The cane-play was an artistic disaster. To the thud of kettle-drum and fluting of trumpets the six quadrilles of riders wove through the long hall at Westminster and re-created with exquisite horsemanship the delicate tilting with reeds brought to Castile long before by the Arabs. The audience chattered.
Watching from the gallery, Philippa was pained, and said so. The bands of the Duke of Alva, Ruy Gomez de Silva and Don Diego de Acevedo moved forward, in a shimmer of tissue and a glow of deep-coloured velvets. ‘It was worse the last time,’ said Don Alfonso beside her. ‘Last time your English friends laughed. They prefer something coarser, with blood in it. Have you distinguished King Philip?’
The shields glanced; the canes with their long streamers arched through the air. Protected by tapestried barriers, the Queen sat with her ladies, dressed at King Philip’s expense, like a box of great nodding peonies. Jane, now on duty, looked grave in purple velvet banded with silver. On the other hand, Jane suited purple. Philippa said, ‘Which is the King?’
‘Opposite Ruy Gomez. In purple and silver, in the band led by Don Diego de Cordova,’ said Ruy Gomez’s secretary. Since he had discovered she also spoke Spanish, his black eyes, to her mild alarm, had outshone even his earrings.
‘Oh,’ said Philippa. Bearing the royal shield was the very high and mighty Prince Philip, sole heir to the realms and dominions of Spain, whose father had thrust upon him the titles of Naples and Sicily in time to call him King at his marriage. A widower, with a nine-year-old son, married to his aunt, twelve years older. A man of twenty-seven, small, bearded and colourless, with thick lips and a narrow, aquiline nose who was far, Philippa noted with regret, from being a natural-born athlete.
A cane, hurled a little awry, was deftly caught and retained by an anonymous English spectator in another part of the gallery. There was a small derisive cheer from his companions. The rider waited a moment, head upturned; then, as it was not thrown back, turned his horse into its pattern again. Another cane was passed to him. ‘I am told,’ Philippa said, ‘that unlike Henri of France, King Philip doesn’t care for pageants or field sports or chivalry.’
Don Alfonso raised his black eyebrows, sneezed, and apologized. ‘It is the climate,’ he said. ‘We are sick with the rheum. First the rolling at sea; then the rain at the wedding. No, he dislikes physical games. His father writes him, For the love of God, appear to be pleased, for there is nothing that could be of greater effect in the service of God, or against France.’ Another cane flew in the air. ‘For what return? His favours would soften stones. He has given pensions of nearly sixty thousand gold crowns to the Queen’s Council alone. He well knows how to pass over those fields of fleshly experience where your good Queen is not gifted: he treats her so deferentially as to appear her son, and the Prince heard him almost use love-talk last week.… For what? His coronation is delayed. They laugh at him. They write tasteless ballads and satires. You heard of the polled cat hung up dead like a priest, with a note like a singing-cake stuck in its paws?’
‘Yes,’ said Philippa. The King had lost his cane and someone had thrown him one from the gallery, slightly misaimed. He dropped it.
‘And always the threat of rebellion. We daren’t leave Spain for months because of it, and even then only with disguised soldiers for servants, and our chests full of hackbuts. The English do not speak to us, except to pick quarrels. We are warned to stay in after dark for the robbers. We move among these people like animals, trying not to notice them, and they likewise with us. He was not going to a marriage feast, Philip said, but to a fight. As soon as his Highness was King of England, they said, we should be masters of France. And here we are. Decisions are taken, armies are directed by women without us, and so long as Parliament sits, we dare not leave England.’ He sneezed, with violence. ‘England: a Paradise inhabited by devils.’
Philippa said, ‘You need bed and a hot drink and a little less fluent self-pity. Is Spain so wonderful?’
‘Bed?’ said Don Alfonso, and nearly captured her hand, before she slid it away. ‘That, I do not deny, is a condition I greatly desire. Spain? It is wonderful, yes. For King Philip, his splendid Doña Isabel de Osario and their family. For me, I do not deny, a pretty face here and there. But in Spain our ladies do not kiss their friends on the lips in the streets, or dine with them unescorted, or show so much leg as they ride. When may I see you again?’
Below, on a ground strewn with half-broken rods, the cane-play was ending. The gallery had lost interest, although one or two canes were still being thrown: As Philippa watched, another sprang through the air and pricked King Philip’s horse, sliding past before he could catch it. He reined in, looking upwards. ‘Did you hear,’ said Don Alfonso, ‘of the baiting on the Bankside? A blind bear got loose, and bit a man on the leg. That is the kind of sport, they say, that we should provide for the English.’
