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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Josephine Tey's "The Daughter of Time" is a masterful exploration of historical truth that melds mystery with a profound examination of human perception. Set within the confines of a hospital room, the novel features Inspector Alan Grant, who, immobilized by a leg injury, embarks on a cerebral investigation into the infamous Richard III and the accusations surrounding the murder of the Princes in the Tower. Employing a unique narrative style that blends vivid characterizations with insightful philosophical musings, Tey challenges the reader to reconsider accepted narratives of history, allwhile leveraging a sophisticated interplay between contemporary detective fiction and historical inquiry. Tey, whose real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh, was a Scottish author whose fascination with history was evident in her literary works. Her background in theater and her critical view of some historical accounts likely informed her approach to "The Daughter of Time," as it reflects her belief in the importance of scrutinizing the past. By drawing parallels between the processes of justice in both fiction and reality, Tey encourages readers to engage critically with historical sources and the motives behind them. This incisive novel is highly recommended for readers who appreciate historical mysteries and thought-provoking literature that interrogates the nature of truth itself. Tey's argument that history often distorts fact makes this book not only an engaging read but essential for those interested in the intersection of history, ethics, and narrative. 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. - 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
Table of Contents
Introduction
Immobilized by injury, a modern detective applies the tools of police work to a disputed chapter of English history, turning a quiet sickroom into a laboratory where reputation is tested, sources are sifted, and the slow, stubborn emergence of truth challenges the comforting certainties forged by rumor, authority, and time itself; in this fusion of inquiry and introspection, the case is not a crime scene but a narrative, and every document, portrait, and silence becomes a clue.
Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, published in 1951, is a crime novel that unfolds as an investigation conducted from a hospital bed, yet its field of action reaches back to fifteenth-century England. Part of Tey’s series featuring Scotland Yard’s Inspector Alan Grant, it departs from conventional whodunits by locating the mystery within the historical record rather than the present day. The contemporary setting is mid-twentieth-century London, but the book’s focus is the turbulent close of the Wars of the Roses and the reign of Richard III. The result is a hybrid: a detective story, a historical inquiry, and a meditation on evidence.
The premise is admirably spare and spoiler-safe. Recuperating and restless, Inspector Grant becomes intrigued by the dissonance between a notorious king’s reputation and the impression made by a surviving portrait. Unable to pursue witnesses or examine scenes, he turns to chronicles, letters, and administrative records, enlisting a young researcher to help assemble materials. What follows is a case built entirely on reading: patterns in testimony, conflicts between sources, and the suggestive weight of omissions. The narrative’s momentum comes from questions, not chases, and from the steady narrowing of possibilities as documents are placed under the same scrutiny a detective would apply to living evidence.
Tey’s voice is lucid, witty, and quietly skeptical, favoring close reasoning over spectacle and cultivating an atmosphere of intellectual suspense. The sickroom setting sharpens the book’s focus, creating a chamber-piece structure where conversations and discoveries carry the dramatic load. The pacing is measured, the tone poised between curiosity and irony, and the style rewards patient attention to detail. Rather than foregrounding period pageantry, the novel keeps the machinery of detection in view—how a hypothesis forms, how a datum alters a pattern, how a source earns or loses credibility. The experience is immersive without being grandiose, exacting without being dry.
At its heart, the book examines how history is made: who gets to tell it, how competing accounts gain authority, and why familiar narratives endure. It probes the interplay of politics and storytelling, showing how convenience, propaganda, and repetition can fix a reputation in place. It also interrogates methods—legal proof versus historical plausibility, eyewitness testimony versus institutional records, the seductions and limits of reading character from appearances. The detective’s craft becomes a model for responsible inquiry, emphasizing corroboration, context, and the courage to revise conclusions. In this way the novel argues for intellectual humility while sustaining the pleasures of a well-constructed puzzle.
The relevance for contemporary readers is striking. In a world saturated with information, The Daughter of Time champions habits of mind that resist the speed and certainty of premature judgment. It encourages skepticism without cynicism, urging readers to test claims, check sources, and notice how sentiment or convenience can harden into consensus. It also offers an ethical appeal: reputations, whether of historical figures or public contemporaries, are fragile constructs that deserve careful handling. By dramatizing the patience required to think clearly, the book invites reflection on our own filters and the stories we accept about the past and present.
Without venturing beyond its initial setup, this introduction can affirm that Tey’s novel offers less a verdict than an invitation—to read more attentively, to weigh competing explanations, and to tolerate uncertainty until the evidence can bear the load placed upon it. The title evokes the idea that truth emerges over time, and the narrative embodies that patience in its methodical accumulation of facts. The result is a work that feels both classic and fresh: a detective story that dignifies research, a historical inquiry that values character and context, and a graceful demonstration that curiosity, rigor, and fairness can coexist with narrative pleasure.
Synopsis
Confined to a hospital bed after a fall during a case, Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant struggles with boredom and the frustration of inactivity. Known for his keen ability to read character from faces, he accepts a friend's suggestion to study portraits of historical figures. When an image of King Richard III catches his attention, Grant is struck by the disparity between the king's reputed villainy and the face he sees. Intrigued, he decides to investigate Richard's history from his bed, treating it as a cold case. With limited mobility, he relies on visitors and books to begin a methodical inquiry.
