The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [78]
He stared at her, and then turning, laid down his pen and pulled a stool forward. ‘Mistress Philippa! Sit, please. Yes, I sent it, these several weeks back. Has it gone astray? Or did you want to send others?’
Philippa said, ‘Did anyone see it?’
He clasped his hands and stared at her, frowning. ‘It went with my report. Mistress Philippa, no one must see these reports. No one knows of them. No one could have seen it.’
‘Then who besides myself knows that Mr Crawford is in Russia?’ Philippa said.
Master Lychpole rose to his feet, his hand pressing hard on the lectern. ‘No one. No one, unless you have told them yourself. Why should you think so? Is it spoken of? Do they know of my messages?’ He gazed at her, his face drawn with anxiety.
‘No,’ said Philippa. Her voice flattened. ‘No one speaks of you or your reports. It seemed to me that there might be a suspicion, a rumour, that Mr Crawford is now in Russia. I wondered if you had lost a letter, or had found your papers disturbed.’
‘There are three clicket locks on that coffer,’ said Lychpole. ‘And I keep the key for each one round my neck. No one could read my papers without my being aware of it. And the letter goes by a safe messenger, and by now will be far out of reach. But what of its answer, or some message to you from your husband? News may come out of Russia as well. It is not a secret that will stay so for ever.’
‘No. That is true,’ Philippa said. ‘I am worried, perhaps, for no reason … what is keeping Master Ascham so busy?’
‘The letters,’ said Bartholomew Lychpole. ‘Forty-seven Latin letters to every prince in the known world announcing the Queen’s happy delivery of a Prince. I tell you, they are right who say that if this birth fails, there will be trouble on a scale we have never yet known.’
For there was no prince or princess; only Ruy Gomez saying, Life is short for such long expectations, and, When they saw her with a girth greater than Gutierre Lopez, they made an error, they say, in their adding.
The Queen lay on her bed, her hair hidden under her cap, an embroidered robe over her shift of white satin, and prayers were said at her bedside, or readings of a devotional nature, or low talk and some discreet music. Sometimes the Queen rose for her meals, urged to the table by all her ladies, but her appetite had always been spare, and had increased little since the start of her pregnancy. She longed, it was easy to see, for hourly news of her kingdom, and to guess the mind of her King, but although he paid dutiful visits, and held her hand, and talked in slow, articulated Spanish and listened, patiently, while she answered in French, the exchanges were more formal, Philippa thought, than she had heard them before.
Then the mourning clothes arrived, and the money, and, released from diplomatic imprisonment, King Philip was able to appear in public at Whit. It was only then that Philippa learned from Don Alfonso how many of Philip’s attendants had already gone to the Emperor at Brussels; and later, the reason. The peace talks at Marek had broken down, and the French and the Emperor Charles were preparing for war. ‘So,’ said her informant with his usual brightness, ‘the King waits only for the birth to cross the Channel instantly. I tell you, a single hour’s delay in this delivery seems to him like a thousand years.’
‘And to the Queen?’ Philippa had answered him tartly. So he did not tell her, as he might have done, that the Emperor had already written advising his son how to announce without undue fuss that his Queen was not pregnant. The Court thought it funny when the Polish Ambassador, come to condole