The Daughter of Time Read Free Page B

of?'
    'He says he had decided to lease his Park Lane flat to Dolly Dacre and buy that Charles The Second house at Richmond that the Latimers are giving up because he has got that Governor's appointment. He had thought about the lack of bathrooms and decided that the little upstairs room with the eighteenth-century Chinese paper would make a very good one. They could remove the beautiful paper and use it to decorate that dull little room downstairs at the back. It's full of Victorian panelling, the dull little room. He had also reviewed the drainage, wondered if he had enough money to take the old tiling off and replace it, and speculated as to what kind of cooking range they had in the kitchen. He had just decided to get rid of the shrubbery at the gate when he found himself face to face with me, on a stage, in the presence of nine hundred and eighty-seven people, in the middle of a speech. Do you wonder that his eyes popped. I see that you have managed to read at least one of the books I brought you if the rumpled jacket is any criterion.'
    'Yes. The mountain one. It was a godsend. I lay for hours looking at the pictures. Nothing puts things in perspective as quickly as a mountain.'
    'The stars are better, I find.'
    'Oh, no . The stars merely reduce one to the status of an amoeba. The stars take the last vestige of human pride, the last spark of confidence, from one. But a snow mountain is a nice human-size yard-stick. I lay and looked at Everest and thanked God that I wasn't climbing those slopes. A hospital bed was a haven of warmth and rest and security by comparison, and The Midget and The Amazon two of the highest achievements of civilisation.'
    'Ah, well, here are some more pictures for you.'
    Marta up-ended the quarto envelope she was carrying, and spilled a collection of paper sheets over his chest.
    'What is this?'
    'Faces,' said Marta, delightedly. 'Dozens of faces for you. Men, women, and children. All sorts, conditions, and sizes.'
    He picked a sheet off his chest and looked at it. It was an engraving of a fifteenth-century portrait. A woman.
    'Who is this?'
    'Lucrezia Borgia. Isn't she a duck.'
    'Perhaps, but are you suggesting that there was any mystery about her?'
    'Oh, yes. No one has ever decided whether she was her brother's tool or his accomplice.'
    He discarded Lucrezia, and picked up a second sheet. This proved to be the portrait of a small boy in late-eighteenth-century clothes, and under it in faint capitals was printed the words: Louis XVII.
    'Now there's a beautiful mystery for you,' Marta said. 'The Dauphin. Did he escape or did he die in captivity?'
    'Where did you get all these?'
    'I routed James out of his cubby-hole at the Victoria and Albert, and made him take me to a print shop. I knew he would know about that sort of thing, and I'm sure he has nothing to interest him at the V. and A.'
    It was so like Marta to take it for granted that a Civil Servant, because he happened also to be a playwright and an authority on portraits, should be willing to leave his work and delve about in print shops for her pleasure.
    He turned up the photograph of an Elizabethan portrait. A man in velvet and pearls. He turned the back to see who this might be and found that it was the Earl of Leicester.
    'So that is Elizabeth's Robin,' he said. 'I don't think I ever saw a portrait of him before.'
    Marta looked down on the virile fleshy face and said: 'It occurs to me for the first time that one of the major tragedies of history is that the best painters didn't paint you till you were past your best. Robin must have been quite a man. They say Henry the Eighth was dazzling as a young man, but what is he now? Something on a playing card. Nowadays, we know what Tennyson was like before he grew that frightful beard. I must fly. I'm late as it is. I've been lunching at the Blague, and so many people came up to talk that I couldn't get away as early as I meant to.'
    'I hope your host was impressed,' Grant said, with a glance