The Ringed Castle: Fifth in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles

by Dorothy Dunnett

  She knew too little about him. Kate would have advised her, but there was no time now to consult Kate. And even Kate could not see the circumstance, as she did, against a lifetime of war and diplomacy, education and statesmanship, in which this was merely a factor. To a cool-tempered man, a small factor. To an ambitious man, his emotional needs already sufficiently catered for, a factor of vanished importance. To Sybilla, life or death … which punishment was greater; which did she deserve? To Kate, what? There Philippa did not know either. She could plan nothing; understand nothing, until she met and weighed up whatever Francis Crawford had become.

  The wages of meddling. If she had never seen Leonard Bailey: if she had resisted this one final impulse to take to Lymond in Russia this final and authenticated piece of equipment: his own blameless blood line. To Russia, with Rob Best and Diccon Chancellor, with Christopher and Killingworth and John Buckland, Diccon’s sardonic sailing-master. To the sea, and bright adventure, away from the incense and whisperings. To the Dwina, where the white rose of Muscovy smoked on the bushes, and laced the wind with its cold scent.…

  She was riding still, the tears still under her veiling, when the chance riders about them became suddenly many, and less than chance: and resolved themselves into a circle of men, armed and bearded, whose leader thrust aside George and Fogge, and riding up to her side said, ‘Mistress Somerville? Do not be frightened. But it seems this rascal here has misled you. This is not the way to Hampton Court Palace.’

  He was not young, but his voice carried every authority, and among the soldiers beside him, there was no friendly face. Philippa said, ‘Who are you, sir? My escort is perfectly adequate. I am not going to Hampton Court Palace, but to some friends in the City.’

  The man shook his helmeted head. ‘In the City? No, mistress. The Queen has given leave for no one to visit the City. Your place is at Court, in the Palace.’

  ‘But——’ said Philippa; and then cut off her protest. George, his hand falling back from his sword, could do nothing against all these men; still less could one girl. They had been sent here to take her; they had been sent to bring her back to her duty.

  Or worse. Who were they? Who had thought it important to find her?

  It was then that Philippa saw the Lennox cipher on every cloak.

  *

  Philippa was ill, or so Lady Lennox was certain. Ill from her loving and onerous duties, and deserving of rest in the Countess’s own fine apartments quite apart from the hubbub of Court, where she could sew, and read, and be quiet, and forget about the odd aberration which sent her wandering on some unspecified journey to London. ‘It is for your health,’ she insisted sweetly, on Philippa’s every protest. ‘The Queen understands. The child tarries still: there are more ladies at Court than any accouchement has need of, and the Duchess of Alva besides. Why fret? Are we so harsh in our care of you? Even if you returned, Philippa, the Queen would merely send you straight back to me.’

  The prison was gilded: the jailers charming and quick with every dainty attention. But, of intention or not, it was a prison. And a man at arms stood before every door. The Edward Bonaventure sailed, but without Philippa Somerville. And the week after she sailed, Jane Dormer came to take Philippa back to her duty.

  She curtseyed to Lady Lennox, and put both hands on Philippa’s shoulders. ‘You are well. I am so glad to see you restored. It is your first season at Court: we were thoughtless to bear quite so hard on you.… Are you sure you wish to return?’

  She herself looked less than well; her white skin sallow, and blue hollows between eye and cheekbone. Philippa, who for ten days had betrayed neither resentment nor anger, snowed neither now, but kissed her cheek, and smiled, and went in her turn to curtsey to the Countess of Lennox, adding the necessary, neatly phrased thanks. Surprise and docility were all she had shown from the beginning, and docility was the essence of her leavetaking now. The Countess, smiling, touched the girl on the cheek. ‘Charming. You do not know how you have brightened my household. I declare, I wish that Harry were older.’

  Jane Dormer’s fingers closed on her own, and Philippa smiled at the gentle reminder, and then again, agreeably, at the Countess of Lennox. Outside, and back in her own room, she did not smile at all, but unpacked, and ascertained her next duty, and swept upstairs and along corridors and across courtyards until she found Roger Ascham, and then the small office with Bartholomew Lychpole half-rising, startled, inside it. She banged the door. ‘The letter,’ said Philippa. ‘The letter to Mr Crawford. Did you send it?’

