PHILIPPA GREGORY
THE QUEEN’S FOOL

Copyright

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2003

Copyright © Philippa Gregory 2003

Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007147298

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007370153

Version: 2019–01–11

Dedication

For Anthony

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Summer 1548

Winter 1552–53

Spring 1553

Summer 1553

Autumn 1553

Winter 1553

Winter 1554

Spring 1554

Summer 1554

Autumn 1554

Winter 1554–55

Spring 1555

Spring – Summer 1555

Autumn 1555

Winter 1555

Spring 1556

Summer 1556

Autumn 1556

Winter 1556–57

Spring 1557

Summer 1557

Winter 1557–58

Spring 1558

Summer 1558

Autumn 1558

Winter 1558

Author’s Note

About the Author

Also by Philippa Gregory

About the Publisher

Summer 1548

The girl, giggling and over-excited, was running in the sunlit garden, running away from her stepfather, but not so fast that he could not catch her. Her stepmother, seated in an arbour with Rosamund roses in bud all around her, caught sight of the fourteen-year-old girl and the handsome man chasing around the broad tree trunks on the smooth turf and smiled, determined to see only the best in both of them: the girl she was bringing up and the man she had adored for years.

He snatched at the hem of the girl’s swinging gown and caught her up to him for a moment. ‘A forfeit!’ he said, his dark face close to her flushed cheeks.

They both knew what the forfeit would be. Like quicksilver she slid from his grasp and dodged away, to the far side of an ornamental fountain with a broad circular bowl. Fat carp were swimming slowly in the water; Elizabeth’s excited face was reflected in the surface as she leaned forward to taunt him.

‘Can’t catch me!’

‘’Course I can.’

She leaned low so that he could see her small breasts at the top of the square-cut green gown. She felt his eyes on her and the colour in her cheeks deepened. He watched, amused and aroused, as her neck flushed rosy pink.

‘I can catch you any time I want to,’ he said, thinking of the chase of sex that ends in bed.

‘Come on then!’ she said, not knowing exactly what she was inviting, but knowing that she wanted to hear his feet pounding the grass behind her, sense his hands outstretched to grab at her; and, more than anything else, to feel his arms around her, pulling her against the fascinating contours of his body, the scratchy embroidery of his doublet against her cheek, the press of his thigh against her legs.

She gave a little scream and dashed away again down an allée of yew trees, where the Chelsea garden ran down to the river. The queen, smiling, looked up from her sewing and saw her beloved stepdaughter racing between the trees, her handsome husband a few easy strides behind. She looked down again at her sewing and did not see him catch Elizabeth, whirl her around, put her back to the red papery bark of the yew tree, and clamp his hand over her half-open mouth.

Elizabeth’s eyes blazed black with excitement, but she did not struggle. When he realised that she would not scream, he took his hand away and bent his dark head.

Elizabeth felt the smooth sweep of his moustache against her lips, smelled the heady scent of his hair, his skin. She closed her eyes and tipped back her head to offer her lips, her neck, her breasts to his mouth. When she felt his sharp teeth graze her skin, she was no longer a giggling child, she was a young woman in the heat of first desire.

Gently he loosened his grip on her waist, and his hand stole up the firmly boned stomacher to the neck of her gown, where he could slide a finger down inside her linen to touch her breasts. Her nipple was hard and aroused, when he rubbed it she gave a little mew of pleasure that made him laugh at the predictability of female desire, a deep chuckle in the back of his throat.

Elizabeth pressed herself against the length of his body, feeling his thigh push forward between her legs in reply. She had a sensation like an overwhelming curiosity. She longed to know what might happen next.

When he made a movement away from her, as if to release her, she wound her arms around his back and pulled him into her again. She felt rather than saw Tom Seymour’s smile of pleasure at her culpability, as his mouth came down on hers again and his tongue licked, as delicate as a cat, against the side of her mouth. Torn between disgust and desire at the extraordinary sensation, she slid her own tongue to meet his and felt the terrible intimacy of a grown man’s intrusive kiss.

All at once it was too much for her, and she shrank back from him, but he knew the rhythm of this dance which she had so light-heartedly invoked, and which would now beat through her very veins. He caught at the hem of her brocade skirt and pulled it up and up until he could get at her, sliding his practised hand up her thighs, underneath her linen shift. Instinctively she clamped her legs together against his touch until he brushed, with calculated gentleness, the back of his hand on her hidden sex. At the teasing touch of his knuckles, she melted; he could feel her almost dissolve beneath him. She would have fallen if he had not had a firm arm around her waist, and he knew at that moment that he could have the king’s own daughter, Princess Elizabeth, against a tree in the queen’s garden. The girl was a virgin in name alone. In reality, she was little more than a whore.

A light step on the path made him quickly turn, dropping Elizabeth’s gown and putting her behind him, out of sight. Anyone could read the tranced willingness on the girl’s face; she was lost in her desire. He was afraid it was the queen, his wife, whose love for him was insulted every day that he seduced her ward under her very nose: the queen, who had been entrusted with the care of her stepdaughter the princess, Queen Katherine who had sat at Henry VIII’s deathbed but dreamed of this man.

But it was not the queen who stood before him on the path. It was only a girl, a little girl of about nine years old, with big solemn dark eyes and a white Spanish cap tied under her chin. She carried two books strapped with bookseller’s tape in her hand, and she regarded him with a cool objective interest, as if she had seen and understood everything.

‘How now, sweetheart!’ he exclaimed, falsely cheerful. ‘You gave me a start. I might have thought you a fairy, appearing so suddenly.’

She frowned at his rapid, over-loud speech, and then she replied, very slowly with a strong Spanish accent. ‘Forgive me, sir. My father told me to bring these books to Sir Thomas Seymour and they said you were in the garden.’

She proffered the package of books, and Tom Seymour was forced to step forward and take them from her hands. ‘You’re the bookseller’s daughter,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The bookseller from Spain.’

She bowed her head in assent, not taking her dark scrutiny from his face.

‘What are you staring at, child?’ he asked, conscious of Elizabeth, hastily rearranging her gown behind him.

‘I was looking at you, sir, but I saw something most dreadful.’

‘What?’ he demanded. For a moment he was afraid she would say that she had seen him with the Princess of England backed up against a tree like a common doxy, her skirt pulled up out of the way and his fingers dabbling at her purse.

‘I saw a scaffold behind you,’ said the surprising child, and then turned and walked away as if she had completed her errand and there was nothing more for her to do in the sunlit garden.

Tom Seymour whirled back to Elizabeth, who was trying to comb her disordered hair with fingers that were still shaking with desire. At once she stretched out her arms to him, wanting more.

‘Did you hear that?’

Elizabeth’s eyes were slits of black. ‘No,’ she said silkily. ‘Did she say something?’

‘She only said that she saw the scaffold behind me!’ He was more shaken than he wanted to reveal. He tried for a bluff laugh, but it came out with a quaver of fear.

At the mention of the scaffold Elizabeth was suddenly alert. ‘Why?’ she snapped. ‘Why should she say such a thing?’

‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Stupid little witch. Probably mistook the word, she’s foreign. Probably meant throne! Probably saw the throne behind me!’

But this joke was no more successful than his bluster, since in Elizabeth’s imagination the throne and the scaffold were always close neighbours. The colour drained from her face, leaving her sallow with fear.

‘Who is she?’ Her voice was sharp with nervousness. ‘Who is she working for?’

He turned to look for the child but the allée was empty. At the distant end of it he could see his wife walking slowly towards them, her back arched to carry the pregnant curve of her belly.

‘Not a word,’ he said quickly to the girl at his side. ‘Not a word of this, sweetheart. You don’t want to upset your stepmother.’

He hardly needed to warn her. At the first hint of danger the girl was wary, smoothing her dress, conscious always that she must play a part, that she must survive. He could always rely on Elizabeth’s duplicity. She might be only fourteen but she had been trained in deceit every day since the death of her mother, she had been an apprentice cheat for twelve long years. And she was the daughter of a liar – two liars, he thought spitefully. She might feel desire; but she was always more alert to danger or ambition than to lust. He took her cold hand and led her up the allée towards his wife Katherine. He tried for a merry smile. ‘I caught her at last!’ he called out.

He glanced around, he could not see the child anywhere. ‘We had such a race!’ he cried.

I was that child, and that was the first sight I ever had of the Princess Elizabeth: damp with desire, panting with lust, rubbing herself like a cat against another woman’s husband. But it was the first and last time I saw Tom Seymour. Within a year, he was dead on the scaffold charged with treason, and Elizabeth had denied three times having anything more than the most common acquaintance with him.

Winter 1552–53

‘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.’

Spring 1553

I was allowed to go home to my father in April and I took him my wages for the quarter. I went in my old boy’s clothes that he had bought me when we first came to England and found that my wrists poked out at the sleeves and I could not get my growing feet into the shoes. I had to cut out the heels and go slipshod through the city.

‘They will have to put you in gowns soon,’ my father remarked. ‘You are half a woman already. What news of the court?’

‘None,’ I said. ‘Everyone says that the king is growing stronger with the warmer weather.’ I did not add that everyone was speaking a lie.

‘God bless him and keep him,’ my father said piously. He looked at me, as if he would know more. ‘And Lord Robert. Do you see him?’

I felt myself colour. ‘Now and then.’ I could have told him to the very hour and the minute when I had last seen Lord Robert. He had not spoken to me, perhaps he had not even seen me. He had been mounted on his horse, about to go hawking for herons along the mudflats of the river shore. He was wearing a black cape and a black hat with a dark feather pinned to the ribbon with a jet brooch. He had a beautiful hooded falcon on his wrist and he rode with one hand outstretched to keep the bird steady and his other hand holding the curvetting horse, which was pawing the ground in its eagerness. He looked like a prince in a story book, he was laughing. I had watched him as I might have watched a seagull riding the wind blowing up the Thames: as a thing so beautiful that it illuminated my day. I watched him, not a woman desiring a man; but a girl worshipping an icon, something far beyond reach but perfection in every way.

‘There is to be a great wedding,’ I said to fill the pause. ‘Lord Robert’s father has arranged it.’

‘Who is to marry?’ my father asked with a gossip’s curiosity.

I ticked off the three couples on my fingers. ‘Lady Katherine Dudley is to marry Lord Henry Hastings, and the two Grey sisters are to marry Lord Guilford Dudley and Lord Henry Herbert.’

‘And you know them all!’ my father boasted, proud as any parent.

I shook my head. ‘Only the Dudleys,’ I said. ‘And not one of them would know me out of livery. I am a very lowly servant at court, Father.’

He cut a slice of bread for me and one for himself. It was stale bread, yesterday’s loaf. He had a small piece of cheese on one plate. On the other side of the room was a piece of meat, which we would eat later, in defiance of the English way of doing things which was to set all of the dinner, meats, breads, puddings as well, on the table at the same time. I thought however much we might pretend, anyone who strolled into the room now would see that we were trying to eat the right way: dairy and meat separate. Anyone looking at my father’s vellum skin and my dark eyes would know us for Jews. We might say that we were converted, we might attend church as enthusiastically as Lady Elizabeth herself was loudly praised for doing, but anyone would know us for Jews, and if they wanted an excuse to rob or denounce us, they would have it to their hand.

‘Do you not know the Grey sisters?’

‘Hardly at all,’ I said. ‘They are the king’s cousins. They say that Lady Jane does not want to marry, she lives only to study her books. But her mother and her father have beaten her till she agreed.’

My father nodded, the forcible ordering of a daughter was no surprise. ‘And what else?’ he asked. ‘What of Lord Robert’s father, the Duke of Northumberland?’

‘He’s very much disliked.’ I lowered my voice to a whisper. ‘But he is like a king himself. He goes in and out of the king’s bedroom and says that this or that is the king’s own wish. What can anyone do against him?’

‘They took up our neighbour the portrait painter only last week,’ my father remarked. ‘Mr Tuller. They said he was a Catholic and a heretic. Took him off for questioning, and he has not come back. He had copied a picture of Our Lady some years ago, and someone searched a house and found it hidden, with his name signed at the foot.’ My father shook his head. ‘It makes no sense in law,’ he complained. ‘Whatever their conviction, it makes no sense. When he painted the picture it was allowed. Now it is heresy. When he painted the picture it was a work of art. Now it is a crime. The picture has not changed, it is the law which has changed and they apply the law to the years when it did not exist, before it was written. These people are barbarians. They lack all reason.’

We both glanced towards the door. The street was quiet, the door locked.

‘D’you think we should leave?’ I asked, very low. I realised for the first time that now I wanted to stay.

He chewed his bread, thinking. ‘Not yet,’ he said cautiously. ‘Besides, where could we go that was safe? I’d rather be in Protestant England than Catholic France. We are good reformed Christians now. You go to church, don’t you?’

‘Twice, sometimes three times a day,’ I assured him. ‘It’s a very observant court.’

‘I make sure I am seen to go. And I give to charity, and I pay my parish dues. We can do nothing more. We’ve both been baptised. What can any man say against us?’

I said nothing. We both knew that anyone could say anything against anyone. In the countries that had turned the ritual of the church into a burning matter no-one could be sure that they would not offend by the way they prayed, even by which direction they faced when they prayed.

‘If the king falls ill and dies,’ my father whispered, ‘then Lady Mary takes the throne, and she is a Roman Catholic. Will she make the whole country become Roman Catholic again?’

‘Who knows what will happen?’ I asked, thinking of my naming the next heir as ‘Jane’ and Robert Dudley’s lack of surprise. ‘I wouldn’t put a groat wager on Lady Mary coming to the throne. There are bigger players in this game than you and I, Father. And I don’t know what they are planning.’

