Dacre's War (10 page)

Mortified at being thwarted, and determined it would not happen again, this time the regent had brought his own army. If his horsemen could not encourage the Scottish runts to forget their fright, he had done all he could. There were few more skilled or courageous soldiers than his battle-hardened troops, and Scotland was fortunate to have them on their side. Taking a deep breath and fastening his jerkin, he left the ship’s rail. He had little doubt that this time he could lead this benighted country to victory in the English borders, and broker a longed-for truce.

Descending the ramp, the duke made for the nearest tavern. His servants had run ahead, and by the time he reached the door clean straw had been strewn on the earthen floor, a sow shooed from beneath a table, and the alewife’s apron turned back to front, to hide the worst of its stains.

None but the duke’s entourage was allowed to leave ship. It was too late to begin their march, and for the rest of his men a stifling night below deck lay ahead. While the duke and his courtiers slept fitfully on the tavern’s tick-ridden sheets, the soldiers were even more restless. Beneath their cramped quarters, in the bowels of the ships, their horses fretted at the airless dark. Shortly after dawn, when the bulkhead ramps were lowered and the beasts led into the light, they pranced in delight, shaking and tossing their heads to create a flurry of flying manes, wild as a quickening sea.

By early morning, the army was on its way, winding south to the borders. As the monotonous tread of hooves gathered pace, so did the regent’s hopes. He lifted his gaze to the brightening day. It would not be long before they reached Jedburgh, where he would make camp. No town was better placed to set a guard on the border, or launch an attack on Henry’s henchmen. He nodded, his serious expression easing. It might be that all his past troubles would conspire to help him. The English Warden General and his men believed the Scots too timid to fight. They would neither expect nor be prepared for the assault the regent was about to unleash upon them. The duke’s face grew sombre once more as he dug in his spurs and raced ahead, eager to hasten that encounter.

CHAPTER EIGHT

27 September 1523

In Crozier’s private chamber, deep in the night, a dog slept by the pinewood fire. A large, long-limbed beast, his grey coat was thick as a pelt. With his blue eyes and hungry teeth he looked more like one of the wolves that roamed the forest than the offspring of the mistress’s mongrel, and Louise often wondered who had sired him. Only in his gentleness was he like the little vixen whom, years after her death, Louise still missed.

Low voices disturbed the dog’s sleep, and he covered his eyes with a paw. Near the fireside Louise was helping her husband out of his travel-stained cloak. On Crozier’s face was the look of a man who is wiping his mind clear of what he has seen. It was always like this, when he came back. The cold-eyed fighter who returned from his expeditions bloodied and exhausted, was transformed as soon as he saw his wife. While she helped him out of his riding gear, setting aside his swords and knives, his steel helmet and silver horn, he would close his eyes and take a slow breath. At her voice, the uproar in his head quietened. It was for her and his home that he lived like this. Were Louise not here at the day’s end, he feared he would ride away from the keep and his people and lose himself forever in the hills. The torments of living on the border were not to his taste. He was a farmer not a soldier, yet that was what he had become.

‘I was so afraid,’ Louise said quietly, as if to match the hush of the forest that pressed at their windows. ‘After what happened at Dryburgh and Melrose and Kelso, it seemed you could not get away unscathed yet again. I had the most terrible dreams.’

‘But I am here, and all is well,’ Crozier replied, and it was fatigue that made his voice little more than a sigh. They sank, clothed, onto the bed. With an arm around Louise, Crozier watched firelight play on the rafters, but the homely sight made him frown.

‘The flames devoured Jedburgh,’ he said, ‘like it was kindling.’ He shook his head, but the images would not fade. ‘Dacre’s men came for it, just as they did Kelso and all the others. They were well prepared, and offered no mercy. No mercy at all.’

Louise sat up. ‘What happened?’

‘Best you don’t hear all of it. You can guess what it was like. There were archers and swordsmen in the streets, fires lit under every thatch and shack. Children cut down, and old folk speared. Even dogs were thrown onto the flames.’ He passed a hand over his eyes. ‘We fought them off hard, but in the end they were stronger.’

‘What then?’ asked Louise, catching the note of a story half finished.

‘I killed Dacre’s horses.’ Crozier’s face was harsh. ‘We crept up on Dacre’s army, and herded their horses over the cliffs. It was cruel, but it had to be done. Dacre is destroying our lands, butchering our people, and he cannot go unpunished. If nothing else, the brute now knows he cannot attack the border and get away with it. He’s not just lost a thousand horses, but he has been made to look a fool.’

‘Not just cruel, but also dangerous,’ Louise replied, thinking of the forces he had unleashed that might soon be heading their way. Too vividly she remembered what had happened when the baron had sent his men to raze the keep and kill them all, shortly after Flodden. That time, Dacre had been too cocksure to take on the task himself. The courage of Crozier and Tom in fighting off the warden’s troops had become legend in these parts. The borderer had nearly died in the attempt, and Louise still woke shuddering from nightmares replaying the days when it had seemed he would not live.

‘Will he know it was you who did it?’ she asked, unable to hide her terror.

Crozier gave a shaky laugh. ‘If he thought so, it would be nothing but a guess. It could have been any of us, not just from this march but further afield too. Some who joined us came from as far off as the Firth of Forth and the Clyde. They’d heard what had happened at Kelso, and wanted to drive Dacre back.’

Louise lay with her head on his shoulder. By the hearth, the wolf slept at last. Beyond the shutters an early blackbird called, mistaking the torchlit courtyard and its bustling men for daybreak.

‘You could be right,’ Crozier conceded. ‘Maybe I have provoked him.’ Unconsciously he touched his side where the scar from that old fight ran round his belly, a gunpowder fuse that still burned. ‘But I will be ready for him.’ He gripped her arm, as if to be sure she was listening. ‘Lou, the time has come to set things straight between him and me.’

