1635: A Parcel of Rogues - eARC (4 page)
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Authors: Eric Flint,Andrew Dennis
Tags: #Fiction, #Alternative History, #Science Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #General
“Maybe another time. I’ve fired muskets a time or two, and I’ve been along fowling with my dad on Hackney Marsh. For now, can we just sit and watch the sun go down? We’ve been scheming for weeks, running since the morning, and we’re probably going to be doing some hard traveling for a while yet, finding Master Cromwell’s children, poor man, and getting to Scotland. This might be the last comfy time we get, hey?”
“Might at that,” Darryl said, putting the rifle back down, and packing away the oil bottles and tools into the wooden box he transported them in. “I guess there’s a time to relax, and if this ain’t it I don’t know when is.”
Vicky answered with another nuzzle against his shoulder. “Until we can get a room of our own at some inn, hey?”
Darryl chuckled. “Hope you looked around for Stephen before you said that, honey.”
She scratched between his shoulder blades. “He likes you, silly. And it’s not like we can’t marry whenever we please. We don’t even have to do it in secret unless you’ve got people who’d object.”
“Don’t we have to stop somewhere, marriage banns or something?” Darryl had a vague memory of hearing, probably in some old movie watched through the deadening fug of a hangover, about couples from England running away to Scotland to get married. A town just over the border, something Green, but he’d never taken the trouble to remember it. Girl stuff, basically.
“Rita thought that too, when she had a little chat with me about you. Me and Mum set her straight. Don’t need a church at all, there’s some as says marriage isn’t even a sacrament. Of course, if we was to marry with just Stephen as a witness for the family I’d never hear the end of it. Although Mum did say if we couldn’t wait until everyone was together for the celebration, she’d understand. Not that I’m going to take her word for it, she’s got a mouth on her if she’s annoyed.”
Darryl called up his mental file on Vicky’s mother Isabel and decided that he, too, would verge on the side of caution. The scary thing was, the woman didn’t look or act like a ravening monster most of the time, but Darryl had watched from the Tower’s inner walls one time while she took a couple of mercenary privates to task for disregarding the hygiene regulations Rita Simpson had drawn up. None of the Yeoman Warders had missed on them by so much as a thousandth of an inch—professionals all, with good reason to take Rita’s word for medical matters—but the mercenaries King Charles had dumped on them toward the end of their stay in the Tower had been a different story.
The resulting explosion—no, detonation! brisance!—of furious denunciation had had more than one sergeant within earshot taking notes. Yeah, pissing off Vicky’s mum was a bad idea. Especially since it was such a reasonable request. He’d spent time taking his ease with those folks, seen them with cause to celebrate, and there was every reason to think that Vicky’s nuptials would be the kind of party that could be seen from space.
“Yeah. I’d love to just marry you quiet-like.” Darryl noted that the internal critic that’d recoiled in horror at the thought of marriage now just sat in the corner muttering
fine, not like I care whether you listen to me anyway
. “But it’d be a shame to disappoint your folks.”
She gave his arm a squeeze. “That’s why I want a private room at an inn. One with a window for you to come in through. Tradition’s important, y’see.”
Darryl squeezed back. “Tradition be damned,” he growled, “if there ain’t no window, I got dynamite that’ll tend to that little detail right quick.”
“I love it when you talk dirty, Darryl.”
Chapter 4
The Tower of London
“Is Finnegan here yet?” the earl of Cork asked Captain Holderness, the moment he entered the still-half-destroyed ruins of what had once been St. Thomas Tower.
Startled, the captain looked up from his examination of the hole in the wall. What he hoped to find there, this many days after the explosion that had blown the hole, was a mystery.
The captain glanced from Boyle to the corner behind him.
“Here, y’lordship,” came a voice from that corner. “And a fine mess you have for me.”
Boyle whirled round and addressed the man. “Behind me, by stealth, Finnegan—not lost your touch coming over the water?”
Finnegan grinned, a world of villainy in the broad, charming smile. “Not hardly, not hardly at all, y’lordship.”
