Sacrifice

by David Pilling

  The old soldier’s stern voice of command overcame Maud’s desire to stay with him. She climbed over the battlements and leaped, war-shouts and the crunch of steel ringing in her ears as she plunged, limbs flailing, into the dark waters.

  Chapter 12

  Salisbury, 2nd November 1483, All Soul’s Day

  Richard was in the cathedral, staring at the silver crucifix on the altar with death in his heart, when they brought him the news of Buckingham’s execution.

  “Did he make a good end?” he asked without taking his eyes off the crucifix.

  “Well enough,” replied Sir James Tyrrell, “he confessed his sins, uttered ‘God bless the King!’ and laid his head on the block.”

  “The headsman was sober, thank God,” added Christopher Wellesbourne, “two swift chops, and the duke’s head dropped into the basket. Neat work.”

  Richard dropped his eyes and contemplated the backs of his hands. Thin, delicate white hands. Clean hands.

  I am a deal stronger than I appear, which is just as well.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, and sighed. Buckingham was dead. The man he had counted on as his chief ally. No, more than that. A friend.

  Why did he do it? Why did his friend forsake him? Richard would never know the true answer, though he had his suspicions. The rebellion had unnerved Buckingham, especially since it was instigated by so many of King Edward’s old retainers. Instead of holding his nerve, and bringing his soldiers from Wales to help Richard crush the rebels, he placed himself at their head and secretly offered Richmond the crown.

  Thankfully, Buckingham’s retainers wanted no share in his treason. One of them betrayed his lord and handed him over to Tyrell and Wellesbourne, who brought him to the King at Salisbury. The prisoner begged for an audience with his old master, but Richard refused.

  “I will hear nothing that man has to say,” he said, “he had great cause to be true, and yet he is the most untrue creature alive.”

  Any pity Richard might have felt for his erstwhile friend was smothered by anger. It had burned inside him for weeks, ever since his agents informed him that Buckingham was engaged in treasonable correspondence with Henry of Richmond.

  Loyaulté me lie.

  Loyalty binds me. Richard’s motto. He had always striven to live up to it, and expected the same from his friends. Those who were loyal could expect every favour in return. Those who broke with him could expect no mercy. They deserved none.

  What do kinslayers deserve?

  Richard shuddered. There were certain things he cared not to think upon, especially here, in the nave of Salisbury Cathedral. God was everywhere, but his hearing was particularly acute inside a religious house.

  He glanced at Tyrrell. A broad-beamed, reliable man, a knight of Suffolk and one of the very few who shared Richard’s knowledge of the fate of the princes in the Tower. Acting on his master’s instructions, Tyrrell had arranged the deaths.

  He kept his own hands clean, of course. The actual killers were a couple of no-marks, old Lancastrians Richard had kept alive in case they might serve some useful purpose. They were also dead now, and could tell no tales.

  Tyrrell calmly held his gaze. The truth was a secret between them, and must remain so.

  “All is done, sire. Prince Edward and Richard of York now sleep forever under the stair.”

  These were Tyrell’s words to his royal master, on the night Richard’s nephews met their end.

  The stair. Ten feet under it, to be exact, their bodies stuffed into a miserable little hole under the staircase leading to the chapel in the White Tower. Even now they lay there, slowly rotting.

  Richard’s guilt fuelled his rage. For a moment he was tempted to ignore propriety and order Buckingham’s headless corpse to be thrown into a dung-pit, but resisted the urge. He could not be seen to be unjust. From now on, Richard would be a model of good kingship.

  “Wellesbourne, have the late duke’s remains taken to Greyfriars,” he said wearily, “and buried there with all due ceremony. He was our enemy in life. We shall not continue to persecute him in death.”

  “Yes, sire,” replied Wellesbourne, and hurried away to do his master’s bidding. Richard watched him go, and then turned to Tyrrell.

  “His family are a different matter,” he said, “we want his wife and sons found and delivered to our custody.”

  Tyrrell nodded. “It is already in hand, sire. I have sent men to Weobley to order Lord Ferrers to hand them over. He will comply.”

