Revenge (21 page)

He jerked his head, indicating that she move to the corner. Mary obeyed, and almost stepped on a trapdoor set in the floor. The timbers looked old and half-rotted, and the iron ring in the middle was spotted with rust.

“Centuries ago, when the word of Christ had only just reached this island,” said Huntley, “a timber hall stood on the site of Greystones, a great mansion by the rough standards of the day. The mistress of the house was a lady named Ealdgyth. She was a pagan, and cleaved to the old Gods of her Saxon ancestors. A band of Christian missionaries from France came to the hall and told her to cast off the pagan gods, who were mere manifestations of the Devil, and accept the truth of Christ.”

He knelt and grasped hold of the ring on the trapdoor. “Ealdgyth was a proud, fierce lady, perhaps somewhat unhinged,” he went on, his face still ghastly in the weak light of the candle, “and would not tolerate being preached at and threatened, as she saw it, by a group of ugly old men. She bade her servants seize the missionaries, and nail them upside down to the walls of her hall in mockery of the crucifixion. This was done. She mocked them, bidding them call on their Saviour even as they bled and suffered, while she sat and ate her dinner.”

It was a dreadful story, but Huntley was not done. “She cut off pieces of their flesh, while they were still living, and added them to her bowl of beef and mutton, pouring a rich sauce over all. Then she ate the lot, purring and licking her fingers with very sign of enjoyment.”

“One of her servants witnessed all. He ran out into the night, careless of the wind and rain, until he reached the hall of one of Ealdgyth’s neighbours. This man, Aelfrith by name, was a good Christian, and shuddered when the servant poured out his tale. Aelfrith summoned his war-band, marched on Ealdgyth’s house and stormed it, slaying all the servants save the one who had betrayed her. There, in the red and reeking hall, they found the remains of the missionaries, and Ealdgyth herself, her hands and face smeared with blood.”

“Do you know what they did to her?” he asked, leering up at Mary. She didn’t care to venture an answer. He would tell her soon enough.

“Hanging was not a severe enough punishment for such crimes. Nor beheading, nor even burning. Aelfrith decreed that the lady be stripped, locked into a coffin and buried alive with a Bible under her own hall, so that she would have time to contemplate her sins and beg forgiveness from God before she starved to death. The poor missionaries were taken down, what was left of them, and given a decent Christian burial elsewhere.”

He heaved on the ring and the heavy trapdoor yawned open a few inches. “My family thought it was just a story,” he said, “until one of my ancestors decided to dig under the cellars. Look, Mary. Look what he found.”

Mary looked, drawn by horrified fascination and the knowledge of what Huntley would do to her if she refused. Below was a square pit with earthen walls, some ten feet deep. An ancient stone sarcophagus lay at the bottom. The lid was missing, and inside, wrapped in a threadbare grey robe, were the dry and whitened bones of a woman, not much bigger than a child. Her skeletal hands clasped an ancient Bible, the leather binding all rotted away and the yellowed pages hanging loose.

She stifled a scream and pressed her back against the wall. Huntley stood up and advanced on her, his hands hanging loose by his sides.

“If you continue to refuse me,” he said, placing a deliberate emphasis on every word, “my father and I have agreed that you will join Ealdgyth in her long sleep. Imagine being folded in her embrace, Mary, down there in the dark, while hunger gnaws at your vitals. The lady’s bones might sustain you for a while, though after all this time I doubt there is much marrow left inside them.”

Mary’s courage failed, and her vision started to blur. Huntley had to move quickly to catch her before she fainted and toppled into the pit. He slapped her until she recovered her senses, and then bullied her back the way they had come. As they left, she noticed that the trapdoor was shut again, hiding its dreadful contents.

The secret of the Red Barn was enough to finally break Mary’s will, and that same evening she meekly agreed to sign a paper declaring her marriage to Henry of Sedgley null and void on the false grounds of non-consummation.

Martin was brought in as a witness. He had also suffered in the care of the Huntleys, being denied food and soundly whipped every time he showed fight, and his eyes were damp with tears as he scrawled his name on the parchment.

