Revenge (9 page)

Meanwhile Richard hunted through the rambling corridors, sword in hand, calling for the Malverns to come out of hiding and face him. None did. Had his quarry escaped?

Boiling with rage and frustration, he put his boot to a random door and stormed into a bedchamber. He pulled open the door of the wardrobe to find a young girl crouched in the shadows, one tiny fist stuffed into her mouth. Her eyes were tightly closed and tears glistened on her cheeks.

Richard stopped dead. He closed his eyes and forced down the rage inside his breast, willing himself to be calm and relent from committing a murder that would haunt him all his days. Breathing hard, he rammed his bloody sword back into its sheath.

“You are Malvern’s grand-daughter, are you not?” he said, panting. “His son’s whelp, or one of his daughters – I forget which. Your folk breed like vermin. Speak!”

The girl remained mute, and with a curse Richard grasped her stick-thin arm. “Let’s go in search of your grandsire,” he said, ignoring her cries and feeble struggles as he dragged her out into the passage.

A brawny man-at-arms appeared. “We’ve found Sir Thomas, lord,” he shouted, his face flushed with stolen wine. “He was hiding in the cellar. We have him outside!”

Richard ran down the passage, almost dropping the girl in his excitement. The greybeard doorkeeper who had given him the keys was crouched under the stair, and cried out when he saw the girl in Richard’s arms.

“No!” he wailed. “Not Kate! Not my darling… Harm not her, I beg!”

Richard ignored him and hurried outside. Smoke was billowing from the door of the barn, where his men had fired the grain sacks within. The yard was strewn with bodies and piles of loot. Grim blood-spattered figures moved about, cutting throats and stripping the dead of valuables.

For a moment Richard hesitated, a worm of doubt creeping into his mind. Had he really meant to bring about this shocking ruin?

All doubts were driven from his mind as he saw his enemy. Sir Thomas Malvern, a stocky, broad-chested man with a tuft of white beard on his chin, was surrounded by a ring of men that jeered and jostled and spat insults at him. A fine red cloak trimmed with rabbit fur had been torn from his body, along with his doublet, leaving him in his shirt and breeches.

Richard tossed the shrieking Kate into the arms of a startled esquire. “Make her watch,” he said, and stalked towards Sir Thomas.

“You may save your wind, Bolton,” the old knight said calmly. “I’ll not beg for my life.”

“Proud Malvern won’t beg for his life,” sneered Richard, standing aside to let him see his granddaughter, “but will he beg for hers?”

Sir Thomas’ haggard face drained of colour. He started towards her, but two men seized his arms and held him fast. “You can’t mean it,” he cried out. “Not the child. She is innocent!”

“Perhaps I will slit her throat, or dash her head against the wall,” snarled Richard, thrusting his face close to Sir Thomas’s. “Where is your mess of children, Malvern? Where is your son, Geoffrey, that great shivering baboon, and those three virginal pigs you call daughters?”

“God has vouchsafed to keep them from my house, and beyond your reach,” replied the old knight, recovering some of his composure. “Geoffrey has gone to Sandwich to join Lord Fauconberg’s army, and my daughters are safe with their cousins at Hereford.”

Richard took a step back, peeled off one of his steel gauntlets and struck Sir Thomas across the face with it. “So Geoffrey has gone to join traitors, has he? No matter – his turn shall come.”

He struck again, causing blood to burst from Sir Thomas’s lip. “Where are your friends? Where are the noble Ramage and Huntley, that conspired with you to slay my father at Blore Heath? Where are they now, eh? Why don’t you call for them?”

He punctuated each question with more blows, until the blood streamed from Sir Thomas’s mouth and nose. “They all live,” his victim gasped. “And, if it pleases God, they will avenge me.”

Richard dropped the gauntlet and grabbed Sir Thomas by the throat. “It is for me to speak of vengeance,” he said in a low voice. “You killed my father, and so I shall kill you, and all your kin.”

“I killed Edward Bolton in fair fight,” Sir Thomas protested. A dark feeling burst in Richard’s breast, flooding his whole body with hot blood.

