The Queen's Fool

Winter 1557-1558

There were rumors that the defeated French army had turned around and was regrouping on the borders of the English Pale and every stranger who came into Calais for the Christmas market was regarded as a spy. The French must come against Calais in revenge for St. Quentin, but the French must know, as we all knew, that the town could not be taken. Everyone was afraid that the ramparts outside the town would be mined, that even now the skilled French miners were burrowing like worms through the very fabric of English earth. Everyone was afraid that the guards would be suborned, that the fort would fall through treachery. But over all of this was a sort of blithe confidence that the French could not succeed. Philip of Spain was a brilliant commander, he had the flower of the English army in the field, what could the French do with an army like ours harassing their own borders, and an impregnable castle like ours behind them?

Then the rumors of a French advance became more detailed. A woman coming into my shop warned Marie that we should hide our books and bury our treasure.

“Why?” I demanded of Marie.

She was white-faced. “I am English,” she said to me. “My grandmother was pure English.”

“I don’t doubt your loyalty,” I said, incredulous that someone should be trying to prove their provenance to me, a mongrel by birth, education, religion and choice.

“The French are coming,” she said. “That woman is from my village and she was warned by her friend. She has come to hide in Calais.”

She was the first of many. A steady flow of people from the countryside outside the gates in the English Pale decided that their best safety lay inside the untouchable town.

The Company of Merchants who all but ran the town organized a great dormitory in Staple Hall, bought in food ahead of the French advance, warned all the fit young men and women of Calais that they must prepare for a siege. The French were coming, but the English and Spanish army would be hard behind them. We need fear nothing, but we should prepare.

Then in the night, without warning, Fort Nieulay fell. It was one of the eight forts that guarded Calais, and as such was only a small loss. But Nieulay was the fort on the River Hames which controlled the sea gates, which were supposed to flood the canals around the town so that no army could cross. With Nieulay in French hands we had nothing to defend us but the other forts and the great walls. We had lost the first line of defense.

The very next day we heard the roar of cannon and then a rumor swept through the town. Fort Risban, the fort which guarded the inner harbor of Calais, had fallen too, even though it was newly built and newly fortified. Now the harbor itself lay open to French shipping, and the brave English boats which bobbed at anchor in the port could be taken at any moment.

“What shall we do?” Marie asked me.

“It’s only two forts,” I said stoutly, trying to hide my fear. “The English army will know we are under siege and come to rescue us. You’ll see, within three days they will be here.”

But it was the French army which drew up in lines before the walls of Calais and it was the French arquebusiers who flung a storm of arrows which arched over the top of the walls and killed at random people running in the streets, desperate to get inside their houses.

“The English will come,” I said. “Lord Robert will come and attack the French from the rear.”

We bolted the shutters on the shop and shrank inside to the back room, in a terror that the great gates, so close to our little shop, would be a focus for attack. The French brought up siege engines. Even hidden as we were in the back room of the shop I could hear the pounding of the great ram against the barred gates. Our men on the ramparts above were firing down, desperately trying to pick off the men who were pounding the defenses, and I heard a roar and a hiss as a great vat of boiling tar was tipped over the walls and showered on the attackers below, I heard their screams as they were scalded and burned, their upturned faces getting the brunt of the pain. Marie and I, desperate with fear, crouched behind the shop door as if the thin planks of wood would shield us. I did not know what to do, or where to go for safety. For a moment I thought of running through the streets to Daniel’s house but I was too afraid to unbolt the front door, and besides the streets were in turmoil with cannon shot overarching the city walls and falling within the streets, burning arrows raining down on the straw roofs and our reinforcements running up through the narrow streets to the walls.

Then the clatter of hundreds of horses’ hooves was in the street outside our door and I realized that the English army, garrisoned inside the town, was gathering for a counterattack. They must think that if they could dislodge the French from the gates of the city, that the surrounding countryside could be retaken and the pressure relieved from the town defenses.

We could hear the horses go by and then the silence while they assembled at the gate. I realized that for them to get out, the gate would have to be thrown open, and for that time my little shop would be right in the center of the battle.

It was enough. I whispered to Marie in French, “We have to get out of here. I am going to Daniel, d’you want to come with me?”

