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'An intolerable bounder,' Grant said.

'Oh, no!' she said, looking wounded.

'A hyperthyroid type,' Grant said pitilessly. 'Rocketing to and fro about he earth like a badly made firework. Are you going off duty now?'

'Whenever I've finished my trays.'

'Could you find that book for me tonight?'

'You're supposed to be going to sleep, not staying awake over history books'

'I might a well read some history as look at he ceiling - which is the alternative. Will you get it for me ?'

'I don't think I could go all the way up to the Nurses' Block and back again tonight for someone who is rude about the Lionheart.'

'All right,' he said. 'I'm not he stuff that martyrs are made of. As far as I'm concerned Coeur-de-Lion is the pattern of chivalry, the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, a faultless commander, and a triple D.S.O. Now will you get the book?'

'It seems to me you've sore need to read a little history,' she said, smoothing a mitred sheet-corner with a large admiring hand, 'so I'll bring you the book when I come past. I'm going out to the pictures anyhow.'

It was nearly an hour before she reappeared, immense in a camel-hair coat. The room lights had been put out and she materialized into the light of his reading-lamp like some kindly genie.

'I was hoping you'd be asleep,' she said. 'I don't really think you should start on these tonight.'

'If there is anything that is likely to put me to sleep,' he said, 'it would be an English history book. So you can hold hands with a clear conscience.'

'I'm going with Nurse Burrows.'

'You can still hold hands.'

'I've no patience with you,' she said patiently and faded backwards into the gloom.

She had brought two books.

One was the kind of history book known as a Historical Reader. It bore the same relation to history as Stories from the Bible bears to Holy Writ. Canute rebuked his courtiers on the shore, Alfred burned the cakes, Raleigh spread his cloak for Elizabeth, Nelson took leave of Hardy in his cabin on the Victory, all in nice clear large print and one-sentence paragraphs. To each episode went one full-page illustration.

There was something curiously touching in the fact that The Amazon should treasure this childish literature. He turned to the fly-leaf to see if her name was there. On the fly-leaf was written:

Ella Darroll,

Form III

Newbridge High School

Newbridge

Gloucestershire.

England

Europe,

The World

The Universe.

This was surrounded by a fine selection of coloured transfers.

Did all children do that, he wondered? Write their names like that, and spend their names like that, and spend their time in class making transfers? He certainly had. And the sight of those squares of bright primitive colour brought back his childhood as nothing had for many years. He had forgotten the excitement of transfers. That wonderfully satisfying moment when you began the peeling-off and saw that it was coming perfectly The adult world held few such gratifications. A clean smacking drive at golf, perhaps, was the nearest. Or the moment when your line tightened and you knew that the fish had struck.

The little book pleased him so much that he went through it at his leisure. Solemnly reading each childish story. This, after all, was the history that every adult remembered. This was what remained in their minds when tonnage and poundage, and ship money, and Laud's Liturgy, and the Rye House Plot, and the Triennial Acts, and all the long muddle of schism and shindy, treaty and treason, had faded from their consciousness.

The Richard III story, when he came to it, was called The Princes In The Tower, and it seemed that young Ella had found the Princes a poor substitute for Coeur-de-Lion, since she had filled every small O throughout the tale with neat pencil shading. The two golden-haired boys who played together in the sunbeam from the barred window in the accompanying picture had each been provided with a pair of anachronistic spectacles, and on the blank back of the picture-page someone had been playing Noughts and Crosses. As far as young Ella was concerned the Princes were a deed loss.

And yet it was a sufficiently arresting little story. Macabre enough to delight any child's heart. The innocent children; the wicked uncle. The classic ingredients in a tale of classic simplicity.

It had also a moral. It was the perfect cautionary tale.

But the King won no profit from this wicked deed. The people of England were shocked by his cold-blooded cruelty and decided that they would no longer have him for King. They sent for a distant cousin of Richard's, Henry Tudor, who was living in France, to come and be crowned King in his stead. Richard died bravely in the battle which resulted, but he had made his name hated throughout the country and many deserted him to fight for his rival.