Grant first consults popular histories and schoolbook narratives, finding them repetitive and dependent on a few familiar sources. He enlists help from actress Marta Hallard and his nurse, who supply reading material, and is soon introduced to Brent Carradine, a young researcher willing to serve as his legs. Brent brings chronicles, state papers, and biographies from libraries and archives, while Grant compiles notes and questions. Early on, Thomas More's celebrated account of Richard becomes central, but Grant examines its provenance, authorship, and timing. Unable to conduct interviews or search sites, he builds a documentary case, weighing each claim against dates, letters, and official records.
To orient himself, Grant reconstructs the political background of 1483. He reviews the death of Edward IV, the minority of his son Edward V, and the appointment of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as Lord Protector. He studies the declaration that Edward IV's children were illegitimate, the parliamentary act known as Titulus Regius, and the process by which Richard accepted the crown. Treating each step as a point in a timeline, Grant tests whether events follow from documented actions or later storytelling. The inquiry emphasizes sequence and evidence, postponing judgment while assembling a clear framework of succession, guardianship, and the legal instruments of the period.
Attention turns to the princes in the Tower, whose disappearance underpins Richard's dark reputation. Grant compares the dates of their last public sightings with records of royal progress, custody arrangements, and the outbreak of Buckingham's rebellion. He analyzes the roles attributed to Sir Robert Brackenbury and Sir James Tyrrell, including a confession reported during the later Tudor reign. Rather than accept a single narrative, he lists possibilities and cross-checks witness distances, incentives, and later edits. The method is investigative rather than dramatic, seeking consistencies and anomalies in the paperwork that governed access, wardship, and the movement of high-profile figures.
Source criticism becomes a major strand. Grant notes that Thomas More wrote decades after the events and under Tudor rule, drawing on traditions linked to John Morton. He considers Polydore Vergil, the Croyland Chronicle, foreign diplomats' dispatches, and household records. Particular weight is given to contemporaneous documents such as warrants, act books, and financial entries, alongside silences or abrupt changes in official wording. Discrepancies between public stories and administrative traces prompt questions about authorship, motive, and the circulation of rumor. The book articulates how chronicles absorb political needs, illustrating how later editors, translations, and summaries can harden conjecture into accepted history.
Grant applies the detective's triad of means, motive, and opportunity to key figures. He contrasts Richard's position as a crowned king with Henry Tudor's precarious claim before Bosworth and his need to consolidate power afterward. The analysis surveys who controlled the princes at various times, who risked exposure, and who benefited from uncertainty. Henry's policies after accession—his marriage to Elizabeth of York, treatment of Yorkist supporters, and handling of the Titulus Regius—are reviewed for their implications. Throughout, the narrative refrains from theatrical revelations, favoring incremental inferences that assemble a picture of shifting advantage, closed records, and outcomes shaped by legal strategy.
With Brent's research, small factual checks accumulate: appointments made by Richard, pardons granted, and the reputations of men later portrayed as villains. Administrative efficiency in the North and foundations for learning and relief are noted as part of Richard's record, weighed without special pleading. The story also revisits uprisings and pretenders—Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck—and considers how their claims intersect with the question of the princes' fate. Each piece is filed against the evolving timeline. As patterns emerge, Grant refines hypotheses, discarding lines that depend on hearsay, and marking where testimony first appears in print generations after the events.
The novel foregrounds how collective memory forms. Grant labels durable but inaccurate stories as public Tonypandy, demonstrating how celebrated narratives can overshadow unshowy records. By juxtaposing chronicles with ledgers and proclamations, he illustrates the gap between moralized history and administrative fact. The hospital setting keeps the inquiry cerebral: evidence arrives on paper, conclusions are provisional, and the detective's satisfaction lies in coherence rather than confession. Conversations with visitors test assumptions and explore how reputations calcify. Even as the case remains purely archival, the steady accumulation of corroborated dates and acts provides traction, encouraging readers to track the chain from claim to document.
As Grant's health improves, his reconstruction reaches a point where the existing charges can be weighed against the timeline he and Brent have verified. The narrative concludes not with an arrest but with a reassessment, setting out a plausible arrangement of motives, silences, and political necessities. While preserving the uncertainty inherent in lost evidence, the book communicates its central idea: that historical verdicts deserve reexamination with primary sources and a clear method. The final pages return to the theme of perception and truth, aligning the detective's craft with the historian's, and leaving the ultimate judgment for readers to measure against the assembled record.
Historical Context
Josephine Tey sets The Daughter of Time in contemporary Britain circa 1950–1951, largely within a London hospital room where Inspector Alan Grant, immobilized by injury, turns to historical detection. The setting channels postwar realities: the National Health Service (founded 1948) organizes hospital care; rationing still affects daily life; and the 1951 Festival of Britain broadcasts a spirit of national self-scrutiny. Scotland Yard methods, shaped by interwar professionalization and wartime intelligence, underpin Grant’s evidentiary approach. London’s libraries, museums, and newspapers embody a culture of archives and public debate. This modern milieu—defined by bureaucratic record-keeping and skepticism toward propaganda—frames the novel’s reexamination of late fifteenth-century English politics.
