The Daughter of Time (16 page)

'Yes, I understand. You've found something worth doing.'

'That's it. I've found something worth doing. And it's me that's going to do it; that's what's wonderful about it. Me. Mrs Carradine's little boy. I come over here with Atlanta, with no idea about anything but using that research gag as an alibi. I walk into the B.M. to get me some dope to keep Pop quiet, and I walk out with a mission. Doesn't that shake you!' He eyed Grant in a considering way. 'You're quite sure, Mr Grant, that you don't want to write this book yourself? After all, it's quite a thing to do.'

'I shall never write a book,' Grant said firmly. 'Not even
My Twenty Years at the Yard.
'

'What! Not even your autobiography?'

'Not even my autobiography. It is my considered opinion that far too many books are written as it is.'

'But this is one that must be written,' Carradine said, looking slightly hurt.

'Of course it is. This one must be written. Tell me: there's something I forgot to ask you. How soon after that double pardon did Tyrrel get that appointment in France? How soon after his supposed service to Henry in July 1486 did he become Constable of the Castle of Guisnes?'

Carradine stopped looking hurt and looked as malicious as it was possible for his kind woolly-lamb face to look.

'I was wondering when you were going to ask that,' he said. 'I was going to throw it at you on my way out if you forgot to ask. The answer is: almost right away.'

'So. Another appropriate little pebble in the mosaic. I wonder whether the constableship just happened to be vacant, or whether it was a French appointment because Henry wanted him out of England.'

'I bet it was the other way about, and it was Tyrrel who wanted to get out of England. If I were being ruled by Henry VII, I'd sure prefer to be ruled by remote control. Especially if I had done a secret job for Henry that might make it convenient for Henry if I didn't live to too venerable an age.'

'Yes, perhaps you're right. He didn't only go abroad, he stayed abroad – as we have already observed. Interesting.'

'He wasn't the only one who stayed abroad. John Dighton did too. I couldn't find out who all the people who were supposed to be involved in the murder actually were. All the Tudor accounts are different, I suppose you know. Indeed most of them are so different that they contradict each other flat. Henry's pet historian, Polydore Virgil, says the deed was done when Richard was at York. According to the sainted More it was during an earlier trip altogether, when Richard was at Warwick. And the personnel changes with each account. So that it's difficult to sort them out. I don't know who Will Slater was – Black Will to you, and another piece of onomatopoeia – or Miles Forrest. But there was a John Dighton. Grafton says he lived for long at Calais "no less disdained than pointed at" and died there in great misery. How they relished a good moral, didn't they. The Victorians had nothing on them.'

'If Dighton was destitute it doesn't look as if he had done any job for Henry. What was he by trade?'

'Well, if it's the same John Dighton, he was a priest, and he was anything but destitute. He was living very comfortably on the proceeds of a sinecure. Henry gave a John Dighton the living of Fulbeck, near Grantham – that's in Lincolnshire – on the 2nd of May, 1487.'

'Well, well,' Grant said, drawling. '1487. And he, too, lives abroad and in comfort.'

'Uh-huh. Lovely, isn't it?'

'It's beautiful. And does anyone explain how the much-pointed-at Dighton wasn't hauled home by the scruff of his neck to hang for regicide?'

'Oh, no. Nothing like that. Tudor historians didn't any of them think from B to C.'

Grant laughed. 'I see you're being educated.'

'Sure. I'm not only learning history. I'm sitting at the feet of Scotland Yard on the subject of the human mind. Well, that will be about all for now. If you feel strong enough I'll read you the first two chapters of the book next time I come.' He paused and said: 'Would you mind, Mr Grant, if I dedicated it to you?'

'I think you had better dedicate it to Carradine The Third,' Grant said lightly.

But Carradine apparently did not feel it to be a light matter.

'I don't use soft soap as a dedication,' he said, with a hint of stiffness.

'Oh, not soft soap,' Grant said in haste. 'A matter of policy merely.'

'I'd never have started on this thing if it hadn't been for you, Mr Grant,' Carradine said, standing in the middle of the floor all formal and emotional and American and surrounded by the sweeping folds of his topcoat, 'and I should like to make due acknowledgement of my indebtedness.'

'I should be delighted, of course,' murmured Grant, and the royal figure in the middle of the floor relaxed to boyhood again and the awkward moment was over. Carradine went away joyous and light-footed as he had come, looking thirty pounds heavier and twelve inches more round the chest than he had done three weeks ago.

