Dacre's War

by Rosemary Goring

  The priest was with Dacre all that day and the next. Blackbird left the baron’s food with the guard, not liking to interrupt the voice he heard droning behind the door. When next he saw his master, he could not believe the change. The baron raised his head when he entered, and looked him in the face. His voice was stronger, and his colour had returned. ‘I have slept, Blackbird,’ he said, like one who has witnessed a miracle, ‘all through the past two nights. That man of God has cleared the room, and my spirit, of those devils.’

  Blackbird blinked. ‘An exorcism?’

  ‘He did not use that word. It was more an act of protection, to shield me from the malevolent forces that have tried to destroy my mind. He said the powers of darkness were so strongly pressing upon me, he could almost see them himself.’ The baron shuddered, as if the mere mention of the devils might conjure them again. Reaching for a vial that lay by his pallet, he pulled the stopper and dabbed a drop of liquid onto his finger, and rubbed it on his forehead. ‘Holy water, Blackbird.’ He shook his head. ‘Ye saints, to think I’ve come to this, as pious as a nun. I’m even saying my confession, though I take care what I say, lest I give the man a seizure. It would be comical, if I felt like laughing. But better all this, wouldn’t ye say, than how I was before?’

  Dacre never disclosed what else the priest and he had discussed, but though the weeks in prison dragged into months, and it seemed he had been forgotten, he kept his spirits up. The devils, it seemed, had been banished. Once a week, the priest returned to conduct mass, take confession, or sit in prayer. The lip service Dacre had paid to God these many years now was heartfelt, and by permission of the cardinal he was allowed a bible. Blackbird was thankful to see his master passing his time reading the gospels, his grammar school Latin brought out for a polish and shine, like an ancient suit of armour. The butler, however, felt no need to join him in his devotions. Assignations with the landlady from the Judge’s Landing offered all the sustenance he required.

  The months passed, and Dacre began to reminisce, dipping into the past like a waterwheel, forever taking another plunge. Blackbird would listen, full of sorrow. His master had never been one for this. Perhaps he sensed there was little ahead, or maybe captivity turned everyone’s mind back to where it had come from.

  ‘Remember all this, do ye?’ Dacre asked one evening. ‘I begin to think I’ve never been away, and the time we’ve had and the things we’ve done over the last thirty years is nothing more than a dream.’ He tugged his beard, and sighed. ‘I could’ve been locked in here a century, it feels so cursed long. D’ye recall, though, how Henry would tiptoe down the stairs and perch on a stool, his mouth tight as a shrivelled prune as he tried not to breathe?’

  Blackbird nodded. ‘He liked to make sure you were suffering.’

  Dacre shook his head. ‘No, it wasn’t that, I don’t think. He was just plain angry. He could not keep away. He was like my own father, telling me again and again how much I had disappointed him. And now, at this age, I can see what he meant.’ He cackled, his face brightening. ‘I damn well nearly brought the country to war, or so he said. It was the arrogance of youth. There I was, my army at my back, trumpets blaring, ready to deal with Moresby. His army was larger than mine, but my men were tougher, that I knew. But of all Moresby’s men, I have to take on the scoundrel Parkes, slice off his ear, and cause an unholy row.

  ‘How was I to know he was a friend of the Scottish king? For all his airs and armour, he looked like a peasant, a trumped-up nobody. And for that lapse of judgement Henry would never forgive me. Not for years did he soften. He’d ignore me at council, as if I was the black sheep of the room, and even when I was safely back home, out of his reach, I felt his eyes on me, following whatever I did.’

  His laugh filled the room. ‘As Bess’s guardian, he made my life hell. He wrangled over each pound of her inheritance, every mile of land I wanted to claim as my own. All to punish me for riding off with her under his nose. As if any red-blooded man could have resisted!’ He paused, and gave a sigh. ‘Yet I could not dislike him. Not at all. He was a man of the old stamp, a hawk whose eye was on everything. Tough on wayward boys like me – and right to be – but trusting us, too, in an odd sort of way. He knew we were loyal and would turn out fine. We just had to burn off our youth, that was all, without causing too much damage.’

