3 A Surfeit of Guns: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (38 page)

“Um…” said Scrope, bursting with curiosity to know what had happened to him. “Your report?”

“To you, verbally, my lord,” said Carey. “Now.”

That was worrying. They returned to Scrope’s dining-room cum council chamber and Carey sat down in one of the chairs with a sigh and blinked at him.

“Will you call for beer, my lord?”

“Of course.”

They waited, Carey tipping his head back against the chair and shutting his eyes. When the beer came, Carey reached out to take the nearest tankard and noticed he still had his gauntlet on. With his teeth he stripped the glove off. Scrope stared at his hand which was mottled purple and red, and missing two fingernails.

“Good God, man, what happened to your…?”

“Thumbscrews,” said Carey shortly and drank most of his beer. “I’ll give you my interpretation of events as I go along, shall I, my lord?”

Scrope nodded, clearly finding it hard to look at his damaged fingers. Carey didn’t blame him. The empurpled nailbeds made him feel queasy in a way that a much worse wound would not.

Carey blinked again at the florid hunters on the tapestry hanging behind Scrope’s head, marshalling his thoughts with great effort. At last he spoke again in a flat tired voice.

“Well, my lord, in my humble opinion we were dealing not only with two loads of firearms, but also with two separate plots. One load of firearms came from the Tower of London and was stolen on the road from Newcastle. The second load was swapped for them to hide the theft. They were the ones that ended up in our Armoury and every single weapon was faulty.

“The first plot concerns Lord Spynie. He had been given the power to procure the King of Scotland’s handguns, but like most army contractors he spent much of the money on other things and was then in a quandary to buy the weapons he needed. Luckily there was a German in Edinburgh, newly arrived from Augsburg where they also make weapons, who offered to supply him the guns at a cut price. All would have been well if the German had in fact been a master gunsmith as he claimed, because to be honest, my lord, the German weapons are usually better than ours. Unfortunately he was not a master, nor even a journeyman. He had been expelled from a Hanseatic gunsmithing guild for shoddy workmanship and fraud. Spynie didn’t know this, or didn’t care, and accepted the deal happily.

“The German, going by the name of Hans Schmidt, set up a gun foundry in Jedburgh where he simply turned out the guns as quickly as he could with untrained labour. I don’t believe he bothered to caseharden the lock parts and the forge-welding and beating out of the barrels was so badly done, they were bound to crack at the first firing and explode at the second.

“Spynie had paid for them, taken delivery of them, when he found out—no doubt, the same way we did—that they were no better than scrap metal. Also the German had disappeared, the King’s procurement money was spent, and Spynie couldn’t make the weapons useable. The problem became more acute after Bothwell’s raid on Falkland Palace, when the King called out his levies for a justice raid.”

“But didn’t he find his runaway German? You told me you had witnessed his arrest…”

“Yes. Schmidt was hiding with a woman who sold him to Spynie once he ran out of money—I’m afraid he was as bad a fraudster as he was a gunsmith.”

“Bloody man deserves to hang, for the maiming and deaths he caused.”

Carey shut his eyes again. “He’s dead,” he said shortly. After a moment he carried on.

“So then Spynie gets wind of our new delivery of weapons from London and with a little help from his English friends—most notably Sir Simon Musgrave, Sir Henry Widdrington and his kin, and the family of Littles—he carries out a daring swap a day or two out of Carlisle. He gets the good Tower weapons; we get the ones the German sold him and put them into our Armoury. Purely incidentally, while helping to swap the weapons over, Long George Little steals himself a new pistol. Which explodes in his hand when he’s on night patrol with me.”

Scrope had steepled his fingers and was looking through them like a child at a frightening sight.

“Clear so far?” prompted Carey.

“Eh? Oh, yes, very clear. A model of clarity, my dear Robin. Would you prefer to continue with this tomorrow, after you’ve had some sleep. You can have had none at all last night—you must be exhausted.”

