Джозефина Тэй - The Daughter of Time

The history book, too, thought that he had personality.

What on earth were benevolences, maintenance, and livery?

And how did the English like having the succession decided for them by French troops?

But, of course, in the days of the Roses, France was still a sort of semi-detached part of England; a country much less foreign to an Englishman than Ireland was. A fifteenth-century Englishman went to France as a matter of course; but to Ireland only under protest.

He lay and thought about that England. The England over which the Wars of the Roses had been fought. A green, green England; with not a chimney stack from Cumberland to Cornwall. An England still unhedged, with great forests alive with game, and wide marshes thick with wildfowl. An England with the same small group of dwellings repeated every few miles in endless permutation: castle, church, and cottages; monastery, church, and cottages; manor, church, and cottages. The strips of cultivation round the cluster of dwellings, and beyond that the greenness. The unbroken greenness. The deep-rutted lanes that ran from group to group, mired to bog in the winter and white with dust in the summer; decorated with wild roses or red with hawthorn as the seasons came and went.

For thirty years, over this green uncrowded land, the Wars of the Roses had been fought. But it had been more of a blood feud than a war. A Montague and Capulet affair; of no great concern to the average Englishman. No one pushed in at your door to demand whether you were York or Lancaster and to hale you off to a concentration camp if your answer proved to be the wrong one for the occasion. It was a small concentrated war; almost a private party. They fought a battle in your lower meadow, and turned your kitchen into a dressing-station, and then moved off somewhere or other to fight a battle somewhere else, and a few weeks later you would hear what had happened at that battle, and you would have a family row about the result because your wife was probably Lancaster and you were perhaps York, and it was all rather like following rival football teams. No one persecuted you for being a Lancastrian or a Yorkist, any more than you would be persecuted for being an Arsenal fan or a Chelsea follower.

He was still thinking of that green England when he fell asleep.

And he was not a whit wiser about the two young princes and their fate.

‘Can’t you find something more cheerful to look at than that thing?’ The Midget asked next morning, referring to the Richard portrait which Grant had propped up against the pile of books on his bedside table.

‘You don’t find it an interesting face?’

‘Interesting! It gives me the willies. A proper Dismal Desmond.’

‘According to the history books he was a man of great ability.’

‘So was Bluebeard.’

‘And considerable popularity, it would seem.’

‘So was Bluebeard.’

‘A very fine soldier, too,’ Grant said wickedly, and waited. ‘No Bluebeard offers?’

‘What do you want to look at that face for? Who was he anyway?’

‘Richard the Third.’

‘Oh, well, I ask you!’

‘You mean that’s what you expected him to look like.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Why?’

‘A murdering brute, wasn’t he?’

‘You seem to know your history.’

‘Everyone knows that. Did away with his two little nephews, poor brats. Had them smothered.’

‘Smothered?’ said Grant, interested. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Smothered with pillows.’ She banged his own pillows with a fragile vigorous fist, and replaced them with speed and precision.

‘Why smothering? Why not poison?’ Grant inquired.

‘Don’t ask me. I didn’t arrange it.’

‘Who said they were smothered?’

‘My history book at school said it.’

‘Yes, but whom was the history book quoting?’

‘Quoting? It wasn’t quoting anything. It was just giving facts.’

‘Who smothered them, did it say?’

‘A man called Tyrrel. Didn’t you do any history, at school?’

‘I attended history lessons. It is not the same thing. Who was Tyrrel?’

‘I haven’t the remotest. A friend of Richard’s.’

‘How did anyone know it was Tyrrel?’

‘He confessed.’

‘ Confessed ?’

‘After he had been found guilty, of course. Before he was hanged.’

‘You mean that this Tyrrel was actually hanged for the murder of the two princes?’

‘Yes, of course. Shall I take that dreary face away and put up something gayer? There were quite a lot of nice faces in that bundle Miss Hallard brought you yesterday.’

‘I’m not interested in nice faces. I’m interested only in dreary ones; in “murdering brutes” who are “men of great ability.”’

‘Well, there’s no accounting for tastes,’ said The Midget inevitably. ‘And I don’t have to look at it, thank goodness. But in my humble estimation it’s enough to prevent bones knitting, so help me it is.’

‘Well, if my fracture doesn’t mend you can put it down to Richard III’s account. Another little item on that account won’t be noticed, it seems to me.’

He must ask Marta when next she looked in if she too knew about this Tyrrel. Her general knowledge was not very great, but she had been educated very expensively at a highly approved school and perhaps some of it had stuck.

But the first visitor to penetrate from the outside world proved to be Sergeant Williams; large and pink and scrubbed-looking; and for a little Grant forgot about battles long ago and considered wide boys alive today. Williams sat planted on the small hard visitors’ chair, his knees apart and his pale blue eyes blinking like a contented cat’s in the light from the window, and Grant regarded him with affection. It was pleasant to talk shop again; to use that elliptical, allusive speech that one uses only with another of one’s trade. It was pleasant to hear the professional gossip, to talk professional politics; to learn who was on the mat and who was on the skids.

‘The super sent his regards,’ Williams said as he got up to go, ‘and said if there was anything he could do for you to let him know.’ His eyes, no longer dazzled by the light, went to the photograph propped against the books. He leant his head sideways at it. ‘Who’s the bloke?’

Grant was just about to tell him when it occurred to him that here was a fellow policeman. A man as used, professionally, to faces as he was himself. Someone to whom faces were of daily importance.

‘Portrait of a man by an unknown fifteenth-century painter,’ he said. ‘What do you make of it?’