  “He had better. Ferrers has a history of playing both sides to his own advantage.”

  Weobley was in Herefordshire, the seat of Lord Ferrers, a nobleman of dubious character. Richard had a long memory, and knew that Ferrers had once given shelter to the young Henry Tudor before the pretender fled to Brittany.

  Buckingham had left his wife and sons in the charge of Ferrers, before departing for the final stage of his miserably unsuccessful rebellion. Perhaps in the knowledge that the thing was doomed to failure, he had divided his family and sent his daughters to the refuge of Brecon Castle.

  Richard smiled. Some refuge. When Buckingham tried to raise his tenants on his Welsh estates, they had marched on Brecon instead, and plundered the castle. So far as Richard knew, the duke’s daughters had been left unharmed.

  Pity. The Welshmen should have raped and butchered the little wenches. No fate is too cruel for the offspring of a traitor.

  He checked himself. These dark thoughts were too frequent. It would be easy, so easy, to fall into bloody tyranny.

  …Prince Edward and Richard of York now sleep forever under the stair…

  “We shall rest here tonight,” he said harshly, “and tomorrow continue our progress into the south-west. Let the rebels come against us in force of arms, if they have the courage. We shall relish the encounter, and prove the strength of our crown on their bodies.”

  That night he enjoyed almost four hours of sleep. Buckingham’s death had removed the source of one anxiety, and God permitted him a measure of rest. Not much, but enough to infuse Richard with a new sense of energy and purpose.

  He was up at cock-crow, bellowing for his squire. As soon as he was armed, Richard led his army west from Salisbury under the dim grey shadow of early morning.

  Exeter was his target. Most of the remaining rebels were gathered in force there, under the command of the Marquess of Dorset and Sir Thomas St Leger.

  Traitors both. Damn them. Dorset may have evaded my bloodhounds, but soon his head shall adorn a pike over the city gates.

  Richard force-marched his men west. It felt good to be on campaign again, his first since the brief invasion of Scotland a year previously. He was a soldier to his boots, born to fight and lead men in battle.

  God was on his side. He was certain of that, and had ample proof of it. Everywhere the rebellion failed. The rebels in Kent had risen too soon, and were scattered by the prompt action of the Duke of Norfolk, who fortunately happened to be touring his new estates in Surrey and Sussex when word of the rebellion reached him. Buckingham’s efforts to raise an army on the Marches had ended in total failure. This left only the rebels in Devonshire, and an isolated garrison at Bodiam Castle in Sussex, to be dealt with.

  Richard prayed that Richmond would join his allies at Exeter. His spies in Brittany informed him that Duke Francis had agreed to supply the pretender with a few ships, and that Richmond planned to land somewhere on the south-west coast.

  “Let him come,” Richard remarked cheerfully to Tyrrell as they neared Bridport, “we relish the thought of meeting the Welsh milksop in battle.”

  He weighed his battle-axe in his hand. It was his favourite weapon, slightly unwieldy, but capable of chopping through steel and flesh. Richard had last wielded it in anger at Tewkesbury, twelve years gone.

  “Time you drank some fresh blood,” he said, patting the blade affectionately.

  Much to his chagrin, there was no glorious pitched battle. No opportunity to smash all his enemies a
t once, leaving him free to live and reign in peace. His army arrived outside the gates of Exeter to learn that the rebel leaders had fled, most of them taking ship for France.

  “Only Sir Thomas St Leger remains, Your Grace,” the High Sheriff informed him, “he is out in the country somewhere, trying to raise men.”

  “What of Richmond?” Richard demanded anxiously, “did he land?”

  “No, Your Grace. There was a terrible gale at sea. We get them in these parts at this time of year. His ships were scattered. One or two were spotted by our guards on the coast, but they turned around and sailed away.”

  Richard subsided. “Drowned or fled, then,” he mused, toying with the ring on his little finger, “we would prefer him delivered to us in chains.”

  “At least the danger is removed, sire,” said Tyrell, “this Richmond must be a poor kind of man, to turn and run at the first sign of difficulty.”

