The Murders of Richard III (18 page)

“That doesn't necessarily follow,” Jacqueline said.

“But Sir Richard has a point. There would be no reason for Buck to invent or fake such a letter; if he wanted to invent evidence, it would have been something more conclusive—” She caught Thomas's eye and turned pink.

“My God, Jacqueline,” Thomas said plaintively.
“Et tu?”

“Well, I'll tell you one thing,” said Strangways, who had recovered his powers of speech, though he was still flushed. “I'm not leaving. You'll have to carry me out of here bodily if you want to get rid of me. I wouldn't miss that meeting tomorrow for a million dollars.”

“I shouldn't allow you to leave if you wanted to,” Weldon said between tight lips. “You will stay and see, and admit your error before the world.”

“That will be the day,” said Strangways.

Liz stood up. The folds of her skirt rippled as she walked across the room and stood next to Weldon. She took his arm. “Don't waste time arguing with him.”

Weldon put his hand over hers. Thomas felt a strange pang; it was as if some premonition warned him, for although he did not know it, this was the last time he would see them standing side by side in the magnificence of golden crowns and shining robes, the shadowy survival of a past that had never lived except in the legend it bred.

Arms locked, the pair moved toward the door, and Strangways stepped back to let them pass, with a deliberate inclination of his head. When they had gone, Thomas sighed. Strangways looked at him.

“Yes,” he said. “I know…. And I'm sorry, in away, for what is going to happen.”

Thomas felt as if he had been wearing his costume for a week, but before he took it off he couldn't resist one last look in the mirror. He doubted that he would ever again appear in coronet and fur-trimmed robes.

The image that confronted him was something of a shock. The debonair duke of the preceding night was a nightmarish figure—a specter out of Clarence's premonitory dream in the Tower, dead and drowned and dragged out to dry. The wig had gone stringy, as cheap wigs are wont to do when wet; the robe was wrinkled and stained; and in the cold light of dawn the crown was obviously paste.

Thomas was about to lower himself thankfully onto his bed when there was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” he said, in a resigned voice. He recognized the knock. Jacqueline's style was unmistakable, even in such normally impersonal actions.

“Are you decent?” inquired Jacqueline, through a modest crack.

“No.”

The door opened. “You aren't going to bed, are you?” Jacqueline asked. She was fully dressed in battle costume—hair pinned back, glasses firmly on the bridge of her nose, purse over her arm.

“Who, me? Why would I think of doing a crazy thing like that?”

“There's no point in going to sleep now. It's morning already.”

Jacqueline sat down on the bed next to Thomas. A vagrant fancy slipped through the latter's mind, but it did not find a lodging place; Helen of Troy couldn't have stimulated Thomas just then.

He yawned. “I noticed it is morning,” he said. “Nothing is going to happen until three this afternoon. I have had no sleep at all, and the hours of the night have not been uneventful. I am exhausted in body, mind, and spirit.”

“I figured you would be,” said Jacqueline. She opened her purse.

Thomas shied back. “No,” he said vigorously. “No. Not some noxious remedy from that bottomless purse. I will not sniff ammonia or drink—”

“What are you raving about?”

The only thing to emerge from the purse was a slip of paper covered with writing in Jacqueline's sprawling hand.

“Here,” said Jacqueline, “is the list of Richard's supposed victims. I copied it from Markham's biography.”

The list read:

1. Edward of Lancaster
   
2. Henry the Sixth
   
3. Clarence
   
4. Hastings
   
5. Rivers, Vaughan, Grey, and Haute
   
6. His wife, Anne
   
7. The princes
   

“So what else is new?” Thomas asked. “They aren't in chronological order,” he added.

“They are except for the princes. Markham puts that one last because it is the main charge. Now look at the list from Walpole's
Historic Doubts.
”

 

“Yes, indeed,” said Thomas. He collapsed backward onto the bed and lay staring at the ceiling with his hands clasped protectively over his stomach. “So what does it all mean?”

“Not a damned thing,” said Jacqueline.

“Your tone is one of poorly repressed exasperation. I deduce that you are baffled.”

“But it has to mean something,” Jacqueline insisted. “I hoped you could tell me what.”

