第 16 页

'But I thought they were very holy people-the Covenanters, I mean.'

'You've been looking at nineteenth-century pictures conventicles. The reverent little gathering in the heather listening to the preacher; young rapt faces, and white hair blowing in the winds of God. The Covenanters were the exact equivalent of the I.R.A. in Ireland. A small irreconcilable minority, and as bloodthirsty a crowd as ever disgraced a Christian nation. If you went to church on Sunday instead of to a conventicle, you were liable to wake on Monday and find your barn burned or your horses hamstrung. If you were more open in your disapproval you were shot. The men who shot Archbishop Sharp in his daughter's presence, in broad daylight on a road in Fife, were the heroes Of the movement. "Men of courage and zeal for the cause of God", according to their admiring followers. They lived safe and swaggering among their Covenanting fans in the West for years. It was a "preacher of the gospel" who shot Bishop Honeyman in an Edinburgh street. And they shot the old parish priest of Carsphairn on his own doorstep.'

'It does sound like Ireland, doesn't it,' Carradine said. 'They were actually worse than the I.R.A. because there was a fifth column element in it. They were financed from Holland, and their arms came from Holland. There was nothing forlorn about their movement, you know. They expected to take over the Government any day, and rule Scotland. All their preaching was pure sedition. The most violent incitement to crime you could imagine. No modern Government could afford to be so patient with such a menace as the Government of the time were. The Covenanters were continually being offered amnesties.'

'Well, well. And I thought they were fighting for freedom to worship God their own way.'

'No one ever stopped them from worshipping God any way they pleased. What they were out to do was to impose their method of church government not only on Scotland but on England, believe it or not. You should read the Covenant some day. Freedom of worship was not to be allowed to anyone according to the Covenanting creed-except the Covenanters, of course.'

'And all those gravestones and monuments that tourists go to see-'

'All Tonypandy. If you ever read on a gravestone that John Whosit "suffered death for his adherence to the Word of God and Scotland's Covenanted work of Reformation", with a- touching little verse underneath about "dust sacrificed to tyranny", you can be sure that the said John Whosit was found guilty before a properly constituted court, of a civil crime punishable by death and that his death had nothing whatever to do with the Word of God.' He laughed a little under his breath. 'It's the final irony, you know, that a group whose name was anathema to the rest of Scotland in their own time should have been elevated into the position of saints and martyrs.'

'I wouldn't wonder if it wasn't onomatopoeic,' Carradine said thoughtfully.

'What?'

'Like the Cat and the Rat, you know.'

'What are you talking about?'

"Member you said, about that Cat and Rat lampoon, that rhyme, that the sound of it made it an offence?'

'Yes; made it venomous.'

'Well, the word dragoon does the same thing. I take it that the dragoons were just the policemen of the time.'

'Yes. Mounted infantry.'

'Well, to me-and I suspect to every other person reading about it-dragoons sound dreadful. They've come to mean something that they never were.'

'Yes, I see. Force majeure in being. Actually the Government had only a tiny handful of men to police an enormous area, so the odds were all on the Covenanters' side. In more ways than one. A dragoon (read policeman) couldn't arrest anyone without a warrant (he couldn't stable his horse without the owner's permission, if it comes to that), but there was nothing to hinder a Covenanter lying snug in the heather and picking off dragoons at his leisure. Which they did, of course. And now there's a whole literature about the poor ill-used saint in the heather with his pistol; and the dragoon who died in the course of his duty is a Monster.'

'Like Richard.'

'Like Richard. How have you been getting on with our own particular Tonypandy?'

'Well, I still haven't managed to find out why Henry was so anxious to hush up that Act as well as repeal it. The thing was hushed-up and for years it was forgotten, until the original draft turned up, just by chance, in the Tower records. It was printed in 1611. Speed printed the full text of it in his History of Great Britain.'

'Oh. So there's no question at all about Titulus Regius. Richard succeeded as the Act says, and the sainted More's account is nonsense. There never was an Elizabeth Lucy in the matter.'