‘If Lady Mary inherits and the country becomes Roman Catholic again then there are some books I shall have to be rid of,’ my father said anxiously. ‘And we are known as good Lutheran booksellers.’

I put my hand up and rubbed my cheek, as if I would brush smuts away. At once he touched my hand. ‘Don’t do that, querida. Don’t worry. Everyone in the country will have to change, not just us. Everyone will be the same.’

I glanced over to where the Sabbath candle burned under the upended pitcher, its light hidden but its flame burning for our God. ‘But we’re not the same,’ I said simply.

John Dee and I read together every morning like devoted scholars. Mostly he commanded me to read the Bible in Greek and then the same passage in Latin so that he might compare the translations. He was working on the oldest parts of the Bible, trying to unravel the secrets of the real making of the world from the flowery speech. He sat with his head resting in his hand, jotting notes as I wrote, sometimes raising his hand to ask me to pause as a thought struck him. It was easy work for me, I could read without comprehension, and when I did not know how to pronounce a word (and there were many such words) I just spelled it out, and Mr Dee would recognise it. I could not help but like him, he was such a kind and gentle man; and I had a growing admiration for his immense ability. He seemed to me to be a man of almost inspired understanding. When he was alone he read mathematics, he played games with codes and numbers, he created acrostics and riddles of intense complexity. He exchanged letters and theories with the greatest thinkers of Christendom, forever staying just ahead of the Papal Inquisitions, which forbade the very questions that everyone’s work suggested.

He had invented a game of his own that only Lord Robert and he could play, called Chess on Many Floors, for which Mr Dee had invented a chess board on three levels made of thick bevelled glass, where the players could go up and down as well as along. It made a game of such difficulty that he and Lord Robert would play the same round for weeks at a time. Other times he would retreat into his inner study and be silent for all the afternoon or all the morning and I knew that he was gazing in the scrying mirror and trying to see what might exist in the world just beyond our own, the world of the spirits which he knew must be there, but which he glimpsed only occasionally.

In his inner chamber he had a small stone bench, with a little fireplace hollowed out of the stone. He would light a charcoal fire, and suspend above it great glass vessels filled with herbs in water. A complicated network of glass tubes would drain liquor from one bottle to the other and then would stand and cool. Sometimes he would be in there for hours and all I would hear, as I copied page after page of numbers for him, was the quiet clink of one flask against another as he poured liquid into a vessel, or the hiss of the bellows as he heated the little fire.

In the afternoons Will Somers and I practised our sword fighting, leaving aside the comical tricks and concentrating on proper fighting, until he told me that I was a commendable swordsman for a fool, and that if I ever found myself in trouble I might use a sword to fight my way out: ‘Like a proud hidalgo’, he said.

Although I was glad to learn a useful skill, we thought that the lessons would have been for nothing since the king continued to be so sick; until in May we were commanded to the great wedding feasts at Durham House in the Strand. The duke wanted a memorable wedding for his family and Will and I were part of an elaborate dinner entertainment.

‘You would think it a royal wedding,’ Will said slyly to me.

‘How, royal?’ I asked.

He put his finger to his lips. ‘Jane’s mother, Frances Brandon, is King Henry’s niece, the daughter of his sister. Jane and Katherine are royal cousins.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And so?’

‘And Jane is to marry a Dudley.’

‘Yes,’ I said, following this not at all.

‘Who more royal than the Dudleys?’ he demanded.

‘The king’s sisters,’ I pointed out. ‘Jane’s own mother. And others too.’

‘Not if you measure in terms of desire,’ Will explained sweetly. ‘In terms of desire there is no-one more royal than the duke. He loves the throne so much he practically tastes it. He almost gobbles it up.’

Will had gone too far for me. I got to my feet. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said flatly.

‘You are a wise child to be so dense,’ he said and patted my head.

Our sword fight was preceded by dancers and a masque and followed by jugglers, and we acquitted ourselves well. The guests roared with laughter at Will’s tumbles and my triumphant skill, and the contrast between our looks: Will so tall and gangling, thrusting his sword wildly this way and that; and me, neat and determined, dancing around him and stabbing with my little sword, and parrying his blows.

The chief bride was as white as the pearls embroidered on her gold gown. Her bridegroom sat closer to his mother than to his new bride and neither bride nor groom spoke so much as one word to each other. Jane’s sister had been married to her betrothed in the same ceremony and she and he toasted each other and drank amorously from the same loving cup. But when the shout went up for a toast for Jane and Guilford, I could see that it cost Lady Jane an effort to raise her golden goblet to her new husband. Her eyes were red and raw, and the shadows under her eyes were dark with fatigue; there were marks on either side of her neck that looked like thumbprints. It looked very much as if someone had shaken the bride by the neck till she agreed to take her vows. She barely touched the bridal ale with her lips, I did not see her swallow.

‘What d’you think, Hannah the Fool?’ the Duke of Northumberland shouted down the hall to me. ‘Shall she be a lucky bride?’

My neighbours turned to me, and I felt the old swimming sensation that was a sign of the Sight coming. I tried to fight it off, this court would be the worst place in the world to tell the truth. I could not stop the words coming. ‘Never more lucky than today,’ I said.

Lord Robert flashed a cautionary look at me but I could not take back the words. I had spoken as I felt, not with the skill of a courtier. My sense was that Jane’s luck, at a low ebb when she married with a bruise on her throat, would now run ever more swiftly downhill. But the duke took it as a compliment to his son and laughed at me, and raised his goblet. Guilford, little more than a dolt, beamed at his mother, while Lord Robert shook his head, and half-closed his eyes, as if he wished he was elsewhere.

There was dancing, and a bride had to dance at her own wedding, though Lady Jane sat in her chair, as stubborn as a white mule. Lord Robert led her gently to the dance floor. I saw him whisper to her and she found a wan little smile and put her hand in his. I wondered what he was saying to cheer her. In the moments when the dancers paused and awaited their turn in the circle his mouth was so close to her ear that I thought she must feel the warmth of his breath on her bare neck. I watched without envy. I did not long to be her, with his long fingers holding my hand, or his dark eyes on my face. I gazed on them as I might look on a pair of beautiful portraits, his face turned to her as sharp as a hawk’s beak in profile, her pallor warming under his kindness.

The court danced until late, as if there were great joy from such weddings, and then the three couples were taken to their bedrooms and put to bed with much throwing of rose petals and sprinkling of rose water. But it was all show, no more real than Will and I fighting with wooden swords. None of the marriages was to be consummated yet, and the next day Lady Jane went home with her parents to Suffolk Place, Guilford Dudley went home with his mother, complaining of stomach ache and bloating, and Lord Robert and the duke were up early to return to the king at Greenwich.

‘Why does your brother not make a house with his wife?’ I asked Lord Robert. I met him at the gateway of the stable-yard, and he waited beside me while they brought out his great horse.

‘Well, it is not unusual. I do not live with mine,’ he remarked.

I saw the roofs of Durham House tilt against the sky, as I staggered back and held on to the wall till the world steadied again. ‘You have a wife?’

‘Oho, did you not know that, my little seer? I thought you knew everything?’

‘I did not know …’ I began.

‘Oh yes, I have been married since I was a lad. And I thank God for it.’

‘Because you like her so much?’ I stammered, feeling an odd pain like sickness under my ribs.

‘Because if I had not been married already, it would have been me married to Jane Grey and dancing to my father’s bidding.’

‘Does your wife never come to court?’

‘Almost never. She will only live in the country, she has no liking for London, we cannot agree … and it is easier for me …’ He broke off and glanced towards his father, who was mounting a big black hunter and giving his grooms orders about the rest of the horses. I knew at once that it was easier for Lord Robert to move this way and that, his father’s spy, his father’s agent, if he was not accompanied by a wife whose face might betray them.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Amy,’ he said casually. ‘Why?’

I had no answer. Numbly, I shook my head. I could feel an intense discomfort in my belly. For a moment I thought I had taken Guilford Dudley’s bloat. It burned me like bile. ‘Do you have children?’

If he had said that he had children, if he had said that he had a girl, a beloved daughter, I think I would have doubled up and vomited on the cobbles at his feet.

But he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘You must tell me one day when I shall get a son and an heir. Can you do that?’

I looked up and tried to smile despite the burning in my throat. ‘I don’t think I can.’

‘Are you afraid of the mirror?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m not afraid, if you are there.’

He smiled at that. ‘You have all the cunning of a woman, never mind the skills of a holy fool. You seek me out, don’t you, Mistress Boy?’

I shook my head. ‘No, sir.’

‘You didn’t like the thought of me married.’

‘I was surprised, only.’

Lord Robert put his gloved hand under my chin and turned my face up to him so that I was forced to meet his dark eyes. ‘Don’t be a woman, a lying woman. Tell me the truth. Are you troubled with the desires of a maid, my little Mistress Boy?’

I was too young to hide it. I felt the tears come into my eyes and I stayed still, letting him hold me.

He saw the tears and knew what they meant. ‘Desire? And for me?’

Still I said nothing, looking at him dumbly through my blurred vision.

‘I promised your father that I would not let any harm come to you,’ he said gently.

‘It has come already,’ I said, speaking the inescapable truth.

He shook his head, his dark eyes warm. ‘Oh, this is nothing. This is young love, green-sickness. The mistake I made in my youth was to marry for such a slim cause. But you, you will survive this and go on to marry your betrothed and have a houseful of black-eyed children.’

I shook my head but my throat was too tight to speak.

‘It is not love that matters, Mistress Boy, it is what you choose to do with it. What d’you choose to do with yours?’

‘I could serve you.’

He took one of my cold hands and took it up to his lips. Entranced, I felt his mouth touch the tips of my fingers, a touch as intimate as any kiss on the lips. My own mouth softened, in a little pursed shape of longing, as if I would have him kiss me, there, in the courtyard before them all.

‘Yes,’ he said gently, not raising his head but whispering against my fingers. ‘You could serve me. A loving servant is a great gift for any man. Will you be mine, Mistress Boy? Heart and soul? And do whatever I ask of you?’

His moustache brushed against my hand, as soft as the breast feathers of his hawk.

‘Yes,’ I said, hardly grasping the enormity of my promise.

‘Whatever I ask of you?’

‘Yes.’

At once he straightened up, suddenly decisive. ‘Good. Then I have a new post for you, new work.’

‘Not at court?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘You begged me to the king,’ I reminded him. ‘I am his fool.’

His mouth twisted in a moment’s pity. ‘The poor lad won’t miss you,’ he said. ‘I shall tell you all of it. Come to Greenwich tomorrow, with the rest of them, and I’ll tell you then.’

He laughed at himself as if the future was an adventure that he wanted to start at once. ‘Come to Greenwich tomorrow,’ he threw over his shoulder as he strode towards his horse. His groom cupped his hands for his master’s boot and Lord Robert vaulted up into the high saddle of his hunter. I watched him turn his horse and clatter out of the stable-yard, into the Strand and then towards the cold English morning sun. His father followed behind at a more sober pace, and I saw that as they passed, although all the men pulled off their hats and bent their heads to show the respect that the duke commanded, their faces were sour.

I clattered into the courtyard of the palace at Greenwich riding astride one of the carthorses pulling the wagon with supplies. It was a beautiful spring day, the fields running down to the river were a sea of gold and silver daffodils, and they reminded me of Mr Dee’s desire to turn base metal to gold. As I paused, feeling the warmer breeze against my face, one of the Dudley servants shouted towards me: ‘Hannah the Fool?’

‘Yes?’

‘To go to Lord Robert and his father in their privy rooms at once. At once, lad!’

I nodded and went into the palace at a run, past the royal chambers to the ones that were no less grand, guarded by soldiers in the Dudley livery. They swung open the double doors for me and I was in the presence room where the duke would hear the petitions of common people. I went through another set of doors, and another, the rooms getting smaller and more intimate, until the last double doors opened, and there was Lord Robert leaning over a desk with a manuscript scroll spread out before him, his father looking over his shoulder. I recognised at once that it was Mr Dee’s writing, and that it was a map that he had made partly from ancient maps of Britain borrowed from my father, and partly from calculations of his own based on the sailors’ charts of the coastline. Mr Dee had prepared the map because he believed that England’s greatest fortune were the seas around the coast; but the duke was using it for a different purpose.

He had placed little counters in a crowd at London, and more in the painted blue sea. A set of counters of a different colour was in the north of the country, Scots, I thought, and another little group like Lord Robert’s chess pawns in the east of the country. I made a deep bow to Lord Robert and to his father.

‘It has to be done at speed,’ the duke remarked, scowling. ‘If it is done at once, before anyone has a chance to protest, then we can deal with the north, with the Spanish, and with those of her tenants who stay loyal, in our own time.’

‘And she?’ Lord Robert asked quietly.

‘She can do nothing,’ the duke said. ‘And if she tries to run, your little spy will warn us.’ He looked up at me on those words. ‘Hannah Green, I am sending you to wait upon the Lady Mary. You are to be her fool until I summon you back to court. My son assures me that you can keep your counsel. Is he right?’

The skin on the back of my neck went cold. ‘I can keep a secret,’ I said unhelpfully. ‘But I don’t like to.’

‘And you will not go into a trance and speak of foretellings and smoke and crystals and betray everything?’

‘You hired me for my trances and foretellings,’ I reminded him. ‘I can’t order the Sight.’

‘Does she do it often?’ he demanded of his son.

Lord Robert shook his head. ‘Rarely, and never out of turn. Her fear is greater than her gift. She is witty enough to turn anything. Besides, who would listen to a fool?’

The duke gave his quick bark of a laugh. ‘Another fool,’ he suggested.

Robert smiled. ‘Hannah will keep our secrets,’ he said gently. ‘She is mine, heart and soul.’

