1635: A Parcel of Rogues - eARC (28 page)

Chapter 32

“Oh, Montrose.” Richard, earl of Cork, was starting to feel his common origins stirring as he read the letter. “Oh, Montrose.”

He’d spent all day listening to Charles Stuart—a man he
prayed
he’d never refer to as King Cripple-cock out loud, and that he would never have to officially hear the servants call him by that name—prate on in the way that only a peevish idiot of that character could. Time and again he’d politely hinted at the need for dismissal to be about His Majesty’s business, but the man had gone on and on and on and
fucking on.

Richard had been born to a poor-relation branch of the Boyles, but that was measured against ownership of a large fraction of Hertfordshire. He still had the diamond ring his mother had given him as a means of making his start in life. He’d done well enough with just the money he’d gone to Ireland with. And for all the money did, he’d had to get his hands dirty more than a time or two. The urge to take the Profane Swearing Act and wipe his arse with it came from those days.

Especially when, after a long day and a tiresome one amid the stench of His Majesty’s chamber pots, he’d to strain his eyes by fading summer’s evening light and a couple of candles to read this latest from Montrose.

“Montrose,” he murmured, weighing all that was said—and not said—between the lines of the brief, signet-sealed parchment. All the trimmings of official correspondence for a letter that was but a note of hand. “Montrose, you utter
cunt.”

Finnegan
. The man had never failed. Until now. Well. There was a first time for everything, wasn’t there? And it just had to happen where it embarrassed Cork in front of Montrose.
This noise comes from south of the Tweed and disturbs the peace of Edinburgh,
coupled with
reassure me that this tumult is not of your ordering.

Finnegan had, in his last, reported that the trail had gone cold at Edinburgh, but that they were using the Mackay bastard as a tethered goat. Lawfully, for a wonder, and they had weeks yet before the next assize, or whatever they called them in Scotland. If there was any way to use Mackay to draw out Cromwell, Finnegan had time to find it.

And now Montrose deems it time to take a piss where Cork was fishing?

He took a deep breath. Ranting fury was all very well—cleansing, in its way—but there was a time and a place for it and the planning of his next move was not that time nor place.

So. Montrose sends a subtle and coded warning that he is impatient with Cork’s man. The immediate solution being, of course, to remind Finnegan that the chase was for Cromwell. Another surge of fury. The one mistake Cork hated, the one he mocked others for mercilessly, the one he loathed in his king, was that of trying to tell the man on the spot what to do when he clearly knew better than anyone else.

Therefore, tell Finnegan that his plan is having unforeseen downsides and to look for another way to the prize.
That
made more sense. And reassure the man that he’d not lost his earl’s confidence. However infuriating, things like this just happened and blaming the man who they happened to was a fool’s business. Even if it was Finnegan’s fault, there was good cause to give the man some time to correct his error. As the earl’s Irish subjects would put it, “the man who never made a mistake never made anything,” and there was a wisdom in that. Finnegan’s record excused much in any case.

The problem, the
real
problem, was as ever King Charles Stuart. He’d given Montrose orders to quiet Scotland while at the same time advancing policy that had Scotland, if not up in arms, at least complaining bitterly. A natural state of affairs for the Scots, true, but it meant that when they had something real to complain about, they came at it with the benefit of
practice.

How to smooth Montrose’s ruffled feathers, then? Royal command? A possibility, but the prospect of trying to get an Order In Council out of the king that wasn’t hedged about with provisions and stipulations and at least one demand for religious conformity was fit to give a man a headache.

Call Finnegan off and ignore Montrose? That had the merit of being the easiest solution. But to give Montrose the cut direct—no, the cut indirect, not acknowledging his letter—would store up trouble for later. He didn’t know Montrose well enough to assess whether he’d bear a grudge, but the man was a Scotsman, so that definitely slanted the betting. Better, then, to reassure the man that his concerns would be attended to. Or apologize for not doing. How, then?

“Clerk!” he bellowed. There was bound to be one still up somewhere. His load of paperwork had more than trebled since he had supplanted Wentworth. And it had been no small thing as merely the earl of Cork.

It took a short while before he had a man present with copy-book and pens, time he used to gather his thoughts. “First,” he said, “To My Lord Montrose, the usual greetings, and see that the fair copy of this has no flavor of officialdom about it. It must be purely a plain letter. The man sent me his last on sealed parchment, the jackanapes, and I’m not about to let him play games like that with me.…”

* * *

Finnegan stamped his boots at the threshold of the White Hart. Whatever else you might say about Edinburgh, it fair rivaled Ireland for rain. The streets were a positive broth of mud when it came, and the stable yards of the White Hart no better. The coaching inn they’d found at Balgreen, west of Edinburgh proper, was a better prospect for the dirt. And for the lads making sport of the locals by calling it Ballygreen.

That little bit of fun was not going to help today. Every day, riding from Balgreen to the White Hart on Edinburgh’s Grass, he stopped by the offices of the Royal Post. Usually to send a short report of his lack of progress, occasionally to receive something from his earl. Today it was a fine, fine packet of bollocks. He’d read but the first few lines and resolved to get himself to a decent breakfast before he read any more. A man could take a headache getting this angry on an empty stomach.

The White Hart was tolerably good for food and drink, but hugely convenient for the Mackay house and, helpfully, for supplies and horses. He and the rest of the
torai
were now very well-found for horseflesh indeed. Helped along by the fact that a lot of the horse-dealers were what the Scots called Erse, and their tongue was close enough cousin to Irish that they could get along. They’d not had room for the whole band the day they’d arrived, but then again, there was something to be said for not having more than a small watch-camp this far in town. The men here were at risk, had to be alert, and were surrounded by temptation. Better to give them short spells of duty at the sharp end, four men at a time, so that they should remain alert and look forward to time out of the stink of the city.

