The Virgin's War (Tudor Legacy #3)(3)
Hands came to rest on Pippa’s shoulders and she gasped. The Princess of Wales said teasingly, “Run out of things for which to scold Kit? I can provide you a list if you need it.”
“But then what will you write to him?”
Anabel took a seat next to Pippa, radiant in one of the soft-hued, luminous gowns meant to distinguish the princess from her royal mother’s taste for richer jewel-toned colours. With a small, secret smile, she confided to Pippa, “Don’t worry about me. I have no shortage of things to write to Kit.”
No doubt. Pippa put aside her unfinished letter and deliberately changed the subject from emotional entanglements to something less fraught. Like politics. “How is the news from Dublin?”
Anabel pulled a face. “It continues disastrous. With the fall of Waterford, only Dublin and Cork are open to reinforcements, and that’s presupposing we have any to send. No one thought the Spanish troops would remain in Ireland this long, but success breeds willingness and King Philip has had little difficulty rotating men in and out without losing the advantage.”
King Philip being also Anabel’s father. She had not referred to him as such, not even to Pippa, for two years. Not since the Spanish fleet had landed ten thousand soldiers to oppose English possession of Ireland. The Spanish king was the enemy now, or at least well on his way to becoming such.
“I suppose Mary Stuart continues to crow about it in her correspondence all over Europe,” Pippa noted. After escaping English captivity several years before, the onetime Scots and French queen had added Spain to her list of royal titles with her marriage to King Philip. Even more than her husband, Mary violently opposed all English interests.
“Certainly, Mary cannot contain her satisfaction when writing to her oldest son. James’s letters to me are three-quarters rants about his mother and one-quarter demands that England do something about Mary Stuart and Ireland. Not that he’s offering any material help.”
The courtship of King James VI of Scotland and England’s Princess of Wales had thus far been conducted entirely on paper. Pippa couldn’t help teasing, “Leaving no space for a single word in any of those letters about his most cherished bride-to-be?”
With simply the slant of her eyebrows and the curl of her lip, Anabel could switch from charming to haughty. Rather like her mother. “I am quite happy to escape fulsome and insincere compliments, I assure you. I am less happy when King James presumes to criticize England’s queen and Parliament for not sending more aid to Ireland. In my last letter, I pointed out that Scotland is also a Protestant nation and perhaps they would be interested in lending money or men for the fight in Ireland. I imagine that will shut him up for a bit.”
“This is quite the most amusing courtship I’ve ever witnessed,” Pippa offered lightly.
“Just so long as James remains content with the courtship rather than pressing for a consummation of the treaty.”
Anabel didn’t have to add the obvious—that she continued to hope the marriage might never take place. Anabel was stubborn and passionate and hardheaded and romantic all in one. As long as she remained unwed, there existed the smallest hope that she might be allowed to marry the man she loved: Kit Courtenay.
Pippa sighed inwardly. The course of true love never did run smooth. But this is beginning to be ridiculous. For all of us.
—
“The Queen of England will not be kept waiting by a rebel Irish countess!” Elizabeth Tudor snapped. It really wasn’t fair to snap at Burghley, who did no more than deliver the message that Eleanor FitzGerald was running late. But he’d had thirty years of serving royals and knew fairness was not to be expected.
That didn’t mean her Treasury Secretary wouldn’t offer his own retorts. “I could hardly burst into her bedchamber and drag her out half clothed,” he said mildly.
“Oh, she’s fully clothed, mark my words. This is a tactical move.” Elizabeth, a princess since birth and a queen since she was twenty-five, knew all about tactical moves. She allowed her ruffled temper to smooth into glass. “Eleanor FitzGerald thinks she is announcing Ireland’s independence. Truly independent rulers do not have to make such petty shows.”
She caught the mordant humour in Francis Walsingham’s eye at her pronouncement, but the Lord Secretary held his tongue. Like Burghley, Walsingham was present in order to intimidate the Irish countess as well as to provide Elizabeth with his experienced judgment after the encounter.
It was a further five minutes before the pages proclaimed the arrival of her ladyship, the Countess of Desmond. Arrived in England as emissary for the rebel earl, her husband, the only reason Elizabeth had agreed to meet with Eleanor FitzGerald was to impress upon the woman the might and power of the English court. Elizabeth had never been to Ireland, but she had read scores of accounts and knew that the Irish nobility—saving, perhaps, those such as her cousin, the Earl of Ormond—often lived in worse conditions than even her own middle-class merchants. Just because England was finding it difficult to fund a sufficient force of soldiers to beat back the Spanish didn’t mean the Irish had any chance at all in the end. Indeed, without Spain’s interference, the uprising would have long since been over.
A point Elizabeth did not hesitate to make when the tardy countess finally arrived and made her barely adequate curtsey. “I thought the entire point of Desmond’s rebellion was resistance to foreign interference,” the queen intoned. “We English have been part of Ireland for more than four hundred years, and yet we are accounted more foreign than the Spanish, who share no heritage with you at all?”