  He fell quiet, and for a minute both men inspected the floor. The distance that lay between now and those far-off days was too painful to contemplate. Since the trial Dacre’s hair had turned silver, and he shuffled around the cell, his limp grown worse with confinement. Blackbird’s legs were slower too, and like an old man he now woke before dawn, and could not get back to sleep. Nor did all his visits to the landlady end in bed. Sometimes, he just liked to talk.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  March 1525

  News of Dacre’s downfall reached the north, and word spread fast through the dales. There was celebration in some quarters, in villages still in ruins after an Armstrong raid, or in the castles of lords who had felt the baron’s greedy hand or baleful eye upon them. Sir William Eure, Vice Warden, no longer slept with a sword by his side. Lord and Lady Foulberry threw a banquet, and danced through the night. The Bishop of Carlisle spent an hour on his knees in thanks before the altar, then called his priests to help him enjoy a crate of fine Spanish wine that had been lying for months in his cellars.

  When the information finally reached Crozier’s Keep, sent up from the village by Father Walsh, Crozier felt only fatigue. He went about his business that day as if nothing had changed, but by nighttime, when the clan was gathered in the great hall, the talk was of nothing else. Unable to join in the revelry, he left long before the merriment had ended. While the hall rang to the sound of singing and pipes, Crozier and Louise sat side by side before the fire in their chamber. They said little, but listened to the snapping of pine cones in the flames and breathed their soothing scent. That night Crozier slept so deeply he hardly seemed to be breathing. When he did not wake at dawn, Louise crept out of the room. Crozier did not appear until noon, but where Tom and Benoit seemed to have grown younger overnight, their faces cleared of strain, his mouth was still set hard. These were volatile times, with Dacre gone, the marches unwatched, and the baron’s allies vengeful and afraid.

  ‘So we can stand down the double watch?’ asked Tom, gulping down ale to clear his wine-thickened head.

  ‘We do no such thing,’ his brother replied, and gathered his men in the courtyard. Until order was established, and a Warden General in place, they were not out of danger, he told them. ‘Could be things will be worse than ever. The double guard stays on duty, and the watch in the valley, and none of us goes beyond these walls without my say-so.’

  Standing near the back, out of Crozier’s view, Barton chewed his black wad of beef, and spat. He eyed the Frenchman, listening doeeyed to the borderer as if he were an innocent, and not a henchman of Beelzebub himself. The sailor crossed his breast, and fingered the crude crucifix he now wore round his neck.

  Mayhem was unloosed, as Crozier had predicted. Sluggishly at first, riots broke out in the west, where Dacre had held firm sway. Sir Christopher stamped on these, and for a time they appeared to have died, but as soon as his troops returned to their barracks, the uprising licked farther along the border. Sir Philip, in residence at Harbottle, was nervous. There was bad blood in the air, everyone sensed it. Joan should not be out here, where forces from all corners might meet. Yet with the border riders out in strength, did he dare send her south for safety?

  She settled the matter for him, refusing to move until her father came home. Since Dacre’s imprisonment, Joan had been moody and restless, given to tears and outbursts, and spending long hours alone in her father’s chamber, which she now used as her own. Philip had neither time nor patience for such matters. Only his brother’s affection for the girl prevented him from losing his temper. Agreeing testily that she could stay, he dismissed her from his mind. Already Tynedale w
as beginning to buck beneath their feet, as if an earthquake were on its way.

  And an earthquake it almost was. In the following weeks, the border clans seemed to put aside their grievances and join as one to show the English king that with the Warden General gone, the land, and the power, was theirs. There had never been such turmoil in Dacre’s yard. Cumberland seethed, Naworth on high alert, and the barracks at Carlisle were never at rest, soldiers despatched in relays, day and night. But it was in the east that the worst unrest was bubbling.

  A courier sent to the king from the Bishop of Durham informed him that the city was almost under siege, and assistance urgently needed. Newcastle, meanwhile, was in the Tynedale highlanders’ sights. Village by village, the outlaw Armstrongs and their gang advanced upon it. There was no doubting their intention. There was panic within the city, and the raiders had reached alarmingly close to its walls with barely a check before the king’s men brought them to a halt. At that point, the conflict did not end, but grew more murderous.