“I’ll go to my cousins, they live near the harbor.”

I crept to the door and opened it a crack. The sight as I peered through was terrifying. The street outside was absolute chaos, with soldiers running up the stone steps to the ramparts laden with weapons, wounded men being helped down. Another great vat of tar was being heated over an open fire only yards from the thatch of a neighboring house. And from the other side of the gate came the dreadful clamor of an army beating against the door, scaling the walls, firing upward, pulling cannon into place and firing shot, determined to breach the walls and get into the town.

I threw open the door and almost at once heard a most dreadful cry from the walls immediately above the shop as a hail of arrows found an unprotected band of men. Marie and I fled into the street. Behind us, and then all around us, came a dreadful crash. The French siege engine had catapulted a great load of stone and rubble over the wall. It rained down on our street like a falling mountain. Tiled roofs shed their load like a pack of cards spilling to the floor, stones plunged through thatch, knocked chimney pots askew, and they rolled down the steeply canted roofs and plunged to the cobblestones to smash around us with a sound like gunfire. It was as if the very skies were raining rocks and fires, as if we would be engulfed in terror.

“I’m off!” Marie shouted to me, plunging away down a lane which led toward the fish quay.

I could not even shout a blessing, the smell of the smoke from burning buildings caught in the back of my throat like the stab of a knife and choked me into silence. The smell of smoke – the very scent of my nightmares – filled the air, filled my nostrils, my lungs, even my eyes, so that I could not breathe and my eyes were filled with tears so that I could not see.

From the ramparts above me I heard a high shriek of terror and I looked up to see a man on fire, the burning arrow still caught in his clothing, as he dived to the floor and rolled, trying to extinguish the flames, screaming like a heretic as his body burned.

I ducked from the doorway and started to run, anywhere to get away from the smell of a man burning. I wanted to find Daniel. He seemed like the only safe haven in a world turned into a nightmare. I knew I would have to fight my way through the chaotic streets, filled with frightened people rushing to the harbor, with soldiers pounding in the opposite direction to the ramparts, and somehow get through the cavalry, their horses wheeling and pushing in the narrow streets, waiting to charge out of the gates and push back the French army.

I pressed myself back against the walls of the houses as a company of horse mustered in the street. The big haunches of the animals pushed one against the other and I shrank back into the doorway, fearing that they would knock me over and I would be crushed.

I waited for my chance to get by, watching other people darting among the big hooves of the horses, seeing Daniel’s street at the other side of the square, hearing the men shout and the horses neigh and the bugler blasting out the call to arms, and I thought, not of my mother – who had faced death like a saint, but of the queen – who had faced death like a fighter. The queen – who had got her own horse and ridden out in the darkness to stand up for her own. And thinking of her, I found the courage to plunge out of the doorway and dart around the dangerous heels of the big horses and duck into a refuge further down the street when a great charge of horsemen came thundering by. Then I looked up and saw the standard they were carrying before them, smirched with mud and bloodied by an earlier battle, and I saw the bear and staff embroidered on the bright ground and I called out: “Robert Dudley!”

A man looked over at me. “At the head, where he always is.”

I pushed my way back, afraid of nothing now, turning horses’ heads to one side, sliding between their big flanks. “Let me by, let me by, sir. I am going to Robert Dudley.”

It became like a dream. The great horses with the men mounted as high as centaurs above me. Their great heavy armor shining in the sunshine, clashing when they brushed one against another, sounding like cymbals when they hammered their halberds on their shields, hearing their great raw bellow above the clatter of the horses on the cobbles, louder than a storm.

I found myself at the head of the square and there was his standard-bearer, and beside him…

“My lord!” I yelled.

Slowly, the helmeted head turned toward me, the visor down so he could not see me. I pulled off the cap from my head, and my hair tumbled down and I lifted my face up toward the dark knight, high on his great horse.

“My lord! It’s me! Hannah the Fool.”

His gauntleted hand lifted the false face of metal, but the shadow of the helmet left his face in darkness and still I could not see him. The horse shifted, held in powerful control by his other hand. His head was turned toward me, I could feel his eyes on me, sharp under the sharp points of the helmet.

“Mistress Boy?”

