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'At least she was a martyr. You'll have to allow her that.'

'Martyr to what?'

'Her religion.'

'The only thing she was a martyr to was rheumatism. She married Darnley without the Pope's dispensation, and Bothwell by Protestant rites.'

'In a moment you'll be telling me she wasn't a prisoner!'

'The trouble with you is that you think of her in a little room at the top of a castle, with bars on the window and a faithful old attendant to share her prayers with her. In actual fact she had a personal household of sixty persons. She complained bitterly when it was reduced to a beggarly thirty, and nearly died of chagrin when it was reduced to two male secretaries, several women, an embroiderer, and a cook or two. And Elizabeth had to pay for all that out of her own purse. For twenty years she paid, and for twenty years Mary Stuart hawked the crown of Scotland round Europe to anyone who would start a revolution and put her back on the throne that she had lost; or , alternatively, on the one Elizabeth was sitting on.'

He looked at Marta and found that she was smiling.

'Are they a little better now?' she asked.

'Are what better?'

'The prickles.'

He laughed.

'Yes. For a whole minute I had forgotten about them. That is at least one good thing to be put down to Mary Stuart's account!'

'How do you know so much about Mary?'

'I did an essay about her in my last year at school.'

'And didn't like her, I take it'

'Didn't like what I found out about her.'

'You don't think her tragic, then.'

'Oh, yes, very. But not tragic in any of the ways that popular belief makes her tragic. Her tragedy was that she was born a Queen with the outlook of a suburban housewife. Scoring off Mrs Tudor in the next street is harmless and amusing; it may lead you into unwarrantable indulgence in hire-purchase, but it affects only yourself. When you use the same technique on kingdoms the result is disastrous. If you are willing to put a country of ten million people in pawn in order to score off a royal rival, then you end by being a friendless failure.' He lay thinking about it for a little. 'She would have been a wild success as a mistress at a girls' school.'

'Beast!'

'I meant it nicely. The staff would have liked her, and all the little girls would have adored her. That is what I meant about her being tragic.'

'Ah well. No casket letters, it seems. What else is there? The Man In The Iron Mask.'

'I can't remember who that was, but I couldn't be interested in anyone who was being coy behind some tinplate. I couldn't be interested in anyone at all unless I could see his face.'

'Ah, yes. I forgot your passion for faces. The Borgias had wonderful faces. I should think they would provide a little mystery or two for you to dabble in if you looked them up. Or there was Perkin Warbeck, of course. Imposture is always fascinating. Was he or wasn't he: A lovely game. The balance can never come down wholly on one side or the other. You push it over and up it comes again, like one of those weighted toys.'

The door opened and Mrs. Tinkers' homely face appeared in the aperture surmounted by her still more homely and historic hat. Mrs. Tinker had worn the same hat since first she began to 'd' for Grant, and he could not imagine her in any other. That she did possess another one he knew, because it went with something that she referred to as 'me blue'. Her 'blue' was an occasional affair, in both senses, and never appeared at 19 Tenby Court. It was worn with a ritualistic awareness, and having been worn it was used in the event as a yardstick by which to judge the proceedings. ('Did you enjoy it, Tink? What was it like?' 'Not worth putting on me blue for l.') She had worn it to Princess Elizabeth's wedding, and to various other royal functions, and had indeed figured in it for tow flashing seconds in a newsreel shot of the Duchess of Kent cutting a ribbon, but to Grant it was a mere report; a criterion of the social worth of an occasion. A thing was or was not worth putting on 'me blue' for.

'I 'eard you 'ad a visitor,' said Mrs. Tinker, 'and I was all set to go away again when I thought the voice sounded familiar like, and I says to meself: "It's only Miss Hallard," I says, so I come in.'

She was carrying various paper bags and a small tight bunch of anemones. She greeted Marta as woman to woman, having been in her time a dresser and having therefore no exaggerated reverence for the goddesses of the theatre world, and looked askance at the beautiful arrangement of lilac sprays that had blossomed under Marta's ministrations. Marta did not see the glance but she saw the little bunch of anemones and took over the situation as if it were something already rehearsed.

