3 A Surfeit of Guns: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (22 page)

“Och no, to be sure, they’ll have been auctioned all over the Debateable Land by now,” said King James. “The surnames might well be a wee bit concerned with myself in the district to do justice and the hanging trees all ready with ropes. It’s not to be wondered at that they might try a thing like that to arm themselves better against me. Not that it will do any good.”

“And then there was the rumour of a Spanish agent at Your Majesty’s court.”

“Never,” said King James very positively. “Now why would we do a silly thing like that, harbouring an enemy of England, considering the manifold kindnesses and generosities to us of our most beloved cousin, the Queen of England.”

“Not, of course, with Your Majesty’s knowledge,” said Carey, managing to sound very shocked, slipping from his stool to go on one knee again. “Such a thought had never crossed my mind. It struck me, however, that some among your nobles might have…designs and desires to change the religion of this land, or something worse, and the Spanish agent might be a part of it.”

“Och, never look so sad, man, and get off yer poor worn out knee again. That’s better. Have some more wine. Nay, any Spaniard at the court, and I’d have had word of him from my lords here all at daggers drawn, quarrelling for his gold.” He smiled wisely at Carey who smiled back.

“Of course, Your Majesty, I was a poor fool to think otherwise.”

“Ay, well, we’ll say no more on it. And when I go into the Debateable Land to winkle out Bothwell, that black-hearted witch of a man, I’ll keep a good eye out for your weapons, never fear.”

“Yes, Your Majesty. If I might venture a little more on the subject: for God’s sake, do not try any that you might capture, for they are all faulty and burst on firing. You may tell one of the faulty guns by a cross scratched on the underside of the stock.”

King James nodded. “I shall bear it in mind,” he said. “But personally I do not care for the crack and report of firearms no more than for the clash of knives or swords. Ye may have noted how most of the beasts we hunted this morning were slain by arrows or bolts or the action of dogs. So I’ll be in no danger from yer badly-welded pistols, have nae fear.”

“I am very happy to hear it,” said Carey after a tiny pause. “Your Majesty’s life is, of course, infinitely precious, not only in Scotland, but also in England.”

Hm, thought King James, is this some message from the Cecils, I wonder? Do they see danger somewhere? I wonder where?

Gently he probed Carey, but thought that in fact the man was as he seemed: concerned at the lost guns from Carlisle and with the rumoured Spanish agent, but he had left London in the middle of June and was already a little behind with the court news. Also it transpired that he was one of the Earl of Essex’s faction, rather than with the Cecils, which showed he was disappointingly short-sighted.

Surely it couldn’t be much longer to wait, thought James as they discussed the merits of hunting par force de chiens as opposed to using beaters; surely the old battle axe would die soon. But it seemed that she was like the Sphinx: full of riddles and immortal, her health depressingly good apart from being occasionally troubled by a sore on her leg.

King James was sinking the wine as quickly as he usually did, with Rob already gone down to the butler for a refill. One of the clerks would be in soon with administrative papers for him to sign and letters to write: he knew he was getting a little tipsy when he slopped some of the wine down his doublet and laughed. Ever the courtier, Sir Robert fetched one of the linen towels off the rack by the fireplace and proffered the end to wipe up the spillage—something that would never even have occurred to Rob or the Earl of Mar or any one of his overdressed hangers-on.

James was full of goodwill and caught Carey’s wrist with his hand as he came close.

“Will ye speak French to me?” he asked. “I dinna speak it well mesen, but the sound of it always thrills my heart.”

“Avec grand plaisir. Alas, Your Majesty, my accent is not what it once was and I have forgotten much,” said Carey in that language. On an affectionate impulse, James kissed his cheek which was so near and so inviting. Only a kiss.

It was a mistake. Carey permitted the familiarity but no more. James felt the tension in him: damn the cold-hearted bloody English, they all bridled at a touch from him as if he was diseased.

“Ye used to remind me so much of d’Aubigny, ye know,” James said thickly, hoping as he looked into Carey’s handsome face that the man was either easily overawed or as sophisticated as he seemed. “Ye still have very much his style, Robin.”

