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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Daughter of Time,' Josephine Tey masterfully blends the realms of detective fiction and historical analysis through the eyes of Inspector Alan Grant. Confined to a hospital bed, Grant's intriguing investigation into the enigmatic figure of King Richard III serves as a medium to explore themes of truth, perception, and the construction of history. Tey's narrative is distinguished by its witty prose and meticulous attention to detail, compelling readers to question both the reliability of historical records and the motivations behind them, while simultaneously delivering a captivating mystery plot. This novel is a pioneering work that challenges the conventional boundaries of the genre, reflecting the literary currents of the mid-20th century that increasingly blurred the lines between fact and fiction. Josephine Tey, an influential figure in the Golden Age of crime fiction, was known for her unconventional storytelling techniques and deep character development. Her own skepticism towards historical narratives and societal beliefs often informed her writing, inviting readers to scrutinize accepted truths. Tey's unique perspective, bolstered by her background in theater and her love for history, finds its most profound expression in 'The Daughter of Time,' where she uses the vehicle of a thriller to explore rich historical themes. This book is highly recommended for readers who appreciate a thought-provoking blend of mystery and historical inquiry. Tey's incisive approach will not only entertain but will also instigate a passion for delving deeper into the past. Whether you're a fan of crime fiction or history enthusiast, 'The Daughter of Time' promises to engage and provoke reflections on the nature of truth itself. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Daughter of Time (Inspector Alan Grant Mystery)
Table of Contents
Introduction
A detective immobilized in the present turns to the past as his new crime scene, weighing reputation against record and showing how received history can falter when tested like evidence in a case.
The Daughter of Time is a mystery novel by Josephine Tey, part of her Inspector Alan Grant series, first published in 1951. Set largely in a contemporary hospital room, it sends a modern policeman into a historical inquiry, bridging mid-twentieth-century Britain and late fifteenth-century England. Rather than pursuing a fresh crime, the story engages with a centuries-old controversy, treating history as a dossier to be examined. The result is a hybrid of detective fiction and historical investigation, attentive to procedure, documentation, and inference, while grounded in the familiar conventions of a character-driven, cerebral whodunit.
Confined to bed after an injury, Inspector Alan Grant seeks an intellectual challenge to alleviate tedium and seizes upon a portrait of Richard III. Struck by the disconnect between the image and the notorious legend attached to it, he begins to question the accepted account surrounding the fate of the princes in the Tower. With help from a researcher who brings him chronicles, letters, and records, Grant applies investigative habits to the past, building timelines, weighing bias, and testing motive. The inquiry unfolds entirely through conversation, reading, and reasoning, offering a case solved by thought rather than pursuit.
Readers encounter a deliberately paced, quietly exhilarating narrative that privileges analysis over action. Tey’s prose is economical and wry, the dialogue crisp, and the mood inquisitive rather than sensational. The hospital room becomes a laboratory of logic, where scraps of testimony and official records are sifted with the same rigor a detective would apply to forensics. This emphasis on method produces a distinctive form of suspense: the tension of minds at work. The novel promises the satisfactions of classic detection while substituting archives for alleyways, and it invites the audience to share in each incremental shift from assumption to argument.
At its core, the book explores how stories harden into certainties and how authority can shape memory. It asks what counts as proof, how bias operates in sources, and why some narratives endure regardless of the evidence that supports them. The detective’s tools—chronology, corroboration, motive—become instruments for historical critique, suggesting that justice is not only a matter for courts but also for posterity. Along the way, the novel probes the ethics of reputation, the responsibilities of historians and readers, and the frailties of perception, offering a study in intellectual humility and disciplined skepticism.
The questions it raises remain urgent in an age saturated with information and competing versions of events. Tey encourages readers to check the provenance of claims, distinguish primary testimony from hearsay, and consider who benefits from a particular account. The book’s relevance lies not in adjudicating a final verdict on the past but in modeling how to think: to slow down, interrogate sources, and accept provisional conclusions. For contemporary audiences, it offers the pleasure of detection and the discipline of critical reading, affirming that curiosity, patience, and evidence-based reasoning are defenses against distortion.
Although it belongs to the Inspector Alan Grant mysteries, the novel stands on its own, welcoming both devoted series readers and newcomers. It is a compact, elegant invitation to revisit familiar history with fresh eyes, to treat archives as living witnesses, and to find drama in the movement of a mind from doubt to discovery. Without revealing outcomes, it is safe to say that the journey matters as much as any verdict, and that the book’s lasting appeal resides in its union of humane character study with a clear, exacting inquiry into how we come to believe what we believe.
