The Daughter of Time (17 page)

'It did indeed, Brent; it did indeed,' Grant said, smiling at counsel's eager young face. 'You ought to be at the Yard, Mr Carradine!'

Brent laughed.

'I'll stick to Tonypandy,' he said. 'I bet there's a lot more of it that we don't know about. I bet history books are just riddled with it.'

'You'd better take Sir Cuthbert Oliphant with you, by the way.' Grant took the fat respectable-looking volume from his locker. 'Historians should be compelled to take a course in psychology before they are allowed to write.'

'Huh. That wouldn't do anything for them. A man who is interested in what makes people tick doesn't write history. He writes novels, or becomes an alienist, or a magistrate –'

'Or a confidence man.'

'Or a confidence man. Or a fortune-teller. A man who understands about people hasn't any yen to write history. History is toy soldiers.'

'Oh, come. Aren't you being a little severe? It's a very learned and erudite – '

'Oh, I didn't mean it that way. I mean: it's moving little figures about on a flat surface. It's half-way to mathematics, when you come to think about it.'

'Then if it's mathematics they've no right to drag in backstairs gossip,' Grant said, suddenly vicious. The memory of the sainted More continued to upset him. He thumbed through the fat respectable Sir Cuthbert in a farewell review. As he came to the final pages the progress of the paper from under his thumb slackened, and presently stopped.

'Odd,' he said, 'how willing they are to grant a man the quality of courage in battle. They have only tradition to go on, and yet not one of them questions it. Not one of them, in fact, fails to stress it.'

'It was an enemy's tribute,' Carradine reminded him. 'The tradition began with a ballad written by the other side.'

'Yes. By a man of the Stanleys. "Then a knight to King Richard gan say." It's here somewhere.' He turned over a leaf or two, until he found what he was looking for. 'It was "good Sir William Harrington", it seems. The knight in question.

'"There may no man their strokes abide, the Stanleys dints they be so strong (the treacherous villains!)
Ye may come back at another tide, methinks ye tarry here too long,
Your horse at your hand is ready, another day you may worship win
And come to reign with royalty, and wear your crown and be our king."
"Nay, give me my battle-axe in my hand, set the crown of England on my head so high.
For by Him that made both sea and land, King of England this day I will die.
One foot I will never flee whilst the breath is my breast within."
As he said so did it be – if he lost his life he died a King.'

'"Set the crown of England on my head";' said Carradine, musing. 'That was the crown that was found in a hawthorn bush afterwards.'

'Yes. Set aside for plunder probably.'

'I used to picture it one of those high plush things that King George got crowned in, but it seems it was just a gold circlet.'

'Yes. It could be worn outside the battle helmet.'

'Gosh,' said Carradine with sudden feeling, 'sure would have hated to wear that crown if I had been Henry! I sure would have hated it!' He was silent for a little, and then he said: 'Do you know what the town of York wrote – wrote in their records, you know – about the battle of Bosworth?'

'No.'

'They wrote: "This day was our good King Richard piteously slain and murdered; to the great heaviness of this city."'

The chatter of the sparrows was loud in the quiet.

'Hardly the obituary of a hated usurper,' Grant said at last, very dry.

'No,' said Carradine, 'no. "To the great heaviness of this city";' he repeated slowly, rolling the phrase over in his mind. 'They cared so much about it that even with a new régime in the offing and the future not to be guessed at they put down in black and white in the town record their opinion that it was murder and their sorrow at it.'

'Perhaps they had just heard about the indignities perpetrated on the King's dead body and were feeling a little sick.'

'Yes. Yes. You don't like to think of a man you've known and admired flung stripped and dangling across a pony like a dead animal.'

'One wouldn't like to think of even an enemy so. But sensibility is not a quality that one would look for among the Henry-Morton crowd.'

'Huh. Morton!' said Brent, spitting out the word as if it were a bad taste. 'No one was "heavy" when Morton died, believe me. Know what the Chronicler wrote of him? The London one, I mean. He wrote: "In our time was no man like to be compared with him in all things; albeit that he lived not without the great disdain and hatred of the Commons of this land."'

Grant turned to look at the portrait which had kept him company through so many days and nights.

'You know,' he said, 'for all his success and his Cardinal's hat I think Morton was the loser in that fight with Richard III. In spite of his defeat and his long traducing, Richard came off the better of these two. He was loved in his day.'

'That's no bad epitaph,' the boy said soberly.

'No. Not at all a bad epitaph,' Grant said, shutting Oliphant for the last time. 'Not many men would ask for a better.' He handed over the book to its owner. 'Few men have earned so much,' he said.

When Carradine had gone Grant began to sort out the things on his table, preparatory to his homegoing on the morrow. The unread fashionable novels could go to the hospital library to gladden other hearts than his. But he would keep the book with the mountain pictures. And he must remember to give The Amazon back her two history books. He looked them out so that he could give them to her when she brought in his supper. And he read again, for the first time since he began his search for the truth about Richard, the schoolbook tale of his villainy. There it was, in unequivocable black and white, the infamous story. Without a perhaps or a peradventure. Without a qualification or a question.

As he was about to shut the senior of the two educators his eye fell on the beginning of Henry VII's reign, and he read: 'It was the settled and considered policy of the Tudors to rid themselves of all rivals to the throne, more especially those heirs of York who remained alive on the succession of Henry VII. In this they were successful, although it was left to Henry VIII to get rid of the last of them.'

He stared at this bald announcement. This placid acceptance of wholesale murder. This simple acknowlegement of a process of family elimination.

Richard III had been credited with the elimination of two nephews, and his name was a synonym for evil. But Henry VII, whose 'settled and considered policy' was to eliminate a whole family was regarded as a shrewd and far-seeing monarch. Not very lovable perhaps, but constructive and painstaking, and very successful withal.

Grant gave up. History was something that he would never understand.

The values of historians differed so radically from any values with which he was acquainted that he could never hope to meet them on any common ground. He would go back to the Yard, where murderers were murderers and what went for Cox went equally for Box.

He put the two books tidily together and when The Amazon came in with his mince and stewed prunes he handed them over with a neat little speech of gratitude. He really was very grateful to The Amazon. If she had not kept her schoolbooks he might never have started on the road that led to his knowledge of Richard Plantagenet.

She looked confused by his kindness, and he wondered if he had been such a bear in his illness that she expected nothing but carping from him. It was a humiliating thought.

'We'll miss you, you know,' she said, and her big eyes looked as if they might brim with tears. 'We've grown used to having you here. We've even got used to
that
.' And she moved an elbow in the direction of the portrait.

A thought stirred in him.

'Will you do something for me?' he asked.

'Of course. Anything I can do.'

'Will you take that photograph to the window and look at it in a good light as long as it takes to count a pulse?'

'Yes, of course, if you want me to. But why?'

'Never mind why. You just do it to please me. I'll time you.'

She took up the portrait and moved into the light of the window.

He watched the second-hand of his watch.

He gave her forty-five seconds and then said: 'Well?' And as there was no immediate answer he said again: 'Well?'

'Funny,' she said. 'When you look at it for a little it's really quite a nice face, isn't it?'

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Version 3  2010-10-05

Alex Bell  [email protected]