Читать книгу Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2: The Queen’s Fool, The Virgin’s Lover, The Other Queen - Philippa Gregory - Страница 13

It was as dark as midnight, though it was still only six in the evening, the mist peeling like a black shroud off the corpse of the cold river. The smell in my nostrils was the scent of despair from the massive wet weeping walls of the Tower of London, surely the most gloomy palace that any monarch ever built. I presented myself to the postern gate and the guard held up a flaming torch to see my white face.

‘A young lad,’ he concluded.

‘I’ve got books to deliver to Lord Robert,’ I said.

He withdrew the torch and the darkness flooded over me, then the creak of the hinges warned me that he was opening the gate outward and I stepped back to let the big wet timbers swing open, and then I stepped forward to go in.

‘Let me see them,’ he said.

I proffered the books readily enough. They were works of theology defending the Papist point of view, licensed by the Vatican and authorised by the queen’s own council.

‘Go through,’ the guard said.

I walked on the slippery cobblestones to the guardhouse, and from there along a causeway, the rank mud shining in the moonlight on either side, and then up a flight of wooden steps to the high doorway in the fortress wall of the white tower. If there was an attack or a rescue attempt, the soldiers inside could just kick the outside steps away, and they were unreachable. No-one could get my lord out.

Another soldier was waiting in the doorway. He led me inside and then rapped at an inner door and swung it open to admit me.

At last I saw him, my Lord Robert, leaning over his papers, a candle at his elbow, the golden light shining on his dark head, on his pale skin, and then the slow-dawning radiance of his smile.

‘Mistress Boy! Oh! My Mistress Boy!’

I dropped to one knee. ‘My lord!’ was all I could say before I burst into tears.

He laughed, pulled me to my feet, put his arm around my shoulders, wiped my face, all in one dizzying caress. ‘Come now, child, come now. What’s wrong?’

‘It’s you!’ I gulped. ‘You being here. And you look so …’ I could not bear to say ‘pale’, ‘ill’, ‘tired’, ‘defeated’, but all those words were true. ‘Imprisoned,’ I found at last. ‘And your lovely clothes! And … and what’s going to happen now?’

He laughed as if none of it mattered, and led me over to the fire, seated himself on a chair and pulled up a stool so that I was facing him, like a favourite nephew. Timidly, I reached forward and put my hands on his knees. I wanted to touch him to be sure that he was real. I had dreamed of him so often, and now he was here before me; unchanged but for the deep lines scored on his face by defeat and disappointment.

‘Lord Robert …’ I whispered.

He met my gaze. ‘Yes, little one,’ he said softly. ‘It was a great gamble and we lost, and the price we will pay is a heavy one. But you’re not a child; you know that it’s not an easy world. I will pay the price when I have to.’

‘Will they …?’ I could not bear to ask him if it was his own death that he was facing with this indomitable smile.

‘Oh, I should think so,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Very soon. I would, if I were the queen. Now tell me the news. We don’t have much time.’

I pulled my stool a little closer, marshalling my thoughts. I did not want to tell him the news, which was all bad, I wanted to look into his drawn face, and touch his hand. I wanted to tell him that I had longed to see him, and that I had written him letter after letter in the code which I knew he would have lost, and sent them all into the flames of the fire.

‘Come on,’ he said eagerly. ‘Tell me everything.’

‘The queen is considering if she should marry, you’ll know that, I suppose,’ I said, low-voiced. ‘And she has been ill. They have proposed one man after another. The best choice is Philip of Spain. The Spanish ambassador tells her that it will be a good marriage but she is afraid. She knows she cannot rule alone but she is afraid of a man ruling over her.’

‘But she will go ahead?’

‘She might withdraw. I can’t tell. She is half-sick with fear at the thought of it. She is afraid of having a man in her bed, and afraid for her throne without one.’

‘And Lady Elizabeth?’

I glanced at the thick wooden door and dropped my low voice to an even quieter murmur. ‘She and the queen cannot agree these days,’ I said. ‘They started very warmly, Lady Mary wanted Elizabeth at her side all the time, acknowledged her as her heir; but they cannot live happily together now. Lady Elizabeth is no longer the little girl of the queen’s teaching, and in debate she is her master. She is as quick-witted as an alchemist. The queen hates argument about sacred things and Lady Elizabeth has ready arguments for everything and accepts nothing. She looks at everything with hard eyes …’ I broke off.

‘Hard eyes?’ he queried. ‘She has beautiful eyes.’

‘I mean she looks hard at things,’ I explained. ‘She has no faith, she never closes her eyes in awe. She is not like my lady, you never see her amazed at the raising of the Host. She wants to know everything as a fact, she trusts nothing.’

Lord Robert nodded at the accuracy of the description. ‘Aye. She was always one to take nothing on trust.’

‘The queen forced her to Mass and Lady Elizabeth went with her hand on her belly, sighing for pain. Then, when the queen pressed her again, she said that she had converted. The queen wanted the truth from her. She asked her to tell the secrets of her heart: if she believed in the Holy Sacrament or no.’

‘The secrets of Elizabeth’s heart!’ he exclaimed, laughing. ‘What can the queen be thinking of? Elizabeth allows no-one near the secrets of her heart. Even when she was a child in the nursery she would barely whisper them to herself.’

‘Well, she said she would give out in public that she is convinced of the merits of the old religion,’ I said. ‘But she doesn’t do so. And she goes to Mass only when she has to. And everyone says …’

‘What do they say, my little spy?’

‘That she is sending out letters to true Protestants, that she has a network of supporters. That the French will pay for an uprising against the queen. And that, at the very least, she only has to wait until the queen dies and then the throne is all hers anyway, and she can throw off all disguise and be a Protestant queen as she is now a Protestant princess.’

‘Oho.’ He paused, taking all this in. ‘And the queen believes all this slander?’

I looked up at him, hoping that he would understand. ‘She thought that Elizabeth would be a sister to her,’ I said. ‘She went with her into London at the very moment of her greatest triumph. She took Elizabeth at her side then, and again at the day of her coronation. What more could she do to show that she loved her and trusted her and saw her as the next heir? And since then, every day, she hears that Elizabeth has done this, or said that, and she sees Elizabeth avoiding Mass, and pretending that she will go, and sliding in her conscience forward and back as she wishes. And Elizabeth …’ I broke off.

‘Elizabeth what?’

‘She was there at the coronation, she was placed second only to the queen at the queen’s own request. She rode in a chariot behind the queen’s,’ I said in a fierce whisper. ‘She carried her train at the coronation, she was first to kneel before the new queen and put her hands in hers and swear to be a true and faithful subject. She swore fidelity before God. How can she now plot against her?’

He sat back in his chair and observed my heat with interest. ‘Is the queen angry with Elizabeth?’

I shook my head. ‘No. It’s worse than anger. She is disappointed in her. She is lonely, Lord Robert. She wanted her little sister at her side. She singled her out for love and respect. She can hardly believe now that Elizabeth does not love her; to find that Elizabeth would plot against her is very painful. And she is assured that she is plotting. Someone comes with a new story every day.’

‘Do they bring any evidence?’

‘Enough to have her arrested a dozen times over, I think. There are too many rumours for her to be as innocent as she looks.’

‘And still the queen does nothing against her?’

‘She wants to bring peace,’ I said. ‘She won’t act against Elizabeth unless she has to. She says that she won’t execute Lady Jane, or your brother …’ I did not say ‘or you’ but we were both thinking of the sentence of death hanging over him. ‘She wants to bring peace to this country.’

‘Well, amen to that,’ Lord Robert said. ‘And will Elizabeth stay at court for Christmas?’

‘She has asked to leave. She says she is ill again and needs the peace of the country.’

‘And is she ill?’

I shrugged. ‘Who can say? She was very bloated and ill-looking when I saw her the other day. But nobody ever really sees her. She keeps to her rooms. She comes out only when she has to. No-one speaks to her, the women are unkind to her. Everyone says there is nothing wrong with her but envy.’

He shook his head at the petty spite of women. ‘All this and the poor girl has to carry a rosary and a missal and go to Mass!’

‘She’s not a poor girl,’ I said, stung. ‘She is poorly treated by the ladies of the queen’s court, but she can blame herself for that. It is only when there are people to see that she speaks very softly and walks with her head drooping. And as for Mass, everyone has to go, all the time. They sing a Mass in the queen’s chapel seven times a day. Everyone goes at least twice a day.’

He half-smiled at the rapid turn of the court to piety. ‘And Lady Jane? Is she truly not to die for her treason?’

‘The queen will never kill her own cousin, a young woman,’ I assured him. ‘She’s to live here for a while as a prisoner in the Tower, and then be released, when the country is quiet.’

He made a little grimace. ‘A great risk for the queen. If I were her advisor I would tell her to make an end of it, to make an end of all of us.’

‘She knows it was not Lady Jane’s choice. It would be cruel of the queen to punish Lady Jane; and she is never cruel.’

‘And the girl was only sixteen,’ he said, half to himself. He rose to his feet, hardly aware of me. ‘I should have stopped it,’ he said. ‘I should have kept Jane safely out of it, whatever plots my father made …’

He looked out of the window at the dark courtyard below where his own father had been executed, begging for mercy, offering evidence against Jane, against his sons, anyone, if he could be spared. When he had knelt before the block, the blindfold over his eyes had slipped down and he had pulled it up and then groped about on his hands and knees, pleading with the headsman to wait until he was ready. It was a miserable end; but not as miserable as the death he had given to the young king in his charge, who had been innocent of everything.

‘I was a fool,’ Robert said bitterly. ‘Blinded by my own ambition. I am surprised you did not foresee it, child, I would have thought the heavens would have been rocking with laughter over the Dudley hubris. I wish to God you had warned me in time.’

I stood, my back to the fire. ‘I wish I had done,’ I said sadly. ‘I would have done anything to save you from being here.’

‘And shall I stay here till I rot?’ he asked quietly. ‘Can you foresee that for me? Some nights I hear the rats skitter on the floor and I think, this is all I will ever hear, this square of blue sky through the window will be all I ever see. She will not behead me, but she will cut off my youth.’

In silence, I shook my head. ‘I listen and listen, and once I asked her directly. She said that she wanted no blood spilt that could be spared. She won’t execute you and she must let you go free when Lady Jane goes free.’

‘I wouldn’t if I were her,’ he said quietly. ‘If I were her, I would rid myself of Elizabeth, of Jane, of my brother and of me; and name Mary Stuart as the next heir, French or not. One clean cut. That’s the only way to get this country back into the Papist church and keep it there, and soon she will realise it. She has to wipe us out, this generation of Protestant plotters. If she does not she will have to cut off one head after another and watch others rise.’

I crossed the room and stood behind him. Timidly I put my hand on his shoulder. He turned and looked at me as if he had forgotten my presence. ‘And you?’ he asked gently. ‘Safe in royal service now?’

