Revenge (16 page)

“What’s the matter?” asked Richard, looking over his shoulder. They looked back at him with hard eyes and his instincts began to shriek that he was in terrible, imminent danger.

He drove in his spurs and crouched low in the saddle, kicking his horse into a gallop, but it was too late. They were on him.

His hand flew to his sword, but before he could draw something cracked against the back of his skull and pitched him into darkness.

He woke sometime later to pain, vile, throbbing pain, like a knife being repeatedly driven and twisted in the back of his head. The blow had hit him squarely on the head wound he suffered at Blore Heath. He whimpered as purple lights danced before his eyes, and struggled to focus.

“Awake, are we?” said a cheerful but unfamiliar voice. A hot blast of stinking breath, a mixture of onions, spices and bad ale, hit Richard in the face. He jerked involuntarily, only to discover that he couldn’t move his limbs.

The mists parted, and a face appeared before him, inches from his own. It was thin and aquiline, handsome in an arrogant sort of way, with slanting pale blue eyes, a slender nose and thinning fair hair scraped back from a high forehead. The face put Richard in mind of a wolf, albeit one desperately in need of a meal.

“Answer me, toad, while you still have a tongue to speak with,” the handsome man said, and whipped a thick leather glove across Richard’s face. The blow stung, but was small beer in comparison to the thudding pain in Richard’s head. Even so, he realised it was wiser to speak than feign dumbness.

“I am awake,” he whispered. His throat felt dry, and there was an awful stale taste in his mouth.

“Good.” The face receded a little, revealing it was mounted on a tall, slender body, well-proportioned and clothed in hunting gear. The huntsman planted one fist on his hip in an elegant, slightly effeminate posture, and tugged thoughtfully at the tip of his pointed little beard.

Richard shook his head blearily, and tried to take in his surroundings. He was in a cramped, dirty little room with a low ceiling and ancient whitewash peeling from the walls. The air was stuffy, for there was no window. He could hear mingled voices below, punctuated by the scrape of a fiddle being played very badly. Some of the voices were raised in drunken laughter or song, and he guessed that he was on the upper floor of some tavern.

The only furniture was the chair Richard sat on. His arms and legs were tied securely to it with lengths of twine and leather straps. Light came from a candle in a dish placed on the floor next to the chair, giving rise to ominous shadows that flickered and danced against the walls. Richard had been stripped of clothes and weapons – everything save for his drawers.

“Attend to me, toad,” drawled the huntsman. “No doubt you are wondering why you are here. The answer is simple. You were knocked unconscious by three good men and true, and carried here at my behest.”

Three good men and true
, Richard thought.
Curtis’s servants
.

“Edward Curtis…” he moaned.

“Did not betray you,” the other interrupted. “No, the silly little barrister would never do anything half so brave. But he should be more careful about whom he employs.”

Does he mean the men were spies? Curtis is a supporter of the Earl…
Is this man an agent of Lord Bonville? Christ, what a web I have fallen into!

As if sensing Richard’s thoughts, the huntsman immediately supplied answers to these questions. “My name is Walter Raleigh,” he drawled. “I am a gentleman of Devonshire, as good a man as the King, and a follower of Lord Bonville.”

He smiled crookedly, making his eyes narrow and increasing his resemblance to a wolf. “Now you must tell me all about the letters you carry. Starting with their whereabouts.”

Richard tried to think. His captors, of whom this Raleigh was probably the chief, didn’t know where the letters were hidden. That meant they hadn’t thought to unpick the stitching of his belt. That in turn meant that Raleigh, for all his gentlemanly posturing and languid airs, was not quite so wise and all-knowing as he wanted Richard to believe.

“I don’t have them,” he lied. “Curtis does. I gave them to him to deliver. My journey to Wells was a bluff.”

“Don’t lie to me, Richard Bolton, or whatever your name is. My men overheard your privy talk with Curtis. You carry letters from the Duke of Somerset on your person, with the intention of taking them to the Earl at Wells. Where are they?”

