2 A Season of Knives: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (32 page)

The question was actually intended for Scrope, although it was aimed at her brother. Neither man answered her.

‘I mean, burning to death is a very painful way to die,’ Philly continued thoughtfully as she elaborated on the caterpillar’s markings, ‘I’m not sure hanging, drawing and quartering is that much more painful. Think of the Book of Martyrs and Cranmer and Latymer burning for their faith under Queen Mary—half the point is that they faced a much worse death than just hanging or the axe. Isn’t it?’

‘I was intending to order the executioner to strangle Mrs Atkinson at the stake,’ said Scrope gently, ‘before the fire was lit.’

Philly didn’t look at him. ‘Well, she couldn’t know you would do that. Nobody bothers with witches, do they? Do you really think Mrs Atkinson is stupid enough to kill her husband by cutting his throat in bed, where the blood alone is likely to accuse her, never mind the corpse? I mean, there’s nothing much less accidental than a cut throat, is there?’

‘Well, she might not have thought of it…’ said Scrope lamely.

Philadelphia found her snips and cut her thread peremptorily.

‘Oh, my lord,’ she cooed. ‘Every woman knows the loyalty she owes her husband as her God-given lord. Every preacher makes it clear, every marriage sermon tells her. It’s not a secret. Mrs Atkinson isn’t half-witted. Cutting his throat would have been idiocy for her.’

‘But Philadelphia,’ wailed Scrope. ‘Who did it then? If it wasn’t Barnabus and it wasn’t Andy Nixon and it certainly wasn’t Lowther and it wasn’t even Kate Atkinson, who did it?’

His wife was stitching a cabbage quite near the caterpillar. She stopped and looked up at Carey.

‘Ask the question nobody seems to have thought of yet,’ she said to him simply. ‘You remember, Robin, Walsingham’s question.’

‘What’s she talking about?’ demanded Scrope, his brow furrowed.

It wasn’t exactly the light of revelation, more the promise of it, the moment when Alexander the Great drew his sword when faced with the Gordian knot.

‘She means the lawyer’s question.
Cui bono
? Who benefits?’ Carey explained slowly. ‘It was what Sir Francis Walsingham always asked when faced with some complicated political puzzle.’

‘Ah,’ said Scrope, not sounding very enlightened. ‘Well, you’d best be quick about it, Robin. The inquest opens at 11 o’clock tomorrow which is the earliest the jury can get here.’

And I’ve been wasting my time with damn silly letters about lodgings, Carey thought to himself.

‘Plenty of time if you get up early enough,’ said Philadelphia brightly, reading his mind. ‘And my lord gives you leave.’

‘Oh, ah, yes, of course,’ said Scrope, his attention already diverted back to the music in front of him. He squinted at the close-printed notes and began playing again.

‘Thank you, my lord.’ Carey said nothing more, blinked past the candles on the virginals lid at the copper sunset light slowly seeping into the bright sky. He shook his head suddenly like a horse with a fly in its ear, as if he had almost fallen into a dream standing up.

Philadelphia was silent at last. Scrope looked sideways at him, saw the frustration and annoyance still in him and rambled into a madrigal accompaniment that he was sure Carey knew. For a moment Scrope wondered if his brother-in-law was still too tense to take the musical bait, but then he opened his mouth and began singing the tenor line to it, which happened to be a very graceful melody. Scrope closed his eyes: God had made a miracle in the human voice, there was no instrument like it, and Carey’s tenor was very good, clear, like a bronze bell, entirely free of affectation. When he forgot the words in the third verse, he made some up and they came to a flourishing end with a cascade of nonny-nos which Carey miraculously managed to negotiate without getting his tongue tangled. Philadelphia had listened to the end without moving, her heart-shaped little face tilted to one side, and then she rose, kissed her brother on the cheek and silently left the room, went down the stone stairs.

Scrope sighed happily and turned a beaming face to him.

‘Splendid. What it must be to be able to sing…’

The music had worked some of its accustomed magic; Carey smiled back and dug in the box of music.

‘You’re sure it wasn’t Lowther?’ he said, still sounding puzzled.

‘Quite sure,’ said Scrope. ‘For the same reason I was sure it wasn’t you either. Character.’

