Sacrifice

by David Pilling

  Meurig lay slumped against a wall. Blood oozed from a hole in his guts. He had managed to pull out the spear that had impaled him, but nothing would stop the life flowing out of his body.

  “What’s this?” said Martin, kneeling beside him, “the old warhorse, come to his last pasture?”

  Meurig slowly raised his hand, drenched in his own gore, and laid his palm against Martin’s cheek.

  “Blood of my blood,” he whispered, “you are sworn now. Find Henry Tudor. Fight for him, or carry a dead man’s curse.”

  Martin jerked his head away. “You damned old fox!” he shouted, but it was too late. The death-rattle already sounded in Meurig’s throat. Martin thought his eyes gleamed in triumph before the light went out of them forever.

  Chapter 16

  Calais, France, November 1484

  Maud had vowed she would never sell her body again, and the Boltons kept their vows. Rather than submit herself to the whoremongers of Calais, she scraped a living by other means, however dirty or dangerous.

  Thus the daughter of Edward Bolton, gentleman of Staffordshire and lord of three manors, was reduced to gutting fish on the harbour of Calais. It was hard work, and poorly paid, as well as disgusting, but Maud was happy to take what she could get.

  Jack Cloudsley’s money had paid for her passage from England, aboard a fishing boat bound for Calais. She begged the captain to divert from his usual course and sail south-east, to the coast of Brittany, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

  “I stick to the main routes, girl,” he said firmly, “the Channel ain’t safe for English shipping at present, and I’m not about to lose my boat and cargo to Lord Cordes and his French pirates.”

  Maud had never heard of Lord Cordes, and said so. “He’s a French lord,” the captain explained, “the Marshal of France, no less. Got some long name no decent Englishman can pronounce, so we calls him Lord Cordes. His ships prowl the Channel like sea-wolves, looking for English vessels to plunder.”

  Lord Cordes failed to make an appearance, and they reached Calais in safety. Maud had never been to sea before, or even out of England, but she had heard tales of Calais, the last major English possession in France.

  The reality was even greater than she imagined. A double line of white sea-walls protected the city, mounted with rows of gleaming cannon, capable of blowing any ship out of the water. Dozens of ships crowded into the harbour, cogs and galleys and smaller vessels, loaded with wine and wool and other goods from England.

  Maud’s first few weeks in Calais were hard, but she was used to surviving on her own, and knew how to avoid the traps and pitfalls of city life.

  Weeks turned into months. Driven by hunger and want, Maud found she could turn her hand to most things. She laboured as a seamstress, working on rough cloth by poor light, and as an oakum-picker, unpicking tarred fibres from old ropes and cordage, used for caulking barrels and the joints of ship timbers. This last job she hated. It was tedious, and painful, and made her fingernails bleed.

  On the whole, Maud preferred gutting fish. The stench and the filth were difficult to endure, but she got to use a sharp knife, and imagined every dead fish was Sir Geoffrey Malvern. There was something deeply satisfying about slitting the cold, wet bodies, and watching the blood and guts slide out.

  Maud said little, and made few friends, but was careful to listen and learn. Calais was nervous, and the populace lived in constant fear of the French. Surrounded by some twenty miles of swampy wetland, called the Pale of Calais, the approaches to the city were defended by two inland castles. One was called Guines, the other Hammes, and both lay somewhere to the south.

  “They won’t stop the French,” was the opinion of one fishwife, a sallow, wall-eyed woman who sold mussels and shellfish from a stall on the edge of the market, “once their little king and his ministers have stopped fighting each other, they will come for us.”

  The fishwife’s name was Blanche, and she appeared to relish the thought of imminent destruction. “There are thousands of the buggers,” she said cheerfully, “far too many for our little garrison to handle. Then there’s that bastard Lord Cordes at sea. He will blockade the port, while the soldiers on land swarm over our defences. You see this knife?”

  From under the stall she produced a long, wickedly sharp knife, which made Maud think wistfully of her old blade at The Cardinal’s Hat.

