Revenge (10 page)

The Lancastrian position seemed unassailable. Geoffrey’s guts churned as he imagined his body pierced by arrows, or one of his limbs blown away by a cannon-shot. This would be his first battle, his father having considered him too young – and too precious, being the only direct male heir to Malvern Hall – to fight at Blore Heath the previous year.

To stiffen his failing courage, he recalled the words of his cousin, William Malvern, in the terrible letter that had informed Geoffrey of his father’s fate at the hands of Richard Bolton, and the pillaging of Malvern Hall:

“Bolton and his main accomplice in these crimes, Henry of Sedgley, Buckingham’s bastard, have fled the county, and gone no man knows where. Their allies have fled also, back to their own lands. It may be that Bolton imagined the Sheriff would be frightened, and dare not try and bring him to justice, but in this he proved to be wrong. Sir John Stanley is a staunch man, not to be intimidated by such cowards. Bolton’s gift of your poor father’s head in a bag drove him into such a rage, I have heard, that he vowed to have the miscreants swinging from the gallows at Stafford before the week was out.

Stanley assembled all his power and marched on Heydon Court, but in spite of his haste the birds were already flown. I pray God, nephew, that He places your father’s murderers in your path. Though they break the King’s laws with impunity, Bolton and Sedgley are for Lancaster, and may have gone to join the King’s army. If His Majesty was the man he should be, he would lay both by the heels and deliver them for justice, but the Lancastrians are in need of soldiers, and will take such villains as they can get…”

Geoffrey shifted his grip on his heavy battle-axe, and replaced his fearful earlier imaginings with a fond picture of Richard Bolton lying in the mud at his feet, whimpering for mercy. He had been wracked with sorrow by the news of his father’s death. That sorrow had gradually curdled into rage, and a driving lust for vengeance.

He, Richard and Henry had been friends as boys, running wild in the quiet woods and fields of Staffordshire. Their boyhood friendship was gone now, dead and buried, replaced by the bitterness of a feud that could only be settled in blood.

A murmur passed down the ranks. Geoffrey craned his neck to watch the little band of horsemen riding back from the Lancastrian lines, towards Warwick’s division. They were led by the Bishop of Salisbury, a grey and grim-faced figure, his heavy robes flapping about him.

Warwick had sent the Bishop at the head of a delegation to treat with Buckingham, requesting that Warwick be allowed to speak to the King. Judging from the Bishop’s expression, the request had been firmly rebuffed. Warwick had sent three previous requests during the march from London, and each time Buckingham had sent back the same blunt response.

We will have to fight, now,
thought Richard, a familiar sick feeling rising in his gut. Tense, expectant silence descended over the army as the Bishop conferred with Warwick. They spoke only briefly, and when they were done the trumpets blasted and a cry echoed down the line: “Advance banners, in the name of God and Saint George!”

William Neville, Lord Fauconberg, a little man strutting proudly at the head of his troops, raised his sword to signal the advance. His personal retainers clustered about him, men-at-arms wearing his livery of blue and white and his badge displaying a fish-hook. Geoffrey, shuffling along in the third rank behind Fauconberg’s retainers, was the new Lord Malvern since his father’s death, and so wore a badge displaying a green wyvern on his chest.

The Yorkists advanced in column, with young Edward’s division in front, Warwick’s second, and Fauconberg’s bringing up the rear. At any moment Geoffrey expected the Lancastrian artillery to roar into life. Sweat rolled down his skin as he imagined lethal volleys of shot ploughing into the tightly-packed Yorkist columns, severing limbs and pulping bodies, shattering the army into red ruin before it got anywhere near the enemy.

The cannons stood silent, and his heart leaped as he realised what had happened – rain, blessed rain sent by God, had spoiled their powder! Buoyed by the knowledge that they wouldn’t have to endure a cannonade, a wave of confidence spread through the Yorkists. Their advance quickened. The men in the leading division broke into a jog. The young Earl of March, an imposing steel-clad giant with long fair hair spilling from under his helm, was at their head.

