The Daughter of Time

‘I didn’t mean something out of the files at the Yard. I meant something more – what’s the word? something classic. Something that has puzzled the world for ages.’

‘As what, for instance?’

‘Say, the casket letters.’

‘Oh, not Mary Queen of Scots!’

‘Why not?’ asked Marta, who like all actresses saw Mary Stuart through a haze of white veils. ‘I could be interested in a bad woman but never in a silly one.’

‘Silly?’ said Marta in her best lower-register Electra voice.

‘Very silly.’

‘Oh, Alan, how can you!’

‘If she had worn another kind of headdress no one would ever have bothered about her. It’s that cap that seduces people.’

‘You think she would have loved less greatly in a sun-bonnet?’

‘She never loved greatly at all, in any kind of bonnet.’

Marta looked as scandalised as a lifetime in the theatre and an hour of careful make-up allowed her to.

‘Why do you think that?’

‘Mary Stuart was six feet tall. Nearly all outsize women are cold. Ask any doctor.’

And as he said it he wondered why, in all the years since Marta had first adopted him as a spare escort when she needed one, it had not occurred to him to wonder whether her notorious level-headedness about men had something to do with her inches. But Marta had not drawn any parallels; her mind was still on her favourite Queen.

‘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.’