Well, it was neat but not gaudy. Reporting at its simplest.

He turned to the second book.

The second book was the School History proper. The two thousand years of England's story were neatly parcelled into compartments for ready reference. The compartments, as usual, were reigns. It was no wonder that one pinned a personality to a reign, forgetful that that personality had known and lived under other kings. One put them in pigeon-holes automatically. Pepys: Charles II. Shakespeare: Elizabeth, Marlborough: Queen Anne. It never crossed one's mind that someone who had seen Queen Elizabeth could also have seen George I. One had been conditioned to the reign idea from childhood.

However, it did simplify things when you were just a policeman with a game leg and a concussed spine hunting up some information on dead and gone royalties to deep yourself from going crazy.

He was surprised to find the reign of Richard III so short. To have made oneself on e of the best-known rulers in all those two thousand years of England's history, and to have had only two years to do it in, surely augured a towering personality. If Richard had no t made friends he had certainly influenced people.

The history book, too, thought that he had personality.

Richard was a man of great ability, but quite unscrupulous as to his means. He boldly claimed the crown on the absurd ground that his brother's marriage with Elizabeth Woodville had been illegal and the children of it illegitimate. he was accepted by the people, who dreaded a minority, and began his reign by making a progress though the south, where he was well received. During this progress, however, the two young Princes, who were living in the Tower, disappeared, and were believed to have been murdered. A serious rebellion followed, which Richard put down with great ferocity. In order to recover some of his lost popularity he held a Parliament, which passed useful statutes against Benevolences, Maintenance, and Livery.

But a second rebellion followed. This took the form of an invasion, with French troops, by the head of the Lancaster branch, Henry Tudor. He encountered Richard at Bosworth, near Leicester, where the treachery of the Satnleys gave the day to Henry. Richard was killed in the battle, fighting courageously, leaving behind him a name hardly less infamous than that John.

What on earth were Benevolences, Maintenance, and Livery?

And how did the English like having the succession decided for them by French troops?

But, of course, in the days of the Roses, France was still a sort of semi-detached part of England; a country much less foreign to an Englishman than Ireland was A fifteenth-century Englishman went to France as a matter of course; but to Ireland only under protest.

He lay and thought about that England. The England over which the Wars of the Roses had been fought. A free green England; with not a chimney-stack from Cumberland to Cornwall. And England still unheeded, with great forests alive with game, and wide marshes thick with wild-fowl. An England with the same small group of dwellings repeated every few miles in endless permutation: castle, manor, church, and cottages. The strips of cultivation mound the cluster of dwellings, and beyond that the greenness. The unbroken greenness. The deep-rutted lanes that ran from group to group, mired to bog in the winter and white with dust in the summer; decorated with wild roses or read with hawthorn as the seasons came and went.

For thirty years, over this green uncrowded land, the Wars of the Roses had been fought. But it had been more of a blood feud than a war. A Montague and Capulet affair; of no great concern to the average Englishman. No one pushed in at your door to demand whether you were York or Lancaster and to hale you off to a concentration camp if your answer proved to be the wrong one for the occasion. It was a small concentrated war; almost a private party. They fought a battle in your lower meadow, and turned your kitchen into a dressing-station, and then turned your kitchen into a dressing0station, and then moved off somewhere or other to fight a battle somewhere else, and a few weeks later you would hear what ha happened at that battle, and you would have a family row

about the result because your wife was probably Lancaster and you were perhaps York, and it was all rather like following rival football teams. no one persecuted you for being a Lancastrian or a Yorkist, any more than you for being an Arsenal fan or a Chelsea follower.

He was still thinking of that green England when he fell asleep.

And he was not a whit wiser about the two young Princes and their fate.