‘I am never safe,’ I said in a low voice. ‘You know why. I never can be safe. I never can feel safe. I love the queen and no-one questions who I am or where I have come from. I am known as her fool, as if I had been with her all my life. I should feel safe, but I always feel as if I am creeping across thin ice.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll take your secret with me to the scaffold if I go that way,’ he promised. ‘You have nothing to fear from me, child. And I have told no-one who you were or where you came from.’

I nodded. When I looked up he was watching me, his dark eyes warm. ‘You’ve grown, Mistress Boy,’ he remarked. ‘Soon be a woman. I shall be sorry not to see it.’

I had nothing to say. I stood dumbly before him. He smiled as if he knew only too well the churn of my emotions. ‘Ah, little fool. I should have left you in your father’s shop that day, and not drawn you into this.’

‘My father told me to bid you farewell.’

‘Aye, he is right. You can leave me now. I will release you from your promise to love me. You are no longer my vassal. I let you go.’

It was little more than a joke to him. He knew as well as I did that you cannot release a girl from her promise to love a man. She either gets herself free or she is bound for life.

‘I’m not free,’ I whispered. ‘My father told me to come to see you and to say goodbye. But I am not free. I never will be.’

‘Would you serve me still?’

I nodded.

Lord Robert smiled and leaned forward, his mouth so close to my ear that I could feel the warmth of his breath. ‘Then do this one last thing for me. Go to Lady Elizabeth. Bid her be of good cheer. Tell her to study with my old tutor, John Dee. Tell her to seek him out, and study with him, without fail. Then find John Dee and tell him two things. One: I think he should make contact with his old master, Sir William Pickering. Got that?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Sir William. I know of him.’

‘And two: tell him to meet also with James Crofts and Tom Wyatt. I think they are engaged in an alchemical experiment that is near to John Dee’s heart. Edward Courtenay can make a chemical wedding. Can you remember all of that?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know what it means.’

‘All the better. They are to make gold from the basest of metal, and cast down silver to ash. Tell him that. He’ll know what I mean. And tell him that I will play my part in the alchemy, if he will get me there.’

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘Just remember the message,’ he said. ‘Tell it back to me.’

I repeated it, word for word, and he nodded. ‘And finally, come back to me just once, for one last time, and tell me what you can see in John Dee’s mirror. I need to know. Whatever becomes of me, I need to know what will happen to England.’

I nodded, but he did not let me go at once. He put his lips to my neck, just below my ear, a little brush of a kiss, a little breath of a kiss. ‘You’re a good girl,’ he said. ‘And I thank you.’

He let me go then, and I stepped back, backwards and backwards from him as if I could not bear to turn away. I tapped on the door behind me, and the guard swung it open. ‘God bless you and keep you safe, my lord,’ I said. Lord Robert turned his head and gave me a smile which was so sweet that it broke my heart even as the door closed and hid him from me.

‘God speed, lad,’ he replied evenly, to the closing door, and then it was shut and I was in the darkness and the cold and without him once more.

In the street outside I took to my heels and started to run home. A shadow suddenly stepped out of a doorway and blocked my way. I gasped in alarm.

‘Hush, it’s me, Daniel.’

‘How did you know I was here?’

‘I went to your father’s shop and he told me you were taking books into the Tower for Lord Robert.’

‘Oh.’

He fell into step beside me. ‘Surely you don’t need to serve him now.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He has released me.’ I very much wished that Daniel would go away so that I could think of the kiss on my neck and the warmth of Lord Robert’s breath against my ear.

‘So you won’t serve him again,’ he said pedantically.

‘I just said,’ I snapped. ‘I am not serving him now. I am delivering books for my father. It just happened to be to Lord Robert. I did not even see him. I just took them in and gave them to a guard.’

‘Then when did he release you from his service?’

‘Months ago,’ I lied, trying to recover.

‘When he was arrested?’

I rounded on him. ‘What does it matter to you? I am released from his service, I serve Queen Mary now. What more d’you need to know?’

His temper rose with mine. ‘I have a right to know everything that you do. You are to be my wife, your name will be mine. And while you insist on running from court to Tower, you put yourself into danger, and the rest of us into danger too.’

‘You’re in no danger,’ I retorted. ‘What would you know of it? You’ve never done anything or been anywhere. The world has turned upside down and back again while you have stayed safe at home. Why should you be in danger?’

‘I’ve not played off one master against another, and shown a false face and spied and given false witness, if that’s what you mean,’ he said sharply. ‘I did not ever think those were great and admirable acts. I have kept my faith and buried my father according to my faith. I have supported my mother and my sisters, and I have saved money against the day of my marriage. Our marriage. While you run around the dark streets, dressed as a pageboy, serve in a Papist court, visit a condemned traitor, and reproach me for having done nothing.’

I pulled my hand away from him. ‘Don’t you see he’s going to die?’ I shouted, and then I was aware that the tears were streaming down my face. Angrily, I rubbed them away with my sleeve. ‘Don’t you know that they’re going to execute him and no-one can save him? Or at best they’ll leave him in there to wait and wait and wait and die of waiting? He can’t even save himself? Don’t you see that everyone I love seems to be taken from me, for no crime? With no way of saving them? Don’t you think I miss my mother every day of my life? Don’t you think I smell smoke every night in my dreams and now this man … this man …’ I broke off in tears.

Daniel caught me by the shoulders, not in an embrace, but with a firm grip to hold me at arm’s length so that he could read my face with a long impartial measuring glance. ‘This man is nothing to do with the death of your mother,’ he said flatly. ‘Nothing to do with someone dying for their faith. So don’t dress up your lust as sorrow. You have been serving two masters, sworn enemies. One of them was bound to end up in there. If it was not Lord Robert then it would have been Queen Mary. One of them was bound to triumph, one of them was bound to die.’

I wrenched myself from his grip, pulling away from his hard unsympathetic eyes, and started to trudge for home. After a few moments I heard him come after me.

‘Would you be weeping like this if it had been Queen Mary in there, with her head on the block?’ he asked.

‘Ssshhh,’ I said, always cautious. ‘Yes.’

He said nothing, but his silence showed his great scepticism.

‘I have done nothing dishonourable,’ I said flatly.

‘I doubt you,’ he said, as coldly as me. ‘If you have been honourable it has only been for lack of opportunity.’

‘Whoreson,’ I said under my breath so he could not hear, and he marched me home in silence and we parted at my doorway with a handshake which was neither cousinly nor loving. I let him go, I would have been glad to throw a large volume at his retreating upright head. Then I went in to my father and wondered how long it would before Daniel came to see him to say that he wanted to be released from our betrothal, and what would happen to me then.

As Fool to the queen I was expected to be in her chambers every day, at her side. But as soon as I could be absent for an hour without attracting notice, I took a chance, and went to the old Dudley rooms to look for John Dee. I tapped on the door and a man in strange livery opened it and looked suspiciously at me.

‘I thought the Dudley household lived here,’ I said timidly.

‘Not any more,’ he said smartly.

‘Where will I find them?’

He shrugged. ‘The duchess has rooms near the queen. Her sons are in the Tower. Her husband is in hell.’

‘The tutor?’

He shrugged. ‘Gone away. Back to his father’s house, I should think.’

I nodded and took myself back to the queen’s rooms, and sat by her feet on a small cushion. Her little dog, a greyhound, had a cushion that matched mine; and dog and I sat, noses parallel, watching with the same brown-eyed incomprehension, while the courtiers came and made their bows and applied for land and places and favours of grants of money, and sometimes the queen patted the dog and sometimes she patted me; and dog and I stayed mum, and never said what we thought of these pious Catholics who had kept the flame of their faith so wonderfully hidden for so long. Well-hidden while they proclaimed the Protestant religion, hidden while they saw Catholics burned, waiting till this moment, like daffodils at Easter, to burst forth and flower. To think that there were so many believers in the country, and nobody knew them till now!

When they were all gone she walked up to a window embrasure where no-one could hear us and beckoned for me. ‘Hannah?’

‘Yes, Your Grace?’ I went to her side at once.

‘Isn’t it time you were out of your pageboy livery? You will be a woman soon.’

I hesitated. ‘If you will allow it, Your Grace, I would rather go on dressed as a pageboy.’

She looked at me curiously. ‘Don’t you long for a pretty gown, and to grow your hair, child? Don’t you want to be a young woman? I thought I would give you a gown for Christmas.’

I thought of my mother plaiting my thick black hair and winding the plaits around her fingers and telling me I would become a beauty, a famously beautiful woman. I thought of her chiding me for my love of rich cloth, and how I had begged for a green velvet gown for Hanukah.

‘I lost my love of finery when I lost my mother,’ I said quietly. ‘There’s no pleasure in it for me without her to choose and fit the dresses on me, and tell me that they suit me. I don’t even want long hair without her here to plait it for me.’

Her face became tender. ‘When did she die?’

‘When I was eleven years old,’ I lied. ‘She took the plague.’ I would never risk revealing the truth that she had been burned as a heretic, not even with this queen who looked so gravely and sorrowfully into my face.

‘Poor child,’ she said gently. ‘It is a loss that you never forget. You can learn to bear it, but you never forget it.’

‘Every time something good happens to me I want to tell her. Every time something bad happens I want her help.’

She nodded. ‘I used to write to my mother, even when I knew that they would never allow me to send my letters to her. Even though there was nothing in them that they could have objected to, no secrets, just my need for her and my sorrow that she was far from me. But they would not let me write to her. I just wanted to tell her that I loved her and I missed her. And then she died and I was not allowed to go to her. I could not even hold her hand and close her eyes.’

She put her hand to her eyes and pressed her cool fingertips against her eyelids, as if to hold back old tears.

She cleared her throat. ‘But this cannot mean that you never wear a gown,’ she said lightly. ‘Life goes on, Hannah. Your mother would not want you to grieve. She would want you to grow to be a woman, a beautiful young woman. She would not want her little girl to wear boy’s clothes forever.’

‘I don’t want to be a woman,’ I said simply. ‘My father has arranged a marriage for me, but I know I am not yet ready to be a woman and a wife.’

‘You can’t want to be a virgin like me,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘It’s not a course many women would choose.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not a virgin queen like you, I have not dedicated myself to being a single woman; but it’s as if …’ I broke off. ‘As if I don’t know how to be a woman,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘I watch you, and I watch the ladies of the court.’ Tactfully I did not add that of them all, I watched the Lady Elizabeth, who seemed to me to be the epitome of the grace of a girl and the dignity of a princess. ‘I watch everyone, and I think I will learn it in time. But not yet.’

She nodded. ‘I understand exactly. I don’t know how to be a queen without a husband at my side. I have never known of a queen without a man to guide her. And yet I am so afraid of marrying …’ She paused. ‘I don’t think a man could ever understand the dread that a woman might feel at the thought of marriage. Especially a woman like me, not a young woman, not a woman given to the pleasures of the flesh, not a woman who is even very desirable …’ She put a hand out to prevent me from contradicting her. ‘I know it, Hannah, you needn’t flatter me.