The duke nodded. ‘Well, then. Tell her the rest.’

I shook my head, wanting to block my ears; but Lord Robert came around the table and took my hand. He stood close to me and when I looked up from my study of the floor I met his dark gaze. ‘Mistress Boy, I need you to go to the Lady Mary and write to me and tell me what she thinks, and where she goes, and who she meets.’

I blinked. ‘Spy on her?’

He hesitated. ‘Befriend her.’

‘Spy on her. Exactly,’ his father said brusquely.

‘Will you do this for me?’ Lord Robert asked. ‘It would be a very great service to me. It is the service I ask of your love.’

‘Will I be in danger?’ I asked. In my head I could hear the knock of the Inquisition on the heavy wooden door and the trample of their feet over our threshold.

‘No,’ he promised me. ‘I have guaranteed your safety while you are mine. You will be my fool, under my protection. No-one can hurt you if you are a Dudley.’

‘What must I do?’

‘Watch the Lady Mary and report to me.’

‘You want me to write to you? Will I never see you?’

He smiled. ‘You shall come to me when I send for you,’ he said. ‘And if anything happens …’

‘What?’

He shrugged. ‘These are exciting times, Mistress Boy. Who knows what might happen? That’s why I need you to tell me what Lady Mary does. Will you do this for me? For love of me, Mistress Boy? To keep me safe?’

I nodded. ‘Yes.’

He put his hand into his jacket and brought out a letter. It was from my father to the duke, promising him the delivery of some manuscripts. ‘Here is a mystery for you,’ Lord Robert said gently. ‘See the first twenty-six letters of the first sentence?’

I scanned them. ‘Yes.’

‘They are to be your alphabet. When you write to me I want you to use these. Where it says “My Lord”, that is your ABC. The M for “my” is your A. The Y is your B. And so on, do you understand? When you have a letter which occurs twice you only use it once. You use the first set for your first letter to me and your second set for your second letter, and so on. I have a copy of the letter and when your message comes to me I can translate it.’

He saw my eyes run down the page. There was only one thing I was looking for and it was how long this system would last. There were enough sentences to translate as many as a dozen letters; he was sending me away for weeks.

‘I have to write in code?’ I asked nervously.

His warm hand covered my cold fingers. ‘Only to prevent gossip,’ he said reassuringly. ‘So that we can write privately to one another.’

‘How long do I have to stay away?’ I whispered.

‘Oh, not for so very long.’

‘Will you reply to me?’

He shook his head. ‘Only if I need to ask you something, and if I do, I will use this almanac also. My first letter will be the first twenty-six characters, my second the next set. Don’t keep my letters to you, burn them as soon as you have read them. And don’t make copies of yours to me.’

I nodded.

‘If anyone finds this letter it is just something you brought from your father to me and forgot.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you promise to do this exactly as I ask?’

‘Yes,’ I said miserably. ‘When do I have to go?’

‘Within three days,’ the duke said from his place behind the table. ‘There’s a cart going to the Lady Mary with some goods for her. You can ride alongside that. You shall have one of my ponies, girl, and you can keep her at Lady Mary’s house for your return. And if something should happen that you think threatens me or Lord Robert, something very grave indeed, you can ride to warn us at once. Will you do that?’

‘Why, what should threaten you?’ I asked the man who ruled England.

‘I shall be the one that wonders what might threaten me. You shall be the one to warn me if it does. You are to be Robert’s eyes and ears at the house of the Lady Mary. He tells me that he can trust you; make sure that he can.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said obediently.

Lord Robert said that I might send for my father to say goodbye to him and he came downriver to Greenwich Palace in a fishing smack on the ebbing tide, with Daniel seated beside him.

‘You!’ I said without any enthusiasm, when I saw him help my father from the bobbing boat.

‘Me,’ he replied with the glimmer of a smile. ‘Constant, aren’t I?’

I went to my father and felt his arms come around me. ‘Oh, Papa,’ I whispered in Spanish. ‘I wish we had never come to England at all.’

‘Querida, has someone hurt you?’

‘I have to go to the Lady Mary and I am afraid of the journey, and afraid of living at her house, I am afraid of …’ I broke off, tasting the many lies on my tongue and realising that I would never be able to tell anyone the truth about myself ever again. ‘I am just being foolish, I suppose.’

‘Daughter, come home to me. I will ask Lord Robert to release you, we can close the shop, we can leave England. You are not trapped here …’

‘Lord Robert himself asked me to go,’ I said simply. ‘And I already said I would.’

His gentle hand caressed my cropped hair. ‘Querida, you are unhappy?’

‘I am not unhappy,’ I said, finding a smile for him. ‘I am being foolish. For look, I am being sent to live with the heir to the throne, and Lord Robert himself has asked me to go.’

He was only partly reassured. ‘I shall be here, and if you send for me I shall come to you. Or Daniel will come and fetch you away. Won’t you, Daniel?’

I turned in my father’s arms to look at my betrothed. He was leaning against the wooden railing that ran around the jetty. He was waiting patiently, but he was pale and he was scowling with anxiety.

‘I would rather fetch you away now.’

My father released me and I took a step towards Daniel. Behind him, bobbing at the jetty, their boat was waiting for them. I saw the swirl of water and saw the tide was ready to turn; we could go upstream almost at once. He had timed this moment very carefully.

‘I have agreed to go to serve Lady Mary,’ I said quietly to him.

‘She is a Papist in a Protestant country,’ he said. ‘You could not have chosen a place where your faith and practices will be more scrutinised. It is me who is named for Daniel, not you. Why should you go into the very den of lions? And what are you to do for Lady Mary?’

He stepped closer to me so we could whisper.

‘I am to be her companion, be her fool.’ I paused and decided to tell him the truth. ‘I am to spy for Lord Robert and his father.’

His head was so close to mine that I could feel the warmth of his cheek against my forehead as he leaned closer to speak into my ear.

‘Spy on Lady Mary?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you have agreed?’

I hesitated. ‘They know that Father and I are Jews,’ I said.

He was silent for a moment. I felt the solidity of his chest against my shoulder. His arm came around my waist to hold me closer to him and I felt the warmth of his grip. A rare sense of safety came over me as he held me, and for a moment I stood still.

‘They are going to act against us?’

‘No.’

‘But you are a hostage.’

‘In a way. It feels more as if Lord Robert knows my secret and trusts me with his. I feel bound to him.’

He nodded for a moment, I craned my neck to look up into his scowling face. For a moment I thought he was angry then I realised that he was thinking hard. ‘Does he know my name?’ he demanded. ‘Of my mother, of my sisters? Are we all at risk?’

‘He knows I am betrothed, but not of you by name. And he knows nothing of your family,’ I said, with quick pride. ‘I have not brought danger to your door.’

‘No, you keep it all to yourself,’ he said with a brief unhappy smile. ‘And if you were questioned you could not keep it secret for long.’

‘I would not betray you,’ I said quickly.

His face was troubled. ‘No-one can remain silent on the rack, Hannah. A pile of stones will crush the truth out of most people.’ He looked down the river over my head. ‘Hannah, I should forbid you to go.’

He felt my instantaneous move of disagreement. ‘Don’t quarrel with me for nothing, for clumsy words,’ he said quickly. ‘I did not mean forbid like a master. I meant I should beg you not to go – is that better? This road leads straight into danger.’

‘I am in danger whatever I do,’ I said. ‘And this way, Lord Robert will protect me.’

‘But only while you do his bidding.’

I nodded. I could not tell him that I had volunteered to walk into this danger, and I would have risked worse for love of Lord Robert.

Gently he released me. ‘I am sorry you are here, and unprotected,’ he said. ‘If you had sent for me I would have come sooner. This is a burden that you shouldn’t have to bear alone.’

I thought of the terror of my childhood, of my wild apprenticeship in fear on our flight through Europe. ‘It is my burden.’

‘But you have kin now, you have me,’ he said with the pride of a young man made head of his family too young. ‘I shall bear your burdens for you.’

‘I bear my own,’ I said stubbornly.

‘Oh yes, you are your own woman. But if you would condescend to send for me if you are in danger, I would come and perhaps be allowed to help you escape.’

I giggled at that. ‘I promise that I will.’ I held out my hand to him in a gesture which suited my boy’s clothing. But he took my hand and drew me close to him again and bent his head. Very gently he kissed me, full on the lips, and I felt the warmth of his mouth on mine.

He released me and stepped back to the boat. I found I was slightly dizzy, as if I had gulped down strong wine. ‘Oh, Daniel!’ I breathed, but he was climbing into the boat and did not hear me. I turned to my father and caught him hiding his smile.

‘God bless you, daughter, and bring you home safe to us,’ he said quietly. I knelt on the wooden pier for my father’s blessing and felt his hand come down on my head in the familiar, beloved caress. He took my hands and raised me up. ‘He is an attractive young man, isn’t he?’ he demanded, a chuckle behind his voice. Then he wrapped his cape around himself and went down the steps to the fishing smack.

They cast off and the little boat travelled swiftly across the darkening water, leaving me alone on the wooden pier. The mist hanging on the river and the gathering dark hid their silhouette, and all I could hear was the splash of the oars and the creak of the rowlocks. Then that sound was gone too and all that was left was the smack and suck of the rising tide and the quiet whistle of the wind.

Summer 1553

Lady Mary was at her house at Hunsdon, in the county of Hertfordshire. It took us three days to get to her, riding northward out of London, on a winding road through muddy valleys and then climbing arduously through hills called the North Weald, journeying some of the way with another band of travellers, and staying overnight on the road, once at an inn, once at a grand house that had been a monastery and was now in the hands of the man who had cleansed it of heresy at some profit to himself. These days they could offer us no rooms better than a hay loft over the stable, and the carter complained that in the old days this had been a generous house of good monks where any traveller might be sure of a good dinner and a comfortable bed, and a prayer to help him on his way. He had stayed here once when his son had been sick nearly to death and the monks had taken him into their care and nursed him back to health with their own herbs and skills. They had charged him not a penny, but said that they were doing the work of God by serving poor men. The same story could have been told up and down the country at every great monastery or abbey on the roads. But now all the religious houses were in the possession of the great lords, the men of court who had made their fortunes by advising that the world would be a better place if wealth was stripped from the English church and poured into their own pockets. Now the feeding of the poor at the monastery gates, the making of free medicines in the nunnery hospitals, the teaching of the children and the care of the old people of the village had gone the way of the beautiful statues, the illuminated manuscripts, and the great libraries.

The carter muttered to me that this was the case all around the country. The great religious houses, which had been the very backbone of England, had been emptied of the men and women who had been called by God to serve in them. The public good had been turned to private profit and there would never be public good again.

‘If the poor king dies then Lady Mary will come to the throne and turn it all back,’ he said. ‘She will be a queen for the people. A queen who returns us to the old ways.’

I reined back my pony. We were on the high road and there was no-one within earshot but I was always fearful of anything that smacked of intrigue.

‘And look at these roads,’ he went on, turning on the box of the cart to complain over his shoulder. ‘Dust in summer and mud in winter, never a pot hole filled in, never a highwayman pursued. D’you know why not?’

‘I’ll ride ahead, you’re right, the dust is dreadful,’ I said.

He nodded and motioned me forward. I could hear his litany of complaint receding in the distance behind me:

‘Because once the shrines are closed there are no pilgrims, and if there are no pilgrims then there is no-one on the roads but the worst sort of people, and those that prey on them. Never a kind word, never a good house, never a decent road …’

I let the mare scramble up a little bank where the ground was softer beneath her small hooves and we ranged ahead of the cart.

Since I had not known the England that he said was lost, I could not feel, as he did, that the country was a lesser place. On that morning in early summer it seemed very fine to me, the roses twining through the hedgerows and a dozen butterflies hovering around the honeysuckle and the beanflowers. The fields were cultivated in prim little stripes, like the bound spine of a book, the sheep ranging on the upper hills, little fluffy dots against the rich damp green. It was a countryside so unlike my own that I could not stop marvelling at it, the open villages with the black-and-white beamed buildings, and the roofs thatched with golden reeds, the rivers that seemed to melt into the roads in glassy slow-moving fords at every corner. It was a country so damp that it was no wonder that every cottage garden was bright green with growth, even the dung hills were topped with waving daisies, even the roofs of the older houses were as green as limes with moss. Compared to my own country, this was a land as sodden as a printer’s sponge, damp with life.

At first I noticed the things that were missing. There were no twisted rows of vines, no bent and bowed olive trees. There were no orchards of orange trees, or lemons or limes. The hills were rounded and green, not high and hot and rocky, and above them the sky was dappled with cloud, not the hot unrelieved blue of my home, and there were larks rising, and no circling eagles.

I rode in a state of wonder that a country could be so lush and so green; but even among this fertile wealth there was hunger. I saw it in the faces of some of the villagers, and in the fresh mounds of the graveyards. The carter was right, the balance that had been England at peace for a brief generation had been overthrown under the last king, and the new one continued the work of setting the country into turmoil. The great religious houses had closed and thrown the men and women who served and laboured in them on to the roads. The great libraries were spilled and gone to waste – I had seen enough torn manuscripts at my father’s shop to know that centuries of scholarship had been thrown aside in the fear of heresy. The great golden vessels of the wealthy church had been taken by private men and melted down, the beautiful statues and works of art, some with their feet or hands worn smooth by a million kisses of the faithful, had been thrown down and smashed. There had been a great voyage of destruction through a wealthy peaceful country and it would take years before the church could be a safe haven again for the spiritual pilgrim or the weary traveller. If it ever could be made safe again.

It was such an adventure to travel so freely in a strange country that I was sorry when the carter whistled to me and called out, ‘Here’s Hunsdon now,’ and I realised that these carefree days were over, that I had to return to work, and that now I had two tasks: one as a holy fool in a household where belief and faith were key concerns, and the other as a spy in a household where treason and tale-bearing were the greatest occupations.