Convinced that he had the measure of Raleigh, Richard said nothing. Downstairs someone bellowed with laughter, making the dusty floorboards tremble. The laughter died away, and was followed by the hiss of oiled steel on leather as Raleigh drew the long Irish knife at his belt.

“If you persist in being stubborn, I will slice off part of your ear,” he said, placing the cold edge of the blade against the underside of Richard’s right ear-lobe. “I will do that, and think no more of it than a farrier trimming a horse’s hoof.”

There was an edge of excitement to his voice. Richard hesitated, caught between self-preservation and reluctance to betray Somerset. His hesitation proved a mistake.

“You may scream all you wish,” hissed Raleigh as he deftly sliced off Richard’s ear-lobe. “The people below are all loyal to Lord Bonville, and quite used to my little interrogations.”

The bloody little gobbet of flesh squelched as it hit the floor. Richard screamed at the top of his lungs, driven half out of his mind with pain and terror, until he found the strength to form words.

“The letters are in my belt!” he wailed. “They are in my belt!”

“Excellent,” said Raleigh. He licked the knife clean and sheathed it. “There, that was easy. Now I am going to find these precious letters of yours, and read and digest their import. I’ll be back later to play with you a little more.”

“But I’ve told you all I know!” Richard snivelled, looking fearfully up at his torturer.

“So? Just because you’ve croaked all your secrets, like the nasty, creeping little toad you are, doesn’t mean you deserve mercy. Far from it. No, you must wait here and ponder on your fate.”

Richard begged piteously for the mercy he couldn’t have, but Raleigh merely shook his head and laughed. He turned and swaggered out, closing and locking the door behind him.

Richard was left alone to sweat and shudder in the dimly lit little room, biting his lip against the agony of his mutilated ear.

What had brought him to this pass? It had to be God’s punishment for his selfishness and stupidity. Guilt gnawed at him as he thought of the wanton crimes he had committed in Staffordshire – the Sheriff’s envoy humiliated, the savage assault on young Huntley, the murder of Sir Thomas Malvern, the pillaging of Malvern Hall, the beating and killing of the servants.

All these sins were on Richard’s conscience. He had justified them to himself as righteous punishments served out to a pack of traitors, but he saw now what a flimsy pretence that was. He had wanted revenge, revenge for his father’s death. Nothing else mattered.

He had behaved like a brute beast, and was now getting his just desserts. It was probably too late to pray for forgiveness, but he did anyway, babbling and pleading with the Almighty to preserve him, to deliver him from the dreadful abyss he had fallen into, and a slow, unspeakable death at the hands of Walter Raleigh.

All the while the laughter and singing and hubbub carried on below, growing louder and more boisterous as the evening wore on. Perhaps if he tipped his chair over, someone below would hear the crash and come upstairs to investigate…but he had screamed his lungs out already, and no-one had come. He recalled the huntsman saying that the people below were all supporters of Lord Bonville, and quite used to his ‘little interrogations’. What kind of monsters could carry on drinking and enjoying themselves while someone was being tortured to death, just a few feet above their heads?

Time wore on, and Richard’s terror grew with the waiting. The thought of what was going to be done to him made his bowels slacken, and the room was filled with a terrible stench.

Reduced to extremity, all his arrogance and pride dissolved, he started to weep, and call out for his mother in place of God.

The creak of floorboards and sound of running footsteps outside jerked him back to his senses. Raleigh had come back. He was eager to get to work judging by the way he scrabbled at the lock.

Someone screamed below, a scream of pain rather than mirth. Richard heard the unmistakable ring of steel.

Keys twisted in the lock, the heavy door swung open, and a man stumbled into the room. Not Raleigh, but a stocky, middle-aged man whom Richard vaguely recognised through his mist of tears. With a shock he realised the man was one of the false bodyguards Curtis had lent him – one of Raleigh’s agents.

He was carrying a falchion, a broad-bladed weapon like a butcher’s knife. The weapon slipped out of his hands as he crumpled to the floor, his eyes glazing over and blood pouring from his open mouth. He fell at Richard’s feet, a crossbow bolt protruding from his back.

