Sacrifice

by David Pilling

  She didn’t even know if the mistress of the house was at home. Maud knew she had come to the city for the coronation, but might well have returned to East Anglia by now.

  As she dithered, the front door opened and a man strode out. He was dressed like a servant, in a plain russet jerkin and woollen hose, yet there was nothing servile about his demeanour. His face was marked by old pox scars and a knife-wound down the length of one cheek, and his long arms were thick with muscle, ending in powerful, swollen hands.

  Maud knew the look. This one was a soldier, still fit and active for his age – she judged him to be in his sixties – and had lived through war and plague.

  “Come here to beg alms, have you?” he said in a thick northern accent as she turned to run.

  Maud’s pride flared. “Piss on your alms, you ugly old sot,” she hissed back, “I go where I please, and am no beggar.”

  To her surprise, he grinned and stuck his tongue in his cheek. “I haven’t been under fire like that for a while. Ugly old sot, is it? You’re the hawk’s chick, right enough.”

  “Follow me,” he said before she could respond, “my mistress sent me to fetch you before your courage failed.”

  Maud hesitated. After a long moment she quelled her doubts and followed him inside.

  The house was as she remembered it. The door led into a narrow screened passage opening onto a little entrance hall, with a tiled floor and whitewashed walls. The furnishings were sparse, a chair or two and an old chest made of dark polished wood, and there were no carpets or wall hangings.

  She shivered. This was a severe, comfortless place, moulded in the character of its mistress.

  The servant glanced up at the bare wooden stairs, and sniffed. “No sign of her ladyship yet,” he said, “better come through to the dining room. She will be down when it pleases her.”

  There were two doors to the left of the main entrance. He pushed open the furthest and beckoned Maud to follow.

  “I’m Jack,” he said, ushering her towards the small table in the middle of the room, “just Jack. And you’re Elizabeth Bolton. Honoured to meet you.”

  The table was made of the same dark wood as the rest of the furniture, old but of good quality. There were two chairs available, and a thin carpet over the black and red tiles. A large square window, with two smaller arched windows flanking it, looked out over a small garden.

  Maud put the table between herself and Jack, with the large window behind her. “How do you know my true name?” she demanded.

  There was a pewter jug on the table, a pair of wooden platters and two sets of eating knives. If it came to it, she could snatch one of the knives to defend herself. Her dagger was still in the drawer of her bedside cupboard at The Cardinal’s Hat. Maud silently cursed her folly in not returning to the brothel to fetch it.

  Jack folded his arms and leaned his broad back against the wall. “My mistress told me, of course,” he replied, slowly looking Maud up and down. There was no lust in his deep-set brown eyes, just careful curiosity.

  “And is she in the habit of sharing all her secrets with servants?”

  “You know her better than that, I think, or should do.”

  “Then why…”

  Maud stopped. She had caught the sound of light footsteps on the stair in the hall. The door to the dining room stood ajar. Jack hurried to pull it wide open, and touched his brow in respect as his mistress soft-footed into the room.

  Lady Margaret de Vere was a short, plump woman, her youthful good looks hardened by age and suffering. By Maud’s reckoning, she was past forty by now, and looked a decade older. She wore no headdress, and her hair was iron-grey, severely scraped back and pinned into a bun.

  The rest of Margaret’s apparel was equally severe. Fashion had passed her by, and her long-sleeved blue gown was made of coarse wool, with no laces, silks or furs. The gown, like its owner, looked worn with use.

  Her hard little eyes swiftly took in the scene. “Elizabeth,” she said, “I saw you from the window of my bedchamber. You should not have dithered in the street like that, girl. There are more spies in this city than fleas on a stray dog.”

  Maud fought an overpowering desire to curtsey. “Apologies, my lady,” she mumbled, “I didn’t know whether to come.”

  “But you made the journey here. I heard about your brother. I am sorry. Your family has suffered much.”

  No more than yours, thought Maud. Margaret de Vere’s father, the old Earl of Warwick, had been killed at Barnet, fighting against his former friend King Edward. Her father-in-law and his eldest son were both executed by the Yorkists, and her husband, John de Vere, was a prisoner in Hammes Castle in France.

