“Well,” he said at last, “I cannot stop you from joining the King’s army. Nor should I try. God bless any man who strikes a blow in such a godly cause. However, I confess to being astonished. You have always been such a mousy little creature. Good God, man, what do you know of soldiering? You’ve never wielded anything more deadly than a quill!”
“Not so, sir,” replied Henry, “I ride well, and have a pistol, which I am a fair shot with. I know nothing of swordplay, but the basic principle is simple enough. One grips the hilt and endeavours to thrust the sharp end into the enemy.”
Audley rested his chin on his hands and puffed out his sallow cheeks. His watery grey eyes, which had so often regarded Henry with a mixture of contempt and indifference for six long years, now held a degree of respect.
“Am I to understand,” he said slowly, “that you intend to ride off to Shrewsbury on that pot-bellied nag of yours, along with your pistol and your villainous old coat and hat, and offer your services as...what, a dragoon?”
“As whatever the royal officers see fit, sir. I ask only to serve, and do my part in the fight against Parliament.”
Audley closed his eyes and laid his right hand flat on the board of his desk, where he was accustomed to sit and calculate all the monies owed him. His office was large, with dark oak panelling on the walls and a grand fire burning merrily inside a hooded hearth. A glass of sherry stood by his elbow. Henry eyed it longingly. He was partial to sherry and port, though could seldom afford either.
The other man drummed his fingers, which were long and suitably grasping, the joints swollen with arthritis.
“I never thought to say this,” he said, “but you make me proud, Henry. As proud as if you were my own son.”
Audley had no children, his wife having died of an ague some ten years previously. Sighing, he pulled out a drawer in his desk and fished out a heavy iron key.
Henry caught his breath. He knew what the key was for. It unlocked Audley’s private safe, reached via a small iron door two-thirds up the wall behind his desk, and hidden behind a false panel. He usually carried the key on his person, hanging on a chain about his scrawny neck.
Breathing hard, Audley slid open the panel and jammed the key in the lock. “No other living soul has seen the contents of my safe,” he grunted, “not even my wife, God rest her soul. In here are my life’s savings.”
There was a loud click as he gave the key a twist, and the door swung open. His head blocked Henry’s view of the interior, but he caught a gleam of silver and gold.
The demon of avarice rose inside him. He glanced at the desk, where the half-empty bottle of sherry sat next to Audley’s glass. The bottle looked heavy. It would be the work of a moment to snatch it up by the neck, step around the desk and bring it down on his master’s unsuspecting head...
Audley was old, nearing sixty, and in poor health. The blow would most likely kill him. God knew it would be no less than the man deserved, after all the insults and petty tyrannies Henry had endured from him.
No, he thought, forcing away the delightful image of William Audley lying face-down in a spreading pool of blood, I have a greater destiny at hand.
Audley turned around, holding a small heap of coins in the bowl of his hands. He laid them carefully on the desk and wiped his brow. Henry noticed he had broken out in a sweat. The spending of money - his precious, long-hoarded money, which Audley cared for more than anything on earth - always caused him terrible distress.
“Eight shillings,” he said, carefully sifting eight silver coins from the pile of currency and laying them in a row on the edge of the desk facing Henry, “enough to buy you a good sword.”
“Two pounds,” he added, sliding forward a couple of larger gold coins, “for a buff coat. You must have some protection in battle.”
Henry was silent, mesmerised by the sight of so much money. Why does the old miser keep it hidden away? He must have enough in that safe to buy a fine house for himself, as well as a coach and servants.
When I come into my fortune, he vowed, none shall have cause to call me miser.
Audley gnawed a knuckle, his other hand trembling as it hovered over the remainder of the money. “A good horse will cost six or seven pounds,” he said, “you cannot ride off to war on that sorry creature you own at present.”
His hand closed over the money. “I will buy the horse for you at market,” he added, smiling weakly at Henry, “I know the breeders in these parts.”
