Джозефина Тэй - The Daughter of Time

‘Why?’

‘Well, it sounded more to my mind like a senator being hasty about someone who had brought in a measure his own people back home wouldn’t like. More like politics than state, if you know what I mean.’

‘You should be at the Yard, Brent. What did the chancellor say?’

‘Well, it’s in French and my French isn’t very good so perhaps you’d better read it for yourself.’

He handed over a sheet of his childish writing and Grant read:

Regardez, je vous prie, les événements qui après la mort du roi Edouard sont arrivés dans ce pays. Contemplez ses enfants, déjà grands et braves, massacrés impunément, et la couronne transportée a l’assassin par la faveur des peuples. [10] Look, please, at the events which after the death of King Edward took place in this country. Contemplate his children, already great and brave, slaughtered with impunity, and the crown transported to the murderer by the favor of the people. (Fr.)

‘“ Ce pays ,” [11] This country (Fr.) ’ said Grant. ‘Then he was in full flood against England. He even suggests that it was with the will of the English people that the boys were “massacred.” We are being held up as a barbarous race.’

‘Yes. That’s what I meant. It’s a congressman scoring a point. Actually, the French regency sent an embassy to Richard that same year – about six months later – so they had probably found that the rumour wasn’t true. Richard signed a safe-conduct for their visit. He wouldn’t have done that if they had been still slanging him as a murdering untouchable.’

‘No. Can you give me the dates of the two libels?’

‘Sure. I have them here. The monk at Croyland wrote about events in the late summer of 1483. He says that there was a rumour that the boys had been put to death but no one knew how; the nasty slap in the meeting of the States-General was in January 1484.’

‘Perfect,’ said Grant.

‘ Why did you want there to have been another instance of rumour?’

‘As a cross-check. Do you know where Croyland is?’

‘Yes. In the Fen country.’

‘In the Fen country. Near Ely. And it was in the Fen country that Morton was hiding out after his escape from Buckingham’s charge.’

‘Morton! Yes, of course.’

‘If Morton was the carrier, then there had to be another outbreak on the continent, when he moved on there. Morton escaped from England in the autumn of 1483, and the rumour appears promptly in January 1484. Croyland is a very isolated place, incidentally, it would be an ideal place for a fugitive bishop to hide out till he could arrange transport abroad.’

‘Morton!’ said Carradine again, rolling the name over on his tongue. ‘Wherever there’s hanky-panky in this business you stub your toe against Morton.’

‘So you’ve noticed that too.’

‘He was the heart of that conspiracy to murder Richard before he could be crowned, he was in back of the rebellion against Richard once he was crowned, and his trail to the continent is sticky as a snail’s with – with subversion.’

‘Well, the snail part is mere deduction. It wouldn’t stand up in court. But there’s no peradventure about his activities once he was across the channel. He settled down to a whole-time job of subversion. He and a buddy of his called Christopher Urswick worked like beavers in Henry’s interest; “sending preuie letters and cloked messengers” to England to stir up hostility to Richard.’

‘Yes? I don’t know as much as you about what stands up in court and what won’t, but it seems to me that that snail’s trail is a very allowable deduction – if you’ll allow me. I don’t suppose Morton waited till he was overseas before beginning his undermining.’

‘No. No, of course he didn’t. It was life and death to Morton that Richard should go. Unless Richard went, John Morton’s career was over. He was finished. It wasn’t even that there would be no preferment for him now. There would be nothing. He would be stripped of his numerous livings and be reduced to his plain priest’s frock. He, John Morton. Who had been within touching distance of an archbishopric. But if he could help Henry Tudor to a throne then he might still become not only archbishop of Canterbury but a cardinal besides. Oh, yes; it was desperately, overwhelmingly important to Morton that Richard should not have the governing of England.’

‘Well,’ said Brent, ‘he was the right man for a job of subversion. I don’t suppose he knew what a scruple was. A little rumour like infanticide must have been child’s play to him.’

‘There’s always the odd chance that he believed it, of course,’ Grant said, his habit of weighing evidence overcoming even his dislike of Morton.

‘Believed that the boys were murdered?’

‘Yes. It may have been someone else’s invention. After all, the country must have been swarming with Lancastrian tales, part mere ill-will, part propaganda. He may have been merely passing on the latest sample.’

‘Huh! I wouldn’t put it past him to be paving the way for their future murder,’ Brent said tartly.

Grant laughed. ‘I wouldn’t, at that,’ he said. ‘What else did you get from your monk at Croyland?’

‘A little comfort, too. I found after I had written that panic wire to you that he wasn’t at all to be taken as gospel. He just put down what gossip came his way from the outer world. He says, for instance, that Richard had a second coronation, at York; and that of course just isn’t true. If he can be wrong about a big, known, fact like a coronation, then he’s not to be trusted as a reporter. But he did know about Titulus Regius, by the way. He recorded the whole tenor of it, including Lady Eleanor.’

‘That’s interesting. Even a monk at Croyland had heard who Edward was supposed to have been married to.’

‘Yes. The sainted More must have dreamed up Elizabeth Lucy a good deal later.’

‘To say nothing of the unspeakable story that Richard based his claim on his mother’s shame.’

‘What?’

‘He says that Richard caused a sermon to be preached claiming that Edward and George were his mother’s sons by some other father, and that he, Richard, was the only legitimate son and therefore the only true heir.’

‘The sainted More might have thought up a more convincing one,’ young Carradine said dryly.

‘Yes. Especially when Richard was living in his mother’s house at the time of the libel!’

‘So he was. I’d forgotten that. I don’t have a proper police brain. That’s very neat, what you say about Morton being the carrier of the rumour. But suppose the rumour turns up somewhere else, even yet.’

‘It’s possible, of course. But I’m willing to lay you fifties to any amount that it won’t. I don’t for one moment believe that there was any general rumour that the boys were missing.’

‘Why not?’

‘For a reason that I hold to be unanswerable. If there had been any general uneasiness, any obviously subversive rumours or action, Richard would have taken immediate steps to checkmate them. When the rumours went round, later, that he was proposing to marry his niece Elizabeth – the boys’ eldest sister – he was on to it like a hawk. He not only sent letters to the various towns denying the rumour in no uncertain terms, he was so furious (and evidently thought of it such importance that he should not be traduced) that he summoned the “heid yins” of London to the biggest hall he could find (so that he could get them all in at one time) and told them face to face what he thought about the affair.’

‘Yes. Of course you’re right. Richard would have made a public denial of the rumour if the rumour was general. After all, it was a much more horrifying one than the one that he was going to marry his niece.’