'I squander my vagabond's hire on white lilac for you, and then Mrs. Tinker puts my nose out of joint by bringing you the Lilies of The Field.'

'Lilies?' said Mrs Tinker, doubtfully.

'Those are the Solomon in all his glory thins. The ones that toiled not neither did they spin.'

Mrs. Tinker went to church only for weddings and christenings, but she belonged to a generation that had been sent to Sunday school. She looked with a new interest at the little handful of glory encased by her woollen glove.

'Well, now. I never knew that. Makes more sense that way, don't it. I always pictured them arums. Fields and fields of arums. Awful expensive, you know, but a bit depressing. So they was colored? Well, why can't they say so? What do they have to call them lilies for!'

And they went on to talk about translation, and how misleading Holy Writ could be ('I always wondered what bread on the waters was,' Mrs. Tinker said) and the awkward moment was over.

While they were still busy with the Bible, The Midget came in with extra flower vases. Grant noticed that the vases were designed to hold white lilac and not anemones. They were a tribute to Marta; a passport to further communing. But Marta never bothered about women unless she had an immediate use for them; her tact with Mrs. Tinker had been mere savoir fairs; a conditioned reflex. So The Midget was reduced to being functional instead of social. She collected the discarded narcissi from the wash-basin and meekly put them back into a vase. The Midget being meek was the most beautiful sight that had gladdened Grant's eyes for a long time.

'Well,' Marta said, having finished her arrangement of the lilac and placed the result where he could see it, 'I shall leave Mrs. Tinker to feed you all the titbits out of those paper bags. It couldn't be, could it, Mrs. Tinker darling, that one of those bags contains any of your wonderful bachelor's buttons?'

Mrs. Tinker glowed.

'You'd like one or two maybe? Fresh outa me over?'

'Well, of course I shall have to do penance for it afterwards - those little rich cakes are death on the waist - but just give me a couple to put in my bag for my tea at the theatre.'

She chose two with a flattering deliberation ('I like them a little brown at the edges'), dropped them into her handbag, and said:' Well, au revoir, Alan. I shall look in, in a day or two, and start you on a sock. There is nothing so soothing, I understand, as knitting. Isn't that so, nurse?'

'Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. A lot of my gentlemen patients take to knitting. They find it whiles away the time very nicely.'

Marta blew him a kiss from the door and was gone, followed by the respectful Midget.

'I'd be surprised if that hussy is any better than she ought to be, ' Mrs. Tinker said, beginning to open the paper bags. She was not referring to Marta.

2

BUT when Marta came back two days later it was not with knitting needles and wool. She breezed in, very dashing in a Cossack hat worn at a casual rake that must have taken her several minutes at her mirror, just after lunch.

'I haven't come to stay, my dear. I'm on my way to the theatre. It's matinee day, God help me. Tea trays and morons. And we've all got to the d frightful stage when the lines have ceased to have any meaning at all for us. I don't think this play is ever coming off. It's going to be like those New York ones that run by the decade instead of by the year. It's too frightening. One's mind just won't stay on the thing. Geoffrey dried up in the middle of the second act last night. His eyes nearly popped out of his head. I thought for a moment he was having a stroke. He said afterwards that he had no recollection of anything that happened between his entrance and the point where he came to and found himself half-way through the act.'

'A black-out, you mean?'

'No. Oh, no. Just being an automaton. Saying the lines and doing the business and thinking of something else all the time.'

'If all reports are true that's no unusual matter where actors are concerned.'

'Oh, in moderation, no. Johnny Garson can tell you how much paper there is in the house what time his is sobbing his heart out on someone's' lap. But that's different from being "away" for half an act. Do you realize that Geoffrey had turned his son out of the house, quarreled with his mistress, and accused his wife of having an affair with his best friend, all without being aware of it?'

'What was he aware of?'

