The Ringed Castle (15 page)

‘I’m sick of Russia. Eden will tell you,’ Chancellor said.

‘I don’t want to hear it in Latin,’ Sir Henry said. ‘My God, I’ve had enough Latin. I did you proud, anyway.
Vehementer pium institutum vestrum amplector, viri honestissimi
 … “Prompted by your ardent affection for your native land, you are applying yourselves to the furtherance of a project which will, I trust, prove beneficial to the people of England and reflect also honour on our common country. I part with Chancellor for this reason: not because I am tired of him, or because I find his maintenance burdensome to me, but that the authority and position Chancellor so well deserves may be given him. While we commit a little money to the hazard of fortune, he commits his very life to the remorseless sea. With what toils will he not be broken? With what dangers and watchings will he not be harassed; with what anxieties will he not be devoured? While we shall remain in our ancestral homes, he will seek foreign and unknown realms; he will entrust his safety to barbarians and unknown tribes; he will even expose his life to the monsters of the deep,” I said. I hope Jane is listening. And now what? Back wined and dined and hanging with furs from the Kremlin, you complain because a man has not the skill to get himself drowned in December. Now I look at you, you’re getting fat.’

‘He isn’t,’ said Jane. ‘I hear the castle of Moscow is fine, and is set on a fair wooded hill.’

‘There is a handful of churches and palaces, ringed about with high walls and rivers. The Tsar’s home, the Kremlin, lies in the innermost ring, and the city outside it.’

‘And is Russia rich?’ added Philippa obediently. ‘What nature of land is it?’

Diccon Chancellor spoke to her, but his eyes were on something beyond her. ‘A land half-snatched by men from the hang-nails of winter, where heat and cold swing like a lodestone. For five months of the year the ice is an ell and more thick on her rivers. The poor may be smitten stiff in their cabins, and the sledges run into Moscow with the sitting dead grasping the harness. Of all the peoples of the earth, they have the hardest living.’

‘They plant crops?’

‘They are sunk in morasses and flooded with rivers: trees march through them like armies. They have no grains to export, nor jewels,
nor spices nor any object of grace. They have walrus teeth and seal oil and sables, martens and grease beavers, hides and timber and tallow, salt and wax. They have no need of hives, for lakes of honey live in the trees. They say a man, slipping, lived in a pool for two days, and had to cling to a bear’s fur to pull himself out.’

‘They are a hardy nation?’ Jane Dormer said.

‘They are strong,’ Chancellor said. ‘Square, brawny men with short legs and big bellies, who do not repine.
I have nothing
, they say,
but it is God’s and the Duke’s Grace’s
. They do not think, as we do, that what is ours is but God’s and our own. They are content to scrape and scratch all their lives at the Tsar’s princely pleasure.’

Philippa’s brown eyes were wide open. ‘Don’t they rebel?’ she said tartly.

‘With what?’ Chancellor said. ‘They have only numbers. And without army, without navy, without order, without standing in Asia or Europe, where else can the Tsar find an income?’

‘I read,’ said Sidney, ‘what you set down for Eden.
If they knew their strength, no man were able to make match with them; nor they that dwell near them should have any rest of them
. Fortunately, they don’t know their own strength.’

‘Unless you teach it them, trading,’ said Chancellor.

It had the ring of a long-standing argument. Sir Henry Sidney caught Philippa’s bland eye and smiled. ‘Diccon’s dream is of travel and conquest. A new Caesar, a new Alexander who will reach further than India and bring back an empire without need for needles and hawks’ bells and looking-glasses, and certainly without lading sheets and kerseys, and garnishes of indifferent pewter. But if you will go exploring, Diccon, you must allow those who dwell in the external light, by the essence of mechanical arts, to attempt to pay for the bottoms.’

‘Without the inferior light,’ Philippa said, ‘which produces sensitive knowledge?’

‘I exclude nothing,’ said Sir Henry, ‘except that Diccon will clamour to join the Worshipful Company of Drapers.’

‘Why,’ said Jane Dormer, ‘may he not enlarge the Christian faith and dominion to the glory of God and the confusion of infidels, comforted by the English merchants peaceably trading in Russia?’

‘Especially,’ said Philippa Somerville, ‘if the Russians are taught to exterminate Tartars.’

The men looked at each other. Sir Henry Sidney got to his feet, and laying his hand on his hip, gazed down on them all with benignity. ‘Thus,’ he said, ‘despite the late confused counsel of ministers, I am persuaded that in this schismatic world, those guided by lights external and lights inferior may well solve our problems in harness.’

