The Daughter Of Time

“Of all the portraits Grant had seen this afternoon this was the most individual. It was as if the artist had striven to put on canvas something that his talent was not sufficient to translate into paint.”

Richard’s portrait projects an indefinable quality that Grant, an expert on faces, has trouble voicing. The detective is obsessed with matching Richard’s face to the known facts of his life. In doing so, he may be able to articulate what he intuitively understands about the image but can’t express in words.

“I suppose villainy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.”

Almost every person who sees the portrait reacts to it negatively. They imbue the man portrayed with sinister intentions. These extreme reactions are created by a projection of evil from the eye of the beholder.

“I’m not interested in nice faces. I’m interested only in dreary ones; in ‘murdering brutes’ who are ‘men of great ability.’”

Grant makes this facetious comment to the Midget as a way of warning her off. However, he is fascinated with Richard precisely because he was a man of great ability who may also have been a murdering brute. Therein lies the contradiction and the heart of the mystery.

“Villains don’t suffer, and that face is full of the most dreadful pain.”

This comment by the Matron offers a shrewd observation about the nature of evil. The greatest villains possess no conscience and, therefore, don’t suffer from remorse. At the same time, she may be projecting the impression of pain from her years of tending the seriously ill.

“Everything in that history had been hearsay. And if there was one word that a policeman loathed more than another it was hearsay. Especially when applied to evidence.”

Grant reaches a turning point in his investigation as soon as he realizes that his so-called credible sources can’t be trusted. He thinks like a detective instead of a history student from that moment forward.

“Nurse Ingham thinks he’s dreary. Nurse Darroll thinks he’s a horror. My surgeon thinks he’s a polio victim. Sergeant Williams thinks he’s a born judge. Matron thinks he’s a soul in torment.”

Grant succinctly sums up each visitor’s reaction to Richard’s portrait. He’s also indirectly commenting on the degree to which preconceived notions shape perception.

“That was Tonypandy. […] It is a completely untrue story grown to legend while the men who knew it to be untrue looked on and said nothing.”

Tonypandy is the name of a town in Wales, but the concept of Tonypandy becomes an important theme throughout the book. It illustrates the point that people often prefer to sustain a comfortable myth rather than an inconvenient truth.

“After all, the truth of anything at all doesn’t lie in someone’s account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper. The sale of a house. The price of a ring.”

The investigation takes a more productive turn when Grant and Brent stop looking in history books for their answers. Historical accounts are often forms of propaganda. Account books and sales receipts are simple facts that don’t carry alternative interpretations.

“I’m asking myself the question that every policeman asks in every case of murder. Who benefits? And for the first time it occurs to me that the glib theory that Richard got rid of the boys to make himself safer on the throne is so much nonsense.”

Grant fails to make headway in his investigation until he approaches it like any other police case. When he finally asks who would benefit from the princes’ death, the solution to the mystery is obvious.

“It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset.”

When Grant’s cousin makes this offhand observation about other examples of Tonypandy, she unknowingly explains the reason why Richard’s name hasn’t yet been cleared. Nobody wants their preconceived ideas about him contradicted.

“He began to wonder whether historians were possessed of minds any more commonsensical than those Great Minds he had encountered, who had been so credulous.”

Grant’s investigation is often stymied by his failure to find much common sense in the sources he studies. A revered author or a Great Mind is assumed to utter the absolute truth on all subjects. This quote suggests that Grant has ceased to rely on authoritative historical sources for information.

“That is why historians surprise me. They seem to have no talent for the likeliness of any situation. They see history like a peepshow; with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.”

Grant’s comment echoes back to his observation about common sense. Learned scholars are supposed to demonstrate clear reasoning ability. The microscopic view with which historians approach a particular historical event prevents them from seeing the forest for the trees. They report events without considering context.

“He was sideways as a crab, you know. He never went straight at anything, even murder. It had to be covered up to look like something else. […] He had a mind like a corkscrew.”

Brent offers this observation about Henry VII. He and Grant aren’t simply analyzing Richard’s personality; they’re also analyzing his adversary’s. The striking difference between the two men makes it easy to guess who the real murderer is.

“The spectacle of Dr. Gairdner trying to make his facts fit his theory was the most entertaining thing in gymnastics that Grant had witnessed for some time. […] As a contortionist Dr. Gairdner was the original boneless wonder.”

Grant’s comment can be applied to the other historians he reads over the course of his investigation. All of them credit Richard with many good qualities and then damn him as a murderer in the next sentence. Gairdner tries to reconcile the contradictions and, in the process of doing so, ties himself up into verbal knots.