She nodded, understanding, as she always had, the bleak code of the borders. Death was not the worst thing that could happen. Preserving dignity and honour mattered far more. After his encounter with Ethan Elliot the past had caught up with them, as she had always known it would. Now they would have to face it.

In the grainy firelight her husband looked weary. Since war with England had resumed, the keep’s men and their allies had been riding far across the border, inflicting as much damage on English villages, crops and cattle as had been done to theirs. But there had been an edge to Crozier’s mood these past few months, a hunger for action that these excursions did not explain. At last she understood.

She sighed, and he put his hand over hers. ‘I couldn’t bear it any longer,’ he said, as if it were a confession. ‘Dacre’s been acting these past twenty years like he was the Lord God Almighty and we nothing more than ants beneath his feet. Thinking how to destroy him keeps me awake at night. I owe it not just to my father, Lou, but to us – you, me, and the clan.’ He sighed. ‘And it was the last promise I made to Ma. She died easier at the thought.’

Few things had made Mother Crozier joyful in her final years, but the prospect of avenging her husband’s murder would have sent her into the next life with her lips curled in a smile. Louise nodded, acknowledging the power of that deathbed vow. The old woman had been thrawn, but she missed her barbed wit and flinty charity more than she mourned her own mother, who had died the same year.

‘Then let me help,’ she said. ‘Since the day you met Ethan Elliot, I have been thinking. There might be another way to take revenge, better than pitting your men against the baron.’ She pulled the bearskin over them. ‘Rest for a while, and in the morning we will be able think more clearly.’ There was no answer. Her husband’s breath rose and fell, and he was already asleep. Louise watched daylight arrive, and birdsong with it, until she too eventually slept.

That morning, Crozier’s Keep rose from a forest of trees fired red and gold in the rising sun. Lapped by leaves, it stood at the head of a high valley, where all comers could be seen on the treeless hills below. Home to Crozier and Louise, her brother, his wife and their brood, Crozier’s grandfather, several cousins and a pack of servants whose tongues were never still, it was more fortress than house. Built for protection not comfort, it was a warren of rooms and passageways whose icy chill turned feet and fingers numb.

Since Crozier’s return, long before dawn, the courtyard had been alive, men ordering their gear, stable boys forking fresh hay into each stall. From the stable door, Hob watched Louise and Crozier disappear into the trees, the mistress’s quick steps barely keeping pace with her husband’s long stride. Their heads were bowed, and they were talking. The young groom frowned. He could see trouble in their gait. Picking up a soft brush, he turned to Crozier’s mare, sweeping her flanks until she gleamed like copper. That at least would please the master when he returned.

Seated on a throne of rock close to the waterfall, the couple watched the river’s headlong rush, and were calmed. For a moment, the threat that hung over them was forgotten, the ageless beauty of this wild land dampening their fears. When at last they began to talk, their words were almost lost beneath the water’s roar, so fierce a torrent its mist thickened the air.

As the morning brightened, Louise laid out her ideas. Crozier listened, and slowly his expression changed. He sat straighter, and began to nod. He glanced sidelong at his wife. Wisps of hair had escaped their golden net and were shivering in the breeze, but there was a steel and resolve in her cat-like face that startled him. When it was clear she was as keen to bring about Dacre’s downfall as he, a dark smile lit his face.

He had never doubted her loyalty to the clan, even in the first days of their marriage, when she was new to the borderlands as well as to him. At first, she had been timid when suggesting ways the keep and its affairs could be better run, its men put to the best use. She feared offending her husband, but instead she made him shake his head in wonder that she could solve problems he had not even noticed. ‘She’s got an auld head on her,’ his mother said, warming to her son’s wife, to the surprise of all.

From their first months together, Crozier and Louise worked in harness, effortlessly in step. Crozier took few decisions without her approval, and while she rarely disagreed with his ideas, he often sought her advice. Thus, this morning, as she told him her plan to outwit Dacre, he did not dismiss it, as most men would, as being not only dangerous but impossible. Her confidence that this might work gave him a glimmer of faith. As in all belief, doubt played as large a part as certainty, but like all belief, rational or not, one could not live without it.

‘You are lord of this land, and leader of all Teviotdale,’ she said, staring across the river to the birches that clung to the lip of the ravine. ‘You have spent years earning that position, yet each month you ride out like a common reiver to maintain your place, and this land. What does a man like Dacre do? He fights, of course, because he is at heart a thug. But he owes his position not to his sword but to his wits. His success lies with his friends and allies, with those whose support he can get by bribing, buying, or bullying. The man has a honeyed tongue and a weaselly brain, and a conscience that’s gagged and bound. All this has brought him more friends and riches than anyone else in the north. Not even the King of England can match the allegiance he commands in these parts.’

Crozier frowned, unsure where this was leading.

‘It seems to me,’ she continued, ‘that you should not place all your assurance in your sword, but try to use your influence instead. If you could gain the confidence of those who can do Dacre far more harm by dropping a word into the king’s ear than you could with all your men hammering at his door, then the task would be easier.’

Crozier gave a laugh. ‘And how do I do that, reiver that I am?’

Louise plucked a long grass, and began to strip it of seeds. ‘You are a man of good breeding, and education. Though you call yourself a farmer, you are one of the most powerful and respected men this side of the border.’ She put a hand on his sleeve. ‘Dacre has the advantage, with his wealth, and the troops he can summon, and his voice at court, but he has grown complacent and lax. Fat too, I believe. You told me yourself that the gentlemen of the marches hate him, that the Percys loathe his being warden of the east, with authority to make them do his bidding. The Ridleys, the Redpaths, and the Carrs all have grievances, as do many others. And even his friends know he is corrupt.’