Chancellor rose in his turn. ‘I do not go,’ he said, ‘because I am tired of you, or because I find your entertainment burdensome, but because I am wrecked on the wit of your women. Mistress Somerville, I have to thank you on Nick and Christopher’s behalf for your interest in them. Take heed at court. There are more monsters there than are born in the ocean.’

‘To laugh, to lie, to flatter, to face: Four ways in court to win men’s grace
. Ascham will like her. I think I shall entrust her classical training to Ascham,’ said Sir Henry. ‘The voyage we are embarked on will demand the cunning and strength of the ancients before winter is over.’

*

On 30 November, the Sidneys’ first child was born; a son named, with resignation, Philip after the current King-consort. Shortly afterwards Philippa with serving-woman and escort rode the thirty-five miles north to London to enter the bridal court of the middle-aged Queen, with the badger’s nose and faded red hair and small, anchorite’s body within the stiff, quarried case of her costume.

There were no eunuchs at the door of Westminster, or black pages, or cool fountains playing. Philippa made the same curtsey to her Queen as she had to Roxelana Sultan; but in a wainscoted room hung with tapestries, before a canopied chair of state embodying the royal arms of England and Spain, and surrounded, on stools, on cushions, on fringed velvet chairs, by extremely plain women.

All except one. Lady Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, First Lady and Mistress of Robes to Queen Mary her cousin, was thirty-nine and still handsome despite ten years of child-bearing, and a lifetime during which she had found herself by turn heir to the throne, bastard, and maid of honour to three of her uncle’s six wives.

She watched Philippa from her place by the Queen, her back straight, her eyes open, her hands still on the silver bone-lace of her kirtle, and the expression on her blonde, big-featured face showed nothing but faint, well-bred boredom. She said, ‘The daughter of Gideon Somerville, who served your grace well in the north, and was once an officer of my own household. Now your grace has two Scots in your service.’

Philippa, who was wearing a great many jewels, rose from her curtsey and, with an effort equally invisible, refrained from replying.

‘What child: no disclaimer?’ said a strong, masculine voice. The Queen extended her hand, the broad wedding band sparkling on the unremarkable fingers. ‘Lady Lennox is born of a Scot, and her lord is another: yet there beats no more true English heart here than hers.’

Philippa kissed the square hand and stepped backwards, her lips glazed with cold incense. She said, ‘Forgive me, your grace. I believed her ladyship to be jesting. For I have no Scottish blood, and no marriage at all but on paper.’ She did not look at Lady Lennox.

‘It is a strange tale we have been told,’ said the Queen. ‘But your union was made, we understand, of necessity and without that blessing of divine and uxorious love with which God sometimes rewards selfless action. Does your husband worship as you do?’

Faultlessly groomed, Philippa’s eyes lost focus slightly. She felt her sponsor, old Lady Dormer, shift slightly behind her, and cast her eyes downwards. ‘The rites of Holy Church attended our marriage,’ she said. ‘We parted soon afterwards.’

‘And the bastard boy whom you brought back to Scotland,’ said Lady Lennox with interest. ‘Is he being reared as a true son of the Church?’ She leaned across to the Queen. ‘The child is not, of course, Mistress Philippa’s own.’

Philippa’s face was perfectly winsome. ‘The child is in England,’ she answered, ‘being taught his duty by my own mother.’

‘And when your union is severed?’ said Margaret Lennox.

‘The child will remain at Flaw Valleys,’ Philippa said.

The Queen’s small mouth, the mouth of Catherine of Aragon, curled in a swift smile. ‘So we have drawn one Scotsman whole to our kingdom,’ she said. ‘And I trust that one day you will give us many stout Englishmen from your true marriage bed. When you are rid of this marriage, we shall look to your fortunes.’

The cadence was one of dismissal. Philippa curtseyed, thinking of her true marriage bed not at all; but of the thin, bolstered figure before her with the broad Flemish features, worn with anxiety.

How goes my daughter’s belly?
had asked the Emperor Charles, who had been betrothed to this same Queen thirty years ago, sitting under his nightcap in the small Brussels house in the park, listening to the night-long ticking tread of his clocks.
Benedicta inter mulieres
, the new Papal Legate had said,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui
. If the Queen died childless, the Catholics said, her sister Elizabeth with French help would inherit the throne, and the kingdom return once more to heresy. If the Queen had a son, the Protestants said, it would prove no more than the conduit by which the rats of Rome might creep into the stronghold. And there had been a placard nailed to the door of the Palace, everyone whispered.
Shall we be such fools, noble English, as to think that our Queen will give birth to anything, except it be a marmot or a puppy?

