Free Sacrifice by David Pilling Page B

sturdy child, with the broad, flat features and hooded eyes of his father. Those eyes now stared glassily at the ceiling. James had crushed the life out of him with a pillow, while the giant did the same to Edward.
       “Well done,” said Tyrrell “you have both earned your freedom.”
       James knew – he had always known – exactly what kind of freedom Richard Plantagenet offered. He stood up and spread his arms wide as the men with daggers closed in.
        “Tell your master,” he said calmly, “that I look forward to greeting him in Hell.”
       He grunted as the blades entered his body, but did not scream or cry out. His companion was a different matter, and squealed like a frightened pig until one of the soldiers had the presence of mind to slash his throat.
       James slowly slid to the floor. His life bled from nine stab-wounds. Shadows rose around him. He thought he saw people. Familiar faces, long departed. His father. His brother.
       The shadows darkened and closed over his head.
     
    Chapter 8
     
    Maud had no tears. They refused to come, even when she saw Sir Geoffrey Malvern riding through London in the front rank of Richard of Gloucester’s household knights. The memory of what he had done to her still had the power to cut like a knife. Still there were no tears.
       Weeks later, she stood under the gatehouse of the Tower and gazed up at the severed head of her brother James, mounted on a pole alongside the heads of his fellow traitors. She was dry-eyed.
       Maud had not seen James for twelve years, but would have recognised him anywhere, at any time. His face was thinner than she remembered, and his flaming red hair and beard much longer, rank with grease and blood, but he was still her kin.
       No-one else knew him, or the other fresh head that had appeared above the gatehouse of the Tower. The second was hideous, like a frowning ape, with a missing eye and lank grey hair. They had simply appeared one morning, having presumably been added to the ranks of traitors during the night. The general opinion was that they had belonged to two of the fifty men arrested for trying to storm the Tower.
       “The rest will soon follow,” said Long Kate, Maud’s friend and fellow whore, “the new king don’t abide traitors. He has their heads off, sharp as you like.”
       Maud looked sidelong at her friend. Long Kate was aptly named, a thin, consumptive streak of a woman, unusually tall for her sex, with spindly limbs and long pale fingers. She was surprisingly popular among the patrons of The Cardinal’s Hat, who seemed to enjoy her novelty value.
       It was tempting to strike her. Maud resisted the urge. Her past was a secret she shared with nobody.
       Almost nobody. She looked up at her brother’s head again, the awful dead thing stuck on the end of a spike, and cast her mind back to the old days, before the disasters of Barnet and Tewkesbury.
       James was always the dark one of the family, a shameless drunk and womaniser and possibly the worst chaplain in the kingdom. He was also kind, and brave, and risked his life over and again carrying messages between Margaret of Anjou and the Earl of Warwick. All three were dead now, along with their causes. 
       She had no way of knowing why James died. Nor did she care overmuch. The last of her brothers was gone. True, Martin was not accounted for, but Maud refused to entertain false hopes. His bones almost certainly lay in one of the grave-pits at Tewkesbury, into which the Yorkists had dumped the corpses of their slaughtered enemies.
       It fell to her to avenge them. She, a weak and degraded woman in a world governed by pitiless men. If the Yorkists ever discovered her true identity, they would cut off her head and place it beside her brother’s. Two pairs of dead eyes, staring out over London until they rotted or were devoured by hungry ravens.
       There was a way. Maud had turned aside from it long ago, preferring to