The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [45]
She had told Sybilla’s sister the Abbess that Lymond would return if assured that his mother was blameless. Relating the whole matter, with difficulty, to herself in the same unlikely dilemma with Kate, she still stoutly believed it. What, with all her determination, she could not bring herself to do was put what she had learned in cold blood into a letter.
How did you inform a man, even a worldly and middle-aged man, that he was not the cadet of a fine Scottish family, but the nameless son of some woman in France? She lay awake toiling over the wording. She looked up a number of books, and assembled a number of apt quotations. She then concluded that whatever she wrote, she could not tolerate the thought that, on the blind and uncertain journey to Volos, it might be opened and read by eyes other than Mr Crawford’s.
The safest course therefore was to wait. To wait until she had a reply, with address, to her first letter. Or to wait until somehow, from somewhere, the news of Lymond’s whereabouts filtered through.
Then had come the offer of a Court position with Queen Mary. Kate had been astonished at her alacrity, accepting. ‘The tedium will send you to drink in a week. Little glasses of holsum bolsum. Remember your cousins.’
‘They had livers,’ Philippa said calmly. ‘I am a virgin with regular habits.’
Her mother Kate looked at her sourly. ‘And what, pray, has London to offer that the great metropolis of Flaw Valleys has failed to supply of mad gaiety?’
‘Austin Grey,’ Philippa said. ‘A Spanish nobleman, if I can find one, rented to the value of eight thousand crowns a year or thereby.’ Reason, she might have added, to absent herself from the over-perceptive eye of the Dowager Lady Culter, and there to await further news of her husband. And opportunity, she might have said, to seek out the second of her elderly relatives who had been withheld so discreetly from her attention: Mr Leonard Bailey, her great-uncle by marriage.
So Philippa departed for London, with Fogge her maid, and a train of baggage which caused Kate’s cook to jump up and down on the threshold. And so, prior to assuming her new post of lady in waiting, she arrived for training at the Sidney household in Penshurst.
This was Austin Grey’s doing, with Tom Wharton as his willing accomplice. Austin, because his cousin was married to Sir Henry Sidney’s best friend; Tom Wharton, because his wife’s nephew, as he explained freely, was courting Sidney’s sister Frances. And both because Jane Dormer, Sidney’s sixteen-year-old niece, was already at Court and among the Queen’s dearest companions.
Accustomed to the muddle of marriage alliances which joined English family to family in little but litigation, Philippa received the news philosophically, wondered who was paying whom and allowed herself a brief groan at the prospect of another girlish companion. The wide winter sky and soft country of Kent restored her natural optimism, a little overturned at the sight of the grey, Gothic splendours of Penshurst. The welcome she received from Sir Henry Sidney and his wife Mary not only redressed the balance, but added another dimension to what was already becoming a decidedly unorthodox life.
Witty, talkative, scholarly, Henry Sidney at twenty-five was an ornament to any society with his long-boned bearded face and thick brown hair and a degree of good sense and good taste which extended from his friendships to the Spanish black-work on his shirt. And he was a courtier, born and bred. His father had been tutor and household steward to the Queen’s young brother Edward, and from the age of nine Henry had been the other boy’s closest companion until he had died, a King in his arms.
Of his political sense and adroitness there could be no better proof than Sir Henry’s present survival. Few of the late King Edward’s near friends were also friends of his sister Queen Mary. More than that, Sir Henry’s bride of three years was the daughter of