The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [46]
Like the Station Laudable of the prophets in Paradise, the gates of Penshurst opened to receive Philippa and she discovered a way of life with no parallel in Flaw Valleys or Malta or Turkey or Richard Crawford’s cordial and uncomplicated household in Scotland.
Below the tall timber roof of the hall there met poets and politicians, churchmen, navigators and merchant adventurers, scholars from Oxford and Cambridge; men who talked about hops and men who talked about ironworks. And it was in this company of men that Philippa, by Henry’s decree, spent most of her time, or those parts of it which she felt Lady Mary could spare her. For to one trained under Kiáya Khátún, there could be little to learn in dress or deportment or manners, and the additional skills she possessed were of a kind better forgotten than exercised. But she read and sewed and chatted with her gentle hostess, and managed to recover, for Lady Mary’s delight, her old skill at the lute and the virginals.
She enjoyed being praised for her playing, although she could not be prevented from pointing out, critically, her own errors of taste and execution after every performance. She enjoyed spending Madame Donati’s despised money on gowns with shirred necks and cuffed oversleeves and fur and galloon in appropriate corners, although she protested mildly at the pronouncement that she must knot up her well-kept brown hair and cover it with a black gable headdress with lappets. ‘I shall look,’ she pointed out grimly, ‘like a sentry-box.’
Henry Sidney, who was just discovering that his latest protégée was an original, sat on his wife’s bed and laughed. ‘Unbound hair is for maidens and brides on their wedding day. You are an old married woman.’
‘She is just seventeen,’ his wife intervened, blandly chiding. ‘And surely you recall what Allendale told us. It was a marriage of propriety. Was it not?’
‘A singular act,’ said Henry Sidney, ‘of Anglo-Scottish co-operation. You have no idea what trouble your uncle and Austin and I have been put to to satisfy the Lord Chancellor that we are not corrupting his pure English corn with the malicious Scotch weeds of coccle. But you are having the marriage annulled?’
‘Yes,’ said Philippa. The papers would be in London, Kate had said, in a month.
‘Perhaps the Papal Legate’s first deed on his arrival?’ Sidney said. ‘Who should be called not Pole the Englishman but Pole the angel. I may not have told you, but I met your husband three years ago at Châteaubriant. I was with a dull English mission and he was distinguishing himself in various unusual positions as a herald of the Queen Dowager of Scotland. Half the French court, male and female, were angling for his attentions, as I remember. Perhaps you should consider retaining him.’
‘But if the marriage is dissolved,’ Philippa said, ‘I needn’t wear black gable headdresses. Or should I have to go into mourning?’
Henry Sidney laughed again and got off his wife’s bed. ‘I should think your friend Mr Crawford will go into mourning,’ he said. ‘You are much too acute for your years. Poor Jane is going to be frightened into a fever.’
‘It’s just the novelty,’ Philippa said. ‘No affected phrase, but a mean and popular style. Do you think I should learn to speak Spanish?’
Sir Henry Sidney, knight, stared at her. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I am convinced that you must. I think you are exactly what the King’s poor homesick nobles require to take their minds off the beer, the Pope, the prices, the climate and the women. Even when dressed like a sentry-box.’
Philippa Somerville lived at Penshurst for six weeks before taking her place at the Court. It was a strange interlude between the easy backwaters of Midculter and the chill reality whose shadow she felt even in that time, as she put it, of training and refitting: the stark reality of central office,