Dacre's War (29 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

September 1524

The letter from the king had arrived at last. The court’s messenger presented it with a flourish from his knapsack, as if a ride of three hundred miles into the wilderness was an everyday matter. The royal seal lay heavy in Blackbird’s hand, glistening and imperious. The butler pressed the letter to his chest, and felt his heart grow large as he carried it to his lordship’s room.

Blackbird was not a worshipful man, but he hoped this message might be the answer Dacre and he had prayed for. The past few weeks his master had been grey-faced with exhaustion, running diplomatic errands for Norfolk as if he were a pageboy, all the while manoeuvring his troops to curb the growing unrest across the dales. At night, the baron could barely climb the stairs, rubbing his thigh and knee as he went, and sinking onto his bed with a sigh of relief that was closer to a gasp.

Since the end of summer, Dacre’s chamber had smelled of Blackbird’s liniment, a rub he first devised for a lame horse but which worked for soldiers also. ‘Next you know I’ll be neighing,’ grumbled Dacre the first time it was applied, stripping off his britches and lying face down on his pallet as his butler instructed. Blackbird did not reply, but rolled up his sleeves, spread butter on his hands, and set to pummelling his master’s leg and haunches, like a cook tenderising beef. When the larded flesh had turned pink, he rubbed in the lotion, and waited for Dacre’s response. After a few seconds it came, the baron hissing between his teeth as he clutched his leg, ‘Jesus’ sake, Blackbird, what in the name of God is in that stuff? It stings like the very devil.’

‘It is meant to, your lordship,’ replied Blackbird primly. ‘As it soaks in, it dissolves the knots and tensions that pain you so sorely.’

‘And the smell,’ groaned Dacre, turning onto his back and sitting up.

‘Ye’ll get used to it,’ said his butler. He turned to leave, but a grunt from the baron stopped him.

‘My lord?’

‘Thank you,’ said Dacre. Blackbird’s eyes smarted to see his master brought so low.

He would take the memory of the night Dacre returned to find the king’s letter to his grave. It might, indeed, have brought it closer. When the baron had pulled off his riding boots and was making for the hall fire, Blackbird drew him aside.

‘A letter from the court awaits you,’ he said, careful to hide his excitement. ‘I have put it in your chamber, but I can bring it down if you prefer to read it among company.’

Dacre pushed past him and hurried up the stairs, his bad leg forgotten in his haste. Hovering at the door behind him, Blackbird watched as the Warden General held a candle above the first page, and the next, peering as if he could not believe what the light revealed. Then he sank onto his bed, as if all breath had left him. The pages fell to the floor, and Blackbird moved swiftly to stop the candle following them. Taking the holder from his master’s hand, he bent to retrieve the letter.

The baron’s lips were sickly pale. ‘To think . . .’ he began hoarsely. The butler waited. Dacre shook his head and gave a laugh, like a cannon clearing its throat. ‘Ye gods. All this . . .’ He lifted his hand, though his meaning was unclear. ‘All this, and they reward me thus.’ He looked up at his butler. ‘See for yourself.’

Blackbird opened the letter, though he had to read it twice for the sense to reach him. ‘Star Chamber?’ he said, stumbling on the dread words.

The letter came from the office of Cardinal Wolsey, in his role as chief inquisitor of Star Chamber, the king’s most private and feared court. Feared, certainly, by Dacre, who had once sat there, in the heart of Westminster, a mouse caught in the king’s claws, toyed with and left bleeding beneath its gold-spangled, celestial ceiling. Stories of the baron’s days in the Fleet gaol had passed into family legend, an amusement for dinner guests that saw the table rock with laughter as Dacre poked fun at himself as well as the old king. But Blackbird recalled very well the misery of Dacre’s days in prison, and the vow the baron had made, when he was released, never again to find himself as trapped and helpless as that. The sight of his master in his cell each morning, white-faced after enduring the dark, had shocked the butler as a young man. Now, in advancing age, he felt abject fear at the prospect of Dacre’s returning there. He read on, not daring to lift his eyes.

