The Daughter of Time

A man called Caxton came out of the Weald of Kent as draper’s apprentice to a future Lord Mayor of London, and then went to Bruges with the twenty merks his master left him in his will. And when, in the dreary autumn rain of the Low Countries, two young refugees from England fetched up on those low shores, in very low water, it was the successful merchant from the Weald of Kent who gave them succour. The refugees were Richard IV and his brother Richard; and when in the turn of the wheel Edward came back to rule England, Caxton came too, and the first books printed in England were printed for Richard IV and written by Edward’s brother-in-law.

He turned the pages and marvelled how dull information is deprived of personality. The sorrows of humanity are no one’s sorrows, as newspaper readers long ago found out. A frisson of horror may go down one’s spine at wholesale destruction but one’s heart stays unmoved. A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy. So Mr Tanner’s account of the progress of the English race was admirable but unexciting. But here and there where he could not avoid the personal his narrative flowered into a more immediate interest. In extracts from the Pastons’ letters, for instance. The Pastons had a habit of sandwiching scraps of history between orders for salad oil and inquiries as to how Clement was doing at Cambridge. And between two of those domesticities appeared the small item that the two little York boys, George, and Richard, were living in the Pastons’ London lodgings, and that their brother Edward came every day to see them.

Surely, thought Grant, dropping the book for a moment on the counterpane and staring up at the now invisible ceiling, surely never before can anyone have come to the throne of England with so personal an experience of the ordinary man’s life as Richard IV and his brother Richard. And perhaps only Charles II after them. And Charles, even in poverty and flight, had always been a King’s son; a man apart. The two little boys who were living in the Pastons’ lodgings were merely the babies of the York family. Of no particular importance at the best of times, and at the moment when the Paston letter was written without a home and possibly without a future.

Grant readied for The Amazon’s history book to find out what Edward was about in London at that date, and learned that he was collecting an army. ‘London was always Yorkist in temper, and men flocked with enthusiasm to the banner of the youthful Edward,’ said the history book.

And yet young Edward, aged eighteen, idol of a capital city and on the way to the first of his victories, found time to come every day to see his small brothers.

Was it now, Grant wondered, that the remarkable devotion of Richard to his elder brother was born. An unwavering life-long devotion that the history books not only did not deny but actually used in order to point the moral. ‘Up to the moment of his brother’s death Richard had been in all vicissitudes his loyal and faithful helpmeet, but the opportunity of a crown proved too much for him.’ Or in the simpler words of the Historical Reader: ‘He had been a good brother to Edward but when he saw that he might become King greed hardened his heart.’

Grant took a sideways look at the portrait and decided that the Historical Reader was off the beam. Whatever had hardened Richard’s heart to the point of murder had not been greed. Or did the Historical Reader mean greed for power? Probably. Probably.

But surely Richard must have had all the power that mortal man could wish. He was the King’s brother, and rich. Was that short step further so important that he could murder his brother’s children to achieve it?

It was an odd set-up altogether.

He was still mulling it over in his mind when Mrs Tinker came in with fresh pyjamas for him and her daily précis of the newspaper headlines. Mrs Tinker never read past the third headline of a report unless it happened to be a murder, in which case she read every word and bought an evening paper for herself on the way home to cook Tinker’s supper.

Today the gentle burble of her comment on a Yorkshire arsenic-and-exhumation case flowed over him unbroken until she caught sight of the morning paper lying in its virgin condition alongside the books on the table. This brought her to a sudden halt.

‘You not feelin’ so good today?’ she asked in a concerned way.

‘I’m fine, Tink, fine. Why?’

‘You ‘aven’t as much as opened your paper. That’s ’ow my sister’s gel started her decline. Not takin’ no notice of what was in the paper.’

‘Don’t you worry. I’m on the up-grade. Even my temper has improved. I forgot about the paper because I’ve been reading history stories. Ever heard of the Princes in the Tower?’

‘Everyone’s ’eard of the Princes in the Tower.’

‘And do you know how they met their end?’

‘Course I do. He put a pillow on their faces when they was asleep.’

‘Who did?’