The story began in the fourteenth century, when the second Edward had
summoned his trusty retainer Robert Turrald from his quiet home in leafy
Buckinghamshire to sit in Parliament as a baron, and by that act of kingly
grace ennobled him and his heirs forever. Successive holders of the title
were summoned to Parliament in their turn until the reign of the seventh
Henry, when one succeeded whose wife brought him three daughters, but no
sons. At his death the title went into abeyance among this plurality of
girls. In peerage law they were his coheirs, and the inheritance could not
descend because not one of them had an exclusive right to it. The
daughters entered a convent and followed their parents to the grave within
a few years, the Crown resumed the estate, and the title had remained in
abeyance ever since.

But the last Lord Turrald had a brother Simon, a roystering blade and
lawless adventurer, who disappeared some years before his elder brother's
death. Little was known of him except that he was supposed to have closed
a brawling career on the field of Bosworth, when Richard the Crookback was
killed and the short-lived dynasty of York ended.

The Turolds' family deed-box told a different story. There was a
manuscript in monkish hand, setting forth, "in the name of God, Amen," the
secret history of Simon, as divulged by him on his deathbed for the
information of his two sons. In this confession he claimed kinship with
the last Lord Turrald of Great Missenden. But he had not dared to claim
the title and rich estates on his brother's death, because he was a
proscribed man. He had been a Yorkist, and had fought for Richard. That
might have been forgiven him if he had not unhorsed his future king at
Bosworth and almost succeeded in slaughtering him with his own reckless
hands. So he had fled, and had remained in obscurity and a safe
hiding-place after his brother's death, preferring his head without a