Carey smiled carefully. “Perhaps from the French court,” he said, in Scottish this time. “My father wanted me to learn Latin as well as French, but alas I was a bad student and spent most of my time pursuing sinful women.” Yes, there was a distinct, if tactful accent on the ‘women’. Another man still in thrall to the she-serpent then. “My ignorance is entirely my own fault.”

James let go of Carey’s arm and drank down what was left of his wine. “My tutor George Buchanan warned me that the wages of sin is death,” he said, wondering whether to be angry at the rebuff or simply sad, and also whether it would be worth having Carey to supper privately and filling him full of aqua vitae. He had known it work sometimes, with the ambitious, although that of course also contained the seed of heartache, in that the love could never be pure. How he longed for the clarity of the love and partnership between Achilles and Patroclus, or Alexander and Hephaistion. And David and Jonathan: it had been a revelation to him when he read how their love surpassed that of women, for how could the ancestor of Christ be guilty? Their love was never condemned in the Bible as was David’s adultery with Bathsheba.

“Mr Buchanan was right, of course,” said Carey softly, not looking at James, his face impossible to read. “We are all sinners and all of us die.”

“Even godlike kings?” sneered King James.

“Your Majesty knows the answer to that better than I do.”

“And queens? What about queens, eh? When do they die?” I am getting drunk, thought King James. That was a tactless question. Carey bridled only a little.

“When Death comes for them.”

“Has she bribed him, or what?”

Carey smiled, the blue eyes intense as chips of aquamarine. “If that were possible, she surely would, but as you know, she would prefer to hold him rather with the promise of a bribe and a flood of sweet words.”

King James laughed at the satire. Carey was sitting down on his stool again, meekly, as if James had never touched his hand, nor kissed his face. It was a pity, a pity: he had lovely shoulders and although his hair was odd, most of the curls black but the roots reddish brown, he had the long Boleyn face and the Tudor hooded bright blue eyes, and he had the smoothness and culture that d’Aubigny had shown King James when he was a raw lad of sixteen. The King’s face clouded: affection and sophistication had been heady things to discover for the first time in his hard-driven scholarly life. He looked on the time he had spent with d’Aubigny as a brief respite in Paradise, before the bastard nobles had kidnapped their King in the Ruthven Raid, with their usual lack of respect, and forced him to send d’Aubigny away. Not content with that they had then almost certainly poisoned the Frenchman. One day, thought King James, one day I’ll have satisfaction on all of them for it.

“Speak some French to me again,” he said, watching Rob refill his goblet and Carey’s. But it wasn’t boys he wanted, unlike Spynie and his friends, it was men with good bodies and good minds: true companions as the Greeks had been, without the mucky dim-witted clinginess and greedy softness of women. Lord God, how Queen Anne his wife bored him with her pawing and treble complaints.

“Je parle tres mal la belle langue,” said Carey, the brand of his Englishness striking through all the music of French. It was like hearing a spinet played by someone in gauntlets and King James sighed again. What was it about the French language that had the power to bewitch him so? The first time he had heard d’Aubigny speak with the rolled rrs so different in Scots and the lilting cadences, he had been moved almost to tears with longing. Perhaps it had been witchcraft…No, the witches were all Scottish like the Earl of Bothwell. D’Aubigny had simply been…d’Aubigny, and this large, proud and beautiful Englishman was nothing of the kind.

There had been a knock at the door some time before and now the secretary and the clerk stood there waiting with sour impatience. Carey had opened the door for them: well, it wasn’t James’s fault if Carey couldn’t see what Buchanan had beaten into the boy-King so well: that, like the wicked French mermaid Queen Mary his mother, women were darkness and dirt combined, the true root of sin, and an ever-present danger to every man’s soul, the invariable tools of the Devil. Poor Carey, to be in thrall to such creatures…Never mind. Perhaps a quiet supper some other time, perhaps the promise of advancement when King James came into his own: the English were the greediest nation on earth, everyone knew that.

King James gestured imperiously to dismiss Sir Robert, who once more genuflected and kissed the royal hand, the contact of skins dry and without content. The clerk and the secretary exchanged glances when they saw their king’s squint-eyed look, and the secretary reordered the papers he was holding. Dammit, he could drink if he wanted to, he was the King.

