The Queen's Fool

Spring-Summer 1555

At Hampton Court they made the room ready for the queen’s confinement. The privy chamber behind her bedroom was hung with the richest of tapestries especially chosen for their holy and encouraging scenes. The windows were bolted shut so that not a breath of air should come into the room. They tied the posts of the bed with formidable and frightening straps that she might cling to, while her labor tore her thirty-nine-year-old body apart. The bed was dressed with a magnificent pillow cover and counterpane which the queen and her ladies had been embroidering since her wedding day. There were great log piles beside the stone fireplace so that the room could be heated to fever pitch. They shrouded the floors with carpets so that every sound should be muffled and they brought in the magnificent royal cradle with a two-hundred-and-forty-piece layette for the boy who would be born within the next six weeks.

At the head of the magnificent cradle was carved a couplet to welcome the prince:

The child which Thou to Mary, oh Lord of Might, does send

To England’s joy: in health preserve, keep, and defend

In the rooms outside the privy chambers were midwives, rockers, nurses, apothecaries and doctors in a constant stream of coming and going, and everywhere the nursemaids ran with piles of freshly laundered linen to store in the birthing chamber.

Elizabeth, now free to walk in the palace, stood on the threshold of the confinement room with me. “All those weeks in there,” she said in utter horror. “It would be like being walled up alive.”

“She needs to rest,” I said. Secretly I was afraid for the queen in that dark room. I thought that she would be ill if she were to be kept from the light and the sunshine for so long. She would not be allowed to see the king, nor to have any company or music or singing or dancing. She would be like a prisoner in her own chamber. And in less than two months’ time, when the baby would come, it would be unendurably hot, locked into that room, curtained in darkness and shrouded in cloth.

Elizabeth stepped back from the doorway with an ostentatiously virginal shudder, and led the way through the presence chamber and into the gallery. Long solemn portraits of Spanish grandees and princes now lined the walls. Elizabeth went past them without turning her head, as if by ignoring them she could make them disappear.

“Funny to think of her releasing me from prison just as she goes into her confinement,” she said, hiding her glee as best she could. “If she knew what it was like being trapped inside four walls she would change the tradition. I will never be locked up again.”

“She will do her duty for the baby,” I said firmly.

Elizabeth smiled, holding to her own opinion with serene self-confidence. “I hear you went to see Lord Robert in the Tower.” She took my arm and drew me close to her, so that she could whisper.

“He wanted some writing paper from my father’s old shop,” I replied steadily.

“He gave you a message for Kat,” Elizabeth pursued. “She told me herself.”

“I delivered it to her, herself. About ribbons,” I said dampeningly. “He is accustomed to use me as his haberdasher and stationer. It is where he first saw me, at my father’s shop.”

She paused and looked at me. “So you know nothing about anything, Hannah?”

“Exactly so,” I said.

“You won’t see this then,” she said smartly, and released her hold on me to turn and smile over her shoulder at a gentleman in a dark suit, who had come out of a side room behind us and was following us, walking slowly in our wake.

To my amazement I recognized the king. I pressed myself back against the wall and bowed, but he did not even notice me, his eyes were fixed on Elizabeth. His pace quickened as he saw the momentary hesitation in Elizabeth’s step, as she paused and smiled at him; but she did not turn and curtsey as she should have done. She walked serenely down the length of the gallery, her hips slightly swaying. Her every pace was an invitation to any man to follow her. When she reached the end of the gallery at the paneled door she paused, her hand on the handle, and turned to glance over her shoulder, an open challenge to him to follow, then she slipped through the door and in a second she was gone, leaving him staring after her.

The weather grew warmer and the queen lost some of her glow. In the first week of May, having left it as late as she could, she said farewell to the court and went through the doors of her privy chamber to the darkened interior where she must stay until the birth of her boy, and for six weeks after that, before being churched. The only people to see her would be her ladies; the queen’s council would have to take their orders from the king, acting in her stead. Messages would be passed into the chamber by her ladies, though it was already being whispered that the queen had asked the king to visit her privately. She could not tolerate the thought of not seeing him for three months, however improper it was that he should come to her at such a time.

Thinking of the look that Elizabeth had shot the king, and how he had followed her swaying hips down the long gallery like a hungry dog, I thought that the queen was well advised to ask him to visit, whatever the tradition of royal births. Elizabeth was not a girl that anyone should trust with their husband, especially when the wife was locked away for a full quarter of the year.

The baby was a little late, the weeks came and went with no sign of him. The midwives predicted a stronger baby for taking his own time and an easier labor when it started, which it must do, any day now. But as May went by they started to remark that it was an exceptionally late baby. The nursemaids rolled their swaddling bandages and started to talk about getting fresh herbs for strewing. The doctors smiled and tactfully suggested that a lady as spiritual and otherworldly as the queen might have mistaken the date of conception; we might have to wait till the end of the month.

While the long hot dull weeks of waiting dragged on there was an embarrassing moment when some rumor set the city of London alight with the news that the queen had given birth to a son. The city went wild, ringing bells and singing in the streets, and the revelers roistered all the way to Hampton Court to learn that nothing had happened, that we were all still waiting, that there was nothing to do but wait.

I sat with Queen Mary every day in the shrouded room. Sometimes I read to her from the Bible in Spanish, sometimes I gave her little pieces of news about the court, or told her Will’s latest nonsense. I took flowers in for her, hedgerow flowers like daisies, and then the little roses in bud, anything to give her a sense that there was still an outside world which she would rejoin soon. She took them with a smile of pleasure. “What, are the roses in bud already?”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“I shall be sorry to miss the sight of them this year.”

As I had feared, the darkness and quietness of the room was preying on her spirits. With the curtains drawn and the candles lit, it was too dark to sew for very long without gaining a splitting headache, it was a chore to read. The doctors had ruled that she should not have music, and the ladies soon ran out of conversation. The air grew stale and heavy, filled with woodsmoke from the hot fire, and the sighs of her imprisoned companions. After a morning spent with her I found I was coming out of the doors at a run, desperate to be out again in the fresh air and sunshine.

The queen had started the confinement with a serene expectation of giving birth soon. Like any woman facing a first labor she was a little afraid, the more so since she was really too old to have a first child. But she had been borne up by her conviction that God had given her this child, that the baby had quickened when the Papal legate had returned to England, that this conception was a sign of divine favor. Mary, as God’s handmaiden, had been confident. But as the days wore on into weeks, her contentment was undermined by the delay. The good wishes that came pouring in from all around the country were like a string of demands for a son. The letters from her father-in-law, the emperor, inquiring as to the delay, read like a reproach. The doctors said that all the signs showed that the baby was coming soon, but still he did not come.

Jane Dormer went around with a face like thunder. Anyone who dared to ask after the health of the queen was stared out of countenance for their impertinence. “Do I look like some village witch?” she demanded of one woman in my hearing. “Do I look like an astrologer, casting spells, guessing birth dates? No? The Queen’s Grace will take to her bed when she thinks fit and not before, and we shall have a prince when God grants it and not before.”

It was a staunch defense and it could hold off the courtiers, but it could not protect the queen from her own painful growing unease. I had seen her unhappy and fearful before and I recognized the gauntness of her face as the shine was rubbed off her.

Elizabeth, in contrast, now free to go where she would, ride where she liked, boat, walk, play at sports, grew more and more confident as the summer drew on. She had lost the fleshiness that had come with her illness, she was filled with energy and zest for life. The Spanish adored her – her coloring alone was fascinating to them. When she rode her great gray hunter in her green riding habit with her copper hair spread out on her shoulders they called her Enchantress, and Beautiful Brass-head. Elizabeth would smile and protest at the fuss they made, and so encourage them even more.

King Philip never checked them, though a more careful brother-in-law would have guarded against Elizabeth’s head being turned by the flattery of his court. But he never said anything to rein in her growing vanity. Nor did he speak now of her marrying and going away from England, nor of her visit to his aunt in Hungary. Indeed, he made it clear that Elizabeth was an honored permanent member of the court and heir to the throne.

I thought this was mostly policy on his part; but then one day I was looking from the palace window to a sheltered lawn on the south side of the palace and I saw a couple walking, heads close together, down the yew tree allée, half hidden and then half revealed by the dark strong trees. I smiled as I watched, thinking at first that it was one of the queen’s ladies with a Spanish courtier, and the queen would laugh when I told her of this clandestine courtship.

