Josephine Tey - The Daughter of Time

‘There isn’t a murder type. People murder for too many different reasons. But I can’t remember any murderer, either in my own experience, or in case-histories, who resembled him.’

‘Of course he was hors concours in his class, wasn’t he. He couldn’t have known the meaning of scruple.’

‘No.’

‘I once saw Olivier play him. The most dazzling exhibition of sheer evil, it was. Always on the verge of toppling over into the grotesque, and never doing it.’

‘When I showed you the portrait,’ Grant said, ‘before you knew who it was, did you think of villainy?’

‘No,’ said the surgeon, ‘no, I thought of illness.’

‘It’s odd, isn’t it. I didn’t think of villainy either. And now that I know who it is, now that I’ve read the name on the back, I can’t think of it as anything but villainous.’

‘I suppose villainy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Well, I’ll look in again towards the end of the week. No pain to speak of now?’

And he went away, kindly and casual as he had come.

It was only after he had given the portrait further puzzled consideration (it piqued him to have mistaken one of the most notorious murderers of all time for a judge; to have transferred a subject from the dock to the bench was a shocking piece of ineptitude) that it occurred to Grant that the portrait had been provided as the illustration to a piece of detection.

What mystery was there about Richard III?

And then he remembered. Richard had murdered his two boy nephews, but no one knew how. They had merely disappeared. They had disappeared, if he remembered rightly, while Richard was away from London. Richard had sent someone to do the deed. But the mystery of the children’s actual fate had never been solved. Two skeletons had turned up – under some stairs? – in Charles II’s day, and had been buried. It was taken for granted that the skeletons were the remains of the young princes, but nothing had ever been proved.

It was shocking how little history remained with one after a good education. All he knew about Richard III was that he was the younger brother of Richard IV. That Edward was a blond six-footer with remarkable good looks and a still more remarkable way with women; and that Richard was a hunchback who usurped the throne on his brother’s death in place of the boy heir, and arranged the death of that heir and his small brother to save himself any further trouble. He also knew that Richard had died at the battle of Bosworth yelling for a horse, and that he was the last of his line. The last Plantagenet.

Every schoolboy turned over the final page of Richard III with relief, because now at last the Wars of the Roses were over and they could get on to the Tudors, who were dull but easy to follow.

When The Midget came to tidy him up for the night Grant said: ‘You don’t happen to have a history book, by any chance, do you?’

‘A history book? No. What would I be doing with a history book.’ It was not a question, so Grant did not try to provide an answer. His silence seemed to fret her.

‘If you really want a history book,’ she said presently, ‘you could ask Nurse Darroll when she brings your supper. She has all her schoolbooks on a shelf in her room and it’s quite possible she has a history among them.’

How like The Amazon to keep her schoolbooks! he thought. She was still homesick for school as she was homesick for Gloucestershire every time the daffodils bloomed. When she lumbered into the room, bearing his cheese pudding and stewed rhubarb, he looked at her with a tolerance that bordered on the benevolent. She ceased to be a large female who breathed like a suction-pump and became a potential dispenser of delight.

Oh yes, she had a history book, she said. Indeed, she rather thought that she had two. She had kept all her schoolbooks because she had loved school.

It was on the tip of Grant’s tongue to ask her if she had kept her dolls, but he stopped himself in time.

‘And of course I loved history,’ she said. ‘It was my favourite subject. Richard the Lionheart was my hero.’

‘An intolerable bounder,’ Grant said.

‘Oh, no!’ she said, looking wounded.

‘A hyperthyroid type,’ Grant said pitilessly. ‘Rocketing to and fro about the earth like a badly made firework. Are you going off duty now?’

‘Whenever I’ve finished my trays.’

‘Could you find that book for me tonight?’

‘You’re supposed to be going to sleep, not staying awake over history books.’

‘I might as well read some history as look at the ceiling which is the alternative. Will you get it for me?’

‘I don’t think I could go all the way up to the Nurses’ Block and back again tonight for someone who is rude about the Lionheart.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m not the stuff that martyrs are made of. As far as I’m concerned Coeur-de-Lion is the pattern of chivalry, the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche , a faultless commander and a triple D.S.O. Now will you get the book?’

‘It seems to me you’ve sore need to read a little history,’ she said, smoothing a mitred sheet-corner with a large admiring hand, ‘so I’ll bring you the book when I come past. I’m going out to the pictures anyhow.’

It was nearly an hour before she reappeared, immense in a camel-hair coat. The room lights had been put out and she materialised into the light of his reading-lamp like some kindly genie.

‘I was hoping you’d be asleep,’ she said. ‘I don’t really think you should start on these tonight.’

‘If there is anything that is likely to put me to sleep,’ he said, ‘it would be an English history book. So you can hold hands with a clear conscience.’

‘I’m going with Nurse Burrows.’

‘You can still hold hands.’

‘I’ve no patience with you,’ she said patiently and faded backwards into the gloom.

She had brought two books.

One was the kind of history book known as a Historical Reader. It bore the same relation to history as Stories from the Bible bears to Holy Writ. Canute rebuked his courtiers on the shore, Alfred burned the cakes, Raleigh spread his cloak for Elizabeth, Nelson took leave of Hardy in his cabin on the Victory, all in nice clear large print and one-sentence paragraphs. To each episode went one full-page illustration.

There was something curiously touching in the fact that The Amazon should treasure this childish literature. He turned to the fly-leaf to see if her name was there. On the fly-leaf was written:

Ella Darroll,

Form III

Newbridge High School,

Newbridge,

Gloucestershire.

England Europe,

The World The Universe.

This was surrounded by a fine selection of coloured transfers.

Did all children do that, he wondered? Write their names like that, and spend their time in class making transfers. He certainly had. And the sight of those squares of bright primitive colour brought back his childhood as nothing had for many years. He had forgotten the excitement of transfers. That wonderfully satisfying moment when you began the peeling-off and saw that it was coming perfectly. The adult world held few such gratifications. A clean smacking drive at golf, perhaps, was the nearest. Or the moment when your line tightened and you knew that the fish had struck.

The little book pleased him so much that he went through it at his leisure. Solemnly reading each childish story. This, after all, was the history that every adult remembered. This was what remained in their minds when tonnage and poundage, and ship money, and Laud’s Liturgy, and the Rye House Plot, and the Triennial Acts, and all the long muddle of schism and shindy, treaty and treason, had faded from their consciousness.