The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [62]
‘Hum,’ said William Garrard. ‘More likely to find yourself lending him money. If you don’t mind my saying so. But perhaps he’s improved. Age can mellow, they say.’
‘They say wrong,’ said Diccon Chancellor. ‘I have known Mistress Philippa these two months, and I have aged while she has grown daily less mellow. Why else am I fleeing the country?’
Chapter 8
As it proved, the distance between London and Gardington, Bucks., was greater than the sum of its miles, and certainly farther than anyone was prepared to let Philippa go, in spite of a certain amount of soliciting, before her presence was again required at court in the space of two days. Hog-tied in any case by her own experienced conscience, Philippa marched back in due course to her mistress, declaiming sourly, ‘Their willingness be the touchstone and trial of their fidelity,’ and proceeded to subvert the life-style and philosophy of Sir Thomas Cawerden, Master of the Revels, under the guise of advising him on the coming masque of Turkish magistrates and torchbearers for Shrovetide.
Since no one, barring a few seamen, one or two merchants, and a member of the staff of the French Ambassador had ever beheld a Turk in their lives, she was given a free hand in the revels storehouse at the old Blackfriars Monastery, and held a minor festival of her own with tailors, painters and joiners among the bales of gold damask and green sarsanet and tinsel tawny brocade: the old masks and buskins and kirtles, and the old hanging cloths of velvet, satin and dornicks, thickly wrought with bright gold embroidery. The masque was a success, and old Lady Dormer, whose two brothers had been Knights of St John, declared that her arm had itched to cut down the infidels, and all for forty-nine pounds, fourteen shillings and twopence. Commended for both taste and economy, Philippa’s stock rose higher at court. Diccon Chancellor called on her, and agreed to teach her some Russian, but refused point blank to take her to Moscow. The Queen was ill, and had to be blooded again.
Serving, with iron good humour, this sick, harassed woman, hagridden by wearing compulsions, Philippa wondered what blind faith still encouraged her scrofulous subjects to apply to be touched for the Evil; what blind custom prompted Brussels’s petition for cramp-rings of each new Easter’s blessing. Thin-armed and drawn, the Queen had none of the glossy, bright-eyed complacency Philippa had admired in other expectant ladies at a similar stage. But like the listening thrush, the Queen’s eye was bent, night and day, on the subtle murmurings of her own lax-muscled body: through the long, grinding prayers; through the dawn meetings of Council where she listened while the Bishop of Winchester chose the agenda, and sat upright through all the bitter discussions, and appended her name to the bills as they were drawn up and placed before Parliament.
In that way the Heresy Act had been carried, restoring the authority of the Bishops’ Courts and making state prosecution for heresy a sudden reality. Before Shrove the Bishop of Gloucester had been snatched from his long imprisonment and burned, held by iron bands, stripped to the shroud, with a bag of gunpowder tied round his neck. The day before, the Queen had gone to bed early and the palace had been full of the sound of raised voices. The day after, King Philip’s chaplain had preached a long calming sermon on tolerance, upbraiding the Bishops for cruelty. But the Act stood, and the Lord Chancellor, upheld by law and his own deep convictions, proceeded one by one to arraign and burn every heretic.
So far as Philippa could see, the claims of humanity had nothing to do with the consequent argument, which on the Chancellor’s side had to do with the redeeming of souls, and on the side of the Emperor’s Ambassador, not to mention King Philip (‘Better not to reign at all than reign over heretics’), had to do with the angering of