But then the girl turned her head and I saw a flash from under her dark hood, the unmistakable glint of copper hair. The girl was Elizabeth, and the man walking beside her, close enough to touch but not touching, was Prince Philip: Mary’s husband. Elizabeth had a book open in her hands, her head was bowed over it, she was the very picture of the devout student, but her walk was the gliding hip-swaying stroll of a woman with a man matching his step to hers.

All at once, I was reminded of the first time I had seen Elizabeth, when she had teased Tom Seymour, her stepmother’s husband, to chase her in the garden at Chelsea. This might be seven years later, but it was the same aroused hot-blooded girl who slid a dark sideways glance at another woman’s husband and invited him to come a little closer.

The king looked back at the palace, wondering how many people might be watching from the windows, and I expected him to weigh the danger of being seen, and take the Spanish way, the cautious way. But instead he gave a reckless shrug of his shoulders and fell into step a little closer to Elizabeth, who gave a start of innocent surprise, and put her long index finger under the word in her book so that she should not lose her place. I saw her look up at him, the color rising in her cheeks, her eyes wide with innocence, but the sly smile on her lips. He slipped his arm around her waist so that he could walk with her, looking over her shoulder at the passage in her book as if they both could see the words, as if they cared for anything but the other’s touch, as if they were not utterly absorbed in the sound of their own rapid breathing.

I put myself outside Elizabeth’s door that night and waited for her and her ladies to go to dinner.

“Ah, fool,” she said pleasantly as she came out of her rooms. “Are you dining with me?”

“If you wish, Princess,” I said politely, falling into her train. “I saw a curious thing today in the garden.”

“In which garden?” she asked.

“The summer garden,” I said. “I saw two lovers walking side by side and reading a book.”

“Not lovers,” she said easily. “You lack the Sight if you saw lovers, my fool. That was the king and I, walking and reading together.”

“You looked like lovers,” I said flatly. “From where I was standing. You looked like a courting couple.”

She gave a little gurgle of delighted laughter. “Oh well,” she said negligently. “Who can say how they appear to others?”

“Princess, you cannot want to be sent back to Woodstock,” I said to her urgently. We were approaching the great double doors of the dining hall at Hampton Court and I was anxious to warn her before we had to enter and all eyes would be on her.

“How would I be sent back to Woodstock?” she demanded. “The queen herself released me from arrest and accusation before she locked herself up, and I know that I am innocent of any plot. The king is my friend and my brother-in-law, and an honorable man. I am waiting, like the rest of England, to rejoice at the birth of my sister’s baby. How might I offend?”

I leaned toward her. “Princess, if the queen had seen you and her husband today, as I saw you, she would banish you to Woodstock in a moment.”

Elizabeth gave a dizzy laugh. “Oh no, for he would not let her.”

“He? He does not give the orders here.”

“He is king,” she pointed out. “He told her I should be treated with respect, and I am. He told her that I should be free to come and go as I wish, and I am. He will tell her that I am to stay at court, and I will. And, he will tell her that I am not to be coerced or ill-treated or accused of anything at all. I shall be free to meet who I choose, and talk with who I choose, and, in short, do anything at all that I choose.”

I gasped that she could leap so far in her confidence. “You will always be under suspicion.”

“Not I,” she said. “Not any more. I could be caught with a dozen pikes in my laundry basket tomorrow, and I would not be charged. He will protect me.”

I was stunned into silence.

“And he is a handsome man.” She almost purred with pleasure. “The most powerful man in Christendom.”

“Princess, this is the most dangerous game you are playing,” I warned her. “I have never heard you so reckless before. Where is your caution gone?”

“If he loves me then nothing can touch me,” she said, her voice very low. “And I can make him love me.”

“He cannot intend anything but your dishonor, and her heartbreak,” I said fiercely.

“Oh, he intends nothing at all.” She was gleaming with pleasure. “He is far beyond intentions. I have him on the run. He intends nothing, he thinks nothing, I daresay he can barely eat or sleep. D’you not know the pleasure of turning a man’s head, Hannah? Let me tell you it is better than anything. And when the man is the most powerful man in Christendom, the King of England and Prince of Spain, and the husband of your icy, arrogant, tyrannical ugly old sister, then it is the greatest joy that can be had!”

A few days later I was out riding. I had outgrown the pony that the Dudleys had given me, and I now rode one of the queen’s own beautiful hunters from the royal stables. I was desperate to be out. Hampton Court, for all its beauty, for all its healthful position, was like a prison this summer, and when I rode out in the morning I always had a sense of escape on parole. The queen’s anxiety and the waiting for the baby preyed on everyone till we were all like bitches penned up in the kennel, ready to snap at our own paws.

I usually rode west along the river, with the bright morning sunshine on my back, past the gardens and the little farms and on to where the countryside became more wild and the farmhouses more infrequent. I could set the hunter to jump the low hedges, and she would splash through streams in a headlong canter. I would ride for more than an hour and I always turned for home reluctantly.

This warm morning I was glad to be out early, it would be too hot for riding later. I could feel the heat of the sun on my face and pulled my cap down lower to shield my face from the burning light. I turned back toward the palace and saw another horseman on the road ahead of me. If he had headed for the stable yard or stayed on the high road, I would hardly have noticed him; but he turned off the road toward the palace and took a little lane which ran alongside the walls of the garden. His discreet approach alerted me, and I turned to look more closely. At once I recognized the scholarly stoop of his shoulders. I called out, without thinking: “Mr. Dee.”

He reined in his horse and turned and smiled at me, quite composed. “How glad I am to see you, Hannah Verde,” he said. “I hoped that we might meet. Are you well?”

I nodded. “Very well, I thank you. I thought you were in Italy. My betrothed wrote to me that he heard you lecture in Venice.”

He nodded. “I have been home for some time. I am working on a map of the coastline, and I needed to be in London for the maps and sailors’ charts. Have you received a book for me? I had it delivered to your father in Calais for safety, and he said he would send it on.”

“I have not been to the shop for some days, sir,” I said.

“When it comes I shall be glad of it,” he said casually.

“Has the queen summoned you, sir?”

He shook his head. “No, I am here privately to visit the Princess Elizabeth. She asked me to bring her some manuscripts. She is studying Italian and I have brought some very interesting old texts from Venice.”

Still I was not warned. “Shall I take you to her?” I offered. “This is not the way to the palace. We can go to the stable yard by the high road.”

Even as he was about to reply, the little gate in the wall opened silently, and Kat Ashley stood in the doorway.

“Ah, the fool,” she said pleasantly. “And the magician.”

“You miscall us both,” he said with quiet dignity, and got down from his saddle. A pageboy ducked out from under Kat Ashley’s arm to hold John Dee’s horse. I realized that he was expected, that they had planned he should enter the palace in secrecy, and – sometimes I was a fool indeed – I realized that it would have been better for me if I had not seen him or, if I had, better to have turned my head and ridden blindly past.

“Take her horse too,” Kat Ashley told the lad.

“I’ll take her back to the stable,” I said. “And go about my business.”

“This is your business,” she said bluntly. “Now you are here you will have to come with us.”

“I don’t have to do anything but what the queen commands me,” I said abruptly.

John Dee put his hand gently on my arm. “Hannah, I could use your gift in the work I have to do here. And your lord would want you to help me.”

I hesitated, and while I paused, Kat took hold of my hand and fairly dragged me into the walled garden. “Come in now,” she said. “You can scurry off once you’re inside, but you are putting Mr. Dee and me in danger while you argue out here in the open. Come now, and leave later if you must.”

As ever, the thought of being watched frightened me. I tossed my reins to the lad and followed Kat, who went to a little doorway, hidden by ivy, which despite all my time in the palace I had never noticed before. She led us up a winding stair, and came out through another hidden doorway, shielded by a tapestry, opposite the princess’s rooms.

She knocked on the door with a special rhythm and it opened at once. John Dee and I went quickly inside. No one had seen us.

Elizabeth was seated on a stool in the window, a lute across her knees, her new Italian lute master a few paces away setting out music on a stand. They looked as innocent as stage players enacting innocence. Indeed they looked so very innocent that the short hairs on the back of my cropped neck prickled as if I were a frightened dog.

Elizabeth looked up and saw me. “Oh, Hannah.”

“Kat dragged me in,” I said. “I think I should go.”

“Wait a moment,” she replied.

Kat Ashley planted her big bottom against the wooden door and leaned back.

“Would you see better if Hannah were to help you?” Elizabeth demanded of John Dee.

“I cannot see without her,” he said frankly. “I don’t have the gift. I was only going to prepare the astrological tables for you; that is all I can do without a seer. I did not know that Hannah would be here today.”

“If she would look for you, what might we see?”

