Dacre's War (2 page)

Part One

1523

Foul Deeds Will Rise Again

CHAPTER ONE

March 1523

From the crown of a grizzled oak, a buzzard blinked as three men rode out of the woods and onto the empty hills. Hunched as a tax collector counting his coins, the bird did not shift from its perch but kept the riders in its sights as they moved steadily across the valley. Only when they had reached the farthermost peak did the glint of helmets and swords disappear, leaving the moorland quiet in their wake. Watchful still, the buzzard scraped its beak and refolded its wings. These men had passed this way often before. They would no doubt soon return.

The threesome rode abreast, bridles chattering. Their dark garb brightened only by steel, they did not speak but cantered over turf and moss, scattering white cattle and goats as they moved west. Adam Crozier's horse was a short head in front, setting the pace and finding the path. The borderer's eyes were fixed on the track, and none would have guessed that his thoughts were not of the assignation that lay ahead, but of the past that raced to meet him at every bend of river and curve of hill.

He had trodden this land since he was a child, and would have known it blindfold: bridlepaths overgrown with wild garlic; river pools where moorhens paddled between soft-scented water lilies or scuttled, chittering, onto the bank; and everywhere the dry, warm scent of beech, hazel and oak, under whose canopy a boy could make a hideaway from branches and bracken as comfortable as anything a stonemason could devise.

Teviotdale was Crozier's domain, the sweetest nut in the borderlands. A cradle of gentle hills and loamy plains, a sparrow's flight from the English border, it was well hidden from the eye of the authorities in Edinburgh. Here, in his youth, crops had grown lush under a fitful sun, and animals had grazed, fearing nothing but the wolf. To look at the hillsides and pastures now, where grain barns were as fortified as castles, and livestock were herded each night into byres only a cannon could breach, such a time seemed as distant as the myths bards sang of when they plucked their lyres on feast days.

The riders slowed as the hillside turned to ash, and their horses picked their way over grasslands charred by flame. The borderer's face tightened. His mare skirted the wooden stumps of a hamlet whose cottages had been fired to dust. Barely twenty miles from Crozier's Keep, he reflected, and the countryside was fast becoming wasteland, so often was it scathed by the gangs who roamed these parts. Soon there would be nothing left for them to steal or destroy. Even then it was unlikely the dalesfolk would be left in peace.

That he and his men were on their way to meet Ethan Elliot, one of the most audacious thieves and ruthless killers this side of Carlisle, made the desolation even more bitter. In his time, Elliot had ravaged the middle march as if it were enemy land and not that of his neighbours. In the Crozier household his name was spoken rarely, and then in whispers, for fear of invoking the evil spirits that none doubted the man harboured or had at his command. For few knew better than they what he was capable of.

In these parts it was commonly believed that it was Elliot who had murdered Crozier's father, when Adam was still a boy. There was no proof, but few doubted it was true. Had he not been so intent these past few years in restoring his family's fortunes, he might have taken revenge, but the condition of his lands, his people, and of the country itself after Flodden, left little room for such an indulgence. Until he reclaimed the honour of his family name – lost long before that fateful battle – and with it their rightful place as leaders of the middle march, he had no spare thought for the man so reviled that they called him the Leper of Liddesdale. If he did not carry the disease himself, he spread a pestilence wherever he went that was almost as disfiguring.

Glad to put the fired earth behind them, the three quickened their pace. Tom Crozier brushed alongside his brother's horse as they negotiated a narrow trail at the head of a gully and indicated the path wending south. ‘See, the prints are fresh. They've been here this past day or so, since it last rained. I reckon they're lying in wait ahead of us.'

‘Who, Dacre's men?' asked their companion. Wat the Wanderer's skill with the crossbow he carried on his back made more powerful men pause before risking his wrath. ‘Unlikely. This season, the Deadwater Marshes would swamp them. If the Warden General is headed into the dale, it'll be by a higher route than the causeway, and we'd have heard of it.'