Many stout Englishmen would that uncompromising vessel of King Harry’s majesty need.

On duty, Philippa was to sleep with Jane Dormer in the Queen’s privy chambers. She had a modest chest taken there: the rest of her
London clothes she had left at the Dormer lodging in the Savoy. She learned, with unqualified regret, of Queen Mary’s habitual timetable, which from tomorrow henceforth she would share. The Queen rose at daybreak: she heard Mass in private before plunging straight into business, which she transacted without pause till past midnight: she never touched food before two o’clock.

‘Like her mother, the sainted Queen Catherine,’ said Lady Dormer that afternoon, steering both girls firmly into the throng of the antechamber. ‘… So many well-bred young gentlemen!… who rose at five, having wakened at midnight for the Matins of the Religious, and who fasted each Friday and Saturday and all Eves of our Blessed Lady. Who believed, poor Lady, that time lost which was spent dressing herself.’

‘She was not permitted, dear grandmother,’ Jane Dormer said, ‘the joys which we celebrate.’

‘That is so.’ Arrested, Lady Dormer raised a delicate hand. ‘The Cardinal Legate, restored to us after twenty years’ banishment. The coming to this land of trouble of the greatest of princes on earth, to be spouse and son, as of old, to this Virgin …’

‘With his disciples around him,’ said Philippa. A man with black eyes and earrings smiled at her.

‘… and the return of England, triumphant, to the See Apostolic upon the devoted petition of Parliament … Don Alfonso.’

‘My Lady Dormer,’ said the man with black eyes, smiling at Lady Dormer. ‘May I assist you? You wish to pass to the royal apartments?’

On principle, Jane’s formidable grandmother never spoke Spanish. ‘There is no need, I thank you,’ she said, her old eyes surveying, in one level stare, all the extravagances of Spanish high fashion. ‘Mistress Jane is not yet due for her service, and Mistress Philippa is here to become acquainted with those more familiar at Court.’ She turned to Philippa, and Philippa met the black eyes, her own well-drilled brown ones quite blank. ‘Let me present Don Alfonso Derronda, secretary to the Prince of Melito. Mistress Philippa Crawford.’

The young Spanish gentleman, recovering from his bow to Jane Dormer, bestowed an even more convolute gesture on Philippa. He floated upright with his rosy lips open. ‘But a coincidence!’ he cried. ‘Mistress Crawford! I have been required to present her to the Prince at the first opportunity.’

The hooded eyes studied him. ‘The first opportunity has not yet occurred,’ said Lady Dormer. ‘When it does, I shall present her.’ Through the chatter of high English voices and the flow of Spanish, halting and fluent, her voice sounded cold. Someone near broke into laughter and a string consort, playing unseen in the fretted room high
in the screen, embarked on a galliard. The long room was too crowded for dancing, but the conversation, as if in sympathy, quickened and sparkled. A voice, recently heard, said to Don Alfonso, ‘Let me present her. The Prince of Melito is standing just over there.’

Lady Lennox had appeared beside Philippa. In two more skilful minutes, she and Don Alfonso were pressing through the bright crowd, with Philippa captured between them. At the far end of the room, smiling, Lady Lennox came to a halt, her furred oversleeves swinging, and the young Spaniard laughed and lifted his eyebrows. ‘I see no Don Ruy Gomez de Silva.’

Margaret Lennox allowed her fine eyes to rest first on the Spaniard and then on Philippa Somerville. ‘Because he is changing his costume for cane-play, as you well know, Don Alfonso. You also know that my poor Lady Dormer dislikes him.’

‘She thinks him a cynic,’ Don Alfonso said.

‘As he is,’ said Lady Lennox.

‘A realist,’ said the young Spaniard.
‘Upon the devoted petition of Parliament!
How impartial, one wonders, were the recent elections to Parliament, and is it not a coincidence that barely a member inimical to Holy Church and the Queen’s will was returned? Has this stiff-necked people, one asks oneself, really been led back so soon to the obedience of the Church? Last year they denied the Sacrament and married their clergy. This year, as they tell me, all their beliefs have been altered. Can it be true that, as Cotswold lions, the people of England follow the faith of their King: Judaism or Mahometism—it is all one to them? Does Parliament really represent the wish of the people?’