دختر زمان

Now is the winter of our discontent... He turned the portrait over to look for a caption. On the back was printed: Richard the Third, from the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, artist unknown. So that was who it was. Richard the Third. Crouchback. The monster of nursery stories. A synonym for villainy. Richard had murdered his two boy nephews, but no one knew how. They had merely disappeared, the mystery had never been solved. Two skeletons had turned up in Charles II's day, and had been buried. It was taken for granted that the skeletons were the remains of the young princes, but nothing had ever been proved. A story macabre enough to delight any child's heart. The innocent children; the wicked uncle. The classic ingredients in a tale of classic simplicity. But the King won no profit from his wicked deed. The people of England, shocked by his cold-blooded cruelty, decided they would no longer have him for King. They sent for his distant cousin, Henry Tudor, who was living in France, to come and be crowned King in his stead. Richard died bravely in the battle which resulted, but he had made his name hated throughout the country and many deserted him to fight for his rival. To have made oneself one of the best-known rulers in all the two thousand years of England's history, and to have had only two years to do it in, surely augured a towering personality. If Richard had not made friends he had certainly influenced people. But had he done it? A police detective decides to unravel history and find out...