‘If you are sure,’ Philippa said, ‘that the man won’t bite back.’
*
The following day, Philippa entered the service of Mary Tudor, this small, quick-spoken woman who prayed and worked with such alarming single-mindedness: who played the lute, through sheer force of practice, better than all of her ladies, yet had no eye for what would enhance her appearance: who hung her walls with goldwork on her tapestries, and her person with stiff, long-trained dresses paved with old-fashioned jewels. The jewels which her father’s second wife Anne Boleyn had sent to wrest from her mother, and which her mentor the Countess of Salisbury had refused to give up. But Mary’s mother had not lived long after that, and Lady Salisbury had been beheaded, and Mary to save her own life had signed the three articles King Henry demanded: that she submitted to her father the King. That she recognized him as the head of the church in England. And that the marriage between the King and his first wife her mother was by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful, thus making a bastard of herself and a princess of her sister Elizabeth.
Small wonder, thought Philippa, that after the degradation, the poverty, the humiliation of that, one’s first act on becoming Queen was to repeal one’s father’s unnatural laws, thus making oneself legitimate and bastardizing one’s sister. And the second, to wear all one’s rightful regalia and a pair of breeches if necessary, to show that, woman or not, here was the heir blessed by God under whom the kingdom would flourish.
Learning to know all the scattered buildings of Westminster, and of Wolsey’s relinquished Whitehall; learning to recognize the officers of State and all their counterparts and double counterparts in King Philip’s households of Spanish and Englishmen, Philippa began to see the reason for the obsessive hard work, in a woman who was only moderately clever, in one of the hardest offices in the world. The fluency in languages modern and classical which visiting ambassadors found so impressive. The aching need for success which showed itself in her fierce joy in gambling; in the cosseted throng of her cage-birds; in her enjoyment in children; in the care—although, to be fair, her nature was to be thoughtful and careful of others—she took with the common people on her travels, stopping to speak with them, and anonymously to care for their troubles.
The desperate need she had for the bulwark of her religion.
Sitting sewing with Jane, or reading aloud, or playing, without much thought, on the lute or the virginals, Philippa’s mind, like one of the Emperor’s clocks, busied itself with the entrancing tangle of England.
The Queen’s mother had been devout. But she had needed the support of her church more than most—mother of five stillborn children in eight years; cast off for another after twenty-four years of marriage. Brought up in that household, naturally Mary Tudor would hold strong religious opinions, even had her own birthright not depended on it. Now, attempting to rule with no apprenticeship for ruling behind her, she needed it for support.
She had little enough, thought Philippa grimly, of the human kind. Jane Dormer was only sixteen; her grandmother too old to master the new political complexities; old Mistress Clarenceux too simple. Margaret Lennox, the oldest, the dearest, the most richly rewarded of all the Queen’s circle, was also the Englishwoman with the nearest Catholic claim to the throne … was that why she had been given, Tom Wharton had told her, the whole three thousand marks yearly tax revenue from the wool trade, simply as a royal gift? The group of gentlemen who had quelled the rebellions and seen to it that Mary returned to the throne had had to be repaid with offices which they were not necessarily fitted for. Even Reginald Pole, Cardinal, royally born and man of integrity, had not supported the Queen in one thing: he had been against the marriage with Philip.
My lord and nephew, the King of England. When she first heard the Queen speak of her husband, Philippa had expected to catch in the deep, over-strong voice the slightest shadow, perhaps, of defiance.
There was none. Perhaps there had never been. Perhaps in crushing the opposition to her marriage she had also argued into oblivion, to herself and to her prie-dieu, the personal reasons. The ponderous young man who visited her daily, tastefully dressed; who gave a due meed of his time to being agreeable to those odd people, the English, and who then retired behind closed doors with Ruy Gomez and the Spanish lords of his court, was no one’s soul-mate, except possibly the unknown Doña Isabel de Osario, mother of unspecified numbers of Spanish illegitimate children, and about whose predecessors Don Alfonso was lyrical. The Emperor’s exhortations to his son to please Queen Mary and to make her happy would hardly spring from cousinly kindness. No untoward personal emotions must upset the Imperial English alliance. More, a warm marriage bed might produce the son which would reconcile the English to their King and to his religion.
