第 12 页

'The sainted Sir Thomas (alias John Morton) says that Richard got busy being charming to the Queen am persuading her not to send a large bodyguard to escort the boy prince from Ludlow; meanwhile cooking up a plot t kidnap the boy on his way to London.'

'According to the sainted More, then, Richard meant m 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 con temporary accusation?

Henry had not even needed proof that Richard was him self 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 I' 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 likeable 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 small 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 under stand, conducting a one-man protest strike against all things Scottish, and will learn no history, sing no song, nor memorize any geography pertaining to so deplorable a country. He announced this going to bed last night and that he has decided to apply for Norwegian citizenship.

Grant took his letter pad from the table and wrote in pencil:

Dearest Laura,

Would you be unbearably surprised to learn that the Princes in the Tower survived Richard III?

As ever

Alan

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 minimize 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 Un forgivable, 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 liquorices 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.'

'I suspected as much. Let us have the facts. Can you begin on the day Edward died?'

'Sure. Edward died on April the 9th 1483. In London. I mean, in Westminster; which wasn't the same thing then. The Queen and the daughters were living there, and the younger boy, I think. 'The young Prince was doing lessons at Ludlow Castle in charge of the Queen's brother, Lord Rivers. The Queen's relations are very much to the fore, did you know? The place is just lousy with Woodvilles.'

'Yes, I know. Go on. Where was Richard?'

'On the Scottish border.'

'What!'

'Yes, I said: on the Scottish border. Caught away off base. But does he yell for a horse and go posting off to London? He does not.'

'What did he do?'

'He arranged for a requiem mass at York, to which all the nobility of the North were summoned, and in his presence took an oath of loyalty to the young Prince.'

'Interesting,' Grant said dryly. 'What did Rivers do? The Queen's brother?'

'On the 24th of April he set out with the Prince for London. With two thousand men and a large supply of arms.'

'What did he want the arms for?'

'Don't ask me. I'm only a research worker. Dorset, the elder of the Queen's two sons by her first marriage, took over both the arsenal and the treasure in the Tower and began to fit up ships to command the Channel. And Council orders were issued in the name of Rivers and Dorset ? "avunculus Regis" and "frater Regis uterinus" respectively ? with no mention of Richard. Which was decidedly off colour when you remember ? if you ever knew ? that in his will Edward had appointed Richard guardian of the boy and Protector of the Kingdom in case of any minority. Richard alone, mind you, without a colleague.'

'Yes, that is in character, at least. He must always have had complete faith in Richard. Both as a person and as an administrator. Did Richard come south with a young army too?'

'No. He came with six hundred gentlemen of the North, all in deep mourning. He arrived at Northampton on April the 29th, He had apparently expected to join up with the Ludlow crowd there; but that is report and you have only a historian's word for it. But the Ludlow procession ? Rivers and the young Prince - had gone on to Stony Stratford without waiting for him. The person who actually met him at Northampton was the Duke of Bucking-ham with three hundred men. Do you know Buckingham?''