Dacre's War (11 page)

She stripped another grass, fingers worrying while her mind raced. ‘The men in Dacre’s pay are thieves and killers, who raid and rape and burn, right across the border. Yet when they have their day in court, they always walk out free men. When did you last hear of an Armstrong on a gibbet? Or in a gaol for more than a week? The fines imposed on them, when they do reach the dock, are as nothing to the money they have stored up for themselves, in league with Dacre. And it’s not just the Armstrongs. Half of the western marches, on both sides of the border, are in his purse.’

Crozier stared at the waterfall. ‘If the Scottish court knew the truth of it,’ he said, ‘they would send their army to crush them all, Scots and English alike. They have no idea of what goes on out here. Nor, most likely, does King Henry.’

Louise nodded. ‘You’d think these parts were invisible. Perhaps for that reason, Dacre has been allowed too free a hand. But we can make use of that fact. He’s going too far. He’s taking liberties, risks, acting as if he’s above the law. And we are not alone in having reason to hate him, my love. Many people want Dacre gone. I’ve heard even the Bishop of Durham is growing suspicious, though knowing how well the baron stands with the king, he says nothing.’

Hesitating, she swept seeds from her skirts. ‘What you need to do is risky. But,’ she continued, as if to reassure herself, ‘not anywhere near as dangerous as tackling him in the open and on your own.’

‘Out with it,’ Crozier said. ‘Tell me what you are thinking.’

Louise paused. Her concern was clear as she held his gaze, before dropping her own. ‘It might be too dangerous. And yet the more I have thought on it, the more I have come to believe that audacity is what’s required. You need to surprise him. And to do that, you must not act alone. You need to be part of an alliance, of men he would never suspect of trying to do him harm. Gain the ear and the trust of his enemies and the job will be half done. They’re too scared to confront him alone. Who would have the courage to speak to the king or his counsellors without knowing they have allies to back them up? A single plaintiff risks not only Henry’s rough justice, but Dacre’s immediate revenge.’

She gazed across the forest to the mid-morning sky, where a lazy buzzard circled. ‘Out here, he can kill whoever he likes. Nobody would ever find the body, let alone the culprit. But if you can bring his naysayers together, if you can make them realise that there is strength and safety in numbers, then you have a chance. The king will be obliged to take heed of what men such as those tell him, when they are all agreed. If he were to ignore them, he knows the north could revolt.’

‘So I act as the messenger boy,’ Crozier said.

‘No. Negotiator and nemesis.’ Her reply was so grim, he felt a chill creep up his spine. She knew as well as he that what she was proposing might prove fatal.

‘There’s only one flaw,’ he said slowly. ‘Dacre’s enemies are also mine.’

‘You might think that,’ she answered, taking his arm, ‘but you would be wrong.’

That evening the hall of Crozier’s Keep lay shadowed in smoky light. Crooked candles glowed on the long deal table, the fire leapt high in its hearth, and tallow lamps flickered from their niches in the walls. Cast in pewter gloom, the group around the table looked like the Last Supper redrawn for a cold country: disciples wrapped in badger skins and plaid, the table empty but for a quantity of drink even Christ at Cana could not have conjured.

Crozier sat at the top, kestrel on his wrist, and men on either side. Louise was placed at the foot, though her husband looked to her so often she might have been the head of the clan and he merely her consort. Feeding the hawk a scrap and sending it back to its perch on the wall, Crozier called everyone to attention. Jugs and tumblers were put down, conversations cut off, some of the men glancing at Louise, hoping her face would hold a clue of what was to come.

‘Gentlemen, cousins, brothers.’ The borderer rapped the table with his dagger’s hilt, waiting for the hall to quieten. When all were listening he outlined the plot, while the clan nodded gravely as their interest mounted.

‘We need to know which knights on the English border we can persuade to our cause,’ he told them. ‘Even those who want Dacre dead will be suspicious of a man like me: neither noble nor at the Scottish court, and famous for raiding their countrymen. For those reasons alone, many will be beyond our reach. I’d not even get over the door. Some, most likely, would run straight to the baron, loathe him though they do, to win favour for flushing his enemy, and have us dead within the week.’