Boyle grinned back. There was more than a little mockery in the title Finnegan gave him, but there was no cause for offense, if you knew him. The ruffian respected nobody who couldn’t get a knife to his throat to compel it. His father had been cut from the same cloth, albeit with less of a veneer of good taste and manners. Boyle had been driven out of his estates by the aftermath of the O’Neil rebellion, and when he got back in he’d made sure, through judicious use of such men as the Finnegans, that none of the seeds of rebellion lay dormant in his lands. It had the happy side-effect of keeping them busy away from stealing other mens’ horses and cattle, both popular pastimes in the wilder parts of Ireland. Paying for a little education and training for such men in their youth reaped dividends. Paying for a lot more education for their sons in turn, and hold out the prospect of an income for those lads that didn’t come from brute farming or thievery, and they’d rob the teeth out of the devil’s head for you. It was the kind of long-term thinking that Boyle liked, and excelled at.
Rapid improvisation in response to events was not his strongest suit, he knew, but if a fellow had laid the groundwork and ensured he had a ready supply of the Finnegans of this world at hand, then surprises could be handled.
“A fine mess, indeed, Finnegan. And knowing that such were about to be made, why, who could I send for across the water but you?” Boyle rubbed his hands against the briskness of the morning. “Have you not made some fine messes in your time? I’m sure you’ll be the right fellow to clear this one up.”
“Ah, well, if that turns out the right thing, yer earlness, sure and I’ll see it done. If not, well, who could yez have sent for over the water but me? By the by, and sure it’s only idle curiosity, but who’s the langer, here? And what’s his part in this mess?”
Finnegan tilted his head at Holderness as he spoke, and Boyle could see a look of concern on the man’s face as he tried to work out what he’d been called. Deciding that he didn’t need Finnegan killing a man in a duel to add to the day’s tomfoolery, Boyle waved him off. “You’ve plenty to be about, Holderness. And since it’s plain you’ve no Irish, Mister Finnegan addressed you with a title of the respect he feels you’re due. I know him of old as a man keen to show all proper respect.”
With Holderness safely away, Finnegan returned his attention to his master after a thoughtful-looking inspection of the damage to the Tower. In truth, not as bad as it looked, but plenty to cover a mass escape. “Almost like they were really only trying to make it look good, y’earlship. How many of the regular garrison are missing? With their families?”
“Sharp, Finnegan, yes, there are some Yeomen missing. I don’t know about the families yet, but Holderness, the useless streak of piss, will have that report for me tomorrow. And speaking of sharp, you’re going to get yourself cut with it one day, Finnegan. Supposing he’d known what that meant?” Boyle knew Finnegan didn’t care a bit, but the man’s education had been expensive and seeing it wasted in some pointless duel, or more likely in hiding the man away until the trouble over a killing died down, would offend his sense of parsimony.
“About as likely, my chief, as him realizing just exactly how much respect he’s due, so. Which I’ll remind you I gave him every bit of. He was in charge here, yes?”
“Yes, though to be fair His Majesty dumped the poor man into an impossible situation, watching over the Americans after they’d had months to work their subversion on the Warders. You’d have done better, but I doubt many would.” Boyle wasn’t quite that sure; he’d had his own spies inside the Tower and from what he’d heard it’d be a hard man and a cunning man both who got ahead of them with their suborning. Finnegan was both, but enough to outbid or outfox people who could see a child live who would have died?
That was the Americans’ signal advantage: paying in considerably more than coin. Boyle was sure there were some things he could learn from them and use back in County Cork to buy even more of the peoples’ loyalty. And there was every chance the Americans would provide the knowledge to do much of it just for the asking. It was a frustration his own youngest boy wasn’t older; from the future histories he’d have a name to make in the natural philosophies, and having the family’s own famous scientist—the new word still sounded odd to him—there to bring the new marvels to the people would be a nice touch. As it was, one of the older boys would have to serve. Either Richard, to cement him into the minds of the people as their future earl, or Roger, to give him something besides his martial ambitions to think on.
“I’m sure your lordship sees no harm in having the man sweat a while. So, who am I to catch for you?”