  “The moment the French get inside the city, I’ll stick this into my heart,” Blanche went on, “it’s that or get raped, and I’ll not surrender my virtue to some garlic-breathed French archer.”

  This raised a snigger from her friends. “He would have to find it first,” remarked one, and narrowly avoided a blow from Blanche’s massive fist.

  Maud had grown confident enough to add her voice. “What of the pretender?” she asked innocently, “I heard he left Brittany, and was welcomed by the French court.”

  This was the latest rumour. Henry of Richmond was said to have escaped from Brittany, just, with hundreds of Breton soldiers at his heels. The Regency council of King Charles had received him warmly at Montargis, along with his followers.

  Lord Cordes, the great enemy of English shipping, was said to have befriended Henry. This caused no end of consternation in Calais. The current Lieutenant was Lord Dynham, a Yorkist loyal to King Richard, and it seemed obvious to many that Henry of Richmond would make the city his first target.

  “You may well ask,” said Blanche, smiling fondly at Maude, “the pretender is a Welshman, and we all know what savages they are. A Welshman raised in France, no less! What a brute he must be. Lord Cordes will give Richmond an army, and send him to reduce Calais. We can expect no mercy, my dears. No mercy at all.”

  As ever, Maud kept her own counsel, and waited. She had no intention of living out her days among the poor of Calais, but was uncertain what to do next. England was barred to her, at least while Richard Plantagenet sat on the throne, and she didn’t expect much from Richmond. The French would use him as a bargaining counter against England, just as the Bretons had, and then throw him away when his usefulness was expended.

  Then came news: sudden, unexpected news, which brought joy to Maud’s heart and threw the citizens of Calais into a delirium of terror.

  The lieutenant of Hammes Castle, Sir James Blount, had deserted his post and fled to Richmond’s court at Montargis. He took with him his long-term prisoner, John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and much of the garrison.

  Panic seized the city. Blount’s brother, Baron Mountjoy, was in command of Guines, the other stronghold defending the approach to Calais. If he also defected, nothing stood between Calais and the French save a few miles of watery swamp and a few pathetic, ill-defended fortifications.

  “Raped in our beds!” declared Blanche, who had rarely sounded happier, “I warned you, my dears, and now it is coming to pass. I advise you all to buy some good sharp knives.”

  That night Maud sat gazing out of the window of her tiny lodgings on the top floor of a dockside boarding house. The window looked out to sea, and the rhythmic churn of the waves helped her to think.

  Oxford’s escape changed everything. Lady Margaret’s husband had always been one of the mainstays of the Lancastrian cause, a fierce and able soldier, though a decade in prison might have softened him.

  He and the other old war-dog, Jasper Tudor, Richmond’s uncle, were the only survivors of the old Lancastrian warrior elite. The rest were all dead, slaughtered on a dozen battlefields or fallen victim to the executioner.

  Twin pillars of a ruined house,thought Maude, Richmond will have to put his faith in them now.

  She was sick of hiding and surviving. If there was to be one last roll of the dice, a final blow struck against York, then she wanted to play her part. Richmond might have little use for a woman with no money or troops, but he needed all the blades he could muster. Maud had a blade hidden under her mattress. If it could gut fish, it could gut Yorkists.

  The next morning she woke early, and went out int
o the streets to hire a horse. The last of her money went on a fat old mare, and enough dried meat and watered ale to last her three or four days.

  No-one cared what Maud did or where she went. It was a great advantage, and the guards on the western gate hardly spared her a glance as she rode out of the city.

  Her knowledge of France was sketchy in the extreme, but she had made discreet enquiries, and knew that Montargis lay somewhere to the south of Paris. Paris itself lay to the south, some one hundred and fifty miles from Calais.

  Maud doubted she would survive the journey. She cared little. The time for caution was past.

  The weather held for the first couple of days. Her horse plodded south along lonely roads, leading through the dank marshes of the Pale and past Hammes. Maud saw the castle to the east. The Plantagenet banners still flew from the walls, so it was still in Yorkist hands.