‘Character?’

‘I loathe the man as much as you do and I don’t doubt you’re right that he sent Mick to bring in the Grahams and lift Lady Widdrington. That’s much more his style. In any case, why duplicate his effort? Presumably he wanted Lady Widdrington kidnapped so as to lure you into some kind of trap.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Well, then, what’s the point of it if you’re in irons for Atkinson’s murder and can’t risk and break your neck trying to rescue her?’

Carey sighed. That was certainly logical, blast it. So now he had three suspects in gaol and not one of them the right person. He turned back to the sheet music and finally found what he had been looking for.

‘This is the one the Queen likes.’ He set the music before Scrope.

‘Good lord, this is new.’

‘All the rage at Court, my lord,’ murmured Carey.

Scrope was running through the music, first right hand, then left hand, then both together.

‘Here you go, two and one.’

Carey sang the Latin voice part to the end, knowing it quite well. Scrope turned the page, blinked hard at the close-tangled black notes, and carried straight on sight-reading, humming to himself and tapping his foot. It was a delicate pastoral piece, the kind of thing the Queen always liked to play. Carey sat down in Scrope’s carved chair to listen until Philadelphia returned again. Despite the somnolence brought on by a heavy meal and the end of the day he was in no hurry to return to his bedchamber, the absence of Barnabus’s snores and the ridiculously short truckle bed to which Buttercup and her family had relegated him. If he closed his eyes he could imagine an Arcadia of shepherds, shepherdesses and Elizabeth Widdrington, as constant in his phantasy as the Queen at Court, and quite as formidable, despite being generally mother-naked in the Greek style. He smiled a little.

‘Oh, look at him,’ said Philadelphia when she returned at last, leaning over her sleeping brother. ‘Poor thing.’

Scrope was lost in the lands of music and only said ‘Eh?’, before carrying on with a complex variation on the notes before him. Philadelphia called John Ogle and his eldest lad. They carried Carey to the guest chamber where Scrope’s own bodyservant, Humphrey Rumney, undressed him and put him to bed to the complex strains from the nearby dining room, and through it all Carey smiled.

Thursday 6th July 1592, before dawn

Carey awoke with that feeling of dislocation that comes from sleeping in a different bed than the one expected. At least it was just long enough for him. The curtains drawn around his bed were half-open and the darkness had that faint pearly greyness of false dawn. For a few seconds he blinked and picked his way through fragments of dream and memory. There was snoring in the room, as usual coming from a truckle bed by the door, though on a subtly different note from Barnabus. No, he was not in fact in bed with a woman; unfortunately he was alone. For a moment he dwelled on his unnatural and pitiable womanless state; in Carey’s opinion, if God had meant men to live without women, He wouldn’t have created Eve.

But Court music was still flowing through his memory. Oh yes. He had been listening to Scrope’s playing the night before and had dozed off; they must have put him to bed. Had he been drunk? No, his memories of the evening were too clear; he had simply been tired.

Memory filtered back. At the forefront of them all was Philadelphia’s reminder of Walsingham’s question: who benefits? If not Lowther, if not Kate Atkinson, who actually benefited from Jemmy Atkinson’s very bloody death?

The answer had come to him from God while he slept: it lay in the fact that by English law, all the murderer’s property went to the victim’s family. Underneath all the complications, that was a simple beacon. Andy Nixon couldn’t have benefited simply because it was so likely he would be accused; as Philly had said, that went double for Mrs Atkinson who was not at all martyr material. No, he was actually looking at an attempt at double or even triple murder, with himself intended as the murder weapon.

He flung back the sheets and counterpane and jumped out of bed. Energy filled him; he loved this time of day and he was impatient to do what he should have done from the start. He knew where he was now, mentally and physically: who could mistake the virulent dragon and St. George on the tapestry hangings, and the strangely shaped pointy-hatted women of the last century? He wondered why Philadelphia had not sent for some better hangings from London for her guest chamber, as he used the chamber pot under the bed, found the tinderbox to light a taper, and looked about for his clothes.

In the truckle bed he found Simon Barnet, lying on his back and imitating his noisy uncle.

