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THE DAUGHTER　OF TIME

'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 sager 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 the 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.'

PENGUIN CRIME PICTION

Editor: Julian Symons

THE DAUGHTER OF TIME

The author of' The Daughter of Time, whose death Cut short a distinguished career as novelist and play wright, was born in the Highlands, her baptismal name being Elizabeth MacKintosh. Destined for art school she preferred to devote three years to physical training, having no intention to make writing her profession. Her versatility, however, led to the creation of two remarkable literary personalities - Gordon Daviot, and Josephine Tey, detective novelist. As playwright she will be remembered by many as the author of Richard of Bordeaux, Queen of Scots, The Laughing Woman, and many other plays. Her first detective novel, The Man in the Queue, published under the name of Gordon Daviot, was written for a competition; for her second, A Shilling for Candles, she took the family name, Josephine Tey. Then followed half a dozen crime stories in quick succession, beginning with Miss Pym Disposes (in which her knowledge of physical training was turned to effective account), followed by The Franchise Affair, (now in Penguins and a success both as novel and film), Brat Farrar, To Love and Be Wise, and The Singing Sands (to be published in Penguins). The Daughter of Time, because of its serious contribution to historical knowledge, is recognized as holding a unique place in detective fiction.

Josephine Tey

THE

DAUGHTER

OF

TIME

'Truth is the daughter of Time'

Old Proverb

I

Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling. Stared at it with loathing. He knew by heart every last minute crack on its nice clean surface. He had made minute crack on its nice clean surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He had made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.

He had suggested to The Midget that she might turn his bed round a little so that he could have a new patch of ceiling to explore. But it seemed that that would spoil the symmetry of the room, and in hospitals symmetry ranked just a short head behind cleanliness and a whole length in front of Godliness. Anything out of the parallel was hospital profanity. Why didn't he read? she asked. Why didn't he go on reading some of those expensive brand-new novels that his friends kept on binging him.

'There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought.'

'You sound constipated, 'said The Midget.

The Midget was Nurse Ingham, and she was in sober fact a very nice five-feet two, with everything in just proportion. Grant called her The Midget to compensate himself for being bossed around by a piece of Dresden china which he could pick up in one hand. When he was on his feet, that is to say. It was not only that she told him what he might or might not do, but she dealt with his six-feet-odd with an off-hand ease that Grant found humiliating. Weights meant nothing, apparently, to The Midget. She tossed mattresses around with the absent-minded grace of a plate spinner. When she was off-duty he was attended to by the Amazon, a goddess with arms like the limb of a beech tree. The Amazon was Nurse Darroll, who came from Gloucestershire and was homesick each daffodil season. (The Midget came from Lytham St Anne's, and there was no daffodil nonsense about her.) She had large soft hands and large softcow's eyes and she always looked very sorry for you, but the slightest physical exertion set her breathing like a suction-pump. On the whole Grant found it even more humiliating to be treated as a dead weight than to be treated as if he was no weight at all.

Grant was bed-borne, and a charge on The Midget and The Amazon, because he had fallen through a trap-door. This, of course, was the absolute in humiliation; compared with which the heavings of The Amazon and the light slingings of The Midget were a mere corollary. To fall through a trap-door was the ultimate in absurdity; pantomimic, bathetic, grotesque. At the moment of his disappearance from the normal level of perambulation he had been in hot pursuit of Benny, Skoll, and the fact that Benny had careered round the next corner slap into the arms of Sergeant Williams provided the one small crumb of comfort in an intolerable situation.

Benny was now 'away' for three years, which was very satisfactory for the lieges, but Benny Would get time off for good behaviour. In hospitals there was no time off for good behaviour.

Grant stopped staring at the ceiling, and slid his eyes sideways at the pile of books on his beside table; the gay expensive pile that The Midget had been urging on his attention. The top one, with the pretty picture of Valetta in unlikely pink, was Lavinia Fitch's annual account of a blameless heroine's tribulations. In view of the representation of the Grand Harbour on the cover, the present Valerie or Angela or Cecile or Denise must be a naval wife. He had opened the book only to read the kind message that Lavinia had written inside.

The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthy and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the hay-lost, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only up-rising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it.

Under the harsh shadows and highlights of Silas's jacket was an elegant affair of Edwardian curlicues and Baroque nonsense, entitled Bells on Her Toes. Which was Rupert Rouge being arch about vice. Rupert Rouge always seduced you into laughter for the first three pages. About Page Three you noticed that Rupert had learned from that very arch (but of course not vicious) creature George Bernard Shaw that the easiest way to sound witty was to use that cheap and convenient method, the paradox. After that you could see the jokes coming three sentences away. The thing with a red gun-flash across a night-green cover was Oscar Oakley's latest. Toughs talking out of the corners of their mouths in synthetic American that had neither the wit nor the pungency of the real thing. Blondes, chromium bars, breakneck chases. Very remarkably bunk.

The Case of the Missing Tin-opener, by John James Mark, had three errors of procedure in the first two pages, and had at least provided Grant with a pleasant five minutes while he composed an imaginary letter to its author.