“I am tired,” Carey admitted in a wintry voice. “But I prefer to make my report while it’s fresh in my mind.”

Scrope inclined his head politely.

“Now we must switch to another plot. Quite separately, Lord Maxwell was very anxious to lay hands on a good supply of firearms to continue and, he hoped, finish his feud with the Johnstones. He needed them because the Johnstones appear to be very well-armed, again with guns corruptly acquired from the Carlisle Armoury.”

“I wish one lot or the other would win,” interrupted Scrope wistfully. “It would cut in half the amount of trouble from the West.”

“Maxwell made contact with Sir Richard Lowther and asked for the longterm hire of the weapons in the Armoury, on the usual illegal and damnably corrupt terms. Not in any way realising that the guns were faulty—in fact they hadn’t arrived at this point—Sir Richard agreed.”

Scrope nodded.

“But with me around and his pet Armoury clerk, Jemmy Atkinson, dead, he realised the old system could no longer work. At the same time, he wanted Maxwell’s money. And so Lowther arranged to break into the Armoury while we were at the muster and steal the guns out of Carlisle. The plan was he would eventually ‘find’ them again once Maxwell had finished off the last Johnstone and no longer needed them. While he was about it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had found clear evidence that it was I stole ‘em.”

Scrope let out a humourless little “Heh, heh, heh.” Then he added anxiously, “Unfortunately you have no proof it was Lowther who organised the theft.”

“No, my lord, I haven’t. There’s nothing you could call proof for any of this.”

Scrope tutted.

Carey paused, editing his story. Would it be wise to tell Scrope he had broken into the Armoury the night before the guns were stolen, marked them and borrowed two for target practice. Scrope would quite probably be finicky about that and also about why Carey hadn’t told him. No, there was no point.

“At any rate, the bad guns went to Lord Maxwell and nobody knew there was anything wrong with them.” Carey’s expression changed to disgust. “That man has the luck of the Devil. If I hadn’t happened to be in Dumfries and saw that the gun he was using looked like Long George’s, we’d be shot of one major Border nuisance.”

Scrope nodded, poured aqua vitae into his tankard and sipped. “Never mind,” he said comfortingly. “You weren’t to know, after all.”

Matters were getting a bit delicate here. Carey decided to skate over some of the details.

“The long and the short of it is, my lord, that Maxwell was highly offended with me when I told him his new guns were all faulty. As a result of his treachery and Sir Henry Widdrington’s, I was arrested by Lord Spynie on a trumped-up charge of treason.”

“Ah,” said Scrope sympathetically. “The thumbscrews.”

“Yes. Fortunately, I have friends at the Scottish court who told the King what had happened and His Majesty was pleased to release me as soon as I had explained myself.”

“How very lucky for you,” said Scrope neutrally. Carey did not respond to his unspoken question.

“Yes. His Majesty was also munificent enough to return to me in recompense the guns that Spynie had stolen from our arms convoy and provide me with an escort to bring them to Carlisle.”

“How extremely…er…munificent. And that’s the story, is it?”

“Yes, my lord,” said Carey.

“The full story?”

All of it that I’m prepared to tell you, Tom Scrope, Carey thought to himself. Too tired to talk he simply nodded.

“How much of this should we pass on to the Queen?”

“None,” Carey answered instantly.

Scrope’s face broke into a childlike smile of pure relief.

“Absolutely. I quite agree, my dear Robin, Her Majesty shouldn’t be troubled with any of these little difficulties at all.”

“That’s what I said to King James.”

“Splendid, splendid,” said Scrope, leaning over to pat Carey’s arm and then, after thinking better of it, his knee. “His Majesty’s very wise and so are you. Discretion, clearly, is in order here.”

“Yes.”

“Right. Well. You’ll be wanting to get to your bed, I expect. Barnabus is waiting for you in your chamber. We’ll house and feed your escort and the ponies and send them back in a couple of days. Where’s Thunder, by the way?”

