The Virgin's War (Tudor Legacy #3)(46)
It was as well to keep all this information in mind, he mused. When he next wrote to Navarro, he might begin to steer him in an unexpected direction. One that would make his daughter sit up and take notice.
But before his daughter, Philip must deal with his wife.
He had allowed Mary to leave Segovia after several months, and she gave no sign that she had considered herself confined in any way. But she had been a touch less arrogant in their most recent dealings.
The arrogance revived the moment Philip told her something she did not wish to hear. In this case, that her long-planned visit to Ireland was cancelled.
“We cannot disappoint our supporters!” she railed. “The faithful of Ireland need a symbol to fight for.”
“Alexander is not even four years old. I will not risk one of my sons on the open seas with a less than certain reception waiting on the other end. Dublin has not fallen yet. There will be an intense push this autumn and I do not want him anywhere near that.”
“Then send me.”
Philip was only half surprised at the suggestion. Mary Stuart’s physical bravery had never been a question, and she had always been driven to head directly for the things she wanted. Just now, she wanted Ireland. Not for the country itself or even its faithful Catholics, but as a symbol to fling in Elizabeth Tudor’s face. You cannot keep hold of your own territories, Mary wanted to proclaim, any more than you could keep me in prison.
“To what purpose?” Philip asked reasonably. “You cannot go near Dublin.”
“Then I will land at Waterford. The Earl of Desmond would surely be willing to meet me there.”
The Earl of Desmond was surely willing to take Spanish money and men, but Philip knew the man would not be thrilled at an imperious foreign queen appearing in person to demand her due. But such was the position of the beggar—the things Desmond wanted must be paid for. Usually at the cost of swallowed pride.
Philip calculated while his wife watched with undisguised impatience. She had never learned to value the time he took before making decisions. To a woman accustomed to acting on impulse, his caution was an irritation.
“I will consider it,” he said finally. “But you would sail on one of my warships, not a royal one. And you would be under the command of a military officer. For your safety.”
“Of course,” she agreed generously.
There was one more matter to broach. “May I ask you, Maria, what you have heard of the meeting of your son and my daughter?”
She sniffed, not being overly endowed with maternal sentiment for the son from whom she’d been separated as an infant. “I have heard that Anne is lovely and James is awkward. No doubt once they are wed, she will move to swallow up Scotland as her mother has tried to do with Ireland. If James cannot oppose his wife, then he may find himself in the same position I did—ousted by his own lords and sent running for the English border. Perhaps then my people will remember how I always held Scotland’s independence sacrosanct.”
Except for the garrisons of French troops both you and your mother used freely, Philip thought sardonically. If Scotland rid itself of James, it would not be to invite Mary back to the crown of her birth.
But that threat might make an intriguing line to play upon in the web surrounding his daughter’s marriage.
—
In the weeks after the Scots visit, Kit threw himself into his new command with almost manic energy. There might be peace between England and Scotland, but the borderlands were a place—and a law—unto themselves. Men raided freely in both directions, one generation after another, and the complexity of familial enmity was enough to make a drunkard out of a monk. There was no shortage of demands upon the March wardens of England.
Up at dawn, in bed long after sunset, hours in between spent on horseback, Kit was frustrated when he finally flung himself into bed only to then stay awake staring up at the ceiling of whatever chamber he happened to be in. As lieutenant general, he nominally commanded all three Marches along the border and he ranged freely from Lord Hunsdon in Berwick to Lord Scrope in Carlisle.
He stayed away from Anabel for more than a month. Though they wrote one another almost daily, there was a constraint to their exchanges. Kit didn’t know how meeting James had affected Anabel—for Kit, dealing with the living, physical man had provoked a restless urge to outpace the future. Knowing that Anabel must marry was one thing. Counting down to a specific day was entirely different.
Besides, being in Anabel’s household would have meant being in the presence of Pippa and Matthew’s unequaled joy every day. That was a bit much to ask him to endure just now.
But in late September, Kit received a summons from the Princess of Wales using all of her names and titles to attend a council at Middleham. He finished up a planned scouting ride with Scrope’s men out of Carlisle, then rode south through a landscape of burnished heather and rocky vales and vast skies.
Middleham impressed Kit with the careful restoration of the medieval castle. Anabel had a feel for the past and the ability to enhance its beauties while updating its inconveniences. She had not, however, completely made it over into a manor. Like the other great castles of the North, Middleham retained its fortress feel. If called upon, it would be able to withstand a siege.
Kit had the uncomfortable feeling it might have to.
He found Anabel in a giddy, slightly dangerous mood. She was waiting for him in the courtyard—not with royal politeness, but more as a woman welcoming her absent lover. Little things—how she held on to his fingers when he kissed her hand, the way she met his eyes with a smile that acknowledged no one else, the subtle adjusting of her position so she seemed always to be turned to him. Though Kit was glad of it—what man didn’t want the woman he loved to be so anxious to see him?—the part of him that had grown up in the last few years warned that it was a bad idea. He knew what James of Scotland had said to Anabel before he left. And from his own journeys through the borderlands, Kit knew that the Scots king was not the only one watching the Princess of Wales’s personal relationships.