The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [70]
The precautions were probably wise. A clash involving five hundred of both races had taken place already and had been hushed up by the Privy Council, as Philippa well knew: only a handful had been killed, fortunately, and twenty-five injured. Don Alfonso and his friends, however, did not wish to be wise, or to be told to put up with any affront or persecution. They wanted to pick a quarrel, personally, with every native in sight, and then slay him.
The birth delayed. The Queen exhorted her bishops to do better in routing out heretics. There were more burnings, and riots at burnings. King Philip wrote and asked the Emperor, who was enjoying a spell of recovery, what to do about libellous placards. London was flooded with thousands of scurrilous pamphlets against religion and parliament, the Council, the Queen and the King, which the Lord Mayor assiduously collected. The Master of the Revels was arraigned, among others, for a share in the Cambridge plotting. The King’s grandmother died.
It was the last straw. Joanna the Mad, mother of the Emperor Charles, sister of Catherine of Aragon had been crazy for forty long years, and her passing, for which her grandson announced he felt a reasonable regret, had the simple effect of freeing twenty-five thousand ducats a year for the Spanish economy.
Unfortunately, it did not free that sum automatically for her own obsequies, or for the cost of Court mourning. The ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral alone, it appeared, would cost seven thousand ducats, and dress for the Court over and above looked like requiring a fortune. The one cheering event Philippa was to remember of that long dreary month was Don Alfonso’s account of the English noblemen flocking to Philip to demand their black suits. ‘And behaving,’ said Philippa’s confidant bitterly, ‘as if their honour would be tarnished for ever if they didn’t obtain them. When we have finished, I tell you, we shall have put more folk into mourning in this kingdom than has ever been seen before, or will be.’
King Philip retired with the colic. Ordered clothes must be paid for, and until more money arrived, he could not properly appear without mourning. It was little comfort to know that his father was in the same position exactly.
There was a wave of warm weather. The Queen, tempted out of doors, walked slowly about between the box hedges, leaning on the arms of her ladies. More ladies had come. The Queen’s apartments at Hampton Court were a low rustle of feminine voices, and sweeping skirts, and unfolding needlework; weaving among the rumbling voices of the doctors, always on call, always in attendance; and the thin, high song of the cage birds, answering the call of the blackbirds and thrushes and chaffinches, free in the gardens outside.
Next to her, day and night, the Queen kept Jane Dormer. And although Philippa took what she could from Jane’s shoulders, it seemed to her that Jane, too, was most at ease at the Queen’s side; tasting her food: sometimes, Philippa knew, sharing her bed when there were strange pains, or nightmares, or long waking hours of thinking and planning.
Philippa, too, felt the quality of this need, and subdued all her own impatience to serve it. She did so soberly, and with a conscience which pained her, for she had already taken the decision to desert this post she had taken so light-heartedly: for adventure; for freedom; out of some petty need, she now saw, to prove her adulthood by manipulating the affairs of her elders.
Before coming to London, she had viewed her life and that of her friends through the eyes of a child at Flaw Valleys, or a child pushed by circumstance on a stormy but magnificent journey through Europe. Now she was wiser. In this brief and