第 11 页

'There isn't one.'

'None at all?'

'Not in the sense that you mean it. There were writers who were contemporaries of Richard, but they wrote after his death. For the Tudors. Which puts them out of court. There is a monkish chronicle in Latin somewhere that is contemporary, but I haven't been able to get hold of it yet. One thing I have discovered though: that account of Richard III is called Sir Thomas More's not because he wrote it but because the manuscript was found among his papers. It was an unfinished copy of an account that appears else where in finished form.'

'Well!' Grant considered this with interest. 'You mean it was More's own manuscript copy?'

'Yes. In his own writing. Made when he was about thirty-five. In those days, before printing was general, manuscript copies of books were the usual thing.'

'Yes. So, if the information came from John Morton, as it did, it is just as likely that the thing was written by Morton.'

'Yes.'

'Which would certainly account for the - the lack of sensibility. A climber like Morton wouldn't be at all abashed by back-stairs gossip. Do you know about Morton?'

'No.'

'He was a lawyer turned churchman, and the greatest pluralist on record. He chose the Lancastrian side and stayed with it until it was clear that Edward IV was home and dried. Then he made his peace with the York side and Edward made him Bishop of Ely. And vicar of God knows how many parishes besides. But after Richard's accession he backed first the Woodvilles and then Henry Tudor and ended up with a cardinal's bat as Henry VII's Archbishop of ? '

Wait a minute!' said the boy, amused. 'Of course I know Morton. He was Morton of "Morton's Fork". "You can't be spending much so how about something for the King; you're spending such a lot you must be very rich so how about something for the King?"'

'Yes. That Morton. Henry's best thumb-screw. And I've just thought of a reason why he might have a personal hatred for Richard. long before the murder of the boys.'

'Yes?'

'Edward took a large bribe from Louis XI to make a dishonourable peace in France. Richard was very angry about that - it really was a disgraceful affair - and washed his hands of the business. Which included refusing a large cash offer. But Morton was very much in favour both of the deal and the cash. Indeed he took a pension from Louis. A very nice pension it was. Two thousand crowns a year. I don't suppose Richard's outspoken comments went down very well, even with good gold for a chaser.'

'No. I guess not.'

'And of course there would be no preferment for Morton under the strait-laced Richard as there had been under the easy-going Edward. So he would have taken the Woodville side, even if there had been no murder.'

'About that murder -' the boy said; and paused.

'Yes?'

'About that murder the murder of those two boys -isn't it odd that no one talks of it?'

'How do you mean: no one talks of it?'

'These last three days I've been going through contemporary papers: letters

and what not. And no one mentions them at all.'

'Perhaps they were afraid to. It was a time when it paid to be discreet.'

'Yes; but I'll tell you something even odder. You know' that Henry brought a Bill of Attainder against Richard after Bosworth. Before Parliament, I mean. Well, he accuses Richard of cruelty and tyranny but, doesn't even mention the murder.'

'What!' said Grant, startled.

'Yes, you may well look startled.'

'Are you sure!'

'Quite sure.'

'But Henry got possession of the Tower immediately on his arrival in London after Bosworth. If the boys were missing it is incredible that he should not publish the fact immediately. It was the trump card in his hand.' He lay in surprised silence for a little. The sparrows on the window-sill quarrelled loudly. 'I can't make sense of it,' he said.

'What possible explanation can there be for his omission to snake capital out of the fact that the boys were missing?'

Brent shifted his long legs to a more comfortable position. 'There is only one explanation,' he said. 'And that is that the boys weren't missing.'

There was a still longer silence this time, while they stared at each other.

'Oh, no, it's nonsense,' Grant said. 'There must be some obvious explanation that we are failing to see.'

'As what, for instance?'

'I don't know. I haven't had time to think.'

'I've had nearly three days to think, and I still haven't thought up a reason that will fit. Nothing will fit the facts except the conclusion that the boys were alive when Henry took over the Tower. It was a completely unscrupulous Act of Attainder; it accused Richard's followers - the loyal 1 flowers of an anointed King fighting against an invader ? of treason. Every accusation that Henry could possibly with any hope of getting away with it was put into

Bill. And the very worst he could accuse Richard of s the usual cruelty and tyranny. The boys aren't even petitioned.'

"It's fantastic.'

'It's unbelievable. But it is a fact.'

'What it means is that there was no contemporary accusation at all.'

'That's about it.'