  He stared at her, and then turning, laid down his pen and pulled a stool forward. ‘Mistress Philippa! Sit, please. Yes, I sent it, these several weeks back. Has it gone astray? Or did you want to send others?’

  Philippa said, ‘Did anyone see it?’

  He clasped his hands and stared at her, frowning. ‘It went with my report. Mistress Philippa, no one must see these reports. No one knows of them. No one could have seen it.’

  ‘Then who besides myself knows that Mr Crawford is in Russia?’ Philippa said.

  Master Lychpole rose to his feet, his hand pressing hard on the lectern. ‘No one. No one, unless you have told them yourself. Why should you think so? Is it spoken of? Do they know of my messages?’ He gazed at her, his face drawn with anxiety.

  ‘No,’ said Philippa. Her voice flattened. ‘No one speaks of you or your reports. It seemed to me that there might be a suspicion, a rumour, that Mr Crawford is now in Russia. I wondered if you had lost a letter, or had found your papers disturbed.’

  ‘There are three clicket locks on that coffer,’ said Lychpole. ‘And I keep the key for each one round my neck. No one could read my papers without my being aware of it. And the letter goes by a safe messenger, and by now will be far out of reach. But what of its answer, or some message to you from your husband? News may come out of Russia as well. It is not a secret that will stay so for ever.’

  ‘No. That is true,’ Philippa said. ‘I am worried, perhaps, for no reason … what is keeping Master Ascham so busy?’

  ‘The letters,’ said Bartholomew Lychpole. ‘Forty-seven Latin letters to every prince in the known world announcing the Queen’s happy delivery of a Prince. I tell you, they are right who say that if this birth fails, there will be trouble on a scale we have never yet known.’

  For there was no prince or princess; only Ruy Gomez saying, Life is short for such long expectations, and, When they saw her with a girth greater than Gutierre Lopez, they made an error, they say, in their adding.

  The Queen lay on her bed, her hair hidden under her cap, an embroidered robe over her shift of white satin, and prayers were said at her bedside, or readings of a devotional nature, or low talk and some discreet music. Sometimes the Queen rose for her meals, urged to the table by all her ladies, but her appetite had always been spare, and had increased little since the start of her pregnancy. She longed, it was easy to see, for hourly news of her kingdom, and to guess the mind of her King, but although he paid dutiful visits, and held her hand, and talked in slow, articulated Spanish and listened, patiently, while she answered in French, the exchanges were more formal, Philippa thought, than she had heard them before.

  Then the mourning clothes arrived, and the money, and, released from diplomatic imprisonment, King Philip was able to appear in public at Whit. It was only then that Philippa learned from Don Alfonso how many of Philip’s attendants had already gone to the Emperor at Brussels; and later, the reason. The peace talks at Marek had broken down, and the French and the Emperor Charles were preparing for war. ‘So,’ said her informant with his usual brightness, ‘the King waits only for the birth to cross the Channel instantly. I tell you, a single hour’s delay in this delivery seems to him like a thousand years.’

  ‘And to the Queen?’ Philippa had answered him tartly. So he did not tell her, as he might have done, that the Emperor had already written advising his son how to announce without undue fuss that his Queen was not pregnant. The Court thought it fu
nny when the Polish Ambassador, come to condole with King Philip on the death of his saintly grandmother, droned onwards in unwitting Latin through every phase of his brief, not omitting those well-expressed paragraphs which congratulated Queen Mary of England on the birth of a beautiful Prince.

  Philippa, more discreet in her way than Don Alfonso, did not relate that to Jane, or the hysterical laughter with which it was greeted. Or so said Sir Henry Sidney, who had been present, and who was interested in the Polish Ambassador for other reasons entirely. Learning this from Sir Henry much later, Philippa was momentarily puzzled. ‘How does the Polish Ambassador affect the affairs of the Muscovy Company?’

  ‘It’s the other way round,’ said Sir Henry. ‘Poland is Russia’s neighbour, you know, and one of her traditional enemies. The King of Poland is very anxious indeed that the Muscovy company should be forbidden to export any arms or military engines which could be used by the Russians against them.’