3

'CAN'T you find something more cheerful to look at than that thing?' 'The Midget asked next morning, referring to die Richard portrait which Grant had propped up against die pile of books on his bed-side table.

'You don't find it an interesting face?'

'Interesting! It gives me die willies. A proper Dismal Desmond.'

'According to the history books he was a man of great ability.'

'So was Bluebeard.'

'And considerable popularity, it would seem.'

'So was Bluebeard.'

'A very fine soldier, too,' Grant said wickedly, and waited. 'No Bluebeard offers?'

'What do you want to look at that face for? Who was he anyway?'

'Richard die Third.'

'Oh, well, I ask you!'

'You mean that's what you expected him to look like.

'Exactly.'

'Why?'

'A murdering brute, wasn't lie?'

'You seem to know your history.'

'Everyone knows that. Did away with his two little nephews, poor brats. Had them smothered.'

'Smothered?' said Grant, interested. 'I didn't know that.'

'Smothered with pillows.' She banged his own pillows with a fragile vigorous fist, and replaced them with speed and precision.

'Why smothering? Why not poison?' Grant inquired.

'Don't ask me. I didn't arrange it.'

'Who said they were smothered?'

'My history book at school said it.'

'Yes, but whom was die history book quoting?'

'Quoting? It wasn't quoting anything. It was just giving facts.'

'Who smothered them, did it say?'

'A man called Tyrrel. Didn't you do any history, at school?'

'I attended history lessons. It is not die same thing. Who was Tyrrel?'

'I haven't the remotest. A friend of Richard's.'

'How did anyone know it was Tyrrel?'

'He confessed.'

'Confessed?'

'After lie bad been found guilty, of course. Before he was hanged.'

'You mean that this Tyrrel was actually banged for the murder of die two Princes?'

'Yes, of course. Shall I take that dreary face away and put up something gayer? There were quite a lot of nice faces in that bundle Miss Hallard brought you yesterday.'

'I'm not interested in nice faces. I'm interested only in dreary ones; in "murdering brutes" who are "men of great ability".'

'Well, there's no accounting for tastes,' said The Midget inevitably. 'And I don't have to look at it, thank goodness. But in my humble estimation it's enough to prevent bones knitting, so help me it is.'

'Well, if my fracture doesn't mend you can put it down to Richard III's account. Another little item on that account won't be noticed, it seems to me.'

He must ask Marta when next she looked in if she too knew about this Tyrrel. Her general knowledge was not very great, but she bad been educated very expensively at a highly approved school and perhaps some of it had stuck.

But the first visitor to penetrate from die outside world proved to be Sergeant Williams; large and pink and scrubbed-looking; and for a little Grant forgot about battles long ago and considered wide boys alive today. Williams sat planted on die small bard visitors' chair, his knees apart and his pale blue eyes blinking like a con' tented cat's in die light from die window, and Grant regarded him with affection. It was pleasant to talk shop again; to use that elliptical, allusive speech that one uses only with another of one's trade. It was pleasant to hear the professional gossip, to talk professional politics; to learn who was on the mat and who was on the skids.

'The Super sent his regards,' Williams said as he got up to go, 'and said if there was anything be could do for you to let him know.' His eyes, no longer dazzled by the light, went to die photograph propped against die books He leant his head sideways at it. 'Who's the bloke?'

Grant was just about to tell him when it occurred to him that here was a fellow policeman. A man as used professionally, to faces as he was himself. Someone to whom faces were of daily importance.

'Portrait of a man by an unknown fifteenth-century painter,' he said. 'What do you make of it?'

'I don't know die first thing about painting.'

'I didn't mean that. I meant what do you make of the subject?'

'Oh. Oh, I sec.' Williams bent forward and drew his bland brows into a travesty of concentration. 'How do you mean: make 0f it?'

'Well, where would you place him? In die dock or on die bench?'

Williams considered for a moment, and then said with Confidence: 'Oh, on die bench.'

You would?'

'Certainly. Why? Wouldn't you?'