Читать книгу The Queen’s Fool - Philippa Gregory - Страница 7

‘I remember this!’ I said excitedly to my father, turning from the rail of the Thames barge as we tacked our way upstream. ‘Father! I remember this! I remember these gardens running down to the water, and the great houses, and the day you sent me to deliver some books to the lord, the English lord, and I came upon him in the garden with the princess.’

He found a smile for me, though his face was weary from our long journey. ‘Do you, child?’ he asked quietly. ‘That was a happy summer for us. She said …’ He broke off. We never mentioned my mother’s name, even when we were alone. At first it had been a precaution to keep us safe from those who had killed her and would come after us, but now we were hiding from grief as well as from the Inquisition; and grief was an inveterate stalker.

‘Will we live here?’ I asked hopefully, looking at the beautiful riverside palaces and the level lawns. I was eager for a new home after years of travelling.

‘Nowhere as grand as this,’ he said gently. ‘We will have to start small, Hannah, in just a little shop. We have to make our lives again. And when we are settled then you will come out of boy’s clothes, and dress as a girl again, and marry young Daniel Carpenter.’

‘And can we stop running?’ I asked, very low.

My father hesitated. We had been running from the Inquisition for so long that it was almost impossible to hope that we had reached a safe haven. We ran away the very night that my mother was found guilty of being a Jew – a false Christian, a ‘Marrano’ – by the church court, and we were long gone when they released her to the civil court to be burned alive at the stake. We ran from her like a pair of Judas Iscariots, desperate to save our own skins, though my father would tell me later, over and over again, with tears in his eyes, that we could never have saved her. If we had stayed in Aragon, they would have come for us too, and then all three of us would have died, instead of two being saved. When I swore that I would rather have died than live without her, he said very slowly and sadly that I would learn that life was the most precious thing of all. One day I would understand that she would have gladly given her life to save mine.

First over the border to Portugal, smuggled out by bandits who took every coin from my father’s purse and left him with his manuscripts and books, only because they could find no use for them. By boat to Bordeaux, a stormy crossing when we lived on deck without shelter from the scudding rain and the flying spray, and I thought we would die of the cold or drowning. We hugged the most precious books to our bellies as if they were infants that we should keep warm and dry. Overland to Paris, all the way pretending to be something that we were not: a merchant and his young apprentice-lad, pilgrims on the way to Chartres, itinerant traders, a minor lord and his pageboy travelling for pleasure, a scholar and his tutor going to the great university of Paris; anything rather than admit that we were new Christians, a suspicious couple with the smell of the smoke from the auto-da-fé still clinging to our clothes, and night terrors still clinging to our sleep.

We met my mother’s cousins in Paris, and they sent us on to their kin in Amsterdam, where they directed us to London. We were to hide our race under English skies, we were to become Londoners. We were to become Protestant Christians. We would learn to like it. I must learn to like it.

The kin – the People whose name cannot be spoken, whose faith is hidden, the People who are condemned to wander, banned from every country in Christendom – were thriving in secret in London as in Paris, as in Amsterdam. We all lived as Christians and observed the laws of the church, the feast days and fast days and rituals. Many of us, like my mother, believed sincerely in both faiths, kept the Sabbath in secret, a hidden candle burning, the food prepared, the housework done, so that the day could be holy with the scraps of half-remembered Jewish prayers, and then, the very next day, went to Mass with a clean conscience. My mother taught me the Bible and all of the Torah that she could remember together, as one sacred lesson. She cautioned me that our family connections and our faith were secret, a deep and dangerous secret. We must be discreet and trust in God, in the churches we had so richly endowed, in our friends: the nuns and priests and teachers that we knew so well. When the Inquisition came, we were caught like innocent chickens whose necks should be wrung and not slashed.

Others ran, as we had done; and emerged, as we had done, in the other great cities of Christendom to find their kin, to find refuge and help from distant cousins or loyal friends. Our family helped us to London with letters of introduction to the d’Israeli family, who here went by the name of Carpenter, organised my betrothal to the Carpenter boy, financed my father’s purchase of the printing press and found us the rooms over the shop off Fleet Street.

In the months after our arrival I set myself to learn my way around yet another city, as my father set up his print shop with an absolute determination to survive and to provide for me. At once, his stock of texts was much in demand, especially his copies of the gospels that he had brought inside the waistband of his breeches and now translated into English. He bought the books and manuscripts which once belonged to the libraries of religious houses – destroyed by Henry, the king before the young king, Edward. The scholarship of centuries was thrown to the winds by the old king, Henry, and every shop on each corner had a pile of papers that could be bought by the bushel. It was a bibliographer’s heaven. My father went out daily and came back with something rare and precious and when he had tidied it, and indexed it, everyone wanted to buy. They were mad for the Holy Word in London. At night, even when he was weary, he set print and ran off short copies of the gospels and simple texts for the faithful to study, all in English, all clear and simple. This was a country determined to read for itself and to live without priests, so at least I could be glad of that.

We sold the texts cheaply, at little more than cost price, to spread the word of God. We let it be known that we believed in giving the Word to the people, because we were convinced Protestants now. We could not have been better Protestants if our lives had depended on it.

Of course, our lives did depend on it.

I ran errands, read proofs, helped with translations, set print, stitched like a saddler with the sharp needle of the binder, read the backwards-writing on the stone of the printing press. On days when I was not busy in the print shop I stood outside to summon passers-by. I still dressed in the boy’s clothes I had used for our escape and anyone would have mistaken me for an idle lad, breeches flapping against my bare calves, bare feet crammed into old shoes, cap askew. I lounged against the wall of our shop like a vagrant lad whenever the sun came out, drinking in the weak English sunshine and idly surveying the street. To my right was another bookseller’s shop, smaller than ours and with cheaper wares. To the left was a publisher of chap books, poems and tracts for itinerant pedlars and ballad sellers, beyond him a painter of miniatures and maker of dainty toys, and beyond him a portrait painter and limner. We were all workers with paper and ink in this street, and Father told me that I should be grateful for a life which kept my hands soft. I should have been; but I was not.

It was a narrow street, meaner even than our temporary lodgings in Paris. Each house was clamped on to another house, all of them tottering like squat drunkards down to the river, the gable windows overhanging the cobbles below and blocking out the sky, so the pale sunshine striped the earth-plastered walls, like the slashing on a sleeve. The smell of the street was as strong as a farmyard’s. Every morning the women threw the contents of the chamber pots and the washing bowls from the overhanging windows and tipped the night-soil buckets into the stream in the middle of the street where it gurgled slowly away, draining sluggishly into the dirty ditch of the River Thames.

I wanted to live somewhere better than this, somewhere like the Princess Elizabeth’s garden with trees and flowers and a view down to the river. I wanted to be someone better than this: not a bookseller’s ragged apprentice, a hidden girl, a woman heading for betrothal to a stranger.

As I stood there, warming myself like a sulky Spanish cat in the sunshine, I heard the ring of a spur against a cobblestone and I snapped my eyes open and leaped to attention. Before me, casting a long shadow, was a young man. He was richly dressed, a tall hat on his head, a cape swinging from his shoulders, a thin silver sword at his side. He was the most breathtakingly handsome man I had ever seen.

All of this was startling enough, I could feel myself staring at him as if he were a descended angel. But behind him was a second man.

This was an older man, near thirty years of age, with the pale skin of a scholar, and dark deep-set eyes. I had seen his sort before. He was one of those who visited my father’s bookshop in Aragon, who came to us in Paris and who would be one of my father’s customers and friends here in London. He was a scholar, I could see it in the stoop of his neck and the rounded shoulders. He was a writer, I saw the permanent stain of ink on the third finger of his right hand; and he was something greater even than these: a thinker, a man prepared to seek out what was hidden. He was a dangerous man: a man not afraid of heresies, not afraid of questions, always wanting to know more; a man who would seek the truth behind the truth.

I had known a Jesuit priest like this man. He had come to my father’s shop in Spain, and begged him to get manuscripts, old manuscripts, older than the Bible, older even than the Word of God. I had known a Jewish scholar like this man, he too had come to my father’s bookstore and asked for the forbidden books, remnants of the Torah, the Law. Jesuit and scholar had come often to buy their books; and one day they had come no more. Ideas are more dangerous than an unsheathed sword in this world, half of them are forbidden, the other half would lead a man to question the very place of the earth itself, safe at the centre of the universe.

I had been so interested in these two, the young man like a god, the older man like a priest, that I had not looked at the third. This third man was all dressed in white, gleaming like enamelled silver, I could hardly see him for the brightness of the sun on his sparkling cloak. I looked for his face and could see only a blaze of silver, I blinked and still I could not see him. Then I came to my senses and realised that whoever they might be, they were all three looking in the doorway of the bookshop next door.

One swift glance at our own dark doorway showed me that my father was in the inside room mixing fresh ink, and had not seen my failure to summon customers. Cursing myself for an idle fool, I jumped forward into their path and said clearly, in my newly acquired English accent, ‘Good day to you, sirs. Can we help you? We have the finest collection of pleasing and moral books you will find in London, the most interesting manuscripts at the fairest of prices and drawings wrought with the most artistry and the greatest charm that …’

‘I am looking for the shop of Oliver Green, the printer,’ the young man said.

At the moment his dark eyes flicked to mine, I felt myself freeze, as if all the clocks in London had suddenly stopped still and their pendulums were caught silent. I wanted to hold him: there, in his red slashed doublet in the winter sunshine, forever. I wanted him to look at me and see me, me, as I truly was; not an urchin lad with a dirty face, but a girl, almost a young woman. But his glance flicked indifferently past me to our shop, and I came to my senses and held open the door for the three of them.

‘This is the shop of the scholar and bookmaker Oliver Green. Step inside, my lords,’ I invited them and I shouted, into the inner dark room: ‘Father! Here are three great lords to see you!’

I heard the clatter as he pushed back his high printer’s stool and came out, wiping his hands on his apron, the smell of ink and hot pressed paper following him. ‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘Welcome to you both.’ He was wearing his usual black suit and his linen at the cuffs was stained with ink. I saw him through their eyes for a moment and saw a man of fifty, his thick hair bleached white from shock, his face deep-furrowed, his height concealed in the scholar’s stoop.

