“Yes, superstition, you say. I will know the truth sooner than you, Senor. Only put it to your Queen. Please.”
Carey ducked his head. Dodd folded his arms and waited, scowling at Hunsdon’s men and the Gentlemen of the Guard now uselessly crowding the top of the tower to keep them back. Soon both Don Jeronimo and his old friend were dead.
***
The Queen passed on down to Christ Church, cheered by the scholars and went immediately to the privy chamber to rest and hear reports. A couple of hours later, with their soaked tabards handed over to be dried and brushed down, Carey and Dodd were brought in to see her sitting under her cloth of estate in the professor’s parlour she was using as her presence chamber with the Earls of Cumberland, Essex and Oxford attending, along with her ladies-in-waiting, including the red-haired one from Cumnor.
Dodd was in a terrible state of nerves which seemed to amuse Carey. “Now you see why I made you go to the stews the other night?” said the cursed Courtier whose fault it was. “If you were doing this the way you smelled that night, the best you could hope would be that any lapdog she threw at you wouldn’t bite you. Though my main worry was that you might then throw it back.”
“Och,” gasped Dodd, trying to stop his knees knocking. For God’s sake, he wasn’t this afeared of the King of Scots, was he? Well he might be, if he was going to meet him. But this was a powerful Queen who had been ruling since before he was born and had a short way with people who offended her.
The Gentleman of the Guard led them in and Carey bowed three times with tremendous elegance and then knelt on both knees. Dodd managed one bow, nearly fell over his own boots and landed with a thud on his knees on the rush matting which hurt.
“Well, Sir Robert, I see you have redeemed yourself,” came the Queen’s voice, very sardonic, somehow familiar…
“Your Majesty is most kind and understanding. If I may mention…”
“You did well with the quest I gave you, but then you fell for an extremely simple trick which could have been very dangerous to me. I will give you both your warrant and your fee, you can be certain of it, and in good time. But not today.”
Carey’s shoulders sagged a little, though he didn’t look surprised.
“Then, ma’am, may I present Sergeant Henry Dodd of Gilsland who dived under Your Majesty’s coach this afternoon to grab the petard there and put the fuse out and then helped stop the assassin on Carfax Tower.”
“Yes, indeed,” said the Queen’s voice, sounding very amused. “Sergeant, your advice yesterday was excellent although I could not have followed it, even if my cousin had not let Don Jeronimo escape. And it seems in the event that it was better so.”
The face was familiar too. Dodd blinked at the beaky old woman under the red wig and suddenly recognised her. Put a black wig on her and she was the black-haired lady-in-waiting. Now he thought of it, that woman had had ginger eyebrows. Jesu, he had shouted at her only yesterday, wagged his finger at her. Jesu. Oh God. Why the hell hadn’t Carey warned him?
His horror was obviously leaking onto his face, because she laughed. Jeronimo must have known who she was despite her black wig. That’s why he said what he said, broke his parole. He only gave it until he saw the Queen, after all. God, oh God. What would she do to him for shouting at her like that?
“Come here, Sergeant.”
He didn’t want to shuffle about on his knees, so he stood up, stepped forward hiding a wince, and knelt again nearer to her, smelling both old lady and rosewater and the incense caught in the velvet of her gown.
“We have persuaded my lord the Earl of Cumberland of your merit and so, Sergeant, we are very happy to present you with this, as a small token of our thanks for your service to us this day.”
It was a parchment scroll. Dodd took it and nearly dropped it. The Queen was smiling at him. Something was snuffling at his other hand and he looked down to see a little fat lapdog licking it.
“Felipe likes you,” she said. “High praise. I, too, like you Sergeant Henry Dodd and am still in your debt for your actions today. I had considered a pension but Sir Robert thought you would prefer what is in the deed there.”
She gave him her hand, covered in white lead paste and powder and heavy with rings, so he kissed the air above it. Then she nodded to him and he realised he was supposed to stand up and back away. He managed it, just about. What had come over him? While he knelt again just in case, and also to take the weight off his feet, the Queen smiled at Carey, too.
“Robin, I know you won’t approve, but I have also written to ask the French ambassador to dedicate a special Mass for the repose of the souls of Don Jeronimo de la Quadra de Jimena and Sam Pauncefoot. Mr. Byrd will arrange the music for it.”
“Your Majesty…”
“Please be quiet, Robin. You know my opinion on the matter which is that there is one God and Jesus is His Son and the rest is argument over trifles. Now you may go.”
Outside on the staircase, Dodd blinked down at the parchment in his hand. Was it a thank you letter? A warrant?
“Aren’t you going to open it, Sergeant?” Carey asked, grinning stupidly.
He did. Bloody foreign again. But then he saw the word “Dedo” and then the word Gilsland. What? He looked up at Carey.
“They’re the deeds to Gilsland,” Carey explained. “You now own it outright, freehold, with the messuage appertaining. She got it off the Earl of Cumberland in exchange for cancelling one of her loans to him.”
“The deeds…” There was his name in foreign. Henricus Doddus, Praetor whatever that was. “To me?”
“Yes. Gilsland is now legally yours. You were Cumberland’s tenant-at-will, now you are the freeholder of the land and the tower, to you and your heirs in perpetuity unless you sell it.”
Dodd’s heart was pounding. “Ye mean I dinna owe rent?”
“No. You have the expenses of maintenance of course, but Gilsland is now yours. Blackrent is your own decision.”
“Och.” He couldn’t take it in. What would Janet say? By God, she’d be ecstatic, none of her brothers nor even her father was anything more than a tenant-at-will. Now he could not be evicted legally. Illegally, of course, he could be turned off it if he couldn’t defend it, but he was now safe from a landlord’s whims and lawyers.
“Of course it won’t change much now,” Carey was still blathering, “and I hope you’ll continue in the castle garrison as sergeant of the guard as well as of Gilsland. But in due course…when…er…the King of Scots eventually comes in and not for a long time, of course, but eventually…you will have a secure title to your lands. Much better than the Grahams, for instance, who are in fact simply squatting on the Storey lands. It could be very important.”
Dodd managed to get his mouth to shut and looked back down at the deeds and then at Carey again. He blinked around himself at the stairs and a world suddenly changed forever by a bit of parchment in his hand.
He couldn’t yet say thank you to Carey, in case he greeted like a bairn so he coughed several times and said gruffly, “Ay sir. Ay. I’ll need tae think about it. Ehm…where now?”
Carey grinned with perfect understanding, which was annoying. “Back to Trinity College to pick up my clerk and my manservant and some supplies and horses, gather up the new men.”
“Ay, and then?”
“North,” Carey was laughing, “north for Carlisle. God knows what the surnames are up to, it’s the full raiding season. We might make York by nightfall.”