“Put down this traitor!” he screamed. The men holding Sir Thomas forced him to his knees.

Richard hesitated for a moment. His ears rang with the screams of Malvern’s granddaughter, and his nostrils were filled with the stench of smoke and blood.

“Find me a block,” he ordered. The esquire who was now wearing Sir Thomas’s stolen cloak took a log from the woodpile next to the barn and set it before the prisoner.

Richard slowly drew his father’s sword from its scabbard. “You may recall this from Blore Heath,” he said, holding up the blade so Sir Thomas’s face was reflected in the dully gleaming steel. “If you had faced my father like a man, one on one, it would have drank your blood then. The blade has suffered a terrible thirst since then, Malvern. It must be quenched.”

The esquire ripped Sir Thomas’s shirt, exposing his chest. Two men seized the man’s neck and forced it down onto the log.

“All your kin shall die, Malvern,” Richard shouted as he raised the sword high, double-handed, “including sweet, innocent little Kate. There – let that be your last thought.”

The sword flashed down, a blow almost nine months in the making, and neatly carved Sir Thomas Malvern’s head from his shoulders.

“Now the girl?” said the man holding Kate. She hung limp in his arms, having swooned at the sight of her grandfather’s beheading. Richard looked around from wiping his sword.

“Of course not,” he said irritably. “I don’t make war on children. Let her go.”

He stooped and picked up Sir Thomas’s severed head. “This shall go to the Sheriff in a bag,” he said, planting a fond kiss on its forehead, “to remind him that the sword is greater than any law.”

9.

Mary first heard the news of her brother’s plight from John Tanner, her mother’s steward. He came clattering into the yard at Sedgley House, balanced like a sack of coal athwart a palfrey that shivered under his weight.

Tanner was a great slug of a man, used to indolence and his own comfort, and it had been many years since he rode so many miles at a gallop. His appearance, puce-faced and sweating and looking fit to burst, put Mary in great fear.

“Richard has fled Staffordshire, my lady,” he gasped out after draining the pottle of ale she handed him, “and the kingdom, too, for aught I know. Mauley has gone with him, and, I am sorry to say, your husband.”

Mary demanded to know what he meant, and he told her of recent events: Mauley’s assault on young Huntley, Richard’s humiliation of the Sheriff’s envoy, the riot and disturbance at Lichfield, and lastly (and worst of all) the robberies and murders at Malvern Hall.

All these crimes and misdeeds had taken place over the course of a few days and, isolated at Sedgley, Mary was ignorant of them before Tanner’s arrival. Her husband had not returned, and her stubborn pride had kept her from going to seek him at Heydon Court. Had she known what Henry intended, she would have hunted him down and dragged him home by his ear.

She took Tanner into the hall, where he stood and warmed his saddle-sore backside by the fire while he told the remainder of his tale.

“The whole county is up in arms, my lady,” he said. “The Sheriff has turned out the garrison of Stafford, and dispatched writs and commission of array to every town. This morning he appeared before Heydon Court with a hundred lances at his back, demanding that your brother and his accomplices give themselves up. A stark man, this Stanley, a bold knight, and swift to his duty.”

Mary gestured impatiently, not caring to hear of the Sheriff’s virtues. “But Richard and the others were already gone?”

“Yes, lady. Dame Anne turned them away from the gate as soon as they returned from Malvern Hall, heavy with plunder and the reek of blood and fire still on them.”

He paused, plucking at his whiskers and staring ruefully at the flagstones. They were swept and scrubbed to a mirror-like finish. Mary allowed her servants no respite.

“Master Richard tried to remonstrate with her,” he went on. “Dame Anne’s face was as bleak and sad as ever I have seen it, but she would not relent. She bade them scatter and flee. When they refused, she drew her knife and laid the point against her breast, which so amazed and frightened them that they obeyed her wishes, and made off.”

Mary had to sit at the table and rally her scattered thoughts. “The blame for this lies on Sir Thomas Malvern’s head,” she said slowly. “If he had kept faith with the King, my father would still be alive, and Richard would not have committed such follies.”