  Or a prudent one.

  Richard was aware of his late brother’s efforts to prise Richmond out of Brittany. They had all failed. The pretender was slippery as any fish. It would require careful handling to drag him in.

  “We want St Leger found and killed,” he said, “let his head adorn the gates of Exeter. As for us, we shall return to London, and there proclaim our victory.”

  Chapter 13

  Whiteladies nunnery, Staffordshire, March 1484

  The convent was a place of supreme peace, tucked away among the rolling hills and dales of Staffordshire. For its little community of nuns, the days slipped by quietly, marked out by the daily ritual of prayer.

  England was a troubled land, and even here the wars of the past twenty years had left their mark. Several of the nuns were widows, seeking consolation in God after the death of their husbands in battle. Not just husbands, but brothers and sons. These bereaved women wandered through the cloisters like ghosts, damaged beyond repair by their losses.

  Even among the bereaved, Mary Bolton was an object of pity. Shorn of her husband, her father, her eldest brother and her daughter, she had also lost her tongue. No-one but the Mother Superior, a second cousin of the Boltons and Mary’s confidante, knew how she came to be so cruelly mutilated.

  Now, on an early spring morning, as white clouds scudded across a fair blue sky outside the window of her cell, Mary endured more pain.

  Whiteladies was an enclosed community, and received few letters. One had arrived the previous winter, carried by an arrogant young squire on a grey horse. The badge on his coat displayed the green wyvern of the Malverns.

  Mary usually kept the letter he brought locked in a chest at the foot of her bed, but today had brought the evil thing out and placed it on a lectern. It was her habit to read beside the window, to get as much natural light as possible. Her eyesight was poor, and had grown worse over the long years since Tewkesbury.

  “Let me burn it, child,” the Mother Superior had offered, many months ago, “its existence causes you nothing but grief.”

  Mary refused. She deserved her grief. It was sent by God to remind her of the suffering of her kin, and the world in general.

  The letter was short, and written in Sir Geoffrey Malvern’s neat, concise hand. The words were burned into her brain.

  - To Lady Mary Bolton, greetings. Know that your brother James is dead, and his head speared on a pole at the Tower. His death caused me great joy. I hope it causes you an equal degree of pain. If your tongue could wag, what sorrows it would relate!

  Sir Geoffrey, Viscount Malvern.’

  The gloating heartlessness of his tone was unbearable. This, from a man who had once played with her brothers as a boy, among the woods and fields near Heydon Court. Now he rejoiced in their destruction.

  Twelve years ago Sir Geoffrey had ordered Mary’s tongue to be ripped out. His soldiers performed the brutal operation with a knife, laughing as they did so. The pain and shock had knocked her unconscious, but by some miracle she did not bleed to death.

  The agony of losing her tongue was nothing compared to that of losing her child. Mary last saw her daughter Elizabeth being carried away in the arms of one of Malvern’s retainers, screaming piteously for her mother.

  Mary’s method of coping with the pain was to focus on the general rather than the personal. Why did God allow such things to happen? What had her family done to deserve such torment? A man like Sir Geoffrey was a true servant of the Devil, and yet he prospered and grew fat on the wages of sin.

  The door to her little cell glided open. Rhian, one of the novices, stepped inside. Mary noted the look of caution on the young Welsh girl’s pallid face. The novices tended to regard Mary as something of a freak, as though being a mute was a sign of evil. True, physical imperfections were suspicious, but she had not been born with hers.

  “She asks for you,” said Rhian in her heavily accented English, “you must hurry. It won’t be long now.”

  Mary steeled herself. She closed her eyes and muttered a prayer.

  “I’m ready,” she said, “take me to her.”

  Kate Malvern lay in the sanatorium. It had been her home for the past two months, ever since she collapsed at prayer.

  Her illness had come on slowly over the winter months, first as a common cold, and then something more sinister. Mary was one of the first to suspect something was amiss, when Kate’s hacking cough refused to leave.

  She was always fragile, thought Mary as she and Rhian descended the stair leading to the sanatorium, now she is in God’s hands.

