The Ringed Castle

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Elizabeth rose. Lifting the tall, silver-gilt jug, arched and spired and nestling with cherubs, she poured more wine with her own hands for her great-uncle, Philippa and herself. Then, sitting, she raised the cup a little and drank. Then she said, ‘A man rising eighty, and pro-French, to follow Marcellus!’

  ‘Poor Marcellus,’ said Philippa. ‘The Imperialists say he is very well where he is, and this new one would not do badly there either. He will be known as Paul IV.’

  ‘An austere and learned old man,’ said Elizabeth thoughtfully. ‘So perhaps Cardinal Pole will now be well enough to mediate for the peace?’

  Philippa said, ‘The Commissioners of France and the Empire are meeting near Gravelines this month, and the Cardinal is due to attend them.’

  Elizabeth put down her cup and her lips, a little apart showed, as was not usual, the small, shadowy teeth. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Should they make peace, they must do as the doctors contrive, and pay Pole an annuity for each anniversary. Now my sister need only be brought to bed of her son, and they may even allow the right honourable and my very good lord the Earl of Devonshire home to offer me marriage. But perhaps even then, he would not accept it. I hear he is in fear of his life.’

  A slight pause developed. ‘Poor Edward Courtenay,’ Philippa thought. Elizabeth said, ‘Master Ascham has heard, no doubt, what has befallen his young friend, John Dee. A melancholy fate for a caster of horoscopes. I hear he had completed one for the Sidneys’ son, sixty-two pages long. Sagittarius, I believe. I am Virgo.’ She paused again. ‘Do you know Dr Dee, Mistress Philippa?’

  Philippa knew John Dee, Diccon Chancellor’s friend; mathematician, geographer and astrologer, who had been arrested for treason after that last cheerful celebration of the Muscovy Company and thrown to the Star Chamber for questioning.

  She also knew why he was charged. John Dee had been a visitor at Woodstock. He had cast Madam Elizabeth’s horoscope, so they said. Worse, he had discussed with her the horoscopes he had already drawn up for the Queen and her husband. His lodgings had been searched, and some of Elizabeth’s own staff arrested.

  Philippa said, ‘I have met him with Mr Chancellor. He used to bring his new instruments sometimes to Penshurst, and his mechanical insects, and find buttons for us, with a pendulum over a map. The servants were frightened. His intellect is so great that his manner sometimes seems mysterious.’

  ‘Unlike the merry and widely esteemed Mr Chancellor,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Do you not find these geographers’ matters tedious to listen to, with their cards and their globes and their plotting? They never see a sweet bay, or a stream, or a green flowering headland but it must be laid black on a paper: they trap the spheres in their springe like a woodman.’

  ‘They are forbearing,’ Philippa said, ‘in their wisdom. I have read a little. Pliny and Ptolemy, Roger Bacon and David Morgan.’

  ‘Geographia?’ said Madam Elizabeth. ‘I did not knew Sir Henry had a manuscript. Or Dr Dee.’

  ‘In Scotland,’ Philippa said, growing despite herself, faintly pink. ‘I read most of them while staying in Scotland.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Madam Elizabeth was amiable. ‘This Scottish husband of yours they tell me of, whom you are so anxious to cast off. Does your English spirit rebel against the poor gentleman’s race? Or is he so obnoxious?’

  Philippa put down her cup. She should have expected, of course, that this shrewd and cautious young woman would have acquainted herself with all the known facts about any visitor allowed by the Queen. She said, ‘My marriage was one of convenience, made when Mr Crawford and I were held prisoner in each other’s company in Turkey. I should prefer not to be tied yet to marriage with anyone, and he may well wish to marry elsewhere.’ She began to feel that she could narrate this explanation to music.

  Elizabeth cast a smiling half-glance at her great-uncle. She said, ‘Ah. So his affections are fixed. And are you not jealous, Mistress Philippa? Or is he so old and ill-favoured that you are glad to be rid of him? What age is he: mine? Or perhaps nearer your mother’s?’

  ‘He is of my mother’s years,’ Philippa said.

  ‘Well?’ said Madam Elizabeth. ‘And is he forthright and hairy, as I am told Scots are wont to be? A man happier with his sword or walking his fields, than in the chambers of princes?’

