A Murder of Crows: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (9 page)

“Sir Robert, is your father providing bailiffs to back up the court staff?” he asked Carey.

Carey was busy smiling and taking his hat off to a boatload of attractive women heading downstream for London Bridge.

“Hm? Oh yes, the steward’s arranging for it and they’ll meet us at Westminster once you have the warrant.”

“Ay, but we’ll niver arrest him, will we?” Dodd said, thinking of Richie Graham of Brackenhill’s likely reaction to any such attempt, never mind Jock o’the Peartree’s. Jock would still be roaring with laughter at the joke as he slit your throat.

The Hunsdon boat was butting up against the boat landing. Carey and Dodd hopped in, while Enys seemed very nervous of the water and nearly fell as he stepped across. He sat himself down and gripped the seat hard with his hands, swallowing.

“I rather think we will, Sergeant,” said Enys, “although I’m sure not for long. And as there is no doubt at all that as soon as he’s bailed he’ll be trying to intimidate the witnesses, I have drafted a writ against him for maintenance to keep in reserve.”

Carey blinked as if puzzled for a moment and then shouted with laughter. “That old Statute against henchmen?”

“Old and from Her Majesty’s grandfather’s time, but still on the books. It’s not the oldest statute I shall be citing.”

“What is?” asked Dodd fascinated, although he had no idea that henchmen were illegal.

“Edward III 1368,” said Enys. Dodd used his fingers to work it out.

“It’s two hundred and twenty-four years old,” he said. “What good is that?”

“It’s a highly important principle,” said Enys, looking annoyed. “You might say it is the foundation of our English liberty. It says that no man may be put to the question or tortured privily without trial or warrant. In effect, habeas corpus.”

Once again Dodd struggled with foreign language. He supposed they meant something about dead bodies.

“I don’t recall Mr. Secretary Walsingham paying that much attention to the statute when he was questioning some Papist,” Carey pointed out.

Enys looked at him distantly. “Sir Robert, it is a fact that a man who murders another for his money may pay no attention to the statutes against murder. It is in the nature of sinful men that they break the law. It is a very different thing to hold that there is no such law to be broken, which Heneage does by his actions.”

“And if the law be changed in parliament?” asked Carey.

“If it be changed, then we must abide by the new law,” said Enys. “But this law has not been changed nor repealed. It was excluded from matters of treason and the Henry VIII statute of Praemunire made many religious matters into treason. Therefore Mr. Secretary Walsingham could and did rightly ignore the statute since he was seeking out Papist traitors against Her Majesty and the Commonweal of England.”

Carey nodded while Dodd stared in fascination to hear such a young man speak in such long and complicated sentences, using such pompous words. Now the lawyer lifted one finger in a lecturing manner. “However, this is not a matter of treason at all. Sergeant Dodd was neither guilty of nor accused of any crime whatsoever when Mr. Vice falsely imprisoned and assaulted him. There was a fortiori no trial and no warrant. I have seldom heard of such a clear case.”

“Ay,” said Dodd, catching up with most of the last part of the speech, “that’s right.” His head was buzzing with the legal talk.

“Perhaps Mr. Vice will simply claim that he was looking for me and laid hold of my henchman to track me down,” said Carey.

“I’m sure he will,” said Enys. “However the fact remains that you were not accused of treason either, Sir Robert. Even your brother was accused only of coining, which may indeed come under the treason laws as petty treason…”

Dodd stretched his eyes at that. Was coining treason? Did Richie Graham with his busy unofficial mint know about it? Did he care?

“…but it is not a direct attack upon her Majesty nor upon the Commonweal of England. And in point of fact, if what you have told me is correct, I believe that Mr. Heneage may be vulnerable to a charge of coining and uttering false coin himself, with your brother and the apothecary Mr. Cheke as witnesses against him.”

Carey whistled through his teeth. “I thought we couldn’t prove that?”

Enys shrugged. “Heneage will bring oath-swearers to disagree but it will depend on the judge. It’s arguable. At this stage it doesn’t have to be provable.”

They came to Westminster steps and jumped out—Enys seemed clumsy again and hesitant as he stepped onto the boat landing at just the wrong time. He might have wound up in the Thames without a quick shove from Dodd.

“Thank you, sir,” he muttered, looking embarassed. “I am still weakened by my sickness.”

“Ay, but your face is healed?” said Dodd, immediately worried because he had never had smallpox in his life.

“Oh it is, I am no longer sick of it. But the pocks attacked my eyes as well and my sight and balance are not what they were,” said the man, rubbing his hand on his face and jaw. Dodd could see the pits on the backs of his hands going up his wrist. Jesu, that was an ugly disease as well, worse than plague in some ways. Of course you were far more likely to die of the plague, but that was relatively quick and if your buboes burst you’d probably get better with no more than a couple of scars on your neck and groin and never be afraid of getting it again. You weren’t going to be hideous for the rest of your life. As for pocks on your eyes…Jesus God. At least there wasn’t much smallpox on the Borders, though Dodd had had a terrible fright when he was nine when his hands had got blistered from a cow with a blistered udder. Both his parents were alive then; it hadn’t been anything, and the blisters on both him and the cow got better soon enough.