He prompted me with a nod, and I pulled forward three stools from under the counter, but the lords did not sit, they stood looking around.

‘And how may I serve you?’ he asked. Only I could have seen that he was afraid of them, afraid of all three: the handsome younger man who swept off his hat and pushed his dark curled hair back from his face, the quietly dressed older man and, behind them, the silent lord in shining white.

‘We are seeking Oliver Green, the bookseller,’ the young lord said.

My father nodded his head. ‘I am Oliver Green,’ he said quietly, his Spanish accent very thick. ‘And I will serve you in any way that I can do. Any way that is pleasing to the laws of the land, and the customs …’

‘Yes, yes,’ the young man said sharply. ‘We hear that you are just come from Spain, Oliver Green.’

My father nodded again. ‘I am just come to England indeed, but we left Spain three years ago, sir.’

‘An Englishman?’

‘An Englishman now, if you please,’ my father said cautiously.

‘Your name? It is a very English name?’

‘It was Verde,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘It is easier for Englishmen if we call ourselves Green.’

‘And you are a Christian? And a publisher of Christian theology and philosophy?’

I could see the small gulp in my father’s throat at the dangerous question, but his voice was steady and strong when he answered. ‘Most certainly, sir.’

‘And are you of the reformed or the old tradition?’ the young man asked, his voice very quiet.

My father did not know what answer they wanted to this, nor could he know what might hang on it. Actually we might hang on it, or burn for it, or go to the block for it, however it was that they chose this day to deal with heretics in this country under the young King Edward.

‘The reformed,’ he said tentatively. ‘Though christened into the old faith in Spain, I follow the English church now.’ There was a pause. ‘Praise be to God,’ he offered. ‘I am a good servant of King Edward, and I want nothing more than to work my trade and live according to his laws, and worship in his church.’

I could smell the sweat of his terror as acrid as smoke, and it frightened me. I brushed the back of my hand under my cheek, as if to wipe away the smuts from a fire. ‘It’s all right. I am sure they want our books, not us,’ I said in a quick undertone in Spanish.

My father nodded to show he had heard me. But the young lord was on to my whisper at once. ‘What did the lad say?’

‘I said that you are scholars,’ I lied in English.

‘Go inside, querida,’ my father said quickly to me. ‘You must forgive the child, my lords. My wife died just three years ago and the child is a fool, only kept to mind the door.’

‘The child speaks only the truth,’ the older man remarked pleasantly. ‘For we have not come to disturb you, there is no need to be afraid. We have only come to see your books. I am a scholar; not an inquisitor. I only wanted to see your library.’

I hovered at the doorway and the older man turned to me. ‘But why did you say three lords?’ he asked.

My father snapped his fingers to order me to go, but the young lord said: ‘Wait. Let the boy answer. What harm is it? There are only two of us, lad. How many can you see?’

I looked from the older man to the handsome young man and saw that there were, indeed, only two of them. The third, the man in white as bright as burnished pewter, had gone as if he had never been there at all.

‘I saw a third man behind you, sir,’ I said to the older one. ‘Out in the street. I am sorry. He is not there now.’

‘She is a fool but a good girl,’ my father said, waving me away.

‘No, wait,’ the young man said. ‘Wait a minute. I thought this was a lad. A girl? Why d’you have her dressed as a boy?’

‘And who was the third man?’ his companion asked me.

My father became more and more anxious under the barrage of questions. ‘Let her go, my lords,’ he said pitifully. ‘She is nothing more than a girl, a little maid with a weak mind, still shocked by her mother’s death. I can show you my books, and I have some fine manuscripts you may like to see as well. I can show you …’

‘I want to see them indeed,’ the older man said firmly. ‘But first, I want to speak with the child. May I?’

My father subsided, unable to refuse such great men. The older man took me by the hand and led me into the centre of the little shop. A glimmer of light through the leaded window fell on my face and he put a hand under my chin and turned my face one way and then the other.

‘What was the third man like?’ he asked me quietly.

‘All in white,’ I said through half-closed lips. ‘And shining.’

‘What did he wear?’

‘I could only see a white cape.’

‘And on his head?’

‘I could only see the whiteness.’

‘And his face?’

‘I couldn’t see his face for the brightness of the light.’

‘D’you think he had a name, child?’

I could feel the word coming into my mouth though I did not understand it. ‘Uriel.’

The hand underneath my chin was very still. The man looked into my face as if he would read me like one of my father’s books. ‘Uriel?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Have you heard that name before?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Do you know who Uriel is?’

I shook my head. ‘I just thought it was the name of the one who came in with you. But I never heard the name before I just said it.’

The younger man turned to my father. ‘When you say she is a fool, d’you mean that she has the Sight?’

‘She talks out of turn,’ my father said stubbornly. ‘Nothing more. She is a good girl, I send her to church every day of her life. She means no offence, she just speaks out. She cannot help it. She is a fool, nothing more.’

‘And why d’you keep her dressed like a boy?’ he asked.

My father shrugged. ‘Oh, my lords, these are troubled times. I had to bring her across Spain and France, and then through the Low Countries without a mother to guard her. I have to send her on errands and have her act as clerk for me. It would have been better for me if she had been a boy. When she is a woman full-grown, I will have to let her have a gown, I suppose, but I won’t know how to manage her. I shall be lost with a girl. But a young lad I can manage, as a lad she can be of use.’

‘She has the Sight,’ the older man breathed. ‘Praise God, I come looking for manuscripts and I find a girl who sees Uriel and knows his holy name.’ He turned to my father. ‘Does she have any knowledge of sacred things? Has she read anything more than the Bible and her catechism? Does she read your books?’

‘Before God, no,’ my father said earnestly, lying with every sign of conviction. ‘I swear to you, my lord, I have brought her up to be a good ignorant girl. She knows nothing, I promise you. Nothing.’

The older man shook his head. ‘Please,’ he said gently to me and then to my father, ‘do not fear me. You can trust me. This girl has the Sight, hasn’t she?’

‘No,’ my father said baldly, denying me for my own safety. ‘She’s nothing more than a fool and the burden of my life. More worry than she is worth. If I had kin to send her to – I would. She’s not worth your attention …’

‘Peace,’ the young man said gently. ‘We did not come to distress you. This gentleman is John Dee, my tutor. I am Robert Dudley. You need not fear us.’

At their names my father grew even more anxious, as well he might. The handsome young man was the son of the greatest man in the land: Lord John Dudley, protector of the King of England himself. If they took a liking to my father’s library then we could find ourselves supplying books to the king, a scholarly king, and our fortune would be made. But if they found our books seditious or blasphemous or heretical, too questioning, or too filled with the new knowledge, then we could be thrown into prison or into exile again or to our deaths.

‘You’re very gracious, sir. Shall I bring my books to the palace? The light here is very poor for reading, there is no need to demean yourselves to my little shop …’

The older man did not release me. He was still holding my chin and looking into my face.

‘I have studies of the Bible,’ my father went on rapidly. ‘Some very ancient in Latin and Greek and also books in other languages. I have some drawings of Roman temples with their proportions explained, I have a copy of some mathematical tables for numbers which I was given but of course I have not the learning to understand them, I have some drawings of anatomy from the Greek …’

Finally the man called John Dee let me go. ‘May I see your library?’

I saw my father’s reluctance to let the man browse the shelves and drawers of his collection. He was afraid that some of the books might now, under some new ruling, be banned as heretical. I knew that the books of secret wisdom in Greek and Hebrew were always hidden, behind the sliding back of the bookshelf. But even the ones on show might lead us into trouble in these unpredictable times. ‘I will bring them out to you here?’

‘No, I will come inside.’

‘Of course, my lord,’ he surrendered. ‘It will be an honour to me.’

He led the way into the inner room and John Dee followed him. The young lord, Robert Dudley, took a seat on one of the stools and looked at me with interest.

‘Twelve years old?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I lied promptly, although in truth I was nearly fourteen.

‘And a maid, though dressed as a lad.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘No marriage arranged for you?’

‘Not straight away, sir.’

‘But a betrothal in sight?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And who has your father picked out for you?’

‘I am to marry a cousin from my mother’s family when I am sixteen,’ I replied. ‘I don’t particularly wish it.’

‘You’re a maid,’ he scoffed. ‘All young maids say they don’t wish it.’

I shot a look at him which showed my resentment too clearly.

‘Oho! Have I offended you, Mistress Boy?’

‘I know my own mind, sir,’ I said quietly. ‘And I am not a maid like any other.’

‘Clearly. So what is your mind, Mistress Boy?’

‘I don’t wish to marry.’

‘And how shall you eat?’

‘I should like to have my own shop, and print my own books.’

‘And do you think a girl, even a pretty one in breeches, could manage without a husband?’

‘I am sure I could,’ I said. ‘Widow Worthing has a shop across the lanes.’

‘A widow has had a husband to give her a fortune, she didn’t have to make her own.’

‘A girl can make her own fortune,’ I said stoutly. ‘I should think a girl could command a shop.’

‘And what else can a girl command?’ he teased me. ‘A ship? An army? A kingdom?’

‘You will see a woman run a kingdom, you will see a woman can run a kingdom better than any in the world before,’ I fired back, and then checked at the look on his face. I put my hand over my mouth. ‘I didn’t mean to say that,’ I whispered. ‘I know that a woman should always be ruled by her father or husband.’

He looked at me as if he would hear more. ‘Do you think, Mistress Boy, that I will live to see a woman rule a kingdom?’

‘In Spain it was done,’ I said weakly. ‘Once. Queen Isabella.’

He nodded and let it go, as if drawing us both back from the brink of something dangerous. ‘So. D’you know your way to Whitehall Palace, Mistress Boy?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then when Mr Dee has chosen the books he wants to see, you can bring them there, to my rooms. All right?’

I nodded.

‘How is your father’s shop prospering?’ he asked. ‘Selling many books? Many customers coming?’

‘Some,’ I said cautiously. ‘But it is early days for us yet.’

‘Your gift does not guide him in his business, then?’

I shook my head. ‘It is not a gift. It is more like folly, as he says.’