“One could go through the catalogue of his acknowledged virtues, and find that each of them, individually, made his part in the murder unlikely in the extreme. Taken together they amounted to a wall of impossibility that towered into fantasy.”

Grant surveys all the chronicles he’s read about Richard to come to some general conclusions about the king’s character. Even Richard’s most negative biographers have at least one good thing to say about him. When his virtues are taken as a whole, the personality that emerges seems an impossible fit for the murderer of two innocent children.

“‘I’ve just thought of the right adjective for Henry,’ he said presently. ‘Shabby. He was a shabby creature. […] But it wasn’t only his greed for money. Everything about him is shabby, isn’t it?’”

Brent spends countless hours sifting through research on Henry and comes to know his character well. The Tudor king wasn’t a magnificent rogue or a reckless daredevil. He was sneaky and manipulative. Of all the adjectives Brent could have used, “shabby” is contemptuously dismissive. It damns with faint criticism because its subject isn’t worthy of anything more.

“Everyone can reason from A to B—even a child. And most adults can reason from B to C. But a lot can’t. Most criminals can’t. […] They’ll lay two completely incompatible things side by side and contemplate them with the most unquestioning content. You can’t make them see that they can’t have both.”

Grant makes this comment after reading Dr. Gairdner. The historian paints Richard as both a virtuous king and a murderer of children. He doesn’t recognize the incompatibility of those two characteristics. Like the average criminal, Dr. Gairdner wants to have his cake and eat it too.

“Even in the destitution of his own grief, good sense was his ruling characteristic. Good sense and family feeling. No base-born son, however active and well-disposed, was going to sit in the Plantagenet’s seat while his brother’s son was there to occupy it.”

Grant contemplates Richard’s actions after his wife and son died. Rather than promote his own illegitimate son into the line of succession, he supported his nephew’s right to succeed him as king. This demonstration of family loyalty once again contradicts the notion that Richard was a murderer.

“And it occurred to him too for the first time in full force just how that family atmosphere strengthened the case for Richard’s innocence. The boys whom he was supposed to have put down […] were Edward’s sons, children he must have known personally and well. To Henry, on the other hand they were mere symbols. Obstacles on a path. […] All questions of character apart, the choice between the two men as suspects might almost be decided on that alone.”

Grant makes the point that the murder of the Tower princes would have been highly personal for Richard. These were the sons of a brother he idolized. In contrast, Henry didn’t know them at all, so the murders would have been a simple matter of expediency. To the extent that Henry had a conscience at all, the death of two unknowns would have cost him little anguish.

“Marta thinks he is a little like Lorenzo the Magnificent. Her friend James thinks it is the face of a saint. My surgeon thinks it is the face of a cripple. Sergeant Williams thinks he looks like a great judge. But I think, perhaps, Matron comes nearest the heart of the matter. […] She says it is a face full of the most dreadful suffering.”

Earlier in the book, Grant offered a similar summary of the conflicting opinions of the people who viewed the portrait. He never ventures an observation of his own about the picture until this moment. All that he has learned about Richard’s life during his investigation leads him to agree with the Matron’s viewpoint.

“Don’t you see: Richard had no need of any mystery; but Henry’s whole case depended on the boys’ end being mysterious. No one has ever been able to think up a reason for such a hole-and-corner method as Richard was supposed to have used. It was a quite mad way to do it.”

Grant has moved on from motive to method in his analysis of the crime. He’s already established that the nature of the crime was out of character for Richard. He’s now saying that the underhanded way in which the crime was carried out was equally out of character for the king. Were Richard the murderer, he would have chosen a more direct approach.

“A man who is interested in what makes people tick doesn’t write history. He writes novels, or becomes an alienist […] History is toy soldiers. […] I mean: it’s moving little figures about on a flat surface. It’s half-way to mathematics.”

When Grant suggests that all history authors should be required to take a course in psychology, Brent replies with this comment. Historians have no interest in probing motivation. They merely report events. When history is recounted this way, it’s as quantifiable as mathematics. The implication is that history shouldn’t be written this way at all.

“Richard III had been credited with the elimination of two nephews, and his name was a synonym for evil. But Henry VII, whose ‘settled and considered policy’ was to eliminate a whole family was regarded as a shrewd and far-seeing monarch.”

Grant unveils the hidden agenda behind many historic chronicles. They are often used as a form of propaganda by the winning side. Both Henry VII and Henry VIII exterminated all the remaining members of the York family who opposed their claims to the throne. This mass murder was greeted with approval, while Richard’s supposed crimes were denounced.