Tom did not look convinced. ‘I don't trust Elliot,' he said. ‘It wouldn't surprise me if we're riding into an ambush. And who better for him to summon to finish us off than his paymaster, who can get here in a day by this route, and scarper in half that time?' His eyes gleamed at the prospect.

Crozier gathered the reins in one hand. ‘Could be you're right,' was all he said, urging his horse up the slope.

There was a poor crop of honesty when Ethan Elliot was born. In its place was a cunning so deep that as he grew from boy to man it appeared to ooze from his pores, slicking his hair, dampening his palms, and giving him an oily sheen that matched his slippery eye. Crozier had never met him – by the time he found his father's corpse, the murderer and his cronies were gone. Yet when, a week earlier, Elliot's youngest son had arrived at Crozier's Keep bearing a message, the borderer had looked into the boy's defiant face and fancied he found reflected in it a glimmer of the man who had brought his family to its knees.

Edward Elliot had knocked at the gates with a club, leaving his companions at the edge of the woods with their horses. A sentry had stripped him of cudgel, sword, dagger and knife, and left him to await his master in the guardroom. Uneasy in the enemy's camp, black forelock drooping over one eye, he wrung his greasy woollen cap in his hands under the stare of the watchmen who were waiting their turn on the walls.

His father had told him to expect little more than a farmer's house, but it was clear the old man had not seen the place in years. As he approached, thick outer walls towered over him until he felt like an ant at the foot of a tree. Once through the main gates, an inner wall guarded the keep, whose ramparts and stonework were so immaculately kept one would have thought them newly built, had not the stories of the keep's long history, and Crozier's battles, carried through all the borders. When finally the clan chief and his brother entered the guardroom, the young man's face revealed a temper as overstrung as a new harp. He had been left idle all morning, but the thought of his father's anger if he did not deliver his message had kept him there.

With a look, Crozier sent the guards out, then closed the door and leaned against it. He was not a tall man, but he filled the room. Edward Elliot was ashamed of the tightness of his throat, the prickle of heat in his hands. ‘I am sent to you by my father, Ethan Elliot,' he said loudly. ‘He requests a meeting with you. He says it is urgent. He must speak to you, and will accept whatever time and place you like, so long as it is soon.' He felt more foolish yet as the words fell onto silence.

Crozier looked at Tom, and back at Edward, who swallowed hard. In that space, all three heard it. There was a long pause. ‘Is that so?' the borderer said at last. He took a step towards Edward, who forced himself not to move. ‘You are too young to remember, lad, but your father's last visit to this place made him, and now you, the least welcome guests we have ever had.'

Edward raised his eyes to meet Crozier's. His heartbeat quickened, but for his father he would face down any threat, and not merely for fear of his rage. ‘He said you would not believe me, nor trust him, and he asked me to give you a pledge of his honour.' He placed a small gold ring in Crozier's hand. ‘If ye take a good look, you'll see his and my mother's initials, and the date of their betrothal. It is her wedding band, and since Ma's death it is his most precious possession.'

Crozier handed it back without a glance. ‘I need no pledge, lad. Your father's word is worthless. Yet I am curious to know what he has to tell me.' He looked up at the arched bricks above their heads, as if searching for an answer. Tom licked his lips, a gesture of anticipation, not fear, and Crozier was pleased. Both of them thought alike.

‘Very well,' he said, looking at Edward, ‘you can go back to Ethan Elliot and tell him that I and my men will meet him a week from today, on Blinkbonny Hill on the Overstone Pass. We shall find him at noon, but he must come with none other than you, nor try to trick or deceive us, or he shall dig his own grave on that hill.' He opened the door, and a sentry appeared to lead the young man back to the gates.

Edward was cantering home with his cousins, breathing deep with relief to be free of the keep, before he realised he had dropped his cap in the guardroom. By then, it was on the sentry's brazier, sizzling with sweat yet barely singed, as if even the flames were reluctant to touch anything that belonged to an Elliot.

A crescent of elms topped Blinkbonny Hill, stark against the sky. Crows circled overhead, but they were the only creatures abroad, their cawing the solitary sound. Concealed behind a thicket of scrub overlooking the hill, Crozier and his companions waited.

