Josephine Tey - The Daughter of Time

She gave him the pad and pencil, and on the reply-paid form he wrote:

Can you find me a similar rumour in France at about the same date?

Grant

After that he ate his supper with a good appetite, and settled down to a good night’s sleep. He was floating in that delicious half-way stage on the way to unconsciousness when he became aware that someone was leaning over to inspect him. He opened his eyes to see who it might be, and looked straight into the anxious yearning brown irises of The Amazon, looking larger and more cowlike than ever in the soft lamplight. She was holding in her hand a yellow envelope.

‘I didn’t quite know what to do,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you and yet I didn’t know whether it mightn’t be important. A telegram, you know. You never can tell. And if you didn’t have it tonight it would mean a whole twelve hours’ delay. Nurse Ingham has gone off duty, so there was no one to ask till Nurse Briggs comes on at ten. I hope I haven’t wakened you up. But you weren’t asleep, were you?’

Grant assured her that she had done the right thing and she let out a sigh that nearly blew the portrait of Richard over. She stood by while he read the telegram, with an air of being ready to support him in any evil news that it might contain. To The Amazon all telegrams conveyed evil tidings.

The telegram was from Carradine.

It said: ‘You mean you want repeat want that there should be another repeat another accusation question mark – Brent.’

Grant took the reply-paid form and wrote: ‘Yes. Preferably in France.’

Then he said to The Amazon: ‘You can turn out the light, I think. I’m going to sleep until seven tomorrow morning.’

He fell asleep wondering how long it would be before he saw Carradine again, and what the odds were against that much desired instance of a second rumour.

But it was not so long after all until Carradine turned up again, and he turned up looking anything but suicidal. Indeed he seemed in some queer way to have broadened out. His coat seemed less of an appendage and more of a garment. He beamed at Grant.

‘Mr Grant, you’re a wonder. Do they have more like you at Scotland Yard? Or do you rate special?’

Grant looked at him almost unbelieving. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve turned up a French instance!’

‘Didn’t you want me to?’

‘Yes. But I hardly dared hope for it. The odds against seemed tremendous. What form did the rumour take in France? A chronicle? A letter?’

‘No. Something much more surprising. Something much more dismaying, actually. It seems that the Chancellor of France, in a speech to the States-General at Tours, spoke of the rumour. Indeed he was quite eloquent about it. In a way, his eloquence was the one scrap of comfort I could find in the situation.’

‘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.

‘“Ce pays”,’ 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?’