The Queen knew that, better than any.… But the pinched lips parted for him as they did for her love-birds; and the pale, shadowless eyes relaxed in the high-coloured face. At two, the Queen had been betrothed to the Dauphin of France, Henri’s brother. At nine, to the Emperor Charles, Philip’s father. Yet again she had been sought by the Dauphin’s father, Francis of France, twice married and twice widowed, with seven bastard children. She had been painted and inspected: ambassadors had surveyed her all her life, until her father proclaimed her a bastard herself. As a child, she had seen herself as an Empress, and as a grown woman had known herself to be no more than an ageing, emotional spinster, the bride of her God.
One could discuss none of this in the pure hearing of Jane, the dear and devout, herself almost the subject of a political marriage with Edward Courtenay, the inconvenient Earl of Devonshire, to keep him out of Elizabeth’s hands. One said it instead to Austin Grey, when he came to see her on her rare periods of leave at Lady Dormer’s, and to escort her to the triumphs and tourneys or the celebration of the Feast of St Lucy, or the St Nicholas’s going about, against orders, in the bright frosty glitter of a December evening in London.
Austin never required brisk handling, as Don Alfonso did, by the end of the evening. He listened to her stream of speculation in silence, and didn’t laugh at her at all, but seemed to regard her power of observation and analysis as something worth celebrating on their own.
Cut off in full spate, Philippa was apt to find it pleasant, but embarrassing. ‘Oh, that’s Kate for you,’ she said the first time. ‘All the Somervilles are fiends for dissecting their neighbours. We had you judged from the moment your nurse brought you to visit, and you cried when the cook’s niece was sick. Tender-hearted.’
She thought, with contrition, that he flushed, but he had more than enough social ease to disguise it. ‘If I were less tender-hearted, I might be tempted to wonder whether you saw in the Queen’s marriage an echo of your own. What dreams are in your head, Philippa? Is it dreams which prevent the annulment from taking place?’
The round brown eyes which opened upon him were probably answer enough. ‘My goodness,’ said Philippa. ‘You’ve never been in the hands of the Turks, or you wouldn’t expect anyone to have much time for dreaming. Nor, I imagine, do you have any recollection of what Lymond is actually like. My mother can barely put up with him. We can’t get an annulment because he hasn’t written giving his formal consent. Which reminds me. Have you ever heard of a gentleman called Leonard Bailey?’
‘No,’ said the Marquis of Allendale on the faintest note of inquiry.
‘Oh,’ said Philippa. ‘Well, if you do, I should be deeply obliged if you’d tell me. He’s by way of being a relation by marriage.’ And was thoughtless enough to giggle at his expression.
Roger Ascham, with whom she had begun her classical studies, was less tender-hearted in his reaction. ‘There are one hundred and eighty thousand people in London. I know them all,’ he said.
‘Well, you write Latin letters for half of them,’ said Philippa, unsubdued. She possessed, it would appear, a brain almost as quick for Latin as Madam Elizabeth’s, and a great deal of rummaging about in the library of her nominal spouse had given her an advantage in some directions which the Queen’s Latin secretary thought quite unethical. They read Virgil, Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Terence and endless pages of Xenophon together and wrangled about Philippa’s analysis of King Philip’s character, which Master Ascham claimed to understand completely after three years as the English Ambassador’s secretary at Augsburg.
‘It would never occur to the Emperor,’ Ascham said, ‘that his son is unpopular. He will give him everything, whether he can hold it or not; whether he has ever fought in anger or not. The Emperor is twisted with gout—a dying man, and no wonder. I remember the Golden Fleece banquet. He had his head in the glass five times as long as any of us, and never less than a quart of Rhenish wine at one time. And the boy’s a tyro. Hates to stir himself: lies abed in the mornings; keeps his fine shape for wooing by diet, and none of your exercise. Have you seen him in the lists?’ asked Master Ascham. ‘I saw him joust genteelly at Augsburg. He hurt neither himself, his horse, his spear, nor the fellow he ran with.’
‘A stout stomach, pregnant-witted, and of a most gentle nature,’ Philippa quoted, with delicacy.
Ascham stiffened, his face going purple.
‘I know. That mountebank Elder,’ Philippa said.
‘John Redshanks,’ said Ascham thinly. ‘An amateur cosmographer from some puny church in a place called Dumbarton. Who claims Henry Darnley to surpass the late King Edward—the Lady Elizabeth—the Grey children as a Latinist.’