I swallowed on a throat which was dry from the dust of the road and also from fear, I pulled my horse alongside the cart and we went in through the lodge gates together, as if I would shelter behind the bulk of the four turning wheels, and hide from the scrutiny of those blank windows that stared out over the lane and seemed to watch for our arrival.

Lady Mary was in her chamber sewing blackwork, the famous Spanish embroidery of black thread on white linen, while one of her ladies, standing at a lectern, read aloud to her. The first thing I heard, on reaching her presence, was a Spanish word, mispronounced, and she gave a merry laugh when she saw me wince.

‘Ah, at last! A girl who can speak Spanish!’ she exclaimed and gave me her hand to kiss. ‘If you could only read it!’

I thought for a moment. ‘I can read it,’ I said, considering it reasonable that the daughter of a bookseller should be able to read her native tongue.

‘Oh, can you? And Latin?’

‘Not Latin,’ I said, having learned of the danger of pride in my education from my encounter with John Dee. ‘Just Spanish and now I am learning to read English too.’

Lady Mary turned to her maid in waiting. ‘You will be pleased to hear that, Susan! Now you will not need to read to me in the afternoons.’

Susan did not look at all pleased to hear that she was to be supplanted by a fool in livery, but she took a seat on a stool like the other women and took up some sewing.

‘You shall tell me all the news of the court,’ the Lady Mary invited me. ‘Perhaps we should talk alone.’

One nod to the ladies and they took themselves off to the bay window and seated themselves in a circle in the brighter light, talking quietly as if to give us the illusion of privacy. I imagined every one of them was straining to hear what I might say.

‘My brother the king?’ she asked me, gesturing that I should sit on a cushion at her feet. ‘Do you have any messages from him?’

‘No, Lady Mary,’ I said, and saw her disappointment.

‘I was hoping he would have thought of me more kindly, now he is so ill,’ she said. ‘When he was a little boy I nursed him through half a dozen illnesses, I hoped he would remember that and think that we …’

I waited for her to say more but then she tapped her fingertips together as if to draw herself back from memories. ‘No matter,’ she said. ‘Any other messages?’

‘The duke sends you some game and some early salad leaves,’ I said. ‘They came in the cart with the furniture, and have been taken round to your kitchens. And he asked me to give you this letter.’

She took it and broke the seal and smoothed it out. I saw her smile and then I heard her warm chuckle. ‘You bring me very good news, Hannah the Fool,’ she said. ‘This is a payment under the will of my late father which has been owed to me all this long while, since his death. I thought I would never see it, but here it is, a draft on a London goldsmith. I can pay my bills and face the shopkeepers of Ware again.’

‘I am glad of it,’ I said awkwardly, not knowing what else to say.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You would have thought that King Henry’s only legitimate daughter would have had her fortune in her own hands by now, but they have delayed and withheld until I thought they wanted me to starve to death here. But now I come into favour.’

She paused, thoughtful. ‘The question which remains, is, why I am suddenly to be so well treated.’ She looked speculatively at me. ‘Is Lady Elizabeth given her inheritance too? Are you to visit her with such a letter?’

I shook my head. ‘My lady, how would I know? I am only a messenger.’

‘No word of it? She’s not at court visiting my brother now?’

‘She wasn’t there when I left,’ I said cautiously.

She nodded. ‘And he? My brother? Is he better at all?’

I thought of the quiet disappearance of the physicians who came so full of promises and then left after they had done nothing more than torture him with some new cure. On the morning that I had left Greenwich, the duke had brought in an old woman to nurse the king: an old crone of a midwife, skilled only in the birthing of children and the laying out of the dead. Clearly, he was not going to get any better.

‘I don’t think so, my lady,’ I said. ‘They were hoping that the summer would ease his chest but he seems to be as bad as ever.’

She leaned towards me. ‘Tell me, child, tell me the truth. Is my little brother dying?’

I hesitated, unsure of whether it was treason to tell of the death of the king.

She took my hand and I looked into her square determined face. Her eyes, dark and honest, met mine. She looked like a woman you could trust, a mistress you could love. ‘You can tell me, I can keep a secret,’ she said. ‘I have kept many many secrets.’

‘Since you ask it, I will tell you: I am certain that he is dying,’ I admitted quietly. ‘But the duke denies it.’

She nodded. ‘And this wedding?’

I hesitated. ‘What wedding?’

She tutted in brief irritation. ‘Of Lady Jane Grey to the duke’s son, of course. What do they say about it at court?’

‘That she was unwilling, and he not much better.’

‘And why did the duke insist?’ she asked.

‘It was time that Guilford was married?’ I hazarded.

She looked at me, as bright as a knife blade. ‘They say no more than that?’

I shrugged. ‘Not in my hearing, my lady.’

‘And what of you?’ she asked, apparently abandoning interest in Lady Jane. ‘Did you ask to come to this exile? From the royal court at Greenwich? And away from your father?’ Her wry smile indicated to me that she did not think it likely.

‘Lord Robert told me to come,’ I confessed. ‘And his father, the duke.’

‘Did they tell you why?’

I wanted to bite my lips to hold in the secret. ‘No, my lady. Just to keep you company.’

She gave me a look that I had never seen from a woman before. Women in Spain tended to glance sideways, a modest woman always looked away. Women in England kept their eyes on the ground before their feet. One of the many reasons why I was glad of my pageboy clothes was that masquerading as a boy I could hold my head up, and look around. But Lady Mary had the bold look of her father’s portrait, the swaggering portrait, fists on hips, the look of someone who has been bred to think that he might rule the world. She had his gaze: a straight look that a man might have, scanning my face, reading my eyes, showing me her own open face and her own clear eyes.

‘What are you afraid of?’ she asked bluntly.

For a moment I was so taken aback I could have told her. I was afraid of arrest, of the Inquisition, afraid of suspicion, afraid of the torture chamber and the heretic’s death with kindling heaped around my bare feet and no way to escape. I was afraid of betraying others to their deaths, afraid of the very air of conspiracy itself. I rubbed my cheek with the back of my hand. ‘I am just a little nervous,’ I said quietly. ‘I am new to this country, and to court life.’

She let the silence run and then she looked at me more kindly. ‘Poor child, you are very young to be adrift, all alone in these deep waters.’

‘I am Lord Robert’s vassal,’ I said. ‘I am not alone.’

She smiled. ‘Perhaps you will be very good company,’ she said finally. ‘There have been days and months and even years when I would have been very glad of a merry face and an uplifted voice.’

‘I am not a witty fool,’ I said cautiously. ‘I am not supposed to be especially merry.’

Lady Mary laughed aloud at that. ‘And I am not supposed to be given especially to laughter,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you will suit me very well. And now, you must meet my companions.’

She called her ladies over to us and named them to me. One or two were the daughters of determined heretics, holding on to the old faith and serving a Roman Catholic princess for pride, two others had the dismal faces of younger daughters with scanty dowries whose chance of service to an out-of-favour princess was only slightly better than the marriage they would have been forced to undertake if they had been left at home. It was a little court with the smell of desperation, on the edge of the kingdom, on the edge of heresy, on the edge of legitimacy.

After dinner the Lady Mary went to Mass. She was supposed to go alone, it was a crime for anyone else to observe the service; but in practice, she went openly and knelt at the very front of the chapel and the rest of her household crept in at the back.

I followed her ladies to the chapel door and then I hovered in a frenzy of worry as to what I should do. I had assured the king and Lord Robert that my father and I were of the reformed faith, but both the king and Lord Robert knew that Lady Mary’s household was an island of illegal Papist practices in a Protestant kingdom. I could feel myself sweating with fear as the meanest housemaid slipped past me to say her prayers, and I did not know the safest thing for me to do. I was in a terror of being reported to the court for being a Roman Catholic, and yet how could I serve in this household as a steadfast Protestant?

In the end, I compromised, by sitting outside where I could hear the mutter of the priest and the whispered responses, but no-one could actually accuse me of attending the service. All the time that I perched on the draughty window-seat I felt ready to leap up and run away. Constantly my hand was at my face, wiping my cheek as if I could feel the smuts from the fires of the Inquisition sticking to my skin. It made me sick in my belly not to know the safest place to be.

After Mass I was summoned to Lady Mary’s room to hear her read from the Bible in Latin. I tried to keep my face blank as if I did not understand the words, and when she handed it to me to put it on its stand at the end of the reading, I had to remind myself not to check the front pages for the printer. I thought it was not such a good edition as my father printed.

She went to bed early, walking with her candle flickering before her, down the long shadowed corridor, past the dark draughty windows of the house, looking out over the darkness of the empty land beyond the tumbling-down castle walls. Everyone else went to bed too, there was nothing to wait up for, nothing was going to happen. There would be no visitors coming to see the popular princess, there would be no mummers or dancers or pedlars drawn by the wealth of the court. I thought that it was no wonder that she was not a merry princess. If the duke had wanted to keep Lady Mary in a place where she would be rarely visited, where her heart and spirits were sure to sink, where she would experience coldness and loneliness every day, he could not have chosen a place more certain to make her unhappy.

The household at Hunsdon turned out to be as I had thought: a melancholy place of outsiders, ruled by an invalid. Lady Mary was plagued with headaches, which often came in the evening, darkening her face as the light drained from the sky. Her ladies would notice her frown; but she never mentioned the pain and never drooped in her wooden chair nor leaned against the carved back, nor rested against the arms. She sat as her mother had taught her, upright like a queen, and she kept her head up, even when her eyes were squinting against dim candles. I remarked on her physical frailty to Jane Dormer, the Lady Mary’s closest friend and lady in waiting, and she said briefly that the pains I saw now were nothing. When it was the Lady’s time of the month, she would be gripped with cramps as severe as those of childbirth, which nothing could ease.

‘What ails her?’ I asked.

Jane shrugged. ‘She was never a strong child,’ she said. ‘Always slight and delicate. But when her mother was put aside and her father denied her, it was as if he had poisoned her. She could not stop vomiting and voiding her food, she could not get out of bed but she had to crawl across the floor. There were some who said she had been poisoned indeed, by the witch Boleyn. The princess was near to death and they would not let her see her mother. The queen could not come to her for fear of never being allowed back to her own court. The Boleyn woman and the king destroyed the two of them: mother and daughter. Queen Katherine hung on for as long as she could but illness and heartbreak killed her. Lady Mary should have died too – she suffered so much; but she survived. They made her deny her faith, they made her deny her mother’s marriage. Ever since then she has been tormented by these pains.’

‘Can’t the doctors …?’

‘They wouldn’t even let her see a doctor for many years,’ Jane said irritably. ‘She could have died for want of care, not once but several times. The witch Boleyn wanted her dead and more than once I swear she sent poison. She has had a bitter life: half-prisoner, half-saint, always swallowing down grief and anger.’

The mornings were the best times for Lady Mary. After she had been to Mass and broken her fast she liked to walk, and often she chose me to walk with her. One warm day in late June she commanded me to walk at her side and to name the flowers and describe the weather in Spanish. I had to keep my steps short so that I did not stride ahead of her, and she often stopped with her hand to her side, the colour draining from her face. ‘Are you not well this morning, my lady?’ I asked.

‘Just tired,’ she said. ‘I did not sleep last night.’

She smiled at the concern on my face. ‘Oh, it is nothing worse than it has always been. I should learn to have more serenity. But not to know … and to have to wait … and to know that he is in the hands of advisors who have set their hearts …’

‘Your brother?’ I asked when she fell silent.

‘I have thought of him every day from the day he was born!’ she burst out passionately. ‘Such a tiny boy and so much expected of him. So quick to learn and so – I don’t know – so cold in his heart where he should have been warm. Poor boy, poor motherless boy! All three of us, thrown together, and none of us with a mother living, and none of us knowing what would happen next.

‘I had more care of Elizabeth than I did of him, of course. And now she is far from me, and I cannot even see him. Of course I worry about him: about what they are doing to his soul, about what they are doing to his body … and about what they are doing to his will,’ she added very quietly.

‘His will?’

‘It is my inheritance,’ she said fiercely. ‘If you report, as I imagine you do, tell them I never forget that. Tell them that it is my inheritance and nothing can change that.’

‘I don’t report!’ I exclaimed, shocked. It was true, I had sent no report, there was nothing in our dull lives and quiet nights to report to Lord Robert or his father. This was a sick princess on a knife blade of watching and waiting, not a traitor spinning plots.

‘Whether or no,’ she dismissed my defence, ‘nothing and no-one can deny me my place. My father himself left it to me. It is me and then it is Elizabeth. I have never plotted against Edward, though there were some who came to me and asked me in my mother’s name to stand against him. I know that in her turn Elizabeth will never plot against me. We are three heirs, taking precedence one after another to honour our father. Elizabeth knows that I am the next heir after Edward, he came first as the boy, I come second as the princess, the first legitimate princess. We all three will obey our father and we stand to inherit one after the other as my father commanded. I trust Elizabeth, as Edward trusts me. And since you promise that you don’t report, you can make this reply if anyone asks you: tell them that I will keep my inheritance. And tell them that this is my country.’

Her weariness was gone, the colour had flamed into her cheeks. She looked around the small walled garden as if she could see the whole kingdom, the great prosperity which could be restored, and the changes she would make when she held the throne. The monasteries she would restore, the abbeys she would found, the life she could breathe back into it. ‘It is mine,’ she said. ‘And I am an English queen-to-be. No-one can put me aside.’