  All our menfolk have gone and left us to carry on the fight. Our weapons need to be more subtle.

  Margaret clasped her bony hands together and moved towards the table. She walked with a light, deliberate step, as though afraid of breaking something.

  “Sit,” she ordered Maud, “you look hungry. Theresa’s girls always looked hungry. Evil woman. She grows fat on the profits of misery.”

  “Bread, cheese and wine,” she added with a snap of her fingers at Jack, “and be quick about it.”

  The old serving-man ducked his head and winked at Maud as he stepped out to the kitchen.

  Maud warily sat on one of the chairs, still with her back to the window, and waited for the other woman to speak again. Margaret said nothing for a time, but studied her through narrowed eyes.

  “How did you know I was still in London?” she rapped out suddenly, her voice full of suspicion.

  “I didn’t,” Maud replied, “I just hoped.”

  “Hoped, did you? You should know better than to hope. What hope is there in a brothel?”

  She tapped her index finger on the table. “You should have come with me, all those years ago, when I offered. I would have taken you back to Norfolk. A hard life, perhaps, but a respectable one. In time, I may have found you a decent husband. No man with any pride would touch you now. Soiled goods.”

  Maud swallowed the insult, not without difficulty, and said nothing.

  It was true enough. In common with the other wives of Lancastrian loyalists, Margaret de Vere had suffered in the aftermath of Tewkesbury. Forced to leave her husband’s seat at Castle Hedingham in Essex, she had wandered from place to place, the disgraced wife of a defeated traitor.

  When her fortunes were at their lowest ebb, she took up lodgings in Southwark, attended by just one faithful servant and scraping a meagre living from her needle. A devout if misguided woman, she made efforts to reform Southwark’s teeming population of whores, and tried to persuade them to accompany her to church.

  The Southwark Nun, Theresa and the other madams mockingly called her. Maud was just twelve at the time, young and frightened and miserable, and one of the few who accepted Margaret’s offer. They became friends of a sort, until Theresa threatened to slit Maud’s nose unless she got off her knees and onto her back again.

  In an unguarded moment, Maud had told Margaret her real name, and something of her history. She had regretted it ever since. Even a little knowledge was power, a weapon others might use against her.

  Margaret’s fortunes had improved somewhat since those days. In one of his sporadic outbursts of generosity, old King Edward took pity on her, and gave her an annuity to live on. The money was enough for her to keep a house in East Anglia, where her husband once ruled supreme, and another in London. So far, King Richard had not seen fit to repeal it.

  Jack returned with a tray bearing half a wheel of cheese, a loaf of good white bread, a jug of wine and two cups. Silence reigned while he set the meal, poured out wine and cut generous slices of bread and cheese.

  “Why,” asked Margaret when he had gone, “are you here? I never thought to see your face again.”

  Maud bridled at her tone, and decided to respond with a question of her own.

  “Why did you tell Jack my name?” she demanded through a mouthful of cheese.<
br />
  Margaret’s mouth set in a firm line of disapproval, but then softened slightly. “You have retained some of your family spirit,” she said, “mere insolence, of course, but it’s something. I feared you were broken by so many misfortunes.”

  “As for Jack, you may as well know his full name is Jack Cloudsley. No mere servant, but a former billman in the service of the Duke of Somerset. After Somerset was slain at Towton, he turned outlaw rather than bend the knee to the Yorkists. A true Lancastrian. I could hardly turn him away when he came to Norfolk and begged to enter my service. He lost both his sons at Hexham.”

  Maud sipped at her wine and winced at the taste. It was poor, vinegary stuff, though her palate was coarsened by years of drinking cheap ale.

  “He rode for a time with an outlaw known as The White Hawk,” Margaret went on, “I expect you know of him.”

  Maud did, and felt a stab of pain, a ghostly blade slipped into her heart. The White Hawk was the name taken by her eldest uncle, Richard Bolton. He died in battle while she was still a child. Her mother used to sing the ballads they composed of his exploits, real and exaggerated.