He shrugged. “Everything. Nothing. How would I know? But we might be able to tell the date of the birth of the queen’s baby. We might be able to know if it is a boy or a girl, and how healthy, and what its future might hold.”

Elizabeth came toward me, her eyes very bright. “Do this for us, Hannah,” she whispered, almost pleading with me. “We all want to know. You, as much as anybody.”

I said nothing. My knowledge of the queen’s growing despair in that darkened room was not one that I wanted to share with her flirtatious half sister.

“I dare not do it,” I said flatly. “Mr. Dee, I am afraid. These are forbidden studies.”

“It is all forbidden now,” he said simply. “The world is forming into two bands of people. Those who ask questions and need answers, and those who think the answers are given to us. Her ladyship is one who asks questions, the queen is one who thinks that everything is already known. I am in the world of those who ask: ask about everything. You too. Lord Robert as well. It is breath of life to question, it is like being dead when one has to accept an answer which comes with the dust of the tomb on it and one cannot even ask ‘why?’ You like to ask, don’t you, Hannah?”

“I was brought up to it,” I said, as if excusing a sin. “But I have learned the price. I have seen the price that scholars sometimes have to pay.”

“You will pay no price for asking questions in my rooms,” Elizabeth assured me. “I am under the protection of the king. We can do as we wish. I am safe now.”

“But I am never safe!” burst from me.

“Come, child,” John Dee urged me. “You are among friends. Do you not have the courage to exercise your God-given gift, in the sight of your Maker and in the company of your friends, child?”

“No,” I said frankly. I was thinking of the faggots of wood that had been piled up in the town square of Aragon, of the stakes at Smithfield, of the determination of the Inquisition to know only what it feared and see only what it suspected.

“And yet you live here, in the very heart of the court,” he observed.

“I am here to serve the queen because I love her, and because I can’t leave her now, not while she is waiting for her baby to be born. And I serve the Princess Elizabeth because… because she is like no other woman I have ever met.”

Elizabeth laughed. “You study me as if I were your book,” she said. “I have seen you do it. I know you do. You watch me as if you would learn how to be a woman.”

I nodded, granting her nothing. “Perhaps.”

She smiled. “You love my sister, don’t you?”

I faced her without fear. “I do. Who could not?”

“Then would you not ease her burden by telling her when this slow baby will come? It is a month late, Hannah. People are laughing at her. If she has mistaken her dates, would you not want to tell her that the baby in her belly is growing well and due this very week, or the next?”

I hesitated. “How could I tell her I knew such a thing?”

“Your gift! Your gift!” she exclaimed irritably. “You can tell her you just saw it in a vision. You don’t have to say the vision was conjured in my rooms.”

I thought for a moment.

“And when you go to see Lord Robert again you could advise him,” Elizabeth said quietly. “You could tell him that he must make his peace with her for she will put her son on the throne of England, and England will be a Catholic and Spanish power forever. You could tell him to give up waiting and hoping for anything else. You could tell him that the cause is lost and he must convert, plead for clemency and set himself free. That news would mean that he could plead for his freedom. You could set him free.”

I said nothing but she understood the rise of color in my cheeks. “I don’t know how he can bear it,” she said, her voice low, weaving a spell around me. “Poor Robert, waiting and waiting in the Tower and never knowing what the future will bring. If he knew that Mary would be on the throne for the next twenty years and her son after her, don’t you think he would sue for his freedom and set himself at liberty again? His lands want him, his people need him, he’s a man that needs the earth under his boots and the wind in his face. He’s not a man to be mewed up like a hooded hawk for half of his life.”

“If he knew for certain that the queen would have a son, would he be able to get free?”

“If a prince was born to her she would release most of them in the Tower for she would know that she was safe on the throne. We would all give up.”

I hesitated no longer. “I’ll do it,” I said.

Elizabeth nodded calmly. “You need an inner room, don’t you?” she asked John Dee.

“Lit with candles,” he said. “And a mirror, and a table covered with a linen cloth. There should be more, but we’ll do what we can.”

Elizabeth went into her privy chamber beyond the audience room and we heard her drawing the curtains and pulling a table before the fireplace. John Dee set out his astronomical charts on her desk; when she came back he had drawn a line through the queen’s date of birth and the date of birth of the king.

“Their marriage was in Libra,” he said. “It is a partnership of deep love.”

I looked quickly at Elizabeth’s face but she was not scoffing, thinking of her triumph over her sister in her flirtation with Philip, she was too serious for her petty triumphs now.

“Will it be fruitful?” she asked.

He drew a line across the thin columns of dizzying numbers. He drew another downward, and where the lines intersected he leaned forward to read the number.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “But I can’t be sure. There will be two pregnancies.”

Elizabeth drew a little gasp like the hiss of a cat. “Two? Live births?”

John Dee consulted the number again and then another set of numbers at the foot of the scroll. “It is very obscure.”

Elizabeth held herself very still, there was no outward sign of her desperation to know.

“So who will inherit the throne?” she asked tightly.

John Dee drew another line, this time horizontally, across the columns. “It should be you,” he said.

“Yes, I know it should be me,” Elizabeth said, reining in her impatience. “I am the heir now, if I am not overthrown. But will it be me?”

He leaned back, away from the pages. “I am sorry, Princess. It is too unclear. The love that she bears him and her desire for a child obscures everything. I have never seen a woman love a man more, I have never seen a woman long more intensely for a child. Her desire is in every symbol of the table, it is almost as if she could wish a child into being.”

Elizabeth, her face like a beautiful mask, nodded. “I see. Would you be able to see more if Hannah would scry for you?”

John Dee turned to me. “Will you try, Hannah? And see what we can learn? It is God’s work, remember, we will be seeking the advice of angels.”

“I’ll try,” I said. I was not very eager to enter the darkened room, and look in the shadowy mirror. But the thought of bringing Lord Robert the news that might release him, of bringing the queen the news that might give her the greatest joy since her coming to the throne, was a great temptation for me.

I went into the room. The candle flames were bobbing either side of a golden mirror. The table was covered with a white linen cloth. As I watched, John Dee drew a five-sided star on the linen with a dark spluttery pen, and then symbols of power at each corner.

“Keep the door shut,” he said to Elizabeth. “I don’t know how long we will be.”

“Can’t I be inside?” she said. “I won’t speak.”

He shook his head. “Princess, you don’t have to speak, you have all the presence of a queen. This has to be just Hannah and me, and the angels if they will come to us.”

“But you will tell me everything,” she urged him. “Not just the things you think I should know. You will tell me all that there is?”

He nodded and shut the door on her eager face and then turned back to me. He pulled a stool before the mirror and seated me gently, looking over my head to my reflection in the mirror. “You are willing?” he confirmed.

“I am,” I said seriously.

“It is a great gift that you have,” he said quietly. “I would give all my learning to be able to do it.”

“I just wish there could be a resolution,” I said. “I wish Elizabeth might have her throne and yet the queen keep it. I wish the queen might have her son and Elizabeth not be disinherited. I wish with all my heart that Lord Robert might be free and yet not plot against the queen. I wish I could be here and yet be with my father.”

He smiled. “You and I are the most unhelpful of conspirators,” he said gently. “For I don’t mind which queen is on the throne as long as she will allow the people to follow their faith. And I want the libraries restored and learning allowed, and for this country to explore the seas and spread outward and outward to the new lands to the west.”

“But how will this work bring it about?” I asked.

“We will know what the angels advise,” he said quietly. “There could be no better guide for us.”

John Dee stepped back from the mirror and I heard his quiet voice pray in Latin that we should do the work of God and that the angels would come to us. I said “Amen,” heartfelt, and then waited.

It seemed to take a very long time. I saw the candles reflected in the mirror, the darkness around them became darker and they seemed to grow more bright. Then I saw that at the core of every candle there was a halo of darkness, and inside the halo of darkness there was the black wick of the candle and a little haze around it. I grew so fascinated with this anatomy of flame that I could not remember what I should be doing, I just stared and stared into the moving lights until I felt that I had fallen asleep, and then John Dee’s hand was gentle on my shoulder and I heard his voice in my ear saying: “Drink this, child.”

It was a cup of warm ale and I sat back on my stool and sipped it, conscious of a heaviness behind my eyes and weariness, as if I were ill.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I must have fallen asleep.”

“D’you remember nothing?” he asked curiously.

I shook my head. “I just watched the flame and then fell asleep.”

