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sheath. The sharp steel glistened with oil. Maud often dreamed of holding it against the plump, well-muscled throat of Sir Geoffrey Malvern.
       “One swift cut,” she murmured, holding the blade up to the light, “just one, and all my ghosts would be laid to rest.”
       Her mind reached back to the day she became a whore. Yorkist soldiers had dragged her shrieking out of a little church, where her mother and a few other Lancastrian fugitives had taken refuge from the massacre of Tewkesbury.
       “She’s yours, lads,” Malvern called out cheerfully, “enjoy her while she lasts.”
       The soldiers did just that. Maud had blocked out the details, and remembered just a vague impression of pain as they violated her over and over again. She might have died, if a Yorkist man-at-arms with more scruples than his fellows had not stood over her body and told the rapists to leave off.
       “For shame, you bastards,” he spat, “do none of you have young daughters, then? She’s but a child, for God’s sake.”
       “Spoils of war,” grumbled one of her tormentors. He had already raped her once, and stood with his hose around his ankles. Maud’s blood speckled the grass where they had forced her to lie.
       There were three of them. She remembered their faces clearly: unshaven, brutish, eyes full of lust and cruelty. They were cravens, and kept well beyond the reach of her rescuer’s sword.
       “She’s just some Lancastrian lordling’s brat,” one said sullenly, “why don’t you piss off and leave us in peace?”
       The man-at-arms held his ground. “None of you will touch her again,” he said firmly, “you should all be gelded for this. Take a step closer, and you will be.”
       He was young, she recalled, a big, ruddy-faced peasant with blue eyes and a curling russet beard. His coat displayed a black sleeve against a white field, the arms of Lord Hastings, a prominent Yorkist lord.
       “Run away, girl,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, “run away, and don’t look back.”
       She gathered up her torn clothes and fled into the nearby woods. The pain in her crotch was almost unbearable, but she didn’t stop running. Briars and thorns snagged her naked body, opening fresh cuts on her tender young flesh. Her feet bled as they stumbled over rough ground, loose stones and patches of nettles.
        At last, when the breath grated in her lungs and she could run no more, Maud stopped beside a little stream. There she washed herself, sobbing in shame and terror and at the agony of cold water on open wounds.
       How she survived the next few days was little short of a miracle. Maud gently ran her thumb along the edge of her dagger as she remembered the cold and the privation, sleeping out in the wild with hunger gnawing at her guts and wolves howling in the distance.
       She ate some berries, and chose the wrong kind. The pain in her belly was worse than that inflicted by the soldiers. Far worse. When she had finished vomiting, she wandered aimlessly in a daze, and by the grace of God found a road.
       One way or another, begging and stealing what she needed, Maud survived. She was drawn west, towards the capital, a natural home for strays and refugees like her, thrown up by the violent tides of war.
       Maud soon found her place in Southwark, a cesspool south of the Thames, into which the city poured its human refuse. There was a market for every kind of vice in Southwark, including child prostitutes.
    The sound of distant trumpets summoned her back to the present. She slammed her dagger back into the sheath and tucked it into her belt.
    It was time to go and see the king.
     
    Chapter 5
    The Tower, 13 th June 1483
     
    Sir Geoffrey Malvern could seldom recall being so nervous. Not even in the aftermath of the Yorkist defeat at Edgecote, fourteen years gone, when he had fled the field and hid in some nearby woods, half-dead with terror.
       A natural coward, Geoffrey