Free Philippa by Bertrice Small Page A

chamber.
    The queen turned to her husband. “Be as diplomatic as only you know how, my lord, when you write to Rosamund Bolton. I do want to see Philippa back at court in the future, and I know she does not wish to live her entire life in the north as her mother does.”
    “ ’Tis strange,” the king remarked. “Rosamund never really liked the court. Her heart and her thoughts were always with her beloved Friarsgate. She could scarcely wait to return to it each time she was forced to visit the court. But her eldest child adores court, and is, I suspect, a born courtier. I wonder what will happen when mother and daughter meet this time. Philippa will not be content to remain in Cumbria.”
    “But she is Friarsgate’s heiress,” the queen noted.
    “I suspect that matters not,” Henry Tudor replied.
    Philippa hurried back to the Maidens’ Chamber where she knew Bessie would be waiting. “I am being sent home,” she declared dramatically as she entered the room.
    “What happened?” Bessie wanted to know. “You will be allowed back, won’t you? It would be terrible if you were exiled forever.”
    “Aye, it would,” Philippa responded, “but I am to be allowed back eventually. The decision will rest with my mother, but I shall make her see reason. Both the king and the queen were there in his privy chamber. They scolded me roundly.”
    “Did you cry?” Bessie asked.
    “I did,” Philippa admitted. “I was so embarrassed to do so before them too.”
    “You were probably spared worse because you did. I have heard it said that the king hates a weeping woman,” Bessie told Philippa with a grin. “So, when do you depart?”
    “I’m to go with the queen’s party as far as Woodstock, and then I will be escorted to Friarsgate from there,” Philippa explained. “Lucy has almost finished the packing. She will be delighted to learn we are going home. She, at least, has missed it.”
    “Is it really so dreadful, this Friarsgate?” Bessie asked. “I come from Shropshire, you know. ’Tis said we have the worst winters in all of England. And my family name is not particularly great either. While I, too, love the court, I am always happy to see Kinlet Hall, and my mother. And I have not your good fortune in being the heiress to my family’s estates.”
    Philippa sighed. “I know I am probably foolish, but I would gladly settle for a small estate in Kent, or Suffolk, or even Devon. My mother’s lands need especial tending. She and my uncle Thomas, who is Lord Cambridge, raise sheep, from which cloth is woven at Friarsgate, and then transported by means of their own ship to several countries for sale. They control, if I understand it correctly, just how much of their cloth they will sell, and to whom. While I am grateful for the revenues raised, most of it goes back into their business, and into Friarsgate itself. If I have learned one thing from my mother, it is that when you have responsibilities such as hers you must tend to them yourself. There are few, if any, who can be trusted to shoulder your burdens, even in part. I don’t want to spend my time in such labor, Bessie. I don’t want Friarsgate, because to possess it I must take responsibility for it. The court is where I want to live, in service to the king and the queen. I want a husband who is a man of the court, and will understand that because he also is in service to the monarch. My father, Sir Owein Meredith, was in service to the house of Tudor from the time he was six. He was knighted on the field of battle. I can just barely remember him, Bessie, but I loved him, and I admired him. I am probably more like him than I am my mother. In fact I am not at all like mama except in our features. Some at Friarsgate who remember back say I am like a great-grandmother of mine, but I would not know that.”
    “Yours has always sounded like a loving family. Will your sisters join the court someday?” Bessie wondered.
    “Banon is certainly old enough,”