‘The point is not that it is a parallel. The point is that every single man who was there knows that the story is nonsense, and yet it has never been contradicted. It will never be overtaken now. It is a completely untrue story grown to legend while the men who knew it to be untrue looked on and said nothing.’
‘Yes. That’s very interesting; very. History as it is made.’
‘Yes. History.’
‘Give me research. After all, the truth of anything at all doesn’t lie in someone’s account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper. The sale of a house. The price of a ring.’
Grant went on looking at the ceiling, and the sparrows’ clamour came back into the room.
‘What amuses you?’ Grant said, turning his head at last and catching the expression on his visitor’s face.
‘This is the first time I’ve seen you look like a policeman.’
‘I’m feeling like a policeman. I’m thinking like a policeman. I’m asking myself the question that every policeman asks in every case of murder: Who benefits? And for the first time it occurs to me that the glib theory that Richard got rid of the boys to make himself safer on the throne is so much nonsense. Supposing he had got rid of the boys. There were still the boys’ five sisters between him and the throne. To say nothing of George’s two: the boy and girl. George’s son and daughter were barred by their father’s attainder; but I take it that an attainder can be reversed, or annulled, or something. If Richard’s claim was shaky, all those lives stood between him and safety.’
‘And did they all survive him?’
‘I don’t know. But I shall make it my business to find out. The boys’ eldest sister certainly did because she became Queen of England as Henry’s wife.’
‘Look, Mr Grant, let’s you and I start at the very beginning of this thing. Without history books, or modern versions, or anyone’s opinion about anything. Truth isn’t in accounts but in account books.’
‘A neat phrase,’ Grant said, complimentary. ‘Does it mean anything?’
‘It means everything. The real history is written in forms not meant as history. In Wardrobe accounts, in Privy Purse expenses, in personal letters, in estate books. If someone, say, insists that Lady Whoosit never had a child, and you find in the account book the entry: “For the son born to my lady on Michaelmas eve: five yards of blue ribbon, fourpence halfpenny” it’s a reasonably fair deduction that my lady had a son on Michaelmas eve.’
‘Yes. I see. All right, where do we begin?’
‘You’re the investigator. I’m only the looker-upper.’
‘Research Worker.’
‘Thanks. What do you want to know?’
‘Well, for a start, it would be useful, not to say enlightening, to know how the principals in the case reacted to Edward’s death. Edward IV, I mean. Edward died unexpectedly, and his death must have caught everyone on the hop. I’d like to know how the people concerned reacted.’
‘That’s straight forward and easy. I take it you mean what they did and not what they thought.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Only historians tell you what they thought. Research Workers stick to what they did.’
‘What they did is all I want to know. I’ve always been a believer in the old saw that actions speak louder than words.’
‘Incidentally, what does the sainted Sir Thomas say that Richard did when he heard that his brother was dead?’ Brent wanted to know.
‘The sainted Sir Thomas (alias John Morton) says that Richard got busy being charming to the Queen and persuading her not to send a large bodyguard to escort the boy prince from Ludlow; meanwhile cooking up a plot to kidnap the boy on his way to London.’
‘According to the sainted More, then, Richard meant from the very first to supplant the boy.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Well, we shall find out, at least, who was where and doing what, whether we can deduce their intentions or not.’
‘That’s what I want. Exactly.’
‘Policeman!’ jibed the boy. ‘“Where were you at five p.m. on the night of the fifteenth inst?”’
‘It works,’ Grant assured him. ‘It works.’
‘Well, I’ll go away and work too. I’ll be in again as soon as I have got the information you want. I’m very grateful to you, Mr Grant. This is a lot better than the Peasants.’
He floated away into the gathering dusk of the winter afternoon, his train-like coat giving an academic sweep and dignity to his thin young figure.
Grant switched on his lamp, and examined the pattern it made on the ceiling as if he had never seen it before.
It was a unique and engaging problem that the boy had dropped so casually into his lap. As unexpected as it was baffling.
What possible reason could there be for that lack of contemporary accusation?
Henry had not even needed proof that Richard was himself responsible. The boys were in Richard’s care. If they were not to be found when the Tower was taken over, then that was far finer, thicker mud to throw at his dead rival than the routine accusations of cruelty and tyranny.
Grant ate his supper without for one moment being conscious either of its taste or its nature.
It was only when The Amazon, taking away his tray, said kindly: ‘Come now, that’s a very good sign. Both rissoles all eaten up to the last crumb!’ that he became aware that he had partaken of a meal.
For another hour he watched the lamp-pattern on the ceiling, going over the thing in his mind; going round and round it looking for some small crack that might indicate a way into the heart of the matter.
In the end he withdrew his attention altogether from the problem, which was his habit when a conundrum proved too round and smooth and solid for immediate solution. If he slept on the proposition it might, tomorrow, show a facet that he had missed.
He looked for something that might stop his mind from harking back to that Act of Attainder, and saw the pile of letters waiting to be acknowledged. Kind, well-wishing letters from all sorts of people; including a few old lags. The really likable old lags were an outmoded type, growing fewer and fewer daily. Their place had been taken by brash young thugs with not a spark of humanity in their egocentric souls, as illiterate as puppies and as pitiless as a circular saw. The old professional burglar was apt to be as individual as the member of any other profession, and as little vicious. Quiet little domestic men, interested in family holidays and the children’s tonsils; or odd bachelors devoted to cage-birds, or second-hand bookshops, or complicated and infallible betting systems. Old-fashioned types.
No modern thug would write to say that he was sorry that a ‘busy’ was laid aside. No such idea would ever cross a modern thug’s mind.
Writing a letter when lying on one’s back is a laborious business, and Grant shied away from it. But the top envelope on the pile bore the writing of his cousin Laura, and Laura would become anxious if she had no answer at all from him. Laura and he had shared summer holidays as children, and had been a little in love with each other all through one Highland summer, and that made a bond between them that had never been broken. He had better send Laura a note to say that he was alive.
He read her letter again, smiling a little; and the waters of the Turlie sounded in his ears and slid under his eyes, and he could smell the sweet cold smell of a Highland moor in winter, and he forgot for a little that he was a hospital patient and that life was sordid and boring and claustrophobic.
Pat sends what would be his love if he were a little older or just a little younger. Being nine, he says: ‘Tell Alan I was asking for him’, and has a fly of his own invention waiting to be presented to you when you come on sick-leave. He is a little in disgrace at the moment in school, having learned for the first time that the Scots sold Charles the First to the English and having decided that he can no longer belong to such a nation. He is therefore, I understand, conducting a one-man protest strike against all things Scottish, and will learn no history, sing no song, nor memorise any geography pertaining to so deplorable a country. He announced going to bed last night that he has decided to apply for Norwegian citizenship.