She saw her eldest brother, Richard, slung like a peddler’s pack over the saddle-bow of a grey pony. The sight of him, grey-faced and insensible, his torso swathed in bloodstained bandages, made the breath catch in her throat.
Her second brother James, the chaplain of Cromford, led the pony on foot. She heard her mother storming into the courtyard below and ordering her steward to unfasten the gates.
There was another man with them, a knight in soiled harness and mounted on a weary, plodding destrier. At first she thought he was her father, which was some comfort, but then she saw the sigil on his surcoat: not the hawk of Bolton, but the leaping stag of their neighbour, Henry of Sedgley.
She coloured. Henry had often been at Heydon Court in recent times, making eyes at her and feigning interest in talk of farming and rent-rolls with her father. Mary was fond of him, though careful not to encourage his advances. She was already betrothed to another of their neighbours, a gentleman named John Huntley.
“Where is Father?” Mary cried. “Why is he not with them?”
Mauley, who had followed her onto the walkway, said gravely that he knew not, and that she had better go down. The burly old soldier was a calming, dependable presence. Shaken as she was, Mary allowed him to take her arm and help her down the steps.
Her brothers and Henry passed through the gates and into the yard, where Dame Anne received them at the head of a crowd of servants. The third and youngest of Mary’s brothers, Martin, just six years old, clung tightly to his mother’s skirts, his face pale as fresh milk as he gazed at the soiled and bloodstained figure slung over the back of the pony.
Ever the practical mistress of the household, Dame Anne did not scream or faint at the sight of Richard so close to death, but instructed two of the grooms to carry him into the hall. There they laid him on a couch by the fire, and erected a screen to shield him from draughts and prying eyes.
“Ride to Lichfield, and fetch a doctor,” Dame Anne snapped at Mauley. “Look for Master Jenkin, or if he is engaged, Hook or Shipton. They are proper surgeons, none of your drunken sawbones, and the best in the county.”
The old retainer hurried off to the stables, and she rounded on James. For a miracle he appeared to be sober.
“I looked for his body on the field, the morning after the battle,” he said hurriedly before she could pepper him with questions, “and would not have found him, were it not for the aid of this knight, who found me at Market Drayton after the fighting was over. We hid in the forest until nightfall. He protected me from the Yorkist soldiers engaged in plundering and stripping the dead, and slew two who tried to prevent us taking Richard from the field.”
He motioned to Henry, who was standing in the doorway, rain dripping off his muddied harness onto the flagstones. The big knight gave Mary an awkward little bow, which she returned with a cool smile.
“My thanks, Henry,” said Dame Anne, though with little warmth. “You are a true friend to us. What of my husband?”
It was the question Mary dreaded, and Henry looked at James to supply the answer. “Madam, we searched the field as long as we dared,” he said, looking at the floor, “but could not find him. He may have escaped. Many did.”
Dame Anne’s face was hard, but grew harder still at this news, and for a moment seemed drained of life, like one of the carved stone heads that decorated the ceiling of All Saints Church. She said nothing, though she wrung her hands, red and swollen from needlework and rheumatism. An oppressive silence reigned in the hall.
“Tanner, remove that chair,” she said at last to the steward, pointing at a chair by the hearth where Edward had loved to sit and drink of an evening, “and put it away until he comes home again. Until then, no-one is to mention my husband’s name in this house. Any servant who mentions his name shall be birched and turned out of doors.”
She handed Martin over to a servant, with instructions to take him to bed, and went to tend to Richard. Mary would have gone too, but Henry coughed to get her attention. “Lady Mary,” he said, “I would speak with you in private.”
“You have a fine sense of timing,” said Mary, more sharply than she intended. “My father is missing, perhaps dead, and my brother lies on the cusp of death. I have no time for you at present.”
His eyes bulged, lending him the appearance of a startled frog. “Forgive me, but what I have to say has a direct bearing on you and your family.”