“The missing so far are Wentworth, Cromwell, and all the Americans we had here. I’ll see you get a list before you’ve got your boys ready to ride. Picked up anything by yourself, yet?” Part of what made Finnegan so bloody useful was the fact that outside County Waterford, everyone assumed he was just another bog-trotting paddy, if English, or a ruffian
torai
, if Irish. Behind the brutish facade, that he could turn up and down like a lampwick, was a keen mind that could get ahead of his master’s orders in gratifyingly useful ways. Never an excess of zeal, no, but frequently armed with just the right information or preparations to get at the task in ways that left other servants standing. Boyle had more than one bright man in his service, but Finnegan was definitely one of the best. Top three, at least.
“Nothing yet, apart from a quiet word with folk as we strolled in. Boats went downriver, two of them, maybe three, maybe just the one. Your earlness knows what a lot of half-stories come out of a mess like this. I’ve given Mulligan and O’Hare a bag of pennies to buy drinks down by the water to get some tales told. Sure and they’re nothin’ but ignorant culchie paddies, that anybody’ll tell the tale to in their shit-shovellin’ britches. Them boys’d make friends with the cat I haven’t got and have him telling every grand tale he knows in half an hour.”
Boyle laughed. “Aye, and they’d have the cat’s daughters pregnant in half an hour more. I’ve heard the tales.”
“Sure they’ve the vices of their virtues, now.” Finnegan grinned. With a little easy-going charm it was possible to make even his crew of monsters seem like loveable rogues. Mulligan and O’Hare had rarely turned up as a team before Finnegan collared them, but then tricksters and cheats seldom worked together. And it would surprise Boyle not a whit to find that one or two of those heartbroken maids hadn’t quite said yes first. As long as he kept them in coin, though, they’d confine themselves to whores or it’d not be a trial for rape they got but a quiet dagger where it’d teach them not to embarrass their master. And Finnegan would wipe his conscience clean at the same time he did his blade. Nor would Boyle lose any sleep, come to it. He’d hold the leashes of monsters while they were useful, but only a fool would shed tears when it came time to put them down. Finnegan’s own guise of virtue came, Boyle knew, from cold calculation—he got more and more reliably through looking like a faithful, if grim, earl’s man. If he knew he faced no repercussion he’d wallow in blood and take a pleasure in it that was all the more chilling for how mild it was.
“Be that as it may. Downriver’s likely. Don’t trouble yourself with where they’ve taken ship from, I’ve sent word to Chatham to get a sea-search in hand. I’ve no more idea than you whether such a thing is even possible, so I’ve asked for word of what success is likely by return of messenger. I’m more worried by what they might manage that stay behind, and I heard about two boats too. If one of those was some second mission, we’ve a rat loose in the pantry. I want it, them, whoever, caught.”
Finnegan touched a forelock. “Am I not your earlness’s terrier, to rat at command?”
“That you are. Stay on the trail, have messages back to me as often as may be. Run them to ground if you can, frustrate whatever knavery they’re about. I’ve a fine lot of politics to play here in London, and you know how I am with surprises on that score. Keep Cromwell, Wentworth and the Americans from pissing in my gravy while I work on the king. You know me for a generous master, and if I can take this trick, Finnegan, I’ll have much to be generous with.”
“Now that I can warm my heart with, my lord.”
“See that you do. See to your boys and what you can learn here. I’ve a clerk going hot-foot back to my house for a pouch of all I have on Cromwell and Wentworth, copied against need. You’ll carry it with you and learn what you need as you go. See it’s burnt before it falls into anyone’s hands but yours or mine. More than one of the little birds that told me what’s in those papers would pay with his life for telling me what he knew, and where would I be without their songs to delight me?”
“I’ve not to kill any birds while I chase your rats for you. Right you are, your earlnessship.”
“Be off, before your jests make me forget how useful you are.”
Chapter 5
“It comes to something that a man may easier read shite than take one,” Robert Mackay muttered. Getting from the commode back to the bed was no joke, but when a man broke his back, that was what he’d to put up with. There was probably a bloody theologian somewhere blethering something about God’s plan out his arse, and be damned to the prating pederast. All the pain and indignity of being helped to the pot, all the indignity and pain of being helped back, and then the
fucking paperwork
was still waiting.