They walked up through the muddy crowded alleys to the great old Hall of Westminster, hard by the Cathedral. The place was teeming with a flock in black robes, some wearing silk with soft flat square hats on their heads and followed by large numbers of young men carrying bags and papers.

“Lord above,” murmured Carey, “It gets worse every year. Michaelmas term hasn’t even started yet and look at them.”

Enys took a deep breath at the doorway into Westminster Hall, gripped his sword hilt lefthanded, and forged ahead into the crowd of lawyers around a desk who were shouting at the listing officers.

He came threading out again, his hat sideways. Just in time he grabbed it and clamped it back on his head.

“Sirs, we shall go before Mr. Justice Whitehead in an hour to swear out the pleadings and have the warrant granted.”

Dodd nodded as if this were all quite normal but he thought that it surely couldn’t be so simple. Normally it took months for a bill to be heard in Carlisle and years if it was a Border matter. Hunsdon had handed Carey a purseful of silver that morning to be sure the matter was well up the list which he had passed to Enys. Perhaps that had worked.

They ventured into Westminster Hall which was split into a dozen smaller sections by wooden partitions while the old fashioned ceiling full of angels and stone icicles echoed with the noise. You couldn’t see the floor at all because it was covered in straw and dung from the streets. Dodd rubbed with his boot and saw some pretty tiles under the muck.

It was indescribably noisy. Not all the partitions had judges sitting behind a wooden bench, but in the ones that did, red-faced men in black gowns were shouting at each other and waving papers. Bailiffs and court servants shouted at each other for the next cases to come to whichever court. There was a hurrying to and fro and an arguing and shouting between lawyers, between litigants, between lawyers and litigants. At every pillar it seemed, there was a huddle of mainly black-robed men engaged in some kind of argument at the top of their voices. It was exactly like a rookery.

Dodd was already starting to get a headache. Although lacking the clang of metal and the snort of horses, the row was as loud as a battlefield, or even louder.

Enys seemed to have spotted his judge and was beckoning them over to stand next to him by the partition.

“I wanted to see what kind of mood his honour is in.”

Dodd peered around the high wooden boards. The judge, sitting with his coif on his head and a pen in his fist, pince nez perched on his nose, was scowling at a shivering young lawyer in a rather new stuff gown.

This judge seemed a little different from the others: an astonishingly luxuriant but carefully barbered grey beard decorated his face and his grey eyes glittered with wintry distaste.

“Mr. Burnett,” he was saying witheringly, “have you in fact read your brief?”

The young lawyer facing him trembled like a leaf and gulped. Judge Whitehead threw his pen down.

“This matter, Mr. Burnett, clearly comes under the purview of the Court of Requests, not King’s Bench. Why you have seen fit to plead it in front of me is a mystery. Well?”

The young lawyer seemed to be choking on his words while behind him his clients looked at each other anxiously.

“God’s truth,” said the judge wearily, “Get out of my court and go and redraft your pleadings, paying due attention to the cases of Bray v. Kirk and the matter of the Abbot of Litchfield v. Habakkuk. Adjourned.”

The young lawyer scurried off, trembling. An older lawyer warily approached the bench, trailing his own clients. “Yes, Mr. Irvine, what is it now?” said the judge in a voice as devoid of welcome as a winter maypole.

Dodd glanced at Enys to see how this was affecting him. To his surprise he saw Enys was smiling quietly and his brown eyes sparkling.

“Disnae sound verra happy the day,” said Dodd, tilting his head at the judge who could be heard berating the unfortunate Mr. Irvine from the other side of the partition, his weary voice cutting through the hubbub like a knife.

“Shh,” warned Enys, with his pocked finger on his pitted lips, “Mr. Justice Whitehead has very good hearing.”

“Ay.”

“Mind you, he may not be able to understand you for all that.”

Dodd sniffed, offended. It was southerners who spoke funny, not him. Meanwhile Enys was listening to the judge’s comments with his head tilted as if listening to music. At one piece which seemed to be entirely in foreign, he chuckled quietly.

“Whit language are they speakin’?” Dodd wanted to know.

“Norman French,” said Enys. “Generally most cases are heard partly in English nowadays, but a great deal of the precedent is in Latin or French.”

“Jesu. And what’s sae funny?”

“His honour just made a rather learned pun.”

“Ay?”

Enys chuckled again in the aggravating way of someone enjoying a private joke. Carey had found a pillar he could lean languidly against and had crossed his arms while he surveyed the passing throngs through half-shut eyes.

“D’ye think he’ll be on my side?”

“Sergeant, his honour will find what is correct in law, you can be sure of that.”

“Ay, but will he be on ma side?”

“My father was wondering if a gift…?” said Carey delicately.

Enys shook his head. “Asolutely not, sir…It would guarantee the opposite decision.”