Speak truth, man, Henry thought angrily, admit you would not trust me with so much of your money.
He quelled his indignation and mustered a show of gratitude. In truth, he could not have not expected so much from his skinflint master, and regarded it as the beginning of a change in his fortunes.
Audley released Henry for the rest of the day to buy equipment. He left the office to discover the first of the King’s soldiers, a troop of forty mounted dragoons, riding into Stafford. Word of their arrival quickly spread, and the citizens turned out in large numbers to hail them as they paraded down the high street.
Henry watched enviously as the soldiers cantered past. Their officer, some rich gentleman’s son with the wispy beginnings of a beard on his peach-soft cheeks, smiled and doffed his plumed hat at the prettiest women in the crowd. His men were well equipped, each man with his buff coat, lobster-tail helmet and back and breast. They carried swords and pistols, and muskets slung over their backs.
Soon I shall be as fine as them, thought Henry, even finer. No more shall people call me The Weasel, and sneer and spit at me in the street. The name of Malvern shall be restored to its old glory. Once again my family shall be honoured and respected, and our lost fortunes restored.
Henry’s new-found courage and resolve, so alien to his usual nervous, retiring character, stemmed from his meeting with the preacher.
There on the heath, despite his nightmares and the ingrained terror of everlasting damnation, he had signed a pact with the Devil.
The preacher was skilled at persuasion. “We were destined to meet,” he said, “my master told me so. He knows and sees all.”
His voice had a strange warmth to it, and dripped like honey into Henry’s ears. “I know your master,” said Henry, making the sign of the cross, “he is a deceiver, and all godly men abjure him.”
“No. It is the godly who are deceived. Look at yourself. What has God done for you? You have no wife, no house, and little money. That horse is ready to buckle under you. You have but one suit of clothes, and can scarce afford another. Remain among the godly, and your lot will be nothing but poverty and isolation, all your days.”
Henry swallowed. Tears stung his eyes. “You know much of me, sir,” he said, “I might return your questions, and ask what your master has done for you. To my eyes you are but a poor and ragged villain who creeps around the land, persuading guileless country girls to sign away their souls.”
“You know nothing,” the other replied softly, “nothing of what has been given me, or what I shall receive. Do you wish to spend eternity as a slave, Malvern, singing the praises of your heavenly oppressor, or do you wish to be free?”
“Free,” retorted Henry, cringing under the lash of the other man’s eyes, “you offer a poor kind of freedom. Free to burn. To endure endless torments in the bowels of Hell.”
He spoke without conviction. Raised an Anglican by his parents, any piety he once possessed had long since withered away. Life and its hardships had ground any true faith out of him.
I am alone, and friendless, and with none to care for me.
Suddenly, brutally, the truth of Henry’s life was revealed to its owner. All the years of loneliness and isolation, the mind-deadening labour in the same tiny little room. The mockery and disdain of his fellow men.
Henry was a good deal tougher than he looked, and had endured his joyless existence without complaint. Just occasionally - at Christmas, perhaps, or on his birthday, when he looked around and saw there was none to help him cele
brate - cold reality swept in, overwhelming his defences and causing him to weep, curled up on the narrow bed of his garret.
Now all his barricades were thrown down. Henry doubled over, as though someone had punched him in the gut. Hot tears rolled unchecked down his sallow cheeks.
“Stop,” he sobbed, covering his face with his sleeve, “stop, I beg you.”
The preacher had caused the dam inside him to break. Somehow he had reached inside Henry’s mind and found the weakness.
“You have listened to too many lies,” said his tormentor, the voice mild and soothing now, like a lullaby, “the priests are all liars. Think, Henry. How do they keep the godly in check? By threatening them with damnation. By breaking men on the wheel, or sending them to the fire, or throwing them in prison. My master does none of these things to his followers. He is the Prince of Peace. His enemy Christ is the Lord of Lies.”
The preacher reached out his gloved hand, beckoning at Henry to dismount. “Let there be no more lies, Henry,” he said gently, “come down, and know the truth.”