Her face was illuminated with her sense of destiny. ‘It is the purpose of my life,’ she said. ‘Nobody will pity me ever again. They will see that I have dedicated my life to being the bride of this country. I will be a virgin queen, I shall have no children but the people of this country, I shall be their mother. There shall be no-one to distract me, there shall be no-one to command me. I shall live for them. It is my holy calling. I shall give myself up for them.’

She turned from me and strode back to the house and I followed her at a distance. The morning sun burning off the mist made a lightness in the air all around her, and I had a moment’s dizziness as I realised that this woman would be a great queen for England, a queen who had a real vision for this country, who would bring back the richness and beauty and charity that her father had stripped out from the churches and from the daily life. The sun was so bright around her yellow silk hood that it was like a crown, and I stumbled on a tussock of grass and fell.

She turned and saw me on my knees. ‘Hannah?’

‘You will be queen,’ I said simply, the Sight speaking in my voice. ‘The king will die within a month. Long live the queen. Poor boy, the poor boy.’

In a second she was by my side, holding me up. ‘What did you say?’

‘You will be queen,’ I said. ‘He is sinking fast now.’

I lost my senses for a moment and then I opened my eyes again and she was looking down at me, still holding me closely.

‘Can you tell me any more?’ she asked me gently.

I shook my head. ‘I am sorry, Lady Mary, I barely know what I said. It was not said knowingly.’

She nodded. ‘It is the Holy Spirit which moves you to speak, especially to speak such news to me. Will you swear to keep it secret between us?’

For a moment I hesitated, thinking of the complicated webs of loyalties that were interwoven around me: my duty to Lord Robert, my honour for my father and mother and our kin, my promise to Daniel Carpenter, and now this troubled woman asking me to keep a secret for her. I nodded. It was no disloyalty not to tell Lord Robert something he must already know. ‘Yes, Lady Mary.’

I tried to rise but I dropped back to my knees with dizziness.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Don’t get up till your head is clear.’

She sat beside me on the grass and gently put my head in her lap. The morning sunshine was warm, the garden buzzed with the sleepy noise of bees and the distant haunting call of a cuckoo. ‘Close your eyes,’ she said.

I wanted to sleep as she held me. ‘I am not a spy,’ I said.

Her finger touched my lips. ‘Hush,’ she said. ‘I know that you work for the Dudleys. And I know you are a good girl. Who better than I to understand a life of complicated loyalties? You need not fear, little Hannah. I understand.’

I felt her soft touch on my hair, she wound my short-cropped curls around her finger. I felt my eyes close and the sinews of my back and neck unknot as I realised I was safe with her.

She, in her turn, was far away in the past. ‘I used to sit like this when Elizabeth took her afternoon nap,’ she said. ‘She would rest her head in my lap and I would plait her hair while she slept. She had hair of bronze and copper and gold, all the colours of gold in one curl. She was such a pretty child, she had that shining innocence of children. And I was only twenty. I used to pretend to myself that she was my baby, and that I was happily married to a man who loved me, and that soon we would have another baby – a son.’

We sat in silence for long moments, and then I heard the door of the house bang open. I sat up and saw one of Lady Mary’s ladies burst out of the shadowy interior and look wildly around for her. Lady Mary waved and the girl ran over. It was Lady Margaret. As she came close I felt Lady Mary’s posture rise, her back straighten, she steadied herself for the news I had foretold. She would let her companion find her here, seated simply in the English garden, her fool dozing beside her, and she would greet the news of her inheritance with words from the Psalms that she had prepared. She whispered them now: ‘This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.’

‘Lady Mary! Oh!’

The girl was almost speechless with her desire to tell, and breathless from her run. ‘At church just now …’

‘What?’

‘They didn’t pray for you.’

‘Pray for me?’

‘No. They prayed for the king and his advisors, same as always, but where the prayer says “and for the king’s sisters”, they missed you out.’

Lady Mary’s bright gaze swept the girl’s face. ‘Both of us? Elizabeth too?’

‘Yes!’

‘You are sure?’

‘Yes.’

Lady Mary rose to her feet, her eyes narrowed with anxiety. ‘Send out Mr Tomlinson into Ware, tell him to go on to Bishop Stortford if need be, tell him to get reports from other churches. See if this is happening everywhere.’

The girl bobbed a curtsey, picked up her skirts and ran back into the house.

‘What does it mean?’ I asked, scrambling to my feet.

She looked at me without seeing me. ‘It means that Northumberland has started to move against me. First, he does not warn me how ill my brother is. Then, he commands the priests to leave Elizabeth and me from the prayers; next, he will command them to mention another, the king’s new heir. Then, when my poor brother is dead, they will arrest me, arrest Elizabeth, and put their false prince on the throne.’

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘Edward Courtenay,’ she said decisively. ‘My cousin. He is the only one Northumberland would choose, since he cannot put himself or his sons on the throne.’

I suddenly saw it. The wedding feast, the white face of Lady Jane Grey, the bruises at her throat as if someone had taken her by the neck to shake their ambition into her. ‘Oh, but he can: Lady Jane Grey,’ I said.

‘Newly wed to Northumberland’s son Guilford,’ Lady Mary agreed. She paused for a moment. ‘I would not have thought they would have dared. Her mother, my cousin, would have to step aside, she would have to resign her claim for her daughter. But Jane is a Protestant, and Dudley’s father commands the keys to the kingdom.’ She gave a harsh laugh. ‘My God! She is such a Protestant. She has out-Protestanted Elizabeth, and that must have taken some doing. She has Protestanted her way into my brother’s will. She has Protestanted her way into treason, God forgive her, the poor little fool. They will take her and destroy her, poor girl. But first, they will destroy me. They have to. Robbing me of the prayers of my people is only the first thing. Next, they will arrest me, then there will be some charge and I will be executed.’

Her pale face suddenly drained even paler and I saw her stagger. ‘My God, what of Elizabeth? He will kill us both,’ she whispered. ‘He will have to. Otherwise there will be rebellions against him from both Protestant and Catholic. He has to be rid of me to be rid of men of courage of the true faith. But he has to be rid of Elizabeth too. Why would a Protestant follow Queen Jane and a cat’s-paw like Guilford Dudley if they could have Elizabeth for queen? If I am dead, she is the next heir, a Protestant heir. He must be planning to forge some charge of treason against us both; one of us is not enough. Elizabeth and I will be dead within three months.’

She strode away from me by a couple of paces, and then she turned and came back again. ‘I must save Elizabeth,’ she said. ‘Whatever else happens. I must warn her not to go to London. She must come here. They shall not take my throne from me. I have not come so far and borne so much for them to rob me of my country, and plunge my country into sin. I will not fail now.’

She turned towards the house. ‘Come, Hannah!’ she threw over her shoulder. ‘Come quickly!’

She wrote to warn Elizabeth, she wrote for advice. I did not see either letter; but that night I took the manuscript Lord Robert had given to me, and using my father’s letter as the base of the code I carefully wrote out the message. ‘M is much alarmed that she is left out of the prayers. She believes that Lady J will be named heir. She has written to Eliz to warn her. And to the Sp ambassador for advice.’ I paused then. It was arduous work, translating every letter into another, but I wanted to write something, a line, a word, to remind him of me, to prompt him to recall me to court. Some line, some simple thing that he would read and think of me, not as his spy, not as a fool, but as me, myself, a girl who had promised to serve him heart and soul, for love.

‘I miss you,’ I wrote, and then I scratched it out, not even troubling to translate it into code.

‘When can I come home?’ went the same way.

‘I am frightened,’ was the most honest of all the confessions.

In the end I wrote nothing, there was nothing I could think of that would turn Lord Robert’s attention to me, while the boy king was dying and his own young white-faced sister-in-law was stepping up to the throne of England and bringing the Dudley family to absolute greatness.

Then there was nothing to do but to wait for news of the death of the king to come from London. Lady Mary had her own private messages coming and going. But every three days or so she received a letter from the duke to tell her that the fine weather was doing its business and the king was on the mend, that his fever had broken, that his chest pains were better, that a new doctor had been appointed who had high hopes that the king would be well by midsummer. I watched Lady Mary read these optimistic notes through once, saw her eyes narrow slightly in disbelief; and then she folded them and put them away in a drawer in her writing desk, and never looked at them again.

Then, in the first days of July, one letter made her snatch her breath and put a hand to her heart.

‘How is the king, my Lady?’ I asked her. ‘Not worse?’

Her colour burned in her cheeks. ‘The duke says that he is better, that he has rallied and that he wants to see me.’ She rose to her feet and paced to the window. ‘Please God he is indeed better,’ she said quietly to herself. ‘Better, and wanting to restore me to our old affection, better, and seeing through his false advisors. Perhaps God has given him strength to get well and to come to a right understanding at last. Or at least well enough to put a stop to this plot. Oh, Mother of God, guide me in what I should do.’

‘Shall we go?’ I asked. I was on my feet already at the thought of returning to London, to court, to see Lord Robert again, to see my father, and Daniel, back to the relative safety of the men who would protect me.

I saw her shoulders straighten as she took the decision. ‘If he asks for me, of course I have to go. Tell them to get the horses ready. We’ll leave tomorrow.’

She went from the room with a rustle of her thick skirts, and I heard her calling to her ladies to pack their clothes, we were all going to London. I heard her run up stairs, her feet pattering on the bare wooden treads like those of a young girl, and then her voice, light and excited, as she called back down to Jane Dormer to take especial care to pack her finest jewels for if the king was indeed well then there would be dancing and feasting at court.

Next day we were on the road, Lady Mary’s pennant before us, her soldiers around us, and the country people tumbling out of their houses in the small villages to call out blessings on her name, and holding up their children for them to see her: a real princess, and a pretty smiling princess at that.

Lady Mary on horseback was a different woman from the white-faced half-prisoner that I had first met at Hunsdon. Riding towards London with the people of England cheering her on, she looked like a true princess. She wore a deep red gown and jacket, which made her dark eyes shine. She rode well, one hand in a worn red glove on the bridle, the other waving to everyone who called out to her, the colour blazing in her cheeks, a stray lock of rich brown hair escaping from her hat, her head up, her courage high, her weariness all gone. She sat well in the saddle, proud as a queen, swaying with the pace of the horse as we made our way to the great road to London.

I rode beside her for much of the way, the little bay pony that the duke had given me stepping out to keep pace with Lady Mary’s bigger horse. She commanded me to sing the songs of my Spanish childhood, and sometimes she recognised the words or the tune as something her mother had once sung to her, and she would sing with me, a little quaver in her voice at the memory of the mother who had loved her.

We rode hard along the London road, splashing through the fords at their summertime low, cantering where the tracks were soft enough. She was desperate to get to court to discover what was happening. I remembered John Dee’s mirror and how I had guessed at the date of the king’s death, the sixth of July, but I did not dare to say anything. I had spoken the name of the next Queen of England, and it had not been Queen Mary. The sixth of July had been a guess to please my lord, and the name Jane had come to me from nowhere – both might mean nothing. But as Lady Mary rode to London, hoping that her fears would prove to be unfounded, I rode at her side hoping that my Sight was all the chicanery and nonsense that I thought it must be.

Of all of the nervous train who rode with her I was the most anxious. For if I had seen true, she was riding not to a reconciliation with her brother the king, but to attend the coronation of Lady Jane. She was riding fast towards her own abdication, and we would all share her bad luck.

We rode all the morning and came just after midday into the town of Hoddesdon, weary of the saddle and hoping for a good dinner and a rest before we continued the journey. Without warning, a man stepped out from a doorway and put his hand up to signal to her. Clearly, she recognised him. At once she waved him forward so he could speak to her privately. He stood close to her horse’s neck and took her rein familiarly in his arm and she leaned down towards him. He was very brief, and though I strained to hear, he kept his voice low. Then he stepped back and melted away into the mean streets of the little town and Lady Mary snapped an order to halt, and tumbled down from her saddle so fast that her Master of Horse could scarcely catch her. She went into the nearest inn at a run, shouting for paper and pen, and ordering everyone to drink, eat, see to their horses and be ready to leave again within the hour.

‘Mother of God, I really can’t,’ Lady Margaret said pitifully as her royal mistress strode past. ‘I’m too tired to go another step.’

‘Then stay behind,’ snapped Lady Mary, who never snapped. That sharpness of tone warned us that the hopeful ride to London, to visit the young, recovering king, had suddenly gone terribly wrong.

I did not dare to write a note for Lord Robert. There was no easy way to get it to him and the whole mood of the journey had changed. Whatever the man had told her it was not that her brother was well and summoning her to dance at his court. When she came out of the parlour she was pale and her eyes were red, but she was not softened by grief. She was sharp with decision, and she was angry.

She sent one messenger flying south down the road to London to find the Spanish ambassador, to beg for his advice and to alert the Spanish emperor that she would need his help to claim her throne. She took another messenger aside for a verbal message for Lady Elizabeth, she did not dare to write it down, she did not dare to give the impression that the sisters were plotting against their dying brother. ‘Speak only to her when you are alone,’ she emphasised. ‘Tell her not to go to London, it is a trap. Tell her to come at once to me for her own safety.’

She sent a further message to the duke himself, swearing that she was too ill to ride to London, but that she would rest quietly at home at Hunsdon. Then she ordered the main group to stay behind. ‘I’ll take you, Lady Margaret, and you, Hannah,’ she said. She smiled at her favourite, Jane Dormer. ‘Follow us,’ she said, and she leaned forward to whisper our destination in her ear. ‘You must bring this company on behind us. We are going to travel too fast for everyone to keep pace.’

She picked six men to escort us, gave her followers a brief leave-taking and snapped her fingers for her Master of Horse to help her into the saddle. She wheeled her horse round and led us out of Hoddesdon, back the way we had come out of the town. But this time we took the great road north, racing away from London, as the sun slowly wheeled overhead and then set on our left, as the sky lost its colour, and a small silvery moon rose over the dark silhouettes of trees.