And Grant took out the new knowledge that had been given him, and hung it on the opposite wall, and stared at it.

She had been shut away from the world; that indestructibly virtuous beauty with the gilt hair.

Why gilt, he wondered for the first time. Silver-gilt probably; she had been radiantly fair. A pity that the word blonde had degenerated to the point where it had almost a secondary meaning.

She had been walled up to end her days where she could be no trouble to anyone. An eddy of trouble had moved with her all through her life. Her marriage to Edward had rocked England. She had been the passive means of Warwick's ruin. Her kindnesses to her family had built a whole new party in England and had prevented Richard's peaceful succession. Bosworth was implicit in that scanty little ceremony in the wilds of Northamptonshire when she became Edward's wife. But no one seemed to have borne her malice. Even the sinned-against Richard had forgiven her her relations' enormities. No one – until Henry came.

She had disappeared into obscurity. Elizabeth Woodville. The Queen Dowager who was mother of the Queen of England. The mother of the Princes in the Tower; who had lived free and prosperous under Richard III.

That was an ugly break in the pattern, wasn't it?

He took his mind away from personal histories and began to think police-fashion. It was time he tidied up his case. Put it shipshape for presenting. It would help the boy with his book, and better still it would clear his own mind. It would be down in black and white where he could see it.

He reached for his writing-pad and pen, and made a neat entry:

CASE: Disappearance of two boys (Edward, Prince of Wales; Richard, Duke of York) from the Tower of London, 1485 or thereabouts.

He wondered whether it would be better to do the two suspects in parallel columns or successively. Perhaps it was better to finish with Richard first. So he made another neat headline; and began on his summing-up:

RICHARD III

Previous Record:

Good. Has excellent record in public service, and good reputation in private life. Salient characteristic as indicated by his actions: good sense.

In the matter of the presumed crime:

(a) He did not stand to benefit; there were nine other heirs to the house of York, including three males.

(b) There is no contemporary accusation.

(c) The boys' mother continued on friendly terms with him until his death, and her daughters attended Palace festivities.

(d) He showed no fear of the other heirs of York, providing generously for their upkeep and granting all of them their royal state.

(e) His own right to the crown was unassailable, approved by Act of Parliament and public acclamation; the boys were out of the succession and of no danger to him.

(f) If he had been nervous about disaffection then the person to have got rid of was not the two boys, but the person who really was next in succession to him: young Warwick. Whom he publicly created his heir when his own son died.

HENRY VII

Previous Record:

An adventurer, living at foreign courts. Son of an ambitious mother. Nothing known against his private life. No public office or employment. Salient characteristic as indicated by his actions: subtlety.

In the matter of the presumed crime:

(a) It was of great importance to him that the boys should not continue to live. By repealing the Act acknowledging the children's illegitimacy, he made the elder boy King of England, and the younger boy the next heir.

(b) In the Act which he brought before Parliament for the attainting of Richard he accused Richard of the conventional tyranny and cruelty but made no mention of the two young Princes. The conclusion is inevitable that at that time the two boys were alive and their whereabouts known.

(c) The boys' mother was deprived of her living and consigned to a nunnery eighteen months after his succession.

(d) He took immediate steps to secure the persons of all the other heirs to the crown, and kept them in close arrest until he could with the minimum of scandal get rid of them.

(e) He had no right whatever to the throne. Since the death of Richard, young Warwick was
de jure
King of England.

It occurred to Grant for the first time, as he wrote it out, that it had been within Richard's power to legitimise his bastard son John, and foist him on the nation. There was no lack of precedent for such a course. After all, the whole Beaufort clan (including Henry's mother) were the descendants not only of an illegitimate union but of a double adultery. There was nothing to hinder Richard from legitimising that 'active and well-disposed' boy who lived in recognised state in his household. It was surely the measure of Richard that no such course had apparently crossed his mind. He had appointed as his heir his brother's boy. Even in the destitution of his own grief, good sense was his ruling characteristic. Good sense and family feeling. No base-born son, however active and well-disposed, was going to sit in the Plantagenets' seat while his brother's son was there to occupy it.

It was remarkable how that atmosphere of family feeling permeated the whole story. All the way from Cicely's journeyings about in her husband's company, to her son's free acknowledgement of his brother George's boy as his heir.