Henry slowly dismounted. His token resistance was quite blown away, like chaff on the wind sweeping the heath. He humbly knelt and bowed his head before the preacher, who drew a wad of parchment from inside his jacket.
“This,” he said, carefully unfolding the crackling sheet, “is the covenant. I daresay you have heard of it.”
“The women in the market,” mumbled Henry, “they said others had signed it.”
“That is so. It is simple enough. Look.”
He held the parchment before Henry’s eyes. It was blank, save for a couple of scrawled signatures and a list of X’s.
“Most of those who signed cannot write,” Marshall laughed, “so I bade them make their mark instead. You, however, are a literate man.”
Henry gulped.“There is no ink,” he said.
“Look again at the signatures on the sheet,” replied Marshall with another of his terrible smiles, “and then draw your dagger.”
Henry peered closer, and saw the marks were scrawled in blood.
3.
A fortnight later, having served his notice to Audley, Henry rode south. Not to join the King’s army at Shrewsbury - at least, not yet - but directly south.
There, some four miles to the west of Lichfield, stood the remains of Malvern Hall. Henry had been there before, and the sight of his lost inheritance never failed to kindle a fire in his breast.
He rode his new horse, a chestnut gelding of just three winters, over newly-harvested fields towards the hall, the tower of which could be seen peering over the deep forest to the south. The fields, which once formed the parkland surrounding the hall, were now leased out by their owner, Sir Francis Bolton, to tenant farmers. Much of the land was recently enclosed, divided into a neat grid system by a series of hedges, dykes and fences. The knowledge that he was trespassing on what was, by rights, his own land, only fuelled Henry’s rage.
Thoughts of the Boltons did nothing to ease his temper. That family had flourished under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, and still had their seat at Heydon Court, a fine red-brick mansion a few miles from Stafford.
It was the Boltons who had caused the ruin of Henry’s family. “Never forget, never forgive,” was the motto taught him by his father, “but for those treacherous pigs, we would be lords still, and live in high estate.”
His parents drummed the story into him as soon as he was old enough to understand it. Back in the days of Henry the Sixth, the Boltons had fought for the House of Lancaster, and the Malverns for York. After twenty years of civil war, the last Yorkist king fell at Bosworth, and Henry’s family went down with him.
Sir Geoffrey Malvern, his direct ancestor, was butchered on the field. Geoffrey’s surviving kin were out of favour with the new Tudor regime, and their fortunes steadily dwindled over the years. A stubborn insistence on clinging to the Catholic faith led to several of them going to the fire under Henry the Eighth, or fleeing into exile, and what remained of their lands was sold off to meet the crippling fines imposed by the crown. The family survived, though scattered and degraded, forced to eke out livings as tradesmen, clerks and minor clergy.
Raised on this legacy of bitterness and loss, Henry now realised he loved revenge more than God. Far more. It was for the sake of revenge he agreed to sign the unholy covenant and barter away his soul.
“In return for which,” the preacher had explained before Henry wrote his signature in blood, taken from a cut on his forearm, “you may ask three gifts from my master.”
“I want to be rich,” said Henry, “with all my family’s lands and estates restored. I want to be invulnerable in battle.”
“Most of all,” he added, his voice trembling with passion, “I want revenge on the Boltons of Staffordshire. I want to see their menfolk slaughtered, their houses plundered and fired, their name stricken from the roll of English nobility. Wiped out! Drowned in their own black blood!”
The preacher grinned. “Greed and violence and revenge,” he said, chuckling, “worthy gifts to ask from your new lord.”
Thus the deal was stuck, and Henry wrote his name on the parchment. He immediately fell prey to doubt. What if the preacher had lied, and there was nothing to be gained from sealing a pact with the Devil but misery and damnation? The priests would say as much, not that Henry would dare tell a priest what he had done.
