The Murders of Richard III - Elizabeth Peters [1]
Jacqueline was regarding the portrait with a fixed stare. Her horn-rimmed glasses rode high on her nose, but she had left the rest of her tailored working costume at home. She wore a short, clinging dress of her favorite green; the short sleeves and plunging neckline displayed an admirable tan. Tendrils of bronze hair curled over her ears and temples. Without turning her head, she spoke. The voice could not by any stretch of the imagination be called mellow.
“The Tower of London,” she said. “Westminster Abbey. Buckingham Palace. I’m just a little country girl who has never been abroad. What am I doing here? I want to see the Changing of the Guard. I want to have tea, a real English tea, in a real London tea shop. I want—”
“You just had lunch,” Thomas said indignantly. “At Simpson’s on the Strand. You had an enormous lunch. Don’t you gain weight?”
Instead of replying, Jacqueline let her eyes drift sideways. They focused on Thomas’s midriff. Reflexively Thomas sucked in his breath, and Jacqueline went on with her mournful monologue.
“I don’t even mind looking at portraits. Elizabeth the First, Charles the Second…I adore Charles the Second. He was a very sexy man. I could contemplate Keats and Byron and Shelley without resentment. And what do I get? A bad portrait—if it is a portrait, and not a seventeenth-century painter’s imaginative guess—of a famous villain. Old Crouchback himself.”
“Old Crouchback!” Thomas was indignant. “Look at him. See anything wrong with his back?”
Jacqueline studied the portrait again and Thomas let out a little sigh of relief as the glasses began to slip slowly down her narrow, high-bridged nose. The glasses were a barometer of Jacqueline’s moods. When she was interested in, or worried about something, she forgot to push them back into place. In moments of extreme emotion they perched precariously on the tip of her nose.
“No,” Jacqueline said finally.
“There is a slight hint of deformity in the set of the shoulders; one looks higher than the other. But that could be due to bad painting. He certainly was not a hunchback. He’s even good-looking, in a gloomy sort of way. It is a contemporary portrait, of course?”
Thomas glanced at her suspiciously. She continued to contemplate the portrait of Richard III with candid interest, but Thomas was not deceived. Art history was one of Jacqueline’s specialties.
“No. It’s been dated to about 1580. Like most of the other portraits of Richard, it was probably copied from a lost original. The only one that might be a contemporary portrait is in the Royal Collection. When it was X-rayed recently, the experts found that parts of it had been painted over. Originally the right shoulder was lower, even with the left, and the eyes were not so narrow and slitlike.”
Jacqueline’s eyebrows lifted. She would never admit it, but Thomas knew that he had caught her interest.
“Retouched, to suggest the hunchbacked, squinting villain? That does suggest that the original was a contemporary portrait, too flattering to suit Richard’s enemies. Let’s see; if I remember my history lessons, Richard’s successor was Henry the Seventh, the first of the Tudor kings and the last heir of the house of Lancaster. Richard was the house of York. Henry got the crown by killing Richard at the Battle of Bosworth—”
“Henry Tudor never killed anyone in a fair fight,” Thomas said contemptuously. “At Bosworth he was running for the rear when Richard was cut down by a dozen men. It was Richard’s good name Henry tried to destroy. Henry had no real claim to the throne and no popular support. He’d have lost the Battle of Bosworth if his widowed mother hadn’t been smart enough to marry one of the most powerful nobles in the kingdom. Lord Stanley and his brother marched to Bosworth field as Richard’s vassals and then treacherously attacked him. The only way Henry could justify his