The sun had not quite reached its peak when there was a crackling of undergrowth from across the valley as riders approached through the woods. When two horses came into sight, crossing the stream that meandered around the foot of the hill, Crozier leaned forward on his mare's neck.

Ethan Elliot rode ahead of his son, his girth swaying in the saddle. A once swaggering figure, with a bull's neck and barrel chest, now Elliot's head drooped as if he knew the fight was over. Crozier frowned. This was not what he had expected. Had he been summoned to hear a confession and clear an old man's conscience before he met his maker?

Plodding up the hill, the Elliots took their place under the elms, where they sat so still they might have been carved from wood. Time passed, and the sun rose higher, as Crozier waited to see if the robber had been followed, or if his henchmen were already in hiding, encircling the hill and its players.

In years past, no man would have ridden to meet Ethan Elliot without first bidding his loved ones a long goodbye. Even Elliot's allies knew better than to turn their backs in his presence. The man had a temper like a rabid dog, they said, docile one minute, savage the next. His corner of Liddesdale, already famed for its outlaws, had become so feared that the common tracks across his lands were overgrown with weeds, few daring to pass that way in case they crossed his path.

But some could not avoid him, no matter how hard they tried. From his fortress-like castle Elliot's hands hovered over the region, casting shadows across the sweetest harvests and fattest cattle, swooping to pluck the best for himself. Retreating to gloat over his spoils, he would for a spell be sated. There were weeks of quiet while he wined and wenched, gambled and squandered, and grew another chin. Then, when his cellars and coffers and larder had dwindled, he'd go back on the prowl, he and a hundred men, whose hoofbeats and yowling filled the border nights with dread.

Only a leader with greater courage and more men could bring him to heel. One such was Sly Armstrong, whose band of thugs was almost as feared as Elliot's, and five times the number. Nobody who valued their skin would say no to Sly and his brothers, and from time to time Elliot did their bidding. But more commanding yet was Thomas Dacre, Warden General and lord of the marches. Dacre was the only man on earth – and beyond it – who scared Elliot. Though the thief had no scruples, he was not without brains.

When it seemed to Crozier that Elliot had come alone, he, Tom and Wat made for the hill. Dismounting at its foot, they led their horses up the slope. There was no sound but the horses' breath, and the slither of leaves as they advanced towards the watchful figures ahead.

As they drew close Edward Elliot got off his horse, but Ethan stayed in the saddle, swaddled in furs. It galled Crozier not to meet him eye to eye, but when he saw the pallid sheen on the old thief's face, the tremor in his hands, he knew he was looking at a dead man.

For a moment, nobody spoke. Ethan's eyes were red-rimmed and weeping, but they held no hint of remorse. ‘Aye, lad,' he said, in a voice still flavoured by his reiver's roar. ‘Well might ye stare at me like that. I've done ye no favours, I know. And if you'd been in the room that night alongside your da, I'd have slit your throat as well. I'm no here tae make amends, if that's what you're thinking. God forbid!'

There was a movement at Crozier's side as Tom started forward, drawing his sword. He did not have time to loosen it before his brother's hand pinned his arm to his side. ‘Stay back,' Adam said. ‘Leave him to me.'

He reached the robber's horse, and put a hand on its bridle. He looked into his enemy's eyes. ‘Tell me what was so urgent that we had to meet, and have done with it.'

Elliot laughed, loosening a rusty nail in his throat. ‘Man of few words, eh? Unlike your father.' He raised a hand to ward off Crozier's rising irritation. ‘Aye, aye, I'm coming to it. Show some respect to your elders, boy. Were Nat alive he'd be a dribbling husk, just like me. Time reaches us all, son, though we all think we can outrun it.' He wiped his rheumy tears. ‘As ye have no doubt guessed, I'm not long for this world. I have spent sleepless nights these last few months, thinking over the past. There's been a lot of memories to keep me company. I've had a fine, full life.' He looked at his son, and his expression hardened.