The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [68]
‘Poor Marcellus,’ said Philippa. ‘The Imperialists say he is very well where he is, and this new one would not do badly there either. He will be known as Paul IV.’
‘An austere and learned old man,’ said Elizabeth thoughtfully. ‘So perhaps Cardinal Pole will now be well enough to mediate for the peace?’
Philippa said, ‘The Commissioners of France and the Empire are meeting near Gravelines this month, and the Cardinal is due to attend them.’
Elizabeth put down her cup and her lips, a little apart showed, as was not usual, the small, shadowy teeth. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Should they make peace, they must do as the doctors contrive, and pay Pole an annuity for each anniversary. Now my sister need only be brought to bed of her son, and they may even allow the right honourable and my very good lord the Earl of Devonshire home to offer me marriage. But perhaps even then, he would not accept it. I hear he is in fear of his life.’
A slight pause developed. ‘Poor Edward Courtenay,’ Philippa thought. Elizabeth said, ‘Master Ascham has heard, no doubt, what has befallen his young friend, John Dee. A melancholy fate for a caster of horoscopes. I hear he had completed one for the Sidneys’ son, sixty-two pages long. Sagittarius, I believe. I am Virgo.’ She paused again. ‘Do you know Dr Dee, Mistress Philippa?’
Philippa knew John Dee, Diccon Chancellor’s friend; mathematician, geographer and astrologer, who had been arrested for treason after that last cheerful celebration of the Muscovy Company and thrown to the Star Chamber for questioning.
She also knew why he was charged. John Dee had been a visitor at Woodstock. He had cast Madam Elizabeth’s horoscope, so they said. Worse, he had discussed with her the horoscopes he had already drawn up for the Queen and her husband. His lodgings had been searched, and some of Elizabeth’s own staff arrested.
Philippa said, ‘I have met him with Mr Chancellor. He used to bring his new instruments sometimes to Penshurst, and his mechanical insects, and find buttons for us, with a pendulum over a map. The servants were frightened. His intellect is so great that his manner sometimes seems mysterious.’
‘Unlike the merry and widely esteemed Mr Chancellor,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Do you not find these geographers’ matters tedious to listen to, with their cards and their globes and their plotting? They never see a sweet bay, or a stream, or a green flowering headland but it must be laid black on a paper: they trap the spheres in their springe like a woodman.’
‘They are forbearing,’ Philippa said, ‘in their wisdom. I have read a little. Pliny and Ptolemy, Roger Bacon and David Morgan.’
‘Geographia?’ said Madam Elizabeth. ‘I did not knew Sir Henry had a manuscript. Or Dr Dee.’
‘In Scotland,’ Philippa said, growing despite herself, faintly pink. ‘I read most of them while staying in Scotland.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Madam Elizabeth was amiable. ‘This Scottish husband of yours they tell me of, whom you are so anxious to cast off. Does your English spirit rebel against the poor gentleman’s race? Or is he so obnoxious?’
Philippa put down her cup. She should have expected, of course, that this shrewd and cautious young woman would have acquainted herself with all the known facts about any visitor allowed by the Queen. She said, ‘My marriage was one of convenience, made when Mr Crawford and I were held prisoner in each other’s company in Turkey. I should prefer not to be tied yet to marriage with anyone, and he may well wish to marry elsewhere.’ She began to feel that she could narrate this explanation to music.
Elizabeth cast a smiling half-glance at her great-uncle. She said, ‘Ah. So his affections are fixed. And are you not jealous, Mistress Philippa? Or is he so old and ill-favoured that you are glad to be rid of him? What age is he: mine? Or perhaps nearer your mother’s?’
‘He is of my mother’s years,’ Philippa said.
‘Well?’ said Madam Elizabeth. ‘And is he forthright and hairy, as I am told Scots are wont to be? A man happier with his sword or walking his fields,