Джозефина Тэй - The Daughter of Time

He looked up from his book to find Matron standing in the middle of the room.

‘I did knock,’ she said, ‘but you were lost in your book.’

She stood there, slender and remote; as elegant in her way as Marta was; her white-cuffed hands clasped loosely in front of her narrow waist; her white veil spreading itself in imperishable dignity; her only ornament the small silver badge of her diploma. Grant wondered if there was anywhere in this world a more unshakable poise than that achieved by the matron of a great hospital.

‘I’ve taken to history,’ he said. ‘Rather late in the day.’

‘An admirable choice,’ she said. ‘It puts things in perspective.’ Her eye lighted on the portrait and she said: ‘Are you York or Lancaster?’

‘So you recognize the portrait.’

‘Oh, yes. When I was a probationer I used to spend a lot of time in the National. I had very little money and very sore feet, and it was warm in the gallery and quiet and it had plenty of seats.’ She smiled a very little, looking back from her present consequence to that young, tired, earnest creature that she had been. ‘I liked the portrait gallery best because it gave one the same sense of proportion that reading history does. All those Importances who had made such a to-do over so much in their day. All just names. Just canvas and paint. I saw a lot of that portrait in those days.’ Her attention went back to the picture. ‘A most unhappy creature,’ she said.

‘My surgeon thinks it is poliomyelitis.’

‘Polio?’ She considered it. ‘Perhaps. I hadn’t thought of it before. But to me it has always seemed to be intense unhappiness. It is the most desperately unhappy face that I have ever encountered and I have encountered a great many.’

‘You think it was painted later than the murder, then?’

‘Oh, yes. Obviously. He is not a type that would do anything lightly. A man of that calibre. He must have been well aware of how heinous the crime was.’

‘You think he belonged to the type who can’t live with themselves anymore.’

‘What a good description! Yes. The kind who want something badly, and then discover that the price they have paid for it is too high.’

‘So you don’t think he was an out-and-out villain?’

‘No; oh, no. Villains don’t suffer, and that face is full of the most dreadful pain.’

They considered the portrait in silence for a moment or two.

‘It must have seemed like retribution, you know. Losing his only boy so soon after. And his wife’s death. Being stripped of his own personal world in so short a time. It must have seemed like divine justice.’

‘Would he care about his wife?’

‘She was his cousin, and they had known each other from childhood. So whether he loved her or not, she must have been a companion for him. When you sit on a throne I suspect that companionship is a rare blessing. Now I must go and see how my hospital is getting on. I have not even asked the question that I came to ask. Which was how you felt this morning. But it is a very healthy sign that you have interest to spare for a man dead these four hundred years.’

She had not moved from the position in which he had first caught sight of her. Now she smiled her faint, withdrawn smile, and with her hands still clasped lightly in front of her belt-buckle moved towards the door. She had a transcendental repose. Like a nun. Like a queen.

It was after luncheon before Sergeant Williams reappeared, breathless, bearing two fat volumes.

‘You should have left them with the porter,’ Grant said. ‘I didn’t mean you to come sweating up here with them.’

‘I had to come up and explain. I had only time to go to one shop, but it’s the biggest in the street. That’s the best history of England they have in stock. It’s the best there is anywhere, they say.’ He laid down a severe-looking sage-green tome, with an air of taking no responsibility for it. ‘They had no separate history of Richard III. I mean, no life of him. But they gave me this.’ This was a gay affair with a coat of arms on the wrapper. It was called The Rose of Raby .

‘What is this?’

‘She was his mother, it seems. The Rose in question, I mean. I can’t wait: I’m due at the Yard in five minutes from now and the super will flay me alive if I’m late. Sorry I couldn’t do better. I’ll look in again, first time I’m passing, and if these are no good I’ll see what else I can get.’

Grant was grateful and said so.

To the sound of Williams’ brisk departing footsteps he began his inspection of the ‘best history of England there is.’ It turned out to be what is known as a ‘constitutional’ history; a sober compilation lightened with improving illustrations. An illumination from the Luttrell Psalter decorated the husbandry of the fourteenth century, and a contemporary map of London bisected the Great Fire. Kings and queens were mentioned only incidentally. Tanner’s Constitutional History was concerned only with social progress and political evolution; with the Black Death, and the invention of printing, and the use of gunpowder, and the formation of the Trade Guilds, and so forth. But here and there Mr. Tanner was forced, by a horrid germaneness, to mention a king or his relations. And one such germaneness occurred in connection with the invention of printing.

A man called Caxton came out of the Weald of Kent as draper’s apprentice to a future lord mayor of London, and then went to Bruges with the twenty merks his master left him in his will. And when, in the dreary autumn rain of the Low Countries, two young refugees from England fetched up on those low shores, in very low water, it was the successful merchant from the Weald of Kent who gave them succour. The refugees were Edward IV and his brother Richard; and when in the turn of the wheel Edward came back to rule England, Caxton came too, and the first books printed in England were printed for Edward IV and written by Edward’s brother-in-law.

He turned the pages and marvelled how dull information is deprived of personality. The sorrows of humanity are no one’s sorrows, as newspaper readers long ago found out. A frisson of horror may go down one’s spine at wholesale destruction but one’s heart stays unmoved. A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy. So Mr. Tanner’s account of the progress of the English race was admirable but unexciting. But here and there where he could not avoid the personal his narrative flowered into a more immediate interest. In extracts from the Pastons’ letters, for instance. The Pastons had a habit of sandwiching scraps of history between orders for salad oil and inquiries as to how Clement was doing at Cambridge. And between two of those domesticities appeared the small item that the two little York boys, George, and Richard, were living in the Pastons’ London lodgings, and that their brother Edward came every day to see them.

Surely, thought Grant, dropping the book for a moment on the counterpane and staring up at the now invisible ceiling, surely never before can anyone have come to the throne of England with so personal an experience of the ordinary man’s life as Edward IV and his brother Richard. And perhaps only Charles II after them. And Charles, even in poverty and flight, had always been a king’s son; a man apart. The two little boys who were living in the Pastons’ lodgings were merely the babies of the York family. Of no particular importance at the best of times, and at the moment when the Paston letter was written without a home and possibly without a future.

Grant readied for The Amazon’s history book to find out what Edward was about in London at that date, and learned that he was collecting an army. ‘London was always Yorkist in temper, and men flocked with enthusiasm to the banner of the youthful Edward,’ said the history book.