Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
The Earl of Arundel looked at him sharply. ‘Is well, thank God. What have you heard?’
‘Is there a child?’ Sidney said. ‘I am told there is not.’
Arundel said, ‘There is no child, as yet. Her Majesty was taken ill through the night, but it has been shown to be a mere defect in the environment of the body, caused by a colic. Why, is there a rumour in London?’
‘No rumour,’ said Henry Sidney. He looked tired, Philippa thought. A page, summoned by her nod, reached up and drew the wet cloak from Sidney’s shoulders: as he took it away, Sir Henry turned to her and bowed, and gave his reply still staring into her face. ‘Not a rumour. Word reached London at daybreak that, half an hour after midnight, the Queen had given birth to a male child with little pain and no danger. London is in festival, Lord Arundel: bells are ringing; shops are shut, and there are bonfires in the streets, with public tables spread with wine and meat for everyone. Word has travelled already abroad. I came here to do my office as courier.’
He finished speaking into silence, and in silence a harsh voice spoke behind him. ‘They are premature,’ said the Queen.
Turning, a pain in her chest, Philippa saw her standing with Jane in her doorway, the doctors behind her. ‘They are premature, but perhaps it is fitting that an infant twice blessed should twice be celebrated. I am well, as you see, and England prospers within me. Give me your prayers, and you shall see a prince before the ash from these rejoicings is cold.’
A few days later, they heard that the Great Bell had been rung in Antwerp and English ships in the harbour had celebrated the news of a birth with volleys of shot, while the Queen Regent had sent a hundred crowns’ drink money to the seamen. About the same time, a small crowd arrived at the court with three screaming children, successfully borne a few days before to a woman, as they explained, of low stature and great age like the Queen, who was now strong, and out of all danger. Philippa, her nerves beaten raw, was all for sending them packing, but Jane prevailed, and had them all brought to the Queen, who spoke to them, Philippa saw, with real tears in her eyes. She had been wrong. Jane still understood her mistress far better than Philippa did.
About that time, King Philip made his first official call on his wife’s sister Elizabeth, but what transpired no one was able to discover. There followed two weeks of seclusion, after which her great-uncle William Howard was permitted to see Madam Elizabeth, and after him, several senior members of the Queen’s Privy Council. It was believed that she was appealing to the Queen through her statesmen to release her from custody. It was certain that she was writing the Queen a great many letters. Philippa sometimes saw them lying open on Queen Mary’s desk, unmistakable in Ascham’s beautiful Italian writing, but she refrained with an effort from reading them. It was a surprise therefore to be called to the Countess of Lennox one day, and told that the lady Elizabeth had asked and been granted leave to resume her studies with Master Ascham, and that there were some books from the Cardinal’s library which Philippa was to take to her.
‘They are, as you might expect, exceedingly precious,’ Lady Lennox
said, smiling. ‘I do not care to entrust them to ignorant hands. Also, you have sufficient knowledge of Master Ascham’s methods to be able to discuss the books with Madam Elizabeth, and to note any others she may require. I am sure, as well, that you will be pleased one day to recall that you met the lady. If she marries abroad, she may well end her life a stranger to England.’
Unless, of course, the Queen’s infant dies, Philippa thought. In which case the Lady Elizabeth, apparently so assiduous in her devotions, may well be the next Queen?
There was a guard outside Elizabeth’s door, and more were waiting below in the gardens. Bedingfield escorted Philippa there himself, and on the threshold handed her over to William Howard, who took her into the small, wainscoted room hung with pictures, where a tall, thin-boned girl sat erect by the fire, dealing playing-cards with manicured, tapering fingers.
Howard fingers. What else of Anne Boleyn could be seen in her daughter? An olive complexion, adroitly lightened, as Philippa saw with the interest of an expert. Long hair, falling shoulder-length beneath the pearled arch of her headdress, which also looked coarser than its light colour would merit. Pale, shallow eyes, light and clear, which certainly did not come from black-haired Anne, and a small mouth the image of the pink, pursed lips in every portrait of King Henry her father. Except that the Queen would not admit that King Henry was Elizabeth’s father, or that she could be her legitimate sister. Her voice was light, and chillingly clear; the expression on the small mouth perfectly affable.
‘Mistress Philippa. Place the books there. It was most courteous of you to call. I have so few visitors. Can you afford a moment to sit and take wine with Sir William and me?’
Philippa curtseyed and thanked her, sinking with ineffable grace into a rather hard brocade chair. Madam Elizabeth’s eyes opened slightly. Wine was brought. ‘So,’ said Elizabeth. ‘You also are learning the pleasures of Priscian’s grammar, and savouring the style of Xenophon’s Hippike, so vivid, so pure …’
‘And whose views on education,’ Philippa said, her lashes downcast, ‘are strongly founded and quite without equal. Master Ascham is well,’ Philippa said, ‘and sends you his duty.’
‘As well as some dutiful books. Or are those from the Cardinal? I am pleased,’ said Elizabeth, ‘to see Master Ascham safely returned from Brussels and comfortably installed with the Queen. I must demand a report on his travels.’
‘He was disappointed,’ said Philippa, ‘to discover, when praising the sincere emotion of Cicero’s lament for Hortensius, that Master Fugger was unable to lend him a copy as his library was always kept padlocked. Not a philologos, a lover of learning, but a bibliotaphos,
a sepulchre for books. His disputations with Master Sturm have barely restored his confidence.’
The thin eyebrows lifted, and Elizabeth smiled, her long hands calmly crossed in her lap. Her servant had gone, and but for Howard, sipping his wine discreetly in the flickering firelight, they had the room to themselves. Elizabeth said, ‘He would find more sincere emotion, perhaps, in the
pro Marcello
, but he is too wise, I am sure, to make witticisms about it.’
The delicacy of the hint was nothing short of enchanting. Philippa, limp with the backwash of liturgical emotion, saw opening before her the prospect of a practical conversation at last. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘Pope Marcellus is dead, and they have appointed another?’
The pale blue eyes opposite moved to Sir William and back. ‘Not Ferrara,’ said Elizabeth.
‘Quis demonium habet
? I heard twenty for the hundred were being laid in the banks on the Cardinal of Naples. Or has the huckstering spoiled him? I cannot believe the Sacred College has been prevented from carrying out the election as the Holy Ghost inspires.’
‘I have heard it quoted,’ said Philippa blandly, ‘that the Emperor’s Ambassador in Rome thinks that a little canvassing might be better than waiting until the Cardinals, out of pure exhaustion, agree on some devil who will be no good to anybody. At any rate Caraffa, the Cardinal of Naples, has been elected.’
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?’