‘And worse than all of these things, I am not a woman who finds it easy to trust men. I hate having to sit with the men of power. When they argue in council, my heart thumps in my chest, and I am afraid that my voice will shake when I have to speak.

‘And yet I despise men who are weak. When I look at my cousin Edward Courtenay that the Lord Chancellor would have me marry, I could laugh out loud at the thought of it. The boy is a puppy and a vain fool and I could never, never debase myself to lie under such a one as him.

‘But if one married a man who was accustomed to command …’ She paused. ‘What a terror it would be,’ she said quietly. ‘To put your heart in the keeping of a stranger! What a terror to promise to obey a man who might order you to do anything! And to promise to love a man till death …’ She broke off. ‘After all, men do not always consider themselves bound by such promises. And what happens then to a good wife?’

‘Did you think you would live and die a virgin?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘When I was a princess I was betrothed over and over again. But when my father denied me and called me his bastard, I knew that there would be no offers of marriage. I set away all thoughts of it then, and all thoughts of my own children too.’

‘Your father denied you?’

‘Yes,’ the queen said shortly. ‘They made me swear on the Bible to my own bastardy.’ Her voice shook, she drew a breath. ‘No prince in Europe would have married me after that. To tell you the truth, I was so ashamed I would not have wanted a husband. I could not have looked an honourable man in the face. And when my father died and my brother became king, I thought I could be like a dowager, like a favourite old godmother, his older sister who might advise him, and I thought he would have children that I might care for. But now everything has changed and I am queen, and even though I am queen I find I still cannot make my own choices.’ She paused. ‘They have offered me Philip of Spain, you know.’

I waited.

She turned to me as if I had more sense than her greyhound, as if I could advise her. ‘Hannah, I am less than a man and less than a woman. I cannot rule as a man, and I cannot give the country the heir that it has a right to desire. I am a half-prince. Neither queen nor king.’

‘Surely, the country only needs a ruler it can respect,’ I said tentatively. ‘And it needs years of peace. I am new-come to this land but even I can see that men don’t know what is right and wrong any more. The church has changed and changed again within their lifetimes and they have had to change and change with it. And there is much poverty in the city, and hunger in the country. Can’t you just wait? Can’t you just feed the poor and restore the lands to the landless, set men back to work and get the beggars and the thieves off the roads? Bring back the beauty to the church and give the monasteries back their lands?’

‘And when I have done that?’ Queen Mary asked, a strange shaking intensity in her voice. ‘What then? When the country is safe inside the church again, when everyone is well fed, when the barns are full and the monasteries and nunneries are prosperous? When the priests are pure in their living and the Bible is read to the people as it should be? When the Mass is celebrated in every village, and the matins bells ring out over all the fields every morning as they should do, as they always have done? What then?’

‘Then you will have done the task that God called you to, won’t you? …’ I stammered.

She shook her head. ‘I will tell you, what then. Then illness or accident befalls me and I die childless. And the bastard of Anne Boleyn and the lute player Mark Smeaton steps up to claim the throne: Elizabeth. And the moment she is on the throne she throws off her mask and shows herself for what she is.’

I could hardly recognise the hiss of her voice, the hatred in her face. ‘Why, what is she? What has she done to upset you so?’

‘She has betrayed me,’ she said flatly. ‘When I was fighting for our inheritance, hers as well as mine, she was writing to the man who was marching against me. I know that now. While I was fighting for her as well as for myself she was making an agreement with him for when I was dead. She would have signed it on my execution block.

‘When I took her into London at my side they cheered the Protestant princess, and she smiled at the cheers. When I sent her teachers and scholars to explain to her the errors of her faith she smiled at them, her mother’s sly smile, and told them that now she understood, now she would receive the blessing of Mass.

‘And then she comes to Mass like a woman forced against her conscience. Hannah! When I was no older than her I had the greatest men of England curse me to my face and threaten me with death if I did not conform to the new religion. They took my mother from me and she died ill and heartbroken and alone, but she never bowed the knee to them. They threatened me with the scaffold for treason! They threatened me with fire for heresy! They were burning men and women for less than I was saying. I had to cling to my faith with all my courage and I did not renounce it until the Emperor of Spain himself told me that I should do so, that I must renounce it, because to keep it was my death sentence. He knew they would kill me if I did not renounce my faith. But all I have done to Elizabeth is to beg her to save her own soul and be my little sister once more!’

‘Your Grace …’ I whispered. ‘She’s only young, she will learn.’

‘She’s not that young.’

‘She will learn …’

‘If she is going to learn then she chooses the wrong tutors. She conspires with the kingdom of France against me, she has a band of men who would stop at nothing to see her inherit. Every day someone tells me of another foul plot, and always, the tendrils come back to her. Every time I look at her now, I see a woman steeped in sin, just like her mother, the poisoner. I can almost see her flesh going black from the sin from her heart. I see her turning her back on the Holy Church, I see her turning her back on my love, I see her rushing towards treason and sin.’

‘You said she was your little sister,’ I reminded her. ‘You said you loved her as if she was your own child.’

‘I did love her,’ the queen said bitterly. ‘More than she remembers. More than I should have done, knowing what her mother did to mine. I did love her. But she is not the child that I loved any more. She is not the little girl that I taught to write and read. She has gone wrong. She has been corrupted. She is steeped in sin. I cannot save her; she is a witch and the daughter of a witch.’

‘She’s a young woman,’ I protested quietly. ‘Not a witch.’

‘Worse than a witch,’ she accused. ‘A heretic. A hypocrite. A whore. I know her for all these. A heretic because she takes the Mass; but I know her to be a Protestant, and she is forsworn with her eyes on the Host. A hypocrite because she does not even own to her faith. There are brave men and women in this land who would go to the stake for their error; but she is not one of them. When my brother Edward was on the throne she was then a shining light of the reformed religion. She was the Protestant princess in her dark gowns and her white ruffs and her eyes turned down and no gold or jewels in her ears or on her fingers. Now he is dead she kneels beside me to see the raising of the Host, and crosses herself, and curtsies to the altar, but I know it is all false. It is an insult to me, which is nothing; but it is an insult to my mother who was pushed aside for her mother, and it is an insult to the Holy Church, which is a sin against God himself.

‘And, God forgive her, she is a whore because of what she did with Thomas Seymour. The whole world would know it; but that other great Protestant whore hid the two of them, and died in hiding it.’

‘Who?’ I asked. I was appalled and fascinated, all at once, remembering the girl in the sunlit garden and the man who held her against a tree and put his hand up her skirt.

‘Katherine Parr,’ Queen Mary said through her teeth. ‘She knew that her husband Thomas Seymour had been seduced by Elizabeth. She caught them at it in Elizabeth’s chamber, Elizabeth in her shift, Lord Thomas all over her. Katherine Parr bundled Elizabeth off to the country, out of the way. She faced down the gossip, she denied everything. She protected the girl – well, she had to, the child was in her house. She protected her husband, and then she died giving birth to his child. Fool. Foolish woman.’

She shook her head. ‘Poor woman. She loved him so much that she married him before my father was cold in the ground. She scandalised the court, and she risked her place in the world. And he rewarded her by tickling a fourteen-year-old girl in her house, under her supervision. And that girl, my Elizabeth, my little sister, wriggled under his caresses and protested that she would die if he touched her again, but never locked her bedroom door, never complained to her stepmother and never found a better lodging.

‘I knew of it. Good God, there was such gossip even I, hidden away in the country, heard of it. I wrote to her and said she should come to me, I had a home, I could provide for us both. She wrote me very sweetly, very fair. She wrote to me that nothing was happening to her and that she did not need to move house. And all the time she was letting him into her chamber in the morning, and letting him lift the hem of her gown to see her shift, and one time, God help her, letting him cut her gown off her, so that she was all but naked before him.

‘She never sent to me for help, though she knew I would have taken her away within the day. A little whore then, and a whore now, and I knew it, God forgive me, and hoped that she might be bettered. I thought if I gave her a place at my side, and the honour which would be hers, then she would grow into being a princess. I thought that a young whore in the making could be unmade, could be made anew, could be taught to be a princess. But she cannot. She will not. You will see how she behaves in the future when she has the chance of a tickling once again.’

‘Your Grace …’ I was overwhelmed by the spilling out of her spite.

She took a breath and turned to the window. She rested her forehead against the thick pane of glass and I saw how the heat from her hair misted the glass. It was cold outside, the unbearable English winter, and the Thames was iron-grey beyond the stone-coloured garden beneath the pewter sky. I could see the queen’s reflected face in the thick glass like a cameo drowned in water, I could see the feverish energy pulsing through her body.

‘I must be free of this hatred,’ she said quietly. ‘I must be free of the pain that her mother brought me. I must disown her.’

‘Your Grace …’ I said again, more gently.

She turned back to me.

‘She will come after me if I die without heir,’ she said flatly. ‘That lying whore. Anything I achieve will be overturned by her, will be spoiled by her. Everything in my life has always been despoiled by her. I was England’s only princess and the great joy of my mother’s heart. A moment, an eyelid blink, and I was serving in Elizabeth’s nursery as her maid, and my mother was deserted and then dead. Elizabeth, the whore’s daughter, is corruption itself. I have to have a child to put between her and the throne. It is the greatest duty I owe to this country, to my mother and to myself.’

‘You will have to marry Philip of Spain?’

She nodded. ‘He, as well as any other,’ she said. ‘I can make a treaty with him that will hold. He knows, his father knows, what this country is like. I can be queen and wife with a man like him. He has his own land, his own fortune, he does not need little England. And then I can be queen of my own country and wife to him, and a mother.’

There was something in the way she said ‘mother’ that alerted me. I had felt her touch on my head, I had seen her with the children that tumbled out from dirty cottages.

‘Why, you long for a child for yourself,’ I exclaimed.

I saw the need in her eyes and then she turned away from me to the window and the view of the cold river again. ‘Oh yes,’ she said quietly to the cold garden outside. ‘I have longed for a child of my own for twenty years. That was why I loved my poor brother so much. In the hunger of my heart I even loved Elizabeth when she was a baby. Perhaps God in his goodness will give me a son of my own now.’ She looked at me. ‘You have the Sight. Will I have a child, Hannah? Will I have a child of my own, to hold in my arms and to love? A child who will grow and inherit my throne and make England a great country?’

I waited for a moment, in case anything came to me. All I had was a sense of great despair and hopelessness, nothing more. I dropped my gaze to the floor and I knelt before her. ‘I am sorry, Your Grace,’ I said. ‘The Sight cannot be commanded. I can’t tell you the answer to that question, nor any other. My vision comes and goes as it wishes. I cannot say if you will have a child.’