Carey backed off, bowed at the door, stepped back another three paces out of sight and then turned and left. King James sighed, tears of self-pity pricking at his eyes: one day he would find someone like d’Aubigny again, one day it would happen. He was the King, and he tried to be a good king and bring peace and justice to his thrawn dangerous uncharming people; surely God would relent again and let him taste love.

Dodd came on Carey washing his hands and face in well-water and drinking aqua vitae by the gulp. He was already a little drunk, Dodd saw, which was no surprise if he had just had audience with the King of Scots, and he was also wound up tight, almost quivering with tension.

“Did the King have anything to say about the guns?” asked Dodd, who knew what Carey had been hoping for.

Carey grunted, shook his head, looked about for a towel, saw that the courtyard of Maxwell’s town house had no such things, and wiped his hands on his hose.

“Any luck with the German or the Italians?” he demanded harshly.

Dodd shook his head in turn. “I dinnae think the German can still be alive,” he said positively, wishing he knew why the foreigners were important. “I’ve been up and down this bloody nest of Scots and not a hide nor a hair of him is there anywhere. Signor Bonnetti is supplying His Majesty with wine, but ye knew that already. How’s the King?”

At least I didn’t nearly puke in his lap this time, thought Carey gloomily, but Jesus, it was close. What is it about me that makes him like me so? I don’t look anything like Lord Spynie, thank God. The aqua vitae burned pleasantly in his throat and he poured Dodd some, as well as more for himself. Dodd, he saw, was full of morbid curiosity about his audience and clearly fighting the impulse to ask nosy questions.

“Drunk when I left him, drunk and maudlin,” snapped Carey. “Come on, let’s go out and ask some more questions.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon on Irish Street, starting at one end and going into every armourer’s and gunsmith they could see.

As it turned out, the first one was typical. “Nay, sir, I canna undertake yer order,” said the master gunsmith, with his broad hands folded behind his leather apron and a bedlam of bellows, furnace, hammering and screeling metal behind him.

“Not even if I pay you forty shillings sterling for each pistol and fifty shillings for the calivers?” pressed Carey, holding one of the sample wares from the front of the shop and looking at it narrowly.

“Nay, sir, it’s impossible,” said the master gunsmith firmly. “Not if ye was to pay double the amount, I couldnae do it. Not before Lammastide next.”

“How about by Michaelmas?”

The master gunsmith sucked his teeth. “I tellt ye, it’s impossible,” he said, “I’m no’ dickering for a price, sir, I could get what I asked, but I canna make enough guns for the orders on my books as it is.”

“What’s the problem?”

“See ye, sir, we allus have full order books, because in Dumfries we make the best weapons in the world, and my shop here makes the best, the finest weapons in a’ of Dumfries. I have none but journeymen makers, here, not a part of yer gun will be made by a ‘prentice, and the lock will be made by meself or my son-in-law that’s a master gunsmith as well. My guns shoot true, they dinna misfire, and they never blow up in yer hand. I’ve turned down bigger orders than yourn fra the Papists, because I canna fill them.”

“Could you not take on extra men?” Carey asked.

The master gunsmith’s red face took on a purple hue. “What? Untrained? Cack-handed fools that canna tell one end of the stock fra the other? No, sir. And ye’ll not thank me if I did, for the weapons they made would be as like to kill ye as yer enemy. We make the finest weapons in the world here and…”

“I thought Augsburg had good weaponsmiths,” said Carey provocatively.

The master gunsmith spat magnificently. “Sir,” he said. “I’ll thank ye to leave my shop. I’ll have nae talk of German mountebanks in this place, ye might sour the metal. Go to Jedburgh for yer weapons if ye’ve a mind to, but begone from here. Out.”

Carey went meekly enough, rubbing his lower lip with his thumb and looking pleased. He tried two more shops, the second of which was full of the choking indescribable stench of the flesh being burnt off horse hooves in a dry cauldron, so that the hooves themselves could be used to case-harden the gun-parts. They retreated from the place in some disorder and stopped at a small alehouse to drink aqua vitae to clean their throats. Carey sent Red Sandy Dodd on with Sim’s Will Croser to carry on the questioning. Dodd stayed with him.