He could not remember what the thin blue book at the bottom of the pile was. Something earnest and statistical, he thought. Tsetse flies, or calories, or sex behaviour, or something.

Even in that, you knew what to expect on the next page. Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thrilled to a formula? Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about 'a new Silas Weekley' or 'a new Lavinia Fitch' exactly as they talked about 'a new brick' or 'a new hairbrush'. They never said 'a new book by' whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.

It might be a good thing, Grant thought as he turned his nauseated gaze away from the motley pile, if all the presses of the world were stopped for a generation. There ought to be a literary moratorium. Some superman ought to invent a ray that would stop them all simultaneously. Then people wouldn't send you a lot of fool nonsense when you were flat on your back, and bossy bits of Meissen wouldn't expect you to read them.

He heard the door open, but did not stir himself to look. He had turned his face to the wall, literally and metaphorically.

He heard someone come across to his bed, and closed his eyes against possible conversation. He wanted neither Gloucestershire sympathy nor Lancashire briskness just now. In the succeeding pause a faint enticement, a nostalgic breath of all the fields of Grasse, teased his nostrils and swam about his brain. He savoured it and considered. The Midget smelt of lavender dusting powder, and The Amazon of soap and iodoform. What was floating expensively about his nostrils was L'Enclos Numero Cinq. Only one person of his acquaintance used L'Enclos Number Five. Marta Hallard.

He opened an eye and squinted up at her. She had evidently bent over to see if he was asleep, and was now standing in an irresolute way - if anything Marta did could be said to be irresolute - with her attention on the heap of all too obviously virgin publications on the table. In one arm she was carrying tow new books, and in the other a great sheaf of white lilac. He wondered whether she had chosen white lilac because it was her idea of the proper floral offering for winter (it adorned her dressing-room at the theatre from December to March), or whether she had taken it because it would not detract from her black-and-white chic. She was wearing a new hat and her usual pearls; the pearls which he had once been means of recovering for her. She looked very handsome, very Parisian, and blessedly unhospital-like.

'Did I waken you, Alan?'

'No. I wasn't asleep.'

'I seem to be bringing the proverbial coals,' she said, dropping the two books alongside their despised brethren. 'I hope you will find these more interesting than you seem to have found that lot. Didn't you even try a little teensy taste of our Lavinia?'

'I can't read anything.'

'Are you in pain?'

'Agony. But it's neither my leg nor my back.'

'What then?'

'It's what my cousin Laura calls "the prickles of boredom".'

'Poor Alan. And how right your Laura is.' She picked a bunch of narcissi out off a glass that was much too large for them, dropped them with one of her best gestures into the wash-basin, and proceeded to substitute the lilac. 'One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.'

'Small nothing. Niggling nothing. It's like being beaten with nettles.'

'Why don't you take-up something?'

'Improve the shining hour?'

'Improve your mind. To say nothing of your soul and your temper. You might study one of the philosophies. Yoga, or something like that. But I suppose an analytical mind is not he best kind to bring to the consideration of the abstract.'

'I did think of going back to algebra. I have an idea that I never did algebra justice, at school. But I've done so much geometry on that damned ceiling that I'm a little off mathematics.'

'Well, I suppose it is no use suggesting jug-saws to someone in your position. How about cross-words? I could get you a book of them, if you like.'

'God forbid.'

'You could invent them, of course. I have heard that that is more fun than solving them.'

'Perhaps. But a dictionary weighs several pounds. Besides, I always did hate looking up something in a reference book.'

'Do you play chess? I don't remember. How about chess problems? White to play and mate in three moves, or something like that.'

'My only interest in chess is pictorial.'

'Pictorial?'

'Very decorative things, knights and pawns and what-not. Very elegant.'

'Charming. I could bring you along a set to play with. All right, no chess. You could do some academic investigating. That's a sort of mathematics. Finding a solution to an unsolved problem.'

'Crime, you mean? I know all the case-histories by heart. And there is nothing more that can be done about any of them. Certainly not by someone who is flat on his back.'

'I didn't mean something out of the files at the Yard. I meant something more - what's the word? - something classic. Something that has puzzled the world for ages.'

'As what, for instance?'

'Say, the casket letters.'

'Oh, not Mary Queen of Scots!'

'Why not?' asked Marta, who like all actresses saw Mary Stuart through a haze of white veils.

'I could be interested in a bad woman but never in a silly one.'

'Silly?' said Marta in her best lower-register Electra voice.

'Very silly.'

'Oh, Alan, how can you!'

'If she had worn another kind of headdress no one would ever have bothered about her. It's that cap that seduces people.'

'You think she would have loved less greatly in a sunbonnet?'

'She never loved greatly at all, in any kind of bonnet.'

Marta looked as scandalized as a lifetime in the theatre and an hour of careful make-up allowed her to.

'Why do you think that?'

'Mary Stuart was six feet tall. Nearly all out-size women are sexually cold. Ask any doctor.'

And as he said it he wondered why, in all the years since Marta had first adopted him as a spare escort when she needed one, it had not occurred to him to wonder whether her notorious level-headedness about men had something to do with her inches. But Marta had not drawn any parallels; her mind was still on her favourite Queen.