‘And me,’ said Philippa.
Fastidiously, Roger Ascham laid down his quill. ‘He does not presumably know of your existence, for which you should be thankful. Unless he is a friend of your husband’s. In which case you would do well to deliver your husband a warning. No offers from that quarter will ever do good to anyone except the Lennoxes. I have heard them exhort the Queen to have her sister executed time without number. Fortunately, the Emperor’s Ambassador has been as strong to dissuade her. The present talk is of marrying Madam Elizabeth to the Margrave of Baden, or any other small state lacking a coastline. They will be hard put to it to find a grate for that coal to burn in.’
‘What cause have they to banish her?’ Philippa said. ‘I heard that her devotions were constant and her discretion alarmingly total. And when the child is born, she will be a further remove from the throne.’
‘It is true,’ Ascham said. ‘A son will bring Burgundy and the Low Countries to England. If Don Carlos were to die, it might unite England wholly with Spain. But is there going to be a child?’
It was not the sort of question asked by Jane, or by Austin, or by any of the plain gentlewomen surrounding the Queen. Philippa said, guardedly, ‘There is a cradle. She speaks of it sometimes. And she is plumper, they say, and of a better colour than before.’
‘She is happier,’ Ascham said. ‘But irregularity in her health there has always been. You have seen the blood-letting. You know of the medicines she takes. And if she has conceived, what chance will the child have? The hours of prayer on her knees, like her mother. The hours of studying papers, of committee with her ministers: this vast council of time-serving Privy Councillors, half of whom should be given provincial duties and sent back to their estates. Gardiner—Paget—Cecil—Petre … how can she know whom to trust, when during the last reign nearly all of them were against her?’
‘She trusts you,’ Philippa said. ‘In spite of the Roman beast and its dogmatic filth in tail-rhymed stanzas, not to mention a few other injudicious pronouncements.’
‘Do you suggest,’ said Ascham with hauteur, ‘that she should have appointed Elder? She took me because she had none better, as she should refuse retirement to William Petre. He has been there so long, he is a Council register in himself. While princes come and vanish like swallows, the land needs some weight in the saddle. Only pray that she doesn’t solicit safe birth for her heir by impossible largesse to the Pontiff. The banished friars are returning, I hear, and the Knights of St John are restored: soon the crown will give back its church lands, and Reginald Pole will be Archbishop of Canterbury, if they make sure to ordain him beforehand.’
Philippa’s brown eye surveyed him. ‘The Crown may give up its church lands, but I doubt if anyone else will be persuaded. The Earl of Bedford proclaimed that he cared more for his sweet Abbey of Woburn than for any fatherly counsel from Rome, and forthwith tugged off and cast down his rosary. The King was far from amused.’
‘I saw him amused only once,’ Roger Ascham said thoughtfully. ‘At a Brussels procession. They had a bear playing the organ, with the keys tied to the tails of twenty cages of cats. It was extremely noisy. The Prince laughed himself into tears. I wonder if he will do the same if … no,’ Master Ascham chided himself. ‘It is bad luck to anticipate disaster. In any case, we have gossiped enough: our time is at an end for today. Collect your books. Do you know Bartholomew Lychpole?’
The secretariat was not large. Philippa said, ‘The man in brown, who always wears spectacles?’
‘Yes. He wanted to speak with you. Wait.’ He bustled out.
Philippa was alone in the room when Master Lychpole arrived. She fastened her penner and then looked up to see him standing diffidently before her, the dim light grey in his lenses. ‘Madam Crawford?’ he said.
Used to another styling, Philippa did not at once respond to her married name. Then she said, ‘Yes. And you are Master Lychpole?’
He nodded. He was not a young man, and he spoke in a low voice, as if anxious not to be heard in conversation with her. ‘I wished to ask you the favour of a few words in private. On a personal matter.’
‘Yes?’ said Philippa, lifting her eyebrows.
Bartholomew Lychpole’s voice had dropped half an octave. ‘Your husband is Francis Crawford of Lymond?’
‘Yes,’ said Philippa in the same sweet, lying cadence she had learned in Stamboul.
‘I am employed here,’ said Bartholomew Lychpole, ‘but I am a man of wide interests. I correspond. I hear many things. But I dare not say what I hear, you understand, or I should lose my employment. I am a poor man, and I dare not lose my employment. I beg you therefore …’
‘You wish to tell me something about Mr Crawford, and you do not wish me to quote you. I understand,’ Philippa said. ‘Whatever you say will remain quite private with me. What do you want me to know?’