‘It is delicate,’ said Old Crozier, from his seat at his grandson’s side. Stooped, dry-boned, his scalp liver-spotted beneath a fog of white hair, he retained most of his wits, though he had already been head of the clan when he met the messenger bringing news of James III’s accession, more than sixty years before.

‘That is one word,’ Adam replied. ‘Another would be hazardous. In taking this road, I may bring Dacre down upon us faster than we have bargained for. I ask your assent before I make a move.’

Fists thumped the table. ‘Let me get my hauns on the bastard,’ said Wat the Wanderer, wetting his beard with a long swig of ale, as if this draught was a promise, sealed with a kiss.

‘Ye’ll be lucky tae get that close,’ said Benoit Brenier, Louise’s brother, who had learned the language as a young boy new from France, and was now more Scottish than any in the dale. ‘He’d send his lackeys out first to cut down the common ranks, before gracing us wi’ his presence. He’ll no waste himsel on small beer. He’ll haud ontae his self respect and only face the top man, once the coast is clear of the likes of us.’

‘Cumberland scum,’ growled murdo Montgomery, Crozier’s cousin, setting off a muttering around the table.

‘Aye, well, scum these English lords may be,’ said Crozier, hushing the noise with a raised hand, as if about to bless the gathering, ‘but it’s them we need on our side if this plan is to work.’ The querulous murmur resumed, but he quashed it with a look.

‘You could start with the Lord Ogle,’ said a quiet voice. Tom Crozier stared around the table. Even in this subdued light the old knife slash on his cheek was plain, but his lively eye and good-humoured mouth softened the scar. Where Crozier was clipped of speech, Tom was wanton with words. A warmer man than his brother, he had a wild temper, though years of struggle had curbed it. There were many, indeed, unnerved by Adam’s cool demeanour and his unerring ear for lies, who preferred to deal with Tom. But as Louise knew well, Tom’s bonhomie could be his undoing, and theirs too, if unchecked.

Now he had their attention, Tom raised his voice. ‘The Lord Ogle of Bothal is an honest man. True to the king, a fine fighter – he can muster a hundred horsemen – and loyal to the tacks on his boots. But he’s no tale-teller. If you had his word on oath condemning Dacre, that would count for something.’

More names followed, from all round the table, knights and gentlemen and farmers who lived within a day or two’s ride of the border, and owed the king ten, twenty, two hundred men in times of war: Sir Roger Grey, Sir Edward Ellarcar, Thomas Hebborn, Rauf Ilderton . . .

At the last name, Crozier snorted. ‘Ilderton is gone to the bad. Does not pay his debts, has enough mistresses to fill a nunnery, and will promise aught to all to pay for another night’s drink. His house is falling to pieces, his stables are almost empty, and his men lie around the village as debauched as their lord.’ His eyes glittered. ‘A more dangerous, useless ally one could not find on either side of the border.’

His wife had cocked her head and was looking at him, curious as a hen at a flea. ‘Yes?’ said Crozier.

She tucked her hands into her sleeves. ‘Surely so venal a lord might serve our own ends, without even being aware he was being useful?’

‘How, precisely?’ Tom asked, before Crozier could speak.

‘His drinking companions will no doubt hear a thing or two, if the right questions are asked, don’t you think?’ Louise smiled. ‘They’d need a good head for barley, of course.’

Benoit began to smile too, the anticipation of dangerous pleasure spreading across his pockmarked face. ‘I’m the man for that,’ he said.

A laugh ran round the hall. Benoit’s growing girth was a matter of pride. His wife Ella was so often with child, some whispered he was trying to compete. He ignored their jibes, and drank on. Only when his paunch threatened to come between him and his carpenter’s table would he cut down on his beer, he told Ella, who would shake her head, pat his belly, and walk off with an infant hitched onto her hip.

Crozier cut across the merriment. ‘You will do nothing unless I tell you. The man’s a wastrel, with a viper’s bite. Our venture will be perilous enough without courting the enemy. Ilderton might be a drunk, but he is wilier, and nastier, than you know. We would have to be desperate to risk delivering ourselves into his hands. And we’re not in that position yet.’

