Sacrifice by David Pilling Page B

without difficulty, and said nothing.
       It was true enough. In common with the other wives of Lancastrian loyalists, Margaret de Vere had suffered in the aftermath of Tewkesbury. Forced to leave her husband’s seat at Castle Hedingham in Essex, she had wandered from place to place, the disgraced wife of a defeated traitor.
       When her fortunes were at their lowest ebb, she took up lodgings in Southwark, attended by just one faithful servant and scraping a meagre living from her needle. A devout if misguided woman, she made efforts to reform Southwark’s teeming population of whores, and tried to persuade them to accompany her to church. 
       The Southwark Nun, Theresa and the other madams mockingly called her. Maud was just twelve at the time, young and frightened and miserable, and one of the few who accepted Margaret’s offer. They became friends of a sort, until Theresa threatened to slit Maud’s nose unless she got off her knees and onto her back again.
       In an unguarded moment, Maud had told Margaret her real name, and something of her history. She had regretted it ever since. Even a little knowledge was power, a weapon others might use against her.
       Margaret’s fortunes had improved somewhat since those days. In one of his sporadic outbursts of generosity, old King Edward took pity on her, and gave her an annuity to live on. The money was enough for her to keep a house in East Anglia, where her husband once ruled supreme, and another in London. So far, King Richard had not seen fit to repeal it.
       Jack returned with a tray bearing half a wheel of cheese, a loaf of good white bread, a jug of wine and two cups. Silence reigned while he set the meal, poured out wine and cut generous slices of bread and cheese.

   “Why,” asked Margaret when he had gone, “are you here? I never thought to see your face again.”
       Maud bridled at her tone, and decided to respond with a question of her own.
       “Why did you tell Jack my name?” she demanded through a mouthful of cheese.
       Margaret’s mouth set in a firm line of disapproval, but then softened slightly. “You have retained some of your family spirit,” she said, “mere insolence, of course, but it’s something. I feared you were broken by so many misfortunes.”
       “As for Jack, you may as well know his full name is Jack Cloudsley. No mere servant, but a former billman in the service of the Duke of Somerset. After Somerset was slain at Towton, he turned outlaw rather than bend the knee to the Yorkists. A true Lancastrian. I could hardly turn him away when he came to Norfolk and begged to enter my service. He lost both his sons at Hexham.”
       Maud sipped at her wine and winced at the taste. It was poor, vinegary stuff, though her palate was coarsened by years of drinking cheap ale.
       “He rode for a time with an outlaw known as The White Hawk,” Margaret went on, “I expect you know of him.”
       Maud did, and felt a stab of pain, a ghostly blade slipped into her heart. The White Hawk was the name taken by her eldest uncle, Richard Bolton. He died in battle while she was still a child. Her mother used to sing the ballads they composed of his exploits, real and exaggerated.
      “This hawk stoops to gather you all,
       That betrayed our good King Henry…”
       “Jack Cloudsley is the last of The White Hawk’s following,” said Margaret, “the others are all dead, slain in battle or rotting on gallows up and down the land. God rest their souls. Outlaws they may have been, but they fought and died for a true cause. The only cause.”
       “What cause?” Maud said bitterly, “there’s nothing left to fight for. God favoured the House of York.”
       “The Devil did,” Margaret corrected her, “and the Devil cannot prosper forever. If you think we are so utterly defeated, why did you come here? I will have an answer.”
       Maud glanced nervously at the doorway into the hall. It should be