It was his voice, coming from the mouth of this great man-god, this great man of metal. But it was his voice, as intimate and warm and familiar as if he had come from dancing at King Edward’s summer feast.

The horse sidled, I stepped back on a doorstep, it raised me up four inches, nothing more. “My lord, it is me!”

“Mistress Boy, what the devil are you doing here?”

“I live here,” I said, half laughing and half crying at seeing him again. “What of you?”

“Released, fighting, winning – perhaps losing at the moment. Are you safe here?”

“I don’t think so,” I said honestly. “Can we hold the town?”

He pulled the gauntlet from his right hand, twisted a ring from his finger, threw it toward me, careless if I caught it or not. “Take this to the Windflight,” he said. “My ship. I will see you aboard if we need to sail. Go now, get aboard. We are to make a charge.”

“Fort Risban is lost!” I shouted above the noise. “You can’t sail away, they will turn the guns on the harbor.”

Robert Dudley laughed aloud as if death itself were a joke. “Mistress Boy, I don’t expect to survive this charge! But you might be lucky and slip away. Go now.”

“My lord…”

“It’s an order!” he shouted at me. “Go!”

I gasped, pushing the ring on my finger. It had been on his little finger, it fitted my third, just above my wedding ring: Dudley’s ring on my finger.

“My lord!” I cried out again. “Come back safe.”

The bugle played so loud that no one could be heard. They were about to charge. He dropped his visor over his face, pulled his gauntlet back on his hand, lifted his lance from its place, tipped it to his helmet in a salute to me, and wheeled his horse around to face his company.

“A Dudley!” he shouted. “For God and the queen!”

“For God and the queen!” they roared back at him. “For God and the queen! Dudley! Dudley!”

They moved toward the city walls, out of the square, and like a camp follower, disobedient to his order, I moved after them. To my left were the lanes running down to the harbor but I was drawn by the jingle of the bits and the deafening clatter of the metaled hooves on the cobbles. The roar of the siege grew louder as they got near to the gate, and at the sound of French rage I hesitated, shrank back, looked behind for the way to the harbor.

Then I saw her. Daniel’s woman, bedraggled with her pretty dress half dragged from her shoulder, exposing her breast. Her child was on her hip, clinging to her, his dark eyes wide, her hair was tumbling down, her eye blacked, her face anguished, running like a hunted deer, skipping and stumbling on the cobbles of the street.

She recognized me at once. She had watched me, as I had watched her, every Sunday at Mass. Both of us confined to the poor pews at the back of church. Both of us trapped into shame by the other’s determination.

“Hannah,” she called out to me. “Hannah!”

“What is it?” I shouted irritably. “What d’you want with me?”

She showed me her child. “Take him!”

At once I remembered the intensity of my vision in church, the first time I had seen her. Then as now there was a screaming and a thundering noise. Then, in my nightmare, she had called out “Take him!” As she cried out the sky suddenly grew dark with a hail of missiles and I ducked into a doorway but on the other side of the street she came on, dodging through the falling rocks. “Hannah! Hannah! I need your help.”

“Go home,” I shouted unhelpfully. “Go to a cellar or somewhere.”

The last of the horses was moving out of the square, we heard the groan of the counterweights as they pulled back the great gates for Lord Robert and his cavalry to charge out, and the great roar of rage as they thundered out to meet the French army.

“They are leaving us?” she screamed in horror. “Running away?”

“No, going out to fight. Find yourself a refuge…” I yelled impatiently.

“God save us, they need not go out to fight them, they are in already! They must turn to fight! The French are here! They are in the town! We are lost!” Daniel’s woman shouted. “It was them…”

Her words suddenly penetrated my mind, and I whirled around to look at her again. At once I realized the significance of her black eye and her torn gown. The French were in the city, and they had raped her.

“They came in through the harbor! Ten minutes ago!” she screamed at me, and as she shouted the words I saw coming down the street behind her a tide of mounted horsemen, the French cavalry, in the streets and behind my lord, cutting off him and his men from the harbor, their horses foaming at the mouth, their lances down for a charge, their visors fixed so that they seemed to have faces of iron, their spurs tearing blood from their horses’ sides, the scream of hooves on cobbles, the absolute horror of a cavalry charge in an enclosed space. The first rank was on us in a moment, a lance plunging down toward me and without thinking I snatched the dagger from my boot and with the short blade I parried the thrust. The shock of the blow jarred my blade from my hand, but saved my life as it threw me back against the door of the house behind me. I felt it yield and I fell back into the darkness of an unknown house as I heard Daniel’s woman scream: “Save my baby! Take him! Take him!”

