The Virgin's War (Tudor Legacy #3)(75)

Kit did have to slap her at last, though he admitted enjoying it more than he should have. It served to stop the stream of filthy accusations, and then he waited, holding her upper arms pinned tight, while Eleanor brought herself under nominal control.

She couldn’t quite manage to sound easy. “You will never have enough evidence of this ridiculous charge to even try me, let alone punish me.”

He leaned in slightly, to impress upon her his words, not knowing how much he resembled his grim father. “You have been playing games with royalty,” he said softly. “Royalty does not require evidence.”

—

Pippa spent six weeks crossing the length and breadth of England’s North with her husband. Matthew was the official emissary from the Princess of Wales’s household, visiting as her treasurer on assignment to assess the various households’ financial and practical readiness for war. Unofficially, Pippa had the more critical task of assessing levels of commitment and possible conspiracies.

It was exhausting. She had worn her gift lightly through her life, so deeply was it woven into her awareness. When she was little, she’d thought everyone experienced the world the way she did. She was ten before John Dee recognized her gifts and subtly began to orient her perspective in order to use it. But recognized or not, it had always simply been part of who she was, and as often as not it was outside her command.

“God speaks when it is necessary,” Dr. Dee had long ago advised. “Which is not the same thing as speaking when we think it is necessary.”

There were times when Pippa wished she was the witch Tomás Navarro thought her to be. Then she could control events. She could be like the Willow Witches of northern tales, three sisters who had destroyed kingdoms and punished faithless men with spells of great power. During this most recent exhaustive tour of the North, she and Matthew had passed a ruined medieval tower that legend claimed had been home to the sisters. Witch Willow, the tower was called, and though Pippa suspected the name had come from the suggestive shape of a nearby ancient tree, she still wished for one moment that she could call down a spell of her own to blast Tomás Navarro and the Spanish threat out of England once and for all.

God, stars, visions, dreams, uncanny knowledge…Pippa had grown accustomed to the caprice of her gift. But never had it weighed on her as it had this last year.

The physical effects were rapidly becoming the most difficult to conceal. The weakness and coughing and frequent fevers of her illness were exacerbated by the pressure of too much knowledge, especially when that included other people’s secrets. As she and Matthew passed from town to town and household to household, Pippa grew steadily more fatigued, making it difficult to sort through multiple impressions of secrecy to pinpoint which ones mattered.

They knew that the Cholmeley family had a Catholic priest in residence, for Anabel had given tacit approval for them to hold Mass within the household itself. That had, naturally, been pressed to its limits, and his services frequently had more than sixty in attendance. But there was no evidence that their involvement with the Spanish went any deeper, certainly not to the point of treason. And they showed no evasion when pressed for their preparations to help defend northern Yorkshire.

York was simpler; the city was unlikely to throw open its gates to welcome a Spanish army unless Anabel herself was present and ordered it. And even then they might well demur. Cities of that size had complicated relationships with sovereigns. Their sympathies might be split where religion was concerned, but the first concern of any city and its merchant guilds was the stability of trade and livelihoods. Pippa found practical people so much easier to deal with than idealists.

By the time they finished up their rounds by meeting with Lord Scrope at Bolton Castle, Matthew had begun to watch Pippa more closely than ever, and she suspected he was one incident away from pulling her out of public affairs. But Pippa knew how critical Lord Scrope’s support was for Anabel. They had played a delicate game with these Catholic lords—allowing them greater latitude in order to gain their loyalties. Loyalties that might turn in a heartbeat if they felt themselves manipulated and betrayed. Anabel’s gamble—and the queen’s—was that their deepest loyalties were to England and their own security first. Would they sacrifice their sovereignty and the safety of their country simply to have a ruler of the same religion? The time was rapidly approaching—perhaps only weeks—before Anabel would have to make plain her absolute loyalty to her mother in order to fight the Spanish. Success in that fight would depend in large measure on how valiantly the northern Catholics came to her side, even at personal cost to themselves.

So Pippa kept herself and her traitorous body under iron control as she and Matthew met with Lord Scrope. She liked the man, one of those individualists the Marches of England seemed to produce, and was fairly confident of his support. But it would not do to make a misstep.

He and Matthew discussed military readiness and matters of supplies in both food and arms for the spring and summer, and then it was Pippa’s turn.

As Warden of the West March, Lord Scrope had been informed by his Captain of Carlisle of the Maxwells’ lackadaisical cattle raid and the possibility of it having been meant merely as a distraction. The borders were a network of complex relationships and grudges, and Scrope spent some time going down those torturous paths in trying to understand it.

“Might it,” Pippa finally asked directly, “have been directed from outside the Marches itself?”