‘I heard you were his wife,’ Lychpole said. ‘I don’t take risks. I can’t afford to take risks. But I thought you should know he is well.’
Philippa sat down very gently and looked at him. She said, ‘I am glad to know that. You have heard from him recently?’
‘Last week,’ said Master Lychpole. ‘Later, I dare say, than any message you have; even if the couriers managed to reach you. It’s not like writing from Brussels. I thought it would please you just to know he was well.’
‘Yes,’ said Philippa. ‘It will please his mother as well when I tell her. Where was he writing from?’
‘Oh, the same place,’ said Bartholomew Lychpole. ‘He dates his letters always from there, although I hear he travels abroad in the country from week to week, on his master’s business, whether it is attack or defence no one can tell me. This season, I wager he would prefer to be by your side in some good English rain. They say there can be a coldness well-nigh beyond mortal man’s bearing, this month in Moscow.’
Philippa Somerville’s eyes became exceedingly large. Lychpole said slowly after a moment, ‘But of course they are prepared for the cold. You must not allow it to worry you.’
Lymond’s titular wife drew a deep breath. ‘It doesn’t,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t thinking of that.… I wonder if your post would reach him more quickly than mine.’
‘You have a letter?’ said Lychpole.
‘I would give you one,’ Philippa said. ‘What direction do you have for him in Moscow?’
But there she came up against a politic silence. Whatever Bartholomew Lychpole’s business, it was conducted in secrecy, and his correspondence was not sent direct, but entrusted to a series of messengers, the last of whom conveyed it to Lymond, wherever in Russia he might be.
For Lymond, it seemed, was in Russia. And the more Philippa thought of it, the likelier somehow did it appear. He had no wish to come home. He had no interest in old loyalties and ancient entanglements, and yet would take no steps, Philippa thought, to place himself in direct conflict with them.
What more likely than that he had stayed on the perimeter, half in, half out the known world, to build a new sphere of power with Kiaya Khátún, who worshipped power, beside him? And this well-meaning, inadequate man was no doubt in some form his spy.
Of all the peoples of the earth, they have the hardest living, Diccon Chancellor had said of the Muscovites. And Sydney had quoted. If they knew their strength, no man were able to make match with them.
Small wonder Lychpole was uneasy. Lymond’s presence in Russia was more than an item of gossip: a matter of purely family concern. To reveal her knowledge of it would not only betray Lychpole’s confidence. It would send all the statesmen of Europe to probe the occurrence: so many squirrels gutting a pine cone. It would force Russia to show her hand, perhaps, before she was ready, and put Lymond’s own life at risk.
Or at more risk. Lymond had never shown any desire for security. Now, lodged at last in a land where his special gifts would be quite unsurpassed, he had an opportunity for dominion which he could expect nowhere else. Philippa had been aware, since the silence which succeeded her last letter, that she must write another, and in fairness set in it what she had learned from Sybilla’s sister, the Abbess. The expedient by which she had hoped to hurry Lymond’s return to his mother was likely, she now knew, to have the opposite effect. And to expect anything else to draw him from the brilliant prospect before him was childish.
She thanked Lychpole, and even gave him some of the coins in her purse towards his goodwill when her letter to Lymond should be written.
But she wrote first to Kate at Flaw Valleys, and not until after Christmas, when the endless Masses were over, and the playlets by Udall, and the masques of Venuses and Cupids, and the subdued but infinite bickering between Spaniards and Englishmen. Philippa, with her light hand on the lute and her hard-won suppleness for the dance, had been much in demand over Christmas, and had been in some degree thankful to see the exhausting Don Alfonso disappear with his superior to Brussels for a spell, although this left Allendale’s quiet company, so undemanding that it troubled her conscience, the more she enjoyed it.
Then, after Christmas, her spare time was mortgaged by her mistress. The Queen was not well. Fatigue and wandering pains; an increasing number of the headaches which always had plagued her were all added to the strain of the disturbed, warring court she ruled over, and the uneven, unpredictable course of King Philip’s affections, and the interminable planning and plotting for the good of her people, with the barometer of their temper as odd and variable as her husband’s. And all the time her courtiers watched her, assessing her bulk and her colour, her temper, her energy, her appetite, and counting each day of her pregnancy.