Even as she ran toward me with him held out before her, even as she thrust him into my hands, and he came all warm and soft and heavy, I heard myself say: “I can’t take him.”

I saw the lance run her through, spearing her spine, as she cried out again: “Take him! Take him!” and at that moment there was a dreadful crash like a forest falling down all at once and a rush of horses and men and danger, and I stumbled back into the dark interior of the house with the boy held tight against me, and the door swung shut on the street with a bang like a thunderclap.

I turned to thank whoever had saved me but before I could speak there was a roar of flames and a sudden blast of hot smoke, and someone pushed past me and threw open the door again.

The thatched roof of this temporary refuge was alight, burning like a pyre, blazing up like kindling in seconds. Everyone who had been hidden in the house was pushing past me to the street outside, more willing to face the merciless cavalry charge than death by burning; and I, smelling smoke like a frightened rat, dashed out after them, the child gripping to me, tight against my shoulder.

Mercifully, the streets were clear for the moment. The French horsemen had chased after Lord Robert’s troop in one mad dangerous dash. But Daniel’s woman was where they had left her with two great lance thrusts through her body. She lay in a deep puddle of her own blood, dead.

At the sight I snatched her child closer to me and started to run down the street, away from the gate, down the stone steps to the harbor, my feet thudding out a rhythm of fear. I could not wait to look for Daniel, I could not do anything but take the chance I had been given with Lord Robert’s ring. I fled to the harbor like a criminal with the hue and cry at my heels, and I was conscious all around me that everyone else was racing too, some carrying bundles of goods, others clutching their children, desperate to get out of the town before the French turned their horses and came back through again.

The boats were tied by just one rope, all sails furled ready to go at a moment’s notice. I looked desperately around for Lord Robert’s standard and saw it, at the prime position, at the very end of the pier where it would be easiest to slip away. I ran down the pier, my feet thudding on the wooden boards, and skidded to a halt when a sailor leaped from the ship and stood before the gangplank with a shining cutlass out of its scabbard, pointing at my throat. “No further, lad,” he said.

“Lord Robert sent me,” I panted.

He shook his head. “We could all say that. What’s happening in town?”

“Lord Robert led his company out in a charge but the French are in the town already, at his back.”

“Can he turn?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see it.”

He shouted an order over his shoulder. The men on deck stood by the ropes for the sails and two men vaulted ashore and held the rope ready to cast off.

I held out my hand to show his ring gripped tight on my finger, above my wedding ring.

The sailor looked at it once, and then looked again more carefully. “His ring,” he said.

“His own. He gave it me himself. He saw me before he led them out. I am his vassal. I was Hannah the Fool before I came here.”

He stepped back and raked me with a quick glare. “I’d not have recognized you,” he said. “And this? Your son?”

“Yes.” The lie was said and gone before I had time to think, and then I would not have recalled it. “Let me aboard. It is my lord’s order that I go to England.”

He stepped to one side and nodded me up the narrow gangplank and then positioned himself square at the foot again. “But you’re the last,” he said decidedly. “Even if they come with a lock of his hair or a love knot.”

We waited for a long hour while others poured down from the town to the quayside. The sailor had to call for other men to come to push the refugees away from Lord Robert’s pier, and curse them for cowards, while the winter afternoon grew dark and no one could tell us whether Lord Robert had broken the French ranks or whether they had entered the town behind his back and cut him down. Then we saw the town lit up from one point to another as the French besieging army broke through the walls and fired one thatched roof and then another.

The sailor on guard at the gangplank snapped out orders and the crew made ready. I sat very quietly on deck, rocking the child against my shoulder, terrified that it would cry and that they would decide that an extra passenger was not worth the extra risk, especially if my lord was not coming.

Then there was a rush of men and horses down to the quayside and a check and a flurry as they flung themselves from the saddle, threw off their armor and hared up to the waiting ships.

