Sacrifice

by David Pilling

  “You must not go,” said his wife, watching him pensively, “all the other gentlemen of the county have declared for the King. If you join Essex, they will be your enemies forever. Our enemies.”

  She touched his shoulder. “Think, Francis. Remember the fate of your ancestors at the hands of their Yorkist neighbours. We cannot afford to be cut off, alone, surrounded by a sea of foes.”

  “Our own people are growing to hate us,” she added when he failed to reply, “the tenants on our manors, who have called the Boltons master for generations without complaint, now look on us with suspicion. Not three days ago poor Susan’s windows at Sedgley farm were smashed, and I heard of the people of Cromford setting up a popinjay in your likeness. The clods then set fire to it and danced around the evil thing in pagan fashion.”

  Francis remained silent. It was not his way to argue with Anne, whom he was usually happy to defer to in family and household matters. Neither would he allow her to make him do anything that might compromise his honour. His way of resistance was to say nothing, and let her fires wither and die for lack of fuel.

  The uneasy silence was broken by their second and youngest son, George, who had sauntered over to the window. “I see our loyal retainers are arming,” he remarked, peering down at the courtyard, “Jenkins and Taylor and the rest. What on earth is young Storey doing with that ancient sallet? It’s far too big for his head.”

  “Giles Storey is nine months your senior, boy,” Francis said harshly, “and a good lad, if a trifle thick in the head. He wears the sallet because I gave our servants permission to take gear from the armoury. Much of it, as you well know, is old and out of fashion.”

  “It suits Jenkin, then,” George countered, “he must be fifty-five if he is a day. Do you truly mean to lead this rabble of gardeners, grooms and decaying serving-men into battle?”

  “I do,” replied Francis, eyeing him sharply, “and you, sir, should ride with us. It would be shameful if neither of my sons fought on the side of God.”

  “We have spoken of this,” said Anne, “and agreed that George can act according to his conscience. If he wishes it, he may stay here with me. That way, if you and Robert are killed in the battle...”

  She could not go on. “If we are killed,” Francis said while his wife wiped away a tear, “there will at least be one adult male heir to inherit the Bolton estates.”

  Otherwise they would fall to Robert’s sons, and the son of Robert’s late cousin John. All three boys were minors. Francis’ blood turned to water at the thought of his lands being in the hands of lawyers until the heirs came of age. Other members of the Bolton clan would gather like vultures over a carcase, eager to grab their share.

  Francis was loath to allow the Bolton estates, acquired through much blood and suffering on the part of his ancestors, to be carved up like a pie. At the same time he wanted George to do his duty. Barely seventeen, the lad was feckless and changeable as a weather-cock, and did not conduct himself as befitted the son of a Puritan gentleman.

  In his darkest moments Francis suspected his youngest son of having inherited the family curse. It only surfaced every couple of generations, and only in one man at a time. The curse took the form of vice: drunkenness, womanising, gambling, all the sins young men were prone to indulge in, but taken to excess.

  The most notorious of the cursed Boltons was one James, brother to the Elizabeth and Martin who lay in the family vault. James did not lie beside them. No-one knew where he lay, since he had vanished into the Tower after the Battle of Tewkesbury, never to be seen again. Francis suspected the Yorkists had murdered him, as they murdered poor Henry the Sixth, and quietly disposed of the bodies somewhere inside that dreaded fortress beside the Thames.

  Francis would not go so far as to say James deserved his fate - he was brave, by all accounts, and loyal to Lancaster - but he was a man of the most appalling character. Thanks to his crimes of lust, there were probably any number of peasants in Staffordshire with Bolton blood in them, had they but known it. Worse, this fornicating drunk had masqueraded as a priest.

  I will not allow you to go the same way, my lad, Francis thought grimly, studying his son. George was well enough to look, lean and wiry, with a head of crisp auburn curls and mild blue eyes. Typical Bolton features. His brother Robert was entirely different - a tall, long, severe-looking man, dark of hair and visage, more like a Spaniard than an Englishman.

  Or so he had appeared when Francis last saw him. The pain of their estrangement hit him again, a shrewd blow to the heart that made him sag with grief.

  “Go to war, or stay at home,” he said to George, mustering himself, “you are no longer a child, and must make your own decision.”

  He held up a finger. “Many fathers would not be so lenient. All I ask is this. Whatever you decide, let it be according to your conscience.”

  George sniffed, and ran his index finger up and down the window sill, still looking down at the servants in the courtyard. His parents watched him closely, waiting.

  “Oh, well,” he said with a shrug, “I can hardly take up arms against my own father. Why, what should I do if I saw you in the opposing battle-line? Laugh, most likely, and be shot for levity unbecoming an officer. Nor am I a stay-at-home.”

  “I am sorry, mother,” he added, turning to Lady Anne, “I will join the army of Parliament, though I have no hatred for the King, and care little how any man chooses to pray.”

  “Why, then,” she asked quietly, taking his hand, “do you choose to risk your precious body in this conflict, and leave me alone?”

  He smiled. There was something eternally childlike about George, and his smile made him seem a boy again. “Family honour, mother. Nothing more.”

  Now the decision was made, Francis rose and left George and his wife together. There was a close bond between them, a subtle mutual devotion, that he had never managed to forge with either of his children. Francis had always preferred to play the role of the stern, distant father, reckoning his sons could only survive in a hard world by learning early to stand up for themselves.

  His lesson had worked, all too well, and left him bereft. Feeling older than his years, he stumped down the main stair and passed through a side-door. This led him to a narrow passage ending in another door and a winding staircase.