  Those who had no thought of taking town or city took instead to the roads. The riders’ secret ways over the Northumberland hills into Scotland were flattened as raiders rode as if into battle, scavenging and scathing until the north of their own country was all but barren, and the Scots fearful their lands would soon be picked clean as well.

  The ferment raged all spring. While Dacre languished in his cell, his border sizzled and roared under fire. Days after flames had been doused, black ash still drifted on the wind, a diabolical snow. Footsteps crackled, and the smell of cinders and burnt wood clung to everything, an invisible shroud that sent cattle mad and made peasants shiver, as if this acrid scent were a harbinger of the end.

  Cardinal Wolsey hurried to York, where he met the Duke of Norfolk. His first greeting was to inform the Duke that the bishops of Durham and Carlisle had sent word they dared not leave their charges in case the unrest deepened.

  ‘More likely frightened to set foot outside their gates in case they get lynched,’ muttered Norfolk, taking a seat in Wolsey’s apartments, and casting a jaundiced eye over the comforts an archbishop could command. Wolsey raised his eyebrows, not disagreeing, and waited until his rich white wine had sweetened the soldier’s tongue. ‘If this continues,’ Norfolk said, putting down his glass and waving away the servant who would have filled it again, ‘or if the situation grows any more grave, as I fear it will, Henry must come north, and be seen at the head of his army.’

  Wolsey looked shocked. ‘Surely it is no more than a brief flaring?’ When Norfolk said nothing, the cardinal began to wring his hands in his lap. ‘You think this is serious rebellion?’

  ‘Most certainly,’ Norfolk replied, not unpleased to see the cardinal’s anxiety. The man who played monarch in the Star Chamber was a mere commoner, and a cowardly one at that, in the face of armed revolt. Norfolk wondered when Wolsey had last drawn a sword. With a cough, he continued. ‘The insurrection stretches from west to east. The Cumberland rioters are making a point, enraged, one presumes, at Dacre’s fate. But from the middle to the eastern marches, each outburst is connected in some way to the next. For once in their benighted existence,’ he said, with something close to venom, ‘these brigands are forgetting their differences, and forging a united front. It is a front, I must advise you, that could see the north splinter from the south. That, as we all know, would be disastrous. The king is close to making peace with France as well as Scotland, yet if it becomes known his own people are in open revolt and rebellion it would weaken his position in negotiations, and – perhaps worse – make him a figure of fun far beyond France.’

  ‘It would seem the bishops were not exaggerating,’ said the cardinal, so quietly he might have been talking to himself, ‘and I have underestimated the risks they face.’ He raised his head, and looked into the duke’s cold eyes. ‘You have a plan for dealing with this, I presume? A hardened campaigner such as yourself generally prefers to give orders than to take them.’

  Norfolk ignored the insolent tone, recognising that only when threatened did Wolsey grow uncivil. ‘Indeed I do. It is a last resort, and one the king’s lawyers are queasy about, but in the north it works.’ Now he beckoned the servant to fill his glass. ‘Usually, anyhow,’ he added.

  Wolsey too drank another glass. He nodded, his expression grave. ‘I believe I know what you are about to suggest.’ His tongue searched for the last traces of wine, and his lips glistened. ‘We must take pledges as security for good behaviour?’

  ‘Pledges, and many of them. Across all three marches.’ Norfolk’s voice was that of a commander, instructing his men. Suddenly he appeared to be looking beyond the room, seeing not the rich blue tapestries that hung from the walls but the forests and hills and hidden villages of the borders, whose ceaseless unquiet would follow him, he feared, until the day his mouth was plugged with earth.

  ‘The most powerful families and the most pernicious clans must be forced to hand over one of their high-ranking men, or several of those less important, who will be held in custody until peace is restored. If trouble erupts and their promises are broken, the pledges will be killed. The borderers hold to a code of honour incomprehensible to those of us who live in the south, but a reminder of the primitive manners and cast of mind they live by. For some reason, it proves effective. Clan loyalty matters to these people in a way none like us can begin to comprehend. For all their barbarous ways, the prospect of one of theirs being killed to atone for their misdeeds seems to keep them in check.’

