Revenge (32 page)

  
And outlaws,
he silently reminded himself.
I am no gentleman now
.

 
The horsemen briefly vanished from view as they rode down a dip that led into the wooded valley. They didn’t slacken their pace.

   Richard nodded. That was good. The traitors obviously had no notion of what was lying in wait for them.

   Below him the ground fell away sharply to a fast-flowing stream before climbing again to the trees on the opposite bank. Richard had tested the stream, and knew the waters were waist-high at their deepest point. Deep enough to impede the horses a little.

   Now the leading officer rode in sight, slowing down as he emerged from the trees and saw the stream. He wore a slashed purple coat with heavy sleeves, and the upper part of his face was concealed by a deep sallet. On his chest he wore a badge displaying three white lions against a halved red and white field. These were the arms of Lord Herbert of Raglan, Earl of Pembroke and a prominent Yorkist lord.

   Richard ran an appreciative eye over his mount, a fine dappled grey courser.

  
Mine. 

  
The officer signalled at his men to steady their pace. They were archers, mounted on ponies and wearing brigandines and open-faced sallets. Their bows were slung over their backs, and quivers full of arrows hung at their sides. Hired soldiers, rough and ignorant, working for a pittance of twopence a day. Richard was not sorry he had to kill them.

   He watched the soldiers carefully guide their ponies down the muddy slope and into the stream. It was quiet. Richard could hear the jingle of the officer’s harness, and fancied he could hear the man’s heavy breathing. Perhaps he was nervous, or sick with cold. Autumn had come early to the north, bringing with it heavy rain and the promise of a filthy winter.

   The officer reached halfway. The deepest point.

   Now.  

 
The word screamed inside Richard’s mind, but he remained silent. There was no need for excess noise. This would be done with the same cold, ruthless efficiency as it had been planned.

   Eighteen men rose from the wet undergrowth lining the northern bank. They had been lying flat on their bellies, and looked like soiled wraiths as they aimed their crossbows at the men in the stream.

   Another twelve appeared from the lighter cover on the southern bank. They behaved with the same swift, silent precision as their fellows, needing no shouted orders or horn-blasts to tell them their business. Four had arquebuses, and knelt to take careful aim with these dangerous, new-fangled weapons. Arquebuses were liable to misfire or even explode if not handled properly.

    Richard watched the ambush unfold with mute joy. The horsemen were taken completely by surprise, and had no time to react before the first flight of missiles hit home.

    His men aimed at the riders, for the ponies were too valuable to kill. Screams and the crackle of gunfire filled the air. Barely a shot was wasted. Men slumped and pitched from their saddles into the water. The stubby white-feathered crossbow bolts punctured eyes and limbs, while the murderous lead balls of the arquebuses smashed through iron helms and flimsy leather brigandines, shattering bone and flesh.

   Moving with an agile grace that belied his heavy-set frame, Richard clambered down the tree and leaped the last few feet to the ground. He didn’t bother picking up his crossbow, but leaned against the trunk and watched the killing with a calm, detached air.  

   Soon the stream was full of dead and dying men, shuddering in their death-throes or moaning in agony. Those who could walk tried to struggle to dry land, but were shot down. One or two, the clever ones, allowed the current to drag them downstream. Richard’s men were wise to the trick, and peeled away to hunt down the fugitives before the stream could carry them to safety.

   Only the officer was left unharmed. He had watched in futile rage and dismay as his men were slaughtered, and now he spied Richard standing alone and apparently unarmed by the oak tree.

   The officer drew his sword, drove in his spurs and urged his pony straight at Richard. His mouth, visible under the iron rim of his sallet, was set in a clenched line of determination.  

   He was clearly a brave man, but Richard hated him. Hated him for serving traitors, and for what had to happen next.

   Richard snatched up his crossbow, took aim, and loosed. The bolt slammed into the grey courser’s neck and pierced her throat. She reared and collapsed onto her side, limbs thrashing and eyes rolling in terror as her life’s blood pumped into the mud.