Synopsis
Convalescing in a London hospital with a broken leg, Inspector Alan Grant is restless, cut off from cases and routine. An actor friend, Marta Hallard, tries to occupy him with prints of historical portraits. Known for reading character from faces, Grant lingers over one image that seems at odds with its reputation: Richard III, infamous as the hunchbacked usurper who murdered his nephews in the Tower. The calm, thoughtful expression in the portrait troubles Grant’s assumptions. Stranded in bed, he decides to conduct a different kind of investigation, treating the centuries-old controversy as a cold case that can be tested by evidence.
Grant begins by assembling sources. With the help of the hospital staff and friends, he requests chronicles, biographies, and facsimiles, determined to separate contemporary testimony from later storytelling. He frames clear questions: what was known at the time, who had the means and motive, and how reliable are the witnesses? His instincts tell him to distrust hearsay and treat historians as narrators with possible agendas. Instead of chasing confessions or missing bodies, he looks for records, dates, and legal acts. The princes in the Tower become the central mystery, and Richard’s role as Protector and then king provides the primary line of inquiry.
A young American researcher, Brent Carradine, visits from the record offices and becomes Grant’s legman. Together they establish a method: start with documents closest to the events and work outward. They map a timeline from the death of Edward IV through the brief reign of Edward V and the coronation of Richard III. They define a working rule against accepting popular myth, nicknaming such distortions Tonypandy, after a famous misremembered incident. Carradine retrieves chronicles, letters, and parliamentary records, while Grant tests each piece against motive, opportunity, and consistency. Their aim is not to vindicate anyone but to identify what the records actually show.
Central to the traditional story is Thomas More’s unfinished history, written decades later and influenced by figures hostile to Richard, notably John Morton. Grant examines its tone and details, noting how anecdote and moral portraiture overshadow citation. He also studies the reported confession of Sir James Tyrrell, long treated as proof of murder, and finds that surviving documentation is elusive or secondhand. The team assesses who controlled the Tower, how the boys were lodged, and when witnesses last saw them. Rather than accept narrative flourishes, they test whether dates align, whether sources derive from each other, and whether silence in records carries meaning.
Beyond the princes, Grant surveys Richard’s conduct as ruler. He notes legislation about fair trials, restrictions on forced loans, and efforts to regulate bail, drawn from parliamentary rolls. He considers patronage in the North and Richard’s reputation among contemporaries outside enemy circles. Episodes often cited as proof of ruthlessness, including the arrests of Hastings and the Rivers faction, are reconsidered with attention to immediate circumstances and testimony. None of this is taken as character evidence in itself, but as context for motive. The portrait that sparked the case remains suggestive rather than decisive, a clue that provokes inquiry rather than concluding it.
Attention turns to Henry Tudor’s ascent after Bosworth and to actions taken at the start of his reign. Carradine compiles statutes and proclamations, noting the repeal and attempted destruction of a parliamentary act that had justified Richard’s claim. The fates of Richard’s opponents and allies are charted alongside the emergence of pretenders, including figures later known as Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck. Grant weighs who benefited from the disappearance of the princes, who had physical access to them at the relevant times, and whose policies reveal concern about legitimacy. The inquiry broadens from a single suspect to a network of incentives.
Carradine brings in additional voices close to events: Mancini’s account from a foreign observer, the Croyland Chronicle from within the English clerical world, and Polydore Vergil writing for the victorious dynasty. Grant compares these testimonies, isolating points of agreement and discrepancies in dates, rumors, and stated motives. He inspects royal household accounts, pardons, and grants that might reveal who was rewarded and when. Names such as Morton and Margaret Beaufort recur in the political landscape, prompting questions about influence and narrative control. By building a consistent chronology, they strip away embroidery and retain a narrow core of facts the sources support.
The hospital setting remains present: nurses debate his project, visitors contribute clippings from schoolbooks, and Marta supplies theatrical analogies about audience expectation. These interludes underscore how easily public stories harden into accepted truth. Grant revises his chart of suspects and hypotheses as each new document arrives, rejecting explanations that rely on desire rather than evidence. The investigation grows more focused, eliminating contradictions and reshaping assumptions about the princes’ fate. By the time Carradine presents a final batch of records, Grant has assembled a coherent explanation that rearranges blame and motive. The novel avoids melodramatic confrontations, emphasizing reasoning over disclosure.