‘You speak out? And you can see what others cannot?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And what did you see when you looked at me?’

His voice was pitched very low, as if he would lead me to whisper a reply. I raised my eyes from his boots, his strong legs, his beautiful surcoat, to the soft folds of his white ruff, his sensuous mouth, his half-lidded dark eyes. He was smiling at me, as if he understood that my cheeks, my ears, even my hair felt hot as if he were the sun from Spain on my head. ‘When I first saw you, I thought I knew you.’

‘From before?’ he asked.

‘From a time to come,’ I said awkwardly. ‘I thought that I would know you, in the days ahead.’

‘Not if you are a lad!’ He smiled to himself at the bawdiness of his thought. ‘So what condition will I be in when you know me, Mistress Boy? Am I to be a great man? Am I to command a kingdom while you command a bookshop?’

‘Indeed, I hope you will be a great man,’ I said stiffly. I would say nothing more, this warm teasing must not lull me into thinking that it was safe to confide in him.

‘What d’you think of me?’ he asked silkily.

I took a quiet breath. ‘I think that you would trouble a young woman who was not in breeches.’

He laughed out loud at that. ‘Please God that is a true seeing,’ he said. ‘But I never fear trouble with girls, it is their fathers who strike me with terror.’

I smiled back, I could not help myself. There was something about the way his eyes danced when he laughed that made me want to laugh too, that made me long to say something extraordinarily witty and grown-up so that he would look at me and see me not as a child but as a young woman.

‘And have you ever foretold the future and it came true?’ he asked, suddenly serious.

The question itself was dangerous in a country that was always alert for witchcraft. ‘I have no powers,’ I said quickly.

‘But without exerting powers, can you see the future? It is given to some of us, as a holy gift, to know what might be. My friend here, Mr Dee, believes that angels guide the course of mankind and may sometimes warn us against sin, just as the course of the stars can tell a man what his destiny might be.’

I shook my head doltishly at this dangerous talk, determined not to respond to him.

He looked thoughtful. ‘Can you dance or play an instrument? Learn a part in a masque and say your lines?’

‘Not very well,’ I said unhelpfully.

He laughed at my reluctance. ‘Well, we shall see, Mistress Boy. We shall see what you can do.’

I gave my little boyish bow and took care to say nothing more.

Next day, carrying a parcel of books and a carefully rolled scroll of manuscript, I walked across the town, past the Temple Bar and past the green fields of Covent Garden to Whitehall Palace. It was cold with a sleety rain which forced my head down and made me pull my cap low over my ears. The wind off the river was as icy as if it were coming straight from the Russias, it blew me up King’s Street to the very gates of Whitehall Palace.

I had never been inside a royal palace before, and I had thought I would just give the books to the guards on the gate, but when I showed them the note that Lord Robert had scrawled, with the Dudley seal of the bear and staff at the bottom, they bowed me through as though I were a visiting prince, and ordered a man to guide me.

Inside the gates, the palace was like a series of courtyards, each beautifully built, with a great garden in the middle set with apple trees and arbours and seats. The soldier from the gate led me across the first garden and gave me no time to stop and stare at the finely dressed lords and ladies who, wrapped in furs and velvets against the cold, were playing at bowls on the green. Inside the door, swung open by another pair of soldiers, there were more fine people in a great chamber, and behind that great room another, and then another. My guide led me through door after door until we came to a long gallery and Robert Dudley was at the far end of it, and I was so relieved to find him, the only man I knew in the whole palace, that I ran a few steps towards him and called out: ‘My lord!’

The guard hesitated, as if he would block me from getting any closer, but Robert Dudley waved him aside. ‘Mistress Boy!’ he exclaimed. He got to his feet and then I saw his companion. It was the young king, King Edward, fifteen years of age and beautifully dressed in plush blue velvet but with a face the colour of skimmed milk and thinner than any lad I had ever seen before.

I dropped to my knee, holding tight to my father’s books and trying to doff my cap at the same time, as Lord Robert remarked: ‘This is the girl-boy. Don’t you think she would be a wonderful player?’

I did not look up but I heard the king’s voice, thinned with pain. ‘You take such fancies, Dudley. Why should she be a player?’

‘Her voice,’ Dudley said. ‘Such a voice, very sweet, and that accent, part Spanish and part London, I could listen to her forever. And she holds herself like a princess in beggar’s clothes. Don’t you think she’s a delightful child?’

I kept my head down so that he should not see my delighted beam. I hugged the words to my skinny chest: ‘a princess in beggar’s clothes’, ‘a sweet voice’, ‘delightful’.

The young king returned me to the real world. ‘Why, what part should she play? A girl, playing a boy, playing a girl. Besides, it’s against Holy Writ for a girl to dress as a boy.’ His voice tailed away into a cough which shook him like a bear might shake a dog.

I looked up and saw Dudley make a little gesture towards the young man as if he would hold him. The king took his handkerchief from his mouth and I saw a glimpse of a dark stain, darker than blood. Quickly, he tucked it out of sight.

‘It’s no sin,’ Dudley said soothingly. ‘She’s no sinner. The girl is a holy fool. She saw an angel walking in Fleet Street. Can you imagine it? I was there, she truly did.’

The younger man turned to me at once, his face brightened with interest. ‘You can see angels?’

I kept down on my knee and lowered my gaze. ‘My father says I am a fool,’ I volunteered. ‘I am sorry, Your Grace.’

‘But did you see an angel in Fleet Street?’

I nodded, my eyes downcast. I could not deny my gift. ‘Yes, sire. I am sorry. I was mistaken. I didn’t mean to give offence …’

‘What can you see for me?’ he interrupted.

I looked up. Anyone could have seen the shadow of death on his face, in his waxy skin, in his swollen eyes, in his bony thinness, even without the evidence of the stain on his handkerchief and the tremor of his lips. I tried to tell a lie but I could feel the words coming despite myself. ‘I see the gates of heaven opening.’

Again, Robert Dudley made that little gesture, as if he would touch the boy, but his hand fell to his side.

The young king was not angry. He smiled. ‘This child tells the truth when everyone else lies to me,’ he said. ‘All the rest of you run around finding new ways to lie. But this little one …’ He lost his breath and smiled at me.

‘Your Grace, the gates of heaven have been opened since your birth,’ Dudley said soothingly. ‘As your mother ascended. The girl’s saying nothing more than that.’ He shot me an angry look. ‘Aren’t you?’

The young king gestured to me. ‘Stay at court. ‘You shall be my fool.’

‘I have to go home to my father, Your Grace,’ I said as quietly and as humbly as I could, ignoring Lord Robert’s glare. ‘I only came today to bring Lord Robert his books.’

‘You shall be my fool and wear my livery,’ the young man ruled. ‘Robert, I am grateful to you for finding her for me. I shan’t forget it.’

It was a dismissal. Robert Dudley bowed and snapped his fingers for me, turned on his heel and went from the room. I hesitated, wanting to refuse the king, but there was nothing to do but bow to him and run after Robert Dudley as he crossed the huge presence chamber, negligently brushing off the couple of men who tried to stop him and ask after the health of the king. ‘Not now,’ he said.

He went down a long gallery, towards double doors guarded by more soldiers with pikes, who flung them open as we approached. Dudley passed through to their salute and I went after him at a run, like some pet greyhound scampering at its master’s heels. Finally we came to a great pair of doors where the soldiers wore the Dudley livery and we went in.

‘Father,’ Dudley said and dropped to one knee.

There was a man at the fireplace of the great inner hall, looking down into the flames. He turned and made an unemotional blessing over his son’s head with two fingers. I dropped to my knee too, and stayed down even when I felt Robert Dudley rise up beside me.

‘How’s the king this morning?’

‘Worse,’ Robert said flatly. ‘Cough bad, he brought up some black bile, breathless. Can’t last, Father.’

‘And this is the girl?’

‘This is the bookseller’s daughter, calls herself twelve, I’d guess older, dresses like a lad but certainly a girl. Has the Sight, according to John Dee. I took her into the king as you ordered, begged her for a fool. She told him that she saw the gates of heaven opened for him. He liked it. She is to be his fool.’

‘Good,’ the duke said. ‘And have you told her of her duties?’

‘I brought her straight here.’

‘Stand, fool.’

I rose to my feet and took my first look at Robert Dudley’s father, the Duke of Northumberland, the greatest man in the kingdom. I took him in: a long bony face like a horse, dark eyes, balding head half-hidden by a rich velvet cap with a big silver brooch of his coat of arms: the bear and staff. A Spanish beard and moustache round a full mouth. I looked into his eyes and saw – nothing. This was a man whose face could hide his thoughts, a man whose very thoughts could conspire to hide his thoughts.

‘So?’ he asked of me. ‘What do you see with those big black eyes of yours, my girl-boy fool?’

‘Well, I don’t see any angels behind you,’ I said abruptly and was rewarded by an amused smile from the duke and a crack of laughter from his son.

‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘Well done.’ He turned to me. ‘Listen, fool – what’s your name?’

‘Hannah Green, my lord.’

‘Listen, Hannah the Fool, you have been begged for a fool and the king has accepted you, according to our laws and customs. D’you know what that means?’

I shook my head.

‘You become his, like one of his puppies, like one of his soldiers. Your job, like a puppy and not like a soldier, is to be yourself. Say the first thing that comes into your head, do whatever you wish. It will amuse him. It will amuse us, and it will set before us all the work of the Lord, which will please him. You will tell the truth in this court of liars, you will be our innocent in this wicked world. Understand?’

‘How am I to be?’ I was absolutely confounded. ‘What d’you want of me?’

‘You are to be yourself. Speak as your gift commands you. Say whatever you wish. The king has no holy fool at present and he likes an innocent at court. He has commanded you. You are now a royal fool. One of the household. You will be paid to be his fool.’

I waited.

‘Do you understand, fool?’

‘Yes. But I don’t accept.’

‘You can’t accept or not accept. You’ve been begged for a fool, you have no legal standing, you have no voice. Your father has handed you over to Lord Robert here, and he has given you to the king. You are now the king’s.’

‘If I refuse?’ I could feel myself trembling.

‘You can’t refuse.’

