“If you didn’t give me that message then Harry Hunks wouldn’t of killed Wolfie and my Grandam,” said Kat, standing by the dead dog, hands on hips, narrow-eyed. “Would he?”
Dodd was too tired to deal with this. “Ay, and Harry Hunks is deid, I killed three ither men this night and now I’m master of them all and Leigh will hang for horsetheft and forgery. Whit more d’ye want?”
“I didn’t know Wolfie would get killed!” Her voice was going up in pitch and it went right through Dodd’s head. He could almost hear his temper snap.
“No, ye didn’t. That’s because ye don’t know what will happen when ye set out for vengeance,” he shouted, “ye canna ken until the fight’s over which side will win.” He was nose to nose with the little maid, full credit to her, she didn’t flinch. “People die and ye canna help it, no matter if ye love ’em or no’…Especially if ye love ’em! D’ye hear me?”
He stopped, realised he had hold of the front of her kirtle and let go, turned away. Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. “What?” he snarled.
“Thank you for killing Harry Hunks,” said Kat with great dignity. “It wasn’t your fault about Wolfie and Grandam. It was mine.”
“Och no, hinny,” he said, and knew she wouldn’t believe him, would never ever believe him. “It was Harry Hunks that did it.” And me, he thought.
She shook her head, went to the back of the cottage and came back with a bucket of water the old woman must have drawn, ready for the morning. She dipped a pitcher out for their drinking water. Then gratefully he put his feet in and the water went dark.
“Do you think I could marry you?” she asked after a moment, “I’m good at cheese and butter and I’ve got some bits of monkish gold I found and a shilling to my dowry?”
Dodd managed not to sputter. “Ah…no, Kat, I’m a married man mesen and ye’re by far too young for me but I’ll see ye wed tae a good man of yer ain if ye like. When yer old enough.” She frowned, puzzled so he said it more southron and she went and dug a hole in the floor under the place with the curds and pulled out a leather bag and slung it round her skinny body.
“I’m ready,” she said. “You can’t bury my grandam the way you are, so we’ll set fire to the cottage and that’ll do it.”
She had good sense. Dodd got his poor feet dry again, hobbled out and pulled the dog’s corpse into the cottage to lie next to the old woman. Harry Hunks could be buried by the foxes and the buzzards and ravens. Then they got the coals under the earthenware curfew going again, both lit handfulls of dry reeds they pulled from the thatch and the roof was dry enough and so the fire flowered where they lit it all about and it made him feel better. There was something clean about fire. He knew a couple of prayers from the Reverend Gilpin but he’d never seen the point in them. He told the ghosts of the Grandam and the dog not to let Harry Hunks walk and he warned God not to play the little maid false again.
Tuesday 19th September 1592, afternoon
Henry Carey Baron Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, first of that name, was sitting in the college garden, looking at the fallen leaves clotting the grass and worrying. He had his walking stick with him which he generally didn’t use in public because he hated to admit that he had arthritis in his knees, as if he were old.
He saw his seventh son before Robin saw him, as his bench was in a shadow between yew trees. The boy…no, even a fond father had to admit that the youngest of his sons was long past full grown, in fact, in his prime, tall, well-built with a breezy swagger that he supposed his sons had picked up from him since they all had it. In fact, of all of them, Robin reminded him of nothing so much as himself when he was a young man, although with the useful addition of his wife’s ingenuity. He knew he didn’t have that wild streak. He was profoundly grateful that Mary Boleyn had been so much less determined than her sister, that she had been married off to the complaisant William Carey while pregnant with him, the King’s bastard. If she had hung onto her virtue the way her younger sister Ann had done, well, he might have been King Henry the IX and had a much worse life, his sons would have been Princes of the Blood Royal and even more trouble than they were anyway. Or more probably they wouldn’t even exist because he would have been married off as a child to some thin-blooded crazy barren Hapsburg or Valois Princess, or God-forbid, Mary Queen of Scots herself and then…He shuddered. No Annie Morgan to marry in a whirlwind. Being a King.
Thank God for bastardy, that was all he could say. His half-sister and cousin, Ann Boleyn’s volcanic daughter, wove and politicked her way to the throne and was the finest Queen any nation had ever had since…Well, no nation had ever had such a Queen. Some fools might have been resentful at being barred the throne, he was not, he loved his firecracker of a half-sister and would do anything for her. Which was why he was Lord Chamberlain, of course, in charge of her palaces and her security, in charge of protecting her sacred person. It was the uttermost trust she could place in anyone. People called him nothing but a knight of the carpet, but when it mattered he had taken Lord Dacre’s hide in the revolt of the Northern Earls. What did he care if men thought him a fool? It made them less careful of him when they plotted.
And here he was, looking at his youngest son who was now a danger to the Queen. He was digging up the early days of her Court when she had been, frankly, a menace, a cocotte, and a flirt who scandalised the Court and the nation and the foreigners in Europe as well. And Robin was doing his considerable best to stir that dirty puddle on the Queen’s own orders.
Insanity. He had urged her to leave it, not to repeat the deadly mistake of 1566, her previous visit to Oxford. So she had used his youngest son as her tool because he had a fine mind and Walsingham had taught him a few things during those months he had spent at the Scottish Court with Walsingham’s embassy and then nineteen months in France for polish, also with Walsingham’s household. Three months he had taken to learn fluent French, a very diligent student for the first time in his life, and then sixteen months to cut a scandalous swath through the French ladies of the Court that even the French had found noteworthy. Perhaps he too had left a scatter of unknown bastard Hunsdon grandchildren among the French aristocracy, adding English yeast and Tudor blood to Parisian style.
Hunsdon smiled. He hoped so. And the boy had spent an astonishing amount of money as the French grandes dames taught vanity, luxury, and extravagance to an apt pupil. His time in a Parisian debtor’s prison had taught him very little about economy, something about power.
And here he came, a little off balance because he wasn’t wearing his sword.
Hunsdon frowned. Why? Why had his son disarmed? Had he worked it all out or made a terrible mistake?
He was on his feet, thumbs in his swordbelt, unaware how much his broad frame made him look like his royal sire-although he had never suffered the gluttony born of misery that had swelled King Henry and given him leg-ulcers and turned him into a monster.
Robin came right up to him and genuflected very properly and respectfully on one knee to his father. Hunsdon had to resist the impulse to raise and hug his son who had been so near death from poison only a couple of days before. He was wary. Generally, his son was only that respectful when there was trouble brewing. Or he wanted money.
Robin stood in front of him and hesitated. Their eyes were on a level. It was always a surprise when the baby of the family did that to you.
“Well?” said Hunsdon, guessing one reason why his son might have left his sword behind.
“Was it you, my lord?” Robin’s voice was strained and soft in the quiet garden, his face unreadable. “Was it you killed Amy Dudley for the Queen?”