“Steady, boys, steady,” came the stentorian shout from the sailor on guard at the gangplank. Six guards stood behind him, shoulder to shoulder with naked blades at the ready, and they checked every man who tried to come aboard for a password, and turned away a good few who raced back down the pier looking for another boat that would take them in. All the time from the town came the explosion of burning gunpowder and the crack of breaking roof tiles and the roar of buildings fired.

“This is not a defeat, it is a rout,” I said in bewilderment in the baby’s tiny ear and he turned and yawned with his little rosebud mouth in a perfect “ooo” as if he were in utter safety and need fear nothing.

Then I saw my lord. I would have recognized him in any crowd. He was walking, broadsword in one hand, helmet in the other, trailing his feet like a defeated man. Behind him came a train of men limping, bleeding, heads bowed. He led them to the ship and stood aside as they went up the gangplank and threw themselves down with a clatter of dented armor on the deck.

“That’s enough, sir,” the sailor said to him quietly when we were fully loaded and my lord looked up, like a man newly wakened from sleep, and said: “But we have to take the rest. I promised they would serve me and I would take them to victory. I can’t leave them here now.”

“We’ll come back for them,” the sailor said gently. He put one strong arm around my lord’s shoulders and drew him firmly up the gangplank. Lord Robert went slowly, like a sleepwalker, his eyes open but seeing nothing.

“Or they’ll get another passage. Cast off!” the sailor shouted to the man at the stern rope. The man flung the rope on shore and the others unfurled the sails. Slowly we moved from the quayside.

“I can’t leave them!” Robert, suddenly fully alert, turned to the widening gulf of water between ship and land. “I can’t leave them here.”

The men left ashore let out a pitiful cry. “A Dudley! A Dudley!”

The sailor caught up Lord Robert in a great bear hug, holding him away from the rail of the ship, preventing him jumping ashore.

“We’ll come back for them,” he assured him. “They’ll get safe passage in other ships, and if the worst comes to the worst then the French will ransom them.”

“I can’t leave them!” Robert Dudley fought to be free. “Hey! You! Sailors! Turn for port. Get to the quayside again!”

The wind was catching the sails, they flapped and then as they trimmed the ropes, the sails went taut and started to pull. Behind us in Calais there was a resounding crash as the doors of the citadel yielded and the French army spilled into the very center of English power in France. Robert turned, anguished, toward the land. “We should regroup!” he cried. “We are about to lose Calais if we go now. Think of it! Calais! We have to go back and regroup and fight.”

Still the sailor did not release him, but now his hold was less to restrain the young lord and more to hold him in his grief. “We’ll come back,” he said and rocked him from one foot to another. “We’ll come back for the rest of them and then we’ll retake Calais. Never doubt it, sir. Never doubt it.”

Lord Robert went to the stern of the boat, scanning the harbor, seeing the disorderly retreat. We could smell the smoke drifting in a pall across the water from the burning buildings. We could hear people screaming, the French were avenging the insult of the starving burghers of Calais who had surrendered to the English all that long time ago. Lord Robert looked half-minded to throw himself in the water and swim back to take charge of the evacuation of the harbor, but even he, in his rage, could see that it was hopeless. We had lost, the English had lost. It was as simple and as brutal as that and the path of a true man was not to risk his life in some mummer’s piece of overacting, but to consider how to win the next battle.

He spent the voyage gazing over the stern to the receding coast of France, long after the formidable profile of the fortress had sunk below the horizon. As the light drained early from the gray January sky he remained standing, looking back, and when the small cold moon came up he was still there, trying to discern some hope on the black horizon. I knew, because I was watching him, as I sat on a coil of rope at the mast, just behind him. His fool, his vassal, wakeful because he was wakeful, anxious because he was anxious, sick with fear for him, for myself, and for whatever the future would bring when we made land in England, an odd trio: a renegade Jew with a Gentile bastard on her hip, and a newly released traitor who had led his men to defeat.

I had not expected his wife Amy at the quayside, but she was there, hand over her eyes, scanning the deck for him. I saw her before she saw him and said, “Your wife,” in his ear.

He went quickly down the gangplank to her, he did not take her in his arms nor greet her with any sign of affection, but he listened intently to her and then he turned to me.