The doubts lingered, and clawed at him now as he rode over the fields. Hoping to shake them from his mind, Henry gave his gelding her head, and was almost jolted out of the saddle as she raced into a gallop and leaped the last dyke before the forest. She was a strong, high-spirited creature, far more lively than his old nag. Audley had proved as good as his word, and bought Henry a beast fit to ride to war.
When he had her under control again, he trotted along a familiar rutted track into the woods. The track, once a wide bridal path for horses, led to Malvern Hall. It was much overgrown in places, though local villagers and farmers still came here to quarry undressed stone from the ruins.
Henry’s simmering anger was tempered by sadness when he arrived within sight of the hall. Every time he came here there was a little less of it.
Still, even a century after being abandoned, the shell of the old house retained a certain grandeur. Dating from as far back as the Conquest, it took more than time and weather, and the depredations of local peasants, to wear down its thick, ivy-covered walls. The roots of the hall might lie exposed, but yet they endured.
“The house of my fathers,” he murmured, “you shall know music and light again. I swear it. I have prostituted my soul for your sake.”
He dismounted, tethered his gelding to a tree, and walked through the open gateway into the grounds. The outer wall that once surrounded the hall was crumbled away to its foundations, and the dyke filled with weeds and brambles and dirty rainwater.
Henry limped through this desolation to the house itself, where he halted in the middle of the courtyard. He closed his eyes and thought he could sense the slow rhythm of time, pulsing up through the ground.
Here, where he stood, was the scene of a foul crime. Sometime during the vicious wars between Lancaster and York, Richard Bolton had slain Sir Thomas Malvern, Geoffrey’s father. Beheaded him in his own courtyard, and forced his granddaughter to watch.
Henry took a deep breath and clenched his fists, digging his fingernails into his palms. He knew the Boltons claimed that they did not start the feud. One of their number was slain in an earlier battle - treacherously slain, so they said, by a Malvern.
“The Boltons are liars,” Henry said through gritted teeth, “and have profited too long from their deceits. The Devil grant they fight for Parliament in the coming war. Let me meet them on the field, and strike down every one.”
Having paid his respects, Henry turned and walked away. He fancied the shadows of the past streamed after him.
4.
Shrewsbury, 22nd September
“We are informed,” said
the king, “that Sir John Byron has left Oxford with a convoy of m...money and silver plate donated by the university to our cause.”
He paused, smoothing his neat moustaches, and took a sip of wine. The officers gathered before him in the hall of Shrewsbury Castle waited patiently for him to continue.
One among was them was not so patient. Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Charles’ swarthily handsome half-German nephew, stood fidgeting like a great wolfhound straining at the leash. At six feet four inches tall, he towered over every other man present, especially his diminutive royal uncle.
Rupert had been in England for the best part of a year. Since arriving from Germany, he had waited eagerly for the death-grapple with King Charles’ rebellious subjects to begin. Now, after months of wrangling and parleying, the hour was finally at hand.
Much to his chagrin, his uncle seemed determined to delay it.
This is not how wars are waged, thought Rupert, tap-tapping the basket hilt of his sword, we should be at their throats, man to man, blade to blade! To hell with this shadow-play.
The prince glanced contemptuously at his fellow officers. Very few, to the best of his knowledge, had any military experience. He, on the other hand, had been a fighting soldier since the age of fourteen, and seen hard service all over the Netherlands and Germany. It was difficult for him not to despise most of the English gentlemen who rallied to the King’s banner.
Some of them might be brave, he allowed, but they are rank amateurs, unfit to lead a single troop of dragoons, let alone a brigade. God grant my uncle sees sense, and gives me command of his cavalry.
“M...my scouts also tell me,” Charles went on, “that Essex is aware of Byron’s movements, and has dispatched a force of dragoons to intercept and seize the convoy before it can reach us here. The dragoons form the vanguard of the enemy host.”
Charles traced a line with one pale finger across the map of south-west England laid out on the table before him. ““My lords, Essex is marching towards Worcester in force. The last we heard, he was at Coventry.”
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