“What are you going to do, sir?”
“Today? I’ll change clothes with Daniel here, you shave my beard and brown my face a bit…”
“I bought some hair dye too, sir,” said Barnabus. While sprinting around Carlisle he had realised that the harder he argued against one of his master’s schemes, the more determined Carey became. He had decided to leave any dissuading to Lady Widdrington. “After all, they might have heard that Swanders is a black-haired man.”
“True enough, well done. We’ll do all that and when it’s dry and I look the part, we’ll leave Carlisle and go north. Daniel stays here with Madam Hetherington and I’ve promised to pay her enough so she’ll let him have one of her girls for the night, the sinful git.” Daniel smiled slyly. “You wait for me outside Carlisle in one of the inns and when I come back tomorrow morning, we’ll decide what to do.”
It broke Barnabus’s heart to shave Carey’s lovely trim little beard and then brown his skin with the walnut juice. Dying Carey’s hair took longer than they expected, what with having to ask Madam Hetherington for a basin and two ewers and waiting for the water to be heated. To his horror, Barnabus found some nits and would have had at them with a fine-toothed comb, but Carey told him to leave them since no one would believe a cadger that hadn’t a few headlice.
“You’ll look a sight for the old lord’s funeral.”
“Oh, the brown comes off your skin with lemon juice,” said Carey, “and I can hide my hair under my hat. Nobody will notice, they’ll all be too busy worrying what they look like themselves.”
While Carey waited bare-chested for his hair and skin to dry, Daniel explained his price system and he memorised the commonest items, laughing heartily when Daniel explained what some of them had really cost him, in case he needed to bargain down.
Barnabus had drawn the curtains while Carey and Daniel Swanders stripped off and swapped clothes. Daniel and he were almost exactly of a size, with Daniel perhaps an inch or two shorter. Swanders tried on Carey’s doublet and posed in front of the mirror they’d had brought in while Carey laughed at him and told him the Queen would love him until she found out he couldn’t dance, sang like a crow and had stolen all her jewels.
By this time Carey was scratching a little in Daniel’s coarse hemp shirt, and putting on his worn homespun woollen hose and greasy leather jerkin. He pulled Daniel’s blue statute cap down over his ears, looked at himself in the mirror and laughed again.
“I got you these sir,” said Barnabus diffidently, taking out the knives he had bought. “See here, this one goes behind your neck, this one’s on your belt and this one’s in your sleeve. The two hidden ones are for throwing…”
“I’m not the dead shot you are, Barnabus…”
“It don’t matter, sir, aim for the body and if they stick in anywhere they’ll distract ‘im long enough for you to make a run for it. Which you will do, won’t you, sir, if they rumble you.”
“Not if I can help it, since they’ll have horses and I won’t.”
“Aren’t you even going to ride?”
“Well Daniel hasn’t any horses, and I can’t ride one of my own, it would be spotted as coming from the south and somebody would ask questions. I can’t ride anything from the Castle stables because of the brands. And I don’t want to buy another horse, even if there were any to be had, which there aren’t.”
Barnabus sighed unhappily. “Can I wait for you a mile or two outside, then sir, with a horse in case you need to…”
“Barnabus, Barnabus, I appreciate your concern, I really do, but you’d get caught. Bothwell will have riders all around the place watching in case anybody tries to steal all his stolen horses back from him and you’d be caught and then they’d beat you up and I’d have to tell them the story to stop them and it would all be very embarrassing. You stay in Carlisle until I get back, do you understand?”
“Yes sir,” said Barnabus mutinously, thinking bleakly of having to face Carey’s father with an explanation of how his youngest son happened to wind up kicking in the wind by his neck from Netherby’s gatehouse.
“Right,” said Carey, “here’s my purse with my rings in it, you arrange things with Madam Hetherington and pay her whatever she asks for looking after Daniel, and then you go back to the castle and tell everybody I’m sick in bed…”
“Can’t I even come a little way with you?”
“Oh all right, if you must, you can meet me in the alleyway.”
Carey took Daniel’s pack, winced a little at its weight, then opened the window and climbed out into the little courtyard.
Barnabus went unhappily to negotiate with Madam Hetherington.
Thursday 22nd June, late afternoon
Even Barnabus had to admit, walking through Carlisle, that Carey made an uncommonly convincing peddler. He even flirted with one of the girls selling meat pies and had her shrieking at an incomprehensible Northumbrian joke.
It took some argument to get Carey, afire with impatience to put his head in the noose, to pause for a beer at the Golden Bell. As soon as they entered the common room, a tall figure in fine grey wool, piped with murrey, snapped her fingers at Barnabus and beckoned them over.
“What the…” hissed Carey. “God’s blood, you told her, you sneaking little bastard, I’ll tan your backside for you…”
“Well, Danny,” said Barnabus, deliberately insolent, “I don’t know what good getting in a fight with me would do you, but if that’s what you want, I’m game.”
Carey growled at him. Lady Widdrington had lifted her head haughtily and was beckoning again.
“I think there’s business to be done with the lady, mate,” said Barnabus, “Ain’t you going to find out what it is?”
In fact, Barnabus nearly gave himself a rupture trying not to laugh as he watched his elegant master slouch over to Lady Widdrington, haul off his statute cap and make an ugly-looking bow. In a minute he had his pack off his back and had opened the top and was delving in the depths. She apparently wanted a thimble, and when he pulled out five in a little packet, she examined them carefully and asked if he was mad.
Barnabus loafed over with the beer, so as not to miss the fun.
His face hidden by digging in the pack, Carey was muttering his reasons for sneaking into Netherby to Lady Widdrington who listened with regal calmness.
“I see why you want to do it,” she said, to Barnabus’s shocked disappointment, “but have you thought it through?”
“I think so, ma’am,” said Carey, producing a card wound with stay laces.
“Do you? Well, I don’t. What’s your excuse for going to Netherby? Why are you there at all? To sell Bothwell broidery silks and some pretty ribbons for his hair?”
This nonplussed Carey who had been so charmed at the idea of getting into Netherby, he had not in fact thought it through. Lady Widdrington examined the laces and talked rapidly out of the side of her mouth.
“In the stables are three northern horses, with Fairburn brands on them, and also the Widdrington mark which might not be known here. They are my horses which I am lending to you as cover. You take them into Netherby and offer them to Bothwell and if he’s as anxious for remounts as you say he is, then he’ll be delighted. We’ll work out a way of getting them back later.”
Carey opened his mouth to argue, stopped, thought, then nodded intently.
“Now you’ll have trouble getting out in the morning, because if the raid is due in the next couple of days, I expect Bothwell will simply close up the castle and let no one out for any reason. He may be mad but he isn’t stupid. So if you find it hard to get out, put all of this powder…” She put down a twist of paper next to some lace bobbins, “…into your wine or beer and it’ll give you all the symptoms of a man with the first stages of the plague-fever, headache, sneezing, and if you complain of pains in your neck, groin and armpits that should frighten the life out of them.”