‘Then I will predict for you,’ she said grimly. ‘I will tell you this. I will marry this Philip of Spain without love, without desire, but with a very true sense that it is what this country needs. He will bring us the wealth and the power of Spain, he will make this country a part of the empire, which we need so much. He will help me restore this country to the discipline of the true church, and he will give me a child to be a godly Christian heir to keep this country in the right ways.’ She paused. ‘You should say Amen,’ she prompted me.

‘Amen.’ It was easily said. I was a Christian Jew, a girl dressed as a boy, a young woman in love with one man and betrothed to another. A girl grieving for her mother and never mentioning her name. I spent all my life in feigned agreement. ‘Amen,’ I said.

The door opened and Jane Dormer beckoned two porters into the room, carrying a frame between them, swathed in linen cloth. ‘Something for you, Your Grace!’ she said with a roguish smile. ‘Something you will like to see.’

The queen was slow to throw off her thoughtful mood. ‘What is it, Jane? I am weary now.’

In answer, Mistress Dormer waited till the men had leaned their burden against the wall, and then took the hem of the cloth and turned to her royal mistress. ‘Are you ready?’

The queen was persuaded into smiling. ‘Is this the portrait of Philip?’ she asked. ‘I won’t be cozened by it. You forget, I am old enough to remember when my father married a portrait but divorced the sitter. He said that it was the worst trick that had ever been played upon a man. A portrait is always handsome. I won’t be taken in by a portrait.’

In answer, Jane Dormer swept the cloth aside. I heard the queen’s indrawn breath, saw her colour come and go in her pale cheeks, and then heard her little girlish giggle. ‘My God, Jane, this is a man!’ she whispered.

Jane Dormer collapsed with laughter, dropped the cloth and dashed across the room to stand back to admire the portrait.

He was indeed a handsome man. He was young, he must have been in his mid-twenties to the queen’s forty years, brown-bearded with dark smiling eyes, a full sensual mouth, a good figure, broad shoulders and slim strong legs. He was wearing dark red with a dark red cap at a rakish angle on his curly brown hair. He looked like a man who would whisper lovemaking in a woman’s ear until she was weak at the knees. He looked like a handsome rogue, but there was a firmness about his mouth and a set to his shoulders which suggested that he might nonetheless be capable of honest dealing.

‘What d’you think, Your Grace?’ Jane demanded.

The queen said nothing. I looked from the portrait back to her face again. She was gazing at him. For a moment I could not think what she reminded me of, then I knew it. It was my own face in the looking glass when I thought of Robert Dudley. It was that same awakening, widening of the eyes, the same unaware dawning of a smile.

‘He’s very … pleasing,’ she said.

Jane Dormer met my eyes and smiled at me.

I wanted to smile back but my head was ringing with a strange noise, a tingling noise like little bells.

‘What dark eyes he has,’ Jane pointed out.

‘Yes,’ the queen breathed.

‘He wears his collar very high, that must be the fashion in Spain. He’ll bring the newest fashions to court.’

The noise in my head was getting louder. I put my hands over my ears but the sound echoed louder inside my head, it was a jangling noise now.

‘Yes,’ the queen said.

‘And see? A gold cross on a chain,’ Jane cooed. ‘Thank God, there will be a Catholic Christian prince for England once more.’

It was too much to bear now. It was like being in a bell tower at full peal. I bowed over and twisted round, trying to shake the terrible ringing out of my ears. Then I burst out, ‘Your Grace! Your heart will break!’ and at once the noise was cut off short and there was silence, a silence somehow even louder than the ringing bells had been, and the queen was looking at me, and Jane Dormer was looking at me, and I realised I had spoken out of turn, shouted out as a fool.

‘What did you say?’ Jane Dormer challenged me to repeat my words, defying me to spoil the happy mood of the afternoon, of two women examining a portrait of a handsome man.

‘I said, “Your Grace, your heart will break”,’ I repeated. ‘But I can’t say why.’

‘If you can’t say why, you had better not have spoken at all,’ Jane Dormer flared up, always passionately loyal to her mistress.

‘I know,’ I said numbly. ‘I can’t help it.’

‘Scant wisdom to tell a woman that her heart will break but not how or why!’

‘I know,’ I said again. ‘I am sorry.’

Jane turned to the queen. ‘Your Grace, pay no heed to the fool.’

The queen’s face, which had been so bright and so animated, suddenly turned sulky. ‘You can both leave,’ she said flatly. She hunched her shoulders and turned away. In that quintessential gesture of a stubborn woman I knew that she had made her choice and that no wise words would change her mind. No fool’s words either. ‘You can go,’ she said. Jane made a move to shroud the portrait with its cloth. ‘You can leave that there,’ she said. ‘I might look at it again.’

While the long negotiations about the marriage went on between the queen’s council, sick with apprehension at the thought of a Spaniard on the throne of England, and the Spanish representatives, eager to add another kingdom to their sprawling empire, I found my way to the home of John Dee’s father. It was a small house near the river in the city. I tapped on the door and for a moment no-one answered. Then a window above the front door opened and someone shouted down: ‘Who is it?’

‘I seek Roland Dee,’ I called up. The little roof over the front door concealed me; he could hear my voice, but not see me.

‘He’s not here,’ John Dee called back.

‘Mr Dee, it is me. Hannah the Fool,’ I called up. ‘I was looking for you.’

‘Hush,’ he said quickly and slammed the casement window shut. I heard his feet echoing on the wooden stairs inside the house and the noise of the bolts being drawn, and then the door opened inward to a dark hall. ‘Come in quickly,’ he said.

I squeezed through the gap and he slammed the door shut and bolted it. We stood face to face inside the dark hallway in silence. I was about to speak but he put a hand on my arm to caution me to be silent. At once I froze. Outside I could hear the normal noises of the London street, people walking by, a few tradesmen calling out, street sellers offering their wares, the distant shout from someone unloading at the river.

‘Did anyone follow you? Did you tell anyone you were looking for me?’

My heart thudded at the question. I felt my hand go to my cheek as if to rub off a smut. ‘Why? What has happened?’

‘Could anyone have followed you?’

I tried to think, but I was aware only of the thudding of my frightened heart. ‘No, sir. I don’t think so.’

John Dee nodded, and then he turned and went upstairs without a word to me. I hesitated, and then I followed him. For a groat I would have slipped out of the back door and run to my father’s house and never seen him again.

At the top of the stairs the door was open and he beckoned me into his room. At the window was his desk with a beautiful strange brass instrument in pride of place. To the side was a big scrubbed oak table, spread with his papers, rulers, pencils, pens, ink pots and scrolls of paper covered with minute writing and many numbers.

I could not satisfy my curiosity until I knew that I was safe. ‘Are you a wanted man, Mr Dee? Should I go?’

He smiled and shook his head. ‘I’m over-cautious,’ he said frankly. ‘My father was taken up for questioning but he is a known member of a reading group – Protestant thinkers. No-one has anything against me. I was just startled when I saw you.’

‘You are sure?’ I pressed him.

He gave a little laugh. ‘Hannah, you are like a young doe on the edge of flight. Be calm. You are safe here.’

I steadied myself and started to look around. He saw my gaze go back to the instrument at the window.

‘What d’you think that is?’ he asked.

I shook my head. It was a beautiful thing, not an instrument I could recognise. It was made in brass, a ball as big as a pigeon’s egg in the centre on a stalk, around it a brass ring cunningly supported by two other stalks which meant it could swing and move, a ball sliding around on it. Outside there was another ring and another ball, outside that, another. They were a series of rings and balls and the furthest from the centre was the smallest.

‘This,’ he said softly, ‘is a model of the world. This is how the creator, the great master carpenter of the heavens, made the world and then set it in motion. This holds the secret of how God’s mind works.’ He leaned forward and gently touched the first ring. As if by magic they all started to move slowly, each going at its own pace, each following its own orbit, sometimes passing, sometimes overtaking each other. Only the little gold egg in the centre did not move, everything else swung around it.

‘Where is our world?’ I asked.

He smiled at me. ‘Here,’ he said, pointing to the golden egg at the very centre of all the others. He pointed to the next ring with the slowly circling ball. ‘This the moon.’ He pointed to the next. ‘This the sun.’ He pointed to the next few. ‘These are the planets, and beyond them, these are the stars, and this –’ he gestured to a ring that was unlike all the others, a ring made of silver, which had moved at his first touch and made all the others move in time. ‘This is the primum mobile. It is God’s touch on the world symbolised by this ring that started the movement of everything, that made the world begin. This is the Word. This is the manifestation of “Let there be light”.’

‘Light,’ I repeated softly.

He nodded. ‘“Let there be light”. If I knew what made this move, I would know the secret of all the movement of the heavens,’ he said. ‘In this model I can play the part of God. But in the real heavens, what is the force that makes the planets swing around, that makes the sun circle the earth?’

He was waiting for me to answer, knowing that I could not, since nobody knew the answer. I shook my head, dizzied by the movement of the golden balls on their golden rings.

He put a hand on it to steady it and I watched it slow and stop. ‘My friend, Gerard Mercator, made this for me when we were both students together. He will be a great map-maker one day, I know it. And I –’ He broke off. ‘I shall follow my path,’ he said. ‘Wherever it leads me. I have to be clear in my head and free from ambition and live in a country which is clear and free. I have to walk a clear path.’

He paused for a moment and then, as if he suddenly remembered me, ‘And you? What did you come here for?’ he asked in quite a different tone of voice. ‘Why did you call for my father?’

‘I didn’t want him. I was looking for you. I only wanted to ask him where you were,’ I said. ‘They told me at the court that you had gone home to your father. I was seeking you. I have a message.’

He was suddenly alight with eagerness. ‘A message? From who?’

‘From Lord Robert.’

His face fell. ‘For a moment I thought an angel might have come to you with a message for me. What does Lord Robert want?’

‘He wants to know what will come to pass. He gave me two tasks. One, to tell Lady Elizabeth to seek you out and ask you to be her tutor, and the other to tell you to meet with some men.’

‘What men?’

‘Sir William Pickering, Tom Wyatt, and James Croft,’ I recited. ‘And he said to tell you this: that they are engaged in an alchemical experiment to make gold from base metal and to refine silver back to ash and you should help them with this. Edward Courtenay can make a chemical wedding. And I am to go back to him and tell him what will come to pass.’

Mr Dee glanced at the window as if he feared eavesdroppers on the very sill outside. ‘These are not good times for me to serve a suspect princess and a man in the Tower for treason, and three others whose names I may already know, whose plans I may already doubt.’

I gave him a steady look. ‘As you wish, sir.’

‘And you could be more safely employed, young woman,’ he said. ‘What is he thinking of, exposing you to such danger?’

‘I am his to command,’ I said firmly. ‘I have given my word.’

