Edvane Stories

Among the records of the Patent Rolls for the reign of Richard III there survives a commission dated 8 March 1485 at Westminster, appointing Oto Gilbert, Thomas Boweryng, Robert Holbeme, Richard Taillour of Toppesham, yeoman of the crown, and Richard Lepton, yeoman of the king’s chamber, to examine the complaint of Giliom Marcellis, a subject of the Duke of Austria, concerning the seizure of his ship by one John Taillour. The entry notes that an earlier commission to Gilbert and Boweryng alone had produced no result, recording only that they “have not done so.” The expanded commission was given until the fifth day of May to certify its findings. No findings were ever certified. No report from either commission survives in the record. The account that follows is imagined. The silence is not.

◆ ◆ ◆

Westminster had taken on the strained quiet of a household waiting upon death. Richard Taillour felt it as soon as he entered the palace. Clerks crossed the courts with papers gathered tightly beneath their arms, servants moved with unusual purpose, and men who ordinarily lingered to exchange news now spoke briefly and passed on. Nothing had been formally proclaimed, yet nobody needed telling that the Queen was failing. Anne Neville had been ill through the winter, and by March the language around her had changed. Men no longer spoke of recovery. They spoke instead of duties, audiences and petitions, as though the ordinary business of the court might continue untouched if everyone agreed not to speak of what was happening within it.

Richard Taillour was conducted to a chamber overlooking the river where a clerk waited with several folded documents arranged before him. Thomas Lepton was already there, standing near the window with his back partly turned. Richard knew him well enough to recognise him but not well enough to call him a friend. The clerk indicated a place at the table and said, “You are appointed with Master Holbeme and Master Lepton to proceed into Devon and inquire into the matter described here.” Richard accepted the parchment and began to read. Giliom Marcellis, a subject of the Duke of Austria, complained of the taking of his ship, the Sint Marie, by one John Taillour and others associated with him. Witnesses were to be examined, evidence gathered, findings certified and returned before the appointed date.

The name naturally stopped him. He read the passage again, then continued to the end before asking, “Who chose me for this?” After a pause, the clerk said that the appointments had been made under the King’s authority. Lepton glanced across from the window and observed that Richard was unlikely to receive anything more useful than that. Richard ignored him for the moment and looked again at John’s name. He had known his cousin as a boy in Toppesham, though the years between them had long since become greater than the years they had shared. John had gone to sea. Richard had entered crown service. There had been no quarrel and no particular affection either, only the gradual widening of distance between two men whose lives had been tforced them apart.

He nevertheless knew enough about John’s later work to understand that the commission could not be treated as an ordinary complaint of piracy. John had worked the Channel for the King, though nobody at court would have described the arrangement so simply. Ships useful to Henry Tudor had been intercepted. Passengers had been detained. Money and correspondence had disappeared into royal hands. Such work lived in the spaces between written orders, and the men who performed it learned that payment was a more reliable acknowledgement than praise. Richard had also heard that John’s payments had stopped. Whether the work had ended before the money or the money before the work was less clear. Nothing in the commission mentioned any of it.

“There was an earlier inquiry,” Richard said. “Gilbert and Boweryng.”

Lepton had turned fully from the window now. “There was.”

“When did they return?”

“They did not.”

The clerk looked displeased by the bluntness of the reply, but Richard was grateful for it. He asked when the two men had been sent and learned that they had gone west in January. There had been no report, no request for more authority, no letter explaining delay and no message passed through another household. Richard asked whether they had been recalled and was told they had not. He asked whether anything had been heard from their servants or their families. The clerk gathered two loose sheets together before replying that nothing had reached the council which altered the position.

That was the moment when the commission began to feel like a warning. Two royal commissioners did not vanish into Devon because an Austrian merchant had lost a cog. If they had been obstructed, they would have complained. If they had discovered nothing, they would still have certified it. If illness or accident had delayed them, somebody would have known. Richard looked down at the King’s seal and understood that he had not been added because the inquiry required another pair of eyes. His surname had brought him into the room.

He asked whether the King wished him to speak to John personally if John could be found. The clerk answered with care. “You are to establish the truth of the complaint and return what you learn.”

“Not quite what I asked.”

“Perhaps,” the clerk said, “but it is what I can tell you.”