  “This hawk stoops to gather you all,

  That betrayed our good King Henry…”

  “Jack Cloudsley is the last of The White Hawk’s following,” said Margaret, “the others are all dead, slain in battle or rotting on gallows up and down the land. God rest their souls. Outlaws they may have been, but they fought and died for a true cause. The only cause.”

  “What cause?” Maud said bitterly, “there’s nothing left to fight for. God favoured the House of York.”

  “The Devil did,” Margaret corrected her, “and the Devil cannot prosper forever. If you think we are so utterly defeated, why did you come here? I will have an answer.”

  Maud glanced nervously at the doorway into the hall. It should be safe enough. Jack Cloudsley appeared to be the only servant in the house, and he was unlikely to betray their confidence.

  “The new king,” she said in a low voice, “isn’t popular in the city. When he got that old preacher to stand up at Saint Paul’s Cross and declare King Edward’s sons bastards, nobody believed it. There are all kinds of rumours. Some say he has murdered them.”

  “I know,” replied Margaret, “it may well be true. Richard of Gloucester is a ruthless man, and a frightened one, as Rivers and Hastings learned to their cost. But what is this to me? I care nothing for the doings of some Yorkist usurper.”

  But you are happy to take his money. Maud smothered the treacherous thought. She knew Margaret was testing her.

  “All kinds of rumours,” she repeated, “of unrest in Kent, and other places. Men want to know what has become of the princes.”

  “And you want to know why your brother James lost his head,” said Margaret, “why now, after so many years in the Tower? Richard is making mistakes. Too many mistakes, and too many enemies. He cannot kill them all.”

  “Are you his enemy, my lady?” Maud ventured.

  Their eyes locked.

  “Are you, Elizabeth?” asked Margaret.

  Chapter 9

  Lower Austria, September 1483

  It was late summer, and the long war against the Holy Roman Empire threatened to drag on into the winter months. The Austrians had suffered defeat after defeat to Matthias’ well-equipped professional soldiers, but still they refused to surrender.

  Slowly, town by town, castle by castle, the Black Army slogged its way up the Danube. The Austrian forces fell back before this relentless advance, and stripped the countryside as they went. The frontier between Austria and Hungary was a Godforsaken wasteland, dotted with the burned-out shells of towns and villages and peopled by corpses.

  “I never saw dearer beef,” remarked Martin Bolton, Captain-General of the Company of the Talon, when he happened to spot a distant cow.

  His men guffawed. The cow was a spindly, lean-shanked beast, wandering aimlessly over the countryside north of Vienna. There was little enough for her to eat, since the fields were brown and barren. There had been no planting here, Martin reckoned, for at least a year. He spied a deserted village in the distance.

  The people are either dead or fled, he thought, and either is better than lingering here.

  “Let the Austrians gnaw on her stringy carcase, and welcome,” said Meurig.

  Meurig was a Welshman, and stringy enough himself, all bone and sinew under his armour. Well past fifty, with a tangled mop of white hair and beard, he claimed to have soldiered his way back and forth across Christendom since fleeing his little village in Gwynedd at the age of thirteen.

  Hard-baked in every kind of villainy, Meurig was one of only two men Martin trusted in all the world. The other was Henrik, the younger son of a Bavarian margrave.

  Henrik had lost most of his right arm during the vicious fighting outside Hainburg. An Austrian sabre lopped the limb clean off, and only some quick work on the part of Father André, a defrocked French priest and the Company’s surgeon, had saved him from bleeding to death.

  A one-armed soldier was of little use, but Martin had marched and fought alongside Henrik for the best part of eleven years. When he first came to Hungary, alone and penniless, Henrik had made a point of befriending him and teaching him the arts of war. For sentiment’s sake, he gave the cripple a job as quartermaster and keeper of the Company’s accounts.

  “Fortunately, I write left-handed,” remarked Henrik, who didn’t allow the loss of a limb to dampen his sense of humour.

  Now the Company of the Talon rode north as part of the Black Army’s vanguard, on their way to besiege some fortress or other. Even after eleven years, Martin still had trouble with the pronunciation of German and Hungarian names, and had completely forgotten where they were headed.

