The Murders of Richard III - Elizabeth Peters [75]
All of them had been affected by the bizarre atmosphere of the past few days. Thomas had felt his own grip on reality slip once or twice. Could an innocent avocation such as historical research fan the spark of incipient schizophrenia? That story of Jacqueline’s about the scholar who worshiped at the shrine of Mary, Queen of Scots…That was not an extreme case, but the asylums, he had heard, were full of people who thought they were Julius Caesar or Napoleon. Abnormality sends out invisible waves that touch the people within its range. One seriously disturbed personality could sensitize others and make them behave abnormally too.
Weldon was an authority on medieval manuscripts. He had called the meeting; naturally he knew the roles the others had assumed. He himself was King Richard, and the victims of the jokes were Richard’s victims. Had Weldon’s sense of identification with his Plantagenet prototype passed the bounds of sanity? Was some sly, submerged segment of Weldon’s personality, beset by doubts as to Richard’s innocence, denied by Weldon’s conscious mind, seeking an outlet? An outwardly dutiful son, subconsciously rejecting and resenting his father’s belief…
Thomas knew he was weltering in a morass of absurd Freudian contradictions, but he couldn’t get the idea out of his head. He felt an urgent need to talk with Jacqueline.
A windblown spatter of rain against the windows made him start. The room was horribly quiet. All at once he was afraid to be alone.
7
WHEN THOMAS REACHED THE DRAWING ROOM HE was out of breath, in part from distress of mind, in part from the speed with which he had traversed the long, empty corridor. He tried to catch Jacqueline’s eye, but did not succeed; she was chatting with Mrs. Ponsonby-Jones and Lady Isobel. From the shape of the latter’s smirk, Thomas deduced that Lady Isobel had taken a nip or two to brace herself for the day’s activities.
All the guests were present except the two who were incarcerated upstairs. Even Philip had come down. His eyes closed and his bandaged head resting against the back of the chair, he was expressing courageous suffering. Liz and Frank were seated side by side on a sofa. The rector and Rawdon were discussing music. Kent stood by the window, his back to the room, looking out at the rain; the set of his shoulders expressed anger and frustration. He probably wants to drag Strangways down and torture him into a confession, Thomas thought.
Weldon wandered around the room, rearranging a pillow here and an ornament there. No one seemed anxious to engage him in conversation; Thomas wondered how many of the others had had the same idea he had. As Weldon passed the sofa on which Liz and Frank were sitting, Thomas thought he saw the girl shrink back. Weldon saw it too. A touch of color came into his face and he walked away.
Finding that his performance was not getting the proper attention, Philip got up and joined Liz and Frank. He said something to Liz. She looked at him with an expression of such fury that Thomas hastened toward them. Her comment reassured him as to the nature of the offense; it was Richard the Third again.
“But that is the crux of the matter,” she exclaimed. “Don’t you see—all the other accusations fall to the ground! No one believes in them today. Nothing tarnishes his reputation except the disappearance of the boys. Everything else hangs on that, even the so-called usurpation. Historians admit that the story of the precontract is probably true, and yet they continue to refer to usurpation. Why? Because afterward the princes disappeared. Yet Richard’s seizure of the throne was not only justified legally, it was a moral imperative, given the attitude of the period. The kingship was a divinely sanctioned gift of God. For Richard to stand aside and see the throne go to a bastard would have been to commit an act of impiety, blasphemy! It is true that bastards could be legitimized by royal decree, but a person so legitimized could hardly hope to inherit the throne. And