‘If I run away?’

‘Punished according to the king’s wishes. Whipped like a puppy. You were your father’s property, now you are ours. And we have begged you for a fool to the king. He owns you. D’you understand?’

‘My father would not sell me,’ I said stubbornly. ‘He would not let me go.’

‘He cannot stand against us,’ Robert said quietly behind me. ‘And I promised him that you would be safer here than out on the street. I gave him my word and he accepted. The business was done while we ordered the books, Hannah. It is finished.’

‘Now,’ continued the duke. ‘Not like a puppy, and not like a fool, you have another task to do.’

I waited.

‘You are to be our vassal.’

At the strange English word I glanced at Robert Dudley.

‘Servant to command, servant for life,’ he explained.

‘Our vassal. Everything you hear, everything you see, you come and tell me. Anything the king prays for, anything that makes him weep, anything that makes him laugh, you come and tell me, or you tell Robert here. You are our eyes and our ears at his side. Understand?’

‘My lord, I have to go home to my father,’ I said desperately. ‘I cannot be the king’s fool nor your vassal. I have work to do at the bookshop.’

The duke raised one eyebrow at his son. Robert leaned towards me and spoke very quietly.

‘Mistress Boy, your own father cannot care for you. He said that in your hearing, d’you remember?’

‘Yes, but, my lord, he only meant that I am a trouble to him …’

‘Mistress Boy, I think your father is not a good Christian from a good Christian family at all, but a Jew. I think you came from Spain because you were expelled by the Spanish for the sin of Jewishness, and if your neighbours and the good citizens of London knew that you were Jews, you would not last for very long in your new little home.’

‘We are Marranos, our family converted years and years ago,’ I whispered. ‘I have been baptised, I am betrothed to marry a young man of my father’s choosing, a Christian Englishman …’

‘I wouldn’t go in that direction,’ Robert Dudley warned bluntly. ‘Lead us to that young man and I imagine you lead us to a family of Jews living in the heart of England itself, and from thence to – where did you say? Amsterdam? And then Paris?’

I opened my mouth to deny it, but I could not speak for fear.

‘All forbidden Jews, all pretending to be Christians. All lighting a candle on Friday night, all avoiding pork, all living with the noose around their necks.’

‘Sir!’

‘They all helped and guided you here, didn’t they? All Jews, all practising a forbidden religion in secret, all helping one another. A secret network, just as the most fearful of Christians claim.’

‘My lord!’

‘Do you really want to be the key that leads this most Christian king to seek you out? Don’t you know that the reformed church can light a pyre just as bright as the Papists? Do you want to pile your family on it? And all their friends? Have you ever smelled roasting human flesh?’

I was shaking in terror, my throat so dry that I could say nothing. I just looked at him and I knew my eyes were black with fear and he would see the sheen of sweat on my forehead.

‘I know. You know. Your father knows he cannot keep you safe. But I can. Enough. I won’t say another word.’

He paused. I tried to speak but all I could manage was a little croak of terror. Robert Dudley nodded at the craven depth of my fear. ‘Now, luckily for you, your Sight has won you the safest and highest place that you might dream of. Serve the king well, serve our family well and your father is safe. Fail us in any one thing and he is tossed in a blanket till his eyes fall backwards in his head, and you are married to a red-faced chapel-going Luther-reading pig herder. You can choose.’

There was the briefest of moments. Then the Duke of Northumberland waved me away. He did not even wait for me to make my choice. He did not need the Sight to know what my choice would have to be.

‘And you are to live at court?’ my father confirmed.

We were eating our dinner, a small pie brought in from the bakehouse at the end of the street. The unfamiliar taste of English pastry stuck at the back of my throat, my father forced down gravy that was flavoured with bacon rinds.

‘I am to sleep with the maidservants,’ I said glumly. ‘And wear the livery of the king’s pages. I am to be his companion.’

‘It’s better than I could have provided for you,’ my father said, trying to be cheerful. ‘We won’t make enough money to pay the rent on this house next quarter, unless Lord Robert orders some more books.’

‘I can send you my wages,’ I offered. ‘I am to be paid.’

He patted my hand. ‘You’re a good girl,’ he said. ‘Never forget that. Never forget your mother, never forget that you are one of the children of Israel.’

I nodded, saying nothing. I saw him spoon a little of the contaminated gravy and swallow it down.

‘I am to go to the palace tomorrow,’ I whispered. ‘I am to start at once. Father …’

‘I will come to the gate and see you every evening,’ he promised. ‘And if you are unhappy or they treat you badly we will run away. We can go back to Amsterdam, we can go to Turkey. We will find somewhere, querida. Have courage, daughter. You are one of the Chosen.’

‘How will I keep the fast days?’ I demanded in sudden grief. ‘They will make me work on the Sabbath. How will I say the prayers? They will make me eat pork!’

He met my gaze and then he bowed his head. ‘I shall keep the law for you here,’ he said. ‘God is good. He understands. You remember what that German scholar said? That God allows us to break the laws rather than lose our lives. I will pray for you, Hannah. And even if you are praying on your knees in the Christian chapel God still sees you and hears your prayer.’

‘Father, Lord Robert knows who we are. He knows why we left Spain. He knows who we are.’

‘He said nothing directly to me.’

‘He threatened me. He knows we are Jews and he said that he would keep our secret as long as I obey him. He threatened me.’

‘Daughter, we are safe nowhere. And you at least are under his patronage. He swore to me that you would be safe in his household. Nobody would question one of his servants. Nobody would question the king’s own fool.’

‘Father, how could you let me go? Why did you agree that they could take me away from you?’

‘Hannah, how could I stop them?’

In the lime-washed room under the eaves of the palace roof I turned over the pile of my new clothes and read the inventory from the office of the Master of the Household:

Item: one pageboy livery in yellow.

Item: one pair of hose, dark red.

Item: one pair of hose, dark green.

Item: one surcoat, long.

Item: two linen shirts for wearing underneath.

Item: two pairs of sleeves, one pair red, one pair green.

Item: one black hat.

Item: one black cloak for riding.

Item: pair of slippers fit for dancing.

Item: pair of boots fit for riding.

Item: pair of boots fit for walking.

Everything used but clean and darned and delivered to the king’s fool, Hannah Green.

‘I shall look a fool indeed.’

That night I whispered an account of my day to my father as he stood at the postern gate and I leaned against the doorway, half-in, half-out. ‘There are two fools at court already, a dwarf called Thomasina, and a man called Will Somers. He was kind to me, and showed me where I should sit, beside him. He is a witty man, he made everyone laugh.’

‘And what do you do?’

‘Nothing as yet. I have thought of nothing to say.’

My father glanced around. In the darkness of the garden an owl hooted, almost like a signal.

‘Can you think of something? Won’t they want you to think of something?’

‘Father, I cannot make myself see things, I cannot command the Sight. It just comes or it does not.’

‘Did you see Lord Robert?’

‘He winked at me.’ I leaned back against the cold stone and drew my warm new cloak around my shoulders.

‘The king?’

‘He was not even at dinner. He was sick, they sent his food to his rooms. They served a great dinner as if he were at the table but they sent a little plate to his rooms for him. The duke took his place at the head of the table, all but sitting on the throne.’

‘And does the duke have his eye on you?’

‘He did not seem to see me at all.’

‘Has he forgotten you?’

‘Ah, he doesn’t have to look to know who is where, and what they are doing. He will not have forgotten me. He is not a man who forgets anything.’

The duke had decided that there was to be a masque at Candlemas and gave it out as the king’s command, so we all had to wear special costumes and learn our lines. Will Somers, the king’s fool who had come to court twenty years ago when he was a boy the same age as me, was to introduce the piece and recite a rhyme, the king’s choristers were to sing, and I was to recite a poem, specially composed for the occasion. My costume was to be a new livery, specially made for me in the fool’s colour of yellow. My hand-me-down livery was too tight on my chest. I was that odd androgynous thing, a girl on the threshold of being a woman. One day, in a certain light, as I turned my head before the mirror I could see the glimpse of a stranger, a beauty. Another day I was as plain as a slate.

The Master of the Revels gave me a little sword and ordered that Will and I should prepare for a fight, which would fit somewhere into the story of the masque.

We met for our first practice in one of the antechambers off the great hall. I was awkward and unwilling, I did not want to learn to fight with swords like a boy, I did not want to be the butt of jokes by taking a public beating. No man at court but Will Somers could have persuaded me to it, but he treated our lesson as if he had been hired to improve my understanding of Greek. He behaved as if it was a skill I needed to learn, and he wanted me to learn well.

He started with my stance. Resting his hands on my shoulders, he gently smoothed them down, took my chin and raised it up. ‘Hold your head high, like a princess,’ he said. ‘Have you ever seen Lady Mary slouch? Ever seen Lady Elizabeth drop her head? No. They walk as if they are princesses born and bred; dainty like a pair of goats.’

‘Goats?’ I asked, trying to raise my head without hunching up my shoulders.

Will Somers grinned at the laborious unfolding of the jest. ‘Up one minute, down the next,’ he said. ‘Heir one moment, bastard the next. Up the mountain and down again. Princesses and goats, all alike. You must stand like a princess, and dance like a goat.’

‘I have seen the Lady Elizabeth,’ I volunteered.

‘Have you?’

‘Once, when I was a little girl. My father brought me on a visit to London and I had to deliver some books to Admiral Lord Seymour.’

Will put a gentle hand on my shoulder. ‘Least said, soonest mended,’ he advised quietly. Then he slapped his forehead and gave me his merry smile. ‘Here am I, telling a woman to mind her tongue! Fool that I am!’

The lesson went on. He showed me the swordsman’s stance, hand on my hip for balance, how to slide forward with my leading foot always on the floor so that I should not trip or fall, how to move behind the sword and to let it retreat to me. Then we started on the feints and passes.

Will first commanded me to stab at him. I hesitated. ‘What if I hit you?’

‘Then I shall take a splinter, not a deadly cut,’ he pointed out. ‘It’s only wood, Hannah.’

‘Get ready then,’ I said nervously and lunged forward.

