The Ringed Castle (17 page)

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.