“Oh,” said Carey distantly, stumbling over another reason to feel depressed, “I sold him to the King.”

“Excellent,” beamed his inane brother-in-law. “Dreadfully expensive to feed and far too good for this part of the world. He’ll be much happier in the King’s stables. Did you…er…get enough for him?”

“Yes, my lord, I can pay the men next month.” He hoped Dodd still had his winnings from the bet with Maxwell that he had given him to look after. Even without that, he thought he could make shift.

Scrope leaned over and aggravatingly patted his knee again. “You’re a miracle-worker, Robin,” he said. “Absolutely extraordinary.”

***

Never had the spiral stair up to his chambers at the top of the Queen Mary Tower seemed so long. He actually had to stop halfway up with his better hand on the stone central spine to catch his breath and wait for his head to stop spinning.

The door of his chamber was open wide with Barnabus getting the fire going and Philadelphia standing there, hands on hips, imperiously overseeing. Carey paused again on the threshold, wondering how much more he could deal with before he fell over.

Philadelphia turned, saw him and ran to him, then skidded to a halt and frowned severely at him. With uncharacteristic gentleness, she folded her arms around him. God, thought Carey, I must look bloody terrible.

However bad he looked, he felt worse. He went and sat on the bed, which had yet another new counterpane on it. Philadelphia sent Barnabus away and then sat down next to him.

“I heard,” she whispered. “I heard it all from Hutchin and Dodd. Let me see.”

“For God’s sake, Philly, I…”

“Oh, shut up.” She picked up his right hand, examined it with her lip caught in her teeth, then took his splinted left hand. “This is Elizabeth Widdrington’s work.”

“Yes,” said Carey, trying to remove it from her grasp. “And it hurt like hell when she did it, so don’t undo it…
Aagh
! Christ
Jesus
, woman, what the hell do you think you’re…”

“I only pressed the ends of your fingers to make sure you still have feeling in them.”

“Well, I do.”

“Don’t growl at me like father, numbness is the first sign of gangrene.”

“Philly, I’ve had about as much nursing as I can take.”

“Then you won’t want the spiced wine I brought you with laudanum in it to help you sleep.”

“No, I…”

“And you won’t want to hear what I found out about my lord Scrope.”

Pure curiosity helped to clear his bleary head. He blinked at her questioningly.

“Scrope knew all about it, about swapping our proper guns for the faulty ones on the Newcastle road. And I’ll bet he knew of Lowther’s little scheme to steal the faulty ones out of our Armoury too.”

“How do you know that?” he asked. “When did you find out?”

Philadelphia sniffed eloquently.

“When I read King James’s letter about it to Scrope, the night after you left for Scotland. He had it in that stupid secret drawer in his desk which I check every so often to make sure he isn’t doing anything idiotic like dealing with Spanish agents and the like.”

She looked at him with kittenish satisfaction at knowing something he didn’t, and her face fell. “Oh,” she said. “You knew?”

Carey shook his head. “I suspected,” he said. “Who arranges the bearfight?” he said. “The bear or the bearwarden? No, it had to be King James operating through Lord Spynie. I remember the Earl of Mar said that the King wanted the German, that night when we saw them capture him in the forest.”

Philly nodded vigorously. “They had it all cooked up between them. Scrope kept quiet about the guns being swapped, King James could use our firearms to settle matters with the Debateable Land, and then he would return the guns to us. They only used the bad guns as dummies because you were about, causing trouble. It wasn’t exactly official, but the King did pay my lord a consideration.”

“A consideration,” said Carey bleakly. “Philly, Scrope’s lands yield three thousand pounds a year.”

“Oh they do, but we spend an awful lot.”

“So then what about Lowther…”

“I expect Scrope thought he had nothing to lose and plenty to gain by letting Lowther steal the bad guns. Maxwell might be badly weakened by the guns exploding in people’s hands, he might even lose a big battle with the Johnstones as a result, which would sort him out and even up the balance in the Scottish West March.”

“He might have died himself.”