To my amazement Will sidestepped me and was at my side, his wooden sword to my throat. ‘You’re dead,’ he said. ‘Not so good at foresight after all.’

I giggled. ‘I’m no good at this,’ I admitted. ‘Try again.’

This time I lunged with a good deal more energy and caught the hem of his coat as he flicked to one side.

‘Excellent,’ he said breathlessly. ‘And again.’

We practised until I could make a convincing stab at him and then he started to lunge at me and teach me to drop to one side or the other. Then he rolled out a thick carpet on the floor and showed me how to turn head over heels.

‘Comical,’ he announced, sitting upright, his legs entwined like a child seated to read a book.

‘Not very,’ I said.

‘Ah, you’re a holy fool, not a jester,’ he said. ‘You have no sense of the laughable.’

‘I have,’ I said, stung. ‘It’s just that you are not funny.’

‘I have been the most comical man in England for nearly twenty years,’ he insisted. ‘I came to court when Henry loved Anne Boleyn and once boxed my ears for jesting against her. But the joke was on her, later. I was the funniest man in England before you were born.’

‘Why, how old are you?’ I asked, looking into his face. The laughter lines were deeply engraved on either side of his mouth, crow’s feet by his eyes. But he was lithe and lanky as a boy.

‘As old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth,’ he said.

‘No, really.’

‘I am thirty-three. Why, d’you want to marry me?’

‘Not at all. Thank you.’

‘You would wed the wittiest fool in the world.’

‘I would rather not marry a fool.’

‘Now that is inevitable. A wise man is a bachelor.’

‘Well, you don’t make me laugh,’ I said provocatively.

‘Ah, you’re a girl. Women have no sense of the ludicrous.’

‘I have,’ I insisted.

‘It is well known that women, not being in the image of God, can have no sense of what is funny and what is not.’

‘I have! I have!’

‘Of course women do not!’ he triumphed. ‘For why else would a woman ever marry a man? Have you ever seen a man when he desires a woman?’

I shook my head. Will put the wooden sword between his legs and made a little rush to one side of the room and then the other. ‘He can’t think, he can’t speak, he can’t command his thoughts or his wishes, he runs everywhere behind his cock like a hound behind a scent, all he can do is howl. How-oww-oww-owwl!’

I was laughing out loud as Will raced around the room, straining backwards as if to restrain his wooden sword, leaning back as if to take the weight of it. He broke off and smiled at me. ‘Of course women have no wit,’ he said. ‘Who with any wit would ever have a man?’

‘Well, not I,’ I said.

‘God bless you and keep you a virgin then, Maid-Boy. But how shall you get a husband if you will not have a man?’

‘I don’t want one.’

‘Then you are a fool indeed. For without a husband how shall you have a living?’

‘I shall make my own.’

‘Then again you are a fool, for the only living you can make is from fooling. That makes you a fool three times over. Once for not wanting a husband, twice for making a living without him, and thrice since the living you make is from fooling. At least I am just a fool, but you are a triple fool.’

‘Not at all!’ I rejoined, falling in with the rhythm of his speech. ‘Because you have been a fool for years, you have been a fool for two generations of kings, and I have only been one for a few weeks.’

He laughed at that and slapped me on the shoulder. ‘Take care, Maid-Boy, or you will not be a holy fool but a witty fool and I tell you, clowning and jesting every day is harder work than saying something surprising once a month.’

I laughed at the thought of my work being to say something surprising once a month.

‘Up and at it!’ Will Somers said, pulling me to my feet. ‘We have to plan how you are going to murder me amusingly by Candlemas.’

We had our sword dance planned in good time and it did seem very funny. At least two practices ended in us both having fits of giggles as we mistimed a lunge and cracked heads together, or both feinted at the same time, and fell backwards, and toppled over. But one day the Master of the Revels put his head into the room and said: ‘You won’t be needed. The king is not having a masque.’

I turned with the play-sword still in my hand. ‘But we’re all ready!’

‘He’s sick,’ the Master said dourly.

‘And is the Lady Mary still coming to court?’ Will asked, pulling on his jerkin against the cold draught of air whistling in through the open door.

‘Said to be,’ the Master said. ‘She’ll get better rooms and a better cut of the meat this time, don’t you think, Will?’

He shut the door before Will could reply, and so I turned and asked, ‘What does he mean?’

Will’s face was grave. ‘He means that those of the court who move towards the heir and away from the king will be making their move now.’

‘Because?’

‘Because flies swarm to the hottest dung heap. Plop, plop, buzz.’

‘Will? What d’you mean?’

‘Ah, child. Lady Mary is the heir. She will be queen if we lose the king, God bless him, poor lad.’

‘But she’s a heret –’

‘Of the Catholic faith,’ he corrected me smoothly.

‘And King Edward …’

‘His heart will break to leave the kingdom to a Catholic heir but he can do nothing about it. It’s how King Henry left it. God bless him, he must be rolling in his shroud to see it come to this. He thought that King Edward would grow to be a strong and merry man and have half a dozen little princes in the nursery. It makes you think, doesn’t it? Is England ever to get any peace? Two young lusty kings: Henry’s father, Henry himself, handsome as the sun, each of them, lecherous as sparrows, and they leave us with nothing but a lad as weak as a girl, and an old maid to come after him?’

He looked at me and I saw him rub his face, as if to brush off some wetness round his eyes. ‘Means nothing to you,’ he said gruffly. ‘Newly come from Spain, damned black-eyed girl. But if you were English, you’d be a worried man now; if you were a man, and if you were a sensible man instead of being a girl and a fool at that.’

He swung open the door and set off into the great hall on his long legs, nodding at the soldiers who shouted a good-natured greeting to him.

‘And what will happen to us?’ I demanded in a hissed whisper, trotting after him. ‘If the young king dies and his sister takes the throne?’

Will threw me a sideways grin. ‘Then we shall be Queen Mary’s fools,’ he said simply. ‘And if I can make her laugh it will be a novelty indeed.’

My father came to the side gate that night and he brought someone with him, a young man dressed in a cape of dark worsted, dark ringlets of hair falling almost to his collar, dark eyes, and a shy boyish smile. It took me a moment to recognise him; he was Daniel Carpenter, my betrothed. It was only the second time I had ever seen him, and I was embarrassed that I failed to recognise him and then utterly shamed to be seen by him in my pageboy livery in golden yellow, the colour of the holy fool. I pulled my cape around me, to hide my breeches, and made him an awkward little bow.

He was a young man of twenty years old, training to be a physician like his father, who had died only last year. His kin had come to England from Portugal eighty years ago as the d’Israeli family. They changed their name to the most English one they could find, hiding their education and their foreign parentage behind the name of a working man. It was typical of their satirical wit to choose the occupation of the most famous Jew of all – Jesus. I had spoken to Daniel only once before, when he and his mother welcomed us to England with a gift of bread and some wine, and I knew next to nothing about him.

He had no more choice in this marriage than I, and I did not know if he resented it as much, or even more. They had chosen him for me because we were sixth cousins, twice removed, and within ten years of each other’s age. That was all that was required and it was better than it might have been. There were not enough cousins and uncles and nephews in England for anyone to be very particular as to whom they might marry. There were no more than twenty families of Jewish descent in London, and half as many again scattered around the towns of England. Since we were bound to marry among ourselves we had very little choice. Daniel could have been fifty years of age, half-blind, half-dead even, and I would still have been wedded to him and bedded by my sixteenth birthday. More important than anything else in the world, more important than wealth or fitness for each other, was that we would be bound to each other in secrecy. He knew that my mother had been burned to death as a heretic accused of secret Jewish practices. I knew that beneath his smart English breeches he was circumcised. Whether he had turned to the risen Jesus in his heart and believed the words of the sermons that were preached at his local church every day and twice on Sundays would be something I might discover about him later, as in time he must learn about me. What we knew for certain of each other was that our Christian faith was new, but our race was very old, and that we had been the hated ones of Europe for more than three hundred years and that Jews were still forbidden to set foot in most of the countries of Christendom, including this one, this England, which we would call our home.

‘Daniel asked to see you alone,’ my father said awkwardly, and he stepped back a little, out of earshot.

‘I heard that you had been begged for a fool,’ Daniel said. I looked at him and watched his face slowly colour red till even his ears were glowing. He had a young man’s face, skin as soft as a girl’s, a down of a dark moustache on his upper lip, which matched his silky dark eyebrows over deep-set dark eyes. At first glance he looked more Portuguese than Jewish, but the heavy-lidded eyes would have betrayed him to one who was looking.

I slid my gaze from his face and took in a slight frame with broad shoulders, narrow waist, long legs: a handsome young man.

‘Yes,’ I said shortly. ‘I have a place at court.’

‘When you are sixteen you will have to leave court and come home again,’ he said.

I raised my eyebrows at this young stranger. ‘Who gives this order?’

‘I do.’

I allowed a frosty little silence to fall. ‘I don’t believe you have any command over me.’

‘When I am your husband …’

‘Then, yes.’

‘I am your betrothed. You are promised to me. I have some rights.’

I showed him a sulky face. ‘I am commanded by the king, I am commanded by the Duke of Northumberland, I am commanded by his son Lord Robert Dudley, I am commanded by my father; you might as well join in. Every other man in London seems to think he can order me.’

He gave a little gulp of involuntary laughter and at once his face was lighter, like a boy’s. He clipped me gently on my shoulder as if I were his comrade in a gang. I found I was smiling back at him. ‘Oh, poor maid,’ he said. ‘Poor set-upon maid.’

I shook my head. ‘Fool indeed.’

‘Don’t you want to come away from all these commanding men?’

I shrugged. ‘I am better living here, than being a burden on my father.’

‘You could come home with me.’

‘Then I would be a burden on you.’

‘When I have served my apprenticeship and I am a physician I will make a home for us.’

‘And when will that be?’ I asked him with the sharp cruelty of a young girl. Again I watched the slow painful rise of his blush.

‘Within two years,’ he said stiffly. ‘I shall be able to keep a wife by the time you are ready for marriage.’

‘Come for me then,’ I said unhelpfully. ‘Come with your orders then, if I am still here.’

‘In the meantime, we are still betrothed,’ he insisted.