It was Mulligan’s turn in charge, and a brief word that there had been no change left Finnegan a moment to order broth and bread and to read the letter from his earl. By the time the potman was clearing the dish away and bringing small beer, Finnegan was more comfortable with the whole business.

“Mulligan!” he called. “You’re sure there’s no change?”

“Sure, Chief,” Mulligan said, “even the woman’s stayed in. There was a few of the
cailleacha
from that Committee thing. From the looks his lordship’s giving them food and clothes for the poor.”

Finnegan chewed his lip a moment. He’d have to get a better description from one of the other boyos. Mulligan’s notion of a
cailleach
was anything twenty years and over with tits smaller than his head.

“Would you say that they’ve settled in a ways, there? Made themselves comfortable with us at their door?”

Mulligan sat himself down. “Now you say it so, Chief, I see that they have. Every now and then there’s a gang of them come out to start something, but I think Tully has the right of it that they’re doing that to give themselves the liberty to move someone in or out. We’ve run a man to all of the ways away in turn, but we’ve not caught the fucker yet. Nothing yesterday, it so happens. For mysef, I’m not hopeful. Too many ways out, not enough of us.”

“It was Tully saying that the other day that made me think of it. You’re to swear to our suspicion that Cromwell’s a visitor there, by reason of the attempts to drive off the watch on the place. We’ll have a warrant sworn out and then when we’re good and sure the man’s there, we attack.”

“The few of us against a defended house?” Mulligan’s voice betrayed genuine concern. “It’s about even in a fair fight, not that I’d engage in such folly, but they’ve stout doors and narrow windows in that place.”

Finnegan snorted. “Credit me with more brains than a fuckin’ rabbit, Mulligan. We’ve a town full of folk that hate us for bein’ Irish. And here and there, a few Erse who’re just as hated and see us as good customers, so they do. Be having a word about which of them is good for a brawl. Tinkers into the fuckin’ bargain, they’ll stop a bullet with the stink of them if nothing else.”

Mulligan laughed at that. “Sure and we don’t mean to start a war here, Chief?”

Finnegan glared back. “See the wit of you doesn’t choke the laughter, Mulligan. Be about it. And pass the word that any man that feels the need should get his leather stretched while he can, there’s like to be a brawl before long.”

* * *

When McCraith had finished his report, Ducos could barely suppress his laughter. “And this they said where it could be heard by all?”

McCraith nodded. “It seems to me they take no notice of servants.”

“A common failing,” Ducos agreed. “And they mean to recruit Erse and vagrants and the like?”

“So they said.” McCraith twisted his mouth in distaste. “Like calls to like, ye might say.”

“By their fruits shall ye know them,” Ducos quoted, to a round of affirmations from the rest of the Party assembled. “And it is, I think, past time that the people of Edinburgh saw that.”

“Aye,” Jamie Fraser put in, “a few o’ you laddies around the grassmarket to remark to folk on how much the Irish swine are talking to their fellow papists among the Erse, what say you, Michel?”

Ducos nodded. It was simple, subtle, drew the attention of the people to what they expected to see, and he didn’t doubt…“Absolutely, and before long they will be seeing it and remarking on it amongst themselves.”

The Gordons volunteered. Their family business would take them there for the next little while, or at least there as easily as anywhere. They had a small concern in rope and cordage, with a store in Leith and a stall they moved about Edinburgh as the trade went. With summer coming to its highest, there was plenty of horse trading on the greenmarket, and where there was horse trading there would be a need for hobbles and halters and other tack. Nobody would remark on their presence, and plenty there knew their faces. With McCraith watching the Irish indoors and the Gordons without, they would know in good time if anything was to happen.

“When they act, as act they must,” Ducos went on, “we must be ready. Whatever they attempt, and our brother McCraith’s news is that they mean to attack the Mackay house, can we raise the crowd behind them?”

“Agin popery? Easily,” Jamie said.

McCraith coughed. “Agin thievin’, drunken papist teuchter horse-copers an’ all. I’ve mair a sense of that locality, and the Erse are no’ well liked, no well liked at a’.”

Ducos snorted. “This is a truth wherever men gather to buy and sell horses: dealers in horseflesh are never liked. That the horse-sellers here are papists is a providence for which we should be grateful.”

There were chuckles at that.

Rab Fraser was next to speak. “I’ll do as I can to be in that locality for the next while. I’ve a wee bit put by if business there is slack.” Rab was a carter, a one-man operation with a cart and two horses.

The others turned out to be able to be at least within summons distance, and undertook to be around during their nonworking hours.

There were times Ducos missed working for the Comte D’Avaux most heartily, and this was one of them. He had been able to undertake all manner of operations under cover of being the comte’s man, often advancing the cause of God while being about his temporal master’s business. Now, he had to keep body and soul together working as a porter here, a hired bravo there, or otherwise presuming on the hospitality of the few clergy who were sympathetic to the cause.

Here and now, he, like Rab Fraser, had a store of coin put by for times like this when he simply
had
to be about the Lord’s work. And the help he could find was limited to these few who had time to spare from keeping themselves and their families fed. The ungodly saw to it that the common mass of people had neither time nor resources to make their desire to serve God known. A man who found himself a single short pay-day away from starvation could do only a very little to advance God’s cause on earth. Ducos was sure it was deliberate.

No matter. It took but a few men and good timing to raise a riot. That they had and more.