‘Where are we going, Lady Mary? It’s getting dark,’ Lady Margaret asked plaintively. ‘We can’t ride in the dark.’

‘Kenninghall,’ Lady Mary crisply replied.

‘Where’s Kenninghall?’ I asked, seeing Lady Margaret’s aghast face.

‘Norfolk,’ she said as if it were the end of the world. ‘God help us, she’s running away.’

‘Running away?’ I felt my throat tense at the scent of danger.

‘It’s towards the sea. She’ll get a ship out of Lowestoft and run to Spain. Whatever that man told her must mean that she’s in such danger that she has to get out of the country altogether.’

‘What danger?’ I asked urgently.

Lady Margaret shrugged. ‘Who knows? A charge of treason? But what about us? If she goes to Spain I’m riding for home. I’m not going to be stuck with a traitor for a mistress. It’s been bad enough in England, I’ll not be exiled to Spain.’

I said nothing, I was feverishly racking my brains to think of where I might be safest: at home with my father, with Lady Mary, or taking a horse and trying to get back to Lord Robert.

‘What about you?’ she pressed me.

I shook my head, my voice quite lost in fear, my hand feverishly rubbing at my cheek. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I should go home, I suppose. But I don’t know the way on my own. I don’t know what my father would want me to do. I don’t understand the rights and the wrongs of it.’

She laughed, a bitter laugh for a young woman. ‘There are no rights and wrongs,’ she said. ‘There are only those who are likely to win and those who are likely to lose. And Lady Mary with six men, me and a fool, up against the Duke of Northumberland with his army and the Tower of London and every castle in the kingdom, is going to lose.’

It was a punishing ride. We did not check until it was fully night, when we paused at the home of a gentleman, John Huddlestone, at Sawston Hall. I begged a piece of paper and a pen from the housekeeper and wrote a letter, not to Lord Robert, whose address I did not dare to give, but to John Dee. ‘My dear tutor,’ I wrote, hoping this would mislead anyone who opened my letter, ‘this little riddle may amuse you.’ Then underneath I wrote the coded letters in the form of a serpentine circle, hoping to make it look like a game that a girl of my age might send to a kind scholar. It simply read, ‘She is going to Kenninghall.’ And then I wrote: ‘What am I to do?’

The housekeeper promised to send it to Greenwich by the carter who would pass by tomorrow, and I had to hope that it would find its destination and be read by the right man. Then I stepped into a little truckle bed that they had pulled out beside the kitchen fire and despite my exhaustion I lay sleepless in the slowly dimming firelight, wondering where I might find safety.

I woke painfully early, at five in the morning, to find the kitchen lad clattering pails of water and sacks of logs past my head. Lady Mary heard Mass in John Huddlestone’s chapel, as if it were not a forbidden ceremony, broke her fast, and was back in the saddle by seven in the morning, riding in the highest of spirits away from Sawston Hall with John Huddlestone at her side to show her the way.

I was riding at the back, the dozen or so horses clattering ahead of me, my little pony too tired to keep pace, when I smelled an old terrible scent on the air. I smelled burning, I smelled smoke. Not the appetising smoke of the roast beef on the spit, not the innocent seasonal smell of burning leaves. I could smell the scent of heresy, a fire lit with ill-will, burning up someone’s happiness, burning up someone’s faith, burning up someone’s house … I turned in the saddle and saw the glow on the horizon where the house we had just left, Sawston Hall, was being torched.

‘My lady!’ I called out. She heard me, and turned her head and then reined in her horse, John Huddlestone beside her.

‘Your house!’ I said simply to him.

He looked beyond me, he squinted his eyes to see. He couldn’t tell for sure, he could not smell the smoke as I had done. Lady Mary looked at me. ‘Are you sure, Hannah?’

I nodded. ‘I can smell it. I can smell smoke.’ I heard the quaver of fear in my voice. My hand was at my cheek brushing my face as if the smuts were falling on me. ‘I can smell smoke. Your house is being burned out, sir.’

He turned his horse as if he would ride straight home, then he remembered the woman whose visit had cost him his home and his fortune. ‘Forgive me, Lady Mary. I must go home … My wife …’

‘Go,’ she said gently. ‘And be very well assured that when I come into my own, you shall come into yours. I will give you another house, a bigger and richer house than this one you have lost for your loyalty to me. I shall not forget.’

He nodded, half-deaf with worry, and then set his horse at a gallop to where the blaze of his house glowed on the horizon. His groom rode up beside Lady Mary. ‘D’you want me to guide you, my lady?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Can you take me to Bury St Edmunds?’

He put his cap back on his head. ‘Through Mildenhall and Thetford forest? Yes, m’lady.’

She gave the signal to move on and she rode without once looking back. I thought that she was a princess indeed, if she could see last night’s refuge burned to the ground and think only of the struggle ahead of her and not of the ruins left behind.

That night we stayed at Euston Hall near Thetford, and I lay on the floor of Lady Mary’s bedroom, wrapped in my cape, still fully dressed, waiting for the alarm that I was sure must come. All night my senses were on the alert for the tramp of muffled feet, for the glimpse of a dipping brand, for the smell of smoke from a torch. I did little more than doze, waiting all the night for a Protestant mob to come and tear down this safe house as they had done Sawston Hall. I had a great horror of being trapped inside the house when they torched the roof and the stairs. I could not close my eyes for fear that I would be wakened by the smell of smoke, so that it was almost a relief near dawn when I heard the sound of a horse’s hooves on cobbles and I was up at the window in a second, knowing that my sleepless watch was rewarded, my hand outstretched to her as she woke, cautioning her to be quiet.

‘What can you see?’ she demanded from the bed, as she pulled back the covers. ‘How many men?’

‘Only one horse, he looks weary.’

‘Go and see who it is.’

I hurried down the wooden stairs to the hall. The porter had the spy hole opened and was arguing with the traveller, who seemed to be demanding admission to stay the night. I touched the porter on the shoulder and he stood aside. I had to stretch up on tiptoes to see through the spy hole in the door.

‘And who are you?’ I demanded, my voice as gruff as I could make it, acting a confidence that I did not feel.

‘Who are you?’ he asked back. I heard at once the sharp cadence of London speech.

‘You’d better tell me what you want,’ I insisted.

He came closer to the spy hole and lowered his quiet voice to a whisper. ‘I have important news for a great lady. It is about her brother. D’you understand me?’

There was no way of knowing whether or not he was sent to entrap us. I took the risk, stepped back and nodded to the porter. ‘Let him in, and then bar the door behind him again.’

He came in. I wished to God that I could have made the Sight work for me when I demanded it. I would have given anything to know if there were a dozen men behind him, even now encircling the house and striking flints in the hay barns. But I could be sure of nothing except that he was weary and travel-stained and buoyed up by excitement.

‘What’s the message?’

‘I shall tell it to no-one but herself.’

There was a rustle of silken skirts and Lady Mary came down the stairs. ‘And you are?’ she asked.

It was his response to the sight of her that convinced me that he was on our side, and that the world had changed for us, overnight. Fast as a stooping falcon, he dropped down to one knee, pulled his hat from his head, and bowed to her, as to a queen.

God save her, she did not turn a hair. She extended her hand as if she had been Queen of England for all her life. He kissed it reverently, and then looked up into her face.

‘I am Robert Raynes, a goldsmith of London, sent by Sir Nicholas Throckmorton to bring you the news that your brother Edward is dead, Your Grace. You are Queen of England.’

‘God bless him,’ she said softly. ‘God save Edward’s precious soul.’

There was a short silence.

‘Did he die in faith?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘He died as a Protestant.’

She nodded. ‘And I am proclaimed queen?’ she demanded in a much sharper tone.

He shook his head. ‘Can I speak freely?’

‘You have ridden a long way to tell a riddle if you do not,’ she observed drily.

‘The king died in much pain on the night of the sixth,’ he said quietly.

‘The sixth?’ she interrupted.

‘Yes. Before his death he changed his father’s will.’

‘He had no legal right to do so. He cannot have changed the settlement.’

‘Nonetheless he did. You are denied the succession, the Lady Elizabeth also. Lady Jane Grey is named as his heir.’

‘He never did this willingly,’ she said, her face blanched.

The man shrugged. ‘It was done in his hand, and the council and the justices all agreed and signed to it.’

‘All the council?’ she asked.

‘To a man.’

‘And what about me?’

‘I am to warn you that you are named as a traitor to the throne. Lord Robert Dudley is on his way now to arrest you and take you to the Tower.’

‘Lord Robert is coming?’ I asked.

‘He will go to Hunsdon first,’ Lady Mary reassured me. ‘I wrote to his father that I was staying there. He won’t know where we are.’

I did not contradict her, but I knew that John Dee would send my note on to him this very day, and that thanks to me, he would know exactly where to look for us.

Her concern was all for her sister. ‘And Lady Elizabeth?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She may be arrested already. They were going to her home too.’

‘Where is Robert Dudley now?’

‘I don’t know that either. It has taken me the whole day to find you myself. I traced you from Sawston Hall because I heard of the fire and guessed you had been there. I am sorry, my l … Your Grace.’

‘And when was the king’s death announced? And Lady Jane falsely proclaimed?’

‘Not when I left.’

She took a moment to understand, and then she was angry. ‘He has died, and it has not been announced? My brother is lying dead, unwatched? Without the rites of the church? Without any honours done to him at all?’

‘His death was still a secret when I left.’

She nodded, her lips biting back anything she might have said, her eyes suddenly veiled and cautious. ‘I thank you for coming to me,’ she said. ‘Thank Sir Nicholas for his services to me which I had no cause to anticipate.’

The sarcasm in this was rather sharp, even for the man on his knees. ‘He told me you are the true queen now,’ he volunteered. ‘And that he and all his household are to serve you.’

‘I am the true queen,’ she said. ‘I always was the true princess. And I will have my kingdom. You can sleep here tonight. The porter will find you a bed. Go back to London in the morning and convey my thanks to him. He has done the right thing to inform me. I am queen, and I will have my throne.’

She turned on her heel and swept up the stair. I hesitated for only one moment.

‘Did you say the sixth?’ I asked the London man. ‘The sixth of July, that the king died?’

‘Yes.’

I dropped him a curtsey and followed Lady Mary upstairs. As soon as we got into her room she closed the door behind us, and threw aside her regal dignity. ‘Get me the clothes of a serving girl, and wake John Huddlestone’s groom,’ she said urgently. ‘Then go to the stables and get two horses ready, one with a pillion saddle for me and the groom, one for you.’

‘My lady?’

‘You call me Your Grace now,’ she said grimly. ‘I am Queen of England. Now hurry.’

‘What am I to tell the groom?’

‘Tell him that we have to get to Kenninghall today. That I will ride behind him, we will leave the rest of them here. You come with me.’

I nodded and hurried from the room. The serving maid who had waited on us last night was sleeping with half a dozen others in the attic bedrooms. I went up the stairs and peeped in the door. I found her in the half-darkness and shook her awake, put my hand over her mouth and hissed in her ear: ‘I’ve had enough of this, I’m running away. I’ll give you a silver shilling for your clothes. You can say I stole them and no-one will be the wiser.’

‘Two shillings,’ she said instantly.

‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘Give them me, and I’ll bring you the money.’

She fumbled under her pillow for her shift and her smock. ‘Just the gown and cape,’ I ordered, shrinking from the thought of putting the Queen of England in louse-ridden linen. She bundled them up for me with her cap and I went light-footed downstairs to Lady Mary’s room.

‘Here,’ I said. ‘They cost me two shillings.’

She found the coins in her purse. ‘No boots.’

‘Please wear your own boots,’ I said fervently. ‘I’ve run away before, I know what it’s like. You’ll never get anywhere in borrowed boots.’

She smiled at that. ‘Hurry,’ was all she said.

I ran back upstairs with the two shillings and then I found Tom, John Huddlestone’s groom, and sent him down to the stables to get the horses ready. I crept down to the bakery just outside the kitchen door, and found, as I had hoped, a batch of bread rolls baked in the warmth of the oven last night. I stuffed my breeches pockets and my jacket pockets with half a dozen of them so that I looked like a donkey with panniers, and then I went back to the hall.

Lady Mary was there, dressed as a serving maid, her hood pulled over her face. The porter was arguing, reluctant to open the door to the stable-yard for a maidservant. She turned with relief when she heard me approach light-footed on the stone flags.

‘Come on,’ I said reasonably to the man. ‘She is a servant of John Huddlestone, his groom is waiting. He told us to leave at first light. We’re to go back to Sawston Hall and we shall be whipped if we are late.’

He complained about visitors in the night disturbing a Christian household’s sleep, and then people leaving early; but he opened the door and Lady Mary and I slipped through. Tom was in the yard, holding one big hunter with a pillion saddle on its back and a smaller horse for me. I would have to leave my little pony behind, this was going to be a hard ride.

He got into the saddle and took the hunter to the mounting block. I helped the Lady Mary scramble up behind him, she took a tight grip around his waist and kept her hood pulled forward to hide her face. I had to take my horse to the mounting block too, the stirrup was too high for me to mount without help. When I was up on him, the ground seemed a long way away, he sidestepped nervously and I jerked on the reins too tightly and made him toss his head and sidle. I had never ridden such a big horse before, and I was frightened of him; but no smaller animal could manage the hard ride we must make today.