The Lancastrians still had their archers, and the unseasonal rain had turned the ground between the two armies into a quagmire. Geoffrey lost a shoe in the soft, sucking mud, and cursed as he was forced to hobble onward with one naked foot.

Then the skies darkened, and the man beside him squealed and went down with an arrow protruding from the eye-piece of his sallet. Geoffrey lowered his head and stumbled on, gagging at the stench of excrement and split gut that filled his nostrils as more arrows strafed Fauconberg’s division, cutting men down and breaking up their carefully ordered ranks.

Geoffrey was breathing hard, his limbs seized with weariness as he laboured through the mud. His heart rattled like a drum. The Yorkists were being decimated by the arrows, and still had to cross a deep ditch, defended by a wall of stakes and thousands of determined, well-fed and rested Lancastrian infantry. They would surely be repelled, panic would set in, and men would start to run. Then the Lancastrian knights would mount their destriers, and the real killing would begin as they pursued their beaten foes across miles of open ground.

Geoffrey’s courage and desire for vengeance shrivelled inside him. He desperately wanted to turn and run, but the press of men forced him on, towards the bristling line of stakes. He glanced ahead, and saw that March’s division had stormed right up to the barricades on the right flank of the Lancastrian position. These were defended by men wearing badges displaying a black ragged staff. He recognised the livery as that of Lord Grey of Ruthin, a powerful Welsh Marcher lord.

He expected March’s advance to grind to a halt as his men came up against the stakes and Grey’s well-armed infantry, but then something extraordinary happened. The men wearing the badge of the ragged staff laid down their weapons and stood aside, allowing the Yorkists to pass through their lines. Some even stooped to help their supposed enemies over the ditch.

Lord Grey had turned traitor. Geoffrey had no idea why or how it had been arranged, being too unimportant to be made privy to such deals, but his heart sang at the result. That one act of treachery would surely reverse the tide of battle. The Lancastrians were doomed, trapped like rats inside their improvised fortress. More to the point, Geoffrey’s chances of survival had just improved dramatically.

His mind switched back to thoughts of revenge. If, as his uncle had suggested, Bolton and Sedgley had joined Buckingham’s army, then they were also trapped. Weighed down in their harness, neither could hope to swim the river, and must stand and fight it out. Or surrender.

Either way, Geoffrey would have their heads. His grievances were known to Lord Fauconberg, who had taken a liking to Geoffrey’s easy charm and apparent valour. It was he who recommended to Warwick that the young man should be knighted. If Bolton and Sedgley were taken prisoner, Geoffrey could count on Fauconberg’s influence to ensure both men were delivered into his hands for justice.

Swift justice.
Geoffrey smiled grimly at the thought as he kicked off his remaining shoe and ran to the barriers in the centre of the Lancastrian position. These were defended by the Earl of Shrewsbury, supported by the lords Egremont and Beaumont, but any semblance of order in the Lancastrian army was dissolving as March’s division rolled up their flank. The deadly arrows had stopped falling, and there were too few left to guard the centre against the assault of Fauconberg’s division.

Geoffrey slid on his backside into the ditch, waded through the knee-deep water and crawled up the opposite bank. He slid in the wet mud, hampered by his battle-axe and jostled by his comrades. At last he climbed out beside an abandoned culverin, and gave an involuntary yell as he trod on the body of one of the crewmen.

The dead man lay on his face, the back of his neck smashed in by a war-hammer. Geoffrey blanched at the awful sight, and then the reality of war – something he had never witnessed in his short, cosseted life – was revealed to him.

The space between the ditch and the river had become a killing ground, with the Yorkists swarming in to overwhelm the confused and demoralised Lancastrians. Lord Grey’s men had turned on their erstwhile comrades to join in the slaughter. The common soldiers of Buckingham and Shrewsbury’s divisions had given up the unequal fight and fled in headlong rout, casting away their weapons and plunging into the river. The knights and men-at-arms in their heavy armour had no choice but to stay and fight. No quarter was given, and those foolish enough to surrender were pulled down and butchered.