  Philippa said dryly, ‘I think, your grace, that you know him.’

  ‘What! I?’ said Elizabeth. ‘Have I not shown that I know him so little, I depend on your eyes for a picture? Is he so like the man I have painted?’

  And Philippa said, ‘You have painted his opposite.’

  There was a light and circumspect silence. Then Elizabeth sighed. ‘It is as Dr Dee said. I have no sense of shadows, only of substance. Let us leave your smooth Mr Crawford to introduce himself, as one day perhaps he will, at my door. Is he in England now, Mistress Philippa?’

  And Philippa, shaking her head, said, ‘No, your grace. I left him in Greece, and have not heard of him since.’

  ‘I see. I shall not ask,’ Elizabeth said, ‘if you have written to him. You know best yourself whether this Court would help his advancement, or would do quite the reverse. If you do not know, I suggest that you ask yourself the name of the person who sent you here today.’

  There was a short silence, while Philippa’s mind made a single critical evaluation. Then she spoke. ‘It was Lady Lennox,’ she said.

  ‘I see,’ said the Lady Elizabeth. On the other side of the table, Master Howard had not moved, but Philippa had the feeling that the scent of triumph had come, like woodsmoke, and tinged the air of the room. ‘Dear Meg. The old companion of my nursery days. I fear she would find me safer behind bars and a hanglock. Is she trusted in Scotland?’

  ‘I hardly think so,’ said Philippa bluntly. ‘Or her husband.’

  ‘Although the child-Queen’s mother invited him north, did she not, to help her against her nobles when she wanted the regency? She has it now, so the Earl of Lennox’s services are no longer wanted in Scotland. Which is as well.’

  ‘Would he have left England?’ Philippa asked. It seemed unlikely. Living was sweet under Queen Mary’s favour: life in Scotland would never be half as opulent, even with all his attainted estates handed back.

  ‘It was a pretty plot,’ said Elizabeth lightly, and her pale eyes sparkled and her teeth, unregarded again, showed, small as a weasel’s. ‘Lennox was to go to Scotland at Mary of Guise’s request, and once there was to suborn the nobles and declare the country for England, throwing out the Queen Dowager and all her adherents and becoming, with the English Queen’s blessing, her Lord Lieutenant and Governor in Scotland. He had the Privy Council’s consent, I am told. He would have gone, except that she was given the Regency, as I said, and no longer needed that risky alliance. But I think he still hopes for it. Or at the very least, to have his lands all restored. He is bent on petty power and the return of old glories. My Lady Lennox is apt to aim higher.… Have you met the boy Darnley?’

  ‘A small, scholarly encounter,’ Philippa said. ‘There was no meeting of souls.’

  ‘No Lennox has one,’ said Elizabeth with precision. ‘The child is already sending copies of his Latin poems and translations to the Queen, and to his cousin Mary of Scotland. Largely written, I should imagine, by Master John Elder, or am I misjudging him? Perhaps he is precocious as well as unpleasant. But note well, Mistress Philippa. There are few women as subtle as the Countess of Lennox. I have enjoyed our meeting. But I should advise you, even if the opportunity presents itself, not to come near me again, and furthermore, to divorce your husband as quickly as possible. It is dangerous air for the wife of a soldier.’

  A few minutes later, her brief visit had ended. Philippa returned to Court in a coma, which barely lifted as she became absorbed once again into the endless minutiae to do with the Queen’s hourly health and wellbeing. From Don Alfonso, she knew that the King was in an agony of irritation over the birth which still kept him tied down in England: of irritation, and of fea
r. The Earl of Pembroke, sent to sound out the loyalty of the garrison leaders at Calais and Guisnes, had been recalled, so great was Philip’s anxiety about his own safety in the event of a disastrous accouchement. Long since, the meetings of citizens had been forbidden in the commonroom of London ordinaries, and his attempts to stop the rising number of quarrels between Spaniards and Englishmen had only resulted in rousing his own nobles’ resentment. Under pain of hanging, no man could raise the cry of Spain! for assistance. No swords were to be carried, and the first Spaniard to use a weapon was to have his hand cut off.