   The officer was thrown, rolling over and over until his head cracked against a tree-root. Stunned, he flopped over onto his back, groaning and pawing at the straps of his dented helm.

     “That was a bloody good horse you made me kill,” said Richard, placing his boot firmly on the officer’s chest, “best bit of horse-flesh I had seen in a while.”

   The fallen man’s sallet finally came off. He was young, with a neat yellow moustache and pale blue eyes. Those eyes slowly lost their glaze as they blinked and squinted up at Richard, taking in the outlaw’s worn and ragged apparel, his gaunt, unshaven features, and the badge sewn on the breast of his jack.

   “You are…” the officer struggled for speech, his lips working as he tried to form words, “you are…”

    “I am the White Hawk,” said Richard, “and you are my prisoner.”

   The outlaws took their prisoner deep into the forest, to one of their temporary camps, a few crude shelters scattered about a clearing and surrounded by a defensive ditch. Here they kept emergency stores of rations and clothing, as well as stockpiles of weapons.

   Richard ordered the officer to be tied to a tree, and a fire lit just in front of him. When the fire was ready, he squatted beside it, drew his dagger and wrapped the hilt in a thick leather glove. He held the blade over the flames.

   A few of the outlaws gathered to watch the interrogation. Others busied themselves making supper.

   “You are Lord Herbert’s man,” he said, “what is your name?”

   The officer swallowed hard and blinked, as though fighting to gather his wits. “Franckton,” he replied hesitantly, “John Franckton. Let me have something drink, in God’s name. My throat is parched.”

   Richard nodded at one of his men, who ran to fetch a cup of ale and poured the contents down Franckton’s eager gullet.

   “My scouts watched you ride from the south-west,” Richard went on once the prisoner had slaked his thirst, “what news from Wales?”

  He noticed that Franckton was visibly trembling. The man was clearly terrified.

   Good. The fame of the outlaw chief known as the White Hawk had spread throughout the north of England, and was now filtering into the rest of the kingdom. Rhymes telling of his wanton cruelty to prisoners, his savage hatred of Yorkists and undying loyalty to King Henry VI were being recited in alehouses up and down the land.

   Few knew the White Hawk’s true identity, which suited Richard: an air of mystery helped him evade capture, and added to his fearsome reputation.

   “What news from Wales?” he repeated when Franckton failed to answer, “I shall not ask a third time.”

   He held up his dagger. The blade was now red-hot from the fire, and glowed dully in the late afternoon sun. Richard had no intention of torturing his prisoner – the White Hawk’s grotesque delight in torture was pure invention, dreamed up by some wandering minstrel – but Franckton didn’t know that.

   Franckton found his voice. “Harlech Castle has fallen at last,” he gabbled, “the garrison has surrendered and fifty knights and gentlemen taken prisoner. Lord Herbert despatched me to inform our garrisons in the north of the victory.”

    Richard received the awful news in silence, though a couple of his men swore. Harlech Castle had been the last major Lancastrian stronghold in the British Isles. The Welsh garrison had held out for eight years against the besieging forces of Lord Herbert, Edward IV’s principal commander in Wales.

   “What of the Earl of Pembroke?” he asked.

   For a moment Franckton looked confused: Richard referred to Jasper Tudor, a fiercely loyal Lancastrian noble. The Yorkist regime had stripped him of his title and bestowed it on Lord Herbert, but to Richard he was the true Earl.

   “Tudor’s forces advanced on Denbigh,” Franckton replied. “They burned the town and occupied the castle, but were forced to retreat and disperse. Tudor himself escaped capture, and has fled to France.”

   Richard chewed his lower lip, pondering. Tudor’s survival and escape was good news, but all else was catastrophe. The Lancastrian cause in Wales was reduced to dust and ashes, and the only hope lay in the north.

   He looked around the clearing, at the handful of ragged, hard-faced men under his command. They were soldiers, or had been, survivors of the appalling Lancastrian defeats at Towton, Hexham and Hedgley Moor. Diehard loyalists to a man, many of them carrying brutal scars and old wounds.