“You spoke,” he said quietly. “You spoke in a language I could not understand, but I think it was the language of angels. God be praised, I think you spoke to them in their language. I copied it down as best I could, I will try to translate it… if it is the key to speaking to God!” He broke off.

“Did I say nothing that you could understand now?” I asked, still bemused.

“I questioned you in English and you answered in Spanish,” he said. He saw the alarm in my face. “It’s all right,” he said. “Whatever secrets you have, they are safe. You said nothing that could not be heard by anyone. But you told me about the queen and the princess.”

“What did I say?” I demanded.

He hesitated. “Child, if the angel who guides you wanted you to know what words were spoken then he would have let you speak them in your waking state.”

I nodded.

“He did not. Perhaps it is better that you do not know.”

“But what am I to tell Lord Robert when I see him?” I demanded. “And what can I say to the queen about her baby?”

“You can tell Lord Robert that he will be free within two years,” John Dee said firmly. “And there will be a moment when he thinks everything is lost, once more, at the very moment everything is just starting for him. He must not despair then. And you must bid the queen to hope. If any woman in the world could be granted a baby because she would be a good mother, because she loved the father, and because she desired a child, it would be this queen. But whether she will have a son in her womb as well as her heart, I cannot tell you. Whether she will have a child from this birth or not, I cannot tell you.”

I got to my feet. “I shall go then,” I said. “I have to take the horse back. But, Mr. Dee-”

“Yes?”

“What about the Princess Elizabeth? Will she inherit the throne as her own?”

He smiled at me. “Do you remember what we saw when we first scried?”

I nodded.

“You said that there will be a child but no child, I think that is the queen’s first baby which should have been born but still has not come. You said that there will be a king, but no king – I think that is this Philip of Spain whom we call king but who is not and never will be king of England. Then you said there will be a virgin queen all-forgotten, and a queen but no virgin.”

“Is that Queen Jane, who was a virgin queen and now everyone has forgotten her, and now Mary who called herself a virgin and is now a married queen?” I asked.

He nodded. “Perhaps. I think the princess’s hour will come. There was more, but I cannot reveal it to you. Go now.”

I nodded and went from the room. As I closed the door behind me I saw his dark absorbed face in the mirror as he leaned forward to blow out the candles and I wondered what else he had heard me say when I had been in my tranced sleep.

“What did you see?” Elizabeth demanded impatiently the moment I closed the door.

“Nothing!” I said. I could almost have laughed at the expression on her face. “You will have to ask Mr. Dee. I saw nothing, it was just like falling asleep.”

“But did you speak, or did he see anything?”

“Princess, I cannot tell,” I said, moving toward the door and pausing only to drop her a little bow. “I have to take my horse back to the stable or they will miss her, and start to look for me.”

Elizabeth nodded my dismissal and just as I was about to open the door there was a knock on it from the outside, in the same rhythm that Kat Ashley had used earlier. In a moment Kat was at the door and had opened it. A man swung into the room and she shut the door smartly behind him. I shrank back as I recognized Sir William Pickering, Elizabeth’s friend of old, and fellow-conspirator from the time of the Wyatt rebellion. I had not even known that Sir William was forgiven and back at court – then I realized that he was probably neither forgiven, nor allowed at court. This was a secret visit.

“My lady, I must go,” I said firmly.

Kat Ashley stopped me. “You will be asked to take some books to Mr. Dee. He will have some papers for you to take to Sir William at a house I will tell you,” she said. “Take a look at him now so that he remembers you again. Sir William, this is the queen’s fool, she will bring you the papers you need.”

If it had not come from Kat Ashley, I might not have remembered Lord Robert’s warning; but my lord had been very clear with me, and his words confirmed my own sense of terror at whatever they were brewing here.

“I am sorry,” I said simply to Kat Ashley, avoiding even looking at Sir William, and wishing that he had never seen me. “But my Lord Robert told me to take no messages for anyone. It was his order. I was to tell you about the ribbons and to run no errands after that. You must excuse me, Princess, sir, Mrs. Ashley, I cannot assist you.”

I went quickly to the door and let myself out before they could protest. When I was safely away and down the corridor I drew breath and realized then that my heart was pounding as if I had run from some danger. When I saw that the door stayed shut and I heard the quiet shooting of the well-oiled bolt and the thud of Kat Ashley’s bottom on the wooden panels, I knew that there was danger there indeed.

It was June and Queen Mary’s baby was more than a month overdue, a time when anyone might start to worry; and the petals falling from the hawthorn in the hedgerows blew across the roads like snow. The meadows were rich with flowers, their perfume heady in the warm air. Still we lingered at Hampton Court, though usually the royal court would have moved on by now to another palace. We waited though the roses came into bloom in the gardens, and every bird in England had a baby in the nest but the queen.

The king went around with a face like thunder, exposed to sharp wit in the English court and to danger in the English countryside. He had guards posted night and day on the roads to the palace, and soldiers at every pier on the river. It was thought that if the queen died in childbirth there would be a thousand men at the gate of the palace to tear the Spanish apart. The only thing that could keep him safe then would be the goodwill of the new queen, Elizabeth. No wonder the princess swished around the court in her dark gown as if she were a black cat, the favored resident of a dairy, overfed on cream.

The Spanish noblemen of the king’s court grew more irritable, as if their own manhood had been impugned by the slowness of this baby. They were frightened of the ill will of the people of England. They were a small band under siege with no hope of relief. Only the arrival of the baby would have guaranteed their safety, and the baby was dangerously late in coming.

The ladies in the queen’s train became sulky; they felt as if they were being made to look like fools, sitting around with little pieces of sewing in their hands, making napkins and bibs and gowns for a baby that did not come. The younger girls, who had been hoping for a merry spring at court with May balls and picnics and masques and hunting, begrudged sitting with the queen in the stuffiness of a darkened room while she prayed for long hours in silence. They emerged from her confinement chamber with faces like spoiled children to say that nothing had happened again today, all day; and the queen seemed no nearer to her time than when she had entered her confinement two months ago.

Only Elizabeth seemed unaffected by the anxious atmosphere of the palace as she walked briskly around the gardens with her long stride, her copper hair flying behind her, a book in her hands. No one walked with her, no one publicly befriended her, no one risked being closely identified with this most problematic princess, but everyone was more aware than ever that as matters now stood, she was the heir to the throne. The birth of a son, would mean that Elizabeth was again unwanted, a threat to everyone’s peace. But while there was no son, then she was the next queen. And whether she was the next monarch, or whether she was an unwanted princess, the king could not take his eyes off her.

At dinner every night, King Philip bowed his head to her before he closed his eyes for grace, in the morning he smiled at her and wished her good day. Sometimes, when there was dancing, she took to the floor with the young ladies of the court, and he sat back in his chair and watched her, his eyes veiled, his face revealing nothing of his thoughts. She never returned his look directly these days, she shot him a cool dark gaze from under lowered eyelids and moved carefully in the paces of the dance, her neck poised, her slim waist shifting from side to side, in time to the music. When she curtsied toward the empty throne of her sister at the end of the dance she kept her face down but her smile was one of absolute triumph. Elizabeth knew that Philip could not take his eyes from her, however guarded his expression. She knew that Mary, tired, despairing of her son, was hardly a rival worth vanquishing; but Elizabeth’s young glad pride leaped up to the challenge of humiliating her older sister by filling her brother-in-law with baffled desire.

I was going to my dinner in the great hall on a cool evening in the first days of June when I felt a touch on my hand. It was a little pageboy, servant to Sir William Pickering, and I threw a quick glance up the stairway to see who else might have seen him before I bent my head to his whisper.

“Lord Robert says to tell you that John Dee is arrested for casting the queen’s horoscope,” he said, his breath tickling my ear. “He said to burn any books or letters of his.”

In the next second he was gone and all my peace of mind gone with him. I turned and walked into dinner, my face a mask, my heart hammering, the back of my hand rubbing feverishly at my cheek, thinking of nothing but the book that John Dee had sent to my father and which he had forwarded, like an arrow to our door.

That night I lay in bed, unsleeping, my heart pounding with terror. I could not think what I should do to protect myself, to protect my father’s fortune which was still stored in the dusty shop off Fleet Street. And what if John Dee told them that I had scryed for him? What if some spy had reported on the afternoon in Princess Elizabeth’s rooms when he had drawn up the astrological charts on the queen herself? What if they knew about handsome Sir William, leaning against the door and being assured that I would run errands for him and for Elizabeth?

I watched the dawn turn my little window pale with light, and by five in the morning I was on the steps at the river gate, scanning the water for a passing wherry boat which might take me into the city.