“Don't give me that humble bit,” said Thomas, still prone. The ceiling was singularly dull. No cracks, no stains, not even a cobweb in a corner. Not in a well-staffed house like this…

He came to with a start as Jacqueline's finger traced a path along the sensitive area on the bottom of his foot. He sat up.

“All right,” he said resignedly. “Let me get dressed and I'll go out and detect with you. Only don't insult my intelligence by intimating that you are leaning on my superior brain. You just want somebody to listen to you and say ‘yes' now and then.”

“Go ahead and dress.” Jacqueline turned her back. As Thomas assumed daytime attire, she continued to talk.

“He isn't following the lists, Thomas. Nobody puts the princes ahead of Hastings. Why did he break the succession there? He followed it up to that point.”

“Dunno,” said Thomas.

“Both lists include the queen's relatives—Rivers, Grey, and the rest. Those were executions—legal, I suppose, according to the usage of the times, but—”

“Nobody is playing those parts.”

“All right, but then why not include the Duke of Buckingham? Richard had him beheaded, like Hastings. The general is playing that part.”

“Buckingham rebelled against a crowned king,” Thomas said. “Richard hadn't been crowned when he arrested Hastings and the Woodville crowd; and some historians doubt that they were really guilty. Buckingham was running around the countryside with an army; you can't quibble about his being a traitor….”

His voice trailed off. He was standing on one foot with a sock halfway on the other.

“This character is not following the lists,” he said, thinking aloud. “Poisoning Rawdon—Henry the Sixth—was out of line too. So he has
some weird list of his own—obviously anti-Richard. Buckingham rebelled against a tyrant and a usurper, not an anointed monarch. You don't think…”

“Oh, yes, I do,” Jacqueline said coyly.

Still on one foot, his shirt tail hanging out, Thomas cursed with a fluency Kent might have envied.

“Okay,” he said, when he had exhausted his repertoire. “Let's go see.”

It was almost an anticlimax to see the head stuck jauntily on top of one of the high carved posts of Kent's bed. The cranium was covered with a fuzzy grayish coating meant to suggest gray hair.

From where he stood in the doorway, Thomas could see Kent's entire body, or at least that part of it that was not covered by sheet and blanket. Kent had not stirred or shifted position since they had checked on him earlier, and he was still snoring.

“This isn't particularly picturesque,” Thomas said critically. “Maybe I'm getting used to it. I feel cheated.”

“He just tiptoed in and stuck the head on the bedpost,” Jacqueline said thoughtfully. “There was a hole at the base of the other neck too.”

“He might at least have covered Kent's head.”

“I'm so sorry he disappointed you, Thomas darling. But I don't blame our anonymous friend for being cautious. Why should he risk waking General Kent? He got his grand effect with Philip.”

“Shall we wake him up?” Thomas asked.

“Do you really want to?”

They looked at each another conspiratorially. Thomas felt a momentary pang of compunction, but it did not endure. Kent might be a bit startled to wake and see the head grinning at him, but knowing that his own skull was firmly attached to his neck bones, he would not be frightened. The man was a bore anyway.

“No,” he said. “Let's just steal away.”

As he closed the door softly behind them, another thought struck him. “We can wipe one suspect off the list,” he said. “Philip couldn't—”

Just then, a neighboring door opened and Philip stepped out into the corridor.

He was as white as the bandage around his head, and his eyes were uncertain. After a surprised start he advanced on the staring pair with a stealthy, theatrical stalk.

“You do me wrong, being so majestical,” he declaimed inaccurately, but with great feeling, “to offer up the show of force—”

“The show is not of force,” Thomas said. “What are you doing out of bed? Where have you been?”

“Where do you think I've been?” Philip asked poignantly. “I'm not a ghost, actually. I've a body. 'Gin a body meet a body….”

He swayed alarmingly. Thomas stepped forward to support him.

“Good Lord,” he exclaimed, as an unmistakable smell reached his nostrils. “Don't you know how dangerous it is to drink after a head injury? Rawdon shouldn't have left you alone.”

“Back to bed,” Jacqueline said. “Come on, Thomas, here we go….”

