I leaned toward her. “Princess, if the queen had seen you and her husband today, as I saw you, she would banish you to Woodstock in a moment.”
Elizabeth gave a dizzy laugh. “Oh no, for he would not let her.”
“He? He does not give the orders here.”
“He is king,” she pointed out. “He told her I should be treated with respect, and I am. He told her that I should be free to come and go as I wish, and I am. He will tell her that I am to stay at court, and I will. And, he will tell her that I am not to be coerced or ill-treated or accused of anything at all. I shall be free to meet who I choose, and talk with who I choose, and, in short, do anything at all that I choose.”
I gasped that she could leap so far in her confidence. “You will always be under suspicion.”
“Not I,” she said. “Not any more. I could be caught with a dozen pikes in my laundry basket tomorrow, and I would not be charged. He will protect me.”
I was stunned into silence.
“And he is a handsome man.” She almost purred with pleasure. “The most powerful man in Christendom.”
“Princess, this is the most dangerous game you are playing,” I warned her. “I have never heard you so reckless before. Where is your caution gone?”
“If he loves me then nothing can touch me,” she said, her voice very low. “And I can make him love me.”
“He cannot intend anything but your dishonor, and her heartbreak,” I said fiercely.
“Oh, he intends nothing at all.” She was gleaming with pleasure. “He is far beyond intentions. I have him on the run. He intends nothing, he thinks nothing, I daresay he can barely eat or sleep. D’you not know the pleasure of turning a man’s head, Hannah? Let me tell you it is better than anything. And when the man is the most powerful man in Christendom, the King of England and Prince of Spain, and the husband of your icy, arrogant, tyrannical ugly old sister, then it is the greatest joy that can be had!”
A few days later I was out riding. I had outgrown the pony that the Dudleys had given me, and I now rode one of the queen’s own beautiful hunters from the royal stables. I was desperate to be out. Hampton Court, for all its beauty, for all its healthful position, was like a prison this summer, and when I rode out in the morning I always had a sense of escape on parole. The queen’s anxiety and the waiting for the baby preyed on everyone till we were all like bitches penned up in the kennel, ready to snap at our own paws.
I usually rode west along the river, with the bright morning sunshine on my back, past the gardens and the little farms and on to where the countryside became more wild and the farmhouses more infrequent. I could set the hunter to jump the low hedges, and she would splash through streams in a headlong canter. I would ride for more than an hour and I always turned for home reluctantly.
This warm morning I was glad to be out early, it would be too hot for riding later. I could feel the heat of the sun on my face and pulled my cap down lower to shield my face from the burning light. I turned back toward the palace and saw another horseman on the road ahead of me. If he had headed for the stable yard or stayed on the high road, I would hardly have noticed him; but he turned off the road toward the palace and took a little lane which ran alongside the walls of the garden. His discreet approach alerted me, and I turned to look more closely. At once I recognized the scholarly stoop of his shoulders. I called out, without thinking: “Mr. Dee.”
He reined in his horse and turned and smiled at me, quite composed. “How glad I am to see you, Hannah Verde,” he said. “I hoped that we might meet. Are you well?”
I nodded. “Very well, I thank you. I thought you were in Italy. My betrothed wrote to me that he heard you lecture in Venice.”
He nodded. “I have been home for some time. I am working on a map of the coastline, and I needed to be in London for the maps and sailors’ charts. Have you received a book for me? I had it delivered to your father in Calais for safety, and he said he would send it on.”
“I have not been to the shop for some days, sir,” I said.
“When it comes I shall be glad of it,” he said casually.
“Has the queen summoned you, sir?”
He shook his head. “No, I am here privately to visit the Princess Elizabeth. She asked me to bring her some manuscripts. She is studying Italian and I have brought some very interesting old texts from Venice.”
Still I was not warned. “Shall I take you to her?” I offered. “This is not the way to the palace. We can go to the stable yard by the high road.”
Even as he was about to reply, the little gate in the wall opened silently, and Kat Ashley stood in the doorway.
“Ah, the fool,” she said pleasantly. “And the magician.”
“You miscall us both,” he said with quiet dignity, and got down from his saddle. A pageboy ducked out from under Kat Ashley’s arm to hold John Dee’s horse. I realized that he was expected, that they had planned he should enter the palace in secrecy, and — sometimes I was a fool indeed — I realized that it would have been better for me if I had not seen him or, if I had, better to have turned my head and ridden blindly past.
“Take her horse too,” Kat Ashley told the lad.
“I’ll take her back to the stable,” I said. “And go about my business.”
“This is your business,” she said bluntly. “Now you are here you will have to come with us.”
“I don’t have to do anything but what the queen commands me,” I said abruptly.
John Dee put his hand gently on my arm. “Hannah, I could use your gift in the work I have to do here. And your lord would want you to help me.”
I hesitated, and while I paused, Kat took hold of my hand and fairly dragged me into the walled garden. “Come in now,” she said. “You can scurry off once you’re inside, but you are putting Mr. Dee and me in danger while you argue out here in the open. Come now, and leave later if you must.”