“Will ye haud ye’re noise, ye auld fool? If you’d bided on that bluidy mare ye’d no be led theer greetin’ yer wame in ma lugs, forbye. And will ye bide readin’ an’ no mither me? F’puir auld Meg? So’s I can clean, here?”
Mackay sighed. She’d a sharp tongue on her, but she spoke sense. Of the nurses he’d hired to mind him while he was waiting to be measured for his last overcoat, this one was the only one who’d not gotten on his nerves beyond all enduring. Largely by trying her damnedest to get on his nerves, as far as he could tell, which made a change from irritating servility or slovenly dullard idleness. And she’d a half-sister who was a grand nurse for the wee girl, and a fair portion of her family had served here in the Edinburgh house over the years. Her closest relative was one of the hostlers down in the mews, if Mackay recalled aright. Of course, it’d been years since he’d been anywhere near the stables. A carriage for long trips, a litter for short ones. And so much arse and elbow he tried to avoid it if he could.
Which meant he was sat here, a fowl on the water for crap like his chief had sent him. Clan loyalties cut through Scots politics like fault lines, which was to say they only really mattered during quakes. Or if you were mining for something, which Reay definitely was. Oh, he could dress it up all he pleased, but he was after something that Charles Stuart would not like. Of course, what Charles Stuart did not like and what he could do anything about were two different things. The man hadn’t called a parliament in years. Mackay couldn’t recall precisely how long, but it couldn’t be much less than ten years. Without taxes and levies, the House of Stuart was governing from its prerogatives. For a certainty, something had come in from the deal with the French, but how much of that remained in the Stuart’s coffers was a vexed question. Not much, if the reports on his spending on all those mercenaries were right. And there was replacing the navy ships the French had gotten shot to pieces. That had to cost right enough, and a necessity since Stuart seemed dead set on offending the United States of Europe.
“Something’s no’ so much shite, I reckon.”
“Aye? And what’d ye ken, fishwifie?”
“Och, fishwifie, is it, y’aud de’il? I ken ye’re grinnin’ like ye’ve been thievin’ frae bairns.”
“Aye, just that that idiot Stuart—”
“Papist—” Meg put in, as though she didn’t even notice she was doing it.
“—who
may
have
some
papist sympathies or at least be willing to tolerate them—is fire and flame for making himself a nuisance to the USE—”
“Papists.”
“Aye? And wha’ wad oor wee fishwifie ken?”
“They have a cardinal. Papists ha’ cardinals. This is aye weel known.”
Mackay looked at her. He could tell when she was quoting the blithering idiot of a preacher at her dementedly independent kirk, because she lost her own accent and used his. And the blithering eejit claimed to be a good Scots presbyterian, like he knew any more of scripture than a hungry dog that’d ate a testament. “I’ll remind ye, Meg, that yon bampot ye set store by disnae ken good sense fra’ a pint o’ pish on the subject o’ European politics or any religion he cannae get fra’ the bottom o’ a bottle.”
“Och, you tak’ that back, ye auld thief! The reverend is a pious man—”
“Haud yer tongue!”
Mackay bellowed. He’d had to learn to put up with a lot since he’d broken his back, compensations like the granddaughter his bastard son had presented him with notwithstanding. But he wasn’t listening to some rabble of a half-educated excuse for a minister described as a pious man when the nearest he got to piety was sobering up on Sundays, the better to rant a meager collection-plate out of an ignorant congregation of waiting-women and idlers. After hearing one too many quotes from the man, Mackay had made inquiries. The man was technically no more than a deacon putting on airs as a curate, for all he insisted he was a lecturer after the Puritan style. Even the rest of the congregationalist mutton-heads in the kirk he preached at knew better than to let him make himself out an elder. He was permitted to preach before the main services to a mostly empty room. Mackay had been amused to discover that there were waiting-women there anyway, there being idiots willing to pay a penny to show that they were pious enough to make sure of their place at worship and rich enough to pay for it done. Which was how the place was on Meg’s regular Sunday-morning round of services, finishing up at St. Giles’s for a Leith warehouse-owner who never turned up anyway. Apparently he thought paying Meg to sit in for him on her creepie-stool and listen to the Word on his behalf would be enough to get him in to heaven. Whatever, the idiot at the independent kirk could spout all the shite he liked but Mackay wasn’t going to listen to it quietly.
