The Daughter of Time

‘Then if it’s mathematics they’ve no right to drag in backstairs gossip,’ Grant said, suddenly vicious. The memory of the sainted More continued to upset him. He thumbed through the fat respectable Sir Cuthbert in a farewell review. As he came to the final pages the progress of the paper from under his thumb slackened, and presently stopped.

‘Odd,’ he said, ‘how willing they are to grant a man the quality of courage in battle. They have only tradition to go on, and yet not one of them questions it. Not one of them, in fact, fails to stress it.’

‘It was an enemy’s tribute,’ Carradine reminded him. ‘The tradition began with a ballad written by the other side.’

‘Yes. By a man of the Stanleys. “Then a knight to King Richard gan say.” It’s here somewhere.’ He turned over a leaf or two, until he found what he was looking for. ‘It was “good Sir William Harrington”, it seems. The knight in question.

“‘There may no man their strokes abide, the Stanleys dints they be so strong (the treacherous villains!)
Ye may come back at another tide, methinks ye tarry here too long,
Your horse at your hand is ready, another day you may worship win
And come to reign with royalty, and wear your crown and be our king.”
“Nay, give me my battle-axe in my hand, set the crown of England on my head so high.
For by Him that made both sea and land, King of England this day I will die.
One foot I will never flee whilst the breath is my breast within.”
As he said so did it be – if he lost his life he died a King.’

‘“Set the crown of England on my head”;’ said Carradine, musing. ‘That was the crown that was found in a hawthorn bush afterwards.’

‘Yes. Set aside for plunder probably.’

‘I used to picture it one of those high plush things that King George got crowned in, but it seems it was just a gold circlet.’

‘Yes. It could be worn outside the battle helmet.’

‘Gosh,’ said Carradine with sudden feeling, ‘sure would have hated to wear that crown if I had been Henry! I sure would have hated it!’ He was silent for a little, and then he said: ‘Do you know what the town of York wrote – wrote in their records, you know – about the battle of Bosworth?’

‘No.’

‘They wrote: “This day was our good King Richard piteously slain and murdered; to the great heaviness of this city.”’

The chatter of the sparrows was loud in the quiet.

‘Hardly the obituary of a hated usurper,’ Grant said at last, very dry.

‘No,’ said Carradine, ‘no. “To the great heaviness of this city”;’ he repeated slowly, rolling the phrase over in his mind. ‘They cared so much about it that even with a new régime in the offing and the future not to be guessed at they put down in black and white in the town record their opinion that it was murder and their sorrow at it.’

‘Perhaps they had just heard about the indignities perpetrated on the King’s dead body and were feeling a little sick.’

‘Yes. Yes. You don’t like to think of a man you’ve known and admired flung stripped and dangling across a pony like a dead animal.’

‘One wouldn’t like to think of even an enemy so. But sensibility is not a quality that one would look for among the Henry-Morton crowd.’

‘Huh. Morton!’ said Brent, spitting out the word as if it were a bad taste. ‘No one was “heavy” when Morton died, believe me. Know what the Chronicler wrote of him? The London one, I mean. He wrote: “In our time was no man like to be compared with him in all things; albeit that he lived not without the great disdain and hatred of the Commons of this land.”’

Grant turned to look at the portrait which had kept him company through so many days and nights.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘for all his success and his Cardinal’s hat I think Morton was the loser in that fight with Richard III. In spite of his defeat and his long traducing, Richard came off the better of these two. He was loved in his day.’

‘That’s no bad epitaph,’ the boy said soberly.

‘No. Not at all a bad epitaph,’ Grant said, shutting Oliphant for the last time. ‘Not many men would ask for a better.’ He handed over the book to its owner. ‘Few men have earned so much,’ he said.