'Lucy? Who's Elizabeth Lucy?'

'Oh, I forgot. You weren't on in that act. According to the sainted More, Richard claimed that Edward was married to one of his mistresses, one Elizabeth Lucy.'

The disgusted look that the mention of the sainted More always caused on young Carradine's mild face made him look almost nauseated.

'That's nonsense.'

'So the sainted More smugly pointed out.' 'Why did they want to hide Eleanor Butler?' Carradine said, seeing the point.

'Because she really had married Edward, and the children really were illegitimate. And if the children really were illegitimate, by the way, then no one would rise in their favour and they were no danger to Richard. Have you noticed that the Woodville-Lancastrian invasion was in Henry's favour, and not in the boys'- although Dorset was their half-brother? And that was before any rumours of their non-existence could have reached him. As far as the leaders of the Dorset-Morton rebellion were concerned the boys were of no account. They were backing Henry. That way, Dorset would have a brother-in-law on the throne of England, and 'the Queen would be his half-sister. Which would be a nice reversal of form for a penniless fugitive.'

'Yes. Yes, that's a point, all right; that about Dorset not fighting to restore his half-brother. If there had been a chance at all that England would have accepted the boy, he surely would have backed the boy. I'll tell you another interesting thing I found. The Queen and her daughters came out of sanctuary quite soon. It's your talking about her son Dorset that reminded me. She not only came out of sanctuary but settled down as if nothing had happened. Her daughters went to festivities at the Palace. And do you know what the pay-off is?'

'No?'

'That was after the Princes had been "murdered". Yes, and I'll tell you something else. With her two boys done to death by their wicked uncle, she writes to her other son, in France-Dorset-and asks him to come home and make his peace with Richard, who will treat him well.'

There was silence. There were no sparrows to talk today. Only the soft sound of the rain against the window.

'No comment?' Carradine said at last.

'You know,' Grant said, 'from the police point of view there is no case against Richard at all. And I mean that literally. It isn't that the case isn't good enough. -Good enough to bring into court, I mean. There, quite literally, isn't any case against him at all?

'I'll say there isn't. Especially when I tell you that every single one of those people whose names you sent me were alive and prosperous, and free, when Richard -was killed at Bosworth. They were not only free, they were very well cared for. Edward's children not only danced at the Palace, they had pensions. He appointed one of the crowd his heir when his own boy died.'

'Which one?'

'George's boy.'

'So he meant to reverse the attainder on his brother's children.'

'Yes. He had protested about his being condemned, if you remember.'

'According to even the Sainted More, he did. So all the heirs to the throne of England were going about their business, free and unfettered, during the reign of Richard III, the Monster.'

'They were more. They were part of the general scheme of things. I mean, part of the family and the general economy of the realm. I've been reading a collection of York records by a man Davies. Records of the town of York, I mean; not the family. Both young Warwick-George's son-and his cousin, young Lincoln, -were members of the Council The town addressed a letter to them. In 1485, that was. What's more, Richard knighted young Warwick at the same time as he knighted his own son, at a splendid "do" at York.' He paused a long moment, and then blurted out 'Mr Grant, do you want to write a book about this?'

'A book!' Grant said, astonished. 'God forbid. Why?'

'Because I should like to write one It would make a much better book than the Peasants.' -

'Write away'

'You see, I'd like to have something to show my father. Pop thinks I'm no good because I can't take an interest in furniture, and marketing, and graphs of sales. If he could actually handle a book that I had written he might believe that I wasn't so hopeless a bet after all. In fact, I wouldn't put it past him to begin to boast about me for a change.'

Grant looked at him with benevolence.

'I forgot to ask you what you thought of Crosby Place,' he said.

'Oh, fine, fine. If Carradine the Third ever sees it he'll want to take it back with him and rebuild it in the Adirondacks somewhere.'

'If you write that book about Richard, he most certainly - will. He'll feel like a part-owner. What are you going to call it?'

'The book?' -'Yes.'

'I'm going to borrow a phrase from Henry Ford, and call it History Is The Bunk.'