I was lucky. An old boatman, starting his day’s work, came across at my hail and took me on board. The soldier sleepily guarding the pier did not even see that I was not a real lad in livery.

“Lechery?” he asked with a wink, guessing from the hour that I had been with some palace kitchenmaid.

“Oh aye, most vile,” I said cheerfully, and jumped into the boat.

I paid my fare and scrambled ashore at the Fleet stairs. I approached the street carefully, trying to see if the door of our shop had been forced. It was too early for our intrusive neighbor to spot me, only a few dairymaids were calling their cows out of the backyards to take them to the meadows for their grass, there was no one to pay any attention to me.

Even so, I hesitated in the opposite doorway for long moments, watching the street and making sure that no one was watching me before I crossed the dirty cobblestones and let myself into the shop and closed our door quickly behind me.

It was dark and dusty inside the shop with the shutters closed. I could see that nothing had been disturbed, nobody had come here yet, I was in time. The package labeled “for Mr. John Dee” in my father’s hand had been taken in by our neighbor and left on the counter, as incriminating as a brand for the burning.

I untied the string and broke my father’s seal. Inside were two books; one was a set of tables which showed, as far as I could tell, the positions of the planets and stars, the other was a guide to astrology in Latin. The two of them in our shop, addressed to John Dee, a man arrested for casting the date of the queen’s death, was enough to have both my father and me hanged for treason.

I took them to the empty fireplace and crumpled up the wrapping paper, ready to burn them, my hands shaking in my haste. I rubbed at the tinderbox for long minutes before it caught, my fear rising at every moment. Then the flint sparked, and lit the tinder, and I could light a candle and take the flame to the paper in the grate. I held it under the corner of the wrapping paper and watched the flame lick it until it was blazing bright yellow.

I took up the books, planning to tear out a handful of pages at a time and burn each one. The first book, the one written in Latin, fluttered open in my hand. I took a fat handful of soft paper pages. They yielded to my fingers as if they had no power, as if they were not the most dangerous thing in the world. I tried to tear them from the fragile spine, but then I hesitated.

I could not do it. I would not do it. I sat back on my heels with the book in my hand with the light of the fire flickering and dying down and realized that not even when I was in mortal danger could I bring myself to burn a book.

It went against the grain of me. I had seen my father carry some of these books across Christendom, strapped to his heart, knowing that the secrets they contained were newly named as heretical. I had seen him buy books and sell books and, more than that, lend and borrow them just for the joy of seeing their learning go onward, spread outward. I had seen his delight in finding a missing volume, I had seen him welcome a lost folio back to his shelves as if it were the son he had never had. Books were my brothers and sisters; I could not turn against them now. I could not become one of those that see something they cannot understand, and destroy it.

When Daniel’s joy in the scholarship of Venice and Padua made my own heart leap with enthusiasm, it was because I too thought that someday everything could be known, nothing need be hidden. And either of these two books might contain the secret of the whole world, might hold the key to understanding everything. John Dee was a great scholar, if he took so much trouble to get hold of these volumes and send them in secret, they would be precious indeed. I could not bring myself to destroy them. If I burned them I was no better than the Inquisition which had killed my mother. If I burned them, I became as one of those who think that ideas are dangerous and should be destroyed.

I was not one of those. Even at risk to my life, I could not become one of those. I was a young woman living at the very heart of a world that was starting to ask questions, living at a time when men and women thought that questions were the most important thing. And who could say where these questions might take us? The tables that had come from my father for John Dee might contain a drug which would cure the plague, they might contain the secret of how to determine where a ship is at sea, they might tell us how to fly, they might tell us how to live forever. I did not know what I held in my hands. I could no more have destroyed it than I could have killed a newborn child: precious in itself, and full of unknowable promise.

With a heavy heart I took the two books and tucked them behind the more innocuous titles on my father’s shelf. I supposed that if the house was searched I could claim ignorance. I had destroyed the most dangerous part of the package: the wrapping, John Dee’s name written in my father’s hand. My father was far away in Calais and there was nothing directly to link us to Mr. Dee.

I shook my head, weary of lying in order to reassure myself. In truth, there were a dozen connections between me and Mr. Dee if anyone wanted to examine them. There were a dozen connections between my father and the scholar. I was known as Lord Robert’s fool, as the queen’s fool, as the princess’s fool, I was connected with everyone whose name was danger. All I could hope for was that the fool’s motley hid me, that the sea between England and Calais shielded my father, and that Mr. Dee’s angels guided him, and would protect him even when he was on the rack, even if his jailers gave him his faggot of kindling and made him carry it to the stake.

It was scant consolation for a girl who had spent her girlhood on the run, hiding her faith, hiding her sex, hiding herself. But there was nothing I could do now except to go on the run again, and my horror of running from England was greater than my terror of being caught. When my father had promised me that this would be my home, that I would be safe here, I had believed him. When the queen had put my head in her lap and twisted my hair into curls around her fingers, I had trusted her as I had trusted my mother. I did not want to leave England, I did not want to leave the queen. I brushed the dust off my jerkin, straightened my cap, and slipped out again to the street.

I got back to Hampton Court in time for breakfast. I ran up the deserted garden from the river and entered the palace by the stable door. Anyone seeing me would have thought that I had been riding in the early morning, as I so often did.

“Good day,” one of the pages said and I turned on him the pleasant smile of the habitual liar.

“Good day,” I replied.

“And how is the queen this morning?”

“Merry indeed.”

Like the curtains at the windows of her confinement chamber, shutting out the summer sun, the queen grew paler and faded through every day of the tenth month of her waiting. In contrast, as Elizabeth’s confidence grew her very presence, her hair, her skin, seemed to shine more brightly. When she swept into the confinement chamber, taking a stool to talk lightly, sing to her lute, or stitch incredibly fine baby clothes, the queen seemed to shrink into invisibility. The girl was a radiant sparkling beauty, even as she sat over her sewing and demurely bowed her flaming head. Beside her, hand on her belly, always waiting in case the child should move, Mary was becoming little more than a shadow. As the days wore on, through the long long month of June, she became like a shadow waiting for the birth of a shadow. She seemed hardly to be there at all, her baby seemed hardly to be there at all. They were both melting away.

The king was a driven man. Everything directed him toward a steady fidelity to his wife: her love for him, her vulnerable condition, the need to appease the English nobility and keep the council favorably disposed toward Spanish policy as the country sneered at the sterile Spanish king. He knew this, he was a brilliant politician and diplomat; but he could not help himself. Where Elizabeth walked, there he followed. When she rode, he called for his horse and galloped after her. When she danced, he watched her and called for them to play the music again. When she studied, he loaned her books and corrected her pronunciation like a disinterested schoolmaster, while all the time his eyes were on her lips, on the neck of her gown, on her hands clasped lightly in her lap.

“Princess, this is a dangerous game,” I warned her.

“Hannah, this is my life,” she said simply. “With the king on my side I need fear nothing. And if he were to be free to marry, then I could look to no better match.”

“Your sister’s husband? While she is confined with his child?” I demanded, scandalized.

Her downcast eyes were slits of jet. “I might think, as she did, that an alliance between Spain and England would dominate all of Christendom,” she said sweetly.

“Yes, the queen thought that, and yet all that has happened is that she has brought the heresy laws on the heads of her subjects,” I said tartly. “And brought herself to solitude in a darkened room with her heart breaking and her sister outside in the sunshine flirting with her husband.”

“The queen fell in love with a husband who married for policy,” Elizabeth decreed. “I would never be such a fool. If he married me it would be quite the reverse. I would be the one marrying for policy and he would be the one marrying for love. And we would see whose heart broke first.”

“Has he told you he loves you?” I whispered, aghast, thinking of the queen lost in her loneliness of the enclosed room. “Has he said he would marry you, if she died?”

“He adores me,” Elizabeth said with quiet pleasure. “I could make him say anything.”

It was hard to get news of John Dee without seeming overly curious. He had simply gone, as if he had never been, disappeared into the terrible dungeons of the Inquisition in England at St. Paul’s, supervised by Bishop Bonner, whose resolute questioning was feeding the fires of Smithfield at the rate of half a dozen poor men and women every week.

“What news of John Dee?” I asked Will Somers quietly, one morning when I found him recumbent on a bench, basking like a lizard in the summer sunshine.

“He’s not dead yet,” he said, barely opening an eye. “Hush.”

“Are you sleeping?” I asked, wanting to know more.

“I’m not dead yet,” he said. “In that, he and I have something in common. But I am not being stretched on the rack, nor being pressed with a hundred rocks on my chest, nor being taken for questioning at midnight, at dawn, and as a rough alternative to breakfast. So not that much in common.”