And it occurred to him too for the first time in full force just how that family atmosphere strengthened the case for Richard's innocence. The boys whom he was supposed to have put down as he would put down twin foals were Edward's sons; children he must have known personally and well. To Henry, on the other hand, they were mere symbols. Obstacles on a path. He may never even have set eyes on them. All questions of character apart, the choice between the two men as suspects might almost be decided on that alone.

It was wonderfully clearing to the head to see it neat and tidy as (a), (b), and (c). He had not noticed before how doubly suspect was Henry's behaviour over Titulus Regius. If, as Henry had insisted, Richard's claim was absurd, then surely the obvious thing to do was to have the thing re-read in public and demonstrate its falsity. But he did no such thing. He went to endless pains to obliterate even the memory of it. The conclusion was inevitable that Richard's title to the crown as shown in Titulus Regius was unassailable.

On the afternoon when Carradine reappeared in the room at the hospital Grant had walked to the window and back again, and was so cock-a-hoop about it that The Midget was moved to remind him that it was a thing that a child of eighteen months could do. But nothing could subdue Grant today.

'Thought you'd have me here for months, didn't you,' he crowed.

'We are very glad to see you better so quickly,' she said primly; and added: 'We are, of course, very glad, too, to have your bed.'

And she clicked away down the corridor, all blonde curls and starch.

Grant lay on his bed and looked at his little prison room with something approaching benevolence. Neither a man who has stood at the Pole nor a man who has stood on Everest has anything on a man who has stood at a window after weeks of being merely twelve stones of destitution. Or so Grant felt.

Tomorrow he was going home. Going home to be cosseted by Mrs Tinker. He would have to spend half of each day in bed and he would be able to walk only with the aid of sticks, but he would be his own man again. At the bidding of no one. In tutelage to no half-pint piece of efficiency, yearned over by no lump of out-sized benevolence.

It was a glorious prospect.

He had already unloaded his hallelujahs all over Sergeant Williams, who had looked in on the completion of his chore in Essex, and he was now yearning for Marta to drop in so that he could peacock in front of her in his new-found manhood.

'How did you get on with the history books?' Williams had asked.

'Couldn't be better. I've proved them all wrong.'

Williams had grinned. 'I expect there's a law against that,' he said.' MI5 won't like it. Treason or
lèse-majesté
or something like that it might turn out to be. You never know nowadays. I'd be careful if I was you.'

'I'll never again believe anything I read in a history book, as long as I live, so help me.'

'You'll have to make exceptions,' Williams pointed out with Williams' dogged reasonableness. 'Queen Victoria was true, and I suppose Julius Caesar did invade Britain. And there's 1066.'

'I'm beginning to have the gravest doubts about 1066. I see you've tied up the Essex job. What is Chummy like?'

'A thorough little blighter. Been treated soft all his life since he started stealing change from his Ma at the age of nine. A good belting at the age of twelve might have saved his life. Now he'll hang before the almond blossom's out. It's going to be an early spring. I've been working every evening in the garden this last few days, now that the days are drawing out. You'll be glad to sniff fresh air again.'

And he had gone away, rosy and sane and balanced, as befitted a man who was belted for his good in his youth.

So Grant was longing for some other visitor from the outside world that he was so soon to be a part of again, and he was delighted when the familiar tentative tap came on his door.

'Come in, Brent!' he called, joyfully.

And Brent came in.

But it was not the Brent who had last gone out.

Gone was the jubilation. Gone was his newly acquired breadth.

He was no longer Carradine the pioneer, the blazer of trails.

He was just a thin boy in a very long, very large overcoat. He looked young, and shocked, and bereaved.

Grant watched him in dismay as he crossed the room with his listless unco-ordinated walk. There was no bundle of paper sticking out of his mail-sack of a pocket today.

Oh, well, thought Grant philosophically; it had been fun while it lasted. There was bound to be a snag somewhere. One couldn't do serious research in that light-hearted amateur way and hope to prove anything by it. One wouldn't expect an amateur to walk into the Yard and solve a case that had defeated the pro's; so why should he have thought himself smarter than the historians. He had wanted to prove to himself that he was right in his face-reading of the portrait; he had wanted to blot out the shame of having put a criminal on the bench instead of in the dock. But he would have to accept his mistake, and like it. Perhaps he had asked for it. Perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he had been growing a little pleased with himself about his eye for faces.

