The Murders of Richard III - Elizabeth Peters [18]
The door burst open.
“Ah,” said a voice. “You must be thinking of me—the missing character! The offensive, precocious small boy!”
The final adjective could only have referred to the apparition’s relative age. His cheeks were still soft and downy, his voice high tenor. Otherwise he was more than large; he was elephantine. His puffy pink face was perfectly spherical. His features were regular and well shaped, but they were drowned in fat. His costume was unfortunate. The tights, stretched to bursting point, enclosed legs like Karnakian pillars, and his tunic was dragged up in front by a pot belly that would have disgraced a middle-aged beer drinker. The front of this garment was streaked with food and drink stains.
“Offensive is right,” said Thomas distastefully. “Jacqueline, this is Percival Ponsonby-Jones, the son and heir of the lady you met downstairs. I needn’t introduce you to him; he knows who you are. He knows everything. How long have you been eavesdropping, Percy?”
“Long enough to hear my mother referred to as a middle-aged hag.” Percy came into the room and dropped heavily onto the bed. From a pouch at his belt he took a handful of cookies and began to eat them, scattering crumbs deliberately.
“Hag was an ill-chosen word,” admitted Jacqueline. “It suggests someone who is haggard and undernourished…. What part are you taking in this charade, child? The court jester? Or perhaps Clarence’s son, the one who was mentally retarded?”
Thomas blinked. Jacqueline was not usually so brutal. The attack disconcerted the boy. He hesitated, trying to decide which insult to answer first.
“I’m Edward the Fifth,” he said. “The one who was murdered by Henry Tudor.”
“Not smothered in the Tower by Richard?” Jacqueline asked.
Percy finished the cookies and extracted an apple from the same place.
“Everyone knows Richard didn’t kill the princes,” he said scornfully. “That’s a Tudor slander. I expect you don’t know who the Tudors were.”
“But I thought the bones of the boys had been found in the Tower,” said Jacqueline gently.
Percy expanded. Thomas felt a faint twinge of pity for the boy; he ought to have been warned by Jacqueline’s earlier comments, but he was too young and too conceited to know better.
“The bones were found in 1674, when some workmen were demolishing a staircase outside the White Tower. It wasn’t till 1933 that the bones were examined by a doctor and a dentist. They said the skeletons were of two children, aged about ten and twelve.
“Now…” Percy took another bite of apple and continued in a muffled voice, “you wouldn’t know this, of course, but the very precision of the ages given is suspect. In order to blame Richard for the crime, you have to prove that the boys were exactly ten, and between twelve and thirteen, when they died, and you can’t prove that because it’s impossible to determine the ages of bones of young people that accurately. You can’t even tell whether they were boys or girls before puberty. The description of where the bones were found doesn’t agree with Sir Thomas More’s story, either, but I won’t go into that, because it’s too complicated for you to understand.”
He smirked at Jacqueline and took another huge bite.
“More says they were buried ‘at the stair foot, meetly deep in the ground under a great heap of stones,’ ” Jacqueline murmured. “The accounts of the seventeenth-century workmen who found the bones imply that they were under the foundations of the stairs. Not only would that have been a much more laborious operation than the one More describes, but it doesn’t agree with his statement that the bones were later removed and reburied elsewhere by