As ever, the thought of being watched frightened me. I tossed my reins to the lad and followed Kat, who went to a little doorway, hidden by ivy, which despite all my time in the palace I had never noticed before. She led us up a winding stair, and came out through another hidden doorway, shielded by a tapestry, opposite the princess’s rooms.
She knocked on the door with a special rhythm and it opened at once. John Dee and I went quickly inside. No one had seen us.
Elizabeth was seated on a stool in the window, a lute across her knees, her new Italian lute master a few paces away setting out music on a stand. They looked as innocent as stage players enacting innocence. Indeed they looked so very innocent that the short hairs on the back of my cropped neck prickled as if I were a frightened dog.
Elizabeth looked up and saw me. “Oh, Hannah.”
“Kat dragged me in,” I said. “I think I should go.”
“Wait a moment,” she replied.
Kat Ashley planted her big bottom against the wooden door and leaned back.
“Would you see better if Hannah were to help you?” Elizabeth demanded of John Dee.
“I cannot see without her,” he said frankly. “I don’t have the gift. I was only going to prepare the astrological tables for you; that is all I can do without a seer. I did not know that Hannah would be here today.”
“If she would look for you, what might we see?”
He shrugged. “Everything. Nothing. How would I know? But we might be able to tell the date of the birth of the queen’s baby. We might be able to know if it is a boy or a girl, and how healthy, and what its future might hold.”
Elizabeth came toward me, her eyes very bright. “Do this for us, Hannah,” she whispered, almost pleading with me. “We all want to know. You, as much as anybody.”
I said nothing. My knowledge of the queen’s growing despair in that darkened room was not one that I wanted to share with her flirtatious half sister.
“I dare not do it,” I said flatly. “Mr. Dee, I am afraid. These are forbidden studies.”
“It is all for
bidden now,” he said simply. “The world is forming into two bands of people. Those who ask questions and need answers, and those who think the answers are given to us. Her ladyship is one who asks questions, the queen is one who thinks that everything is already known. I am in the world of those who ask: ask about everything. You too. Lord Robert as well. It is breath of life to question, it is like being dead when one has to accept an answer which comes with the dust of the tomb on it and one cannot even ask ‘why?’ You like to ask, don’t you, Hannah?”
“I was brought up to it,” I said, as if excusing a sin. “But I have learned the price. I have seen the price that scholars sometimes have to pay.”
“You will pay no price for asking questions in my rooms,” Elizabeth assured me. “I am under the protection of the king. We can do as we wish. I am safe now.”
“But I am never safe!” burst from me.
“Come, child,” John Dee urged me. “You are among friends. Do you not have the courage to exercise your God-given gift, in the sight of your Maker and in the company of your friends, child?”
“No,” I said frankly. I was thinking of the faggots of wood that had been piled up in the town square of Aragon, of the stakes at Smithfield, of the determination of the Inquisition to know only what it feared and see only what it suspected.
“And yet you live here, in the very heart of the court,” he observed.
“I am here to serve the queen because I love her, and because I can’t leave her now, not while she is waiting for her baby to be born. And I serve the Princess Elizabeth because… because she is like no other woman I have ever met.”
Elizabeth laughed. “You study me as if I were your book,” she said. “I have seen you do it. I know you do. You watch me as if you would learn how to be a woman.”
I nodded, granting her nothing. “Perhaps.”
She smiled. “You love my sister, don’t you?”
I faced her without fear. “I do. Who could not?”
“Then would you not ease her burden by telling her when this slow baby will come? It is a month late, Hannah. People are laughing at her. If she has mistaken her dates, would you not want to tell her that the baby in her belly is growing well and due this very week, or the next?”
I hesitated. “How could I tell her I knew such a thing?”
“Your gift! Your gift!” she exclaimed irritably. “You can tell her you just saw it in a vision. You don’t have to say the vision was conjured in my rooms.”
I thought for a moment.
“And when you go to see Lord Robert again you could advise him,” Elizabeth said quietly. “You could tell him that he must make his peace with her for she will put her son on the throne of England, and England will be a Catholic and Spanish power forever. You could tell him to give up waiting and hoping for anything else. You could tell him that the cause is lost and he must convert, plead for clemency and set himself free. That news would mean that he could plead for his freedom. You could set him free.”
I said nothing but she understood the rise of color in my cheeks. “I don’t know how he can bear it,” she said, her voice low, weaving a spell around me. “Poor Robert, waiting and waiting in the Tower and never knowing what the future will bring. If he knew that Mary would be on the throne for the next twenty years and her son after her, don’t you think he would sue for his freedom and set himself at liberty again? His lands want him, his people need him, he’s a man that needs the earth under his boots and the wind in his face. He’s not a man to be mewed up like a hooded hawk for half of his life.”
“If he knew for certain that the queen would have a son, would he be able to get free?”
“If a prince was born to her she would release most of them in the Tower for she would know that she was safe on the throne. We would all give up.”
I hesitated no longer. “I’ll do it,” I said.