The inquiry culminates in a measured judgment grounded in dates, laws, and credible testimony. Grant’s conclusion challenges the inherited schoolroom narrative without relying on sensational discoveries. The story closes with his recovery underway and with a historical figure reconsidered through the lens of methodical detection. The book’s title resonates: truth, the daughter of time, emerges from patient scrutiny rather than from repetition. Tey presents an investigation that treats the past as a case file, inviting readers to question who writes history and to distinguish record from rumor. The outcome reframes reputations while illustrating how disciplined inquiry can unsettle legend.
Historical Context
Set principally in a London hospital room around 1950, the novel unfolds in the immediate postwar milieu of Britain, marked by the National Health Service (created in 1948), lingering austerity, and a culture newly attuned to questioning authority. Inspector Alan Grant, immobilized by injury, turns his investigative methods to the archives, summoning catalogues, chronicles, and portraits from institutions such as the British Museum and the Public Record Office. The physical setting is modern, but the inquiry transports readers to late fifteenth-century England, allowing the novel to juxtapose mid-twentieth-century evidence-based skepticism with the turbulent political world of Plantagenet and early Tudor rule.
The Wars of the Roses (1455–1487) provide the essential prelude to the case. This dynastic conflict between the houses of Lancaster and York began at St Albans (1455) and reached brutal crescendos at Towton (1461), Barnet (1471), and Tewkesbury (1471). Edward IV’s restoration in 1471 ended Lancastrian hopes; Henry VI died in the Tower that year. The period’s factionalism, shifting loyalties, and use of attainder framed the rapid succession crises that followed. The book continually references this background to show that claims about guilt and legitimacy must be read within a landscape where power, custody, and legal process were weapons as decisive as armies.
Richard, Duke of Gloucester, assumed the protectorship on the death of his brother Edward IV in April 1483, when the heir, Edward V, was about 12. Richard intercepted the royal party at Stony Stratford on 30 April, detaining Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, and others, who were executed at Pontefract in June. Lord Hastings was summarily executed on 13 June. A sermon by Ralph Shaa later alleged Edward IV’s precontract with Eleanor Butler, and on 25 June the Three Estates petitioned Richard to take the crown; he was crowned on 6 July 1483. Parliament’s Titulus Regius (1484) formalized these claims. The novel scrutinizes these records to reassess the legality of events.
The disappearance of Edward V and his brother Richard of Shrewsbury from the Tower in 1483 remains the central historical mystery. Chronicler Dominic Mancini reported they were seen less often by late summer, fueling rumor but not naming a killer. Contemporaries later advanced competing theories implicating Richard III, Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, or Henry Tudor. In 1674, bones were discovered beneath a staircase in the Tower and interred in Westminster Abbey; a 1933 examination was inconclusive. The book emphasizes the absence of a contemporary murder charge during Richard’s reign and probes motive and opportunity, arguing that later narratives hardened into orthodoxy without firm evidentiary grounding.
Henry Tudor’s victory at Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485 ended Richard’s rule; Henry dated his reign from 21 August to criminalize Yorkist resistors. His first Parliament issued sweeping attainders (1485), he married Elizabeth of York in January 1486, and he repealed and ordered the destruction of Titulus Regius in 1486. Challenges followed: Lambert Simnel, crowned in Dublin in May 1487, was defeated at Stoke Field on 16 June 1487; Perkin Warbeck claimed to be the younger prince from 1491 and was executed in 1499, as was Edward, Earl of Warwick. Henry’s Council Learned in the Law enforced bonds that curtailed nobles. The novel weighs these actions when assessing motive and character.
Tudor-era historiography cemented Richard’s villainy. Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia, drafted from about 1513 and revised into the 1530s, depicted Richard as tyrannical. Thomas More’s unfinished History of King Richard III, composed around 1513 and first printed in 1557, supplied a vivid account of the princes’ murder that influenced subsequent chronicles. Henry VII’s repeal and suppression of Titulus Regius limited access to contrary legal arguments. The book interrogates such sources against earlier, closer witnesses like the continuation of the Crowland Chronicle and Mancini, modeling source criticism: it contrasts politically convenient narratives with parliamentary rolls, warrants, and financial records to illustrate how authority shapes historical memory.
The novel also engages modern examples of misremembered history to illuminate how myths form. It cites Tonypandy (1910–1911), when police violence during Welsh miners’ strikes and the contested role of the Home Office entered public legend, often at odds with official records and contemporaneous reports. The case becomes a parable of narrative drift. In the twentieth century, organized efforts to reassess Richard III emerged, notably the Fellowship of the White Boar in 1924 (later the Richard III Society), promoting scrutiny of primary evidence. The book aligns with this movement’s ethos, demonstrating, through a detective’s method, how archival diligence can correct long-standing political slanders.