They dragged the protesting actor to his room. When they had him safely in his bed, Jacqueline went straight to the bureau drawer and removed a bottle of whiskey. Philip was still singing “Comin' Through the Rye” as they left.

“Put him back on the list, Thomas,” Jacqueline said, tightening the cap on the bottle before putting it into her purse. “He can walk.”

“Not very well. Damn it, Jacqueline, I know the guy's an actor, but nobody could counterfeit injury that effectively. I felt that crack on his cranium with my own two hands. If it weren't for that…”

“Yes?” Jacqueline said encouragingly.

“He's malicious enough. He was spouting the most Godawful slanders about the others before we went down for the banquet.”

“Such as?”

“It would take too long to repeat them. Can I go to bed now?”

“No. Can't you rise above the demands of your vile body?”

“It feels vile at the moment, I must admit. What do you want to do now?”

“I want to pay a call on Mrs. Ponsonby-Jones.”

Thomas's head was fogged by fatigue, malmsey, and chronic sinus trouble. It took him several seconds to understand.

“Mrs. Ponsonby-Jones—Queen Anne. You think she—”

“Richard poisoned her, didn't he?”

“No, he did not. She died of consumption, or something equally lingering.”

“Something with boiling oil in it.”

“Your quotations are getting less and less appropriate. Mrs. Ponsonby-Jones is probably okay. The old witch was drunk as a skunk last night and drugged to boot. It would be gilding the lily to make her any sicker than she was.”

Jacqueline didn't answer. She stopped before Mrs. Ponsonby-Jones's door and tried the knob.

The door was locked.

“I expect she locked herself in,” Jacqueline said. “Thus demonstrating more intelligence than any of the others. However, we had better make sure.”

She pounded on the door.

The noise sounded hellishly loud to Thomas, but at first it had no effect on the occupant of the room. He was beginning to feel apprehensive when there were sounds from within. The door was flung open.

Presumably Wilkes had summoned one of the female servants to help Mrs. Ponsonby-Jones into her nightclothes. She wore a voluminous gown of pale blue. Her face was a bilious yellow. The colors clashed hideously. Her puffy features were set in an expression that would have made Shakespeare's villainous Richard look like a saint. With an effort that made her quiver from head to foot, Mrs. Ponsonby-Jones focused her eyes.

“How dare you?” she moaned. “How dare you, how—”

The door started to close. Jacqueline threw herself against it. “Wait a minute. Are you all right?”

“No,” said Mrs. Ponsonby-Jones emphatically.

“Have you been sick?” Thomas inquired anxiously.

The question was not well phrased. Mrs. Ponsonby-Jones's eyes looked like currants sunk in a doughy slab of pudding. She slammed the door. Jacqueline removed her arm just in time.

She and Thomas stood staring at the door until it stopped vibrating. Thomas expected an irate
delegation to emerge from the other rooms, but apparently the guests were still comatose.

“Was she or wasn't she?” he asked.

“Sick? Definitely. As to whether she has been visited by the comedian, I think not. He likes to have his efforts noted and appreciated. A hung-over female tossing her cookies in private wouldn't do the trick.”

“How vulgar you are.”

“I haven't begun to be vulgar yet. Let's get out of here.”

“Can I go to—”

“No, you cannot go to bed. I need fresh air. Let's go for a walk.”

“It's raining.”

“So it is. How unusual.”

Thomas sighed. To walk in the rain with the lady you love is romantic when you are eighteen. When you are fifty it is merely conducive to sniffles and rheumatism.

“How about the conservatory?”

The conservatory was an acceptable compromise, but it was not the happiest locale for a conversation in that house of confusion. The electric lights did not wholly dispel the gray gloom of a rainy morning, and the rain drummed on the glass panes overhead, setting up quivering echoes in the greenery. Epiphytes hung like fleshy
miniature monsters. The fronds of palm trees brushed the glass roof; they had squat, spiny trunks, like deformed pineapples. Green branches reached out at them as they walked along the graveled paths. Such was Thomas's mood that he would not have been surprised if a swollen, fecund bud had opened, fringed with fangs, and snapped at his sleeve.