'Hullo, Mr Grant.'

'Hullo, Brent.'

Actually it was worse for the boy. He was at the age when he expected miracles to happen. He was still at the age when he was surprised that a balloon should burst.

'You look saddish,' he said cheerfully to the boy. 'Something come unstuck.'

'Everything.'

Carradine sat down on the chair and stared at the window.

'Don't these damned sparrows get you down?' he asked, fretfully.

'What is it? Have you discovered that there was a general rumour about the boys before Richard's death, after all?'

'Oh, much worse than that.'

'Oh. Something in print? A letter?'

'No, it isn't that sort of thing at all. It's something much worse. Something quite – quite fundamental. I don't know how to tell you.' He glowered at the quarrelling sparrows. 'These damned birds. I can never write that book now, Mr Grant.'

'Why not, Brent?'

'Because it isn't news to anyone. Everyone has known all about those things all along.'

'Known? About what?'

'About Richard not having killed the boys at all, and all that.'

'They've
known?
Since when!'

'Oh, hundreds and hundreds of years.'

'Pull yourself together, chum. It's only four hundred years altogether since the thing happened.'

'I know. But it doesn't make any difference. People have known about Richard's not doing it for hundreds and hundreds –'

'Will you stop that keening and talk sense. When did this – this rehabilitation first begin?'

'Begin? Oh, at the first available moment.'

'When was that?'

'As soon as the Tudors were gone and it was safe to talk.'

'In Stuart times, you mean?'

'Yes, I suppose – yes. A man Buck wrote a vindication in the seventeenth century. And Horace Walpole in the eighteenth. And someone called Markham in the nineteenth.'

'And who in the twentieth?'

'No one that I know of.'

'Then what's wrong with your doing it?'

'But it won't be the same, don't you see. It won't be a great discovery!' He said it in capitals. A Great Discovery.

Grant smiled at him. 'Oh, come! You can't expect to pick Great Discoveries off bushes. If you can't be a pioneer what's wrong with leading a crusade?'

'A crusade?'

'Certainly.'

'Against what?'

'Tonypandy.'

The boy's face lost its blankness. It looked suddenly amused, like someone who has just seen a joke.

'It's the damnedest silliest name, isn't it!' he remarked.

'If people have been pointing out for three hundred and fifty years that Richard didn't murder his nephews and a schoolbook can still say, in words of one syllable and without qualification, that he did, then it seems to me that Tonypandy has a long lead on you. It's time you got busy.'

'But what can
I
do when people like Walpole and those have failed?'

'There's that old saying about constant water and its effect on stone.'

'Mr Grant, right now I feel an awfully feeble little trickle.'

'You look it, I must say. I've never seen such self-pity. That's no mood to start bucking the British public in. You'll be giving enough weight away as it is.'

'Because I've not written a book before, you mean?'

'No, that doesn't matter at all. Most people's first books are their best anyway; it's the one they wanted most to write. No, I meant that all the people who've never read a history book since they left school will feel themselves qualified to pontificate about what you've written. They'll accuse you of whitewashing Richard; "whitewashing" has a derogatory sound that "rehabilitation" hasn't, so they'll call it whitewashing. A few will look up the Britannica, and feel themselves competent to go a little further in the matter. These will slay you instead of flaying you. And the serious historians won't even bother to notice you.'

'By God, I'll make them notice me!' Carradine said.

'Come! That sounds a little more like the spirit that won the Empire.'

'We haven't got an Empire,' Carradine reminded him.

'Oh, yes, you have,' Grant said equably. 'The only difference between ours and yours is that you acquired yours, economically, in the one latitude, while we got ours in bits all over the world. Had you written any of the book before the awful knowledge of its unoriginality hit you?'

'Yes, I'd done two chapters.'

'What have you done with them? You haven't thrown them away, have you?'

'No. I nearly did. I nearly threw them in the fire.'

'What stopped you?'

'It was an electric fire.' Carradine stretched out his long legs in a relaxing movement and began to laugh. 'Brother, I feel better already. I can't wait to land the British public one in the kisser with a few home truths. Carradine the First is just raging in my blood.'

'A very virulent fever, it sounds.'