Carey looked surprised and worried. “Yes, but if we can’t buy him…”

“If we
could
buy him, then so could Mr. Vice—it would become not a court case but an auction,” said Enys. “I had rather deal with someone that gives justice without fear or favour.”

Carey’s eyebrows went up further. “I hadn’t thought that any judges did that.”

“Remarkably, sir, there are a few. In fact, I am in some hopes that Mr. Vice might make the mistake that we will not.”

Dodd was listening to the learned judge asking Mr. Irvine if he had ever heard of the relevant law and precedents to this case, and if he had, why had he quoted the wrong ones? Enys had an appreciative grin on his face.

“He sounds a terror,” said Dodd.

The bailiff gave mournful tongue with their names five minutes later as Irvine and his clients fled with their case adjourned until the lawyer could learn to read.

With a spring in his step and an expression on his face that looked remarkably like Carey’s before he launched into some insane battle or gamble, Enys led the way into the little booth and bowed to the judge. Watching Carey out of the corner of his eye and seeing him uncover and bow, Dodd scrambled to do likewise, dropped his new beaver hat on the disgusting floor, and had to grovel to pick it up again before somebody stood on it.

“Mr. Enys,” growled the judge, “I had heard you had thought better of the law and gone back to Cornwall?”

“No, my lord,” said Enys surprised. “Who told you that?”

“Evidently a fool,” snorted the judge. “Well?”

Enys handed over the sheaf of pleadings and the warrant written in a fine clear secretary hand. The judge paused as he saw who was named as the Respondent and shot a piercing grey stare over his spectacles at Enys who stared straight back, not a muscle moving in his face. Not that you could have told if it had, thanks to the scarring, thought Dodd. That lawyer would be a nightmare opponent at primero.

The judge turned to the warrant. Very briefly, something like the ghost of a smile hovered near his mouth.

“You have started proceedings in the Old Bailey?”

“Yes, your honour. Not wishing to waste any time, I briefed a solicitor to file the necessary criminal indictment about an hour ago. We are here because although the crimes were committed in the City, Mr. Vice Chamberlain Heneage is in fact resident at Chelsea which is for our purposes in the borough of Westminster.”

Another small smile. The judge turned to Dodd. “Mr. Dodd…”

Dodd coughed hard with nervousness, but he was not going to go down in the record as anything other than what he was and what he was came to more than a mere mister.

“
Sergeant
Dodd, my lord,” said Dodd. “Beggin’ your pardon.”

“You’re not a lawyer, surely?” said the judge, his brow wrinkling.

Crushing his immediate impulse to challenge the man to a duel over the insult, Dodd coughed again.

“Nay sir, Ah’m Land-Sergeant o’Gilsland, in Cumberland. On the Borders, sir.”

The judge’s lips moved as he worked this out. “Really? My apologies. How do you come to be in London, then, Sergeant?”

“Ah come with Sir Robert Carey, my lord.”

The judge transferred his attention to Carey who stepped forward and swept him another Courtier’s bow.

“
Carey
? Is my lord Baron Hunsdon involved in this matter, Sir Robert?”

“Yes, your honour,” explained Carey with a face so open and innocent, Dodd felt the judge was bound to get suspicious. “My most worshipful father is outraged that Mr. Vice Chamberlain Heneage should have falsely imprisoned and assaulted Sergeant Dodd who serves under me in the Carlisle Castle Guard where I am Deputy Warden under my Lord Warden of the West March. My father is very kindly helping Sergeant Dodd seek redress for his injuries and the insult.”

Even Carey shifted slightly under the impact of the judge’s skewering glare and silence. “Is this a matter of Court faction, Sir Robert?” he asked at last.

“No your honour, of course not. It is a matter of seeking justice for an abhorrent and illegal assault and…”

“Yes, yes, Sir Robert, thank you,” sniffed Judge Whitehead. “Mr. Enys, I suppose you had better open these pleadings.”

This Enys did with verve and in detail, not seeming to need to shout to be heard quite clearly in the court, quoting various laws in parliament against which Heneage had offended and various legal precedents establishing the same. More than half of what he said was in Norman French but Carey, who spoke French, whispered a translation for Dodd. Enys came to the end and Dodd was surprised to find he had understood most of what had been said that wasn’t actually in foreign.

“Sergeant Dodd,” said Judge Whitehead, “are those the facts as Mr. Enys has related them? You were arrested in error instead of Sir Robert on a warrant of debt and not believed as to your true identity. You were shortly after removed from the Fleet by Mr. Heneage who was fully aware that you were not in fact Sir Robert Carey since he complained of it. You were then falsely imprisoned by him in his coach and interrogated by him therein, during which time he himself as well as his servants and agents laid violent hands upon you?”

“Ay, my lord.” Dodd felt himself flushing with anger, enraged again at being beaten like a boy or a peasant of no account and not able to fight back.

“Mr. Heneage produced no warrant and did not accuse you of any crime?”

“No, my lord.”