“I have to go to court, I have to explain to the queen what has happened at Calais,” he said briefly. “Heads will have to roll for this, perhaps mine.”

“My lord,” I breathed.

“Yes,” he said savagely. “I don’t seem to have done much to advance my family. Hannah, you go with Amy, she is staying with friends in Sussex. I shall send for you there.”

“My lord.” I went a little closer. “I don’t want to live in the country,” was all I could say.

Robert Dudley grinned at me. “I am sure, sweetheart. I cannot stand it myself. But you must endure it for a month or two. If the queen beheads me for incompetence, then you can make your own way where you please. All right? But if I survive this, I will open my London house and you shall come back to my service. Whatever you wish. How old is the child?”

I hesitated, realizing I did not know. “He’s nearly two,” I said.

“You married his father?” he asked.

I looked him in the face. “Yes.”

“And named him?”

“Daniel, for his father.”

He nodded. “Amy will take care of you,” he said. “She likes children.” A snap of his fingers summoned his wife to his side. I saw her shake her head in disagreement, and then lower her eyes when she was overruled. When she shot me a look of pure hatred I guessed that he had ordered her to care for me and my son, when she would rather have gone with him to the queen’s court.

She had brought his horse. I watched him swing up into his saddle, his men mount up around him. “London,” he said succinctly and rode his horse north toward whatever fate had for him.

I could not get the measure of Amy Dudley as we rode through the icy countryside of England in those cold days of January 1558. She was a good rider but she seemed to take little pleasure in it, not even on the days when the sun rose like a red disk on the horizon and when a few robins hopped and hid in the leafless hedgerows, and the frost in the morning made the blood sing. I thought it was the absence of her husband that made her so sulky; but her companion, Mrs. Oddingsell, did not try to cheer her, they did not even speak of him. They rode in silence, as women accustomed to it.

I had to ride behind them, all the way from Gravesend to Chichester, with the baby strapped on my back and every evening I was aching from my buttocks to my neck with the strain. The extraordinary child had barely made a noise from the moment that his mother had half flung him at me as the French cavalry rode her down. I had changed his clout with some linen lent to me on board ship, and wrapped him in a sailor’s woolen knitted vest and generally lugged him around as if he were a box that someone had insisted I carry against my will. He had not uttered one word of inquiry or protest. Sleeping, he had rested against me, nestled in as if he were my own; awake, he sat on my lap or on the floor at my feet, or stood, one hand holding firmly on to my breeches. He said not one word, not in French, the language of his mother, nor in English. He regarded me with solemn dark eyes and said nothing.

He seemed to have a certainty that he should be with me. He would not fall asleep unless I was watching him, and if I tried to put him down and move away from him he would raise himself up and toddle after me, still silent, still uncomplaining, but with a little face which became more and more crumpled with distress as he got left behind.

I was not a naturally maternal woman, I had not been a girl for dolls, and of course there had been no baby brother or sister for me to nurse. Yet I could not help but admire this small person’s tenacity. I had suddenly come into his life as his protector, and he would ensure that he stayed by my side. I started to like the feeling of his fat little hand stretching trustfully up for mine, I started to sleep well with him nestled against my side.

Lady Amy Dudley did nothing to help me with him in the long cold ride. There was no reason that she should, she did not want me nor him. But it would have been kind of her to order one of the men to take me on a pillion saddle behind him, so that I might have held the child in my arms and eased my aching back. She must have seen that at the end of a long day in the saddle I was so exhausted that I could barely stand. It would have been kind of her to see me housed quickly, to have made sure that there was gruel for the baby. But she did nothing for me, nothing for him. She eyed us both with a glaring suspicion and said not one word to me, other than an order to be ready to leave at the appointed time.

I felt the universal smugness of women with children and reminded myself that she was barren. I thought too that she suspected her husband of being the father of my child, and that she was punishing the two of us for her jealousy. I decided that I must make clear to her soon that I had not seen his lordship for years, and that I was now a married woman. But Amy Dudley gave me no chance to speak with her, she treated me as she treated the men who rode with her, as part of the cold landscape, as one of the ice-trimmed trees. She paid no attention to me at all.