‘He should release you,’ he said gently. ‘He cannot command anything from the Tower.’

‘He has released me. I am to see him only once more,’ I said. ‘When I go back and tell him what you have foreseen for England.’

‘Shall we look in the mirror and see now?’ he asked.

I hesitated. I was afraid of the dark mirror and the darkened room, afraid of the things that might come through the darkness to haunt us. ‘Mr Dee, last time I did not have a true seeing,’ I confessed awkwardly.

‘When you said the date of the death of the king?’

I nodded.

‘When you predicted that the next queen would be Jane?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your answers were true,’ he observed.

‘They were nothing more than guesses,’ I said. ‘I plucked them from the air. I am sorry.’

He smiled. ‘Then just do that again,’ he said. ‘Just guess for me. Just guess for Lord Robert. Since he asks it?’

I was caught and I knew it. ‘Very well.’

‘We’ll do it now,’ he said. ‘Sit down, close your eyes, try to think of nothing. I will get the room ready for you.’

I did as he told me and sat on a stool. I could hear him moving quietly in the next room, the swish of a closing curtain, and the little spitting noise of flame as he carried a taper from a fire to light the candles. Then he said quietly: ‘It is ready. Come, and may the good angels guide us.’

He took my hand and led me into a small box room. The same mirror we had used before was leaning against a wall, a table before it supported a wax tablet printed with strange signs. A candle was burning before the mirror and he had put another opposite, so that they seemed like innumerable candles disappearing into infinite distance, beyond the world, beyond the sun and the moon and the planets as he had showed them to me on his swinging circular model; not all the way to heaven but into absolute darkness where finally there would be more darkness than candle-flame and it would be nothing but dark.

I drew a long breath to ward off my fear and seated myself before the mirror. I heard his muttered prayer and I repeated: ‘Amen’. Then I gazed into the darkness of the mirror.

I could hear myself speaking but I could hardly make out the words. I could hear the scratching of his pen as he wrote down what I was saying. I could hear myself reciting a string of numbers, and then strange words, like a wild poetry which had a rhythm and a beauty of its own; but no meaning that I could tell. Then I heard my voice say very clearly in English: ‘There will be a child, but no child. There will be a king but no king. There will be a virgin queen all-forgotten. There will be a queen but no virgin.’

‘And Lord Robert Dudley?’ he whispered.

‘He will have the making of a prince who will change the history of the world,’ I whispered in reply. ‘And he will die, beloved by a queen, safe in his bed.’

When I recovered my senses John Dee was standing by me with a drink which tasted of fruit with a tang behind it of metal.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked me.

I nodded. ‘Yes. A little sleepy.’

‘You had better go back to court,’ he said. ‘You will be missed.’

‘Will you not come, and see Lady Elizabeth?’

He looked thoughtful. ‘Yes, when I am sure it is safe. You can tell Lord Robert that I will serve him, and I will serve the cause, and that I too think the time is ripe now. I’ll advise her and be her intelligencer during these days of change. But I have to take care.’

‘Are you not afraid?’ I asked, thinking of my own terror of being observed, my own fear of the knock on the door in darkness.

‘Not very,’ he said slowly. ‘I have friends in powerful places. I have plans to complete. The queen is restoring the monasteries and their libraries must be restored too. It is my God-given duty to find and restore the books to their shelves, the manuscripts and the scholarship. And I hope to see base metal turn to gold.’

‘The philosopher’s stone?’ I asked.

He smiled. ‘This time it is a riddle.’

‘What shall I tell Lord Robert when I go back to see him in the Tower?’ I asked.

John Dee looked thoughtful. ‘Tell him nothing more than he will die in his bed beloved of a queen,’ he said. ‘You saw it, though you did not know what you could see. That’s the truth, though it seems impossible now.’

‘And are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Are you sure that he will not be executed?’

He nodded. ‘I’m sure. There is much for him to do, and the time of a queen of gold will come. Lord Robert is not a man to die young with his work unfinished. And I foresee a great love for him, the greatest love he has ever known.’

I waited, hardly breathing. ‘Do you know who he will love?’ I whispered.

Not for a moment did I think it would be me. How could it be? I was his vassal, he called me Mistress Boy, he laughed at the girl’s adoration that he saw in my face and offered to release me. Not even at that moment when John Dee predicted a great love for him did I think that it would be me.

‘A queen will love him,’ John Dee said. ‘He will be the greatest love of her life.’

‘But she is to marry Philip of Spain,’ I observed.

He shook his head. ‘I can’t see a Spaniard on the throne of England,’ he predicted. ‘And neither can many others.’

It was hard to find a way to speak with the Lady Elizabeth without half the court remarking on it. Although she had no friends at court and only a small circle of her own household, she seemed to be continually surrounded by apparently casual passers-by, half of whom were paid to spy on her. The French king had his spies in England, the Spanish emperor had his network. All the great men had maids and men in other households to keep watch for any signs of change or of treason, and the queen herself was creating and paying a network of informers. For all I knew, someone was paid to report on me, and the very thought of it made me sick with fear. It was a tense world of continual suspicion and pretend friendship. I was reminded of John Dee’s model of the earth with all the planets going around it. This princess was like the earth, at the very centre of everything, except all the stars in her firmament watched her with envious eyes and wished her ill. I thought it no wonder that she was paler and paler and the shadows under her eyes were turning from the blue to the dark violet of bruises, as the Christmas feast approached and there was no goodwill from anyone for her.

The queen’s enmity grew every day that Elizabeth walked through the court with her head high, and her nose in the air, every time she turned away from the statue of Our Lady in the chapel, every time she left off her rosary and wore instead a miniature prayer book on a chain at her waist. Everyone knew that the prayer book contained her brother’s dying prayer: ‘Oh my lord God, defend this realm from Papistry and maintain thy true religion’. To wear this, in preference to the coral rosary that the queen had given her, was more than a public act of defiance, it was a living tableau of disobedience.

To Elizabeth, it was perhaps little more than a showy rebellion; but to our queen it was an insult that went straight to her heart. When Elizabeth rode out dressed in rich colours and smiling and waving, people would cheer her and doff their hats for her; when she stayed home in plain black and white people came to Whitehall Palace to see her dine at the queen’s table and remark on her fragile beauty and the plain Protestant piety of her dress.

The queen could see that although Elizabeth never openly defied her, she continually gave the gossip mongers material to take outside the court and to spread among those who kept to their Protestant ways:

‘The Protestant princess was pale today, and did not touch the stoop of holy water.’

‘The Protestant princess begged to be excused from evening Mass because she was unwell again.’

‘The Protestant princess, all but prisoner in the Papist court, is keeping to her faith as best as she can, and biding her time in the very jaws of the Antichrist.’

‘The Protestant princess is a very martyr to her faith and her plain-faced sister is as dogged as a pack of bear-baiters, hounding the young woman’s pure conscience.’

The queen, resplendent in rich gowns and delighting in her mother’s jewels, looked tawdry beside the blaze of Elizabeth’s hair, the martyr whiteness of her pallor and the extreme modesty of her black dress. However the queen dressed, whatever she wore, Elizabeth, the Protestant princess, gleamed with the radiance of a girl on the edge of womanhood. The queen beside her, old enough to be her mother, looked weary, and overwhelmed by the task she had inherited.

So I could not simply go to Elizabeth’s rooms and ask to see her. I might as well have announced myself to the ambassador from Spain who watched Elizabeth’s every step, and reported everything to the queen. But one day, as I was walking behind her in the gallery, she stumbled for a moment. I went to help her, and she took my arm.

‘I have broken the heel on my shoe, I must send it to the cobbler,’ she said.

‘Let me help you to your rooms,’ I offered, and added in a whisper, ‘I have a message for you, from Lord Robert Dudley.’

She did not even flicker a sideways glance at me, and in that absolute control I saw at once that she was a consummate plotter and that the queen was right to fear her.

‘I can receive no messages without my sister’s blessing,’ Elizabeth said sweetly. ‘But I would be very glad if you would help me to my chamber, I wrenched my foot when the heel broke.’

She bent down and took off her shoe. I could not help but notice the pretty embroidery on her stocking, but I thought it was not the time to ask her for the pattern. Always, everything she owned, everything she did, fascinated me. I gave her my arm. A courtier passing looked at us both. ‘The princess has broken the heel of her shoe,’ I explained. He nodded, and went on. He, for one, was not going to trouble himself to help her.

Elizabeth kept her eyes straight ahead, she limped slightly on her stockinged foot and it made her walk slowly. She gave me plenty of time to deliver the message that she had said she could not hear without permission.

‘Lord Robert asks you to summon John Dee as your tutor,’ I said quietly. ‘He said, “without fail”.’

Still, she did not look at me.

‘Can I tell him you will do so?’

‘You can tell him that I will not do anything that would displease my sister the queen,’ she said easily. ‘But I have long wanted to study with Mr Dee and I was going to ask him to read with me. I am particularly interested in reading the teaching of the early fathers of the Holy Church.’

She shot one veiled glance at me.

‘I am trying to learn about the Roman Catholic church,’ she said. ‘My education has been much neglected until now.’

We were at the door of her rooms. A guard stood to attention as we approached and swung the door open. Elizabeth released me. ‘Thank you for your help,’ she said coolly, and went inside. As the door shut behind her I saw her bend down and put her shoe back on. The heel was, of course, perfectly sound.

John Dee’s prediction that the men of England would rise up to prevent the queen marrying a Spaniard was proved every day in dozens of incidents. There were ballads sung against the marriage, the braver preachers thundered against a match so dangerous to the independence of the country. Crude drawings appeared on every lime-washed wall in the city, chap books were handed out slandering the Spanish prince, abusing the queen for even considering him. It was no help that the Spanish ambassador assured every nobleman at court that his prince had no interest in taking power in England, that the prince had been persuaded to the match by his father, that indeed Prince Philip, a desirable man of under thirty years might well have sought a bride to bring him more pleasure and profit than the Queen of England, eleven years his senior. Any suggestion that he wanted the match was proof of Spanish greed, any hint that he might have looked elsewhere was an insult.

The queen herself nearly collapsed under the weight of conflicting advice, under her great fear that she would lose the love of the people of England without gaining the support of Spain.

‘Why did you say my heart would break?’ she feverishly demanded of me, one day. ‘Was it because you could foresee it would be like this? With all my councillors telling me to refuse the match, and yet all of them telling me to marry and have a child without delay? With all the country dancing at my coronation and then, minutes later, all of them cursing the news of my wedding?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I could not have foretold this. I think no-one could have foretold such a turn-around in such a little time.’

‘I have to guard against them,’ she said, more to herself than to me. ‘At every turn I have to keep them at my beck and call. The great lords, and every man under them, have to be my loyal servants; but all the time they whisper in corners and set themselves up to judge me.’