“Has he confessed?” I asked, my voice a little breath.

“Can’t have done,” Will said pragmatically. “Because if he had confessed he would be dead, and there his similarity to me would be ended, since I am not dead but merely asleep.”

“Will…” “Fast asleep and dreaming, and not talking at all.”

I went to find Elizabeth. I had thought of speaking to Kat Ashley but I knew she despised me for my mixed allegiances, and I doubted her discretion. I heard the blast of the hunting horns and I knew that Elizabeth would have been riding. I hurried down to the stable yard and was there as the hounds came streaming in, with the riders behind them. Elizabeth was riding a new black hunter, a gift from the king, her cap askew, her face glowing. The court was all dismounting and shouting for their grooms. I sprang forward to hold her horse and said quietly to her, unheard in the general noise, “Princess, do you have any news of John Dee?”

She turned her back to me and patted her horse’s shoulder. “There, Sunburst,” she said loudly, speaking to the horse. “You did well.” To me in an undertone she said: “They are holding him for conjuring and calculing.”

“What?” I asked, horrified.

She was absolutely calm. “They say that he attempted to cast the queen’s astrology chart, and that he summoned up spirits to foretell the future.”

“Will he speak of any others, doing this with him?” I breathed.

“If they charge him with heresy you should expect him to sing like a little blinded thrush,” she said, turning to me and smiling radiantly, as if it were not her life at stake as well as mine. “They’ll rack him, you know. No one can stand that pain. He will be bound to talk.”

“Heresy?”

“So I’m told.”

She tossed her reins to her groom and walked toward the palace, leaning on my shoulder.

“They’ll burn him?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Princess, what shall we do?”

She dropped her arm around my shoulder and gripped it hard, as if she were holding me to my senses. I could feel that her hand did not tremble for a moment. “We will wait. And hope to survive this. Same as always, Hannah. Wait, and hope to survive.”

“You will survive,” I said with sudden bitterness.

Elizabeth turned her bright face to me, her smile merry but her eyes were like chips of coal. “Oh yes,” she said. “I have done so, thus far.”

In mid-June the queen, still pregnant, broke with convention to release herself from the confinement chamber. The physicians could not say that she would be any worse for being outside, and they thought walking in the air might give her an appetite for her meals. They were afraid that she was not eating enough to keep herself and her baby alive. In the cool of the morning or in the shadowy evening she would stroll slowly in her private garden attended only by her ladies and the members of her household. She was changing before my eyes from the deliciously infatuated woman that Prince Philip of Spain had wedded and bedded, and loved into joy, back to the anxious prematurely aged woman that I had first met. Her new confidence in love and happiness was draining away from her, with the pink of her cheeks and the blue of her eyes, and I could see her drawn back to the loneliness and fearfulness of her childhood, almost like an invalid slipping toward death.

“Your Grace.” I dropped to one knee as I met her in the privy garden one day. She had been looking at the fast flow of the river past the boat pier, looking, and yet not seeing. A brood of ducklings was playing in the current, their mother watchful nearby, surveying the little bundles of fluff as they paddled and bobbed. Even the ducks on the Thames had young; but England’s cradle, with that hopeful poem at the bed-head, was still empty.

She turned an unseeing dark gaze to me. “Oh, Hannah.”

“Are you well, Your Grace?”

She tried to smile at me but I saw her lips twist down.

“No, Hannah, my child. I am not very well.”

“Are you in pain?”

She shook her head. “I should be glad of pain, of labor pains. No, Hannah. I feel nothing, not in my body, not in my heart.”

I drew a little closer. “Perhaps these are the fancies that come before birth,” I said soothingly. “Like when they say women have a craving for eating raw fruit or coal.”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.” She held out her hands to me, as patient as a sick child. “Can’t you see, Hannah? With your gift? Can you see, and tell me the truth?”

Almost unwillingly I took her hands and at her touch I felt a rush of despair as dark and as cold as if I had fallen into the river which flowed beneath the pier. She saw the shock in my face, and read it rightly at once.

“He’s gone, hasn’t he?” she whispered. “I have somehow lost him.”

“I wouldn’t know, Your Grace,” I stumbled. “I’m no physician, I wouldn’t have the skill to judge…”

She shook her head, the bright sunlight glinting on the rich embroidery of her hood, on the gold hoops in her ears, all this worldly wealth encasing heartbreak. “I knew it,” she said. “I had a son in my belly and now he is gone. I feel an emptiness where I used to feel a life.”

I still had hold of her icy hands, I found I was chafing them, as people will chafe the hands of a corpse.

“Oh, Your Grace!” I cried out. “There can be another child. Where one has been made you can make another. You had a child and lost him, hundreds of women do that, and go on to have another child. You can do that too.”

She did not even seem to hear me, she let her hands lie in mine and she looked toward the river as if she would want it to wash her away.

“Your Grace?” I whispered, very quietly. “Queen Mary? Dearest Mary?”

When she turned her face to me her eyes were filled with tears. “It’s all wrong,” she said, and her voice was low and utterly desolate. “It has been going wrong since Elizabeth’s mother took my father from us and broke my mother’s heart, and nothing can put it right again. It’s been going wrong since Elizabeth’s mother won my father to sin and led him from his faith so that he lived and died in torment. It’s all wrong, Hannah, and I cannot put it right though I have tried and tried. It is too much for me. There is too much sadness and sin and loss in this story for me to put right. It is beyond me. And now Elizabeth has taken my husband from me, my husband who was the greatest joy of my life – the only joy of my life – the only man who ever loved me, the only person I have ever loved since I lost my mother. She has taken him from me. And now my son has gone from me too.”

Her darkness flowed through me like a draft of the deepest despair. I gripped her hands as if she were a drowning woman, swept away in a night flood.

“Mary!”

Gently she pulled her hands from me, and walked away, alone again, as she always had been, as now she thought she always must be. I ran behind her, and though she heard my footsteps she did not pause or turn her head.

“You could have another child,” I repeated. “And you could win your husband back.”

She did not pause or shake her head. I knew that she was walking with her chin up and the tears streaming down her cheeks. She could not ask for help, she could not receive help. The pain in her heart was that of loss. She had lost the love of her father, she had lost her mother. Now she had lost her child and every day, in full view of the court, she was losing her husband to her pretty younger sister. I fell back and let her go.

For the long hot month of July the queen said nothing to explain why her baby was not coming. Elizabeth inquired after her health every morning with the most sisterly concern, and remarked every day in her sweet clear voice:

“Gracious, what a long long time this babe is taking to be born!”

Every day people came out from London to say Masses for the queen’s safe delivery, and we all stood up in church three times a day to say “Amen.” The news they brought from London was that of a city of horrors. The queen’s belief that her baby would not come until England was cleansed of heresy had taken a vicious turn. In the hands of her Inquisitors, Bishop Bonner and the rest of them, there was a savage policy of secret arrests and cruel tortures. There were rumors of unjust trials of heretics, of maidservants being taken up in their ignorance and when they swore that they would not surrender their Bible, being taken to the stake and burned for their faith. There was a vile story of a woman pregnant with her first child who was accused of heresy and charged before a court. When she would not bow her head to the dictates of the Roman Catholic priest they put her on a stake and lighted the pyre. In her terror she gave birth to the child then and there, and dropped it on to the faggots. When the baby slithered from her shaking thighs to the ground, crying loud enough to be heard over the crackle of the flames, the executioner forked the naked child back into the fire with a pitchfork, as if he were a crying bundle of kindling.

They made sure that these stories did not reach the queen but I was certain that if she knew she would put a stop to the cruelty. A woman waiting for her own child to be born does not send another pregnant woman to the stake. I took my chance one morning, when she was walking.

“Your Grace, may I speak with you?”

She turned and smiled. “Yes, Hannah, of course.”

“It is a matter of state and I am not qualified to judge,” I said cautiously. “And I am a young woman, and perhaps I don’t understand.”

“Understand what?” she asked.

“The news from London is very cruel,” I said, taking the plunge. “I am sorry if I speak out of turn, but there is much cruelty being done in your name and your advisors do not tell you of it.”

There was a little ripple at my temerity. At the back of the group of ladies I saw Will Somers roll his eyes at me.

“Why, what do you mean, Hannah?”

“Your Grace, you know that many of the great Protestants of the land have gone quietly to Mass and their priests have put away their wives and become obedient to the new laws. It is only their servants and the foolish people in the villages who do not have the wit to tell a lie when they are examined. Surely you would not want the simple people of your country to be burned for their faith? Surely, you would want to show them mercy?”