Tanner rubbed his chin. “The thread winds endlessly, my lady. If the Duke of York had not raised arms against the King, if the King had governed the realm better – why, even if his father, God rest him, had not died young, we might have been spared much. If, if, if. We must stick with facts. As for Malvern’s head, your brother removed it from his shoulders and sent it to the Sheriff in a leathern bag.”

Mary winced at this grisly addition. “Tell me, then, as one in need of advice,” she replied, “what facts must we deal with now? Has the Sheriff seized Heydon Court?”

“No, thanks to your wise mother. She wheedled him with sweet words, invited him and his officers inside, and regaled them with the best our kitchen and cellar had to offer. I have a notion money changed hands, for Sir John is not above palming silver if it is offered him. However, your brother and your husband are declared outlaws, and so is Nicholas Mauley. The family estate is now legally turned over to your mother. She is mistress of all, until Martin comes of age.”

Tanner hesitated, his jowls wobbling as he glanced shiftily at Mary. “Sedgley House and lands are declared forfeit, and will be taken into the Sheriff’s hands,” he added. “Your mother begged leave for a servant of the family to inform you of this, rather than his bailiffs. Hence my coming here.”

“Well,” she said, laying her hands flat on the table and adopting a mock-cheerful tone, “we must make the best of it. I struggled to love this damp and nasty house, and the servants will not be sorry to see me go. Back to Heydon Court, then, to beg charity and sanctuary from my mother.”

“Dame Anne sends this assurance, lady,” he said quickly. “You are welcome to return to the family home, and need feel no shame at it.”

Mary masked her anger with a smile. Despite her flippant words, Sedgley had become her home. Months of shaping and hewing the place to her liking, of forging a life with Henry, all now lay in ruins.

Her husband was partly to blame. She pictured his fleshy, honest face, and for the first time in her life felt a stab of hatred for him. The fool had helped Richard commit his crimes, and was likely to dance on the gallows for it. Or else spend the remainder of his days as a hunted fugitive, condemning her to a life of loneliness and dishonour.

Such thoughts were of little use, and Mary was not the sort to wallow in self-pity. “We must pack up my belongings,” she said, rising. “The servants here are a set of handless clowns, and will break every pot and vessel if left without direction.”

Tanner smiled fondly at her. “There speaks your mother, my lady. Dame Anne never breaks under any strain.”

“And if we did, who would set things to rights?” she demanded. “My dead father; my outlaw husband? Or perhaps my brothers, one a drunk, the other a murderer, and the last a child? What a foul trick God played, when he set men in charge of this world!”

Tanner studied the floor and made no answer. Throwing up her hands, Mary stormed away to rouse the servants.

10.

Northampton, 10
th
July 1460

Sir Geoffrey Malvern, just sixteen years old and only the previous day dubbed a knight by the Earl of Warwick, was cold, hungry, weary and terrified.

Rain drummed on his helm, seeping through the joints in his harness and trickling down his flesh, already damp with the exertion of the march from London. His greaves were caked in mud up to the knees, and his muscles ached with slogging over bad roads under the weight of so much metal and leather.

Geoffrey was standing in Lord Fauconberg’s division, on the left flank or rearguard of the Yorkist army. The Earl of Warwick held the centre, and the Duke of York’s eldest son, Edward, Earl of March, and the Duke of York held the right.

Some seven thousand men in all stood and waited for death in the rain, with the River Nene ahead of them and the grey silhouette of Delapré Abbey visible to the east.

Ahead of them, blocking the road to the walled town of Northampton that rose beyond the river, were the Lancastrians under the Duke of Buckingham. King Henry was known to be in the Lancastrian camp – the royal standard could be seen fluttering in the centre of their position – but he was no soldier, and it was rumoured that his suspect wits had deserted him again.

The Lancastrians were fewer, five thousand or so, but Buckingham had thrown up a formidable wall of defences. He had the Nene to his back, and his front and flanks were well-protected by water-filled ditches fed by a channel from the river, timber palisades, rows of sharpened stakes and cannon.