She rose from her chair and walked the eight steps to the window, turned and walked back again. I remembered the first time I had seen her at Hunsdon, in the little court where she rarely laughed, where she was little more than a prisoner. Now she was Queen of England and still she was imprisoned by the will of the people, and still she did not laugh.

‘And the council are worse than the ladies of my chamber!’ she exclaimed. ‘They argue ceaselessly in my very presence, there are dozens of them but I cannot get a single sensible word of advice, they all desire something different, and they all – all of them! – lie to me. My spies bring me one set of stories, and the Spanish ambassador tells me others. And all the time I know that they are massing against me. They will pull me down from the throne and push Elizabeth on to it out of sheer madness. They will snatch themselves from the certainty of heaven and throw themselves into hell because they have studied heresy, and now they cannot hear the true word when it is given to them.’

‘People like to think for themselves …’ I suggested.

She rounded on me. ‘No, they don’t. They like to follow a man who is prepared to think for them. And now they think they have found him. They have found Thomas Wyatt. Oh yes, I know of him. The son of Anne Boleyn’s lover, whose side d’you think he is on? They have men like Robert Dudley, waiting on his chance in the Tower, and they have a princess like Elizabeth: a foolish girl, too young to know her own mind, too vain to take care, and too greedy to wait, as I had to wait, as I had to wait honourably, for all those long testing years. I waited in a wilderness, Hannah. But she will not wait at all.’

‘You need not fear Robert Dudley,’ I said quickly. ‘D’you not remember that he declared for you? Against his own father? But who is this Wyatt?’

She walked to the wall and back to the window again. ‘He has sworn he will be faithful to me but deny me my husband,’ she said. ‘As if such a thing could be done! He says he will pull me from the throne, and then put me back again.’

‘Does he have many on his side?’

‘Half of Kent,’ she whispered. ‘And that sly devil Edward Courtenay as king in waiting, if I know him, and Elizabeth hoping to be his queen. And there will be money coming from somewhere to pay him for his crime, I don’t doubt.’

‘Money?’

Her voice was bitter. ‘Francs. The enemies of England are always paid in francs.’

‘Can’t you arrest him?’

‘When I find him, I can,’ she said. ‘He’s a traitor ten times over. But I don’t know where he is nor when he plans to make his move.’ She walked to the window and looked out, as if she would see beyond the garden at the foot of the palace walls, over the silver Thames, cold in the winter sunlight, all the way to Kent and the men who kept their plans hidden.

I was struck by the contrast between our hopes on the road to London and how it was, now that she was queen crowned. ‘D’you know, I thought when we rode into London that all your struggles would be over.’

The look she turned to me was haunted, her eyes shadowed with brown, her skin as thick as candle-wax. She looked years older than she had done that day when we had ridden in to cheering crowds at the head of a cheering army. ‘I thought so too,’ she said. ‘I thought that my unhappiness was over. The fear that I felt all through my childhood: the nightmares at night, and the terrible waking every day to find that they were true. I thought that if I was proclaimed queen and crowned queen then I would feel safe. But now it is worse than before. Every day I hear of another plot against me, every day I see someone look askance when I go to Mass, every day I hear someone admire Lady Elizabeth’s learning or her dignity or her grace. Every day I know that another man has whispered with the French ambassador, spread a little gossip, told a little lie, suggested that I would throw my kingdom into the lap of Spain; as if I had not spent my life, my whole life, waiting for the throne! As if my mother did not sacrifice herself, refuse any agreement with the king so that she might keep me as the heir! She died without me at her side, without a kind word from him, in a cold damp ruin, far away from her friends, so that I might one day be queen. As though I would throw away her inheritance for a mere fancy for a portrait! Are they mad that they think I might so forget myself?

‘There is nothing, nothing, more precious to me than this throne. There is nothing more precious to me than these people; and yet they cannot see it and they will not trust me!’

She was shaking, I had never seen her so distressed. ‘Your Grace,’ I said. ‘You must be calm. You have to seem serene, even when you are not.’

‘I have to have someone on my side,’ she whispered, as if she had not heard me. ‘Someone who cares about me, someone who understands the danger I am in. Someone to protect me.’

‘Prince Philip of Spain will not …’ I began but she raised her hand to silence me.

‘Hannah, I have nothing else to hope for but him. I hope that he comes to me, despite all the wicked slander against him, despite the danger to us both. Despite the threats that they will kill him the moment he sets foot in this kingdom. I hope to God that he has the courage to come to me and make me his wife and keep me safe. For as God is my witness, I cannot rule this kingdom without him.’

‘You said you would be a virgin queen,’ I reminded her. ‘You said you would live as a nun for your people and have no husband but them and no children but them.’

She turned away from the window, from the view of the cold river and the iron sky. ‘I said it,’ she concurred. ‘But I did not know then what it would be like. I did not know then that being a queen would bring me even more pain than being a princess. I did not know that to be a virgin queen, as I am, means to be forever in danger, forever haunted by the fear of the future, and forever alone. And worse than everything else: forever knowing that nothing I do will last.’

The queen’s dark mood lasted till dinner time and she took her seat with her head bowed and her face grim. A deadened silence fell over the great hall, no-one could be merry with the queen under a cloud, and everyone had their own fears. If the queen could not hold her throne, who could be sure of the safety of his house? If she were to be thrown down and Elizabeth to take her place then the men who had just restored their chapels and were paying for Masses to be sung would have to turn their coats again. It was a quiet anxious court, everyone looking around, and then there was a ripple of interest as Will Somers rose up from his seat, straightened his doublet with a foppish flick of his wrists and approached the queen’s table. When he knew that all eyes were upon him he dropped elegantly to one knee and flourished a kerchief in a bow.

‘What is it, Will?’ she asked absently.

‘I have come to proposaloh matrimonioh,’ Will said, as solemn as a bishop, with a ridiculous pronunciation of the words. The whole court held its breath.

The queen looked up, the glimmer of a smile in her eyes. ‘Matrimony? Will?’

‘I am a proclaimed bacheloroh,’ he said, from the back of the hall there was a suppressed giggle. ‘As everybody knowsohs. But I am prepared to overlookoh it, on this occasionoh.’

‘What occasion?’ The queen’s voice trembled with laughter.

‘On the occasion of my proposaloh,’ he said. ‘To Your Grace, of matrimonioh.’

It was dangerous ground, even for Will.

‘I am not seeking a husband,’ the queen said primly.

‘Then I will withdraw,’ he said with immense dignity. He rose to his feet and stepped backwards from the throne. The court held its breath for the jest, the queen too. He paused; his timing was that of a musician, a composer of laughter. He turned. ‘But don’t you go thinkingoh,’ he waved a long bony forefinger at her in warning, ‘don’t you go thinkingoh that you have to throw yourself away on the son of a mere emperororoh. Now you know you could have me, you know.’

The court collapsed into a gale of laughter, even the queen laughed as Will, with his comical gangling gait, went back to his seat and poured himself an extra large bumper of wine. I looked across at him and he raised it to me, one fool to another. He had done exactly what he was supposed to do: to take the most difficult and most painful thing and turn it into a jest. But Will could always do more than that, he could take the sting from it, he could make a jest that hurt no-one, so that even the queen, who knew that she was tearing her country apart over her determination to be married, could smile and eat her dinner and forget the forces massing against her for at least one evening.

I went home to my father leaving a court humming with gossip, walking through a city seething with rebellion. The rumours of a secret army mustering to wage war against the queen were everywhere. Everyone knew of one man or another missing from his home, run off to join the rebels. Lady Elizabeth was said to be ready and willing to marry a good Englishman – Edward Courtenay – and had promised to take the throne as soon as her sister was deposed. The men of Kent would not allow a Spanish prince to conquer and subdue them. England was not some dowry which a princess, a half-Spanish princess, could hand over to Spain. There were good Englishmen that the queen should take if she had a mind to marry. There was handsome young Edward Courtenay with a kinship to the royal line on his own account. There were Protestant princelings all over Europe, there were gentlemen of breeding and education who would make a good king-consort to the queen. Assuredly she must marry, and marry at once, for no woman in the world could rule a household, much less a kingdom, without the guidance of a man; a woman’s nature was not fitted to the work, her intelligence could not stretch to the decisions, her courage was not great enough for the difficulties, she had no steadfastness in her nature for the long haul. Of course the queen must marry, and give the kingdom a son and heir. But she should not marry, she should never even have thought of marrying a Spanish prince. The very notion was treason to England and she must be mad for love of him, as everyone was saying, even to think of it. And a queen who could set aside common sense for her lust was not fit to rule. Better to overthrow a queen maddened by desire in her old age than suffer a Spanish tyrant.

My father had company in the bookshop. Daniel Carpenter’s mother was perched on one of the stools at the counter, her son beside her. I knelt for my father’s blessing, and then made a little bow to Mrs Carpenter and to my husband-to-be. The two parents looked at Daniel and I, as prickly as cats on a garden wall, and tried, without success, to hide their worldly-wise amusement at the irritability of a young couple during courtship.

‘I waited to see you and hear the news from court,’ Mrs Carpenter said. ‘And Daniel wanted to see you, of course.’

The glance that Daniel shot at her made it clear that he did not wish her to explain his doings to me.

‘Is the queen’s marriage to go ahead?’ my father asked. He poured me a glass of good Spanish red wine and pulled up a stool for me at the counter of the shop. I noted with wry amusement that my work as fool had made me a personage worthy of respect, with a seat and my own glass of wine.

‘Without doubt,’ I said. ‘The queen is desperate for a helper and a companion, and it is natural she should want a Spanish prince.’

I said nothing about the portrait which she had hung in her privy chamber, on the opposite wall from the prie-dieu, and which she consulted with a glance at every difficult moment, turning her head from a statue of God to a picture of her husband-to-be and back again.

My father glanced at Mrs Carpenter. ‘Please God it makes no difference to us,’ he said. ‘Please God she does not bring in Spanish ways.’

She nodded, but she failed to cross herself as she should have done. Instead she leaned forward and patted my father’s hand. ‘Forget the past,’ she said reassuringly. ‘We have lived in England for three generations. Nobody can think that we are anything but good Christians and good Englishmen.’

‘I cannot stay if it is to become another Spain,’ my father said in a low voice. ‘You know, every Sunday, every saint’s day, they burned heretics, sometimes hundreds at a time. And those of us who had practised Christianity for years were put on trial alongside those who had hardly pretended to it. And no-one could prove their innocence! Old women who had missed Mass because they were sick, young women who had been seen to look away when they raised the Host, any excuse, any reason, and you could be informed against. And always, always, it was those who had made money, or those who had advanced in the world and made enemies. And with my books and my business and my reputation for scholarship, I knew they would come for me, and I started to prepare. But I did not think they would take my parents, my wife’s sister, my wife before me …’ He broke off. ‘I should have thought of it, we should have gone earlier.’

