Ods Bodkins

By A.T. Baker

THE KING'S GREY MARE by ROSEMARY HAWLEY JARMAN 448 pages. Little, Brown. $8.95.

The lot of historical novelists is a hard one. The livelier their imagination, the more polished their prose, the more they risk the displeasure of scholars --whose imagination and prose tend to be quite the reverse. But Rosemary Hawley Jarman's first novel, We Speak No Treason, managed to command the respect of critics, the enthusiasm of readers, and respectful cheers from members of the Richard III Society as a long overdue recasting of Shakespeare's "pois'nous bunch-back'd toad." Jarman portrayed Richard as a relatively gentle soul in an age of violence, whose hunchback and its concomitant aura of evil had been painted on by Tudor propagandists.

Jarman's second novel is less successful--in part because its central figure, Elizabeth Woodville, has no particular historical image to revise. No one in Jarman's sedulously studied medieval prose is beautiful or pretty, but only in varying degrees "fair," and Elizabeth is very fair indeed. The Woodvilles were convinced that they were descended from a French water witch named Melusine who lived during the tag end of the Wars of the Roses. With a combination of her mother's witchly potions and her own obduracy, Elizabeth seduced a king, Edward IV, into marriage.

Once Queen, she briskly installed her brothers in places of power, arranged useful marriages for her sisters, bore two sons who were to become the tragic little princes of the Tower--and later married off one daughter to an, other king, the Tudor who became Henry VII. So she survived, in an age where survival was far more important than policy, where brothers murdered brothers on suspicion of disloyalty, the villains of yesterday were the dinner guests of tomorrow and no issues seemed involved, save who had married whom, who had insulted whom, and in whose bed he or she had been begot.

Author Jarman, 38, was herself begot in the quiet pottery town of Worcester, north of London. She trained as a soprano with an opera career in mind, got married and divorced, and returned to Worcester to take a job as a social worker. One day she read a book about Richard III and mentioned "crookback" to her mother. "Rubbish," said her mother. Jarman began exploring in libraries. Her mother urged her on; when she broke her leg and was hospitalized, she insisted that her daughter bring her a page of manuscript every day. Then a friend sent the manuscript off to a London publisher, and ...

Since the success of We Speak No Treason, the author spends much of her time visiting ruined castles from the times she writes about. Her love for the medieval word and habit is certainly relentless. Every small boy is a knave and every lover a leman; people wear cha-pines, not shoes; nobody can leave without a "void of wine" that is poured into a hanap rather than a cup or even a tankard. But perhaps because her protagonist is a woman, Jarman's second book sags dangerously near the breathiness that has afflicted many a female historical novelist before her. Sample:

"Against his strong breast, she exhaled her shuddering relief."

For all that, Rosemary Jarman does manage to convey the lush, devious, bawdy ambience of her chosen century, makes lively a time, place and society that once were and now still seem passing strange. --A.T. Baker

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