I tried to read his face. ‘As much as we ever have been. The old women seem to have arranged it to their satisfaction if not to ours. Did you want more?’

‘I like to know where I am,’ he said stubbornly. ‘I have waited for you and your father to come from Paris and then from Amsterdam. For months we none of us knew if you were alive or dead. When you finally came to England I thought you would be glad of … be glad of … a home. And then I hear you and your father are to set up house together, you are not coming to live with Mother and me; and you have not put aside your boy’s costume. Then I hear you are working for him like a son. And then I hear you have left the protection of your father’s house. And now I find you at court.’

It was not the Sight that helped me through all of this, but the sharp intuition of a girl on the edge of womanhood. ‘You thought I would rush to you,’ I crowed. ‘You thought you would rescue me, that I would be a fearful girl longing to cling to a man, ready to fling myself at you!’

The sudden darkening of his flush and the jerk of his head told me that I had hit the mark.

‘Well, learn this, young apprentice physician, I have seen sights and travelled in countries that you cannot imagine. I have been afraid and I have been in danger, and I have never for one moment thought that I would throw myself at a man for his help.’

‘You are not …’ He was lost for words, choking on a young man’s indignation. ‘You are not … maidenly.’

‘I thank God for it.’

‘You are not … a biddable girl.’

‘I thank my mother for that.’

‘You are not …’ His temper was getting the better of him. ‘You would not be my first choice!’

That silenced me, and we looked at each other in some sort of shock at the distance we had come in so little a time.

‘Do you want another girl?’ I asked, a little shaken.

‘I don’t know another girl,’ he said sulkily. ‘But I don’t want a girl who doesn’t want me.’

‘It’s not you I dislike,’ I volunteered. ‘It’s marriage itself. I would not choose marriage at all. What is it but the servitude of women hoping for safety, to men who cannot even keep them safe?’

My father glanced over curiously and saw the two of us, face to face, aghast in silence. Daniel turned away from me and took two paces to one side, I leaned against the cold stone of the doorpost and wondered if he would stride off into the night and that would be the last I would see of him. I wondered how displeased my father would be with me if I lost a good offer through my impertinence, and if we would be able to stay in England at all if Daniel and his family considered themselves insulted by us newcomers. We might be family and entitled to the help of our kin, but the hidden Jews of England were a tight little world and if they decided to exclude us, we would have nowhere to go but on our travels again.

Daniel mastered himself, and came back to me.

‘You do wrong to taunt me, Hannah Green,’ he said, his voice trembling with his intensity. ‘Whatever else, we are promised to one another. You hold my life in your hands and I hold yours in mine. We should not disagree. This is a dangerous world for us. We should cleave together for our own safety.’

‘There is no safety,’ I said coldly. ‘You have lived too long in this quiet country if you think there is ever any safety for such as us.’

‘We can make a home here,’ he said earnestly. ‘You and I can be married and have children who will be English children. They will know nothing but this life, we need not even tell them of your mother, of her faith. Nor of our own.’

‘Oh, you’ll tell them,’ I predicted. ‘You say you won’t now, but once we have a child you won’t be able to resist it. And you’ll find ways to light the candle on Friday night and not to work on the Sabbath. You’ll be a doctor then, you will circumcise the boys in secret and teach them the prayers. You’ll have me teach the girls to make unleavened bread and to keep the milk from the meat and to drain the blood from the beef. The moment you have children of your own you will want to teach them. And so it goes on, like some sickness that we pass on, one to another.’

‘It’s no sickness,’ he whispered passionately. Even in the midst of our quarrel, nothing would make us raise our voices. We were always aware of the shadows in the garden, always alert to the possibility that someone might be listening. ‘It is an insult to call it a sickness. It is our gift, we are chosen to keep faith.’

I would have argued for the sake of contradicting him, but it went against the deeper grain of my love for my mother and her faith. ‘Yes,’ I said, surrendering to the truth. ‘It is not a sickness, but it kills us just as if it were. My grandmother and my aunt died of it, my mother too. And this is what you propose to me. A lifetime of fear, not Chosen so much as cursed.’

‘If you don’t want to marry me, then you can marry a Christian and pretend that you know nothing more,’ he pointed out. ‘None of us would betray you. I would let you go. You can deny the faith that your mother and your grandmother died for. Just say the word and I shall tell your father that I wish to be released.’

I hesitated. For all that I had bragged of my courage, I did not dare to tell my father that I would overthrow his plans. I did not dare to tell the old women who had arranged all of this, thinking only of my safety and Daniel’s future, that I wanted none of it. I wanted to be free; I did not want to be cast out.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, a girl’s plea. ‘I’m not ready to say … I don’t know yet.’

‘Then be guided by those who do,’ he said flatly. He saw me bridle at that. ‘Look, you can’t fight everyone,’ he advised me. ‘You have to choose where you belong and rest there.’

‘It’s too great a cost for me,’ I whispered. ‘For you it is a good life, the home is made around you, the children come, you sit at the head of the table and lead the prayers. For me it is to lose everything I might be and everything I might do, and become nothing but your helpmeet and your servant.’

‘This is not being a Jew, this is being a girl,’ he said. ‘Whether you married a Christian or a Jew, you would be his servant. What else can a woman be? Would you deny your sex as well as your religion?’

I said nothing.

‘You are not a faithful woman,’ he said slowly. ‘You would betray yourself.’

‘That’s a dreadful thing to say,’ I whispered.

‘But true,’ he maintained. ‘You are a Jew and you are a young woman and you are my betrothed, and all these things you would deny. Who do you work for in the court? The king? The Dudleys? Are you faithful to them?’

I thought of how I had been pledged as a vassal, begged as a fool and appointed as a spy. ‘I just want to be free,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be anybody’s anything.’

‘In fool’s livery?’

I saw my father looking towards us. He could sense that we were far from courtship. I saw him make a little tentative move as if to interrupt us, but then he waited.

‘Shall I tell them that we cannot agree and ask you to release me from our betrothal?’ Daniel asked tightly.

Wilfully, I was about to agree, but his stillness, his silence, his patient waiting for my reply made me look at this young man, this Daniel Carpenter, more closely. The light was going from the sky and in the half-darkness I could see the man he would become. He would be handsome, he would have a dark mobile face, a quick observing eye, a sensitive mouth, a strong straight nose like mine, thick black hair like mine. And he would be a wise man, he was a wise youth, he had seen me and understood me and contradicted my very core, and yet still he stood waiting. He would give me a chance. He would be a generous husband. He would want to be kind.

‘Leave me now,’ I said feebly. ‘I can’t say now. I have said too much already. I am sorry for speaking out. I am sorry if I angered you.’

But his anger had left him as quickly as it had come, and that was another thing that I liked in him.

‘Shall I come again?’

‘All right.’

‘Are we still betrothed?’

I shrugged. There was too much riding on my answer. ‘I haven’t broken it,’ I said, finding the easiest way out. ‘It’s not broken yet.’

He nodded. ‘I shall need to know,’ he warned me. ‘If I am not to marry you, then I could marry another. I shall want to marry within two years; you, or another girl.’

‘You have so many to choose from?’ I taunted him, knowing that he had not.

‘There are many girls in London,’ he returned. ‘I could marry outside our kin, well enough.’

‘I can see them allowing that!’ I exclaimed. ‘You’ll have to marry a Jew, there’s no escape from that. They will send you a fat Parisian or a girl with skin the colour of mud from Turkey.’

‘I would try to be a good husband even to a fat Parisian or to a young girl from Turkey,’ he said steadily. ‘And it is more important to love and cherish the wife that God gives you than to run after some silly maid who does not know her own mind.’

‘Would that be me?’ I asked sharply.

I expected his colour to rise but this time he did not blush. He met my eyes frankly and it was I who looked away first. ‘I think you are a silly maid if you turn from the love and protection of a man who would be a good husband, to a life of deceit at court.’

My father came up beside Daniel before I could reply, and put a hand on his shoulder.

‘And so you two are getting acquainted,’ he said hopefully. ‘What d’you make of your wife-to-be, Daniel?’

I expected Daniel to complain of me to my father. Most young men would have been all a-prickle with their pride stinging, but he gave me a small rueful smile. ‘I think we are coming to know each other,’ he said gently. ‘We have overleaped being polite strangers and reached disagreement very quickly, don’t you think, Hannah?’

‘Commendably quick,’ I said, and was rewarded by the warmth of his smile.

Lady Mary came to London for the Candlemas feast, as had been planned; it seemed that no-one had told her that her brother was too sick to rise from his bed. She rode in through the palace gate of Whitehall with a great train behind her, and was greeted at the very threshold of the palace by the duke, with his sons, including Lord Robert, at his side, and the council of England bowing low before her. Seated high on her horse, her small determined face looking down at the sea of humbly bowing heads, I thought I saw a smile of pure amusement cross her lips before she put down her hand to be kissed.

I had heard so much about her, the beloved daughter of the king who had been put aside on the word of Anne Boleyn, the whore. The princess who had been humbled to dust, the mourning girl who had been forbidden to see her dying mother. I had expected a figure of tragedy: she had endured a life which would have broken most women; but what I saw was a stocky little fighter with enough wit about her to smile at the court, knocking their noses on their knees because, suddenly, she was the heir with formidable prospects.

The duke treated her as if she were queen already. She was helped from her horse and led in to the banquet. The king was in his chamber, coughing and retching in his little bed; but they had the banquet anyway, and I saw the Lady Mary look round at the beaming faces as if to note that when the heir was in the ascendant, a king could lie sick and alone, and no-one mind at all.

There was dancing after dinner but she did not rise from her seat, though she tapped her foot and seemed to enjoy the music. Will made her laugh a couple of times, and she smiled on him as if he were a familiar face in a dangerous world. She had known him when he was her father’s fool and given her brother carry-backs, and sung nonsense songs at her and sworn it was Spanish. When she looked around the court now at the hard faces of the men who had seen her insulted and humiliated by her own baby brother it must have been a small relief to know that Will Somers at least never changed in his unswerving good humour.