  By contrast, the roads north of Paris were choked with traffic, and Maud lost herself among the throng. Her horse might have resembled a musty old carpet wrapped around a barrel, and been about as comfortable to ride, but the beast made slow, steady progress. Few of her fellow travellers gave Maud a second glance, though one or two sneered at the horse. She was careful to keep her hood down and her fingers wrapped around the hilt of her knife.

  Only once did she meet with danger. A troop of mounted archers cantered past, on their way north, and she urged her horse into the verge to make room for them.

  One of the stragglers reined in to get a better look at her face under the hood. His jupon bore three silver helms against a black field, a device Maud didn’t recognise. She imagined it belonged to some French lord.

  The archer rode closer. He was a youngish man, with cropped brown hair and a stupid face. His mouth was twisted in a frown, and he reached out one grimy hand to pluck at her hood.

  Maud twisted her head away. “Be still,” he barked “I won’t hurt you unless I have to.”

  Some of his comrades stopped to watch the show. They all had dirty, coarse faces – peasant faces, Maud thought – and were unlikely to help her. Long-buried memories of her rape at the hands of Yorkist soldiers flickered through her mind.

  “That’s better,” said the archer when she made no further move, “I just want to get a look at you…girl, is it? Now why would a girl be travelling alone on this bit of carrion, eh?”

  He twitched back her hood, and his frown changed to a grin of pure delight. “Look, boys,” he said, turning to wink at his mates, “Christmas has come early.”

  Maud’s knife shot out like a claw and raked down the side of his face, opening a gash on his cheek. He squealed and almost fell off his pony, glaring at her with furious eyes as he clapped a hand over the wound.

  “I’ll scar you for that,” he roared, and reached for his sword while his mates crowed with laughter.

  Before he could draw, their captain came to Maud’s rescue. “What the hell is this?” he bawled, “we have to be at Béthune by dusk, or our lord will have my guts for supper. Julien, what in the name of God are you doing with that girl?”

  Julien started to gabble some reply. “You can have your fill of whores in Béthune,” snarled his captain, “now get back in line.”

  “But, sir,” whined Julien, “she cut my face!”

  “Good for her, and I’ll cut your cock if you don’t look sharp. Move!”

  With a last hate-fuelled glance, Julien turned back to join the others. Some of them gave Maud a wave and a cheer before they rode away. She watched them go until they were a mere wisp of dust on the horizon, and then slid from the saddle to wipe her bloody knife clean on the grass.

  She continued south, following the slightly crooked route to Paris, through Arras and Péronne. Weary and aching from sleeping in the open, she reached Compiégne late in the afternoon of the third day after leaving Calais, and looked for a bed for the night in the cheapest tavern she could find.

  The last of her money went on the room and a rough meal of bread and cheese. Faint with exhaustion, she sat in a stall and gnawed at the hard cheese, straining to listen to the talk around her in the crowded taproom.

  Among all the inconsequential drunken chat, she picked out a few gems of information.

  “The pretender is in Paris,” one man said, “the court moved there last week, and he went with it.”

  “How many men has he got?” asked another in an anxious voice, “enough to threaten Calais?”

  “Barely enough to threaten a wine-shop. A few poor and ragged exiles from England, that’s all. Even if he does scrape an army together, he won’t go to Calais. The bitch of Beaujeu will pack him off to England in a few ships, to try his fortunes against the white boar.”

  Maud’s head swam as she laboured to make sense of this. The identity of the white boar was obvious, but the bitch of Beaujeu caused her some difficulty. Then she remembered: the council of France was dominated by the young king’s eldest sister, Anne of Beaujeu. With most unusual behaviour for a woman, and a young woman at that, she had seized the reins of power in her brother’s minority, and showed no sign of giving it up. She, and Lord Cordes, would be the arbiters of Richmond’s fate.

  Judging from the talk, Anne was not popular, at least among the menfolk of France. Maud found much to admire in her, but was too tired to think or listen any further that night. Finishing her meal, she struggled up the stairs to her room, and collapsed into a dreamless sleep on the grubby bed.

  She set out early the next morning on the last stretch to Paris. Unable to afford a bite of breakfast, she had saved a heel of bread from the previous night, and ate it on the way.

