The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [50]
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