Beyond the window the Thames moved slowly by. Somewhere within the palace Anne Neville lay dying while men discussed Richmond, succession and the loyalty of those whose loyalty had already been purchased. Against such concerns the theft of a merchant vessel should have been trivial. Yet the first commissioners had disappeared, a second commission had been issued, and the King had now sent John Taillour’s cousin to discover what had become of them.

Lepton told him they would leave the following morning. Richard folded the parchment and placed it with the other documents he had been given. By the time he crossed the outer court again, he had abandoned the comforting possibility that his appointment was accidental. He had been sent because John might listen to blood where he had refused authority. What Richard could not yet decide was whether the King expected him to bring his cousin back, persuade him to speak, or merely discover what had happened to the last men who tried.

◆ ◆ ◆

They left Westminster under grey skies, three men riding west with two servants and documentation enough to make the journey official. Holbeme rode mostly in silence. Lepton spoke when there was something worth saying, which Richard preferred to the nervous chatter of men who disliked long roads. The scenery changed gradually. Broad sweeps became narrower tracks, and villages appeared less frequently. They stopped at inns where news arrived slowly, and Richard listened more than he spoke. Richmond’s name surfaced often enough to remind him that the King’s enemies existed beyond the Channel as well as within England, though nobody in these places seemed interested in the subtleties of court. They spoke instead of prices, weather, sickness and whether the roads ahead were passable.

On the second day they met a priest travelling east with two men and a mule. He raised a hand before they had fully drawn level and asked whether they had heard. Lepton answered that they had heard many things.

“The Queen is dead.”

Richard felt Holbeme shift nervously in his saddle.

“When?”

“Yesterday, or the day before. Men disagree. They say the sun darkened the same day.”

Lepton looked towards the clouded sky. “An eclipse.”

The priest crossed himself. “Call it what you will.”

Richard asked where the report had come from. The priest named another traveller, who had heard it from a merchant coming out of London, who had heard it from men attached to a noble household. It was the usual chain by which certainty diminished as it travelled, yet Richard believed the first part. Anne Neville had been dying when he left Westminster. The only uncertainty had been how many days remained to her.

They rode on after exchanging little more. For a time nobody spoke. Richard did not take the eclipse as an omen. He had no patience for men who turned every shadow across the sun into a prophecy, but he understood what such a story could do once it reached the villages behind them. A queen dead, the sky darkened, a threatened king and an heirless court. By the time the tale reached Devon, the order of events would no longer matter.

Holbeme eventually said, “Bad timing.”

“For whom?” Lepton asked.

“For everyone.”

Richard let that stand. His thoughts had already returned to John Taillour. The further they travelled from Westminster, the less plausible the commission seemed to him as ordinary business. Westminster felt distant now, though not absent. Richard understood that whatever waited in Devon belonged to the same world they had left behind. The King’s seal travelled with them, and so did the consequences of everything done beneath it.

Axmouth made its presence known by smell.

Salt, mud, fish and woodsmoke drifted inland before the road gave them a clear view of the estuary. The harbour lay beneath them, and houses, sheds and yards pressed close to the river where it widened towards the sea.

Beyond that stood the Sint Marie.

He knew her at once from the papers’ description. She sat further out than the local boats, her dark hull motionless in the water. There should have been men aboard. Even an idle merchant vessel required movement, repair, watchfulness, some sign that human hands still worked aboard her. Richard saw none. No figure crossed the deck, nor did any sail shift. Nothing appeared broken, and the ship had the look of being abandoned in place.

“That must be her, then,” Lepton said. Holbeme shaded his eyes, saying he thought she rode low, though Richard could not tell at that distance. “We will look at her properly tomorrow,” he said. “Tonight we seek intelligence on Gilbert and Boweryng.”

That proved easier than expected. The innkeeper remembered them immediately. Two gentlemen from the King, lodged together for nine nights, with three horses between them and papers enough to cover his best table. They had questioned fishermen, merchants, boatmen and anyone who had worked near the harbour when the Sint Marie appeared. They had paid for their rooms in advance and left their belongings behind.

“They went out one morning?” Richard asked.

The innkeeper frowned. “I could not say it was morning.”

“But they went out.”

“I suppose they must have.”

Richard waited, but the man could not improve upon it. Gilbert and Boweryng had been present, and then they had not. Nobody remembered seeing them leave for the last time. Nobody had seen them ride away. Their horses remained in the stable until the landlord, after several days, began asking whether someone should be told.