The letter was pompous and long-winded, Wolsey relishing his role. After a ponderous preamble, in which the cardinal laid out the duties and scope of Star Chamber – ‘to reform enormities committed by the misuse of power in the king’s realm’ – he informed the baron that ‘consequent upon information received of late by this court it is our duty to bring you before it, to answer the charges laid against you from several parties, each of whom has sworn on oath the probity of their testimony.’

In order to discharge this difficult and regrettable duty, the chamber demands your appearance on the first Monday of October, in this the fifteenth year of King Henry’s blessed reign. You will appear before a tribunal composed of myself as Lord Chancellor, the Lord High Treasurer, the Keeper of the Privy Seal, a member of the clerical estate – in this instance myself again – three justices of the court and two impartial witnesses, of your own estate. You will be allowed, and expected, to give a full account of your alleged misdeeds and crimes. Failure to do so, or being adjudged guilty of the indictments levelled against you, will result in imprisonment and further punishment, as decided by this court in accord with the king’s wishes.

The Warden General had risen from his bed and was stooped, stoking the fire, when the butler put the letter aside. ‘What do ye make of it, eh? Snakes not just at court, but beneath our very feet in the undergrowth here. Vipers, wherever we stand.’ His tone was resigned, but the butler was cheered by his master’s resolute look. Pale he might be, but Dacre was a soldier and surrender a word he would never understand.

The baron nodded, as if reading the servant’s mind. ‘I’ll fight this, Blackbird. Damned if I care what the court thinks of me, so long as I do not spend the rest of my days in gaol.’ He smiled at the poker in his hand. ‘It would suit me well to be dismissed from this post. God rot my enemies, they might end up achieving what my begging letters never could.’ He hung up the poker and stood, rubbing his back. ‘If I am stripped of my station and sent home in disgrace, I will bless them, all of them, whoever they may be.’

But anonymous as his accusers were, Dacre was already compiling a list of likely candidates. The tabulation was in his head, otherwise a ream of paper would have been filled, there being so many who wished him ill.

A few days later the baron and Blackbird set off for London. The roads were dry, the weather was fine, and they made good speed. Neither spoke much as they cantered, knee to knee, down earthen tracks, or trotted smartly though pot-holed main streets, ignoring the beggars who clapped their bells and reached out their hands.

The middle counties slipped past under their hooves, accents growing nasal, words squeezed out of shape, and found themselves thinking of the soft-spoken, hard-living lands they had left behind. As London drew nearer, the countryside ripened, as did its people. Houses were higher, thatch thicker, waists and faces fatter. Even cattle and sheep had a prosperous air, while the sleek horses they hired at each posting house made the marches’ nimble beasts seem stunted and clumsy as shelties. But these elegant creatures tired fast, and needed, said Dacre, as much rest and watering as a newly-wed wife.

The Warden General sniffed the air as they rode the last few miles into London on the old Roman road, and a lemony sneer settled on his face. ‘Can ye blame me for no attending council as often as Henry would like? it is a foul place, always was. The putrid air turns my stomach,’ he said, tugging a kerchief over his nose as fields disappeared beneath smithies, bakers, hovels and taverns. Blackbird nodded, as they trotted past a team of dray horses pulling a butcher’s load of carcasses still running with blood.

The scent of freshly killed beasts was perfume compared to the smells that reached them when they passed through Bishop’s Gate into the city, where river and street competed for stench. From the water came the yells and oaths of ferrymen, the calls and whistles of those hailing them, and the cries of merchants steering their barges between the nimbler rowing boats, whose jostling threatened to spill their towering cargo. Nevertheless, the cacophony was music beside the shouts from the street, as vendors of everything from ‘Hot crab, hot!’ to ‘Ribs of beef!’ and ‘Fine writing ink!’ bellowed their wares and pressed in upon passers-by. Blackbird’s head was spinning as a taverner stood before his premises, reciting his best wines at the top of his lungs. Behind him, a weaver shrieked the quality of her silk stockings, her children lined up beside her, dangling the goods over their arms, where they trembled like ghostly legs.

