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