The evening unfolded, and with it the clan’s ideas. Conversation spiralled, excitement mounted, terrors began to recede. It was agreed that Crozier would make his first overture to the Lord Ogle, fourteen miles over the border in Redesdale, and take Tom with him. Thereafter events would be shaped by circumstance. ‘Let’s drink to that,’ said the borderer, raising his tankard and draining it in a gulp.

By midnight, only Old Crozier and Louise were sober. As she helped him to his room, a hand under his chicken-bone arm, she heard him mumbling. She leaned closer. ‘It is dangerous,’ he was saying, ‘very, very dangerous.’ When she left him at his door, he gave her a sweet smile, but already his mind had wandered. Confused though he often was, in his clouded eyes she detected fear. In this at least he was still in his right mind.

CHAPTER NINE

8 October 1523

It was a soft autumn day when Oliver Barton rode out of Edinburgh and made for the Lammermuir hills. Rising from a sea of mist, the sun hung over the firth, golden and sweet. Barton tipped the brim of his hat to shield his pale blue eyes. More used to a ship than a saddle he rode stiffly, his horse prancing at his leaden seat, jibbing at the rough hand on the bit. The sailor responded in kind. Digging in his spurs, he drew a beading of blood on the piebald’s belly. By the time they had put the city behind them and were heading south, they understood each other. The next morning, when Barton approached the roadside inn’s stable and called for a horse, the animal reared its head, and stamped. An ostler led a bay into the yard, but for the rest of the day the piebald was alert for his rider’s return. Only at nightfall, when it was clear he was gone, did he finally grow calm.

Barton rode on into the borders, rarely raising his head. He made his way slowly, though an observer would have guessed from the look in his eye that this was no idle excursion. Every few miles he would pull up his horse and scan the hills, his distaste plain at the prospect of so much dry land still to cross. Yet even that did not quicken his pace, and he had been five nights on the road before he came within sight of Swinburn, which lay at the foot of Crozier’s valley.

In late afternoon, woodsmoke swirled around the village roofs, fires freshly stoked for the night-time chill. It was an unkempt place, its cottages and hovels warped with age, their timbers arthritic and cracked. As Barton’s horse clipped down the street, a baker was smooring his oven, keeping the embers warm for his midnight doughs. He looked up as the window darkened, but the traveller had almost passed, swaddled in cloak and hat.

In the horse’s wake, a goat nosed in the gutter, hens pecking by its side. A herdsman whistled his way down the street, cattle and sheep safely byred, mind empty of anything but the prospect of broth. Shuttering his shopfront, a shoemaker was about to settle down by his fire to stitch a pair of new boots when the rider approached. Barton jerked the reins, and came to a halt. The horse snorted, but neither man spoke. Strangers were not uncommon in the village, but they were not welcome. One such as this, whose face was tight as a miser’s fist, was doubly disliked.

Barton’s eyes narrowed, and he looked off, beyond Swinburn, to where the forested valley began. ‘Crozier’s Keep up there?’ he asked, inclining his head towards the trees. The shoemaker nodded, and made for his door. ‘Don’t look so feart,’ the sailor said. ‘I am his cousin. I mean him no harm.’

‘You’re no like any Crozier I ever met,’ said the shoemaker. ‘They’d never be seen on a nag like that.’

Barton gathered the reins. ‘Thank’ee all the same.’ He touched a mocking finger to his hat, and continued on his way down the street, the gathering dusk closing in behind him.

Hob was first to meet the visitor. Leading a fretful young mare back from the meadow where she had lost a shoe, he reached the woods that circled the keep, and saw Barton ahead of him, a swaying shape on a weary horse whose hollow back and short neck suggested she was a posting inn’s cheapest hire.

‘Hallo there,’ he cried, hurrying to catch up. The traveller turned, but did not stop. Hob jogged to come alongside, his red hood falling back to reveal a narrow face, and such a quantity of fair hair it was as if a bowl of syllabub had been tipped over his head. Tall and slender, the keep’s head groom retained some of his boyhood charm, his eyes wide and friendly. But he was no fool, and he mistrusted the man before him. ‘Where you headed, man?’ he asked.