  The steps ended on the first floor of the oldest part of the house. Once part of the servant’s quarters, it was little-used these days except for storage. Francis made his way down a passage thick with dust and cobwebs, past five open doorways. Inside each was a small, cluttered room, full of old furniture and the rubbish of generations.

  The sixth door was barred and locked. William Clarke, one of his grooms, stood on guard. Clarke wore a breastplate that had last seen service against Lambert Simnel’s rebels at Stoke field, over a century before Francis’ birth, and was armed with a sword and a pole-axe.

  “How is the prisoner?” Francis asked, returning the other man’s salute.

  “Quiet, my lord,” replied Clarke, looking straight ahead, “quiet as a mouse. Not a sound since we locked him away. An hour ago I opened the door to check, thinking he might have harmed himself. He was on his knees beside the bed, praying.”

  Francis nodded. “Begging the Lord for mercy, no doubt,” he said, “open the door. I would speak with him.”

  Clarke laid his pole-axe against the wall and took the set of keys from his belt. Francis stood back a little, patting his sword-hilt for assurance, while his servant fiddled with the rusted lock.

  Eventually he got the door open. “Stand back, there,” he cried, drawing his sword and stepping inside, “Sir Francis wishes to see you. Speak to his lordship with respect, and make no hasty moves, else I’ll spit you on this blade.”

  Francis cleared his throat and walked inside.

  Henry Malvern had been shut up for three days inside this tiny room, little more than a cupboard, with nothing but spiders and rats for company. There was a slit window, divided by an iron bar and set
high in the wall, too narrow for even his meagre body to squeeze through. Francis had made provision for Henry’s arrival, ordering his servants to clear out the junk and put in a small pallet bed and a bucket.

  The prisoner stood next to the far wall, under the window. He looked rather like a schoolboy awaiting punishment, eyes downcast, hands folded on his stomach.

  What a stunted, half-grown, feeble-looking creature, thought Francis, can he really be of the old blood of Malvern?

  “Leave us,” he said to Clarke, “wait outside. I shall be safe enough.”

  With a last suspicious glance at the prisoner, Clarke left the room and pulled the door shut behind him.

  “Look at me,” Francis ordered. Henry obediently raised his head and met his captor’s searching gaze. He was naturally pale, more so through lack of sleep and constant prayer, and his thin, drawn features had a malnourished look about them. Otherwise Henry Malvern was entirely unremarkable to look at. A typical penny-pinching clerk of the lower sort, well below the sphere of Francis’ privileged existence.

  Francis would have come to see him sooner, but had spent the past three days and nights struggling with his conscience. There was also the war to consider. After much dithering, Essex had finally marched from Worcester to oppose the King’s advance on London, and it was reckoned the opposing forces would clash before the week was out.

  “Soon I must leave Heydon Court,” said Francis, “God knows if I shall see my home again. There is one last item of business to deal with before I go. You.”

  Henry said nothing. His mouth was set in a thin line, and Francis found it impossible to read the thoughts behind his grey eyes. Perhaps the man was already resigned to death.

  “You knowingly put your signature to a treaty with the Devil,” Francis went on, “it matters not that the treaty was false. Intent is all. What do you have to say in your defence?”

  Henry swallowed before responding. “My defence?” he said in a high, reedy voice, “there is nothing to defend. I have committed no crime. Your agents deceived me and abducted me, against all the laws in the land, and I am held here against my will. It is you, Sir Francis Bolton, who should stand trial.”

  Francis winced. As a justice with a thorough grounding in law, he knew what he did was illegal. Any lawyer, confronted with an account of his misdeeds - entrapment, abduction, imprisonment - would have been horrified.

  He cared not. England was on the brink of war against the enemies of God. In such a conflict, those on the side of right could not afford to observe legal niceties.

  “I have downstairs,” he said, “a list of eight names, including yours. I could, if I wished, have their owners brought into court and made to stand trial for witchcraft. Rather than risk such a scandal, and spreading horror and dismay across the county, I have decided to show mercy to all but one.”

  There was no need to name the unfortunate party. “God will judge me,” he said heavily, “and, weighing the lives of those I have spared against the one condemned, find me innocent.”

  “So I am marked to die,” replied Henry, “very well. Do it, then, and be damned to you.”

  He spoke with a nerveless courage Francis would not have expected in so miserable-looking a creature. It was a relief to know the man wasn’t going to struggle against his fate.

  “You will sign a confession,” said Francis, “and be hanged as a witch in Stafford market tomorrow at noon. Your death will, I pray, deter others from embracing evil.”

  Now their roles were reversed, and it was Henry who looked on the other man with contempt. “Did your tame priest ask why I chose to sign the covenant?” he asked.

  “He did. Your immortal soul in exchange for earthly wealth and glory. Fleeting pleasures. An educated man like yourself should have known better.”

  Henry’s mouth twitched into a smile. “And revenge. Above all, revenge. I wanted to see your family destroyed, cast down into the dirt, just as mine was. God has never seen fit to give the Malverns justice, so I thought the Devil might.”

  “An old feud,” said Francis, revolted by his prisoner’s lack of piety, “ended long ago, in the days of our great-grandsires. No excuse for giving yourself to darkness.”

  Henry straightened from his habitual sloop and pointed at his captor. “Not ended, sir. Never ended. From the scaffold I shall curse you and all your kin. You know the power of a condemned man’s curse. The wars to come shall, I pray to all the powers above and below, swallow up the men of your blood, and leave nothing but fatherless children and the lamenting of widows.”

  His laughter was a thin, piercing noise, tinged with madness. “The white hawk of Bolton shall drown in her own blood, and the ghost of Sir Geoffrey Malvern be avenged at last!”

  END

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  THE DEVIL’S DUE

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