With the dignity of long, bitter solitude, the Queen never confided. Observant and sensible, Philippa simply deduced what was necessary and did it. Sometimes she was required to read; sometimes to sing; sometimes to take sides in some abstract discussion which was merely a treadmill on which an over-active mind could exhaust itself. She led the Queen to indulge her pleasure in instruction, and was lent books; and learned with genuine humility how her performance on the spinet could be improved. She undertook, for Shrovetide, to arrange a Turkish masque with the Master of Revels.
She was left little time for reflection. Don Alfonso had no sooner left than she was invited by Lady Lennox to her house, the old Percy manor, at Hackney, and there met the child Henry Darnley and his tutor John Elder, who addressed her in Latin, inquiring how Master Ascham’s young bride was faring.
Philippa, the silent repository of a great deal of Spanish gossip about Master Ascham’s sweet Mag, also disliked being quizzed about it, and especially in Latin. She said in the same language, ‘As well as your master, I hope,’ and Elder bowed with a grimace. Lady Lennox’s husband, of uncertain religious allegiance, was not much to the fore in this court of bouncing princely prelates, although the unseen influence of his plotting made itself felt from time to time. He suffered an ailment, they said, which made him nervous of solitude. It was the only reason Philippa in her tarter moments could think of for his adherence to the brilliant Margaret. Ruffled, Philippa lowered her gaze to John Redshanks’s nine-year-old pupil and greeted him also in Latin.
There was a silence, during which the blue pebble eyes of Henry Lord Darnley stared sagging at Philippa. Then he sneered.
It was a very juvenile sneer, starting round the nose and disappearing under the eaves of the cheeks. ‘I am afraid, Madam,’ said Lord Darnley in English, ‘your Latin is not of the same order as mine.’
Taking her time, Philippa measured him from head to foot with her eye. She grinned. ‘I should hope not!’ she said; and, smiling at Elder, followed the house steward to Lady Lennox’s chamber, where she behaved herself extremely well under rather trying circumstances. Only when she was about to leave did Lady Lennox introduce a new subject.
‘You have not heard, I suppose, from your husband?’
‘From Mr Crawford? No, Lady Lennox,’ Philippa said. ‘Nor do I expect any letters.’
Lady Lennox smiled, her back straight against a large walnut chair upholstered in ginger brocade, entwined with the arms of Stewart and Douglas. ‘This churlish bridegroom!’ she said. ‘However fleeting the marriage, he owes it to you, one would think, at least to assure himself that you are well, and in no need. Indeed, it is more urgent than that. I am told that the annulment will depend on his communicating with you. He must assure them, as you have done, that the marriage was on paper only; and that further, he is willing to release you.’ She smiled. ‘Do you think he is? Or is it not possible that seeing you now, a privileged lady of the Queen’s privy chamber, he might change his mind?’
A picture of Kiaya Khátún rose into Philippa’s head, superimposed on a lengthy tally of other ladies, all remarkable for their beauty, brains and general complaisance as the mistresses of Francis Crawford of Lymond. Lifting her eyebrows, Philippa transformed a giggle, gravely, into a cough. ‘No,’ she said with regret.
It sounded bald, but there were pitfalls in qualifying it. She could mention his age, but it was possible that Lady Lennox was even older than he was. And even Ruy Gomez, one remembered, had married a child-bride of twelve. Further, it would be impolitic, Philippa felt, to refer to Kiaya Khátún. Philippa opened wide, disingenuous eyes on the Countess of Lennox, and the Countess of Lennox smiled back.
‘And you?’ she said teasingly. ‘Are you so sure that this marriage was platonic? No man with his arts would give his name to someone he found distasteful, or would submit to a marriage service without a chaste embrace, at least, from the bride. Did you not find him pleasing?’
There was something between them, Kate had said. And looking at those smiling, violent eyes, Philippa suddenly knew what it was. She said levelly, ‘I admire his cleverness. He, I think, admires my plain speaking. There is, I suppose, friendship between us. But, to answer your question, in all the years since I was a child of ten, there has never been a gesture of affection between us. There has been no occasion.’
The black eyes resting on her brown ones were calm. ‘And when he came to Flaw Valleys,’ Margaret Lennox said, ‘of course it was to visit your mother.’ She rose, and, pausing by Philippa’s chair, lifted her clear-skinned face as she might lift a doll’s, by the chin. ‘Charming,’ said Lady Lennox. ‘A good, kind-hearted girl. We must find a husband worthy of you, from among all those eager escorts at Court. But first, by some means, we must find Mr Crawford and have you set free. Do you and your family use every means to discover him, and we shall also. He has obligations. He shall be reminded of them.’