‘Quicker if I dress myself,’ said Carey, passed his hand over his chin and decided to shave now. He doubted he would have the time to go to the barber’s later and he certainly didn’t trust Simon with a razor yet. On the other hand he needed hot water.

He shook the truckle bed vigorously until Simon sat up on his elbow and blinked at him.

‘Wha’?’ Simon asked.

‘Good morning,’ Carey said brightly. ‘Run and fetch me a pitcher of hot water to shave with and something to eat and drink, there’s a good lad, Simon.’

Simon swung his legs over the side of the truckle bed and rubbed his eyes. Like most of the boys in the Castle he hardly ever bothered to take his clothes off. ‘Yessir,’ he muttered, got up, swayed, hauled his boots on and shambled out of the door.

‘I said run,’ Carey called after him reproachfully. ‘I’m in a hurry.’

‘Urrh,’ sighed Simon and speeded to a tottering trot.

One of the boys from the kitchen eventually turned up with a pitcher of hot water, saying Simon was on his way. Stuffing his face again, Carey thought, as he worked the soap into a lather and nipped through to Scrope’s chamber to borrow his razor; I’ll have to get him new livery soon, the rate he’s growing. It was a lot of trouble shaving himself, but life at Court had ingrained it into him that he couldn’t appear in any official capacity with a chin covered in stubble. And he couldn’t regrow his beard until the black dye in his hair had finished growing out, which he hadn’t thought of when he did it. The Scropes were still fast asleep, along with their respective maid and manservant, their bedchamber a choir of snores. Amazing how people wasted the best part of the day lying in their beds.

Half an hour later he was in his green velvet suit and shrugging the shoulder strap of his swordbelt over his arm. As usual, Simon Barnet was taking three times as long as Barnabus to do a perfectly simple job and Carey soon got tired of waiting for him. He put his hat on, crept through the intervening chamber and his sister and brother-in-law’s bedroom, and clattered down the stairs of the Keep. Nobody was stirring in the hall, where most of the servants still slept wrapped in their cloaks, on benches or in the rushes, and out into the cold morning air. There wasn’t anybody about so Carey went across to the Keep gate and had a quick word with Solomon Musgrave. Then he went to his chambers in the Queen Mary Tower, greeted Buttercup, lit a candle and did some hurried paperwork. Finally he went to the new barracks, and knocked on the door of Sergeant Dodd’s little chamber next to the harness room.

It took a while but eventually there were thumping sounds inside and Dodd opened the door in his shirt and hose, with his helmet in one hand and his sword in the other.

‘What the hell is it…?’ he demanded. ‘Och, sorry, sir. Is there a raid?’

‘Er…no, Sergeant,’ said Carey, trying not to look past his shoulder at where Janet Dodd lay in the rumpled little bed. ‘Only we have a lot to do and not much time to do it in.’

‘Oh. Ah,’ said Dodd, slowly catching up with this. ‘There’s no raid?’

‘No.’

‘Och God, it’s still the middle of the night, sir; it’s…’

‘Dodd,’ said Carey patiently, wondering what on earth was the matter with the man. ‘It’s a couple of hours before dawn and I want to start rounding up witnesses for the inquest, so I’d be grateful if you would get yourself dressed and come and help me.’

Dodd leaned his sword against the wall and then put his hand across his eyes and moaned like a cow in calf.

‘Ay sir,’ he said heavily at last. ‘I’ll be wi’ ye.’

Dodd yawned and shut the door. Carey went outside the barracks building and stood in the yard, mentally making lists. Janet came out still lacing her kirtle and hurried past him with an amused expression on her face.

‘Have they opened the buttery yet, do ye know sir?’ she asked him.

‘I don’t know, Mrs Dodd.’

‘Och,’ she shook her head and hurried on.

By the time Dodd was ready, the stable boys were beginning to stir although the gate wasn’t due to open for an hour yet. Solomon Musgrave opened the postern gate for them and Carey and Dodd went down past the trees and into Carlisle town. There were a few lights lit in the windows and a night-soil wagon clattered slowly down Castlegate ahead of them, while two men with shovels picked up the least unpleasant piles of manure and tossed them in the back.