‘Papa, we couldn’t save her,’ I said, comforting him with the same words that he had used to me when I had cried that we should have stayed and died beside her.

‘Old times,’ Mrs Carpenter said briskly. ‘And they won’t come here. Not the Holy Inquisition, not in England.’

‘Oh yes, they will,’ Daniel asserted.

It was as if he had said a foul word. A silence fell at once; his mother and my father both turned to look at him.

‘A Spanish prince, a half-Spanish queen, she must be determined to restore the church. How better to do it than to bring in the Inquisition to root out heresy? And Prince Philip has long been an enthusiast for the Inquisition.’

‘She’s too merciful to do it,’ I said. ‘She has not even executed Lady Jane, though all her advisors say that she should. Lady Elizabeth drags her feet to Mass and misses it whenever she can and no-one says anything. If the Inquisition were to be called in to judge then Elizabeth would be found guilty a dozen times over. But the queen believes that the truth of Holy Writ will become apparent, of its own accord. She will never burn heretics. She knows what it is like to be afraid for her life. She knows what it is like to be wrongly accused.

‘She will marry Philip of Spain but she will not hand over the country to him. She will never be his cipher. She wants to be a good queen, as her mother was. I think she will restore this country to the true faith by gentle means; already, half the country is glad to return to the Mass, the others will follow later.’

‘I hope so,’ Daniel said. ‘But I say again – we should be prepared. I don’t want to hear a knock on the door one night and know that we are too late to save ourselves. I won’t be taken unawares, I won’t go without a fight.’

‘Why, where would we go?’ I asked. I could feel that old feeling of terror in the pit of my belly, the feeling that nowhere would ever be safe for me, that forever I would be waiting for the noise of feet on the stairs, and smelling smoke on the air.

‘First Amsterdam, and then Italy,’ he said firmly. ‘You and I will marry as soon as we get to Amsterdam and then continue overland. We will travel all together. Your father and my mother and my sisters with us. I can complete my training as a physician in Italy and there are Italian cities that are tolerant of Jews, where we could live openly in our faith. Your father can sell his books, and my sisters could find work. We will live as a family.’

‘See how he plans ahead,’ Mrs Carpenter said in an approving whisper to my father. He too was smiling at Daniel as if this young man was the answer to every question.

‘We are not promised to marry till next year,’ I said. ‘I’m not ready to marry yet.’

‘Oh, not again,’ said my father.

‘All girls think that,’ said Mrs Carpenter.

Daniel said nothing.

I slid down from my stool. ‘May we talk privately?’ I asked.

‘Go into the printing room,’ my father recommended Daniel. ‘Your mother and I will take a glass of wine out here.’

He poured more wine for her and I caught her amused smile as Daniel and I went into the inside room where the big press stood.

‘Mr Dee tells me that I will lose the Sight if I marry,’ I said earnestly. ‘He believes it is a gift from God, I cannot throw it away.’

‘It is guesswork and waking dreams,’ Daniel said roundly.

It was so close to my own opinion that I could hardly argue. ‘It is beyond our understanding,’ I said stoutly. ‘Mr Dee wants me to be his scryer. He is an alchemist and he says …’

‘It sounds like witchcraft. When Prince Philip of Spain comes to England, John Dee will be tried for a witch.’

‘He won’t. It’s holy work. He prays before and after scrying. It’s a holy spiritual task.’

‘And what have you learned, so far?’ he asked sarcastically.

I thought of all the secrets I had known already, the child who would not be a child, the virgin but not queen, the queen but no virgin, and the safety and glory which would come to my lord. ‘There are secrets I cannot tell you,’ I said, and then I added: ‘And that is another reason that I cannot be your wife. There should not be secrets between man and wife.’

He turned away with an exclamation of irritation. ‘Don’t be clever with me,’ he said. ‘You have insulted me before my mother and before your father by saying you don’t want to marry at all. Don’t come in here with me and try to be clever about going back on your word. You are so full of trickery that you will talk yourself out of happiness and into heartbreak.’

‘How should I be happy if I have to be a nothing?’ I asked. ‘I am the favourite of Queen Mary, I am highly paid. I could take bribes and favours to the value of hundreds of pounds. I am trusted by the queen herself. The greatest philosopher in the land thinks I have a gift from God to foretell the future. And you think my happiness lies in walking away from all this to marry an apprentice physician!’

He caught my hands, which were twisting together, and pulled me towards him. His breath was coming as quickly as my own. ‘Enough,’ he said angrily. ‘You have insulted me enough, I think. You need not marry an apprentice physician. You can be Robert Dudley’s whore or his tutor’s adept. You can think yourself the queen’s companion but everyone knows you as the fool. You make yourself less than what I would offer you. You could be the wife of an honourable man who would love you and instead you throw yourself into the gutter for any passerby to pick up.’

‘I do not!’ I gasped, trying to pull my hands away.

Suddenly he pulled me towards him and wrapped his arms around my waist. His dark head came down, his mouth close to mine. I could smell the pomade in his hair and the heat of the skin of his cheek. I shrank back even as I felt the desire to go forward.

‘Do you love another man?’ he demanded urgently.

‘No,’ I lied.

‘Do you swear, on all you believe, whatever that is, that you are free to marry me?’

‘I am free to marry you,’ I said, honestly enough, for God knew as well as I did that no-one else wanted me.

‘With honour,’ he specified.

I felt my lips part, I could have spat at him in my temper. ‘Of course, with honour,’ I said. ‘Have I not told you that my gift is dependent on my virginity? Have I not said that I will not risk that?’ I pulled away from him but his grip on me tightened. Despite myself, my body took in the sense of him: the strength of his arms, the power of his thighs which pressed against me, the scent of him, and for some odd reason, the feeling of absolute safety that he gave me. I had to pull away from him to stop myself from yielding. I realised that I wanted to mould myself around him, put my head on his shoulder, let him hold me against him and know that I was safe – if only I would let him love me, if only I would let myself love him.

‘If they bring in the Inquisition, we will have to leave, you know that.’ His grip was as hard as ever, I felt his hips against my belly and had to stop myself rising on my toes to lean against him.

‘Yes, I know that,’ I said, only half-hearing him, feeling him with every inch of my body.

‘If we leave, you will have to come with me as my wife, I will take you and your father to safety under no other condition.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we are agreed?’

‘If we have to leave England then I will marry you,’ I said.

‘And in any case we will marry when you are sixteen.’

I nodded, my eyes closed. Then I felt his mouth come down on to mine and I felt his kiss melt every argument away.

He released me and I leaned back against the printing press to steady myself. He smiled as if he knew that I was dizzy with desire. ‘As to Lord Robert, it is my request that you serve him no longer,’ he said. ‘He is a convicted traitor, he is imprisoned, and you endanger yourself and us all by seeking his company.’ His look darkened. ‘And he is not a man I would trust with my betrothed.’

‘He thinks of me as a child and a fool,’ I corrected him.

‘You are neither,’ he said gently. ‘And neither am I. You are half in love with him, Hannah, and I won’t tolerate it.’

I hesitated, ready to argue, and then I felt the most curious sensation of my life: the desire to tell the truth to someone. I had never before felt the desire to be honest, I had spent all my life enmeshed in lies: a Jew in a Christian country, a girl in boy’s clothing, a passionate young woman dressed as a Holy Fool, and now a young woman betrothed to one man and in love with another.

‘If I tell you the truth about something, will you help me?’ I asked.

‘I will give you the best help I can,’ he said.

‘Daniel, talking with you is like bargaining with a Pharisee.’

‘Hannah, talking with you is like catching fish in the Sea of Galilee. What is it you would tell me?’

I would have turned away but he caught me and drew me back close to him. His body pressed against me, I felt his hardness and I suddenly understood – an older girl would have understood long before – that this was the currency of desire. He was my betrothed. He desired me. I desired him. All I had to do was to tell him the truth.

‘Daniel, this is the truth. I saw that the king would die, I named the day. I saw that Jane would be crowned queen. I saw that Queen Mary would be queen, and I have seen a glimpse of her future, which is heartbreak, and the future of England, which is unclear to me. John Dee says I have a gift of Sight. He tells me it comes in part from me being a virgin and I want to honour the gift. And I want to marry you. And I desire you. And I cannot help but love Lord Robert. All those things. All at once.’ I had my forehead pressed against his chest, I could feel the buttons of his jerkin against my forehead and I had the uncomfortable thought that when I looked up he would see the mark of his buttons printed on my skin and I would look, not desirable, but foolish. Nonetheless I stayed, holding him close, while he considered the rush of truths I had told him. Moments later he eased me back from him and looked into my eyes.

‘Is it an honourable love, as a servant to a master?’ he asked.

He saw my eyes shift away from his serious gaze and he put his hand under my chin to hold my face up to him. ‘Tell me, Hannah. You are to be my wife. I have a right to know. Is it an honourable love?’

I felt my lip quiver and the tears come to my eyes. ‘It’s all muddled up,’ I said weakly. ‘I love him for what he is …’ I was silenced by the impossibility of conveying to Daniel the desirability of Robert Dudley; his looks, his clothes, his wealth, his boots, his horses were all beyond my vocabulary. ‘He is … wonderful.’ I did not dare look into his eyes. ‘I love him for what he might become – he will be freed, he will be a great man, a great man, Daniel. He will be the maker of a Prince of England. And tonight he is in the Tower, waiting for the sentence of death, and I think of him, and I think of my mother waiting, like he is waiting, for the morning when they took her out …’ I lost my voice, I shook my head. ‘He is a prisoner as she was. He is on the edge of death, as she was. Of course I love him.’

He held me for a few more seconds and then he coldly put me from him. I could almost feel the icy air of the quiet printing room rush between us. ‘This is not your mother. He is not a prisoner of faith,’ he said quietly. ‘He is not being tried by the Inquisition but by a queen whom you assure me is merciful and wise. There is no reason to love a man who has plotted and intrigued his way to treason. He would have put Lady Jane on the throne and beheaded the mistress that you say you love: Queen Mary. He is not an honourable man.’

I opened my mouth to argue but there was nothing I could say.

‘And you are all mixed up with him, with his train, with his treasonous plans, and with your feeling for him. I won’t call it love because if I thought for one moment it was anything more than a girl’s fancy I would go out now to your father and break our betrothal. But I tell you this. You have to leave the service of Robert Dudley, whatever future you have seen for him. You have to avoid John Dee and you have to surrender your gift. You can serve the queen until you are sixteen but you have to be my betrothed in word and in every act you take. And in eighteen months’ time from now, when you are sixteen, we will marry and you will leave court.’

‘Eighteen months?’ I said, very low.

He took my hand to his mouth and he bit the fat mons veneris at the root of my thumb, where the plumpness of the flesh tells hucksters and fairground fortune-tellers that the woman is ready for love.

‘Eighteen months,’ he said flatly. ‘Or I swear I will take another girl to be my wife and throw you away to whatever future the soothsayer, the traitor, and the queen make up for you.’