‘It is worse than I remember it,’ said Dacre, as they rode through the crowds and past Old London Bridge. Blackbird was not listening, his attention caught by the tarred heads decorating the walls, spiked like black cherries on a stick. Dacre followed his gaze, and grunted. ‘And they call us savages.’ Blackbird noticed his master turned from the sight, though surely he could not fear that one day his own neck would be set on a pike for public display?

The lodgings Dacre led them to were upriver, where the water was clearer, and boats fewer. The Judge’s Landing, a handsome, bow-fronted wooden house, had a small formal garden to the front, and backed onto the Thames and a private quay. It was where Dacre always stayed when attending court. ‘Better taking a boat than trusting to the streets, with its thieving urchins and filth, my lord,’ said the new landlady, curtseying in the presence of a peer of the realm, whose nobility and wealth were evident despite his plainly cut clothes and coating of dust.

She led them to a low-ceilinged room overlooking the river, hung with tapestries and appointed with enough candelabra and lamps to light a market town. ‘Dinner will be brought to your room at five,’ she said, leaving them with a smile, but not before a kick of her dark gown revealed a flash of rose-pink leg. Both men saw, as they had been meant to, but only Blackbird continued to stare at the door some time after it had closed.

Sunday passed slowly, church bells pealing in such a profusion of keys it was like listening to an ill-formed chapel choir being put through its paces. As the day wore on, Dacre sat by the window, growing quieter. That night at dinner he scarcely touched the steamed perch and three-bird roast, but he drank deep, and fell into bed as if he had been knocked unconscious. There were no shouts in the night, but his snoring kept Blackbird awake until his namesakes called the dawn chorus. Soon the river was loud with ferrymen, and the air with tolling bells, and there was nothing for it but to rise.

A green-painted boat pulled up to the quay at a servant’s cry, and the men climbed into it. ‘Westminster Palace,’ said Dacre, sourmouthed with wine. Dressed in black but for their linen shirts, they had a clerical air, though as much for their stony faces as their garb, and the sculler did not disturb their sombre mood but dipped the oars in silence.

Westminster soon came into view, and once the press of boats at the steps had eased, they alighted. The royal buildings soared into the clear sky, the living embodiment of stern, pitiless power. The Star Chamber was well known to them both, but the sight of it a few hundred yards down the river made Dacre’s acid stomach turn. He belched, and turned aside to spit. The chamber was smaller than he had remembered. Narrow and high, with prominent bow windows reflecting the river, it was distinguished by a tall brick gable chimney that was incongruously homely. Flanked by halls where on fair days bear- and bull-baiting offered a grisly parody of what went on behind its doors, the Star Chamber looked onto the Thames as if disdaining the teeming palace grounds, where the populace scurried past.

The hour was still early, but already the place was thronged with pilgrims, packmen and pilferers. Ragged and barefoot, these thieves darted like shadows, out of sight as soon as spotted, hands filled, bags crammed, and their trail gone cold long before their victims discovered their purse-strings snipped.

Lowering his head, Blackbird crossed himself and took Dacre’s arm to negotiate a path between the laden mules hurrying towards the quayside.

‘Feel free to pray for yourself,’ said Dacre, ‘but don’t do so on my behalf, I know the workings of this court too well. Not even the Virgin Mary could soften their hearts once they are made up. Whatever is to come, I shall carry it on my head alone. There’ll be no need to blame the almighty if things go badly wrong.’

It was mid-morning when Dacre was brought to the chamber by an officer of the court. He paused at the door, ignoring the clerk’s hand on his elbow. The blue ceiling with its heavy gold stars was startlingly bright, catching the river’s reflection through the mullioned windows. Not for the first time he was taken aback at the mismatch between the chamber’s heavenly appearance and its far from elevated function. This was where Wolsey held sway, a realm in which, they whispered, he wielded almost as much power as the king.