Grant took his letter pad from the table and wrote in penciclass="underline"
Dearest Laura,
Would you be unbearably surprised to learn that the Princes in the Tower survived Richard III?
P.S. I am nearly well again.
9
‘Do you know that the Bill attainting Richard III before Parliament didn’t mention the murder of the Princes in the Tower?’ Grant asked the surgeon next morning.
‘Really?’ said the surgeon. ‘That’s odd, isn’t it?’
‘Extremely odd. Can you think of an explanation?’
‘Probably trying to minimise the scandal. For the sake of the family.’
‘He wasn’t succeeded by one of his family. He was the last of his line. His successor was the first Tudor. Henry VII.’
‘Yes, of course. I’d forgotten. I was never any good at history. I used to use the history period to do my home algebra. They don’t manage to make history very interesting in schools. Perhaps more portraits might help.’ He glanced up at the Richard portrait and went back to his professional inspection. ‘That is looking very nice and healthy, I’m glad to say. No pain to speak of now?’
And he went away, kindly and casual. He was interested in faces because they were part of his trade, but history was just something that he used for other purposes; something that he set aside in favour of algebra under the desk. He had living bodies in his care, and the future in his hands; he had no thought to spare for problems academic.
Matron, too, had more immediate worries. She listened politely while he put his difficulty to her, but he had the impression that she might say: ‘I should see the almoner about it if I were you’. It was not her affair. She looked down from her regal eminence at the great hive below her buzzing with activity, all of it urgent and important; she could hardly be expected to focus her gaze on something more than four hundred years away.
He wanted to say: ‘But you of all people should be interested in what can happen to royalty; in the frailness of your reputation’s worth. Tomorrow a whisper may destroy you.’ But he was already guiltily conscious that to hinder a Matron with irrelevances was to lengthen her already lengthy morning round without reason or excuse.
The Midget did not know what an Attainder was, and made it clear that she did not care.
‘It’s becoming an obsession with you, that thing,’ she said, leaning her head at the portrait. ‘It’s not healthy. Why don’t you read some of those nice books?’
Even Marta, whose visit he had looked forward to so that he could put this odd, new proposition to her and see her reaction, even Marta was too full of wrath with Madeleine March to pay any attention to him.
‘After practically promising me that she would write it! After all our get-together and my plans for when this endless thing finally comes to an end. I had even talked to Jacques about clothes! And now she decides that she must write one of her awful little detective stories. She says she must write it while it is fresh – whatever that is.’
He listened to Marta’s grieving with sympathy – good plays were the scarcest commodity in the world and good playwrights worth their weight in platinum – but it was like watching something through a window. The fifteenth century was more actual to him this morning than any on-goings in Shaftesbury Avenue.
‘I don’t suppose it will take her long to write her detective book,’ he said comfortingly.
‘Oh, no. She does them in six weeks or so. But now that she’s off the chain how do I know that I’ll ever get her on again. Tony Savilla wants her to write a Marlborough play for him, and you know what Tony is when he sets his heart on something. He’d talk the pigeons off the Admiralty Arch.’
She came back to the Attainder problem, briefly, before she took her leave.
‘There’s sure to be some explanation, my dear,’ she said from the door.
Of course there’s an explanation, he wanted to shout after her, but what is it? The thing is against all likelihood and sense. Historians say that the murder caused a great revulsion of feeling against Richard, that he was hated for the crime by the common people of England, and that was why they welcomed a stranger in his place. And yet when the tale of his wrongdoing is placed before Parliament there is no mention of the crime.
Richard was dead when that complaint was drawn up, and his followers in flight or exile; his enemies were free to bring against him any charge they could think of. And they had not thought of that spectacular murder.
Why?
The country was reputedly ringing with the scandal of the boys’ disappearance. The very recent scandal. And when his enemies collected his alleged offences against morality and the State they had not included Richard’s most spectacular piece of infamy.
Why?
Henry needed every small featherweight of advantage in the precarious newness of his accession. He was unknown to the country at large and he had no right by blood to be where he was. But he hadn’t used the overwhelming advantage that Richard’s published crime would have given him.
Why?
He was succeeding a man of great reputation, known personally to the people from the Marches of Wales to the Scots border, a man universally liked and admired until the disappearance of his nephews. And yet he omitted to use the one real advantage he had against Richard, the unforgivable, the abhorred thing.
Why?
Only The Amazon seemed concerned about the oddity that was engaging his mind; and she not out of any feeling for Richard but because her conscientious soul was distressed at any possibility of mistake. The Amazon would go all the way down the corridor and back again to tear off a page in a loose-leaf calendar that someone had forgotten to remove. But her instinct to be worried was less strong than her instinct to comfort.
‘You don’t need to worry about it,’ she said, soothing. ‘There’ll be some quite simple explanation that you haven’t thought of. It’ll come to you sometime when you’re thinking of something else altogether. That’s usually how I remember where something I’ve mislaid is. I’ll be putting the kettle on in the pantry, or counting the sterile dressings as Sister doles them out, and suddenly I’ll think: “Goodness, I left it in my burberry pocket.” Whatever the thing was, I mean. So you don’t have to worry about it.’
Sergeant Williams was in the wilds of Essex helping the local constabulary to decide who had hit an old shopkeeper over the head with a brass scale-weight and left her dead among the shoelaces and liquorice all-sorts, so there was no help from the Yard.
There was no help from anyone until young Carradine turned up again three days later. Grant thought that his normal insouciance had a deeper tinge than usual; there was almost an air of self-congratulation about him. Being a well-brought-up child he inquired politely about Grant’s physical progress, and having been reassured on that point he pulled some notes out of the capacious pocket of his coat and beamed through his horn-rims at his colleague.
‘I wouldn’t have the sainted More as a present,’ he observed pleasantly.
‘You’re not being offered him. There are no takers.’
‘He’s away off the beam. Away off.’