It was a cold winter, and not even Christmas brought any joy to the people. Every day brought the queen news of more petty complainings and uprisings in every county in the land. Every incident was small, hardly worth regarding, snowballs were thrown at the Spanish ambassador, a dead cat was slung into the aisle of a church, there were some insulting words scrawled on a wall, a woman prophesied doom in a churchyard – nothing to frighten the priests or the lords of the counties individually; but put together, they were unmistakeable signs of widespread unease.

The queen held Christmas at Whitehall and appointed a Lord of Misrule and demanded a merry court in the old ways, but it was no good. The missing places at the Christmas feast told their own story: Lady Elizabeth did not even visit her sister, but stayed at Ashridge, her house on the great north road, ideally placed to advance on London as soon as someone gave the word. Half a dozen of the queen’s council were unaccountably missing; the French ambassador was busier than any good Christian should be at Christmastide. It was clear that there was trouble brewing right up to the very throne, and the queen knew it, we all of us knew it.

She was advised by her Lord Chancellor, Bishop Gardiner, and by the Spanish ambassador that she should move to the Tower and put the country on a war footing, or move right away from London and prepare Windsor Castle for a siege. But the grit I had seen in her in the days when she and I had ridden cross-country with only a stable groom to guide us came to her again, and she swore that she would not run from her palace in the very first Christmas of her reign. She had been England’s anointed queen for less than three months, was she to be another queen as Jane? Should she too lock herself and her dwindling court into the Tower, as another more popular princess gathered her army about her and prepared to march on London? Mary swore she would stay in Whitehall from Christmas until Easter and defy the rumours of her own defeat.

‘But it’s not very merry, is it, Hannah?’ she asked me sadly. ‘I have waited for this Christmas all my life, and now it seems that people have forgotten how to be happy.’

We were all but alone in her rooms. Jane Dormer was seated in the bay window to catch the last of the grey unhelpful afternoon light on her sewing. One lady was playing at a lute, a mournful wail of a song, and another was laying out embroidery threads and winding them off the skein. It was anything but merry. You would have thought that this was the court of a queen on the brink of death, not one about to marry.

‘Next year it will be better,’ I said. ‘When you are married and Prince Philip is here.’

At the very mention of his name the colour rose up in her pale cheeks. ‘Hush,’ she said, gleaming. ‘I would be wrong to expect it of him. He will have to be often in his other kingdoms. There is no greater empire in the world than the one he will inherit, you know.’

‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of the fires of the auto-da-fé. ‘I know how powerful the Spanish empire is.’

‘Of course you do,’ she said, recalling my nationality. ‘And we must speak Spanish all the time to improve my accent. We’ll speak Spanish now.’

Jane Dormer looked up and laughed. ‘Ah, we must all speak Spanish soon.’

‘He won’t impose it,’ the queen said quickly, always conscious of spies even here, in her private rooms. ‘He wants nothing but what is best for Englishmen.’

‘I know that,’ Jane said soothingly. ‘I was only joking, Your Grace.’

The queen nodded, but the frown did not leave her face. ‘I have written to Lady Elizabeth to tell her to return to court,’ she said. ‘She must come back for the Christmas feast, I should not have allowed her to leave.’

‘Well, it’s not as if she adds much to the merriment,’ Jane remarked comfortably.

‘I do not require her presence for the merriment she brings me,’ the queen said sharply, ‘but for the greater pleasure of knowing where she is.’

‘You may have to excuse her, if she is too ill to travel …’ Jane remarked.

‘Yes,’ said the queen. ‘If she is. But, if she is too ill to travel, then why would she move from Ashridge to Donnington Castle? Why would a sick girl, too ill to come to London where she might be cared for, instead plan a journey to a castle ideally placed for siege, at the very heart of England?’

There was a diplomatic silence.

‘The country will come round to Prince Philip,’ Jane Dormer said gently. ‘And all this worry will be forgotten.’

Suddenly, there was a sharp knock from the guards outside and the double doors were thrown open. The noise startled me and I was on my feet in an instant, my heart pounding. A messenger stood in the doorway, the Lord Chancellor with him, and the veteran soldier Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk beside him, their faces grim.

I fell back, as if I would hide behind her. I had an immediate certainty that they had come for me, they somehow had discovered who I was, and had a warrant for my arrest as a heretic Jew.

Then I saw they were not looking at me. They were looking at the queen and their jaws were set and their eyes cold.

‘Oh, no,’ I whispered.

She must have thought it was the end for her, as she rose slowly to her feet and looked from one stern face to another. She knew that the duke could turn his coat in a moment, the council could have mustered a swift plot; they had done it before against Jane, they could do it again. But she did not blench, the face she turned to them was as serene as if they had come to invite her to dine. In that moment I loved her for her courage, for her absolute queenly determination never to show fear. ‘How now, my lords?’ she said pleasantly, her voice steady though they walked into the centre of the room and looked at her with hard eyes. ‘I hope you bring me good news for all you seem so severe.’

‘Your Grace, it is not good news,’ Bishop Gardiner said flatly. ‘The rebels are marching against you. My young friend Edward Courtenay has seen the wisdom to confess to me and throw himself on your mercy.’

I saw her eyes flicker away, to one side, as her swift intelligence assessed this information; but her expression did not otherwise alter at all, she was still smiling. ‘And Edward tells you?’

‘That a plot is in train to march on London, to put you in the Tower and to set the Lady Elizabeth on the throne in your place. We have the names of some of them: Sir William Pickering, Sir Peter Carew in Devon, Sir Thomas Wyatt in Kent, and Sir James Crofts.’

For the first time she looked shaken. ‘Peter Carew, who turned out for me in my time of need, in the autumn? Who raised the men of Devon for me?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Sir James Crofts, my good friend?’

‘Yes, Your Grace.’

I kept back behind her. These were the very men that my lord had named to me, that he had asked me to name to John Dee. These were the men who were to make a chemical wedding and to pull down silver and replace it with gold. Now I thought I knew what he meant. I thought I knew which queen was silver and which was gold in his metaphor. And I thought that I had again betrayed the queen while taking her wage, and that it would not be long before someone discovered who had been the catalyst in this plot.

She took a breath to steady herself. ‘Any others?’

Bishop Gardiner looked at me. I flinched back from his gaze but it went on past me. He did not even see me, he had to give her the worst news. ‘The Duke of Suffolk is not at his house in Sheen, and no-one knows where he has gone.’

I saw Jane Dormer stiffen in the window-seat. If the Duke of Suffolk had disappeared then it could mean only one thing: he was raising his hundreds of tenants and retainers to restore the throne to his daughter Jane. We were faced with an uprising for Elizabeth and a rebellion for Queen Jane. Those two names could turn out more than half of the country, and all the courage and determination that Queen Mary had shown before could come to nothing now.

‘And Lady Elizabeth? Does she know of this? Is she at Ashridge still?’

‘Courtenay says that she was on the brink of marriage with him, and the two of them were to take your throne and rule together. Thank God the lad has seen sense and come over to us in time. She knows of everything, she is waiting in readiness. The King of France will support her claim and send a French army to put her on the throne. She may even now be riding to head the rebel army.’

I saw the queen’s colour drain from her face. ‘Are you sure of this? My Elizabeth would have marched to my execution?’

‘Yes,’ the duke said flatly. ‘She is up to her pretty ears in it.’

‘Thank God Courtenay has told us of this now,’ the bishop interrupted. ‘There may still be time for us to get you safely away.’

‘I would have thanked Courtenay more if he had the sense never to engage in it,’ my queen countered sharply. ‘Your young friend is a fool, my lord, and a weak disloyal fool at that.’ She did not wait for his defence. ‘So what must we do?’

The duke stepped forward. ‘You must go to Framlingham at once, Your Grace. And we will put a warship on standby to take you out of the country to Spain. This is a battle you cannot win. Once you’re safe in Spain perhaps you can regroup, perhaps Prince Philip …’

I saw her grip on the back of her chair tighten. ‘It is a mere six months since I rode into London from Framlingham,’ she said. ‘The people wanted me as queen then.’

‘You were their choice in preference to the Duke of Northumberland with Queen Jane as his puppet,’ he brutally reminded her. ‘Not instead of Elizabeth. The people want the Protestant religion and the Protestant princess. Indeed, they may be prepared to die for it. They won’t have you with Prince Philip of Spain as king.’

‘I won’t leave London,’ she said. ‘I have waited all my life for my mother’s throne, I shan’t abandon it now.’

‘You have no choice,’ he warned her. ‘They will be at the gates of the city within days.’

‘I will wait till that moment.’

‘Your Grace,’ Bishop Gardiner said. ‘You could withdraw to Windsor at least …’

Queen Mary rounded on him. ‘Not to Windsor, not to the Tower, not to anywhere but here! I am England’s princess and I will stay here in my palace until they tell me that they want me as England’s princess no more. Don’t speak to me of leaving, my lords, for I will not consider it.’

The bishop retreated from her passion. ‘As you wish, Your Grace. But these are troubled times and you are risking your life …’

‘The times may be troubled, but I am not troubled,’ she said fiercely.

‘You are gambling with your life as well as your throne,’ the duke almost shouted at her.

‘I know that!’ she exclaimed.

He took a breath. ‘Do I have your command to muster the royal guard, and the city’s trained bands and lead them out against Wyatt in Kent?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But there must be no sieges of towns and no sacking of villages.’

‘It cannot be done!’ he protested. ‘In battle, one cannot protect the battle ground.’

‘These are your orders,’ she insisted icily. ‘I will not have a civil war fought over my wheat fields, especially in these starving times. These rebels must be put down like vermin. I won’t have innocent people hurt by the hunt.’

For a moment he looked as if he would argue. Then she leaned towards him. ‘Trust me in this,’ she said persuasively. ‘I know. I am a virgin queen, my only children are my people. They have to see that I love them and care for them. I cannot get married on a tide of their innocent blood. This has to be gently done, and firmly done, and done only once. Can you do it for me?’

He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. He was too afraid to waste time in flattery. ‘Nobody can do it. They are gathering in their hundreds, in their thousands. These people understand only one thing and that is force. They understand gibbets at the cross-roads and heads on pikes. You cannot rule Englishmen and be merciful, Your Grace.’

‘You are mistaken,’ she said, going head to head with him, as determined as he was. ‘I came to this throne by a miracle and God does not change his mind. We will win these men back by the love of God. You have to do it as I command. It has to be done as God would have it, or His miracle cannot take place.’

The duke looked as if he would have argued.

‘It is my command,’ she said flatly.

He shrugged and bowed. ‘As you command then,’ he said. ‘Whatever the consequences.’

She looked over his head to me, her face quizzical, as if to ask what I thought. I made a little bow, I did not want her to know the sense of immense dread that I felt.