  It was strange, how Mary could feel such pity for a Malvern, but there was no enmity between her and Kate. A kind of friendship had formed between them. Whether through guilt or affection, or a mixture of both, Kate made a point of spending time with Mary, and often played at chess with her in the evenings.

  The sanatorium was small, with room for just six beds. All but one were empty. It was stuffy and close, thanks to a fire burning merrily in the grate, and the scent of fragrant herbs hung heavy in the air.

  Kate smiled weakly as the two women entered the room. She was thin, shockingly thin, her elfin face no more than a skull with yellow skin stretched too tight over delicate bones. Her chestnut hair, which once tumbled to her shoulders in thick tresses, was cropped ruthlessly short. The Mother Superior, in her slightly misguided kindness, thought it might help to keep away lice.

  Mary nodded frantically at the window. The wooden shutters were firmly closed and plunged the room into darkness. Aside from the fire, light came from rows of white candles mounted on an iron candelabra.

  In Heaven’s name, she wanted to shout, open it, and let us get some fresh air in here!

  “It’s all right,” Kate’s thin husk of a voice came from the bed, “leave it closed, please. The cold air hurts my chest.”

  Her voice broke off into a feeble cough. Rhian hurried over to Kate’s bedside and lifted a bucket from the floor to her mouth.

  “Spit out the evil, fach,” the novice said in soothing tones, “hawk and spit. Get all the bile out.”

  Kate’s head was propped up on a heap of pillows, but she lacked the strength to sit upright. Rhian helped her, tilting her head forward until she could spit a few drops of blackish phlegm into the bucket.

  She fell back against the pillows, exhausted. Her body under the thick blankets was painfully wasted, almost childlike. There was a translucent quality to her skin, and her hollow eyes were full of pain and misery.

  Green eyes, thought Mary, the same that once captivated my brother. What would he make of her now?

  Tears stung her own eyes, and she had to look away. Her youngest brother, Martin, had once been secretly betrothed to Kate, back when the world was young. The deadly feud between their families meant it had to be kept a secret.

  Mary thought there was something wonderfully innocent about their brief affair.The two lovers were like characters from some French pastoral, the young knight and his fair maid.

  Perhaps it would have been better if they died young.

  The r
omance quickly turned sour. Her eldest brother, Richard, had gone wild when he found out, and almost throttled Martin with his bare hands. Richard was full of dark passions, his soul consumed by desire for revenge on their father’s killers. He got his revenge, or a measure of it, before death took him as well.

  Death was coming for Kate. Mary could almost sense his grim shade near the sickbed. She signalled at Rhian, who understood.

  “I will fetch the Mother Superior,” she said, and hurried out of the room. Mary smiled at her haste. The novice was a picture of youth and health. This was no place for her.

  Kate smiled and tried to raise her hand. Mary caught it in her own. The fingers were terrifyingly brittle, like bundles of dry twigs. If Mary exerted the slightest pressure, they would break.

  Instead she stroked the papery skin. It wasn’t fair. Kate was still young, barely thirty, and should never have come to Whiteladies. She only did so to escape the cruelty of men.

  Her uncle Geoffrey had married her off to one of his neighbours, a much older man named Edmund Ramage. They were a poor match, but Kate might have endured it for the sake of her family. What she could not endure was the nightmare that followed, when an enraged Martin came to Ramage’s house and slaughtered him in single combat. Her brave young knight, turned to a bloody-handed killer before her eyes.

  Too fragile. Far too fragile.

  “Mary,” said Kate, her voice barely more than a whisper, “you have always been my friend. Thank you.”

  Mary smiled. In truth, her pity for Kate was tempered by a degree of contempt. The girl was surrendering, running away, as she had run away from every difficulty in life. God would receive her soul, no doubt, but she might have made a greater effort to hold onto it.

  For all her sorrow, Mary would never surrender.God would have to tear the last breath from her body. She would live to see the House of York undone, and her family restored. The usurper Richard Plantagenet had crushed the last rebellion, but there would be others. He had made too many enemies to survive for long.