Their chamber had not been disturbed. Richard found clothing, money, a travelling cloak and a packet of papers tied with cord. Gilbert’s seal lay beside an unfinished page of notes. Nothing suggested men preparing to depart.

The notes were worse than useless in their incompleteness. Names appeared beside fragments of testimony, references to the ship, the harbour and John Taillour, but no conclusion had been drawn. One page listed three men to be examined again. Another contained only a date and the words going aboard, followed by a space where the sentence should have continued.

Lepton read it twice. “Whose hand?”

“Gilbert’s, I think.”

Holbeme looked towards the window. “Then they boarded her.”

“Perhaps.”

“And did not come back.”

Richard folded the paper carefully. “We do not know that.”

By the following morning they had spoken to several townsmen, and ignorance began to take on a pattern. People answered readily enough when asked who Gilbert and Boweryng were, where they had stayed and what questions they had asked. The difficulty came when Richard tried to learn what happened afterwards. One fisherman remembered seeing them near the quay, but not whether they had taken a boat. A cooper thought they had spoken with John Taillour himself, then withdrew the claim and said he might have heard it from someone else. A woman who sold fish insisted the commissioners had left Axmouth days before anyone noticed them missing, though their horses and possessions proved otherwise.

Nobody refused to speak.

Late the following afternoon Richard stood above the harbour again with Lepton beside him. The tide had changed and local craft had shifted with it, but the Sint Marie remained apart from all of them.

Lepton said, “Do you feel they are lying?”

Richard studied the ship. “No.”

“Then what?”

“I think they are trying very hard to remember correctly.”

“And failing?”

Richard looked back towards the town, where men continued their work as though nothing beyond the harbour required notice.

“Yes,” he said.

◆ ◆ ◆

The examinations began in the inn’s upper room, which offered a semblance of privacy. By midday the table was covered with notes. The witnesses came one at a time, some uneasy, some merely curious, and none seemed to understand why the same questions had to be asked. The difficulty was that the answers were were precise in ways that could not all be true.

The first fisherman said the Sint Marie had entered the estuary before Christmas with a full crew visible on deck. He remembered men at the rail and another standing forward with a sounding line. He could not name the day, but he was certain of the season because frost had been lying on the roofs that morning. When Richard asked whether John Taillour had been aboard, the fisherman shook his head. “Not then. He came later in a boat from the shore. I saw him go out to her.”

The next witness was a harbour labourer who helped move casks near the quay. He insisted the ship had arrived after Christmas and had drifted in with no men visible anywhere upon her. “She came too quiet,” he said. “No shouting or sail handling. Nothing. Just came in.” When Richard asked about John, the man looked puzzled. “He was aboard already.”

“You saw him?”

“I saw someone at the stern.”

“You knew it was Taillour?”

The labourer hesitated. “When they told me, yes.”

That answer remained with Richard after the man had gone. It was not a lie in any ordinary sense. The labourer believed what he had said, just as the fisherman believed his own account, yet the two could not be put together without one of them breaking.

The cargo produced the same problem. Marcellis had described goods consistent with northern trade, stockfish, wax, furs and other merchandise intended for sale. A cooper remembered seeing barrels lowered, while another man swore nothing had ever been unloaded. A third claimed the hold was so full that the hatch covers sat crooked above the cargo. When Richard asked how he knew, the man admitted he heard it said and had never boarded the ship.

Lepton grew impatient as the contradictions accumulated. “Half the town cannot have dreamed the same vessel differently.”

“No,” Richard said. “But who is being truthful and who is not?”

Holbeme had remained quieter through most of the questioning. He asked fewer questions than Lepton, but Richard noticed that he watched the witnesses closely whenever John’s name was spoken. By afternoon Richard had begun to notice something else. Each time a witness said Taillour, the eyes across the table moved briefly towards him.

The last man they examined that day was an elderly fisherman named Gabriel Halliwell, whose hands shook even when they rested flat upon the table. He remembered Gilbert and Boweryng and claimed they had questioned him twice. Richard asked what he had told them.

“That the ship was wrong.”

Lepton shifted in his chair. “Wrong how?”

Halliwell stared out of the window, though the harbour could not be seen from where he sat. “Smelled wrong.”

“Fish?”

“No.”

“Rot?”

“Not that either.”

Richard waited.

Halliwell rubbed at one thumb with the other. “Deep water. You know the smell when something comes up in a net that has been down too long. Mud and salt and cold together. She smelled like that from the quay.”

“That is some distance.”

