The Queen's Fool

by Philippa Gregory

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “He’s very… pleasing,” she said.

  Jane Dormer met my eyes and smiled at me.

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

  “What dark eyes he has,” Jane pointed out.

  “Yes,” the queen breathed.

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

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

  “Yes,” the queen said.

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

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

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

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

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

  “I know,” I said numbly. “I can’t help it.”

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

  “I know,” I said again. “I am sorry.”

  Jane turned to the queen. “Your Grace, pay no heed to the fool.”

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

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

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

  “He’s not here,” John Dee called back.

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

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

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

  “Did anyone follow you? Did you tell anyone you were looking for me?”

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

  “Could anyone have followed you?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “You are sure?” I pressed him.

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

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

  “What d’you think that is?” he asked.

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

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

  “Where is our world?” I asked.

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

  “Light,” I repeated softly.

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

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

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

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

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

  He was suddenly alight with eagerness. “A message? From who?”

  “From Lord Robert.”

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

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

  “What men?”

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

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

  I gave him a steady look. “As you wish, sir.”

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

  “I am his to command,” I said firmly. “I have given my word.”

  “He should release you,” he said gently. “He cannot command anything from the Tower.”

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

  “Shall we look in the mirror and see now?” he asked.

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

  “When you said the date of the death of the king?”

  I nodded.

  “When you predicted that the next queen would be Jane?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your answers were true,” he observed.

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

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

  I was caught and I knew it. “Very well.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “And Lord Robert Dudley?” he whispered.

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

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

  “Are you all right?” he asked me.

  I nodded. “Yes. A little sleepy.”

  “You had better go back to court,” he said. “You will be missed.”

  “Will you not come, and see Lady Elizabeth?”

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

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

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

  “The philosopher’s stone?” I asked.

  He smiled. “This time it is a riddle.”

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

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

  “And are you sure?” I asked. “Are you sure that he will not be executed?”

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

  I waited, hardly breathing. “Do you know who he will love?” I whispered.

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

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

  “But she is to marry Philip of Spain,” I observed.

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

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

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