Philippa began her letter to Kate in the palace that evening, and was found by Jane Dormer with her face swollen and her nose a brilliant red, in the first wave of homesickness she had felt since coming to London. Mistress Clarenceux, appealed to, made Philippa pack up her letter and belongings without further ado, and transferred her for four days of freedom to the Sidneys’ house at St Anthony’s, Broad Street, where she realized for the first time how tired she was. Nursed by the staff of Sir Henry, she slept for the better part of twenty-four hours, and then resumed both her usual acute interest in her fellow human beings, and her half-begun note to her mother.
… in your rustic solitude, far from David’s timbrels and Aaron’s sweet sounding bells—how can you bear it? Outside Spain, there is nothing to touch us for living civilly, now gussets have reached us at last. True, our clothes are badly made, and our hair is dressed in the French style, instead of the way Spanish unmarried girls do it, which would suit us a great deal better. But our skins are good, and we are learning to dance properly, instead of all that prancing and trotting we used to do at Uncle Somerville’s. Of course, our skirts ought to be longer. We show our ankles when we sit in a way thoroughly shocking, not to mention what licence occurs after all this sugared wine. As you know, eating and drinking are our only distractions (we drink more beer than would fill the Valladolid river) as our conversation is exceedingly limited. Although, of course, there are no people on earth like the English for gossip.
As, dearest Kate, you can see. Would you like me to marry a Spaniard and worship the buttock-bone of Pentecost and the great toe of the Trinity, once I am divorced? Not that there is any prospect of annulment at present: Mr Crawford has not deigned to write. But I have heard, in the most roundabout way, that he is well and active, and no doubt making Hell hotter somewhere. Perhaps Sybilla will wish to be reassured. And I can confirm that, whatever he has done, he cannot have married.
I am at the Sidneys’ in St Anthony’s, very merry because their precious Russia Company is about to be granted its charter. The wool trade (did you know? do you care?) has declined in the last three or four years, and they want a new outlet. This lets them trade in any part of the world, and gives them a monopoly of Muscovy trade and all the north lands not before frequented by Englishmen. That is the practical element. The dream is to travel through to Bokhara, and open up a direct route to the Orient. They have their navigator in Diccon Chancellor. (You may commence worrying: he is a widower with two small sons.) And they have their genius in this old man Cabot, who can tell you more about the ways of the sea, sitting at his desk than any man alive in the world.… Would you let me go overseas again, Kate dear?… I rather thought that you wouldn’t.
I go back to Court in two days, and shall thereby miss Conception Day, and the Spanish procession round the Savoy. We are very stiff in our Poperies, but the Dormers are selflessly kind as well as devout. The Queen worships with a fervour which seems to disturb her nerves rather than calm them. But her outbursts of temper are quickly over: her intentions always good. She is afraid, more than anything, that King Philip will leave her before the baby is born.
I have nothing of news or of levity to tell you of that, for it doesn’t bear speaking of But the Cardinal, as ever, is confident, and working hard, as he says, for two births. To the Queen a son, and to Christendom that peace which is desired.
He may be right. They can’t fight for four months anyway. But they say France has plenty of money and isn’t interested in peace, except to buy a delay. And that the Emperor will never forgive what Henri did to his sister last year, hacking the trees and statues at Binche with his own sword, even though the Netherlands is exhausted with a tax (did you know?) bigger than all the Peruvian revenues.
Everyone is afraid that if there is a resumption of war, Philip will drag us into it, even though the marriage contract said otherwise. At any rate, the Spaniards here are longing to have an excuse to leave court and would infinitely prefer, I rather think, to abandon us all safely behind them. It might please you to know that Master Ascham, on reflection, thinks the Sultan of Turkey to be a good, merciful, just and liberal prince, and thinks that if the Emperor Charles were as fair, he would have no trouble with his subjects. It remains to see what trouble his subjects are going to have with his son.