I expected her smile of acknowledgment, but the face she turned to me was scowling. “If there are families who have turned their coat and not their faith then I want their names,” she said, her voice hard. “You are right: I don’t seek to burn servants, I want them all, masters and men, to turn again to the church. I would be a sorry Queen of England if I did not insist on the same law for rich and for poor. If you know the name of a priest with a wife in hiding, Hannah, then you had better tell me now or you will be risking your own immortal soul.”

I had never seen her so cold.

“Your Grace!”

It was as if she did not hear me. She put her hand on her heart and she cried out: “Before God, Hannah, I will save this country from sin even though it cost life after life. We have to turn back to God and from heresy and if it takes a dozen fires, if it takes a hundred fires, we will do it. And if you, even you, are hiding a name then I will have it from you, Hannah. There will be no exceptions made. Even you shall be questioned. If you will not tell, I shall have you questioned…”

I could feel the color draining from my face and my heart start to race. After surviving so long, to put myself into danger, to step up to the rack! “Your Grace!” I stammered. “I am innocent…”

There was a scream from the back of the court and we all turned to look. A lady in waiting was running, holding her skirts away from her pounding feet, toward the queen. “Your Grace!” she whimpered. “Save me! It is the fool! He is run mad!”

Will Somers was bent down in a squat, his great long legs folded up. Beside him in the grass was a frog, emerald green, blinking his fat eyes. Will blinked too, mirroring his actions.

“We are racing,” he said with dignity. “Monsieur le Frog and I have a wager that I shall get to the end of the orchard before him. But he is playing a long game. He is trying to out-strategy me. I would wish someone to tickle him with a stick.”

The court was convulsed, the woman who had screamed had turned and was laughing too. Will, squatting like a frog, knees up around his ears, goggle-eyes blinking, was inescapably funny. Even the queen was smiling. Someone fetched a stick and stood behind the frog and gave it a little poke.

At once the frightened thing leaped forward. Will leaped too in a great unexpected bound. Will was clearly in the lead with his first hop. With a roar the courtiers ran into two lines to form a track, and someone prodded the frog once more. This time he was more alarmed and took three great bounds and started to crawl as well. The ladies flapped their skirts to keep him on course as Will bounded behind him, but the frog was clearly gaining. Another touch of the stick and he was off again, Will in hot pursuit, people shouting odds and bets, the Spaniards shaking their heads at the folly of the English but then laughing despite themselves and throwing down a purse of coins on the frog.

“Someone tickle Will!” came a shout. “He’s lagging back.”

One of the men found a stick and went behind Will who leaped a little faster, to keep out of the way. “I’ll do it!” I said and snatched the stick from him and mimed a great beating when the stick hit the ground behind Will and never so much as touched his breeches.

He went as fast as he could have done, but the frog was thoroughly frightened and seemed to know that the thick thorn hedge threaded with bean flowers at the end of the orchard was a safe haven. He bounded toward it and Will arrived a mere toad’s nose behind. There was a great roar of applause and a chink of coins being exchanged. The queen held her belly and laughed out loud, and Jane Dormer slipped an arm around her waist to support her, and smiled to see her mistress so happy for once.

Will unfolded himself from the ground, his gangling legs stretching out at last, his face creased with a smile as he took his bow. The whole court moved on, talking and laughing about Will Somers’s race with a frog, but I delayed him, a hand on his arm.

“Thank you,” I said.

He looked at me steadily, no trace of the fool about either of us. “Child, you cannot change a king, you can only make him laugh. Sometimes, if you are a very great fool, you can make him laugh at himself, and then you may make him a better man and a better king.”

“I was clumsy,” I confessed. “But Will, I spoke to a woman today and the things that she told me would have made you weep!”

“Far worse in France,” he said quickly. “Worse in Italy. You of all people should know, child, that it is worse in Spain.”

That checked me. “I came to England thinking that this was a country that would be more merciful. Surely the queen is not a woman to burn a priest’s wife.”

He dropped an arm over my shoulders. “Child, you are a fool indeed,” he said gently. “The queen has no mother to advise her, no husband who loves her, and no child to distract her. She wants to do right and she is told by everyone around her that the best way to bring this country to heel is to burn a few nobodies who are destined for hell already. Her heart might ache for them but she will sacrifice them to save the rest, just as she would sacrifice herself for her own immortal soul. Your skill, my skill, is to make sure that it never occurs to her to sacrifice us.”

I turned a face to him which was as grave as he would have wished. “Will, I have trusted her. I would trust her with my life.”

“You do rightly,” he said in mock approbation. “You are a very true fool. It is only a fool who trusts a king.”

In July the court should have been on progress, traveling round the great houses of England, enjoying the hunting and the parties and the pleasures of the English summer, but still the queen said nothing about when we might leave. Our setting out had been delayed day after day waiting for the birth of the prince, and now, twelve weeks late, nobody truly believed that the prince would come.

Nobody said anything to the queen – that was the worst of it. Nobody asked her how she was feeling, whether she was ill, if she was bleeding or sick. She had lost a child which meant more to her than the world itself, and nobody asked her how she did, or if they could comfort her. She was surrounded by a wall of polite silence, but they smiled when she had gone by, and some of them laughed behind their hands and said that she was an old and foolish woman and that she had mistaken the drying-up of her courses for a pregnancy! and what a fool she was! and what a fool she had made of the king! and how he must hate her for making him the laughingstock of Christendom!

She must have known how they spoke of her, and the bitter twist of her mouth showed her hurt; but she walked with her head high through a summertime court which was buzzing with malice and gossip, and she still said nothing. At the end of July, still without a public word from the queen, the midwives packed up their dozens of bandages, put away the embroidered white silk layette, packed away the bonnets, the little bootees, the petticoats and the swaddling bands and finally carried the magnificent wooden cradle from the birthing room. The servants took down the tapestries from the windows and the walls, the thick Turkish rugs from the floor, the straps and the rich bedding from the bed. Without any word of explanation from the doctors, from the midwives or from the queen herself, everyone realized that now there was no baby, now there was no pregnancy, and the matter was closed. The court moved in an almost silent procession to Oatlands Palace and took up residence so quietly that you would have thought that someone had died in hiding, of shame.

John Dee, charged with heresy, conjuring and calculing, disappeared into the terrible maw of the Bishop’s Palace in London. It was said that the coalhouses, the woodstores, the cellars, even the drains below the palace were serving as cells for the hundreds of suspected heretics waiting to be questioned by Bishop Bonner. In the neighboring St. Paul’s Cathedral, the bell tower was crammed with prisoners who scarcely had a place to sit, let alone lie down, deafened by the ringing of the bells in the arches over their heads, exhausted by brutal interrogation, broken by torture and waiting, with dreadful certainty, to be taken out and burned.

I could hear nothing of Mr. Dee, not from Princess Elizabeth, nor from any of the gossips around court. Not even Will Somers, who usually knew everything, had heard of what had happened to John Dee. He scowled at me when I asked him and said, “Fool, keep your own foolish counsel. There are some names better not mentioned between friends, even if they are both fools.”

“I need to know how he fares,” I said urgently. “It is a matter of some… importance to me.”

“He has disappeared,” Will said darkly. “Turns out he was a magician indeed that he could vanish so completely.”

“Dead?” My voice was so low that Will could not have heard the word, he guessed the meaning from my aghast face.

“Lost,” he said. “Disappeared. Which is probably worse.”

Since I did not know what a lost man might say before he disappeared I never slept more than a few hours every night, waking up with a start at every sound outside the door, thinking that they had come for me. I started to dream of the day they had come for my mother, and between my childhood terror for her and my own fears for myself I was in a sorry state.

Not so the Princess Elizabeth. She might never have heard of John Dee. She lived her life at the court with all the Tudor glamour she could exploit, walking in the garden, eating her dinner in the hall, attending Mass sitting one place behind her sister, and always, always, meeting the glance of the king with an unspoken promise.

Their desire for each other lit up the court. It was an almost palpable heat. When she walked into the room everyone could see him tense like a hound when he hears the hunting horn. When he walked behind her chair she would give a little involuntary shiver, as if the very air between them had caressed the nape of her neck. When they met by accident in the gallery they stood three feet apart, as if neither of them dared to go within arm’s length, and they skirted each other, moving one way and then another as if in a dance to music that only they could hear. If she turned her head to one side he would look at her neck, at the pearl swinging from her earlobe, as if he had never seen such a thing before. When he turned his head she would covertly steal a glance at his profile, and her lips would part in a little sigh as she looked at him. When he helped her down from the saddle of her horse, he held her against him after her feet had touched the ground and the two of them were shaking by the time he released her.