Elizabeth nodded calmly. “You need an inner room, don’t you?” she asked John Dee.
“Lit with candles,” he said. “And a mirror, and a table covered with a linen cloth. There should be more, but we’ll do what we can.”
Elizabeth went into her privy chamber beyond the audience room and we heard her drawing the curtains and pulling a table before the fireplace. John Dee set out his astronomical charts on her desk; when she came back he had drawn a line through the queen’s date of birth and the date of birth of the king.
“Their marriage was in Libra,” he said. “It is a partnership of deep love.”
I looked quickly at Elizabeth’s face but she was not scoffing, thinking of her triumph over her sister in her flirtation with Philip, she was too serious for her petty triumphs now.
“Will it be fruitful?” she asked.
He drew a line across the thin columns of dizzying numbers. He drew another downward, and where the lines intersected he leaned forward to read the number.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “But I can’t be sure. There will be two pregnancies.”
Elizabeth drew a little gasp like the hiss of a cat. “Two? Live births?”
John Dee consulted the number again and then another set of numbers at the foot of the scroll. “It is very obscure.”
Elizabeth held herself very still, there was no outward sign of her desperation to know.
“So who will inherit the throne?” she asked tightly.
John Dee drew another line, this time horizontally, across the columns. “It should be you,” he said.
“Yes, I know it should be me,” Elizabeth said, reining in her impatience. “I am the heir now, if I am not overthrown. But will it be me?”
He leaned back, away from the pages. “I am sorry, Princess. It is too unclear. The love that she bears him and her desire for a child obscures everything. I have never seen a woman love a man more, I have never seen a woman long more intensely for a child. Her desire is in every symbol of the table, it is almost as if she could wish a child into being.”
Elizabeth, her face like a beautiful mask, nodded. “I see. Would you be able to see more if Hannah would scry for you?”
John Dee turned to me. “Will you try, Hannah? And see what we can learn? It is God’s work, remember, we will be seeking the advice of angels.”
“I’ll try,” I said. I was not very eager to enter the darkened room, and look in the shadowy mirror. But the thought of bringing Lord Robert the news that might release him, of bringing the queen the news that might give her the greatest joy since her coming to the throne, was a great temptation for me.
I went into the room. The candle flames were bobbing either side of a golden mirror. The table was covered with a white linen cloth. As I watched, John Dee drew a five-sided star on the linen with a dark spluttery pen, and then symbols of power at each corner.
“Keep the door shut,” he said to Elizabeth. “I don’t know how long we will be.”
“Can’t I be inside?” she said. “I won’t speak.”
He shook his head. “Princess, you don’t have to speak, you have all the presence of a queen. This has to be just Hannah and me, and the angels if they will come to us.”
“But you will tell me everything,” she urged him. “Not just the things you think I should know. You will tell me all that there is?”
He nodded and shut the door on her eager face and then turned back to me. He pulled a stool before the mirror and seated me gently, looking over my head to my reflection in the mirror. “You are willing?” he confirmed.
“I am,” I said seriously.
“It is a great gift that you have,” he said quietly. “I would give all my learning to be able to do it.”
“I just wish there could be a resolution,” I said. “I wish Elizabeth might have her throne and yet the queen keep it. I wish the queen might have her son and Elizabeth not be disinherited. I wish with all my heart that Lord Robert might be free and yet not plot against the queen. I wish I could be here and yet be with my father.”
He smiled. “You and I are the most un
helpful of conspirators,” he said gently. “For I don’t mind which queen is on the throne as long as she will allow the people to follow their faith. And I want the libraries restored and learning allowed, and for this country to explore the seas and spread outward and outward to the new lands to the west.”
“But how will this work bring it about?” I asked.
“We will know what the angels advise,” he said quietly. “There could be no better guide for us.”
John Dee stepped back from the mirror and I heard his quiet voice pray in Latin that we should do the work of God and that the angels would come to us. I said “Amen,” heartfelt, and then waited.
It seemed to take a very long time. I saw the candles reflected in the mirror, the darkness around them became darker and they seemed to grow more bright. Then I saw that at the core of every candle there was a halo of darkness, and inside the halo of darkness there was the black wick of the candle and a little haze around it. I grew so fascinated with this anatomy of flame that I could not remember what I should be doing, I just stared and stared into the moving lights until I felt that I had fallen asleep, and then John Dee’s hand was gentle on my shoulder and I heard his voice in my ear saying: “Drink this, child.”
It was a cup of warm ale and I sat back on my stool and sipped it, conscious of a heaviness behind my eyes and weariness, as if I were ill.
“I am sorry,” I said. “I must have fallen asleep.”
“D’you remember nothing?” he asked curiously.
I shook my head. “I just watched the flame and then fell asleep.”
“You spoke,” he said quietly. “You spoke in a language I could not understand, but I think it was the language of angels. God be praised, I think you spoke to them in their language. I copied it down as best I could, I will try to translate it… if it is the key to speaking to God!” He broke off.
“Did I say nothing that you could understand now?” I asked, still bemused.
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