I, Richard - Elizabeth George [79]
So she'd ask him if he'd taken his medicine, and since Bernie Perryman never did anything—save pour himself a Black Bush— without having been reminded a dozen times, the answer would be no. So Betsy would seek out the pills and shake the dosage into her palm. And Bernie would take it obediently and then stagger out of the house—sans jacket as usual—and head to St. James Church to do his duty.
Betsy would call after him to take his jacket, but Bernie would wave off the suggestion. His wife would shout, “Bernie! You'll catch your death—” and then stop herself at the sudden thought that entered her mind. Bernie's death, after all, was what she needed in order to be with her Beloved.
So her glance would drop to the bottle of pills in her hand and she would read the label: Digitoxin. Do not exceed one tablet per day without consulting physician.
Perhaps at that point, she would also hear the doctor's explanation to her: “It's like digitalis. You've heard of that. An overdose would kill him, Mrs. Perryman, so you must be vigilant and see to it that he never takes more than one tablet.”
More than one tablet would ring in her ears. Her morning bonk with Malcolm would live in her memory. She'd shake a pill from the bottle and examine it. She'd finally start to think of a way that the future could be massaged into place.
Happily, Malcolm turned from the farmhouse to his budding Ricardians. All was going according to plan.
“From this location,” Malcolm told his audience of eager but elderly seekers of Love on the Battlefield, “we can see the village of Sutton Cheney to our northeast.” All heads swivelled in that direction. They may have been freezing their antique pudenda, but at least they were a cooperative group. Save for Sludgecur who, if she had a pudendum, it was no doubt swathed in long underwear. Her expression challenged him to concoct a Romance out of the Battle of Bosworth. Very well, he thought, and picked up the gauntlet. He'd give them Romance. He'd also give them a piece of history that would change their lives. Perhaps this group of Aussie oldies hadn't been Ricardians when they'd arrived at Bosworth Field, but they'd damn well be neophyte Ricardians when they left. And they'd return Down Under and tell their grandchildren that it was Malcolm Cousins—the Malcolm Cousins, they would say—who had first made them aware of the gross injustice that had been perpetrated upon the memory of a decent King.
“It was there in the village of Sutton Cheney, in St. James Church, that King Richard prayed on the night before the battle,” Malcolm told them. “Picture what the night must have been like.”
From there, he went onto automatic pilot. He'd told the story hundreds of times over the years that he'd served as Special Guide for Groups at Bosworth Field. All he had to do was to milk it for its Romantic Qualities, which wasn't a problem.
The King's forces—12,000 strong—were encamped on the summit of Ambion Hill where Malcolm Cousins and his band of shivering neo-Ricardians were standing. The King knew that the morrow would decide his fate: whether he would continue to reign as Richard III or whether his crown would be taken by conquest and worn by an upstart who'd lived most of his life on the continent, safely tucked away and coddled by those whose ambitions had long been to destroy the York dynasty. The King would have been well aware that his fate rested in the hands of the Stanley brothers: Sir William and Thomas, Lord Stanley. They had arrived at Bosworth with a large army and were encamped to the north, not far from the King, but also—and ominously—not far from the King's pernicious adversary, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who also happened to be Lord Stanley's stepson. To secure the father's loyalty, King Richard had taken one of Lord Stanley's blood sons as a hostage, the young man's life being the forfeit if his father betrayed England's anointed King by joining Tudor's forces in the upcoming battle. The Stanleys, however, were a wily lot and had shown themselves