  ‘And will you agree?’ Philippa said. ‘Will Barnes and Gresham agree?’

  ‘The Privy Council will agree,’ Sidney said. ‘Or I think it extraordinarily likely. And loyal men that they are, how can England’s brave haberdashers scruple to follow?’

  In the middle of June, the Queen’s pains began; the casements were shut, the doors barred, and her chambers locked against all save her doctors and women. The pains continued, but became intermittent. Jostled out by her superiors, Philippa did what she could, and tried to save Jane some of her unceasing duties, and sat in a corner and experienced grief, when she could do nothing else, for the middle-aged woman who lay rigid, praying aloud, behind the curtains of cloth-of-gold quilting, beneath the spangles and bone lace and crown of plumed feathers, and the flat counterpane, embroidered with roses in silk and gold twist, and the initials of Philip and Mary, intertwined.

  She was asleep in her own room, exhausted, when Jane Dormer came to her in the morning, and kneeling by the low bed, touched her hand.

  There was no need to speak. The question stood in Philippa’s brown, waking eyes, and meeting them, Jane shook her head. ‘The pains have gone, and the reason for them has shown itself. Not a birth, the doctors say, but the opposite. The Queen has restarted her courses.’

  Philippa looked at Jane’s white face. ‘Not an imminent birth?’

  ‘They say not. If the Queen presses them, no doubt they will say less firmly that it is unlikely. If she argues enough, they may even announce that the Queen’s delivery has been a little deferred. But she is not pregnant. She is not pregnant, Philippa.’ She was wet-eyed: within a shadow of an explosive outbreak of tears.

  Philippa put an arm round her shoulders. ‘Have you never suspected it? Think how simply such a thing happens. It begins with some unlucky accident of the flesh which this Queen is prone to, and because she needs and yearns for a pregnancy, she believes what the evidence tells her. She makes an ecstatic pronouncement in the joy at the Cardinal’s return, and the pregnancy is irrevocably dated. I’ve seen a girl fearful of childbirth listen to her body the way the Queen has done, all those months. It’s a curious music it plays, and if you study it long enough, you hear what you want.

  ‘All along the Queen has been pushed: by the nation’s eagerness, by the political need; by her own growing desire for her husband to stay at her side. Her household takes the steps for her: marks the weeks, prepares the nursery, makes the clothes; makes ready the celebrations, and she can hardly ignore them. She is part of it too: the miracle began within her; she cannot deny it. If she has doubts, their excitement reinfects her and she forgets them. Or, at times afraid, she may sometimes try to push it behind her; ignore the span slipping away until the reminders become quickly too many: until every eye is on her, and her food and her gait and her humour: until doctors are watching her day and night and false reports of the birth are flying already.…’

  ‘You mean,’ Jane said slowly, ‘that she has known all along she was barren?’

  ‘I mean,’ Philippa said, ‘that she believes that for the devout, all things are possible. And that for nine months she has prayed for a miracle.’

  ‘Poor lady,’ said Jane, and cried in Philippa’s arms while, dry-eyed, Philippa stared into the new world she had discovered in London and begged, with a grimness unknown to the Marian shrines, to be vouchsafed the means to endure in it, and even, one day, to mend it as it needed.

  The Queen’s doctors announced that an error of possibly two or three months had been made with Her Majesty’s pregnancy, and that delivery was now likely to take place in August, or even September. Two gentlemen who indulged in ribald remarks as a consequence were sent to the Tower. And the King sent a note to his dear friend, Ruy Gomez da Silva: Let me know what line I can take with the Queen about leaving her, and about religion. I see I must say something, but God help me.

  The Emperor Charles received a letter. The King his son and Ruy Gomez wished to leave England for Spain. King Philip desired above all to escape from the great and continual distress in which he found himself, but was intent on two things: to leave the Queen feeling convinced he would always continue to love her most dearly, and that he would come back shortly to remain with her—she showing that she would not consent to his departure either mentally or verbally otherwise. Also, to devise means of returning without trouble to England, so as not to have thrown away so much money, time, toil and repute.

  There was another uprising in Warwickshire: Pembroke dealt with it.