Henry seemed in earnest – Mary thought he was born earnest, painfully so – and spoke with unusual conviction. “A moment, then,” she sighed, “but no more.”
She led him out of the hall, down a short flight of steps through an arched doorway into the buttery. There were no servants present, and she felt a brief tremor of anxiety at being alone with this big, powerful knight, reeking of sweat and horses and other men’s blood.
This is Henry
, Mary thought, looking up into his mild blue eyes.
He would rather stab himself than do me harm
.
“Well?” she demanded, putting her head to one side and folding her arms. He swallowed nervously, and seemed to take uncommon interest in a wheel of cheese lying on a side-table.
“I…” he began, and then the words came out in a rush. “I saw your father pulled down and slain in the battle, and who slew him. It was Sir Thomas Malvern. I also saw the banners of the men who helped him do it. They were those of his friends, Edmund Ramage and John Huntley.”
Mary searched his face, looking for any trace of deceit. There was none, but still she couldn’t bring herself to believe him.
“You’re lying,” she said quietly. “You are jealous of my fiancée, and want me to think him a traitor. This is a crude strategy, Henry, and you have played it at the wrong time.”
He stiffened. “No man calls me liar without having to prove it on his body,” he said in a cold, deliberate tone, quite different from his earlier stammering, “and no woman either, who wishes to remain my friend. John Huntley is your fiancé, I accepted that long ago, but I swear to you, on my honour as a belted knight, that yesterday I saw his banner in the Yorkist line. I do not say that he was there himself. It may have been his father, or one of their kin.”
The forceful indignation in his voice made Mary hesitate, and it was with some difficulty that she mastered her churning emotions. “I don’t doubt your honour,” she said haltingly, “and I am sorry I gave you the lie. The Ramages were there too?”
Henry nodded, mollified. “Malvern, Huntley and Ramage. I saw them all, clustered together on the left wing of the Yorkist array.”
Mary’s mind wrestled with the implications of what Henry was saying. The Malverns were an ancient Staffordshire knightly family, fond of boasting that their ancestors had come over with the Conqueror, though the claim had never been proved. They had always looked down on the Boltons, regarding them as upstarts but two generations removed from tradesmen (which was quite true – Mary’s great-grandfather had been a chandler in Burton-upon-Trent.) The Boltons resented and envied them in return.
Edward Bolton had spent much of his life embroiled in a number of lawsuits against Sir Thomas, minor cases of trespass and hunting rights that sometimes boiled over into violence, but the Boltons had never suspected him for a traitor. And yet, if Henry was speaking the truth, he and his allies among the Staffordshire gentry had taken up arms for the Yorkists at Blore Heath.
Nothing more passed between them. Mary was too emotional for speech, and after the brief flare of temper his usual tongue-tied demeanour in her presence quickly returned.
They went back in silence to the hall, where the servants were making up a proper bed for Richard, while a turnspit built up the fire and tossed sweet-smelling herbs onto the flames. The servants had brought basins of hot water, towels and salves for the patient, but Dame Anne shooed them away and insisted on tending him herself.
She was intent on Richard when Mary came in, and carefully unpicked the filthy bandage wrapped around his torso.
“This nasty rag was torn from a dead solder’s cloak on the battlefield,” she muttered without looking up from her work. “It will be a wonder if the dirt and grease from it has not entered his wound.”
“When I found him, he was bleeding his life out from a hole in his back,” said James, clearly wishing himself in a pot-house somewhere. “What was I to do – let him bleed?”
His mother clucked her tongue and waved him away. “Yes, yes,” she said, gently laying a damp scented cloth against Richard’s brow, “no doubt you did your best. Go and find something to eat in the kitchens. Or drink.”
Her deliberate emphasis on the last word didn’t even make James wince, and he gratefully lumbered away in search of a liquid breakfast.
Mary studied Richard’s face as Dame Anne unpeeled the foul bandage. His skin was grey, the colour of death, and his eyelids flickered occasionally, like one fighting to regain consciousness.
