carey himself, Cumberland had the sense to leave the maids strictly alone, for all their sighing and fluttering. He wouldn’t risk joining Sir Walter in the Tower for marrying a Maid of Honour in a hurry. Anyway, he was already married to the formidable Margaret Clifford.