  ‘Then why do the king’s legal advisers so dislike this tactic?’

  Norfolk gave a bark of laughter. ‘Poor, sheltered souls, they are uncomfortable at the idea of an innocent man being made to pay for someone else’s crime. Yet these pledges are innocent only, I should add, in the sense that for so long as he – or she – is in custody, they cannot be said to have taken part in whatever outrage then leads to their execution. In all other respects, these pledges are as guilty and culpable as the rest of their brethren, and their deaths disturb neither my sleep nor my conscience.’

  Wolsey rose, and took a turn around his chamber. ‘We must settle this without dragging Henry out of London. That will do nothing to improve his temper, which of late has grown ragged.’

  ‘I had not noticed,’ replied Norfolk, merely to provoke. Wolsey ignored him, and paced on. At last, when it seemed he would have worn out his buckskin soles, he came to a halt.

  ‘Can you undertake to have pledges taken, and swiftly?’

  The soldier nodded. ‘The bishops can instruct their men to begin the process at Durham, Carlisle, and all points between. I shall personally oversee pledges in the middle march, where the worst offenders live.’ He smiled. ‘The border gaols will be full within the week. A pleasant thought, is it not?’

  Wolsey looked at him as if nothing to do with the north would ever be other than objectionable.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Norfolk, to break the silence, ‘our good man Dacre has no advice to offer for the extirpation of the border thugs, and the restoration of peace?’

  ‘I had not thought to ask,’ Wolsey replied, taken off guard. ‘Surely he would see that as weakness on our parts, and confirmation that he alone can keep the north under control.’

  ‘Even so, we both know Henry will release him one day. Dacre could surely be persuaded that helping us in this matter might bring that day closer?’

  ‘I wish to have as little to do with him as possible.’ Wolsey gestured dismissively with one hand as if the baron’s plight in no way mattered to him.

  ‘Has the king visited him in the Fleet? I am merely curious,’ said Norfolk, watching the cardinal’s face.

  ‘I have advised him against it. Not only is the place verminous, but Dacre must be made to feel he has been cut off, and is in a state of utter banishment. Henry would not wish him pampered.’

  Norfolk let the subject drop, and even during dinner – a stilted, stuttering evening which both longed to get through so they could re
tire to bed – he did not raise it again. He did note, however, that the cardinal was drinking hard. Covering his own glass as the bottle was carried round the table, he knew that the man was afraid.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Barton’s last visit to Harbottle had been disturbing. Still troubled by his cough, he had led his mare to the stables, her hooves skittering on the glazed cobbles. It was not Blackbird who spoke to him at the door, but a servant he had never seen, who told him his visit was fruitless. The baron was gone to London a few days before, and nobody knew when he would return. ‘I will see her ladyship, then,’ said Barton, trying to enter, but the doorman blocked his way.

  ‘With her father away, her ladyship cannot receive visitors.’

  At that moment Barton heard Joan coming down the stairs, chattering to her maid. He began loudly to protest, but Joan’s descent took forever, and the servant was eyeing Barton’s boot, which was rammed against the door, with a look that suggested he would very soon stamp upon it before at last the young woman heard their voices, and recognised her father’s friend. ‘What brings you here?’ she asked, the maid at her elbow like a brown velvet shadow.

  ‘I have business with your father,’ Barton said, bowing low, cap in hand. ‘But this good gentleman informs me he is away.’

  The life disappeared from Joan’s eyes, and she waved a petulant hand at the doorman. ‘I will see Barton,’ she said. ‘Please bring ale to the hall for our guest.’ Answering the disapproval in the man’s face, she added: ‘Fret not, Walker. My maid will remain with me at all times. There’s no need to be concerned.’

  Rolling her eyes, she led Barton to the hall, where Mary chased off the dogs, who were hogging the hearth, and stoked the fire with fresh logs.