“I know.”

“And you smelled it there?”

The old man nodded. “It carried.”

Richard had no immediate question. Halliwell looked embarrassed by his own words and was eager to leave. When the examinations were finished, Richard gathered the pages into order. He had expected lies, evasions, divided loyalties and perhaps fear of John Taillour. Instead he had found men who contradicted one another without seeming to know they were doing so.

Outside, the Sint Marie remained where she had been since their arrival. By then Richard no longer believed the shore would tell them what had happened, though he strongly suspected the ship might.

By the next morning Richard had stopped expecting yet another witness to make sense of the rest. The testimony had become a circle. Every account led back to the Sint Marie, and every contradiction remained intact no matter how often he returned to it. Gilbert and Boweryng had reached the same point before they disappeared. Their notes ended where the ship began.

Lepton thought that settled the matter. “We board her, then.”

Holbeme looked less certain. “With whom?”

That question proved harder than the first. The harbour men were willing enough to discuss tides and depths until Richard asked who would take them out. The first boatman agreed for a generous fee and promised to be ready before noon. When the commissioners reached the quay, his boat was there but he was not. A boy eventually told them that the man had gone upriver to visit a brother.

Lepton swore under his breath. “Looks like we must find another.”

They did, though the second man listened with no enthusiasm and made his conditions clear. He would take them towards the ship, but he would not bring his boat against her hull.

“You expect us to swim the last part?” Lepton asked.

The boatman shook his head. “There are shallows near her. Mud shifts there.”

“She is afloat.”

“She sits strangely.”

Richard had heard several versions of the same excuse by then. Tide. Mud. Wind. Poor anchorage. None explained why men who worked those waters every day became unwilling when the short rwo to the Sint Marie was involved.

They eventually found a willing boatman, paying more than double the rate for his services, and he took them out until the town had begun to recede behind them and the ship stood large enough for Richard to see her properly. From shore she had seemed merely neglected. At this distance the neglect became difficult to explain.

The rigging hung without the wind’s natural pull. Some lines sagged heavily while others remained drawn taut though the sailcloth had long since been furled. The hull was dark with moisture well above the waterline. Richard first took it for spray, but the day was calm, and the boards seemed wet from within rather than from outside. Even the angle of the ship troubled him. She did not list exactly, yet she appeared to rest in the water as though something below were holding her in place.

Holbeme noticed it too. “She rides too deep.”

“Perhaps she is fully laden,” Lepton said.

The boatman stopped rowing. “I go no closer.”

Lepton turned towards him. “You were paid to take us out.”

“And I have.”

They were close enough now to see the rail and the empty deck beyond it. No one appeared. No voice challenged them. Nothing moved except a loose end of rope that brushed slowly against the hull.

“Take us alongside,” Richard said.

The boatman’s face tightened. “I said I would not.”

Richard reminded him that he carried the King’s seal and the man took up the oars again. The Sint Marie grew above them until the hull blocked their view of the town. A rope ladder hung over the side. Lepton caught it first. Richard followed, with Holbeme behind him. The deck gave slightly beneath their boots.

Richard turned to instruct the boatman but he was already pulling away.

◆ ◆ ◆

The deck of the Sint Marie was colder than the air in the town or the harbour. Richard noticed it first through the soles of his boots, a damp chill rising from the boards as though the ship had been standing in winter water rather than beneath a mild spring sky. The smell followed. Salt, mud and rot. Holbeme covered his mouth with one hand and Lepton looked towards the stern as if expecting someone to appear and explain the condition of the vessel.

No one came.

The deck was wet in places, though no rain had fallen. Water gathered in hollows around the bases of the masts and glistened between the planks. Richard crouched to touch it, then stopped before his fingers reached the surface. The instinct embarrassed him, but not enough to overcome it.

“We should find the crew,” Lepton said.

Richard nodded and led them forward. The first body lay beyond a coil of rope near the rail, partly hidden by the angle of the deck. For a moment he took it for a bundle of sailcloth. Then he saw a hand.

The sailor had collapsed against the timber with his head bent sharply to one side. His clothes were soaked through. His face was swollen and blue, his lips pale, his hair plastered across his face as though he had only just been dragged from the sea. There was no wound upon him and no blood on the boards.

Holbeme whispered, “Drowned.”

Richard looked towards the water beyond the rail. “Here?”