She did not drink deeply, and she ate very little; she was not a famous glutton as her father had been. I looked her over, as did the court: this woman who might be my next mistress. She was a woman in her thirty-seventh year, but she still had the pretty colouring of a girl: pale skin and cheeks which readily flushed rosy pink. She wore her hood set back off her square honest face and showed her hair, dark brown with a tinge of Tudor red. Her smile was her great charm; it came slowly, and her eyes were warm. But what struck me most about her was her air of honesty. She did not look at all like my idea of a princess – having spent a few weeks at court I thought everyone there smiled with hard eyes and said one thing and meant the opposite. But this princess looked as if she said nothing that she did not mean, as if she longed to believe that others were honest too, that she wanted to ride a straight road.

She had a grim little face in repose, but it was all redeemed by that smile: the smile of the best-beloved princess, the first of her father’s children, born when he was a young man who still adored his wife. She had quick dark eyes, Spanish eyes, from her mother and her rapid appreciation of everything around her. She held herself upright in her chair, the dark collar of her gown framing her shoulders and neck. She had a great jewelled cross at her throat as if to flaunt her religion in this most Protestant court, and I thought that she must be either very brave or very reckless to insist on her faith when her brother’s men were burning heretics for less. But then I saw the tremor in her hand when she reached for her golden goblet and I imagined that like many women she had learned to put on a braver face than she might feel.

When there was a break in the dancing, Robert Dudley was at her side, whispering to her, and she glanced over to me and he beckoned me forward.

‘I hear you are from Spain, and my brother’s new fool,’ she said in English.

I bowed low. ‘Yes, Your Grace.’

‘Speak Spanish,’ Lord Robert commanded me, and I bowed again and told her in Spanish that I was glad to be at court.

When I looked up I saw the delight in her face at hearing her mother’s language. ‘What part of Spain?’ she asked eagerly in English.

‘Castile, Your Grace,’ I lied at once. I did not want any inquiries made of us and of my family’s destruction in our home of Aragon.

‘And why did you come to England?’

I was prepared for the question. My father and I had discussed the dangers of every answer and settled on the safest. ‘My father is a great scholar,’ I said. ‘He wanted to print books from his library of manuscripts, and he wanted to work in London, which is such a centre of learning.’

At once the smile left her, and her face grew harder. ‘I suppose he turns out copies of the Bible to mislead people who cannot begin to understand it,’ she said crossly.

My gaze slid to Robert Dudley, who had bought one of my father’s Bibles newly translated into English.

‘In the Latin only,’ he said smoothly. ‘A very pure translation, Lady Mary, and with very few errors. I daresay Hannah will bring you one, if you would like.’

‘My father would be honoured,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘And you are my brother’s holy fool,’ she said. ‘D’you have any words of wisdom for me?’

I shook my head helplessly. ‘I wish I could see at will, Your Grace. I am much less wise than you, I should think.’

‘She told my tutor John Dee that she could see an angel walking with us,’ Robert put in.

The Lady Mary looked at me with more respect.

‘But then she told my father that she saw no angels behind him.’

Her face at once creased into laughter. ‘No! Did she? And what said your father? Was he sorry not to have an angel at his side?’

‘I don’t think he was very surprised,’ Robert said, smiling too. ‘But this is a good little maid, and I think she does have a true gift. She has been a great comfort to your brother in his illness. She has a gift of seeing the truth and speaking true, and he likes that.’

‘That alone is a rare gift to find at court,’ the Lady Mary said. She nodded kindly to me and I stepped back and the music started up again. I kept my eye on Robert Dudley as he led out one young lady and then another to dance before the Lady Mary, and I was rewarded when after some minutes he glanced over to me and gave me a hidden approving smile.

The Lady Mary did not see the king that night but the chambermaids’ gossip was that when she went into his room the next day she came out again, white as a winding sheet. She had not known till then that her little brother was so near to his death.

After that, there was no reason for her to stay. She rode out as she had come, with a great retinue following behind, and all the court bowing as low as they could reach, to indicate their new-found loyalty; half of them praying silently that, when the young king died and she came to the throne, she would be blessed with forgetfulness and overlook the priests they had burned at the stake, and the churches they had despoiled.

I was watching this charade of humility from one of the palace windows when I felt a gentle touch on my sleeve. I turned, and there was Lord Robert, smiling down at me.

‘My lord, I thought you would be with your father, saying goodbye to the Lady Mary.’

‘No, I came to find you.’

‘For me?’

‘To ask you if you would do me a service?’

I felt my colour rise to my cheeks. ‘Anything …’ I stammered.

He smiled. ‘Just one small thing. Would you come with me to my tutor’s rooms, and see if you can assist him in one of his experiments?’

I nodded and Lord Robert took my hand and, drawing it into the crook of his arm, led me to the Northumberland private quarters. The great doors were guarded by Northumberland men, and as soon as they saw the favoured son of the house they snapped to attention and swung the double doors open. The great hall beyond was deserted, the retainers and the Northumberland court were in the Whitehall garden demonstrating their immense respect to the departing Lady Mary. Lord Robert led me up the grand stairs, through a gallery, to his own rooms. John Dee was seated in the library overlooking an inner garden.

He raised his head as we came into the room. ‘Ah, Hannah Verde.’

It was so odd for me to hear my real name, given in full, that for a moment I did not respond, and then I dipped a little bow. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘She says she will help. But I have not told her what you want,’ Lord Robert said.

Mr Dee rose from the table. ‘I have a special mirror,’ he said. ‘I think it possible that, one with special sight might see rays of light that are not visible to the ordinary eye, d’you understand?’

I did not.

‘Just as we cannot see a sound or a scent, but we know that something is there, I think it possible that the planets and the angels send out rays of light, which we might see if we had the right glass to see them in.’

‘Oh,’ I said blankly.

The tutor broke off with a smile. ‘No matter. You need not understand me. I was only thinking that since you saw the angel Uriel that day, you might see such rays in this mirror.’

‘I don’t mind looking, if Lord Robert wishes it,’ I volunteered.

He nodded. ‘I have it ready. Come in.’ He led the way to an inner chamber. The window was shielded by a thick curtain, all the cold winter light blocked out. A square table was placed before it, the four legs standing on four wax seals. On top of the table was an extraordinary mirror of great beauty, a gold-wrought frame, a bevelled rim, and a golden sheen on the silvering. I stepped up to it and saw myself, reflected in gold, looking not like the boy-girl I was, but like a young woman. For a moment I thought I saw my mother looking back at me, her lovely smile and that gesture when she turned her head. ‘Oh!’ I exclaimed.

‘D’you see anything?’ Dee asked, I could hear the excitement in his voice.

‘I thought I saw my mother,’ I whispered.

He paused for a moment. ‘Can you hear her?’ he asked, his voice shaking.

I waited for a moment, longing with all my heart that she would come to me. But it was only my own face that looked back at me, my eyes enlarged and darkened by unshed tears.

‘She’s not here,’ I said sadly. ‘I would give anything to hear her voice, but I cannot. She has gone from me. I just thought that I saw her for a moment; but it is my own face in the mirror.’

‘I want you to close your eyes,’ he said, ‘and listen carefully to the prayer that I am going to read. When you say “amen” you can open your eyes again and tell me what you see. Are you ready?’

I closed my eyes and I could hear him softly blowing out the few candles illuminating the shadowy room. Behind me I was conscious of Lord Robert sitting quietly on a wooden chair. I wanted only to please him. ‘I am ready,’ I whispered.

It was a long prayer in Latin, I understood it despite Mr Dee’s English pronunciation of the words. It was a prayer for guidance and for the angels to come and protect the work we would do. I whispered ‘amen’ and then I opened my eyes.

The candles were all out. The mirror was a pool of darkness, black reflected in black, I could see nothing.

‘Show us when the king will die,’ Mr Dee whispered from behind me.

I watched, waiting for something to happen, my eyes staring into the blackness.

Nothing.

‘The day of the king’s death,’ Dee whispered again.

In truth, I could see nothing. I waited. Nothing came to me. How could it? I was not some sibyl on a Greek hillside, I was not some saint to whom mysteries were revealed. I stared into the darkness until my eyes grew hot and dry and I knew that far from being a holy fool I was a fool pure and simple, looking at nothing, at a reflection of nothing, while the greatest mind in the kingdom waited for my answer.

I had to say something. There was no going back and telling them that the Sight came to me so seldom and so unheralded that they would have done better to leave me leaning against the wall of my father’s shop. They knew who I was, they had promised me sanctuary from danger. They had bought me and now they expected some benefit for their bargain. I had to say something.

‘July,’ I said quietly, as good a reply as any.

‘Which year?’ Mr Dee prompted me, his voice silky and quiet.

Common sense alone suggested that the young king could not live much longer. ‘This year,’ I said unwillingly.

‘The day?’

‘The sixth,’ I whispered in reply, and I heard the scratch of Lord Robert’s pen as he recorded my mountebank prophecy.

‘Tell the name of the next ruler of England,’ Mr Dee whispered.

I was about to reply ‘Queen Mary’, echoing his own tranced tone. ‘Jane,’ I said simply, surprising myself.

I turned to Lord Robert. ‘I don’t know why I said that. I am most sorry, my lord. I don’t know …’

John Dee quickly grasped my jaw, and turned my head back to the mirror. ‘Don’t talk!’ he ordered. ‘Just tell us what you see.’

‘I see nothing,’ I said helplessly. ‘I am sorry, I am sorry, my lord. I am sorry, I can’t see anything.’

‘The king who comes after Jane,’ he urged me. ‘Look, Hannah. Tell me what you see. Does Jane have a son?’

I would have said ‘yes’ but my tongue would not move in my dry mouth. ‘I cannot see,’ I said humbly. ‘Truly, I cannot see.’

‘A closing prayer,’ Mr Dee said, holding me in my chair by a firm grip on my shoulders. He prayed again in Latin that the work should be blessed, that the visions should be true, and that no-one in this world nor in any other should be harmed by our scrying.

‘Amen,’ I said, more fervently now that I knew this was dangerous work, perhaps even treasonous work.

I felt Lord Robert rise to leave the room and I pulled away from Mr Dee and ran after him.

‘Was it what you wanted?’ I demanded.

‘Did you tell me what you thought I wanted to hear?’