“Excellent,” grunted Huntley the Elder, his piggy eyes gleaming with satisfaction as they pored over the document. “I shall send word to the Sheriff at Stafford, and set a day for the happy union of our families.”

The date set was the twelfth of October. A strange listlessness stole over Mary in the days leading up to the wedding. She wafted about the house like Ealdgyth’s ghost, careless of the mocking glances of the servants and the abuse heaped on her by the Huntleys. She seemed broken now, a timid, shiftless thing, with but one useful purpose – to produce a healthy male heir to Greystones.

At last the dreaded day came, and she was thrust into a wedding gown and made to board a palfrey for the journey to Stafford. But inside the sleeve of that gown, a small eating knife was hidden, with which Mary planned to slash her wrists, or preferably her husband’s, before they stood up in church and said their wedding vows.

Fortune, who Mary thought had long since abandoned her, came to her aid instead. It sent a most unlikely saviour in the form of her eldest brother, James, the wine-sodden lecher who had brought nothing but shame on the Boltons ever since he chose drink over duty.

The wedding party had not ridden thirty paces from Greystones before the peace of the forest was broken by a horn-blast, and the woods either side of the road erupted with yelling, green-clad brigands, armed with swords and bows. Huntley’s small retinue was quickly scattered or shot down, and Mary put the knife in her sleeve to better use than intended by sticking it in the eye of one of the men-at-arms set to guard her.

When the brief melee was over she was obliged to prevent her brother murdering Huntley the Elder as the latter lay helpless. She had no personal desire to preserve her tormentor’s life, but policy dictated that he should be spared, at least for a little while.

“We should send a messenger to the Sheriff at Stafford,” she said quickly, “instructing him to release our mother unharmed. Otherwise we will kill his allies, father and son, and send him their heads in a bag.”

James, who stood poised to smash Huntley’s brains in with a monstrous wooden club, was moved to smile.

“As our brother Richard sent him the head of Thomas Malvern,” he said, “poor Stanley would have quite a collection.”

To Mary’s relief, he lowered his club, and the look of murder died on his face.

A messenger was duly dispatched to Stafford, and the Huntleys bound and taken into the woods. Their surviving followers were turned off, to go where they wished and spread the word of the fate of those that challenged the white hawk.

Mary was astonished to see the well-organised company of men James had gathered about him since the fall of Heydon Court. She was no less astonished by the change in him. In the past she had frequently likened James to a pig, wallowing in self-pity and joyless debauchery, but now he was more like a wolf, lean and hungry and relentless.

“Well, sweet sister,” he asked her as they sat around the campfire on that first night in the forest, “are you inclined to think better of me now?”

“It seems I have little choice,” she muttered, hugging her knees and staring into the fire.

A good deal more was said as they awkwardly tried to bridge the gulf between them. Mary thanked him for his rescue, but rebuffed his questions about what had happened to her inside Greystones. She knew he shared Richard’s taste for vengeance, and it would have taken little to persuade him to set about the prisoners.

For their part the Huntleys said little. Mary could not tell if their expressions were those of beaten men, or if they were privately scheming a way out of their predicament.

They stayed two days in the forest, moving their captives from wood to wood. On the evening of the second day the messenger returned with a reply from the Sheriff.

“He is prepared to release our mother,” said James, reading the brief letter written in Stanley’s elegant hand, “on condition that we give him the Huntleys unharmed. If we wish to make an exchange, he will meet us tomorrow at dusk, at The Seven Sleepers.”

The Seven Sleepers was an old stone circle on a hill at the northern edge of the forest, near the Burnt Wood. It was a suitably dramatic spot for an exchange of prisoners, Mary thought. She had never suspected the prim, aesthetic Sir John Stanley to have such a streak of romance in him.

James quickly disabused her of that notion. “The hill is a bare, exposed place,” he said, “at least a quarter of a mile from the shelter of the trees. Stanley might be planning to surround the place with his soldiers and catch us like fish in a net. We shall meet him on the edge of the forest instead.”