'But - but wait a minute. Tyrrel was hanged for the murder. He actually confessed to it before he died. Wait a minute.' He reached for Oliphant and sped through the pages looking for the place. 'There's a full account of it here somewhere. There was no mystery about it. Even the Statue of Liberty knew about it.'

'Who?'

'The nurse you met in the corridor. It was Tyrrel who committed the murder and he was found guilty and confessed before his death.'

'Was that when Henry took over in London, then?'

'Wait a moment. Here it is.' He skimmed down the paragraph. 'No, it was in 1502.' He realized all of a sudden what he had just said, and repeated in a new, bewildered tone: 'In - 1502.'

'But - but - but that was -'

'Yes. Nearly twenty years afterwards.'

Brent fumbled for his cigarette case, took it out, and then put it hastily away again.

'Smoke if you like,' Grant said. 'It's a good stiff drink I need. I don't think my brain can be working very well. I feel the way I used to feel as a child when I was blindfolded and be whirled round before beginning a blind-man's-buff game.'

'Yes,' said Carradine. He took out a cigarette and lighted it. 'Completely in the dark, and more than a little dizzy.'

He sat staring at the sparrows.

'Forty million school books can't be wrong,' Grant said after a little.

'Can't they?'

'Well, can they!'

'I used to think so, but I'm not so sure nowadays.'

'Aren't you being a little sudden in your scepticism?'

'Oh, it wasn't this that shook me.'

'What then?'

'A little affair called the Boston Massacre. Ever heard of it?'

'Of course.'

'Well, I discovered quite by accident, when I was looking up something at college, that the Boston Massacre consisted of a mob throwing stones at a sentry. The total casualties were four. I was brought up on the Boston Massacre, Mr Grant. My twenty-eight-inch chest used to swell at the very memory of it. My good red spinach-laden blood used to seethe at the thought of helpless civilians mowed down by the fire of British troops. You can't imagine what a shock it was to find that all it added up to in actual fact was a brawl that wouldn't get more than local reporting in a clash between police and strikers in any American lock-out.'

As Grant made no reply to this, he squinted his eyes against the light to see how Grant was taking it. But Grant was staring at the ceiling as if he were watching patterns forming there.

'That's partly why I like to research so much,' Carradine volunteered; and settled back to staring at the sparrows.

Presently Grant put his hand out, wordlessly, and Carradine gave him a cigarette and lighted it for him.

They smoked in silence.

It was Grant who interrupted the sparrows' performance.

'Tonypandy,' he said.

'How's that?'

But Grant was still far away.

'After all, I've seen the thing at work in my own day, haven't I,' he said, not to Carradine but to the ceiling. 'It's Tonypandy.'

'And what in heck is Tonypandy?' Brent asked. 'It sounds like a patent medicine. Does your child get out of sorts? Does the little face get flushed, the temper short, and the limbs easily tired? Give the little one Tonypandy, and see the radiant results.' And then, as Grant made no answer: 'All right, then; keep your Tonypandy. I wouldn't have it as a gift.'

'Tonypandy,' Grant said, still in that sleep-walking voice, 'is a place in the South of Wales.'

'I knew it was some kind of physic.'

'If you go to South Wales you will hear that, in 1910, the Government used troops to shoot down Welsh miners who were striking for their rights. You'll probably hear that

Winston Churchill, who was Home Secretary at the time, was responsible. South Wales, you will be told, will never forget Tonypandy !'

Carradine had dropped his flippant air.

'And it wasn't a bit like that?'

'The actual facts are these. The rougher section of the Rhondda valley crowd had got quite out of hand. Shops were being looted and property destroyed. The Chief Con stable of Glamorgan sent a request to the Home Office for troops to protect the lieges. If a Chief Constable thinks a situation serious enough to ask for the help of the military a Home Secretary has very little choice in .the matter. But Churchill was so horrified at the possibility of the troops coming face to face with a crowd of rioters and having to fire on them, that he stopped the movement of the troops and sent instead a body of plain, solid Metropolitan Police, armed with nothing but their rolled-up mackintoshes. The troops were kept in reserve, and all contact with the rioters was made by unarmed London police. The only bloodshed in the whole affair was a bloody nose or two. The Home Secretary was severely criticized in the House of Commons incidentally for his "unprecedented intervention". That was Tonypandy. That is the shooting-down by troops that Wales will never forget.'

'Yes,' Carradine said, considering. 'Yes. It's almost a parallel to the Boston affair. Someone blowing up a simple affair to huge proportions for a political end.'

'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 modem 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 straightforward 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 ~ 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.