The Ringed Castle (16 page)

Lady Lennox did not wince, nor move as much as would stir the folds of black velvet laid under her jewel-sewn head-dress. She said, ‘How can you doubt it? What else are we assisting their Majesties to celebrate?’

‘The slicking down,’ said Don Alfonso, ‘of the thread of rebellion.’ Margaret Lennox laughed. ‘Gloomy Spaniard! Will it stay down, do you think?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Don Alfonso. ‘Or perhaps, looking again, we shall see not a single frayed thread, but a yawning black hell-hole of heresy.… If Mistress Crawford permits, might your humble servant take her to the cane-play?’

Philippa switched her obedient gaze to Lady Lennox, who smiled and laid a splendid ringed hand on her shoulder. ‘Mistress Crawford, I am sure, would prefer to be called Mistress Philippa. Her marriage is soon to be null: perhaps Lady Dormer omitted to tell you. And yes, I am convinced that cane-play would appeal to her much more than the troubles of government. Although I do not suggest negligence in study. Master Elder, my son Darnley’s tutor, has told me
today that he would be happy, Mistress Philippa, to make you his pupil. A touch of the Latin tongue is advantageous in the household of princes.’

‘How kind you are,’ Philippa said. ‘If my readings with Mr Ascham allow it, I should be privileged to study with Mr Elder as well.’

There was an elegant silence. Then Margaret Lennox smiled and touched the warm, scented surface of Philippa’s cheek. ‘I have offended you. Don’t hold it against me. I am merely anxious to help. Don Alfonso, take good care of her. I suspect she is a mine of accomplishments.’

‘So you are not afraid of her,’ said Don Alfonso, after the Countess had gone. ‘Although she is a formidable lady. You know, I suppose, that John Elder and Roger Ascham love each other as do God and the Devil?’

‘Yes,’ said Philippa.

‘And if the Queen’s Latin secretary will take you, then you must be a pupil of promise indeed.’

‘My Latin is promising,’ Philippa said, ‘but my English not necessarily so.’

‘Then we shall converse in Latin,’ said her new conquest promptly. ‘Although not in the hearing of Lady Lennox.’

Lady Lennox had half crossed the hall when a man she did not know, from the privy clerk’s office, hurried after her and asked if she would repeat the name of the lady to whom she had been speaking. Lady Lennox did so, with courteous precision, and asked him his own, which was Bartholomew Lychpole.

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.’