By exposing the fragility of received history, the book critiques the political uses of narrative in both the fifteenth century and the author’s present. It indicts the mechanisms by which states fashion legitimacy—attainders, propaganda, destruction of records—and shows how these practices create enduring social injustice through reputational harm. Juxtaposing Tudor statecraft with modern institutional authority, it questions deference to official versions and the press’s role in amplifying them. The inquiry into the princes becomes a broader argument for procedural fairness and evidentiary standards, implicitly criticizing class-inflected chronicle writing and the asymmetry of power that allows rulers to fix blame beyond the reach of courts.
“Truth is the daughter of Time” Old Proverb
The Daughter of Time (Inspector Alan Grant Mystery)
1
Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling. Stared at it with loathing. He knew by heart every last minute crack on its nice clean surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He had made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.
He had suggested to The Midget[1] that she might turn his bed round a little so that he could have a new patch of ceiling to explore. But it seemed that that would spoil the symmetry of the room, and in hospitals symmetry ranked just a short head behind cleanliness and a whole length in front of Godliness. Anything out of the parallel was hospital profanity. Why didn’t he read? she asked. Why didn’t he go on reading some of those expensive brand-new novels that his friends kept on bringing him.
‘There are far too many people born into the world[1q], and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It’s a horrible thought.’
‘You sound constipated,’ said The Midget.
The Midget was Nurse Ingham, and she was in sober fact a very nice five-feet two, with everything in just proportion. Grant called her The Midget to compensate himself for being bossed around by a piece of Dresden china which he could pick up in one hand. When he was on his feet, that is to say. It was not only that she told him what he might or might not do, but she dealt with his six-feet-odd with an off-hand ease that Grant found humiliating. Weights meant nothing, apparently, to The Midget. She tossed mattresses around with the absent-minded grace of a plate spinner. When she was off-duty he was attended to by The Amazon, a goddess with arms like the limb of a beech tree. The Amazon was Nurse Darroll, who came from Gloucestershire and was homesick each daffodil season. (The Midget came from Lytham St Anne’s, and there was no daffodil nonsense about her.) She had large soft hands and large soft cow’s eyes and she always looked very sorry for you, but the slightest physical exertion set her breathing like a suction-pump. On the whole Grant found it even more humiliating to be treated as a dead weight than to be treated as if he was no weight at all.
Grant was bed-borne, and a charge on The Midget and The Amazon, because he had fallen through a trap-door. This, of course, was the absolute in humiliation; compared with which the heavings of The Amazon and the light slingings of The Midget were a mere corollary. To fall through a trap-door was the ultimate in absurdity; pantomimic, bathetic, grotesque. At the moment of his disappearance from the normal level of perambulation he had been in hot pursuit of Benny Skoll, and the fact that Benny had careered round the next corner slap intothe arms of Sergeant Williams provided the one small crumb of comfort in an intolerable situation.
Benny was now ‘away’ for three years, which was very satisfactory for the lieges, but Benny would get time off for good behaviour. In hospitals there was no time off for good behaviour.
Grant stopped staring at the ceiling, and slid his eyes sideways at the pile of books on his bedside table; the gay expensive pile that The Midget had been urging on his attention. The top one, with the pretty picture of Valetta in unlikely pink, was Lavinia Fitch’s annual account of a blameless heroine’s tribulations. In view of the representation of the Grand Harbour on the cover, the present Valerie or Angela or Cecile or Denise must be a naval wife. He had opened the book only to read the kind message that Lavinia had written inside.
The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthy and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas’s last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the hay-loft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas’s fault that its steam provided the only up-rising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it.
Under the harsh shadows and highlights of Silas’s jacket was an elegant affair of Edwardian curlicues andBaroque nonsense, entitled Bells on Her Toes. Which was Rupert Rouge being arch about vice. Rupert Rouge always seduced you into laughter for the first three pages. About Page Three you noticed that Rupert had learned from that very arch (but of course not vicious) creature George Bernard Shaw that the easiest way to sound witty was to use that cheap and convenient method, the paradox. After that you could see the jokes coming three sentences away.
The thing with a red gun-flash across a night-green cover was Oscar Oakley’s latest. Toughs talking out of the corners of their mouths in synthetic American that had neither the wit nor the pungency of the real thing. Blondes, chromium bars, breakneck chases. Very remarkably bunk.
