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

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

The child which Thou to Mary, oh Lord of Might, does send To England’s joy: in health preserve, keep, and defend

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

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

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

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

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

‘She will do her duty for the baby,’ I said firmly.

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

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

‘He gave you a message for Kat,’ Elizabeth pursued. ‘She told me herself.’

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

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

‘Exactly so,’ I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, Your Grace.’

‘I shall be sorry to miss the sight of them this year.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘In which garden?’ she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth gave a dizzy laugh. ‘Oh no, for he would not let her.’

‘He? He does not give the orders here.’

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

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

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

I was stunned into silence.

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

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

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

‘He cannot intend anything but your dishonour, and her heartbreak,’ I said fiercely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I have not been to the shop for some days, sir,’ I said.

‘When it comes I shall be glad of it,’ he said casually.

‘Has the queen summoned you, sir?’

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

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

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

‘Ah, the fool,’ she said pleasantly. ‘And the magician.’

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

‘Take her horse too,’ Kat Ashley told the lad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth looked up and saw me. ‘Oh, Hannah.’

‘Kat dragged me in,’ I said. ‘I think I should go.’

‘Wait a moment,’ she replied.

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

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

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

‘If she would look for you, what might we see?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But I am never safe!’ burst from me.

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

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

‘And yet you live here, in the very heart of the court,’ he observed.

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

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

I nodded, granting her nothing. ‘Perhaps.’

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

I faced her without fear. ‘I do. Who could not?’

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

I hesitated. ‘How could I tell her I knew such a thing?’

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

I thought for a moment.

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

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

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

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

I hesitated no longer. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Will it be fruitful?’ she asked.

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

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

Elizabeth drew a little gasp like the hiss of a cat. ‘Two? Live births?’

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

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

‘So who will inherit the throne?’ she asked tightly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I am,’ I said seriously.

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

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

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

‘But how will this work bring it about?’ I asked.

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

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

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

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

‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘I must have fallen asleep.’

‘D’you remember nothing?’ he asked curiously.

I shook my head. ‘I just watched the flame and then fell asleep.’

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

‘Did I say nothing that you could understand now?’ I asked, still bemused.

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

‘What did I say?’ I demanded.

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

I nodded.

‘He did not. Perhaps it is better that you do not know.’

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

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

I got to my feet. ‘I shall go then,’ I said. ‘I have to take the horse back. But, Mr Dee –’

‘Yes?’

‘What about the Princess Elizabeth? Will she inherit the throne as her own?’

He smiled at me. ‘Do you remember what we saw when we first scried?’

I nodded.

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

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

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

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

‘What did you see?’ Elizabeth demanded impatiently the moment I closed the door.

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

‘But did you speak, or did he see anything?’

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

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

‘My lady, I must go,’ I said firmly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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