They found another body near the hatch, then two more below. Each was the same. Wet clothing. Bloated skin. Salt crusting the hair and beard. Some lay where they might have been working. Others had slumped against walls or steps. There were no overturned weapons, no signs of a struggle, no marks that suggested murder. They looked like men recovered from deep water and arranged carefully aboard after death.

The lower decks were worse. The air became colder with every step, and the timbers sweated steadily enough that water ran down the walls in thin trails. Richard could hear it dripping somewhere ahead of them, a slow regular sound that seemed too loud in the stillness.

Lepton stopped beside a doorway. “There.”

Gilbert was lying on his back in the narrow passage, one arm twisted beneath him. Boweryng had fallen further inside the cabin, close to the table where several pages of paper had been spread out to dry or to be examined. Richard recognised them by their clothes and by the official seal lying in a pool beside Boweryng’s hand.

For several moments they stood in silence.

The papers were ruined. Ink had bled across them until names, dates and statements had dissolved into blue black stains. Richard lifted one carefully by the corner, but the sheet sagged under its own weight and tore. Whatever Gilbert and Boweryng had discovered had been reduced to pulp.

Holbeme backed away from the doorway. “This is not possible.”

Richard turned to him. Holbeme’s face had lost colour and his breathing had become shallow.

“They drowned,” he said. “All of them. But they are here.”

Lepton answered more harshly than Richard expected. “We can see where they are.”

“That is not what I mean.”

Richard understood perfectly. He looked again at Gilbert and Boweryng, at the soaked papers and the water shining across the floorboards. Nothing in the commission gave him language for what he was seeing. Nothing in crown service had prepared him to account for drowned men found above the waterline of a ship that had never sunk.

He kept going because stopping would have meant admitting reason had already failed them. They had found the missing commissioners, but not the explanation they had come for, and John Taillour must still be somewhere aboard. As long as his cousin remained unfound, there was still one living man who might answer for what had happened here. Richard chose to believe that for a little longer.

They found John aft.

He was standing where the passage widened beneath the stern. Richard did not see him arrive there. One moment there was only darkness beyond the hanging lamp, the next there was a man within it, watching them.

Richard knew him at once, though years had altered his face. The boy from Toppesham was buried somewhere beneath the beard, he drawn cheeks and the damp, shiny skin. John’s clothes were wet through, yet no water dripped from them. His hair lay against his forehead as though he had just come out of the sea, and there was something in his eyes that terrified Richard.

John examined the three of them and then spoke to his cousin. “So, he sent you.”

Richard took a step nearer. “The King sent commissioners.”

“No. He sent you.”

The distinction settled between them.

“Gilbert and Boweryng are dead.”

“I know.”

“You let them die?”

John’s expression changed little. “They came with seals and questions. They wanted a thief. They found what was left.”

Lepton began to speak, but Richard lifted a hand and stopped him. Whatever authority they had carried aboard meant nothing here. He asked John what had happened to the Sint Marie. John looked towards the timbers as if the ship itself might answer.

“I needed the King to notice me again.”

Richard felt Holbeme stir behind him. “So you took Marcellis’s ship for that?”

“I took something he could not ignore.”

The voice remained calm. John spoke of the years in the Channel without pride and without apology. Ships had been watched, stopped, searched and sometimes sunk. Men carrying Tudor money had vanished. Couriers had gone overboard with their letters still sewn inside their coats. Some vessels had been taken because of what they carried. Others had been destroyed because the King’s interests required that nobody aboard return to speak of what they had seen.

“You knew enough of it,” John said.

“Not this, john, no.”

“Damn you, you knew enough!”

Richard could not answer. The Danish ship had come late in the second year. John had been told only that it carried men and correspondence useful to Richmond. He attacked at night. The vessel burned, rolled and went down. No survivors were taken.

“They stayed with the ship,” John said. “Then, they stayed with me.”

Holbeme whispered a prayer.

John glanced towards him. “They do not care for that.”

Richard asked what he meant, and John pressed one hand against his chest. “They are not in me the way a devil is in a possessed man. They lean. They wait. They remember the water and they want company in it.”

Richard realised then that John was still in there, still thinking, still watching, and that whatever had taken hold of him had not been merciful enough to take that away.

“You could have stopped this.”

“Sometimes.”

“And Gilbert? Boweryng?”

John looked towards the passage behind them. “I did not stop that.”

Holbeme made a sound of disgust. “Murderer.”