Next morning the company set out through the woods. Ten of them were mounted while the rest – their best scouts, picked from the poachers and foresters in their ranks – forged ahead. Mary had given her hated wedding gown to an outlaw as a gift for his wife.

Like the others, she donned a dark green jerkin and hose and a hooded mantle. The company resembled Robin Hood and his band, and she thought James made a fine Friar Tuck, loping bare-legged through the forest with his cassock hitched up to his belt.

The golden noonday sun was slanting across the grassy ridge of the Seven Sleepers when they reached the forest’s edge. The Sleepers were seven grey moss-covered sentinels, pitted and broken under the weight of many centuries, arranged in a rough circle on the summit of the hill by long-rotted pagan hands.

As James had instructed, they went no further, and sent out three riders to watch for the approach of the Sheriff. They soon came racing back with word that Stanley’s banner was sighted, approaching along the road from the north with forty lances at his back.

“What did I tell you?” James said to Mary with a wry smile. “Stanley comes in force, to take us all and deliver our bodies to Stafford gaol. A clumsy trap, and ill-laid.”

He gave orders for everyone to stay inside the edges of the forest, while he rode out alone to meet the Sheriff.

“I shall stay within bow-shot of the trees,” he explained, “and if Stanley tries to arrest me, send a flight of arrows at him. Otherwise, stay back and remain out of sight.”

Once again Mary marvelled at the new purpose and strength in him. It reminded her of the change in her husband when he returned from the Lancastrian defeat at Northampton. War, Mary reflected as she watched James ride out to face the Sheriff, forges men anew, and not always for the worse.

He met Stanley where the road curved under the shadow of the Sleepers. Though Mary feared he would be clapped in chains, no attempt was made to arrest him. Instead the two men spoke amicably, with James making frequent gestures at the forest.

“He will be telling grand lies to the Sheriff, all about his fearsome army of outlaws,” said Hodson. “Hundreds of young men, all armed cap-a-pie, just waiting for his signal to burst forth and slaughter all in their path.”

“Stanley is reputed to be a shrewd man,” said Mary, nervously twisting her reins as she watched them confer. “He won’t be fooled so easily.”

“He will have all your heads,” spat Huntley the Elder, who was standing within earshot, “but I shall ask him to spare you, Mary Bolton, so you might keep your delayed appointment with the lady Ealdgyth at Greystones.”

Mary could not help but shudder, and the man in charge of Huntley cuffed him so hard his nose bled. He shook the blood away and kept his eyes fixed on her, malice radiating from their sunken depths.

Barely half an hour later, James and the Sheriff rode back side-by-side towards the forest, followed by six lancers and a woman riding a palfrey. Relief and joy flooded through Mary as she recognised the latter as her mother.

Dame Anne appeared unharmed by her term of captivity at Stafford. She was the same gaunt, indomitable presence as ever, smiling thinly when she saw Mary and barking at one of the lancers to help her from the saddle.

“Well, daughter,” she said as Mary rode eagerly from the cover of the trees and tumbled out of the saddle to embrace her, “I am happy to see you. But why are you dressed like some common woodsman? My God, you stink!”

Despite the harshness of her tone she returned Mary’s embrace with interest. Mary could see her mother had aged. The lines at the corners of her eyes had spread a little further and deeper, and the strands of loose hair peering out from under her coif had turned a little greyer.

“Your face is bruised,” she muttered, looking over Mary with a critical eye. “Where is Martin? Did the Huntleys maltreat you?”

Mary smiled, consciously deflecting her questions. “Martin is well,” she said blandly, “and we had nothing to complain of.”

Later, when she had the leisure and could steel herself to contemplate the horrors of the recent past, Mary would tell her mother the truth of what happened at Greystones.

The piercing nasal tones of the Sheriff interrupted their reunion. “Bring out your prisoners,” he said impatiently. “We have a bargain to seal.”