  At least, she considered, her journey had been cut short. Richmond was now in Paris, just some twenty miles south. Maud wondered what he was like, and how he would react when she offered to serve him. He would probably laugh, in which case she would remind him that his fate lay in the hands of a woman, and storm off with dignity intact.

  A wasted journey, Maud thought wryly, but she could think of nowhere better to go. Her father and uncles would not have hesitated to offer their swords to Richmond. Desire for revenge, and a residual sense of duty, compelled her to do the same.

  The suburbs of Paris were a bewildering maze of narrow streets, much like Southwark, and Maud soon got lost. Eventually she persuaded a beggar to point her in the direction of the Palais du Louvre, the great royal fortress-palace on the banks of the Seine.

  Maud made her way on foot, leading her horse by the reins through teeming crowds. The whole of the city was in a ferment, alive with rumours of war and invasion, though who was fighting who seemed unclear.

  It seemed Paris was about to be attacked by the Orléanists, a rival faction to the Regency council headed by Anne of Beaujeus. Many were on the side of the Orléanists, and exchanged filthy barbs with those who supported the Regency. Others shouted it was the Bretons and their English allies who should be feared, and that a great allied army was massed on the borders of Brittany, poised to invade France and lay waste the country.

  Few voices, Maud noticed, mentioned Henry of Richmond. It appeared the pretender was seen as no threat by the citizens of Paris.

  She encountered more soldiers as she neared the palace, a gigantic mass of stone looming over the Right Bank of the Seine. Some had English accents, a blessed sound, and she glimpsed the quartered red and yellow arms of John de Vere among the forest of banners.

  Then she spied the white hawk. It flew past her, emblazoned on a standard carried by a one-armed soldier in a plain leather jerkin and round helm.

  Maud’s heart ceased to beat. After a second it resumed, slowly. Her eyes followed the hawk to a bridge on the eastern side of the river, where a knot of horsemen were gathered.

  They were all clothed in steel, but only two wore arms on their surcoats. One, a tall, ruddily handsome man, displayed a white star against a red field.

  The other was big, far bigger than she remembered, a coarse-faced brute with reddish hair, an untidy beard, and the dead e
yes of a practiced killer.

  Killer or no, he was still her kinsman, her last kinsman, and the white hawk was emblazoned on his chest.

  Maud abandoned her horse and ran towards the bridge. She slipped on piles of dung and rubbish, shoved aside any who stood in her way.

  She reached the horsemen, pursued by a storm of curses, and seized Martin’s bridle. He was deep in conversation with the knight of the white star, and looked down, bewildered, at the thin, lank-haired girl who had interrupted them.

  “What in hells do you want?” he demanded, “let go of my bridle. Damn it, is there no end to these street beggars?”

  Maud tried to speak, but the words died inside her. All she could do was bow her head.

  The dam broke, and Elizabeth Bolton found her tears at last.

  Chapter 17

  The Tower, England, January 1485

  God had given, it seemed to Sir Geoffrey Malvern, and now saw fit to take.

  He had taken away King Richard’s only legitimate son, Edward of Middleham. The boy, just seven years old, died in Yorkshire in the spring, and left his parents prostrate with grief. In Richard’s case, grief was joined by terror, for now he had no direct heir of his body.

  No sons, thought Geoffrey. Not unless you counted Richard’s bastards. One, John of Gloucester, was due to replace Lord Dynham as Lieutenant of Calais. Bastards were of limited value. They could not inherit the crown.

  Richard had been forced to make another of his nephews, John de le Pole, Earl of Lincoln, the unofficial heir designate. As a mark of his new favour and importance, de la Pole was showered with revenues and estates.

  Geoffrey disliked the young earl. Handsome, vain and supercilious, with an inflated opinion of his own worth, he reminded Geoffrey too much of himself as a youth.

  Where in God’s name were the princes? Even now, months after their disappearance, it was the question on thousands of lips. Geoffrey had a fairly good idea of their whereabouts. He shivered. There were some things even he wouldn’t stoop to, and preferred not to contemplate.