His sister Philadelphia, Lady Scrope, was as pert and tousled as ever in black velvet and burgundy taffeta. She was frowning at her cards. Laboriously she totted up her primero points, while her husband watched her, his gaunt, beaky, under-chinned face quite softened for that moment. Even the Lord Warden of the English West March could lose his heart to a woman and it was right that the woman was his wife. Unfortunately, his wife did not return the sentiment.
To Carey’s left sat Sir Richard Lowther, his enemy and rival for the Deputy Wardenship. Sir Richard was glowering at his cards as if they were reivers he planned to hang, but might be persuaded to let go for a bribe.
Nothing interesting would happen for a while, Carey thought, and let his attention wander again. Two of the players in the second game at the other end of the table were not very well known to him. There was Edward Aglionby, the Mayor, who had invited them to the card party and whose house this was. He was a handsome solidly-built man with fine wavy grey hair under his hat and a grave pleasant manner. There was a local merchant, John Leigh, like Aglionby a Carlisle draper and grocer. He was not paying proper attention to his cards and had lost heavily. Now he was blinking at them again, but clearly not seeing them. Then there was Young Henry Widdrington, heir to the headship of one of the major English East March surnames, painfully spotted. And the one Carey knew so well, who had methodically been taking John Leigh’s money off him all evening, was sitting upright and alert on the bench beside him, with the rose-tinted light from the window falling just so on her face and making her beautiful.
She isn’t beautiful, Carey thought to himself while he waited for his sister to finish counting under her breath. Not even the most maddened poet in the world could say Elizabeth Widdrington was like Cynthia or Diana or Thetis or whoever. She had a long nose and an extremely determined chin and there was no question but that age would make her even beakier. Her hair was a wavy brown, her eyes were the blue-grey of a steel helmet and her mouth would never ever be a rosebud. Wisely she didn’t put red lead on it to make it something it wasn’t.
She felt the warmth of his stare, looked up, caught his eyes and coloured. He smiled, and her cheeks became rosy and her eyes sparkled. It delighted him privately that she blushed when she saw him, more prized in her because otherwise she was distressingly self-possessed. He wondered idly where the blush started and how far down it went and from there went on to his perennial speculations about what he would see when he finally lifted her smock over her head and…
‘Honestly, Robin, you should pay attention to the game.’ He looked round to see his sister grinning at him naughtily. Young Henry Widdrington on Elizabeth’s right was gazing elaborately into space so as not to see the byplay between his young step-mother and Carey. What little skin that could be seen between his outrageous collection of spots was redder than Elizabeth’s. He had folded.
Carey coughed and pushed five shillings into the middle of the table. Sir Richard Lowther breathed hard through his nose and put in his own five shillings with a resolute thump of his hand. He gave Carey what Carey mentally tagged as the bad gambler’s glare and upped the stake by two shillings. Equably Carey shoved his own two shillings into the pot and waited for Lord Scrope, who was dealing, to make his decision. Philly, he knew, was trying to mature her flush and so would stay in for the draw and then fold when she didn’t get it. Nobody could fathom what Lord Scrope thought he was doing at the best of times, and Carey wasn’t going to start now.
Elizabeth was watching him and he looked steadily back at her. Her eyes were still sparkling and she lifted her chin, her mouth curving. Carey moved his padded hose on the bench, the ruff round his neck suddenly feeling tight and uncomfortable. Lord, Lord, her husband, Sir Henry, was a lucky man. Damn the old villain for marrying her; damn Carey’s own father for arranging the match; and damn Elizabeth too for being a great deal more high-principled than most of the married women he had met at Court.
‘Er…’ said Scrope, and pushed his stake into the middle. Philly exchanged three cards-what on earth does she think she’s doing, Carey wondered briefly, as he dropped one card on the table for replacement. Lowther exchanged two, glanced at the cards, and his bushy grey eyebrows almost met in the effort to look disappointed. His fingers started drumming on his thigh. Scrope took two cards, squinted and humphed.
Carey got his new card which was a bit of a long shot, looked at it and relaxed. Most of the time he played strictly on the odds but every so often he gambled wildly on an unlikely hand, just to keep people guessing. On this occasion his gamble had suddenly turned into a much better bet. He was holding all of the fives-a chorus, with a point score of sixty. There were only three hands that could better it: a chorus of aces, sixes or sevens. Naturally it was possible somebody had one-he hadn’t seen any aces, sixes or sevens discarded. The next stage in the game was the vying; it was a peculiarity of primero that you must announce how many points you held in your hand and while you could exaggerate your score, you couldn’t understate it.
‘As I have sixty points I think I’ll raise you,’ said Scrope, with his habitual nervous smile. Philadelphia looked annoyed and folded.
‘Have you indeed?’ sniffed Lowther, ‘I’ve seventy two and I’ll see you and raise you.’
Carey smiled lazily. ‘Eighty four,’ he said, as he often did, and raised the both of them. As they had all folded on the last deal, there were now about three pounds in the pot. Philly tutted under her breath and frowned, while Scrope looked from him to Lowther and back again, trying to read their minds. It was Lowther that Scrope was really worried about, Carey noted with interest; obviously Lowther’s overbid was likely to mean something.
After a lot of hesitation, Scrope folded as well. Lowther glowered at Carey who looked back, still smiling. He scratched the itch on his cheekbone of the glorious green and yellow remnants of a black eye he had got a week before. A prominent local reiver had given it to him, along with many other grazes and bruises and a couple of cracked ribs, but the fault lay entirely with Sir Richard Lowther, who had once been Deputy Warden of the West March and intended to be so again, soon. Carey found that baiting Lowther had added greatly to his enjoyment of the evening; otherwise the play was too slow for him and too inept.
For ten years he had attended at Court and occasionally played cards with his cousin and aunt, the Queen; tense high-stake sessions lasting past midnight, sometimes with the Earl of Leicester, before his death; more recently with the magnificent and prickly Sir Walter Raleigh and Carey’s own patron the Earl of Essex. Nothing could be more different from Carlisle. The hot faintly honeyed smell of expensive beeswax candles had brought it all back to him. At Court there were also occasional yawns from dozing maids-in-waiting and men-at-arms, the rustle of silk and velvet around the table, and the soft clatter of the Queen’s pearl-ropes as she moved to bet. To his surprise he felt wistful for it: the brilliant colours and decorous smells, the sense of finding the edge of himself, every nerve stretched with the necessity for being witty as well as playing cleverly. The Queen was an excellent player with a good memory for the cards and absolute intolerance of hesitation or ineptitude. She expected to win much of the time but she also despised cheating to make sure she would and could spot it better than many coney-catchers in the City. Carey generally found it took five or six sessions with less dangerous courtiers in order to finance one evening playing the Queen.
He brought himself back to the present because Lowther had raised him again by two pounds, so he thought of his bed and of the walk back to the castle postern gate with Elizabeth.