Do you remember when all I did was make threatening gestures at greenfly? You have seen all this, and so had Gideon, and you chose distance and sanity, although there could have been little enough safety when Henry was King. Imagine what we have now, faced with the records of three different reigns in seven years, each with differing policies and attitudes to religion. And the statesmen from each reign still here among us (those who have survived), each struggling like an insect in gum with his history. Happy the clever, political animals, such as Cecil, or Sir Henry or even Winchester, I suppose, who hold only moderate prejudices, and can trim their sails lightly, man and boy, through three reigns, and gain in comfort and status and happiness.
Perhaps, when rulers have short lives, the state profits best from devious men who can give it long service. A matter of common sense, brains and experience, and not of religion or ethics at all. Oh, Kate … your only error in life was to make me a girl, instead of a man.
… How is Kuzúm?
She completed the letter and sent it off later, with a servant of Austin’s. She did not add that the celebrations attending the last stages of the framing of the Muscovy charter had brought enough merchants to St Anthony’s to enable her to indulge her new interest in Russia. She met some of the company’s agents: Lane, Price, bearded Killingworth, and the big man Rob Best, who broke a tasselled stool wrestling with Chancellor. She met old Mr Cabot and some of his coterie of cosmographers: Richard Eden and Thomas Digges and Clement Adams and Dr Records and Mr Chancellor’s friend and instructor, John Dee. And she listened flatteringly to Sir George Barnes and Will Garrard, Lord Mayor elect, who had promoted Diccon’s first trip to Russia, and were now planning the second.
‘Diccon can do it,’ said Garrard. ‘Wyndham couldn’t do it, poor devil. I couldn’t do it. Don’t want to. Snug in Southfleet and Dorney, counting my money like George, not in Mombasa, dying of the bloody flux. We’ll fill the ships up with broadcloth, and maybe a little sugar to sweeten the Tsar. And send them off in the spring: April perhaps. The Philip and Mary. And Diccon will have the Edward Bonaventure again.’
‘Back,’ said Sir Henry, ‘to the inferior and exterior lights, Mistress Philippa. Richard Chancellor, you have a gleam in your eye. You complain when we send you sailing north to the ice floes but you know very well that you would pay from your pocket to go there. How long will it take you?’
‘From here to the Dwina? Two months by sea, I should reckon. The ships can land us and our cargo, and then sail back to England to winter. From the Dwina to Moscow I don’t know. There is the cargo to carry, and a thousand miles of Rusland to cover. Last time we did it by horse sleigh. This time,’ said Diccon casually, his spare frame supported on the upright of Philippa’s armchair, ‘this time, I thought I’d take Christopher.’
Philippa opened her mouth. ‘As an apprentice?’ Garrard said. ‘The lad’s surely too young.’
The black beard and clear charcoal eyes were both directed ominously upon Philippa. She shut her mouth. ‘Nothing hardens like sea water,’ said Chancellor.
‘You mean,’ said Philippa smartly, ‘nothing pickles like brine.’
‘I mean——’
‘Did you know,’ said Henry Sidney’s smooth voice, interrupting, ‘that Mr Garrard knows your Mr Bailey? I had forgotten to tell you.’
Her mind engaged in battle for the future of Diccon Chancellor’s son, Philippa did not, for the moment, recollect possessing a Mr Bailey. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
‘Leonard Bailey. God confound you, Philippa; you made an eminent fuss about tracing him. The brother of Honoria Bailey, your husband’s grandmother. You will observe that whatever you have forgotten, the relationship is engraved in my memory.’
But she had already remembered. Covering a genuine shock with a great deal of discreet and well-mannered acting, she learned that Leonard Bailey, whose sister had married a Scot from Midculter, Lanarkshire, was indeed a neighbour of Garrard’s in Buckinghamshire.
‘That was it, Henry … Mistress Philippa,’ said Will Garrard cheerfully. ‘You’ll find old Lady Dormer knows him as well, shouldn’t wonder. Of her generation, although it’s a while now since all the tattle. A self-willed old gentleman, so I’m told, always complaining of poverty. And certainly, Gardington could do with some upkeep, although he must take quite a good sum in rents.… He’s a relative of your husband’s?’
‘He cut himself off from the family,’ Philippa said, her hesitation small but touching. ‘I thought, since I was here—I thought perhaps I might effect a reconciliation.’
‘Hum,’ said William Garrard. ‘More likely to find yourself lending him money. If you don’t mind my saying so. But perhaps he’s improved. Age can mellow, they say.’
‘They say wrong,’ said Diccon Chancellor. ‘I have known Mistress Philippa these two months, and I have aged while she has grown daily less mellow. Why else am I fleeing the country?’