At the heart of the book’s inquiry lies the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487), a dynastic conflict between the houses of Lancaster and York that convulsed England’s polity. Edward IV, a Yorkist, seized the throne in 1461, briefly lost it in 1470, and ruled again from 1471 until his death on 9 April 1483. His brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, governed the turbulent north, commanding loyalty through the Council of the North and military skill demonstrated at Barnet and Tewkesbury (1471). The political vacuum in 1483—minor heir, factional court, and contested regency—created conditions for extraordinary constitutional maneuvers. Tey’s novel probes this crisis as the seedbed of later historical distortions.
The disappearance of Edward V (born 1470) and his brother Richard of Shrewsbury (born 1473), the “Princes in the Tower,” in the summer of 1483 anchors the narrative. Lodged in the Tower of London—then a royal residence and administrative center—they were last reliably reported seen in late summer 1483. Under Henry VII, an alleged 1502 confession by Sir James Tyrrell was circulated without surviving text or trial record. In 1674, workmen found bones beneath a staircase in the White Tower; Charles II ordered them interred in an urn at Westminster Abbey (1678). A 1933 examination by Lawrence Tanner and colleagues found they were children, but identification remained unproven. The novel tests each claim against motive, means, and evidentiary reliability.
Central to 1483 is the legal-constitutional pivot surrounding Titulus Regius (January 1484). After preacher Ralph Shaa’s sermon at St Paul’s Cross (22 June 1483) publicized a precontract between Edward IV and Lady Eleanor Butler, Parliament declared Edward IV’s children illegitimate, enabling Richard’s accession (he accepted the crown on 26 June 1483). Titulus Regius codified these arguments, citing canonical impediments and political necessity. Henry VII, after winning the crown in 1485, repealed the act in 1486 and ordered copies destroyed, threatening discussion under penalties. The book interrogates this sequence—sermon, petition, statute, repeal—asking whether legal instruments clarified or obscured truth, and who benefited from erasure of the documentary trail.
The turbulence of 1483–1485 further includes the Duke of Buckingham’s rebellion (October 1483), a multi-county rising in southern and western England, allied with the exiled Henry Tudor in Brittany. Storms and poor coordination doomed it; Buckingham was captured and executed at Salisbury (2 November 1483). Henry Tudor fled to France, secured support from Charles VIII’s regency, sailed from Harfleur, and landed at Milford Haven on 7 August 1485. He marched through Wales and the Marches to confront Richard III at Bosworth Field (22 August 1485), Leicestershire; the Stanleys’ pivotal defection decided the battle. The novel links these events to narrative construction, noting how victorious Tudors retroactively framed Richard’s regime as criminal to legitimize their own.
Tudor statecraft relied on historiography as political instrument. Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia (commissioned ca. 1507; published 1534) and Thomas More’s unfinished History of King Richard III (composed ca. 1513–1518) shaped the archetype of a tyrant-king and child-murderer, later amplified by Edward Hall (1548) and Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577/1587). Henry VII’s marriage to Elizabeth of York (1486) symbolically united houses while legislative acts (attainders of 1485–1487) consolidated power. Pretenders—Lambert Simnel (crowned in Dublin 1487; defeated at Stoke Field, 16 June 1487) and Perkin Warbeck (1490s)—exposed Tudor insecurity about legitimacy, incentivizing blackening the Yorkist past. The novel scrutinizes these sources’ patronage, timing, and contradictions as hallmarks of political narrative manufacture.
The twentieth-century reevaluation of Richard III contextualizes Tey’s project. The Fellowship of the White Boar, founded in 1924 (later the Richard III Society, 1959), promoted archival reexamination of 1483–1485. The 1933 reopening of the Westminster Abbey urn, advances in prosopography, and professionalized source criticism fostered skepticism of inherited tales. Post–World War II Britain, having experienced state propaganda and information control (1939–1945), prized evidentiary standards; police procedure, forensic logic, and casework became cultural touchstones. By assigning a Scotland Yard inspector to an armchair inquiry using portraits, chronicles, and administrative records, the novel mirrors this methodological shift, presenting historiography as detective work and inviting the public to audit official versions of the past.
The book functions as a social and political critique by exposing how power curates collective memory: statutes rescinded, documents destroyed, and confessions publicized without proofs. It indicts “trial by tradition,” where classed chroniclers and court-dependent scholars fix reputations beyond appeal. In postwar terms, it challenges bureaucratic complacency and media echo, advocating evidentiary fairness regardless of status—king, courtier, or commoner. The portrayal of Richard III’s vilification interrogates scapegoating as a tool for regime consolidation, while the hospital-bound inquiry satirizes the authority of received wisdom. By modeling rigorous source analysis, it critiques institutional opacity and urges democratic accountability in how nations narrate justice, legitimacy, and guilt.
“Truth is the daughter of Time” Old Proverb
The Daughter of Time
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, and far too many words written.[1q] 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 into the 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 and Baroque 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 book but 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 the proper 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 and your 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!’