He glared at Meg, who’d adopted the dropped-jaw, shocked stare of the rarely-contradicted. “The USE is not papist. It’s not Calvinist. It’s not Lutheran, for a’ that Gustavus Adolphus is a Lutheran and a pious one from what I hear. And there’s nothing so much wrong with Lutherans, not at all. The worst ye can say is they’re wrong in the matter of religion. And they’re folk for a’ that, ye daft hen. As for the papists, aye, they’ve a cardinal for the USE. Because there’s papists in the USE. And they’re let be as they should be, to be wrong in their ain way. Or would ye seek tae save ’em against their will? Do mair than witness? Get yersel’ tae heaven through good works, will ye? Like these blethering meddlers in the kirk that want tae rule as well as minister?”
He kept up his glare. Meg sat down heavily on a chair. Mackay was secretly gratified. He’d had a stare that could quell the unruliest private soldier in his day, and it was pleasing to see that being crippled hadn’t taken the edge off it.
“Didnae think o’ that, did ye? No? Now take yon pot o’ shite oot o’ here, and mind it’ll do ye more good than anything ye hear from a whole regiment o’ divines if ye don’t mind the truth o’ religion, which is to save yer ain soul, no’ rule the world. Out!”
Meg left in a hurry. Mackay sighed. He’d either got her to shut up with the constant refrain of
no popery
that was the only bit of her goading he didn’t find refreshing, or he’d lost the first nurse he’d been able to stand at any price.
Still, yelling at her had given him a few thoughts to reply to Reay with. His chief had been careful to couch his letter in terms praising the merits of the freedom of religion the USE was now practicing, and how harmful enforcement of
cuius regio, eius religio
had proven in the Germanies. It was surely, purely a coincidence that the packet had included some information on the course of the wars of religion from future scholars, and that the pages concerning the Bishops’ Wars were right at the front.
And then all the material on how Scotland ought, in the future when her soldiers came home from the wars, be best served by a united government that settled secular affairs securely and left the divines alone. That he was entirely silent on how the divines would be involved in secular affairs was surely just an oversight, a matter he had chosen not to deal with at that time. The fact that he had said nothing about whom the government of Scotland might be united
under,
well, only a fool would see that he was not taking it entirely as read that that meant a United Kingdom under the House of Stuart. To suggest otherwise, well, that would be to accuse Reay of rankest treason. Only the rankest traitor would compass his words in that way, surely?
Mackay smiled. Donald Mackay, Lord Reay and chief of Clan Mackay might act the bluff soldier, but he was chief of one of Scotland’s greater clans—even in numbers; in quality there was none finer than Clan Mackay—and as such bore a heavy weight of political responsibility. Under such a weight, a man grew cunning or failed, and Reay hadn’t failed yet. He and several of his sons were now senior commanders under Gustavus Adolphus, their estates in Caithness and Sutherland doing well by all accounts and, in the event of clan strife, able to be defended by several thousand veteran soldiers with the latest in modern arms and tactics.
The Ring of Fire had been an opportunity that the Mackays had been well placed to grasp—not least because it was a Mackay who was the first of Gustav Adolf’s soldiers who’d encountered the Americans. Robert Mackay’s own son Alex, in fact. Who’d found himself a bride into the bargain, now a baroness of Sweden, which was a weight off Robert’s mind. It would not do for a man to leave his legitimate issue short to support his bastard, so seeing young Alex make his own way in the world with great success was a fine thing. And it meant that the fast friendship between Alex and his other sons would never be troubled by vexatious disputes over property. The boy even had his own retainers, when those lads finished their terms of service with the USE. He’d be a credit and an asset to the clan, and none would give him grief over his bastard birth. Not lightly, anyway. Julie’s rifle was a thing of legend from one end of Europe to another, and a man who could treat your death as so minor a matter as to leave it to his wife was nobody’s whipping-boy. As he’d pointed out to several idiots who’d made snide remarks.