'Excellent.'

'However, I'll have a lot more reading to do and a lot more research, before I can start writing.'

'Most assuredly you have. You haven't arrived yet at the real question.'

'What is that?'

'Who did murder the boys.'

'Yes, of course,'

'If the boys were alive when Henry took over the Tower what happened to them?'

'Yes. I'll get on to that. I still want to know why it was so important to Henry to hush up the contents of Titulus Regius.'

He got up to go, and then noticed the portrait that was lying on its face on the table. He reached over and restored the photograph to its original place, propping it with a concerned care against the pile of books.

'You stay there,' he said to the painted Richard. 'I'm going to put you back where you belong.'

As he went out of the door, Grant said:

'I've just thought of a piece of history which is not Tonypandy.'

'Yes?' said Carradine, lingering. 'The massacre of Glencoe.' 'That really did happen?' 'That really did happen. And-Brent!' Brent put his head back inside the door. 'Yes?'

'The man who gave the order for it was an ardent Covenanter.'

13

CARRADINE had not been gone more than twenty minutes when Marta appeared, laden with flowers, books, candy, and goodwill. She found Grant deep in the fifteenth century as reported by Sir Cuthbert Oliphant. He greeted her with an absentmindedness to which she was not accustomed

'If your two sons had been murdered by your brother in-law, would you take a handsome pension from him?'

'I take it that the question is, rhetorical,' Marta said, putting down her sheaf of flowers and looking round to see which of the already occupied vases would best suit their type.

'Honestly, I think historians are all mad Listen to this:

"The conduct of the Queen-Dowager is bard to explain; whether she feared to be taken from sanctuary by force, or whether she was merely tired of her forlorn existence at Westminster, and had resolved to be reconciled to the murderer of her sons out of mere callous apathy, seems uncertain."

'Merciful Heaven!' said Marta, pausing with a delft jar in one hand and a glass cylinder in the other, and looking at him in wild surmise.

'Do you think historians really listen to what they are saying?'

'Who was the said Queen-Dowager?'

'Elizabeth Woodville. Edward IV's wife.'

'Oh, yes. I played her once. It was a "bit". In a play about Warwick the Kingmaker.'

'Of course I'm only a policeman,' Grant said. 'Perhaps I never moved in the right circles. It may be that I've met only nice people. Where would one have to go to meet a woman who became matey with the murderer of her two boys?'

'Greece, I should think,' Marta said. 'Ancient Greece.'

'I can't remember a sample even there.'

'Or a lunatic asylum, perhaps. Was there any sign of idiocy about Elizabeth Woodville?'

'Not that anyone ever noticed. And she was Queen for twenty years or so.'

'Of course the thing is farce, I hope you see,' Marta said, going on with her flower arranging. 'Not tragedy at all. "Yes, I know he did kill Edward and little Richard, but he really is a rather charming creature and it is so bad for my rheumatism living in rooms with a north light".'

Grant laughed, and his good temper came back.

'Yes, of course. It's the height of absurdity. It belongs to Ruthless Rhymes, not to sober history. That is why historians surprise me. They seem to have no talent for the likeliness of any situation. They see history like a peepshow; with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.'

'Perhaps when you are grubbing about with tattered records you haven't time to learn about people. I don't mean about the people in the records, but just about People. Flesh and blood. And how they react to circumstances.'

'How would you play her?' Grant asked, remembering that the understanding of motive was Marta's trade.

'Play who?'

'The woman who came out of sanctuary and made friends with her children's murderer for seven hundred merks per annum and the right to go to parties at the Palace.'

'I couldn't. There is no such woman outside Euripides or a delinquent's home. One could only play her as a rag. She'd make a very good burlesque, now I think of it. A take-off of poetic tragedy. The blank verse kind. I must try it sometime. For a charity matinée, or some thing. I hope you don't hate mimosa. It's odd, considering how long I've known you, how little I know of your likes and dislikes. Who invented the woman who became buddies with her sons' murderer?'