   Not all of those wounds were physical. Richard’s eye came to rest on Jack Cloudsley, a Cumbrian and his unofficial second-in-command. Cloudsley had once been a billman in the Duke of Somerset’s retinue. Somerset’s final defeat and execution had robbed Cloudsley of his beloved lord, his profession, and both of his sons, drowned in the Devil’s Water during the rout at Hexham. The pain of these deaths never left him. It was etched into the coarse lines of his face, and fuelled his berserk rages in combat.

   Cloudsley reminded Richard of Nicholas Mauley, the old soldier and Bolton family retainer who had died in a tavern brawl in Devonshire. Like Mauley, he was something of a surrogate father to Richard, and had on several occasions saved his life. 

   “That’s the last redoubt gone,” Cloudsley said in his guttural Cumbrian tones, “it’s all over.”

   “Not quite,” said Richard, “there is one stronghold left.”

   His men looked at him quizzically. “Here!” he cried, spreading his arms, “let the Yorkists try to storm the greenwood, if they dare. We are not alone.”

   “Feels lonely,” remarked Jenkyn, an archer from Nottinghamshire who had lost one eye and two fingers on his left hand to Yorkist blades. No-one else said anything.

   Once again, as so often since Somerset’s death, Richard found himself staring into the pit of despair. A black shadow crawled out of it, suffocating his mind and strangling the words of encouragement he knew his men badly needed to hear.

   He glanced at Franckton, and decided the man had outlived his usefulness.

   “Hang him,” he said.  

2.

Cromford, Staffordshire

The new chaplain of All Saint’s church, Father Stephen Doe, was a nervous, pale young man, afflicted with a lisp and a tendency to turn scarlet whenever anyone looked at him. He suffered from some condition whereby his thick, dirty-yellow tonsure was falling out in clumps, lending him the appearance of a bird halfway through its moult.

   He always made a point of emerging from his church when Mary came to visit her mother’s grave.

  
Like a mouse from its hole,
she thought as he came scuttling out of the porch, the wide sleeves of his surplice flapping about him. It was raining, light drizzle falling from a dishwater-grey sky, but the chaplain ran as though the waters of the Flood were about to descend on him.

   “Lady Mary,” he called out in his pipe-reed voice, “good morning to you!”

   “Good morning, Father Doe,” she replied without any great enthusiasm. Mary would have preferred to address him by his title, but he insisted that she use his first name. The poor deluded man seemed to think it strengthened the imaginary bond between them.

   Mary kept her eyes fixed on the gravestone. It was a simple rectangle, with an image of the white hawk of Bolton, wings and talons outspread, carved into the middle. The inscription carved around the edges of the stone was written in Latin and translated as:

  
You here pass by, pray for the soul of Elizabeth, who was the honoured wife of Edward Bolton on whose soul God have mercy.

  
Dame Elizabeth had dictated the inscription while she lay dying in her bedchamber at Heydon Court. Even in the grip of the cancer that slowly devoured her innards, the old woman never ceased to think of her late husband. Edward had died fighting for Lancaster at the Battle of Blore Heath, pulled down and slain by men he had known and worked with much of his life.

   “Traitors,” Dame Elizabeth rasped shortly before she died, “they swore oaths of loyalty to their King, and then joined with York. Their souls shall burn for it.”

   On the western side of the cemetery, placed at a discreet distance from Dame Elizabeth’s last resting place, were two larger and more elaborate headstones. These were the graves of her enemies, the Huntleys, carved in white marble and engraved with an image of the sunburst that was the symbol of their now extinct house.

   The obese Huntley had drunk and gorged himself to death five years previously, leaving Greystones and its surrounding lands to his son, another John and once Mary’s fiancée. John the Younger survived his father by a mere sixteen months before succumbing to dysentery brought on by a fever. He left no children save a bastard daughter, and so the Huntley manors had reverted to the crown.