The Case of the Missing Tin-opener, by John James Mark, had three errors of procedure in the first two pages, and had at least provided Grant with a pleasant five minutes while he composed an imaginary letter to its author.
He could not remember what the thin blue book at the bottom of the pile was. Something earnest and statistical, he thought. Tsetse flies, or calories, or sex behaviour, or something.
Even in that, you knew what to expect on the next page. Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula? Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about ‘a new Silas Weekley’ or ‘a new Lavinia Fitch’ exactly as they talked about ‘a new brick’ or ‘a new hairbrush’. They never said ‘a new book by’ whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the bookbut in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.
It might be a good thing, Grant thought as he turned his nauseated gaze away from the motley pile, if all the presses of the world were stopped for a generation. There ought to be a literary moratorium. Some Superman ought to invent a ray that would stop them all simultaneously. Then people wouldn’t send you a lot of fool nonsense when you were flat on your back, and bossy bits of Meissen wouldn’t expect you to read them.
He heard the door open, but did not stir himself to look. He had turned his face to the wall, literally and metaphorically.
He heard someone come across to his bed, and closed his eyes against possible conversation. He wanted neither Gloucestershire sympathy nor Lancashire briskness just now. In the succeeding pause a faint enticement, a nostalgic breath of all the fields of Grasse, teased his nostrils and swam about his brain. He savoured it and considered. The Midget smelt of lavender dusting powder, and The Amazon of soap and iodoform. What was floating expensively about his nostrils was L’Enclos Numéro Cinq. Only one person of his acquaintance used L’Enclos Number Five. Marta Hallard.
He opened an eye and squinted up at her. She had evidently bent over to see if he was asleep, and was now standing in an irresolute way—if anything Marta did could be said to be irresolute—with her attention on the heap of all too obviously virgin publications on the table. In one arm she was carrying two new books, and in the other a great sheaf of white lilac. He wondered whether she had chosen white lilac because it was her idea of theproper floral offering for winter (it adorned her dressing-room at the theatre from December to March), or whether she had taken it because it would not detract from her black-and-white chic. She was wearing a new hat and her usual pearls; the pearls which he had once been the means of recovering for her. She looked very handsome, very Parisian, and blessedly unhospital-like.
‘Did I waken you, Alan?’
‘No. I wasn’t asleep.’
‘I seem to be bringing the proverbial coals,’ she said, dropping the two books alongside their despised brethren. ‘I hope you will find these more interesting than you seem to have found that lot. Didn’t you even try a little teensy taste of our Lavinia?’
‘I can’t read anything.’
‘Are you in pain?’
‘Agony. But it’s neither my leg nor my back.’
‘What then?’
‘It’s what my cousin Laura calls “the prickles of boredom”.’
‘Poor Alan. And how right your Laura is.’ She picked a bunch of narcissi out of a glass that was much too large for them, dropped them with one of her best gestures into the wash-basin, and proceeded to substitute the lilac. ‘One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn’t, of course. It’s a small niggling thing.’
‘Small nothing. Niggling nothing. It’s like being beaten with nettles.’
‘Why don’t you take-up something?’
‘Improve the shining hour?’
‘Improve your mind. To say nothing of your soul andyour temper. You might study one of the philosophies. Yoga, or something like that. But I suppose an analytical mind is not the best kind to bring to the consideration of the abstract.’
‘I did think of going back to algebra. I have an idea that I never did algebra justice, at school. But I’ve done so much geometry on that damned ceiling that I’m a little off mathematics.’
‘Well, I suppose it is no use suggesting jig-saws to someone in your position. How about cross-words? I could get you a book of them, if you like.’
‘God forbid.’
‘You could invent them, of course. I have heard that that is more fun than solving them.’
‘Perhaps. But a dictionary weighs several pounds. Besides, I always did hate looking up something in a reference book.’
‘Do you play chess? I don’t remember. How about chess problems? White to play and mate in three moves, or something like that.’
‘My only interest in chess is pictorial.’
‘Pictorial?’
‘Very decorative things, knights and pawns and whatnot. Very elegant.’
‘Charming. I could bring you along a set to play with. All right, no chess. You could do some academic investigating. That’s a sort of mathematics. Finding a solution to an unsolved problem.’
‘Crime, you mean? I know all the case-histories by heart. And there is nothing more that can be done about any of them. Certainly not by someone who is flat on his back.’
‘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[2].’
‘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 out-size women are sexually 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.’
