The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, Alex Bell

find out. And meanwhile perhaps you'd like a look at Oliphant. He's the modern authority on the period, or so I understand.'
    Grant said that he would be delighted to take a look at Sir Cuthbert.
    'I'll drop him in when I'm passing tomorrow – I suppose it'll be all right if I leave him in the office for you? and as soon as I find out about the contemporary writers I'll be in with the news. That suit you?'
    Grant said that that was perfect.
    Young Carradine went suddenly shy, reminding Grant of the woolly lamb which he had quite forgotten in the interest of this new approach to Richard. He said good night in a quiet smothered way, and ambled out of the room followed by the sweeping skirts of his topcoat.
    Grant thought that, the Carradine fortune apart, Atlanta Shergold looked like being on a good thing.

    8
----
    'Well,' said Marta when she came again, 'what did you think of my woolly lamb?'
    'It was very kind of you to find him for me.'
    'I didn't have to find him. He's continually underfoot. He practically lives at the theatre. He must have seen To Sea in a Bowl five hundred times; when he isn't in Atlanta's dressing-room he's in front. I wish they'd get married, and then we might see less of him. (They're not even living together, you know. It's all pure idyll.') She dropped her 'actress' voice for a moment and said: 'They're rather sweet together. In some ways they are more like twins than lovers. They have that utter trust in each other; that dependence on the other half to make a proper whole. And they never have rows or even quarrels, that I can see. An idyll, as I said. Was it Brent who brought you this?'
    She poked the solid bulk of Oliphant with a doubtful finger.
    'Yes, he left it with the porter for me.'
    'It looks very indigestible.'
    'A bit unappetising, let us say. It is quite easily digested once you have swallowed it. History for the student. Set out in detailed fact.'
    'Ugh!'
    'At least I've discovered where the revered and sainted Sir Thomas More got his account of Richard.'
    'Yes? Where?'
    'From one John Morton.'
    'Never heard of him.'
    'Neither did I, but that's our ignorance.'
    'Who was he?'
    'He was Henry VII's Archbishop of Canterbury. And Richard's bitterest enemy.'
    If Marta had been capable of whistling, she would have whistled in comment.
    'So that was the horse's mouth!' she said.
    'That was the horse's mouth. And it is on that account of Richard that all the later ones were built. It is on that story that Holinshed fashioned his history, and on that story that Shakespeare fashioned his character.'
    'So it is the version of someone who hated Richard. I didn't know that. Why did the sainted Sir Thomas report Morton rather than someone else?'
    'Whoever he reported, it would be a Tudor version. But he reported Morton, it seems, because he had been in Morton's household as a boy. And of course Morton had been very much "in on the act", so it was natural to write down the version of an eyewitness whose account he could have at first hand.'
    Marta poked her finger at Oliphant again. 'Does your dull fat historian acknowledge that it is a biased version?'
    'Oliphant? Only by implication. He is, to be honest, in a sad muddle himself about Richard. On the same page he says that he was an admirable administrator and general, with an excellent reputation, staid and good-living, very popular by contrast with the Woodville upstarts (the Queen's relations) and that he was "perfectly unscrupulous and ready to wade through any depth of bloodshed to the crown which lay within his grasp". On one page he says grudgingly: "There are reasons for supposing that he was not destitute of a conscience" and then on a later page reports More's picture of a man so tormented by his own deed that he could not sleep. And so on.'
    'Does your dull fat Oliphant prefer his roses red, then?'
    'Oh, I don't think so. I don't think he is consciously Lancastrian. Though now that I think of it he is very tolerant of Henry VIIs usurpation.