  The precautions were probably wise. A clash involving five hundred of both races had taken place already and had been hushed up by the Privy Council, as Philippa well knew: only a handful had been killed, fortunately, and twenty-five injured. Don Alfonso and his friends, however, did not wish to be wise, or to be told to put up with any affront or persecution. They wanted to pick a quarrel, personally, with every native in sight, and then slay him.

  The birth delayed. The Queen exhorted her bishops to do better in routing out heretics. There were more burnings, and riots at burnings. King Philip wrote and asked the Emperor, who was enjoying a spell of recovery, what to do about libellous placards. London was flooded with thousands of scurrilous pamphlets against religion and parliament, the Council, the Queen and the King, which the Lord Mayor assiduously collected. The Master of the Revels was arraigned, among others, for a share in the Cambridge plotting. The King’s grandmother died.

  It was the last straw. Joanna the Mad, mother of the Emperor Charles, sister of Catherine of Aragon had been crazy for forty long years, and her passing, for which her grandson announced he felt a reasonable regret, had the simple effect of freeing twenty-five thousand ducats a year for the Spanish economy.

  Unfortunately, it did not free that sum automatically for her own obsequies, or for the cost of Court mourning. The ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral alone, it appeared, would cost seven thousand ducats, and dress for the Court over and above looked like requiring a fortune. The one cheering event Philippa was to remember of that long dreary month was Don Alfonso’s account of the English noblemen flocking to Philip to demand their black suits. ‘And behaving,’ said Philippa’s confidant bitterly, ‘as if their honour would be tarnished for ever if they didn’t obtain them. When we have finished, I tell you, we shall have put more folk into mourning in this kingdom than has ever been seen before, or will be.’

  King Philip retired with the colic. Ordered clothes must be paid for, and until more money arrived, he could not properly appear without mourning. It was little comfort to know that his father was in the same position exactly.

  There was a wave of warm weather. The Queen, tempted out of doors, walked slowly about between the box hedges, leaning on the arms of her ladies. More ladies had come. The Queen’s apartments at Hampton Court were a low rustle of feminine voices, and sweeping skirts, and unfolding needlework; weaving among the rumbling voices of the doctors, always on call, always in attendance; and the thin, high song of the cage birds, answering the call of the blackbirds and thrushes and chaffinches, free in the gardens outside.

  Next to her, day and night, the Queen kept Jane Dormer. And although Philippa took what she could from Jane’s shoulders, it seemed to her that Jane, too, was most at ease at the Queen’s side; tasting her food: sometimes, Philippa knew, sharing her bed when there were strange pains, or nightmares, or long waking hours of thinking and planning.

  Philippa, too, felt the quality of this need, and subdued all her own impatience to serve it. She did so soberly, and with a conscience which pained her, for she had already taken the decision to desert this post she had taken so light-heartedly: for adventure; for freedom; out of some petty need, she now saw, to prove her adulthood by manipulating the affairs of her elders.

  Before coming to London, she had viewed her life and that of her friends through the eyes of a child at Flaw Valleys, or a child pushed by circumstance on a stormy but magnificent journey through Europe. Now she was wiser. In this brief and dizzying apprenticeship, she had started to realize that, whatever his occupation, Lymond’s life was lived on this level: the level on which the future of whole communities could be steered or reshaped, improved or jeopardized by a handful of people.

  And the fascination of that, she was now aware, far surpassed anything else one could imagine. The search for the child, which she had thought so important, had been made at a cost which the death of one evil, powerful man, Graham Malett, had only just merited—the cost of months spent in limbo, away from the world of affairs. She had once thought Lymond’s life could be blighted by some accident of birth which had left his origins in some mystery. She knew that because of it he was unlikely to come home. But beyond that she could not imagine, now, that it would make any difference whatever to the career he elected to follow.

  She knew now that Lymond had no need of her, or of Kuzúm, the child she had rescued. Her inclination and her duty lay here in London, with this small, unhappy, violent woman and the tragedy of her marriage. But before that, she had another duty: to Lymond’s family who did not understand, as she did, and who saw themselves as spurned and discarded. And to her mother Kate, whom her marriage had so bewildered. Who had known Lymond first, as Margaret Lennox had so brutally pointed out, when she, a child of ten, had disliked and betrayed him.

  So, for all these reasons, and quite unknown to any person at Court; to Jane or old Lady Dormer; to Henry Sidney her benefactor; to Diccon Chancellor, who would have put her in irons, or his son Christopher, who would have betrayed her with his approving exuberance, Philippa Somerville was going to Russia.

