‘Nevertheless she is looking for you with a gun. She says that Brent’s attitude to the B.M. has become the attitude of an addict to his drug. She can’t drag him away from it. If she takes him away from it physically, he spends the time harking back to it in his mind; so that she mightn’t exist as far as he is concerned. He has even stopped sitting through To Sea in a Bowl. Do you see much of him?’
‘He was here a few minutes before you came. But I don’t expect to hear from him again for some days to come.’
But in that he was wrong.
Just before supper-time the porter appeared with a telegram.
Grant put his thumb under the dainty Post Office lick on the flap and extracted two sheets of telegram. The telegram was from Brent.
Hell and damnation an awful thing has happened (stop) you know that chronicle in Latin I talked about (stop) the chronicle written by the monk at Croyland Abbey (stop) well I’ve just seen it and the rumour is there the rumour about the boys being dead (stop) the thing is written before Richard’s death so we are sunk aren’t we and I specially am sunk and that fine book of mine will never be written (stop) is anyone allowed to commit suicide in your river or is it reserved for the British.
Into the silence the voice of the porter said: ‘It’s reply-paid, sir. Do you want to send an answer?’
‘What? Oh. No. Not right away. I’ll send it down presently.’
‘Very good, sir,’ said the porter looking respectfully at the two sheets of telegram – in the porter’s family a telegram was confined to one sheet only – and went away, not humming this time.
Grant considered the news conveyed with such transatlantic extravagance in the matter of telegraphic communication. He read the thing again.
‘Croyland,’ he said, considering. Why did that ring a bell? No one had mentioned Croyland so far in this case. Carradine had talked merely of a monkish chronicle somewhere.
He had been too often, in his professional life, faced with a fact that apparently destroyed his whole case to be dismayed now. He reacted as he would have reacted in a professional investigation. He took out the upsetting small fact and looked at it. Calmly. Dispassionately. With none of poor Carradine’s wild dismay.
‘Croyland,’ he said again. Croyland was somewhere in Cambridgeshire. Or was it Norfolk? Somewhere on the borders there, in the flat country.
The Midget came in with his supper, and propped the flat bowl-like plate where he could eat from it with a modicum of comfort, but he was not aware of her.
‘Can you reach your pudding easily from there?’ she asked. And as he did not answer: ‘Mr Grant, can you reach your pudding if I leave it on the edge there?’
‘Ely!’ he shouted at her.
‘What?’
‘Ely,’ he said; softly, to the ceiling.
‘Mr Grant, aren’t you feeling well?’
He became conscious of The Midget’s well-powdered and concerned little face as it intruded between him and the familiar cracks.
‘I’m fine, fine. Better than I’ve ever been in my life. Wait just a moment, there’s a good girl, and send a telegram down for me. Give me my writing-pad. I can’t reach it with that mess of rice pudding in the way.’
She gave him the pad and pencil, and on the reply-paid form he wrote:
Can you find me a similar rumour in France at about the same date?
After that he ate his supper with a good appetite, and settled down to a good night’s sleep. He was floating in that delicious half-way stage on the way to unconsciousness when he became aware that someone was leaning over to inspect him. He opened his eyes to see who it might be, and looked straight into the anxious yearning brown irises of The Amazon, looking larger and more cowlike than ever in the soft lamplight. She was holding in her hand a yellow envelope.
‘I didn’t quite know what to do,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you and yet I didn’t know whether it mightn’t be important. A telegram, you know. You never can tell. And if you didn’t have it tonight it would mean a whole twelve hours’ delay. Nurse Ingham has gone off duty, so there was no one to ask till Nurse Briggs comes on at ten. I hope I haven’t wakened you up. But you weren’t asleep, were you?’
Grant assured her that she had done the right thing and she let out a sigh that nearly blew the portrait of Richard over. She stood by while he read the telegram, with an air of being ready to support him in any evil news that it might contain. To The Amazon all telegrams conveyed evil tidings.
The telegram was from Carradine.
It said: ‘You mean you want repeat want that there should be another repeat another accusation question mark – Brent.’
Grant took the reply-paid form and wrote: ‘Yes. Preferably in France.’
Then he said to The Amazon: ‘You can turn out the light, I think. I’m going to sleep until seven tomorrow morning.’
He fell asleep wondering how long it would be before he saw Carradine again, and what the odds were against that much desired instance of a second rumour.
But it was not so long after all until Carradine turned up again, and he turned up looking anything but suicidal. Indeed he seemed in some queer way to have broadened out. His coat seemed less of an appendage and more of a garment. He beamed at Grant.
‘Mr Grant, you’re a wonder. Do they have more like you at Scotland Yard? Or do you rate special?’
Grant looked at him almost unbelieving. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve turned up a French instance!’
‘Didn’t you want me to?’
‘Yes. But I hardly dared hope for it. The odds against seemed tremendous. What form did the rumour take in France? A chronicle? A letter?’
‘No. Something much more surprising. Something much more dismaying, actually. It seems that the Chancellor of France, in a speech to the States-General at Tours, spoke of the rumour. Indeed he was quite eloquent about it. In a way, his eloquence was the one scrap of comfort I could find in the situation.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, it sounded more to my mind like a Senator being hasty about someone who had brought in a measure his own people back home wouldn’t like. More like politics than State, if you know what I mean.’
‘You should be at the Yard, Brent. What did the Chancellor say?’
‘Well, it’s in French and my French isn’t very good so perhaps you’d better read it for yourself.’
He handed over a sheet of his childish writing and Grant read:
Regardez, je vous prie, les événements qui après la mort du roi Edouard sont arrivés dans ce pays. Contemplez ses enfants, déjà grands et braves, massacrés impunément, et la couronne transportée a l’assassin par la faveur des peuples.
‘“Ce pays”,’ said Grant. ‘Then he was in full flood against England. He even suggests that it was with the will of the English people that the boys were “massacred”. We are being held up as a barbarous race.’
‘Yes. That’s what I meant. It’s a Congressman scoring a point. Actually, the French Regency sent an embassy to Richard that same year – about six months later – so they had probably found that the rumour wasn’t true. Richard signed a safe-conduct for their visit. He wouldn’t have done that if they had been still slanging him as a murdering untouchable.’
‘No. Can You give me the dates of the two libels?’
‘Sure. I have them here. The monk at Croyland wrote about events in the late summer of 1483. He says that there was a rumour that the boys had been put to death but no one knew how. The nasty slap in the meeting of the States-General was in January 1484.’
‘Perfect,’ said Grant.