Tom turned his horse’s head and led the way out of the yard. I turned after him and heard my heart pounding and knew that I was on the run, once again, and afraid, once again, and that this time I was perhaps in a worse case than I had been when we had run from Spain, or when we had run from Portugal, even when we had run from France. Because this time I was running with the pretender to the throne of England, with Lord Robert Dudley and his army in pursuit, and I was his vassal sworn; her trusted servant, and a Jew; but a practising Christian, serving a Papist princess in a country sworn to be Protestant. Little wonder that my heart was in my mouth and beating louder than the clopping of the hooves of the big horses as we went down the road to the east, pushing them into a canter towards the rising sun.

When we reached Kenninghall at midday, I saw why we had ridden till the horses foundered to get here. The sun was high in the sky and it made the fortified manor house look squat and indomitable in the flat uncompromising landscape. It was a solid moated house, and as we drew closer I saw that it was no pretty play-castle; this had a drawbridge that could be raised, and a portcullis above it that could be dropped down to seal the only entrance. It was built in warm red brick, a deceptively beautiful house that could nonetheless be held in a siege.

Lady Mary was not expected, and the few servants who lived at the house to keep it in order came tumbling out of the doors in a flurry of surprise and greeting. After a nod from Lady Mary I quickly told them of the astounding news from London as they took our horses into the stable-yard. A ragged cheer went up at the news of her accession to the throne and they pulled me down from the saddle and clapped me on the back like the lad I appeared to be. I let out a yelp of pain. The inner part of my legs from my ankles to my thighs had been skinned raw from three days in the saddle, and my back and shoulders and wrists were locked tight from the jolting ride from Hunsdon to Hoddesdon, to Sawston to Thetford to here.

Lady Mary must have been near-dead with exhaustion, sitting pillion for all that long time, a woman of nearly forty years and in poor health, but only I saw the grimace of pain as they lifted her down to the ground; everyone else saw the tilt of her chin as she heard them shout for her, and the charm of the Tudor smile as she welcomed them all into the great hall and bid them good cheer. She took a moment to pray for the soul of her dead brother and then she raised her head and promised them that just as she had been a fair landlord and mistress to them, she would be a good queen.

That earned her another cheer and the hall started to fill with people, workers from the fields and woods and villagers from their homes, and the servants ran about with flagons of ale and cups of wine and loaves of bread and meat. The Lady Mary took her seat at the head of the hall and smiled on everyone as if she had never been ill in her life, then after an hour of good company, she laughed out loud and said she must get out of this cloak and this poor gown, and went to her rooms.

The few house servants had flung themselves into getting her rooms ready and her bed was made with linen. It was only the second-best bedding, but if she was as weary as I then she would have slept on homespun. They brought in a bath tub, lined it with sheets to protect her from splinters, and filled it with hot water. And they found some old gowns, which she had left behind when she was last at this house, and laid them out on the bed for her to choose.

‘You can go,’ she said to me, as she threw the servant girl’s cloak from her shoulders to the floor, and turned her back to the maid to be unlaced. ‘Find something to eat and go straight to bed. You must be tired out.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, hobbling for the door with my painful bow-legged stride.

‘And, Hannah?’

‘Yes, lady … Yes, Your Grace?’

‘Whoever it is who has paid your wages while you have been in my household, and whatever they hoped to gain from that – you have been a good friend to me this day. I will not forget it.’

I paused, thinking of the two letters I had written to Lord Robert that would bring him hard on our heels, thinking what would happen to this determined, ambitious woman when he caught us, thinking that he was certain to catch us here, since I had told him exactly where to come; and then it would be the Tower for her, and probably her death for treason. I had been a spy in her household and the falsest of friends. I had been a byword for dishonour and she had known some of it; but she could not have dreamed of the falseness that had become second nature to me.

If I could have confessed to her then, I would have done. The words were on my tongue, I wanted to tell her that I had been put into her household to work against her; but that now that I knew her, and loved her, I would do anything to serve her. I wanted to tell her that Robert Dudley was my lord and I would always be bound to do anything he asked me. I wanted to tell her that everything I did seemed to be always full of contradictions: black and white, love and fear, all at once.

But I could say nothing, and I had been brought up to hold secrets under my lying tongue, so I just dropped to one knee before her and bowed my head.

She did not give me her hand to kiss, like a queen would have done. She put her hand on my head like my own mother used to do and she said, ‘God bless you, Hannah, and keep you safe from sin.’

At that moment, at that particular tenderness, at the very touch of my mother’s hand, I felt the tears well up in my eyes; and I got myself out of the room and into my own small attic bedchamber and into my bed without bath or dinner, before anybody should see me cry like the little girl I still was.

We were at Kenninghall for three days on siege alert, but still Lord Robert and his company of cavalry did not come. The gentlemen from the country all around the manor came pouring in with their servants and their kinsmen, some of them armed, some of them bringing blacksmiths to hammer out spears and lances from the pruning hooks, spades and scythes that they brought with them. The Lady Mary proclaimed herself as queen in the great hall, despite the advice of more cautious men, and flying in the face of a pleading letter from the Spanish ambassador. He had written to tell her that her brother was dead, that Northumberland was unbeatable, and that she should set about negotiating with him while her uncle in Spain would do his best to save her from the trumped-up charge of treason and sentence of death which was certain to come. That part of his letter made her look grim, but there was worse.

He warned her that Northumberland had sent warships into the French seas off Norfolk, specially to prevent the Spanish ships from rescuing her and taking her to safety. There could be no escape for her, the emperor could not even attempt to save her. She must surrender to the duke and give up her claim to the crown, and throw herself on his mercy.

‘What can you see, Hannah?’ she asked me. It was early morning, and she had just come from Mass, her rosary beads still in her fingers, her forehead still damp with holy water. It was a bad morning for her, her face, sometimes so illuminated and merry with hope, was grey and tired. She looked sick of fear itself.

I shook my head. ‘I have only seen for you once, Your Grace, and I was certain then that you would be queen. And now you are. I have seen nothing since.’

‘I am queen indeed now,’ she said wryly. ‘I am proclaimed queen by myself at least. I wish you had told me how long it would last, and if anyone else would agree with me.’

‘I wish I could,’ I said sincerely. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘They tell me to surrender,’ she said simply. ‘The advisors I have trusted all my life, my Spanish kinsmen, my mother’s only friends. They all tell me that I will be executed if I continue with this course, that it’s a battle I can’t win. The duke has the Tower, he has London, he has the country, he has the warships at sea and an army of followers and the royal guard. He has all the coin of the realm at the Mint, he has all the weapons of the nation at the Tower. I have this one castle, this one village, these few loyal men and their pitchforks. And somewhere out there is Lord Robert and his troop coming towards us.’

‘Can’t we get away?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘Not fast enough, not far enough. If I could have got on a Spanish warship then, perhaps … but the duke has the sea between here and France held down by English warships, he was ready for this, and I was unprepared. I am trapped.’

I remembered John Dee’s map spread out in the duke’s study and the little counters which signified soldiers and sailors on ships all around Norfolk, and Lady Mary trapped in the middle of them.

‘Will you have to surrender?’ I whispered.

I had thought she was frightened; but at my question the colour rushed into her cheeks, and she smiled as if I had suggested a challenge, a great gamble. ‘You know, I’m damned if I will!’ she swore. She laughed aloud as if it was a bet for a joust rather than her life on the table. ‘I have spent my life running and lying and hiding. Just once, just once I should be glad to ride out under my own standard and defy the men who have denied me, and denied my right and denied the authority of the church and God himself.’

I felt my own spirits leap up at her enthusiasm. ‘My la … Your Grace!’ I stumbled.

She turned a brilliant smile on me. ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Why should I not, just once, fight like a man and defy them?’

‘But can you win?’ I asked blankly.

She shrugged, an absolutely Spanish gesture. ‘Oh! It’s not likely!’ She smiled at me as if she were truly merry at the desperate choice before her. ‘Ah, but Hannah, I have been humbled to dust by these men who would now put a commoner such as Lady Jane before me. They once put Elizabeth before me. They made me wait on her as if I were her maid in her nursery. And now I have my chance. I can fight them instead of bowing to them. I can die fighting them instead of crawling to them, begging for my life. When I see it like this, I have no choice. And I thank God, there is no better choice for me than to raise my standard and to fight for my father’s throne and my mother’s honour, my inheritance. And I have Elizabeth to think of, too. I have her safety to secure. I have her inheritance to pass on to her. She is my sister, she is my responsibility. I have written to her to bid her come here, so that she can be safe. I have promised her a refuge, and I will fight for our inheritance.’

Lady Mary gathered her rosary beads in her short workmanlike fingers, tucked them into the pocket of her gown and strode towards the door of the great hall where her armies of gentlemen and soldiers were breaking their fast. She entered the head of the hall and mounted the dais. ‘Today we move out,’ she announced, loud and clear enough for the least man at the back of the hall to hear her. ‘We go to Framlingham, a day’s ride, no more than that. I shall raise my standard there. If we can get there before Lord Robert we can hold him off in a siege. We can hold him off for months. I can fight a battle from there. I can collect troops.’

There was a murmur of surprise and then approbation.

‘Trust me!’ she commanded them. ‘I will not fail you. I am your proclaimed queen and you will see me on the throne, and then I will remember who was here today. I will remember and you will be repaid many times over for doing your duty to the true Queen of England.’

There was a deep low roar, easily given from men who have just eaten well. I found my knees were shaking at the sight of her courage. She swept to the door at the back of the hall and I jumped unsteadily ahead of her and opened it for her.

‘And where is he?’ I asked. She did not have to be told who I was asking for.

‘Oh, not far,’ Lady Mary said grimly. ‘South of King’s Lynn, I am told. Something must have delayed him, he could have taken us here if he had come at once. But I cannot get news of him. I don’t know where he is for sure.’

‘Will he guess that we are going to Framlingham?’ I asked, thinking of the note that had gone to him, naming her destination here, its spiral on the paper like a curled snake.

She paused at the doorway and looked back at me. ‘There is bound to be one person in such a gathering who will slip away and tell him. There is always a spy in the camp. Don’t you think, Hannah?’

For a moment I thought she had trapped me. I looked up at her, my lies very dry in my throat, my girl’s face growing pale.

‘A spy?’ I quavered. I put my hand to my cheek and rubbed it hard.

She nodded. ‘I never trust anyone. I always know that there are spies about me. And if you had been the girl I was, you would have learned the same. After my father sent my mother away from me there was no-one near me who did not try to persuade me that Anne Boleyn was true queen and her bastard child the true heir. The Duke of Norfolk shouted into my face that if he were my father he would bang my head against the wall until my brains fell out. They made me deny my mother, they made me deny my faith, they threatened me with death on the scaffold like Thomas More and Bishop Fisher – men I knew and loved. I was a girl of twenty and they made me proclaim myself a bastard and my faith a heresy.

‘Then, all in a summer’s day, Anne was dead and all they spoke of was Queen Jane and her child, Edward, and little Elizabeth was no longer my enemy but a motherless child, a forgotten daughter, just like me. Then the other queens …’ She almost smiled. ‘One after another, three other women came to me and I was ordered to curtsey to them as queen and call them Mother, and none of them came close to my heart. In that long time I learned never to trust a word that any man says and never even to listen to a woman. The last woman I loved was my mother. The last man I trusted was my father. And he destroyed her, and she died of heartbreak, so what was I to think? Will I ever be a woman who can trust now?’

She broke off and looked at me. ‘My heart broke when I was a little more than twenty years old,’ she said wonderingly. ‘And d’you know, only now do I begin to think that there might be a life for me.’

She smiled. ‘Oh, Hannah!’ she sighed and patted me on the cheek. ‘Don’t look so grave. It was all a long time ago and if we can triumph in this adventure then my story is ended happily. I shall have my mother’s throne restored, I shall wear her jewels. I shall see her memory honoured and she will look down from heaven and see her daughter on the throne that she bore me to inherit. I shall think myself a happy woman. Don’t you see?’

I smiled uncomfortably.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

I swallowed on my dry throat. ‘I am afraid,’ I confessed. ‘I am sorry.’

She nodded. ‘We are all afraid,’ she said frankly. ‘Me too. Go down and choose a horse from the stable and get a pair of riding boots. We are an army on the march today. God save us that we may make Framlingham without running into Lord Robert and his army.’

Mary raised her standard at Framlingham Castle, a fortress to match any in England, and unbelievably half the world turned up on horseback and on foot to swear allegiance to her and death to the rebels. I walked beside her as she went down the massed ranks of the men and thanked them for coming to her and swore to be a true and honest queen to them.

We had news from London at last. The announcement of King Edward’s death had been made shamefully late. After the poor boy had died, the duke had kept the corpse hidden in his room while the ink dried on his will, and the powerful men of the country considered where their best interests lay. Lady Jane Grey had to be dragged on to the throne by her father-in-law. They said she had cried very bitterly and said that she could not be queen, and that the Lady Mary was the rightful heir, as everyone knew. It did not save her from her fate. They unfurled the canopy of state over her bowed head, they served her on bended knee despite her tearful protests, and the Duke of Northumberland proclaimed her as queen and bent his sly head to her.

The country was launched into civil war, directed against us, the traitors. Lady Elizabeth had not replied to the Lady Mary’s warnings, nor come to join us at Framlingham. She had taken to her bed when she had heard the news of her brother’s death and was too sick even to read her letters. When Lady Mary learned of that, she turned away for a moment to hide the hurt in her face. She had counted on Elizabeth’s support, the two princesses together defending their father’s will, and she had promised herself that she would keep her young sister safe. To find that Elizabeth was hiding under the bed covers rather than racing to be with her sister, was a blow to Mary’s heart as well as to her cause.

We learned that Windsor Castle had been fortified and provisioned for a siege, the guns of the Tower of London were battle-ready and turned to face inland, and Queen Jane had taken up residence in the royal apartments in the Tower and was said to lock the great gate every night to prevent any of her court slipping away: a coerced queen with a coerced court.

