He was still illogically fuming when he fell asleep, and he woke fuming.
‘Do you know that your Sir Thomas More knew nothing about Richard III at all?’ he said, accusingly, to The Amazon the moment her large person appeared in the doorway.
She looked startled, not at his news but at his ferocity. Her eyes looked as if they might brim with tears at another rough word.
‘But of course he knew!’ she protested. ‘He lived then.’
‘He was eight when Richard died,’ Grant said, relentless. ‘And all he knew was what he had been told. Like me. Like you. Like Will Rogers of blessed memory. There is nothing hallowed at all about Sir Thomas More’s history of Richard III. It’s a damned piece of hearsay and a swindle.’
‘Aren’t you feeling so well this morning?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Do you think you’ve got a temperature?’
‘I don’t know about a temperature, but my blood pressure’s away up.’
‘Oh dear, dear,’ she said, taking this literally. ‘And you were doing so very well. Nurse Ingham will be so distressed. She has been boasting about your good recovery.’
That The Midget should have found him a subject for boasting was a new idea to Grant, but it was not one that gave him any gratification. He resolved to have a temperature in earnest if he could manage it, just to score off The Midget.
But the morning visit of Marta distracted him from this experiment in the power of mind over matter.
Marta, it seemed, was pluming herself on his mental health very much as The Midget was pluming herself on his physical improvement. She was delighted that her pokings-about with James in the print shop had been so effective.
‘Have you decided on Perkin Warbeck, then?’ she asked.
‘No. Not Warbeck. Tell me: what made you bring me a portrait of Richard III? There’s no mystery about Richard, is there?’
‘No. I suppose we took it as illustration to the Warbeck story. No, wait a moment. I remember. James turned it up and said: “If he’s mad about faces, there’s one for him!” He said: “That’s the most notorious murderer in history, and yet his face is in my estimation the face of a saint”.’
‘A saint!’ Grant said; and then remembered something. “Over-conscientious”,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I was just remembering my first impressions of it. Is that how it seemed to you: the face of a saint?’
She looked across at the picture, propped up against the pile of books. ‘I can’t see it against the light,’ she said, and picked it up for a closer scrutiny.
He was suddenly reminded that to Marta, as to Sergeant Williams, faces were a professional matter. The slant of an eyebrow, the set of a mouth, was just as much an evidence of character to Marta as to Williams. Indeed she actually made herself faces to match the characters she played.
‘Nurse Ingham thinks he’s a dreary. Nurse Darroll thinks he’s a horror. My surgeon thinks he’s a polio victim. Sergeant Williams thinks he’s a born judge. Matron thinks he’s a soul in torment.’
Marta said nothing for a little while. Then she said: ‘It’s odd, you know. When you first look at it you think it a mean, suspicious face. Even cantankerous. But when you look at it a little longer you find that it isn’t like that at all. It is quite calm. It is really quite a gentle face, perhaps that is what James meant by being saint-like.’
‘No. No, I don’t think so. What he meant was the – subservience to conscience.’
‘Whatever it is, it is a face, isn’t it! Not just a collection of organs for seeing, breathing, and eating with. A wonderful face. With very little alteration, you know, it might be a portrait of Lorenzo the Magnificent.’
‘You don’t suppose that it is Lorenzo and that we’re considering the wrong man altogether?’
‘Of course not. Why should you think that?’
‘Because nothing in the face fits the facts of history. And pictures have got shuffled before now.’
‘Oh, yes, of course they have. But that is Richard all right. The original – or what is supposed to be the original is at Windsor Castle. James told me. It is included in Henry VIII’s inventory, so it has been there for four hundred years or so. And there are duplicates at Hatfield and Albury.’
‘It’s Richard,’ Grant said resignedly. ‘I just don’t know anything about faces. Do you know anyone at the B.M.?’
‘At the British Museum?’ Marta asked, her attention still on the portrait. ‘No, I don’t think so. Not that I can think of at the moment. I went there once to look at some Egyptian Jewellery, when I was playing Cleopatra with Geoffrey – did you ever see Geoffrey’s Antony? it was superlatively genteel but the place frightens me rather. Such a garnering of the ages. It made me feel the way the stars make you feeclass="underline" small and no-account. What do you want of the B.M.?’
‘I wanted some information about history written in Richard III’s day. Contemporary accounts.’
‘Isn’t the sainted Sir Thomas any good, then?’
‘The sainted Sir Thomas is nothing but an old gossip,’ Grant said with venom. He had taken a wild dislike to the much-admired More.
‘Oh, dear. And the nice man at the Library seemed so reverent about him. The Gospel of Richard III according to St Thomas More, and all that.’
‘Gospel nothing,’ Grant said rudely. ‘He was writing down in a Tudor England what someone had told him about events that happened in a Plantagenet England when he himself was five.’
‘Five years old?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, dear. Not exactly the horse’s mouth.’
‘Not even straight from the course. Come to think of it, it’s as reliable as a bookie’s tips would be. He’s on the wrong side of the rails altogether. If he was a Tudor servant he was on the laying side where Richard III was concerned.’
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so. What do you want to find out about Richard, when there is no mystery to investigate?’
‘I want to know what made him tick. That is a more profound mystery than anything I have come up against of late. What changed him almost overnight? Up to the moment of his late brother’s death he seems to have been entirely admirable. And devoted to his brother.’
‘I suppose the supreme honour must always be a temptation.’
‘He was Regent until the boy came of age, protector of England. With his previous history, you would think that would have been enough for him. You would have thought, indeed, that it would have been very much his cup of tea: guardian of both Edward’s son and the kingdom.’
‘Perhaps the brat was unbearable, and Richard longed to “larn” him. Isn’t it odd how we never think of victims as anything but white innocents. Like Joseph in the Bible. I’m sure he was a quite intolerable young man, actually, and long overdue for that pushing into the pit. Perhaps young Edward was just sitting up and begging to be quietly put down.’