The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [212]
‘I have another son,’ Richard said. ‘Three children in all. Mariotta is well. Sybilla is not.’
Lymond said, ‘Did Philippa get her divorce?’
There was a little pause. Then Richard said, ‘That was crude, for you.’
‘But as you will find,’ said Lymond softly, addressing the sand, ‘I am a very crude man. Did she get her divorce?’
The hammer strokes of fear, soft and regular as he had felt them at Dunnottar, began to beat in Richard’s chest. Now, he schooled his pleasant brown face and guarded his eyes as Lymond no longer needed to do, and said, in a voice of which he was not ashamed, ‘Don’t you know?’
‘Moscow and Philippa being, although on the same planet, some small distance apart, the most recent news,’ Lymond said, ‘has escaped me. The Lennoxes were trying to interfere, I rather gathered.’
‘You will have to look higher than that,’ Richard said. ‘The culprit for the moment is Pope Paul IV. There is a test case on foot in the Vatican.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ Lymond said, with mild irritation. After a moment, he added, ‘All right. You may as well tell me.’
‘I don’t know how much you know,’ said Richard. Resentment, fear, desperation seemed to shadow all they said. He pushed them aside, looking out at the grey moving sea with its looping of foam; the even, grey sky curtained by hanging dark vapours of storm-air. He said, ‘There is a truce in being, signed nine months ago, between the King of France and the Emperor Charles. It is supposed to last for five years, but it may be broken already, for all I know. Already France has formed a defensive league with the Duke of Ferrara and the new Pope, Pope Paul, the Caraffa, who is eighty years old and loathes Spaniards.’
‘The scum of the earth,’ Lymond said. ‘… the spawn of Jews and Moors, now the masters of Italy, who had been known only as its cooks …?’
‘So he has said,’ Richard agreed. ‘France is ready for war. Or at least, the de Guises want it, if the Constable does not. And if France wants to invade Naples and take back the old Angevin inheritance, she could hardly have a better opening than now, with a Pope strongly antagonistic to Spain, and the Empire ruled not by Charles, but this sluggish, inexperienced Prince.…’
‘So the Emperor has abdicated?’ Lymond said. ‘And left Spain and the Netherlands and Sicily and Spain to the noble Philip, Queen Mary’s husband? Then I should guess he has not been back to England.’
Richard shook his head. ‘The Emperor left in the autumn, after putting off the abdication for a year. Philip is in Brussels, supposedly bound by the truce, facing the Pope’s little league with King Henri and consulting the theologians, they say, on how to wage a defensive war against the Pope. In fact, he’s done rather more. The Duke of Alva is outside Rome already, with twelve thousand foot and sixteen hundred horse and twelve artillery pieces, and the city is waiting in panic.’
‘Defended by?’
‘Monluc and your friend Piero Strozzi. The truce is a farce. The French army is ready. They have been withdrawing troops from Scotland all autumn. Senarpont, they say, is gathering men at Boulogne to attack Calais and your other old compère Lord Grey of Wilton.’
‘And England?’ Lymond asked.
‘Waiting, as ever, for Philip to come. He has promised, I hear, to cross over at Lent. Spain wants the Queen of England to crown him, and declare war on France if the French won’t observe the peace. The Queen, they say, has decided that if the truce is broken and the Low Countries attacked, she will stand by the old treaty Henry VIII made with the Emperor. That is, she will supply horse and foot without actually engaging in war.’
‘An honourable, if lunatic proposition,’ Lymond said. ‘And if she does, will her people follow her? What of the religion?’
‘Pole is Archbishop of Canterbury. The burnings go on. Mostly of theologians or people of humble position: the