Northumberland himself, the battle-hardened veteran, had raised an army and was coming to root out our Lady Mary, who was now officially named as a traitor to Queen Jane. ‘Queen Jane indeed!’ Jane Dormer exclaimed, irritably. The royal council had ordered Lady Mary’s arrest for treason, there was a price on her head as a traitor. She was alone in all of England. She was a rebel against a proclaimed queen, she was beyond the law. Not even her uncle, the Spanish emperor, would support her.

No-one knew how many troops Northumberland had under his command, no-one knew how long we could last at Framlingham. He would join with Lord Robert’s company of horse, and then the two men would come against Lady Mary: well-trained, well-paid men, experienced fighting men up against one woman and a chaotic camp of volunteers.

And yet, every day more men arrived from the surrounding countryside, swearing that they would fight for the rightful queen. The sailors from the warships anchored at Yarmouth who had been ordered to set sail to attack any Spanish ships which might be hanging offshore to rescue her, had mutinied against their commanders, and said that she must not leave the country: not because they had blocked her escape, but because she should be mounting the throne. They left their ships and marched inland to support us: a proper troop, accustomed to fighting. They marched into the castle in ranks, quite unlike our own draggle of farm labourers. At once they started teaching the men gathered at the castle how to fight and the rules of battle: the charge, the swerve, the retreat. I watched them arrive, and I watched them settle in, and for the first time I thought that Lady Mary might have a chance to escape capture.

She appointed an almoner to send out carts to bring in food for the makeshift army, which now camped all around the castle. She appointed building teams to repair the great curtain wall. She sent scouring parties out to beg and borrow weapons. She sent out scouts in every direction every dawn and dusk to see if they could find the duke and Lord Robert’s army in their stealthy approach.

Every day she reviewed the troops and promised them her thanks and a more solid reward if they would stand by her, hold the line; and every afternoon she walked on the battlements, along the mighty curtain wall which ran around the impenetrable castle, and looked to the London road for the plume of dust which would tell her that the most powerful man in England was riding at the head of his army against her.

There were very many advisors to tell the Lady Mary that she could not win a pitched battle against the duke. I used to listen to their confident predictions and wonder if it would be safer for me to slip away now, before the encounter which must end in defeat. The duke had seen a dozen actions, he had fought and held power on the battlefield and in the council chamber. He forged an alliance with France and he could bring French troops against us if he did not defeat us at once, and then the lives of Englishmen would be taken by Frenchmen, the French would fight on English soil and it would all be her fault. The horror of the Wars of the Roses, with brother against brother, would be re-lived once more if Lady Mary would not see reason and surrender.

But then, in the middle of July, it all fell apart for the duke. His alliances, his treaties, could not hold against the sense that every Englishman had that Mary, Henry’s daughter, was the rightful queen. Northumberland was hated by many and it was clear that he would rule through Jane as he had ruled through Edward. The people of England, from lords to commoners, muttered and then declared against him.

The accord he had stitched together to darn Queen Jane into the fabric of England all unravelled. More and more men declared in public for Lady Mary, more and more men secretly slipped away from the duke’s cause. Lord Robert himself was defeated by an army of outraged citizens, who just sprang up from the ploughed furrows, swearing that they would protect the rightful queen. Lord Robert declared for the Lady Mary and deserted his father but, despite turning his coat, was captured at Bury by citizens who declared him a traitor. The duke himself, trapped at Cambridge, his army disappearing like mist in the morning, announced suddenly that he too was for Lady Mary and sent her a message explaining that he had only ever tried to do his best for the realm.

‘What does this mean?’ I asked her, seeing the letter shaking so violently in her hand that she could hardly read it.

‘It means I have won,’ she said simply. ‘Won by right, accepted right and not by battle. I am queen and the people’s choice. Despite the duke himself, the people have spoken and I am the queen they want.’

‘And what will happen to the duke?’ I asked, thinking of his son, Lord Robert, somewhere a prisoner.

‘He’s a traitor,’ she said, her eyes cold. ‘What do you think would have happened to me if I had lost?’

I said nothing. I waited for a moment, a heartbeat, a girl’s heartbeat. ‘And what will happen to Lord Robert?’ I asked, my voice very small.

Lady Mary turned. ‘He is a traitor and a traitor’s son. What do you think will happen to him?’

Lady Mary took her big horse and, riding side saddle, set off on the road to London, a thousand, two thousand men riding behind her, and their men, their tenants and retainers and followers coming on foot behind them. The Lady Mary was at the head of a mighty army with only her ladies and me, her fool, riding with her.

When I looked back I could see the dust from the horses’ hooves and the tramping feet drifting like a veil across the ripening fields. When we marched through villages, men came running out of their doors, their sickles or bill hooks in their hands, and fell in with the army and matched their step to the marching men’s. The women waved and cheered and some of them ran out with flowers for the Lady Mary or threw roses in the road before her horse. The Lady Mary, in her old red riding habit, with her head held high, rode her big horse like a knight going into battle, a queen going to claim her own. She rode like a princess out of a story book to whom everything, at last, is given. She had won the greatest victory of her life by sheer determination and courage and her reward was the adoration of the people that she would rule.

Everyone thought that her coming to the throne would be the return of the good years, rich harvests, warm weather, and an end to the constant epidemics of plague and sweat and colds. Everyone thought that she would restore the wealth of the church, the beauty of the shrines and the certainty of faith. Everyone remembered the sweetness and beauty of her mother who had been Queen of England for longer than she had been a princess of Spain, who had been the wife that the king had loved the longest and the best, and who had died with a blessing for him, even though he had deserted her. Everyone was glad to see her daughter riding to her mother’s throne with her golden cap on her head and her army of men behind her, their bright glad faces showing the world that they were proud to serve such a princess and to bring her to her capital city, which even now declared for her and was ringing the bells in every church tower to make her welcome.

On the road to London I wrote a note for Lord Robert, and translated it into his code. It read: ‘You will be tried for treason and executed. Please, my lord, escape. Please, my lord, escape.’ I put it into the fire in the hearth of an inn and watched it burn black, and then I took the poker and mashed it into black ash. There was no way that I could get the warning to him, and in truth, he would not need a warning.

He knew the risks he was running and he would have known them when he was defeated and gave himself up at Bury. He would know now, wherever he was, whether in the prison of some small town being taunted by men who would have kissed his shoe a month ago, or already in the Tower, that he was a dead man, a condemned man. He had committed treason against the rightful heir to the throne and the punishment for treason was death, hanging until he lost consciousness, coming back into awareness with the shock of the agony of the executioner slicing his stomach open and pulling his guts out of his slit belly before his face so that his last sight would be his own pulsing entrails, and then they would quarter him: first slashing his head from his body and then hacking his body into four pieces, setting his handsome head up on a stake as a warning to others, and sending his butchered corpse to the four corners of the city. It was as bad a death as anyone could face, almost as bad as being burned alive and I, of all people, knew how bad that was.

I did not cry for him, as we rode to London. I was a young girl but I had seen enough death and known enough fear to have learned not to cry for grief. But I found I could not sleep at night, not any night, for wondering where Lord Robert was, and whether I would ever see him again, and whether he would ever forgive me for riding into the capital of England, with crowds cheering and crying out blessings, at the side of the woman who had so roundly defeated him, and who would see him and all his family destroyed.

Lady Elizabeth, too sick to rise from her bed during the days of danger, managed to get to London before us. ‘That girl is first, everywhere she goes,’ Jane Dormer said sourly to me.

Lady Elizabeth came riding out from the city to greet us, at the head of a thousand men, all in the Tudor colours of green and white, riding in her pride as if she had never been sick with terror and hiding in her bed. She came out as if she were Lord Mayor of London, coming to give us the keys to the city, with the cheers of the Londoners ringing like a peal of bells all around her, crying ‘God bless!’ to the two princesses.

I reined in my horse and fell back a little so that I could see her. I had been longing to see her again ever since Lady Mary had spoken of her with such affection, ever since Will Somers had called her a goat: up one moment and down the next. I remembered the flash of a green skirt, the invitingly tilted red head against the dark bark of the tree, the girl in the garden that I had seen running from her stepfather, and making sure that he caught her. I was desperately curious to see how that girl had changed.

The girl on horseback was far beyond the child of shining innocence that Lady Mary had described, beyond the victim of circumstance that Will had imagined, and yet not the calculating siren that Jane Dormer hated. I saw instead a woman riding towards her destiny with absolute confidence. She was young, only nineteen years old, yet she was imposing. I saw at once that she had arranged this cavalcade – she knew the power of appearances and she had the skill to design them. The green of her livery had been chosen by her to suit the flaming brazen red of her hair which she wore loose beneath her green hood as if to flaunt her youth and maidenhood beside her older spinster sister. Green and white were the Tudor colours of her father, and no-one looking at her high brow and red hair could doubt this girl’s paternity. The men riding closest to her as her guards had been picked, without doubt, for their looks. There was not one man beside her who was not remarkably handsome. The dull-looking ones were all scattered, further back in her train. Her ladies were the reverse; there was not one who outshone her, a clever choice, but one which only a coquette would make. She rode a white gelding, a big animal, almost as grand as a man’s warhorse, and she sat on it as if she had been born to ride, as if she took joy in mastering the power of the beast. She gleamed with health and youth and vitality, she shone with the glamour of success. Against her radiance, the Lady Mary, drained by the strain of the last two months, faded into second place.

Lady Elizabeth’s entourage halted before us and Lady Mary started to dismount as Lady Elizabeth flung herself down from her horse as if she had been waiting all her life for this moment, as if she had never skulked in bed, biting her nails and wondering what would happen next. At the sight of her, the Lady Mary’s face lit up, as a mother will smile on seeing her child. Clearly, Elizabeth riding in her pride was a sight that gave her sister a pure unselfish joy. Lady Mary held out her arms, Elizabeth plunged into her embrace and Lady Mary kissed her warmly. They held each other for a moment, scrutinising each other’s faces and I knew, as Elizabeth’s bright gaze met Mary’s honest eyes, that my mistress would not have the skill to see through the fabled Tudor charm to the fabled Tudor duplicity which lay beneath.

Lady Mary turned to Elizabeth’s companions, gave them her hand and kissed each of them on the cheek to thank them for bearing Elizabeth company and giving us such a grand welcome into London. Lady Mary folded Elizabeth’s hand under her arm, and scanned her face again. She could not have doubted that Elizabeth was well, the girl was radiant with health and energy, but still I heard a few whispered confidences of Elizabeth’s faintness, and swelling of her belly, and headache, and the mysterious illness that had confined her to bed, unable to move, while the Lady Mary had stared down her own fear alone, and armed the country and prepared to fight for their father’s will.

Elizabeth welcomed her sister to the city and congratulated her on her great victory. ‘A victory of hearts,’ she said. ‘You are queen of the hearts of your people, the only way to rule this country.’

‘Our victory,’ Mary said generously at once. ‘Northumberland would have put us both to death, you as well as me. I have won the right for us both to take our inheritance. You will be an acknowledged princess again, my sister and my heir, and you will ride beside me when I enter London.’

‘Your Grace honours me too much,’ Elizabeth said sweetly.

‘She does indeed,’ Jane Dormer said in a hiss of a whisper to me. ‘Sly bastard.’

The Lady Mary gave the signal to mount and Elizabeth turned to her horse as her groom helped her into her saddle. She smiled around at us; saw me, riding astride in my pageboy livery, and her gaze went past me, utterly uninterested. She did not recognise me as the child who had seen her with Tom Seymour in the garden, so long ago.

But I was interested in her. From the first glimpse I had of her, up against a tree like a common whore, she had haunted my memory. There was something about her that absolutely fascinated me. The first sight I had of her was that of a foolish girl, a flirt, a disloyal daughter, but there was always more to her than that. She had survived the execution of her lover, she had avoided the danger of a dozen plots. She had controlled her desire, she had played the game of a courtier like an expert, not like a girl. She had become her brother’s favourite sister, the Protestant princess. She had stood outside the conspiracies of the court and yet known to a penny the price of every man. Her smile was utterly carefree, her laugh as light as birdsong; but her eyes were as sharp as a black-eyed cat that misses nothing.

I wanted to know every single thing about her, to discover everything she did, and said, and thought. I wanted to know if she hemmed her own linen, I wanted to know who starched her ruff. I wanted to know how often she washed her great mane of red hair. As soon as I saw her, in her green gown at the head of such a troop of men and women on that huge white horse, I saw a woman that I could one day wish to be. A woman who was proud of her beauty and beautiful in her pride; and I longed to grow into a woman like that. The Lady Elizabeth seemed to me to be something that Hannah the Fool might become. I had been an unhappy girl for so long, and then a boy for so long, and a fool for so long that I had no idea how to be a woman – the very idea baffled me. But when I saw the Lady Elizabeth, high on her horse, blazing with beauty and confidence, I thought that this was the sort of woman that I might be. I had never seen such a thing in my life before. This was a woman who gave no quarter to a disabling maidenly modesty, this was a woman who looked as if she could claim the ground she walked on.

But she was not bold in a brazen way, for all of her red hair, and her smiling face, and the energy of her every movement. She deployed all the modesty of a young woman, with a sideways sliding smile at the man who lifted her back into the saddle, and a flirtatious turn of the head as she gathered up the reins. She looked like someone who knew all the pleasures of being a young woman and was not prepared to take the pains. She looked like a young woman who knew her mind.

I looked from her to the Lady Mary, the mistress that I had come to love, and I thought that it would be better for her if she made plans to marry off Lady Elizabeth at once, and send her far away. No household could be at peace with this firebrand in its midst, and no kingdom could settle with such an heir burning so brightly beside an ageing queen.

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