Sacrifice (13 page)

   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 at 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 romance 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.