‘No! I spoke as it came to me.’ That was true of the sudden word ‘Jane’, I thought.

He looked sharply at me. ‘Do you promise? Mistress Boy, you are no use to John Dee nor to me if you choose your words to please me. The only way you can please me is by seeing true and saying true.’

‘I am! I did!’ My anxiety to please him and my fear of the mirror were together too much for me and I gave a little sob. ‘I did, my lord.’

His face did not soften. ‘Swear?’

‘Yes.’

He rested a hand on my shoulder. My head throbbed so much that I longed to lean my cheek against the coolness of his sleeve but I thought I should not. I stood stock-still like the boy he called me, to face his scrutiny.

‘Then you have done very well for me,’ he said. ‘That was what I wanted.’

Mr Dee came out of the inner chamber, his face alight. ‘She has the Sight,’ he said. ‘She has it indeed.’

Lord Robert looked at his tutor. ‘Will this make a great difference to your work?’

The older man shrugged. ‘Who knows? We are all children in darkness. But she has the Sight.’ He paused, and then turned to me. ‘Hannah Verde, I must tell you one thing.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘You have the Sight because you are pure in heart. Please, for yourself and for the gift you bear, refuse any offers of marriage, resist any seduction, keep yourself pure.’

Behind me, Lord Robert gave a snort of amusement.

I felt my colour rise slowly from my neck to my ear lobes to my temples. ‘I have no carnal desires,’ I said in a voice as low as a whisper. I did not dare to look at Lord Robert.

‘Then you will see true,’ John Dee said.

‘But I don’t understand,’ I protested. ‘Who is Jane? It is Lady Mary who will be queen if His Grace dies.’

Lord Robert put his finger on my lips and at once I was silent. ‘Sit down,’ he said and pressed me into a chair. He drew up a stool and sat beside me, his face close to mine. ‘Mistress Boy, you have seen today two things that would have us all hanged if they were known.’

My heart raced with fear. ‘My lord?’

‘Just by looking in the mirror you put us all in danger.’

My hand went to my cheek as if I would wipe away smuts from a fire. ‘My lord?’

‘You must say not a word of this. It is treason to cast the horoscope of a king, and the punishment for treason is death. You cast his horoscope today and you foretold the day of his death. D’you want to see me on the scaffold?’

‘No! I …’

‘Do you want to die yourself?’

‘No!’ I could hear a quaver in my voice. ‘My lord, I am afraid.’

‘Then never say one word of this to anyone. Not even to your father. As to the Jane of the mirror …’

I waited.

‘Just forget all you saw, forget I even asked you to look in the mirror. Forget the mirror, forget the room.’

I looked at him solemnly. ‘I won’t have to do it again?’

‘You will never have to do it again unless you consent. But you must forget it now.’ He gave me his sweet seductive smile. ‘Because I ask it of you,’ he whispered. ‘Because I ask it of you as your friend, I have put my life in your hands.’

I was lost. ‘All right,’ I said.

The court moved to Greenwich Palace in February and it was given out that the king was better. But he never asked for me, nor for Will Somers, he did not ask for music nor for company, nor did he ever come to the great hall for dinner. The physicians, who had been in full-blown attendance with their gowns flapping, waiting in every corner of the court, talking amongst themselves and giving carefully guarded replies to all inquiries, seemed to slip away as the days wore on and there was no news of his recovery, and not even their cheerful predictions about leeches cleansing the young man’s blood and poison carefully administered killing his disease, seemed to ring very true. Lord Robert’s father, the Duke of Northumberland, was all but king in Edward’s place, seated at the right hand of an empty throne at dinner, taking the chair at the head of the council table every week, but telling everyone that the king was well, getting better all the time, looking forward to the finer weather, planning a progress this summer.

I said nothing. I was being paid as a fool to say surprising and impertinent things but I could think of nothing more impertinent and surprising than the truth – that the young king was half-prisoner to his protector, that he was dying without companions or nursing, and that this whole court, every great man in the land, was thinking of the crown and not of the boy; and that it was a great cruelty, to a boy only a little older than me and without a mother or a father to care for him, to be left to die alone. I looked around me at the men who assured each other that the young man of fifteen, coughing his lungs out in hiding, would be fit to take a wife this summer, and I thought that I would be a fool indeed if I did not see that they were a bunch of liars and rogues.

While the young king vomited black bile in his chamber, the men outside quietly helped themselves to the pensions, to the fees from offices, to the rents from monasteries that they closed for piety and then robbed for greed, and no-one said one word against it. I would have been a fool indeed to tell the truth in this court of liars, I would have been as incongruous as an angel in Fleet Street. I kept my head down, I sat near Will Somers at dinner, and I kept silent.

I had new work to do. Lord Robert’s tutor Mr Dee sought me out and asked if I would read with him. His eyes were tired, he said, and my father had sent him some manuscripts that could be more easily deciphered by young sight.

‘I don’t read very well,’ I said cautiously.

He was pacing ahead of me in one of the sunny galleries overlooking the river, but at my words he turned and smiled.

‘You are a very careful young woman,’ he said. ‘And that is wise in these changing times. But you are safe with me and with Lord Robert. I imagine you can read English and Latin fluently, am I right?’

I nodded.

‘And Spanish, of course, and perhaps French?’

I kept my silence. It was obvious that I spoke and read Spanish as my native tongue, and he would guess that I must have picked up some French during our stay in Paris.

Mr Dee came a little closer and bent his head to whisper in my ear. ‘Can you read Greek? I need someone who can read Greek for me.’

If I had been older and wiser I would have denied my knowledge. But I was only fourteen and proud of my abilities. My mother herself had taught me to read Greek and Hebrew, and my Father called me his little scholar, as good as any boy.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can read Greek and Hebrew.’

‘Hebrew?’ he exclaimed, his interest sharpened. ‘Dear God, child, what have you seen in Hebrew? Have you seen the Torah?’

At once I knew I should have said nothing. If I said yes, that I had seen the laws of the Jews and the prayers, then I would have identified myself and my father beyond doubt as Jews and practising Jews at that. I thought of my mother telling me that my vanity would get me into trouble. I had always thought that she meant my love of fine clothes and ribbons for my hair. Now, dressed as a boy in a fool’s livery I had committed the sin of vanity, I had been prideful of my schooling and the punishment could be extreme.

‘Mr Dee …’ I whispered, aghast.

He smiled at me. ‘I guessed you had fled Spain as soon as I saw you,’ he said gently. ‘I guessed you were Conversos. But it was not for me to say. And it is not in Lord Robert’s nature to persecute someone for the faith of their fathers, especially a faith which they have surrendered. You go to church, don’t you? And observe feast days? You believe in Jesus Christ and his mercy?’

‘Oh yes, my lord. Without fail.’ There was no point in telling him that there was no more devout Christian than a Jew trying to be invisible.

Mr Dee paused. ‘As for me, I pray for a time when we are beyond such divisions, beyond them to the truth itself. Some men think that there is neither God nor Allah nor Elohim …’

At his speaking the sacred name of the only God I gave a little gasp of surprise. ‘Mr Dee? Are you one of the Chosen People?’

He shook his head. ‘I believe there is a creator, a great creator of the world, but I do not know his name. I know the names that he is given by man. Why should I prefer one name to another? What I want to know is His Holy Nature, what I want is the help of his angels, what I want to do is to further his work, to make gold from base, to make Holy from Vulgar.’ He broke off. ‘Does any of this mean anything to you?’

I kept my face blank. In my father’s library in Spain there had been books that told of the secrets of the making of the world, and there had been the scholar who had come to read them, and the Jesuit who wanted to know the secrets beyond those of his order.

‘Alchemy?’ I asked, my voice very low.

He nodded. ‘The creator has given us a world full of mysteries,’ he said. ‘But I believe that they will be known to us one day. Now we understand a little, and the church of the Pope, and the church of the king, and the laws of the land all say that we should not question. But I don’t believe that it is the law of God that we should not question. I think that he has made this world as a great and glorious mechanical garden, one that works to its own laws and grows to its own laws and that we will one day come to understand it. Alchemy – the art of change – is how we shall come to understand it, and when we know how things are made, we can make them ourselves, we will have the knowledge of God, we ourselves will be transubstantiated, we shall be angels …’

He broke off. ‘Does your father have many works on alchemy? He showed me only those on religion. Does he have alchemy texts in Hebrew? Will you read them to me?’

‘I only know the permitted books,’ I said cautiously. ‘My father does not keep forbidden books.’ Not even this kind man who trusted me with his own secrets could lure me into speaking the truth. I had been raised in utter secrecy, I would never lose the habit of fear-filled duplicity. ‘I can read Hebrew, but I don’t know the Jewish prayers. My father and I are good Christians. And he has not shown me any books on alchemy, he does not stock them. I am too young to understand books like that. I don’t know that he would want me to read Hebrew to you, sir.’

‘I will ask him and surely he will allow it,’ he said easily. ‘Reading Hebrew is a gift of God, a skill with languages is the sign of a pure heart. Hebrew is the language of the angels, it is the closest we mortals can come to speaking to God. Did you not know that?’

I shook my head.

‘But of course,’ he continued, glowing with enthusiasm. ‘God spoke to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before the Fall and they became the first people of earth. They must have spoken Hebrew, they must have understood God in that language. There is a language beyond Hebrew, which is what God speaks with heavenly beings, and it is that language which I hope to discover. And the way to it must be through Hebrew, through Greek and through Persian.’ He broke off for a moment. ‘You don’t speak or read Persian, do you? Or any of the Arab tongues?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘No matter,’ he replied. ‘You shall come every morning and read with me for an hour and we shall make great progress.’

‘If Lord Robert says I may,’ I temporised.

Mr Dee smiled at me. ‘Young lady, you are going to help me to understand nothing less than the meaning of all things. There is a key to the universe and we are just beginning to grasp at it. There are rules, unchangeable rules, which command the courses of the planets, the tides of the sea, and the affairs of men, and I know, I absolutely know, that all these things are interlinked: the sea, the planets, and the history of man. With God’s grace and with the skill we can muster we will discover these laws and when we know them …’ He paused. ‘We will know everything.’