The Murders of Richard III - Elizabeth Peters [6]
He broke off, eyeing Jacqueline with a sudden wild surmise. She stared owlishly back at him over the rims of her glasses; and Thomas, who seldom did so, swore imaginatively.
“You know all this! You, who claim to have read every detective story ever printed…Of course you know it. You’ve read The Daughter of Time.”
“Sure.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?”
“I lo-o-ove to hear you talk,” said Jacqueline silkily.
“There are times when I could kill you.”
“I read all Josephine Tey’s mysteries,” Jacqueline said. “The Daughter of Time is absolutely brilliant. But it’s a novel, not a work of serious history. It is far from unbiased.”
“What else have you read?” Thomas asked with resignation.
Jacqueline reached for the last bun.
“Once a librarian, always a librarian,” she said, nibbling. “When I read historical fiction I always check to see what’s real and what’s made up. Tey got her material from one of Richard’s apologists, and she is just as biased as the Tudor historians, only on the other side—Saint Richard the Third, full of love and peace and flowers. I read some historical novels about Richard,” she added, finishing the bun with a snap of her white teeth. “Most of them portrayed him as a sensitive martyr, wringing his slender hands and sobbing. I doubt that he cried much.”
“You are really—”
“So now we come to the house party,” said Jacqueline. She eyed the crumbs on the empty plate regretfully, and went on, “I assume the party has to do with your hero. What is it, a meeting of some organization? There is a group that is concerned with Richard’s rehabilitation. They call themselves Ricardians, and are not to be confused with the followers of the economist, David Ricardo. They put In Memoriam notices in the Times on the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth.”
Jacqueline’s tone gave this otherwise innocuous statement implications that made Thomas’s eyes narrow with exasperation. His sense of humor triumphed, however, and he smiled sheepishly.
“There are several groups interested in Richard the Third. I suspect ours is the freakiest of them all.”
“That’s nice.”
“You needn’t be sarcastic.”
“I’m not being sarcastic. There is no happier outlet for our inherent aggressive instincts than the belligerent support of an unorthodox cause. I myself,” said Jacqueline proudly, “am a member of the friends of Jerome.” She watched Thomas sort through his capacious memory for potential historic Jeromes, and added, “Jerome is a place, not a person. It’s an absolutely marvelous ghost town in Arizona. It sits on top of an abandoned mine, and if we don’t get busy, it is going to slide right down the hill into—”
“That’s even crazier than our organization.”
“One attribute of eccentric groups is their lack of sympathy for other eccentrics. Tell me about Richard’s friends.”
“Don’t call us that. It’s one of the names of the older organization from which we reneged when they denied Sir Richard’s illegitimacy.”
Jacqueline had again produced her tatting. She studied it fixedly for several seconds before she looked at Thomas.
“Just say that again, Thomas. Slowly.”
“Our founder and president is Sir Richard Weldon,” Thomas explained. “He claims to be descended from one of Richard the Third’s illegitimate children. The Richard the Third Society wouldn’t accept his claim, in spite of well-documented—”
“Thomas!”
“Well, it could be true. Richard had several bastards; everybody did in those days.”
“That resolves all my doubts. You tempt me, Thomas,” Jacqueline said pensively. “I’d like to meet Sir Richard…Weldon. That isn’t the department store?”
“Stores, not store. They’re all over England. But you’ll like Sir Richard,” Thomas added with seeming irrelevance. “He’s a nice guy,