The Daughter of Time

‘Yes. Of course you’re right. So the children were proclaimed illegitimate, in open Parliament. And Richard was crowned. With all the nobility of England in attendance. Was the Queen still in sanctuary?’

‘Yes. But she had let the younger boy join his brother.’

‘When was that?’

Carradine searched through his notes. ‘On June the 16th. I’ve put: “At the request of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Both boys living at the Tower.”’

‘That was after the news had broken. The news that they were illegitimate.’

‘Yes.’ He tidied his notes into some kind of neatness and put them away in the enormous pocket. ‘That seems to be all, to date. But here’s the pay-off.’ He gathered his train from either side of him on to his knees with a gesture that both Marta and King Richard might have envied. ‘You know that Act, that Titulus Regius.’

‘Yes; what about it?’

‘Well, when Henry VII came to the throne he ordered that the Act should be repealed, without being read. He ordered that the Act itself should be destroyed, and forbade any copies to be kept. Anyone who kept a copy was to be fined and imprisoned during his pleasure.’

Grant stared in great astonishment.

‘Henry VII!’ he said. ‘Why? What possible difference could it make to him?’

‘I haven’t a glimmer of an idea. But I mean to find out before I’m much older. Meanwhile, here is something to keep you amused till the Statue of Liberty brings your British tea.’

He dropped a paper on to Grant’s chest.

‘What is this?’ Grant said, looking at the torn-out page of a note-book.

‘It’s that letter of Richard’s about Jane Shore. I’ll be seeing you.’

Left alone by himself in the quiet, Grant turned over the page and read.

The contrast between the sprawling childish hand-writing and the formal phrases of Richard’s imagining was piquant in the extreme. But what neither the untidy modern script nor the dignified phrases could destroy was the flavour of the letter. The bouquet of good humour that came up from the page as a bouquet comes up from a good-humoured wine. Translated into modern terms it said:

I hear to my great astonishment that Tom Lynom wants to marry Will Shore’s wife. Apparently he is infatuated with her, and is quite determined about it. Do, my dear Bishop, send for him and see if you can talk some sense into his silly head. If you can’t, and if there is no bar to their marriage from the Church’s point of view, then I agree to it, but tell him to postpone the marriage till I am back in London. Meanwhile this will suffice to secure her release, on surety for her good behaviour, and I suggest that you hand her over for the time being to the care of her father, or anyone else who seems good to you.

It was certainly, as young Carradine had said, ‘more in sorrow than in anger’. Indeed, considering that it was written about a woman who had done him a deadly wrong, its kindness and good temper was remarkable. And this was a case where no personal advantage could come to him from magnanimity. The broad mindedness that had sought for a York-Lancaster peace might not have been disinterested; it would have been enormously to his advantage to have a united country to rule. But this letter to the Bishop of Lincoln was a small private matter, and the release of Jane Shore of no importance to anyone but the infatuated Tom Lynom. Richard had nothing to gain by his generosity. His instinct to see a friend happy was apparently greater than his instinct for revenge.

Indeed, his instinct for revenge seemed to be lacking to a degree that would be surprising in any red-blooded male, and quite astonishing in the case of that reputed monster Richard III.

11

The letter lasted Grant very nicely until The Amazon brought his tea. He listened to the twentieth century sparrows on his window-sill and marvelled that he should be reading phrases that formed in a man’s mind more than four hundred years ago. What a fantastic idea it would have seemed to Richard that anyone would be reading that short, intimate letter about Shore’s wife, and wondering about him, four hundred years afterwards.

‘There’s a letter for you, now isn’t that nice,’ The Amazon said, coming in with his two pieces of bread-and-butter and a rock bun.

Grant took his eyes from the uncompromising healthiness of the rock bun and saw that the letter was from Laura.

He opened it with pleasure.