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restful sinecure I think,” he said.
    “Did you think it would be?”
    Carey laughed. “Christ, no, or I’d never have come.”
    “Don’t swear, Robin, you’re getting worse than father.”
    “He warned me that things were rotten here, but he didn’t know the details.”
    “How would he, staying warm in London with the Queen and messing about with players.”
    “Why Philly, you sound bitter.”
    She put her face in her hands.
    “John does his best in the East March but…”
    “He makes an ass of himself from time to time and the Berwick townsmen can’t stand him, I know.”
    “We need father to run a good strong Warden’s Raid,” said his sister ferociously, “burn all their towers down for them. Then they’d behave.”
    Carey put his arm round her shoulders and held her tight.
    “You don’t need father, you’ve got me, Philly my dear,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
    “You won’t let him make you leave?” She was blinking up at him with a frown.
    Carey sucked wind through his teeth. “If the Queen orders me back to Westminster, you know I have to go.”
    “She won’t, will she?”
    “Not if we can forestall whatever Lowther writes to Burghley.”
    “You could send a letter with the Berwick men and have John put it in his usual package to London.”
    “Yes,” said Carey, thoughtfully, “I’ll do that.” He yawned. “I’ll do it in the morning before I go out with Dodd. There’ll be no time later, I want to inspect my men before I call a paymuster for them. And I must go to bed, Philly, or I’ll fall asleep here and you’ll have to turf Nurse out of her trundle bed and put me in it.”
    Philly grinned at him. “Nonsense, she’d carry you down the stairs on her back and dump you with the other servants in the hall and then she’d give you a thick ear in the morning.”
    “She would,” Carey said as he stood up, and kissed his sister on the forehead. “Thank you for your good word to Scrope.”
    “You don’t mind that I made him send for you?”
    “Sweetheart, you did me the best favour a sister could, you got me out of London and saved my life.”
    “Oh?’ said Philly naughtily, “And who was she?”
    “None of your business. Good night.”
    Monday, 19th June, morning
    Dawn came to Carlisle with a feeble clearing of the sky and a wind to strip the skin and cause a dilemma over cloaks: wear one, be marginally warmer and risk having it ripped from your back by a gust, or leave it off and freeze. Dodd put on an extra shirt, a padded doublet and his better jack and decided to freeze.
    Carey was already in the stableyard when he arrived, between two of the castle’s rough-coated hobbies, checking girth straps and saddle leathers and passing a knowledgeable hand down the horses’ legs. He had on a clean but worn buff jerkin, his well-cut suit of green wool trimmed with olive velvet and his small ruff was freshly starched. He looked repulsively sprightly.
    “Do you never shoe your horses, Sergeant?” he asked as Dodd came into view.
    Dodd considered an explanation and decided against it. “No sir.” Carey patted a foreleg and lifted the foot to inspect the sturdy, well-grown hoof. He smiled quizzically and Dodd relented a little. “Not hobbies, sir.”
    “I like a sure-footed horse myself,” said Carey agreeably and mounted.
    As Carlisle’s stolid red walls and rabble of huts dropped behind them Carey seemed for some reason to be quite happy. Dodd failed to see why: the vicious wind was harrying clouds across the blue like a defeated army and the land was soused with the rain of the previous days. This was June, for Heaven’s sake, and it felt like February. Dodd began to run through his normal tally of worries: lack of money, the hay harvest likely to fail, lack of money, the barley crop poor, the rye and oats only middling and the wheat gone to the Devil, lack of money, pasturage poor and sour and Mildred, one of Janet’s work-horses, mysteriously off her feed, Janet