  Her modest cloth bag was packed. Her letters to Kate and Sybilla were written. Her formal apology to the Queen was prepared and her arrangement was at last firmly made, with the reluctant Robert Best, to put her on one Will Whiskyn’s hoy, lying between Tilbury and Gravesend, and thence smuggle her on board the Edward Bonaventure.

  Two days before she was due at Tilbury, she obtained leave from the Queen to make a short visit. It was her excuse to leave Court but the visit, as it chanced, was genuine enough. Before leaving for Russia, Philippa had determined to pay her first and last call on Leonard Bailey, brother of the late Honoria Bailey and great-uncle of her husband Francis Crawford, at the manor of Gardington, Bucks.

  She took with her one groom, lent her by Sir Henry Sidney, and her own maidservant Fogge. Through Sir Henry, she had received Garrard’s directions on reaching the manor: from old Lady Dormer, she had learned a little more of this elderly man, whose sister had married into an eminent Scottish family and who, disillusioned, had left Scotland as a young man and settled, on a small English pension, to become a minor landowner of no great skill or resources, known largely for his liking for law and his constant embroilment in petty disputes.

  It was not an appealing prospect, but Philippa, having sent off a letter announcing herself, made the journey with what stoicism she could muster, and found her virtue rewarded by the gift of a warm summer’s day, which turned the Vale into a broad wooded meadow below the blue heights of the Chilterns, and drove free air through her lungs, stuffed with the sick intriguings of Court.

  She found Gardington a modest white house with three gables and a central door flanked by crenellated bay windows, their casements open to the soft garden air. A thread of smoke rose from the tall, red-brick chimneys, and she could hear someone whistling in the big ivy-clad barn which adjoined the house on the left, but there was no sign of life from the house. Leaving her groom and her maid, Philippa dismounted and marching up to the door, rapped with the closing-ring.

  No one answered. At the second series of knocks, a dog began barking, and, after a moment, was joined by another. The whistling in the barn stopped. Philippa waited, gave another unavailing bang on the door, and then walked to the barn, her bongrace jerking with the vehemence of her stride.

  The whistler jumped to his feet, a lad in buff jacket and slops, his ha
lf-mended rake dropped on the floor. ‘I,’ said Philippa clearly, ‘am Mistress Somerville from the Queen’s Court at London. Mr Bailey expects me. Why does no one answer the door?’

  The lad wiped his hands on his sides. ‘He’s out,’ he said.

  ‘His servants?’ said Philippa.

  ‘She’s out, too,’ said the lad. ‘Jeff’s took them to market.’

  ‘I see,’ said Philippa. ‘And when will they return?’

  ‘He said,’ said the boy, ‘he would be out for the day.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘Is it dinnertime?’

  ‘Past, I should think,’ Philippa said. She and Fogge and George the groom had shared some fruit and cheese from a basket, but there remained a certain emptiness of which she was not unaware.

  ‘Oh,’ said the boy. ‘Then he’s not to be back till tomorrow.’

  ‘From market?’ Philippa said.

  The boy gazed at her with undisturbed amiability. ‘No,’ he explained patiently. ‘If it’s after dinner, he hasn’t gone to the market. He’s gone to stay with a friend.’

  ‘And the housekeeper?’ said Philippa.

  ‘Off to see a sick mother,’ the boy said triumphantly; and Philippa opened her purse, searched for and gave him a teston.

  ‘Well done,’ said Philippa cordially and left him, subsiding once more to the floor with his rake. She then walked straight back to the house and climbed through the open bay window.

  The room inside was quite empty, except for a wainscot cupboard with an aumbry, a painted spruce table and one or two cheapish thrown chairs, although the cold fireplace had an overmantel of elaborate friezework, and the ceiling was also carried out in fine decorative plaster. There was a tapestry, discoloured with smoke, on one wall. Philippa left the room silently.

  A narrow corridor, with more doors opening from it. A steep staircase, its bannisters of carved and waxed oak. A shaft of daylight from the rear of the house, and the subdued clack of pewter or earthenware. Philippa, treading quietly, walked to the front door and opened it, and then made her way back to the sound.