“I think he has taken a blow to the head,” said Mary, trying to mimic her mother’s calmness. Her eyes prickled with tears, but this was no time to show weakness.
Dame Anne ignored her. By now she had managed to peel away most of the bandage, revealing a vivid reddish-purple bruise on Richard’s abdomen. There was no other obvious wound, but the couch under him was stained with fresh blood.
Kneeling to get a closer look, she gently worked her hand under his lower back.
“Stabbed in the kidney,” she said flatly, taking her soaking hand away and sniffing it. “Let us pray the doctor arrives soon.”
She wiped her hand on a clean towel, and turned to Henry. “You have our gratitude,” she said, “but there is no more you can do here. Go home and look to the safety of your own estate. The country hereabouts will be thick with Yorkists looking for easy plunder.”
Her voice brooked no argument, and Henry looked only too relieved to be quit of Heydon Court for the time. He bowed, shot Mary a brief look, and strode out into the rain.
“What did the Bastard have to say to you?” Dame Anne demanded when the door had closed behind him. “Not pressing his suit, I hope, the lustful little pig.”
“No,” replied Mary, wary of repeating anything Henry had said to her. She could tell her mother was stretched to the limit, like a sail-rope in a hurricane.
Dame Anne looked at her with the soul-stripping gaze that never failed to extract the truth.
“He told me that he saw the banners of Malvern, Huntley and Ramage in the Yorkist lines,” Mary admitted after a long moment. “He swore on his honour that it was true.”
The harsh lines on her mother’s face seemed to deepen a little. “So, our friends and neighbours have turned traitor,” she said in the quiet, controlled voice Mary recognised as the prelude to a storm. “God rot their souls. Well, this puts an end to your betrothal to young John Huntley, whether or not he was on the field. Was that all Henry said?”
Mary drew in a deep breath. “He also said he saw Father slain on the field by Sir Thomas Malvern,” she said, her voice choked with emotion, “aided by men wearing the livery of Huntley and Ramage.”
Her mother fell silent, concentrating on cleaning the grime and bloodstains from Richard’s body. The expected storm never broke, and Dame Anne said nothing more until Mauley returned with the doctor from Lichfield. Meanwhile Mary went to the private family chapel, a small chamber reached via a passage at the far end of the hall. There she knelt before the little altar and allowed the pent-up dam of her sorrow to break.
As instructed, Mauley had engaged Master Shipton, a yellow-skinned, lugubrious greybeard in a long black gown and a black floppy hat. The doctor took his time examining Richard. Mary thought his hands were like wrinkled spiders as they crawled over the patient’s flesh.
“His skull is fractured,” Master Shipton said eventually, wagging his grey head, “and that will heal in time, though I cannot speak for the condition of his brain. He may recover his wits, he may not. The real danger is the stab-wound in his kidney. I can salve and dress it, and leave you instruction on how to tend it, but the healing of the wound is in God’s hands.”
Dame Anne was unimpressed and paid his fee with a bad grace, but Mary was more realistic. She appreciated that doctors were not miracle-workers, and that they should give thanks to God that Richard had a chance of life. Over two thousand men were said to have met their end on Blore Heath, and hundreds of English homesteads plunged into mourning for their loss.
Days passed, and Richard clung to life. The women nursed him ceaselessly. Even James visited on occasion, to breathe prayers and wine fumes over his brother.
When her husband failed to return after four days, Dame Anne sent Mauley and three of the five men-at-arms she employed to guard the house to look for him on the battlefield.
They returned two days later, carrying his body in the back of a cart. Mary and the rest of the household gathered in the yard to watch them lift him down and lay him on the earth. Edward was a gigantic figure, his harness caked in dried blood and filth.
Mauley unbuckled and gently removed Edward’s helm. The face beneath was stiff and pale in death, one eyeball destroyed by the sword-thrust that had entered his brain and killed him.
The sight of her father’s corpse unleashed a wave of grief and desolation to sweep over Mary. Her head swam, and it was only with difficulty that she maintained her composure before the servants.