John’s eyes settled on him, and the water came. It seeped through the planks, spread across the floor and rose around their boots with impossible speed. Lepton grabbed at the wall. Holbeme tried to move towards the stairs, but his feet slipped beneath him as the cold water climbed.

Richard reached for them, but John caught his wrist.

“Not you.”

The words sounded forced now. John’s face had tightened with the apparent effort, and Richard saw fear there as Holbeme and Lepton disappeared beneath the freezing water, their cries ending quickly. John did not release Richard until the water began to fall away.

“Tell him this,” he said, his breathing ragged. “The dead remember. The sea keeps what it is given, and silence does not make the dead quiet.”

◆ ◆ ◆

No clear memory lay between John’s last words and the harbour. The ship, the passage, the bodies and the icy water had all broken apart in Richard’s mind, leaving only fragments that refused to join. He remembered John’s hand on his wrist, and the pressure of water against his chest. After that came darkness, then the shock of air. He came to himself lying in the bottom of the boat that had brought them out. His clothes were soaked and his hands were bleeding. For several moments he did not understand where he was. There was no boatman, and one oar floating several yards away, turning slowly in the tide.

The Sint Marie was already moving.

Richard forced himself upright and watched her pass across the mouth of the harbour. No sail had been raised, and no crew stood at the lines. The water was calm, yet the ship travelled steadily towards the open Channel as though drawn along rather than driven by wind.

He could not remember how he had left her.

He searched his memory and found only resistance, as if some part of his mind had closed a door and was holding it shut. Somewhere behind that door were Holbeme and Lepton, the drowned commissioners, John standing in the dark and the moment when Richard had ceased to be aboard the ship. He could approach those things only so far before the memory dissolved.

By the time men from the harbour reached him, the Sint Marie was little more than a dark shape beyond the estuary. They shouted questions as they dragged his boat towards the quay, but Richard answered badly. He told them the others were dead. He told them John Taillour had been aboard. When they asked how he had escaped, he found that he had no words for it. On shore someone wrapped him in a blanket and another man pressed a cup into his hands. Richard scarcely noticed either. His attention remained fixed on the water long after the Sint Marie had vanished from sight.

John had spared him. That much he knew. He also knew why.

The King had sent him west because blood might succeed where authority had failed, and in the end it had. Richard had been recognised, allowed to live and sent back carrying something more dangerous than evidence. John had given him a message which no clerk could soften and no commission could turn into proper language.

The dead remembered what had been done to them.

Richard sat above the harbour until the light began to fade that evening, knowing that sooner or later he would have to return to and tell the King that silence had not buried anything.

He returned to Westminster with no clear memory of the road. By then Anne Neville had been buried and the court had found new anxieties to occupy it. Rumours moved through the palace concerning Elizabeth of York, and the King had been forced to deny publicly that he had poisoned his wife. Across the water Henry Tudor remained a threat. Against such matters, the disappearance of a merchant vessel in Devon seemed almost trivial.

Richard gave his account nevertheless.

He spoke of Gilbert and Boweryng, of Holbeme and Lepton, of the dead crew and the water inside the Sint Marie. He repeated John’s words as closely as he could remember them and made no attempt to soften what they implied about the King’s work in the Channel. There were gaps in his testimony. He could not explain how he had left the ship, and when asked about the last moment he saw John, he found that his mind simply refused to supply it. Everything else came with an unwanted clarity.

The men who heard him were stoic. No one laughed, and they did not dismiss his account out of hand. Questions were asked, notes were taken and the papers were gathered away. He was told that further instructions would follow. None did.

The fifth day of May passed without any certified findings from the commission. No formal account of Gilbert and Boweryng’s deaths was entered. Nothing was recorded concerning Holbeme or Lepton, and the complaint of Giliom Marcellis disappeared among other unfinished business. Richard’s testimony was neither completed, certified, nor carried forward into the machinery of record.

Then the machinery itself changed hands.

On 22 August Richard III died at Bosworth. Men who had served him disappeared, submitted or found new masters. Old papers lost their urgency. Questions that had once demanded answers became matters belonging to a dead reign.

John Taillour was never heard from again. The Sint Marie was never reported in English waters after leaving Axmouth.

The rolls preserved the complaint, the commissions and the failure to certify their findings. They preserved nothing of what happened aboard that ship.

History kept the silence.

The Channel kept the rest.

I welcome polite comments. If you enjoyed this story, you might also enjoy The Vanishing of Spearhafoc