There was not a word spoken between them that the queen could not have heard, there was no caress that anyone could see. The simple proximity of day-to-day life was enough to set them both aflame, his hands on her waist, her hands on his shoulders in a dance, the moment when they stood close, eyes locked. There was no doubt that this woman would escape any punishment while this king was ruling the country. He could barely let her out of his sight, he was not likely to send her to the Tower.

The queen had to watch all this. The queen, worn thin to gauntness, with a flat belly, had to watch her younger sister summon the king by merely raising her plucked eyebrow. The queen had to watch the man she still passionately loved at another woman’s beck and call, and that woman, Elizabeth, the unwanted sister who had stolen Mary’s father, was now seducing her husband.

Queen Mary never showed a flicker of emotion. Not when she leaned from her chair and made a smiling remark to Philip and then realized that he had not even heard her, he was so absorbed in watching Elizabeth dance. Not when Elizabeth brought him a book she was reading and composed a Latin motto for the dedication, extempore before the whole court. Not when Elizabeth sang him a tune which she had written for him, not when Elizabeth challenged him to a race while out hunting, and the two of them outstripped the court and were missing for half an hour. Mary had all the dignity of her mother, Katherine of Aragon, who had seen her own husband besotted by another woman for six long years and for the first three of them had sat on her throne and smiled at them both. Just as her mother had done, Mary smiled at Philip with love and understanding, and smiled at Elizabeth with courtesy; and only I, and the few people who really loved her, would have known that her heart was breaking.

I had a letter from my father in August, asking me when I would join them at Calais. Indeed, I was anxious to go. I could not sleep in England now, the place that I had sought as my home was no longer a haven. I wanted to be with my own people, I wanted to be with my father. I wanted to be far from Bishop Bonner and the smoke of Smithfield.

I went to Elizabeth first. “Princess, my father asks me to join him in Calais, do I have your permission to go?”

Her pretty face scowled at once. Elizabeth was a great collector of servants, she never liked anyone to leave. “Hannah, I have need of you.”

“God bless you, Princess, but I think you are well served,” I said with a smile. “And you did not give me a very warm welcome when I came to you at Woodstock.”

“I was ill then,” she said irritably. “And you were Mary’s spy.”

“I have never spied on anyone,” I said, conveniently forgetting my work for Lord Robert. “The queen sent me to you, as I told you. Now I see that you are respected and well-treated at court, I can leave you, you don’t need me.”

“I shall decide what service I need and what I can do without,” she said at once. “Not you.”

I made my little pageboy bow. “Please, Princess, let me go to my father and my betrothed.”

She was diverted by the thought of my marriage, as I knew she would be. She smiled at me, the true Tudor charm shining through her irritability. “Is that what you are after? Ready to put off your motley and go to find your lover? Do you think you are ready to be a woman, little fool? Have you studied me enough?”

“You would not be my study if I wanted to be a good wife,” I said sharply.

She gave a ripple of laughter. “Thank God, no. But what have you learned from me?”

“How to torment a man to madness, how to make a man follow you without even turning your head, and how to get down from your horse so you press against every inch of him.”

She threw back her head and laughed, a loud genuine laugh. “You’ve learned well,” she said. “I only hope you get as much joy from these skills as I do.”

“But what profit?” I asked.

The glance Elizabeth shot me was one of acute calculation. “Some amusement,” she conceded. “And real profit. You and I have slept safer in our beds because the king is in love with me, Hannah. And my path to the throne has been a little clearer since the most powerful man in the world swore he would support me.”

“You have his promise?” I asked, amazed at her.

She nodded. “Oh, yes. My sister is betrayed more deeply than she knows. Half her country is in love with me, and now her husband too. My advice to you, as you go to your husband, is never to trust him and never love him more than he loves you.”

I shook my head, smiling. “I mean to be a good wife,” I said. “He is a good man. I mean to leave this court and go to him and become a good and steady wife to him.”

“Ah, you can’t be that,” she said bluntly. “You’re not a woman grown yet. You’re afraid of your own power. You’re afraid of his desire. You’re afraid of your own desire. You’re afraid of being a woman.”

I said nothing, though it was the truth.

“Oh, go then, little fool. But when you are bored, and you will be bored, you can come back to me again. I like having you in my service.”

I bowed and took myself off to the queen’s rooms.

The moment I opened the door I knew that there was something wrong. My first thought was that Queen Mary was ill, somehow fatally ill and yet not attended. The room was empty of her women, she was all but alone. The room was gloomy; with the shutters closed, it was cold, as the summer heat did not penetrate the thick walls. She was crouched on the floor, doubled-up, folded over her knees, her forehead pressed on the cold hearthstone at the empty fireside. Only Jane Dormer was with her, seated in the shadows behind her, in stubborn silence. When I went to the queen and knelt before her I saw her face was wet with tears.

“Your Grace!”

“Hannah, he is leaving me,” she said.

I shot a bemused look at Jane and she scowled at me, as if I were to blame.

“Leaving you?”

“He is going to the Low Countries. Hannah, he is leaving me… leaving me.”

I took her hands. “Your Grace…”

Her eyes were sightless, filled with tears, fixed on the empty hearth. “He is leaving me,” she said.

I went over to Jane Dormer, stabbing her needle into a linen shirt in the window seat. “How long has she been like this?”

“Since he told her his news, this morning,” she said coldly. “He sent her ladies away when she started screaming that her heart would break, then, when he could not stop her weeping, he left too. He has not come back, and they have not come back.”

“Has she not eaten? Have you brought her nothing?”

She glared at me. “He has broken her heart, as you predicted,” she said flatly. “Don’t you remember it? I do. When I brought her the portrait and I was so hopeful and she was so taken with him. You said he would break her heart and he has done so. Him with his baby that was there and then gone, him with his Spanish lords longing to go and fight the French, and forever complaining about England. Now he has told her he is going to war against the French, but not when he will come back; and she can say nothing but that he is leaving, leaving her. And she cries as if she would die of grief.”

“Shouldn’t we get her to bed?”

“Why?” she demanded. “He won’t come to her in bed for lust, if he won’t come here for pity, and his presence is the only thing that will help her.”

“Mistress Jane, we cannot just sit here and see her cry and cry like this.”

“What would you have us do?” she asked. “Her happiness is given over to a man who does not care enough for her to stay when she has lost his baby and has lost the love of her people for him. A man who does not have enough common pity to give her a word of comfort. We cannot heal this hurt with a cup of warm ale and a brick beneath her feet.”

“Well let’s get her that, at least,” I said, falling on the suggestion.

“You get it,” she said. “I’m not leaving her alone. This is a woman who could die of loneliness.”

I went to the queen and knelt beside her where she keened, soundlessly, her forehead knocking against the hearthstone as she rocked forward and back. “Your Grace, I’m going down to the kitchen, can I bring you anything to eat or drink?”

She sat back on her heels but did not look at me. Her forehead was bloody where she had grazed it against the stone. Her gaze remained fixed on the empty hearth; but she put out her cold little hand and took mine. “Don’t leave me,” she said. “Not you as well. He’s leaving me, you know, Hannah. He just told me. He’s leaving me, and I don’t know how I can bear to live.”

Dear Father,

Thank you for your blessing in your letter to me. I am glad that you are well and that the shop in Calais is doing so well. I should have been glad to obey your command and come to you at once but when I went to the queen for permission to leave her service I found her so ill that I cannot leave her, at least for this month. The king has set sail for the Lowlands, and she cannot be happy without him, she is quite desolate. We have come to Greenwich and it is like a court in mourning. I will stay with her until he returns which he has promised, on his word of honor, will be very soon. When he comes back I shall come to you without delay. I hope this is agreeable to you, Father, and that you will explain to Daniel and to his mother that I would prefer to be with them, but that I feel it is my duty to stay with the queen at this time of her great unhappiness.

I send you my love and duty and hope to see you soon -

Your Hannah

Dear Daniel,

Forgive me, I cannot come yet. The queen is in a despair so great that I dare not leave her. The king has left and she is clinging to all her other friends. She is so bereft that I fear for her mind. Forgive me, love, I will come as soon as I can. He has sworn it is a brief absence, merely to protect his interests in the Low Countries and so we expect him back within the month. September or October at the latest, I will be able to come to you. I want to be your wife, indeed I do.

Hannah