'He was the most ruthless old blaggard that ever felled timber. He started as a logger and ended up with a Renaissance castle, two yachts, and a private car. Railroad car, you know. It had green silk curtains with bobbles on them and inlay woodwork that had to be seen to be believed. It has been popularly supposed, not least by Carradine the Third, that the Carradine blood was growing thin. But right now I'm all Carradine the First. I know just how the old boy felt when he wanted to buy a particular forest and someone said that he couldn't have it. Brother, I'm going to town.'

'That's nice,' Grant said, mildly. 'I was looking forward to that dedication.' He took his writing-pad from the table and held it out.'I've been doing a policeman's summing-up. Perhaps it may help you when you come to your peroration.'

Carradine took it and looked at it with respect.

'Tear it off and take it with you. I've finished with it.'

'I suppose in a week or two you'll be too busy with real investigations to care about a – an academic one,' Carradine said, a little wistfully.

'I'll never enjoy one more than I've enjoyed this,' Grant said, with truth. He glanced sideways at the portrait which was still propped against the books. 'I was more dashed than you would believe when you came in all despondent, and I thought it had come to pieces.' He looked back at the portrait and said: 'Marta thinks he is a little like Lorenzo the Magnificent. Her friend James thinks it is the face of a saint. My surgeon thinks it is the face of a cripple. Sergeant Williams thinks he looks like a great judge. But I think, perhaps, Matron comes nearest the heart of the matter.'

'What does she say?'

'She says it is a face full of the most dreadful suffering.'

'Yes. Yes, I suppose it is. And would you wonder, after all.'

'No. No, there was little he was spared. Those last two years of his life must have happened with the suddenness and weight of an avalanche. Everything had been going along so nicely. England on an even keel at last. The civil war fading out of mind, a good firm government to keep things peaceful and a good brisk trade to keep things prosperous. It must have seemed a good outlook, looking out from Middleham across Wensleydale. And in two short years – his wife, his son, and his peace.'

'I know one thing he was spared.'

'What?'

'The knowledge that his name was to be a hissing and a byword down the centuries.'

'Yes. That would have been the final heart-break. Do you know what I personally find
the
convincing thing in the case for Richard's innocence of any design for usurpation?'

'No. What?'

'The fact that he had to send for those troops from the North when Stillington broke his news. If he had had any fore-knowledge of what Stillington was going to say, or even any plans to concoct a story with Stillington's help, he would have brought those troops with him. If not to London then to the Home Counties where they would be handy. That he had to send urgently first to York and then to his Nevill cousins for men is proof that Stillington's confession took him entirely unawares.'

'Yes. He came up with his train of gentlemen, expecting to take over the Regency. He met the news of the Woodville trouble when he came to Northampton, but that didn't rattle him. He mopped up the Woodville two thousand and went on to London as if nothing had happened. There was still nothing but an orthodox Coronation in front of him as far as he knew. It wasn't until Stillington confessed to the council that he sends for troops of his own. And he has to send all the way to the North of England at a critical moment. Yes, you're right, of course. He was taken aback.' He propped the leg of his spectacles with a forefinger in the old tentative gesture, and proffered a companion piece. 'Know what I find the convincing thing in the case for Henry's guilt?'

'What?'

'The mystery.'

'Mystery?'

'The mysteriousness. The hush-hush. The hole-and-corner stuff.'

'Because it is in character, you mean?'

'No, no; nothing as subtle as that. Don't you see: Richard had no need of any mystery; but Henry's whole case depended on the boys' end being mysterious. No one has ever been able to think up a reason for such a hole-and-corner method as Richard was supposed to have used. It was a quite mad way to do it. He couldn't hope to get away with it. Sooner or later he was going to have to account for the boys not being there. As far as he knew he had a long reign in front of him. No one has ever been able to think why he should have chosen so difficult and dangerous a way when he had so many simpler methods at hand. He had only to have the boys suffocated, and let them lie in state while the whole of London walked by and wept over two young things dead before their time of fever. That is the way he
would
have done it, too. Goodness,
the whole point
of Richard's killing the boys was to prevent any rising in their favour, and to get any benefit from the murder the fact of their deaths would have to be made public, and as soon as possible. It would defeat the whole plan if people didn't
know
that they were dead. But Henry, now. Henry
had
to find a way to push them out of sight. Henry
had
to be mysterious. Henry
had
to hide the facts of when and how they died. Henry's
whole case
depended on no one's knowing what exactly happened to the boys.'