Kat had woken up while all of this was going on and watched with frank fascination, her pointed chin on her arms on the side of the cart.
“So that’s why he helped you, was it?” she asked without surprise. “I did wonder.”
Jeronimo went quietly and Dodd made introductions to Carey who smiled and said nothing about yet another waif added to his father’s household. The goats were inspected and approved of by the Steward, although the young billy kid was likely to meet his inevitable fate soon.
And the inevitable time came when Dodd had to get down from his horse again. He sternly refused a litter but took a dismounting block and tried not to wince. He still couldn’t put his boots on and so he followed a servant to one of the downstairs rooms usually lived in by scholars. When Carey offered him a shoulder, he took it and soon found himself seated on the side of a comfortable half-tester bed, next to a small fire in the hearth, his feet soaking in cool salted water with dried comfrey and allheal in it, which stung like the devil, and drinking a large jack of excellent ale. The chamber gave onto a small parlour that had another chamber leading off it where there was a pile of packs and Carey’s Court suit hanging up on the wall. Dodd started to explain to him what had been going on but when he started yawning every other word and losing track, Carey called in the barber surgeon who had been sent to bandage Dodd’s feet.
“The story can wait. I’ll be riding out with my father immediately,” he said, “Get some sleep, Henry and…by God, I’m pleased to see your miserable face again!”
Carey clapped Dodd on the back and went through the parlour to clatter down the stairs. The barber surgeon peeled off the clouts, cleared out a lot of thorns and a sharp stone splinter while Dodd drank more ale and wished the man in hell, then put clean linen socks on him and bowed himself out.
Dodd found a decent linen shirt waiting for him on the bed and was pleased to put it on rather than the filthy hemp shirt and woollen breeches although no doubt the lice would be sorry. He was too tired to be hungry, ignored the platter of pork pie, bread and cheese and finished the contents of the jug of ale. He fell into bed, asleep almost before his head hit the pillow.
His last thought was a question as to what the hell was it Carey had been up to while Dodd had been busy, which had made him look distinctly pale and unhealthy, coupled with a forlorn hope that he might let Dodd sleep for a couple of days at least.
Wednesday 20th September 1592, late afternoon
Sunset was coming through the small glass window as Dodd woke because someone had just come into his room.
Yes, it was Carey. Dodd knew he hadn’t slept nearly long enough, but he didn’t see the point of complaining about it. Carey’s face was unreadable, closed down into the affable, slightly stupid-looking mask he wore when he played primero for high stakes.
“Ay,” sighed Dodd, “what now?”
“Sergeant, I hate to have to tell you this but we absolutely must visit the stews.”
“Eh?”
It turned out to be one of the strangest experiences of Dodd’s life and it was only a pity he was too tired and hungry to enjoy it properly. He had to get dressed again in a respectable suit of wool that Carey said was borrowed from the Under-steward and apologised for it being well out of fashion as it had been handed on from Carey’s father. Dodd didn’t care, at least it wasn’t as tight and uncomfortable as Carey’s previous loan, now being worn by Captain Leigh in jail.
Dodd had leather slippers to put on and low pattens to save them from the disgraceful cobbles and he wobbled painfully across Broad Street and down a tiny alley with the sign of a magpie hanging on an alehouse at the corner. Did none of the scholars here know that horse muck was good for gardens and making gunpowder?
They went into a little house that smelled of woodsmoke and was full of sly-eyed women with very low-cut bodices, but Carey swept straight past them, for a wonder.
The next thing was shocking. They were in a room full of shelves with a tiled floor and Carey proceeded to strip off all his clothes as if he were about to go for a swim, even his shirt. An ancient attendant folded his doublet and hose and handed him a linen cloth which he wrapped around his hips like someone in an old religious picture. Then he put on a new pair of wooden pattens from a row by the wall. Firmly ramming down his multiple suspicions and wondering if he was in fact delirious and hallucinating, Dodd did the same and clopped after Carey along floors that got hotter and hotter until they were in a small room with a brazier in it. Several other men were sitting about on wooden benches-old men, mainly, with grey beards, wrinkled stomachs and twiglike arms, a few spotty youths like peeled willow wands and with a tendency to peer.
The heat from the brazier was fierce and Dodd could feel the sweat popping out all over him.
“We never got round to doing this in London, which is a pity as they’re much better there,” Carey said conversationally, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to take off his linen cloth, fold it and sit on the edge of the bench on it. He stretched his legs negligently in front of him, peering at one of the white scars. “This will do.”
“Ehm…whit the…why…?”
Carey didn’t meet his eyes. “Sovereign for bruises and damage generally, helps sweat out poisons and so on and so forth.”
Dodd had never heard of a medical treatment that required you to get this hot though he had heard of some alchemists curing the French pox with mercury and sweating.
“Och,” he said, as Carey had done so he didn’t burn his arse on the planks and tried not to fight the heat as the sweat started dripping off him in rivers. You had to admit it was sort of relaxing.
“We’re lucky it’s the men’s day today,” Carey said. “Otherwise we’d have had to pollute the Isis.”
The older men and youths left a little later and Carey opened his eyes and smiled lazily at Dodd who was dozing where he sat.
“Now then,” he said, “what have you been up to, Sergeant, apart from recruiting a sorry pack of my lord Essex’s deserters for the Carlisle castle guard?”
“Ay,” Dodd said, sticking his jaw out, “but they are nae related to onybody, are they? And they can shape up or die.”
Carey laughed. Dodd told him the story. Carey was a good audience, exclaiming with anger at Dodd being ambushed, laughing at his description of Kat.
“That’s the child in the cart?”
“Ay. How is she?”
“Still asleep as far as I know, with the wife of the Trinity College cook looking after her. Last I heard she was insisting she had to stay with you.”
Dodd carried on with his tale until he brought it to the death of Harry Hunks and his own decision to leave the ill-starred monastery.
“If ye ask him, d’ye think the Earl of Essex will pay his men at last?”
Carey’s expression became unhappy and he looked away.
“Ay, well, their stupid captain’s plan was tae get into the procession in their stupid tangerine and white rags and ask him in public why he betrayed them?”
“I gathered something of the sort from the unfortunate Captain Leigh. It would not have been allowed, believe me.”
Dodd said nothing although he suspected that with the number of alleyways and passages in Oxford town and some men who weren’t too fussy about what they did, it might be easier than Carey thought.
“I dinna think they expected more than tae humiliate him and perhaps get the Queen to pay them instead.”
Carey made a non-committal grunt.
Dodd sat up, despite the puddle of sweat on the floor under him and the way he was starting to get dizzy with the heat.
“Sir,” he said sternly, “they should be paid. They ainly went wi’ the Earl because they believed him. The maist of them are not fighting men, or they werenae, they was younger sons of farmers that wanted adventure and found that fighting wisnae as he painted it. And the maist o’ them died and not one o’ them was paid aught but promises.”