The Daughter of Time

‘I don’t know about a temperature, but my blood pressure’s away up.’

‘Oh dear, dear,’ she said, taking this literally. ‘And you were doing so very well. Nurse Ingham will be so distressed. She has been boasting about your good recovery.’

That The Midget should have found him a subject for boasting was a new idea to Grant, but it was not one that gave him any gratification. He resolved to have a temperature in earnest if he could manage it, just to score off The Midget.

But the morning visit of Marta distracted him from this experiment in the power of mind over matter.

Marta, it seemed, was pluming herself on his mental health very much as The Midget was pluming herself on his physical improvement. She was delighted that her pokings-about with James in the print shop had been so effective.

‘Have you decided on Perkin Warbeck, then?’ she asked.

‘No. Not Warbeck. Tell me: what made you bring me a portrait of Richard III? There’s no mystery about Richard, is there?’

‘No. I suppose we took it as illustration to the Warbeck story. No, wait a moment. I remember. James turned it up and said: “If he’s mad about faces, there’s one for him!” He said: “That’s the most notorious murderer in history, and yet his face is in my estimation the face of a saint”.’

‘A saint!’ Grant said; and then remembered something. “Over-conscientious”,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. I was just remembering my first impressions of it. Is that how it seemed to you: the face of a saint?’

She looked across at the picture, propped up against the pile of books. ‘I can’t see it against the light,’ she said, and picked it up for a closer scrutiny.

He was suddenly reminded that to Marta, as to Sergeant Williams, faces were a professional matter. The slant of an eyebrow, the set of a mouth, was just as much an evidence of character to Marta as to Williams. Indeed she actually made herself faces to match the characters she played.

‘Nurse Ingham thinks he’s a dreary. Nurse Darroll thinks he’s a horror. My surgeon thinks he’s a polio victim. Sergeant Williams thinks he’s a born judge. Matron thinks he’s a soul in torment.’

Marta said nothing for a little while. Then she said: ‘It’s odd, you know. When you first look at it you think it a mean, suspicious face. Even cantankerous. But when you look at it a little longer you find that it isn’t like that at all. It is quite calm. It is really quite a gentle face, perhaps that is what James meant by being saint-like.’

‘No. No, I don’t think so. What he meant was the – subservience to conscience.’

‘Whatever it is, it is a face, isn’t it! Not just a collection of organs for seeing, breathing, and eating with. A wonderful face. With very little alteration, you know, it might be a portrait of Lorenzo the Magnificent.’

‘You don’t suppose that it is Lorenzo and that we’re considering the wrong man altogether?’

‘Of course not. Why should you think that?’

‘Because nothing in the face fits the facts of history. And pictures have got shuffled before now.’

‘Oh, yes, of course they have. But that is Richard all right. The original – or what is supposed to be the original is at Windsor Castle. James told me. It is included in Henry VIII’s inventory, so it has been there for four hundred years or so. And there are duplicates at Hatfield and Albury.’

‘It’s Richard,’ Grant said resignedly. ‘I just don’t know anything about faces. Do you know anyone at the B.M.?’

‘At the British Museum?’ Marta asked, her attention still on the portrait. ‘No, I don’t think so. Not that I can think of at the moment. I went there once to look at some Egyptian Jewellery, when I was playing Cleopatra with Geoffrey – did you ever see Geoffrey’s Antony? it was superlatively genteel but the place frightens me rather. Such a garnering of the ages. It made me feel the way the stars make you feel: small and no-account. What do you want of the B.M.?’

‘I wanted some information about history written in Richard III’s day. Contemporary accounts.’

‘Isn’t the sainted Sir Thomas any good, then?’

‘The sainted Sir Thomas is nothing but an old gossip,’ Grant said with venom. He had taken a wild dislike to the much-admired More.

‘Oh, dear. And the nice man at the Library seemed so reverent about him. The Gospel of Richard III according to St Thomas More, and all that.’

‘Gospel nothing,’ Grant said rudely. ‘He was writing down in a Tudor England what someone had told him about events that happened in a Plantagenet England when he himself was five.’

‘Five years old?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, dear. Not exactly the horse’s mouth.’

‘Not even straight from the course. Come to think of it, it’s as reliable as a bookie’s tips would be. He’s on the wrong side of the rails altogether. If he was a Tudor servant he was on the laying side where Richard III was concerned.’

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so. What do you want to find out about Richard, when there is no mystery to investigate?’