The Daughter of Time

Pat sends what would be his love if he were a little older or just a little younger. Being nine, he says: ‘Tell Alan I was asking for him’, and has a fly of his own invention waiting to be presented to you when you come on sick-leave. He is a little in disgrace at the moment in school, having learned for the first time that the Scots sold Charles the First to the English and having decided that he can no longer belong to such a nation. He is therefore, I understand, conducting a one-man protest strike against all things Scottish, and will learn no history, sing no song, nor memorise any geography pertaining to so deplorable a country. He announced going to bed last night that he has decided to apply for Norwegian citizenship.

Grant took his letter pad from the table and wrote in pencil:

Dearest Laura,

Would you be unbearably surprised to learn that the Princes in the Tower survived Richard III?

As ever

Alan

P.S. I am nearly well again.

9

‘Do you know that the Bill attainting Richard III before Parliament didn’t mention the murder of the Princes in the Tower?’ Grant asked the surgeon next morning.

‘Really?’ said the surgeon. ‘That’s odd, isn’t it?’

‘Extremely odd. Can you think of an explanation?’

‘Probably trying to minimise the scandal. For the sake of the family.’

‘He wasn’t succeeded by one of his family. He was the last of his line. His successor was the first Tudor. Henry VII.’

‘Yes, of course. I’d forgotten. I was never any good at history. I used to use the history period to do my home algebra. They don’t manage to make history very interesting in schools. Perhaps more portraits might help.’ He glanced up at the Richard portrait and went back to his professional inspection. ‘That is looking very nice and healthy, I’m glad to say. No pain to speak of now?’

And he went away, kindly and casual. He was interested in faces because they were part of his trade, but history was just something that he used for other purposes; something that he set aside in favour of algebra under the desk. He had living bodies in his care, and the future in his hands; he had no thought to spare for problems academic.

Matron, too, had more immediate worries. She listened politely while he put his difficulty to her, but he had the impression that she might say: ‘I should see the almoner about it if I were you’. It was not her affair. She looked down from her regal eminence at the great hive below her buzzing with activity, all of it urgent and important; she could hardly be expected to focus her gaze on something more than four hundred years away.

He wanted to say: ‘But you of all people should be interested in what can happen to royalty; in the frailness of your reputation’s worth. Tomorrow a whisper may destroy you.’ But he was already guiltily conscious that to hinder a Matron with irrelevances was to lengthen her already lengthy morning round without reason or excuse.

The Midget did not know what an Attainder was, and made it clear that she did not care.

‘It’s becoming an obsession with you, that thing,’ she said, leaning her head at the portrait. ‘It’s not healthy. Why don’t you read some of those nice books?’

Even Marta, whose visit he had looked forward to so that he could put this odd, new proposition to her and see her reaction, even Marta was too full of wrath with Madeleine March to pay any attention to him.

‘After practically promising me that she would write it! After all our get-together and my plans for when this endless thing finally comes to an end. I had even talked to Jacques about clothes! And now she decides that she must write one of her awful little detective stories. She says she must write it while it is fresh – whatever that is.’

He listened to Marta’s grieving with sympathy – good plays were the scarcest commodity in the world and good playwrights worth their weight in platinum – but it was like watching something through a window. The fifteenth century was more actual to him this morning than any on-goings in Shaftesbury Avenue.

‘I don’t suppose it will take her long to write her detective book,’ he said comfortingly.