'He says he had decided to lease his Park Lane flat to Dolly Dacre and buy that the second house at Richmond that the Latimers are giving up because he has got that Governor's appointment. He had thought about the lack of bathrooms and decided that the little upstairs room with the eighteenth-century Chinese paper would make a very good one. They could remove the beautiful paper and use it to decorate that dull little room downstairs at the back. It's full of Victorian panelling, the dull little room. He had also reviewed the drainage, wondered if he had enough money to take the old tiling off and replacing it, and speculated as to what kind of cooking range they had in the kitchen. He had just decided to get rid of the shrubbery at he gate when he found himself face to face with me, on a stage, in the presence of nine hundred and eighty-seven people, in the middle of a speech. Do you wonder that his eyes popped! I see that you have managed to read at least one of the books I brought you - if the rumpled jacket is any criterion.'

'Yes. The mountain one. It was a godsend. I lay for hours looking at the pictures. Nothing puts things in perspective as quickly as a mountain.'

'The stars are better, I find.'

'Oh, no. The stars merely reduce one to the status of an amoeba. The stars take the last vestige of human pride, the last spark of confidence, from one. But a snow mountain is a nice human-size yard-stick. I lay and looked at Everest and thanked God that I wasn't climbing those slopes. A hospital bed was a haven of warmth and rest and security by comparison, and The Midget and The Amazon two of the highest achievements of civilization.'

'Ah, well, here are some more pictures for you.'

Marta up-ended the quarto envelope she was carrying, and spilled a collection of paper sheets over his chest.

'What is this?'

'Faces,' said Marta, delightedly. 'Dozens of faces for you. Men, women, and children. All sorts, conditions, and sizes.'

He picked a sheet off his chest and looked at it. It was an engraving of a fifteenth-century portrait. A woman.

'Who is this?'

'Lucrezia Borgia. Isn't she a duck.'

'Perhaps, but are you suggesting that there was any mystery about her?'

'Oh, yes. No one has ever decided whether she was her brother's tool or his accomplice.'

He discarded Lucrezia, and picked up a second sheet. This proved to be the portrait of a small boy in late eighteenth-century clothes, and under it in faint capitals were printed the words: Louis XVII.

'Now there's a beautiful mystery for you,' Marta said. 'The Dauphin. Did he escape or did he die in captivity?'

'Where did you get all these?'

'I routed James out of his cubby-hole at the Victoria and Albert, and made him take me to a print shop. I knew he would know about that sort of thing, and I'm sure he has nothing to interest him at the V. and A.'

It was so like Marta to take it for granted that a Civil Servant, because he happened also to be a playwright and an authority on portraits, should be willing to leave his work and delve about in print shops for her pleasure.

He turned up the photograph of an Elizabethan portrait. A man in velvet and pearl. He turned the back to see who this might be and found that it was the Earl of Leicester.

'So that is Elizabeth's Robin,' he said. 'I don't think I ever saw a portrait of him before.'

Marta looked down on the virile fleshy face and said: 'It occurs to me for the first time that one of the major tragedies of history is that the best painters didn't paint you till you were past your best. Robin must have been quite a man. They say Henry the Eighth was dazzling as a young man, but what is he now? Something on a playing card. Nowadays we know what Tennyson was like before he grew that frightful beard. I must fly. I'm late as it is. I've been lunching at the Blague, and so many people came up to talk that I couldn't get away as early as I meant to.'

'I hope your host was impressed,' Grant said, with a glance at the hat.

'Oh, yes. She knows about hats. She took one look and said "Jacques Tous, I take it."'

'She!' said Grant surprised.

'Yes. Madeleine March. And it was I who was giving her luncheon. Don't look so astonished: it isn't tactful. I'm hoping, if you must know, that she'll write me that play about Lady Blessington. But there was such a to-ing and fro-ing that I had no chance to make any impression on her. However, I gave her a wonderful meal. Which reminds me that Tony Bittmaker was entertaining a party of seven. Magnums galore. How do you imagine he keeps going?'

'Lack of evidence.' Grant said, and she laughed and went away.

In the silence he went back to considering Elizabeth's Robin. What mystery was there about Robin?

Oh, yes. Amy Robsart, of course.