The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [53]
‘Yes,’ said Philippa. The King had lost his cane and someone had thrown him one from the gallery, slightly misaimed. He dropped it.
‘And always the threat of rebellion. We daren’t leave Spain for months because of it, and even then only with disguised soldiers for servants, and our chests full of hackbuts. The English do not speak to us, except to pick quarrels. We are warned to stay in after dark for the robbers. We move among these people like animals, trying not to notice them, and they likewise with us. He was not going to a marriage feast, Philip said, but to a fight. As soon as his Highness was King of England, they said, we should be masters of France. And here we are. Decisions are taken, armies are directed by women without us, and so long as Parliament sits, we dare not leave England.’ He sneezed, with violence. ‘England: a Paradise inhabited by devils.’
Philippa said, ‘You need bed and a hot drink and a little less fluent self-pity. Is Spain so wonderful?’
‘Bed?’ said Don Alfonso, and nearly captured her hand, before she slid it away. ‘That, I do not deny, is a condition I greatly desire. Spain? It is wonderful, yes. For King Philip, his splendid Doña Isabel de Osario and their family. For me, I do not deny, a pretty face here and there. But in Spain our ladies do not kiss their friends on the lips in the streets, or dine with them unescorted, or show so much leg as they ride. When may I see you again?’
Below, on a ground strewn with half-broken rods, the cane-play was ending. The gallery had lost interest, although one or two canes were still being thrown: As Philippa watched, another sprang through the air and pricked King Philip’s horse, sliding past before he could catch it. He reined in, looking upwards. ‘Did you hear,’ said Don Alfonso, ‘of the baiting on the Bankside? A blind bear got loose, and bit a man on the leg. That is the kind of sport, they say, that we should provide for the English.’
‘If you are sure,’ Philippa said, ‘that the man won’t bite back.’
*
The following day, Philippa entered the service of Mary Tudor, this small, quick-spoken woman who prayed and worked with such alarming single-mindedness: who played the lute, through sheer force of practice, better than all of her ladies, yet had no eye for what would enhance her appearance: who hung her walls with goldwork on her tapestries, and her person with stiff, long-trained dresses paved with old-fashioned jewels. The jewels which her father’s second wife Anne Boleyn had sent to wrest from her mother, and which her mentor the Countess of Salisbury had refused to give up. But Mary’s mother had not lived long after that, and Lady Salisbury had been beheaded, and Mary to save her own life had signed the three articles King Henry demanded: that she submitted to her father the King. That she recognized him as the head of the church in England. And that the marriage between the King and his first wife her mother was by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful, thus making a bastard of herself and a princess of her sister Elizabeth.
Small wonder, thought Philippa, that after the degradation, the poverty, the humiliation of that, one’s first act on becoming Queen was to repeal one’s father’s unnatural laws, thus making oneself legitimate and bastardizing one’s sister. And the second, to wear all one’s rightful regalia and a pair of breeches if necessary, to show that, woman or not, here was the heir