  Exhausted, the Queen’s ladies continued to give her their care and their comfort. The Queen rose from her bed, and moved through her rooms slowly, undertaking no business. Then plans were announced to move the whole Court briefly to Oatlands, four miles farther from London, and Philippa along with the others was plunged into lists and planning and packing. The Queen, sitting erect in her carved chair, a counterpane over her knees, issued the orders, and, when the time came, was placed in her closed litter and taken through the green summer park to her barge, and from there to her palace.

  Hampton Court emptied, for cleansing. The ladies brought for the accouchement, unable to find rooms in the bijou restrictions of Oatlands, were advised quietly to withdraw and vanish. And a cradle, carried out and locked in a storeroom, lay on its side so that this time its poorly scanned legend had only the mice to be witness: The child whom Thou to Mary, O Lord of Might has send …

  Ten days later, the King and Queen were back in Hampton Court, and the watchers and Ambassadors saw that the Queen no longer walked with her ladies alone, but had her statesmen for the first time around her, and was giving audiences once again, her manner affable; her face stiff; half-shorn, half-crumbled, like sandstone, and only the small, tightly-rimmed eyes liquid and suffering. Philippa heard then that the Emperor had sent a peremptory summons to Philip and that the Queen had agreed he should go.

  He left for London in less than a fortnight, and the Queen, staying by his side at the last moment, unexpectedly shared his public farewells in the City, acclaimed in her open litter by the crowds who ran and shouted along the long road, and who had seemingly considered her dead. Then together, the Crown and the Court moved on downriver, to where Philip’s ships waited at Greenwich.

  And at Greenwich, the Queen summoned Philippa and at last gave her leave of absence. ‘You have been my sweet servant, and you deserve rest from your labours. Your mother must lack you. Take your way home to the north, and comfort her, and on my good lord’s return we shall see you.’ And dismissing her, had given her a brooch and a chain; while from Lady Lennox there had emanated a kind smile and a message for her good lady mother.

  Philippa retired to her room, wanly aghast. She did not want to go north. She could not face her own mother, and how could she avoid visiting Midculter, when all that she knew must be stamped on her face? And more than that, the ships would be returning from Russia. Not with Chancellor: that she did not expect. But the Edward and the Philip and Mary were to sail back to England to winter. And, since they might sur
ely bear letters, Philippa wished to be there when they came.

  She applied, as was her sensible habit, for aid to the Sidneys. Lady Mary did not inquire why it was inconvenient for Mistress Philippa to spend a month at her home in Flaw Valleys. She merely arranged, with the greatest good will, for Philippa to join them instead down at Penshurst. And two days later, sent her husband to Greenwich to escort her.

  He arrived on a day of typical chaos. All the Court were still there, Spanish and English, for with King Philip to Brussels were going the Queen’s principal ministers and almost the whole of her Council: a measure of safety, no less than a promise of willing and speedy return. And back in England, Philip was leaving his Queen yet another assurance: his German and Spanish infantry and Burgundian cavalry, his Chapel functionaries, his physicians and pages and his whole stable department were to remain behind him, patient pawns awaiting redemption; exiles in an unfriendly land.

  Philippa was ready and thankful to leave. She welcomed Sir Henry as he stooped, spurs clinking, through the low door of her room, and he smiled and gave her a kiss and said ‘It should have been Allendale. I was to bring you his respects. That’s one young man, along with a number of others, who wish your divorce would speed, Philippa.’

  So Austin had already said. She thought of him, smiling, and of all the warm farewells she had received today from her immediate circle. The kisses and gifts and affectionate raillery from all the men and women with whom she had brushed shoulders in the last ten months had both surprised Philippa and touched her. Don Alfonso, miming despair combined with exhausted relief, was going in the King’s train to Brussels. Austin, she knew, would find more than one excuse to come to Penshurst. She said, ‘I don’t suppose they want it any more eagerly than I do. It seems to be delayed once again. They say now that nothing can be done until Mr Crawford sends his formal consent.’

  ‘Sends,’ Henry Sidney repeated. He looked round and pushed the door shut; then pulling a stool forward for Philippa, went and perched himself on the window seat. ‘Philippa, are you sure he won’t come back to Scotland?’