Geoffrey had been raised on tales of knightly chivalry, but now he was exposed to the full horror of battle. Defenceless, writhing bodies were pinned down and hacked apart, their steel shells cracked open by mauls and hammers, long knives and poniards rammed through eye-holes and visors, bloody and indiscriminate murder committed by grinning, shrieking monsters, caked in blood and filth, their eyes staring wildly as they stabbed and hacked and bludgeoned their victims into oblivion. He recoiled, dropped his axe, and decided to hide under the gun carriage until all was over.

I’m a coward.
The thought drummed into his head as he crouched under the shadow of the culverin, filling him with shame, but not enough to compel him to venture out and risk his skin. Even the desire for revenge failed to restore his courage. Richard Bolton and Henry of Sedgley, if they were present, could shift for themselves.

A coward.

Weeping and shivering like a frightened infant, he curled up into a ball and prayed for God to see him safe.

11.

Following their flight from Staffordshire, one stride ahead of the enraged Sheriff and his bloodhounds, Richard, Mauley and Henry of Sedgley made their way to Tamworth. There they took quarters at an inn, where Richard and Henry quarrelled over what to do next. Henry was all for venturing on to Coventry and joining the royal army mustering under the command of his father, the Duke of Buckingham, but Richard disagreed.

“We are wanted men,” he hissed, keeping his voice low as they huddled together in the corner of a wine-shop. “If we go to the King, we risk being hanged. Word of our crimes may have gone before us. Better to leave the country altogether for a time, until the matter is forgotten, and go to join the Duke of Somerset in France. He will know nothing of our past, and care less if we prove our worth to him.”

“No,” Henry replied stubbornly. “I am for Coventry. My duty lies there. I want to fight for King Henry, and for my father.”

“The father you have never met! Why do you think Buckingham will acknowledge you? He has never shown the slightest interest before.”

Henry stared fiercely into his cup, but did not answer. Richard turned to Mauley. “What of you?” he asked the older man. “Are you for Coventry, or France?”

“Neither, if I was wise,” said Mauley with a rueful smile. “I should renounce my service to you, Master Bolton, and offer my sword to some lord who cares not to question his men too closely about their pasts. Or perhaps shave my head and enter a monastery.”

He sighed, and traced a crude outline of the white hawk of Bolton in a puddle of stale wine on the table. “Your father brought me back from France, ten years ago,” he said quietly, “when he might have left me on the field at Formigny, wounded and broken that I was. For his sake, I will stay with you.”

Richard was relieved, for he had feared going off into the unknown without a companion. Nothing he said, however, could persuade Henry to change his mind, and the two parted with bitter words and a curt farewell.

After buying food and clothes for the journey and a pack-horse to carry Richard’s harness, he and Mauley set off south for the coast.

Mauley had travelled the length of England many times in his adventurous youth, and knew the way to Portsmouth. After four days of hard riding along unfamiliar roads, sleeping in the open and constantly looking over their shoulders for any sign of pursuit, they reached the coast weary but unscathed.

Now penniless, Richard sold their pack-horse to pay their passage across the Channel. The money raised wasn’t enough, so with extreme reluctance and not a few tears, he sold a few pieces of his father’s harness to an armourer’s shop near the market cross.

“Less weight to carry,” said Mauley, trying to cheer him, “and less for me to clean, since it appears I must serve as your esquire for the time. An esquire, at my age!”

“How old are you, Mauley?” asked Richard. Not that he cared, but he was desperate to take his mind off the shame of selling his father’s gear.

“Difficult,” the other man replied, rubbing the grey bristles on his chin. “I was but a child when the news of Harry the Fifth’s death reached my village. Fifty, maybe? Far too old to be running about after some hare-brained outlaw knight.”

He meant that as a joke, but Richard scowled. The rough deference Mauley had always shown him had fallen away noticeably since they fled Staffordshire. If it continued he feared the man would start treating him like an equal. But there was nothing to be done. Mauley was currently his only friend in the world, and it wouldn’t do to alienate him.