The Murders of Richard III - Elizabeth Peters [65]
“Are you decent?” inquired Jacqueline, through a modest crack.
“No.”
The door opened. “You aren’t going to bed, are you?” Jacqueline asked. She was fully dressed in battle costume—hair pinned back, glasses firmly on the bridge of her nose, purse over her arm.
“Who, me? Why would I think of doing a crazy thing like that?”
“There’s no point in going to sleep now. It’s morning already.”
Jacqueline sat down on the bed next to Thomas. A vagrant fancy slipped through the latter’s mind, but it did not find a lodging place; Helen of Troy couldn’t have stimulated Thomas just then.
He yawned. “I noticed it is morning,” he said. “Nothing is going to happen until three this afternoon. I have had no sleep at all, and the hours of the night have not been uneventful. I am exhausted in body, mind, and spirit.”
“I figured you would be,” said Jacqueline. She opened her purse.
Thomas shied back. “No,” he said vigorously. “No. Not some noxious remedy from that bottomless purse. I will not sniff ammonia or drink—”
“What are you raving about?”
The only thing to emerge from the purse was a slip of paper covered with writing in Jacqueline’s sprawling hand.
“Here,” said Jacqueline, “is the list of Richard’s supposed victims. I copied it from Markham’s biography.”
The list read:
Edward of Lancaster
Henry the Sixth
Clarence
Hastings
Rivers, Vaughan, Grey, and Haute
His wife, Anne
The princes
“So what else is new?” Thomas asked. “They aren’t in chronological order,” he added.
“They are except for the princes. Markham puts that one last because it is the main charge. Now look at the list from Walpole’s Historic Doubts.”
1st. Edward Prince of Wales, son of Henry the Sixth
2nd. Henry the Sixth
3rd. George, Duke of Clarence
4th. Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan
5th. Lord Hastings
6th. Edward the Fifth and his brother
7th. His own queen
“Yes, indeed,” said Thomas. He collapsed backward onto the bed and lay staring at the ceiling with his hands clasped protectively over his stomach. “So what does it all mean?”
“Not a damned thing,” said Jacqueline.
“Your tone is one of poorly repressed exasperation. I deduce that you are baffled.”
“But it has to mean something,” Jacqueline insisted. “I hoped you could tell me what.”
“Don’t give me that humble bit,” said Thomas, still prone. The ceiling was singularly dull. No cracks, no stains, not even a cobweb in a corner. Not in a well-staffed house like this…
He came to with a start as Jacqueline’s finger traced a path along the sensitive area on the bottom of his foot. He sat up.
“All right,” he said resignedly. “Let me get dressed and I’ll go out and detect with you. Only don’t insult my intelligence by intimating that you are leaning on my superior brain. You just want somebody to listen to you and say ‘yes’ now and then.”
“Go ahead and dress.” Jacqueline turned her back. As Thomas assumed daytime attire, she continued to talk.
“He isn’t following the lists, Thomas. Nobody puts the princes ahead of Hastings. Why did he break the succession there? He followed it up to that point.”
“Dunno,” said Thomas.
“Both lists include the queen’s relatives—Rivers, Grey, and the rest. Those were executions—legal, I suppose, according to the usage of the times, but—”
“Nobody is playing those parts.”
“All right, but then why not include the Duke of Buckingham? Richard had him beheaded, like Hastings. The general is playing that part.”
“Buckingham rebelled against a crowned king,” Thomas said. “Richard hadn’t been crowned when he arrested Hastings and the Woodville crowd; and some historians doubt that they were really guilty. Buckingham was running around the countryside with an army; you can’t quibble about his being a traitor….”
His voice trailed off. He was standing on one foot with a sock halfway on the other.
“This character is not following the lists,” he said, thinking aloud. “Poisoning Rawdon—Henry the Sixth—was out of line too. So he has some weird list of his own—obviously anti-Richard. Buckingham