How the Mackays would have fared if their patron had died at Lutzen was a detail Grantville hadn’t brought back, although Donald had backed the losing side in the civil war that would have happened. It looked as though he was minded not to make that mistake again. Or the first time, if a fellow wanted to be particular about it. So, Reay was sending oblique communications. Assuming that your opponent had the intelligence to read your mail was a good one, so you’d to couch it in terms you’d both understand that could be explained away as innocent. Using a cipher was a dead giveaway, of course. There’d be room and time to clear up misunderstandings later, at need. Unless Mackay missed his guess, this fellow Lennox who’d be coming over to Scotland soon, was one of his son’s hard crew of borderer cavalry. A reliable fellow, to hear Alex speak of it.
Lennox would no doubt have been been briefed in full by Lord Reay. Though he was not a Mackay clansman by birth, but a border reiver who’d decided to take up respectable soldiering, Lennox had come to enjoy the security of a clan loyalty.
For the time being, though, Lord Reay wrote of curbing the secular power of the divines and uniting Scotland’s leadership. So. Who was most likely the target, here? The trick with Scots politics, of course, was to stand back and squint a little, to get the broad strokes of the picture. Once you started in on the details of clan and family feuding, litigation and lesser disputes, you’d never be stopping. You had two main lots, though: the presbyterians who disagreed with James VI’s dictum
no bishop, no king
—they were quite happy to do without bishops and treated monarchy as a separate matter—and the episcopalians, who supported bishops in order to support the king. There weren’t many in Scotland, other than the bishops themselves, who regarded episcopacy as a good idea in and of itself. Of course, there were plenty of smaller factions looking for more independence for the various independents, but mostly it was the adherents of the covenant of 1580 against the episcopalians. Call it covenant against royalist, but it was more shaded than that.
And then you had the highland-lowland rivalry, what with the highlanders still counting plenty of papists among their number. The chances of actually extirpating the old religion in the wilder places were remote at best, whatever the Covenant might say on the matter. And when you got right to it, more than a few of the greater lords of the Scots peerage, Reay of the Mackays included, counted thousands of highlanders among their people, and if put to it could raise fine private armies of savage light troops more than willing to wreak plentiful havoc for the promise of plunder. Of course, that’d have the lowlanders taking up arms against the prospect of thieving, drunken highland savages let loose in their midst.
Mackay shook his head ruefully. He was letting himself get drawn in. Covenant and Episcopal parties. Stick with that. It was a matter on which everyone had a mind which side he was on, and there were real political consequences to it. Not quite Crown against Parliament the way the English did it, but close enough. Lord Reay—and who else? A question for another time, that—was looking to add a third faction to the mix. Taking over one or another of the first two or recruiting from both to get bigger than either? From the hints Reay had scattered through his letter, he was looking to unite a new faction behind the idea of loyalty to Scotland first and only. Which was interesting, but any fool could see there was a reason Scotland had ended up the subordinate kingdom after the Union of the Crowns in the person of James the Sixth and First. It wasn’t simply the inability of Scotsmen in the mass to agree on anything no matter how trivial, although that had certainly contributed heavily. It was the plain fact that Scotland, as a country, had no resources save the flower of her manhood with which to make her way in the world. Three quarters of the country was good for hard-scrabble herding and little else. There were mines here and there, but precious few of those, no great ports, no towns with long traditions of manufacture. If you couldn’t butcher it or sell its wool, Scotland produced very little of it.
There
might
be a hint in the shape of the digression Reay had made about the value of the Wietze oil-fields, where they were mining the oil that made the fuel for the wonderful machines Grantville designed and Magdeburg built. Was there a source of that under Scotland? If so, there was something reduced the matter to the irreducible. Or irreducible when it came to Scotland, say. The factions. Who to talk to about that? Mackay decided it was time to make some notes, and rang for his secretary.