  It didn’t matter. One siege was much the same as another. Mud and bullets and death and boredom. Sickness too, if the autumn rains came on early, and the Austrians found the courage to resume their attacks on the baggage train.

  He fingered the S-shaped cross-guard of his sabre. Two days ago, the Company of the Talon had ambushed a patrol of Austrian light cavalry as they attempted to ford a river.

  An enjoyably bloody skirmish followed. Nine of Martin’s men died in exchange for twenty-three Austrians, and he killed an Austrian knight in single combat. His sabre, a perfectly balanced and multi-layered weapon, slightly curved in the Turkish style, took his opponent’s head off with one blow. Martin remembered the head’s surprised expression as it flew away, and chuckled.

  “There’s a sound I haven’t heard in a while,” grunted Meurig, “damned if I can see anything to laugh about. Never known such a bloody awful campaign. Mark me, we’ll still be shivering and shitting in our tents on the Austrian border come Christmas.”

  “Cheer up, you old croaker,” said Martin, “it’ll be dark soon, and we can stop and have some more of that bloody awful wine from Klosterneuberg you like drinking so much.”

  Meurig wiped his nose with the back of his gauntlet. “Better than I liked Klosterneuberg,” he replied, “a pretty town, but not after we finished with it.”

  Martin nodded grimly. He preferred not to remember. Klosterneuberg, a small town in Lower Austria, had fallen to the Black Army back in April. The sack that followed was no worse than usual, but the Hungarians suffered terrible casualties during the siege, and exacted a horrific revenge.

  Eleven years as a professional mercenary had hardened Martin’s stomach to most things, but the wanton torture of innocents was something new. When he saw the dead things in the cellar, under the wine-shop near the town square, he first threw up, and then ordered the culprits found and arrested.

  There were five, hard-faced brigands from the wastes of Swabia. Martin should have tried and hanged them, according to Company rules, but lost patience. In front of his assembled troops, he drew his sabre and hacked them all to death, until they resembled so many lumps of bleeding meat.

  “This is my discipline,” he shouted, shaking hi
s blood-spattered blade at his men, “this is what happens to those who skin infants alive. Do you hear me, you dogs? Look on, and remember.”

  As a result the other captains called him The Butcher, though he preferred The White Hawk. The Butcher had an unlucky ring. A Lancastrian lord, Robert Clifford, was once known by that name, and earned the hatred of all until his death at Towton.

  Martin shook his head. He was reluctant to think of anything that reminded him of England. Memories of his homeland, of the people he had left behind, caused him nothing but pain and bitterness.

  Memories of Kate Malvern, the only woman he had ever loved. She might have fled with him into exile, but instead chose to take the veil and hide away in a convent. Her love of God, she had claimed during their last meeting, was greater than her love for him.

  She lied. Fear of man was her motive, not the love of God. Fear of me.

  When dusk came on, the vanguard camped between two hills, with the distant lights of the Austrian fortress just visible through the gathering darkness to the northwest. A thick mist was coming down, so the King ordered watch-fires to be lit on the surrounding heights.

  “My arse,” declared Casimir as he warmed himself over the sputtering campfire, “is turned to leather. Twelve hours we were in the saddle today. Twelve hours! And we had to crawl along like snails, to match the pace of the bloody infantry. Damned foot-sloggers.”

  Martin ignored him. Casimir was a Pole, and an unusually learned man for a mercenary. He claimed to be an ex-student, expelled from the Jagiellonian University in Kazimierz for reasons he kept deliberately vague. Some of the younger men were awed by his air of haughty confidence and command of six languages. Martin found him irritating, and suspected him of coveting the leadership of the Company.

  Casimir could fight well enough, and was getting more cocky of late. At some point, not too far in the future, Martin would have to smash his pretensions, and possibly his face into the bargain.

  It was an infuriatingly pretty face, almost girlish, with long lashes, soft blue eyes and cropped fair hair. Thanks to his looks, Casimir rarely resorted to rape.