More footsteps sounded, and a shadow appeared in the doorway. Richard squinted and made out a tall figure holding a crossbow.

“Christ,” said Mauley, holding his free hand to his nose, “it bloody stinks in here.”

He stepped over the body of the man he had shot, dropped the crossbow and drew his knife to cut the bonds securing Richard to the chair.

Mauley worked quickly, and Richard was soon free and prostate on the floor, crying out in pain as blood flowed back to his numbed wrists and ankles.

“Up,” Mauley urged, grasping him by the arm. “We have to move quickly. Can you walk? What the hell happened to your ear?

“Give me a weapon!” Richard begged, fighting the pain in his limbs as he struggled to stand. “A sword, a knife, anything!”

Mauley picked up the dead man’s falchion and handed it to Richard, who managed to get a firm grip on the hilt at the second attempt. He clung to Mauley’s shoulder as the big man helped him onto the landing. Judging from the noise downstairs, a pitched battle had erupted in the tavern.

“I followed you from Woodbury House and witnessed your abduction,” Mauley explained. “I went back and confronted Curtis, who swore he had no knowledge that half his men were spies in Lord Bonville’s pay. He gave me the remainder of his guards, four men, and advised me to seek you here.”

“And where is that?”

“A town called Tiverton. This is The Rose Inn, a known gathering-place for Lord Bonville’s retainers and well-wishers. It was easy to find you here. We just followed the screams.”

He went before Richard down the stairs. “Stay close to me,” he said, swapping his knife to his left hand and drawing his sword. “We will have to cut our way out.”

“Somerset’s letters,” said Richard, soiled and bleeding and virtually naked as he hobbled down the steps. “We have to retrieve them.”

A stool flew past his eyes, shattering against the wall. A man holding a bloody axe appeared at the foot of the stair, bearded and snarling, one side of his coarse face disfigured by a swelling bruise. Mauley lunged at him, kicked him in the groin and slashed his sword across his eyes. The blinded man dropped his axe and stumbled away, howling and clutching at his face.

The taproom was full of brawling, shouting men and one or two women, bludgeoning and stabbing at each other with swords, knives, tankards, fists, and anything else that came to hand. Richard looked around desperately for any sign of Raleigh. He spied the man standing in a corner, observing the fight with a look of utter disdain on his patrician features.

Adrenaline flooded Richard’s veins, overcoming the pain in his abused body. He clattered down the steps, was saved from falling as Mauley put out an arm to steady him, and threw himself into the melee, wielding his falchion double-handed.

He swung the blade into one man’s back and head-butted another that turned to meet him. Someone smashed a clay tankard over his head, but he ignored the fresh burst of pain that blossomed inside his skull. Finally he emerged, battered and bleeding, just a sword’s-length away from his quarry.

“Whoreson!” he shouted as Raleigh shrank away, his eyes wide with fear, one pale, blue-veined hand reaching for his knife. Richard’s falchion whirled, and Raleigh’s hand fell twitching to the floor.

“Where are the letters?” Richard yelled.

“In the back room,” Raleigh gasped, staring in horror at the bleeding stump of his wrist. Richard saw a door standing ajar nearby and ran through it.

Inside was a large, whitewashed room with empty shelves lining the walls and barrels stacked in one corner. A table and a chair stood in the middle. Somerset’s letters were spread out on the table, next to a quill and an inkwell.

Richard snatched up the heap of parchment, heard a scream, and whipped round just in time to witness Mauley disarmed and thrust against a wall. His opponent, a bigger and stronger man than he, rammed his dagger up to the hilt into Mauley’s chest.

Mauley is dead.
The thought barely registered as Richard looked around desperately for a means of escape. The room had a double set of windows, latticed and framed. He ran across the room, twisted the latch, flung the windows open and dived over the sill.

He landed with a squelch in a narrow, foul-smelling alleyway littered with rubbish. There were shouts and the clatter of harness at one end – watchmen come to deal with the brawl, perhaps, or more of Lord Bonville’s supporters – but all was dark and silent at the other.