I had plenty of time to think as we went slowly south and west on the frozen roads, winding through villages and past fields where it was clear that hunger had hold of the land. The great barn doors stood open, there was neither hay nor straw to keep. The villages were often in darkness, the cottages empty. Some small hamlets were utterly deserted, the people despairing of making a living on the poor land in the continuously bad weather.

I went down the empty roads with my eyes on the country which was bleak and so cursed; but my mind was on my husband and the town I had left. Now that our flight was over and we had arrived in a comparative safe haven, I was sick with fear for Daniel. Now I had time to realize that Daniel and I had lost each other again, and we had lost each other so finally that we might never meet. I did not even know if he was alive. We were trapped in countries at war with each other, and we had parted during the most bitter fighting that Christendom had ever seen. It would be impossible for me to return to him at Calais and for all I knew he could have been killed in that first vicious charge into the city, or he could be ill with the many contagious diseases that a wounded army would bring. I knew that he would think it his duty to go out to help the injured and the sick, and I could only pray for the unlikely hope that the French would show mercy to an enemy doctor in the town which had been a thorn in their side for two centuries.

The arrival of the army would be followed by the French Catholic church, alert for heresy in a town which had once been proudly Protestant. If Daniel had escaped death during the fighting, if he had escaped disease from the soldiers, he might still be taken as a heretic if someone accused him of being a Jew.

I knew that worrying about him helped neither of us, at all; but it was impossible to stop myself, as I rode along the cold hard roads. I could not get a letter into Calais until some sort of peace was declared and that would not be for months. Worse, I could not expect to hear from him, he would have no idea where I had gone or even if I were alive. When he went to my shop in the city wall to look for me, as he surely would do, he would find the place sacked or burned out, and not even Marie, supposing she had survived, would be able to tell him where I was. And then he would find that little Daniel’s mother was dead and that the boy was missing too. He would have no reason to guess that I and his son were together in safety in England. He would think that he had lost his wife and his child in one dreadful battle.

I could not enjoy my safety when I knew that he might still be in danger, there could be no happiness for me until I knew that he was alive. I could not settle in England, I did not think I could settle anywhere until I knew that Daniel was safe. I rode along the cold roads, the weight of his son strapped awkwardly on my back, and I started to wonder at my own discomfort. Somewhere on the road – in Kent, I think – it came to me with the simple brightness of the wintry sun lying on the horizon and shining blindingly into my eyes. I could not settle without Daniel, because I loved him. I had loved him perhaps from the moment I had seen him at the gates of Whitehall Palace where we had quarreled at our meeting, and I had loved his steadiness and his fidelity and his patience with me ever since. I felt as if I had grown up with him. He had seen me begged as a fool to the king, devoted to the queen and entranced by the Princess Elizabeth. He had seen my schoolchild adoration of my master, and he had seen me struggle with myself to become the woman I now was. The only thing he had not seen, the only thing I had never let him guess, was the resolution of this inner battle: the moment when I could say, “Yes, I am a woman, and I love this man.”

Everything that had happened in Calais melted away before this one fact. The intrusion of his mother, the malice of his sisters, his own innocent stupidity in thinking that we could all live happily under one small roof. Nothing seemed to matter but that I knew now that I loved him, and that I had to acknowledge that it might be too late for me ever to tell him. He could be dead.

If he were dead then it did not seem to matter very much that he had laid with another girl; the greater loss quite concealed the smaller betrayal. As I mounted my horse in the morning and dismounted wearily at night I realized that I was indeed the widow I announced myself to be. I had lost Daniel, and only now did I have the sense to find that I had loved him all along.

We were to stay in a great house, north of Chichester, and I was glad to clatter into the stable yard at midday and hand over my tired horse to one of the grooms. I was weary as I followed Lady Dudley up the steps to the great hall, and apprehensive – I did not know these people, and being on my lady’s charity was not a position any woman would freely choose. I was too independent in my own mind, and she was too distant and cold to make anyone feel welcome.

Lady Dudley led the way into the great hall, I followed Mrs. Oddingsell with Danny on my hip, and there was our hostess, Lady Philips, with a hand held out for Lady Dudley, and a deep curtsey. “You shall have your usual room overlooking the park,” she said, and then she turned to Mrs. Oddingsell and me with a smile.

“This is Mrs. Carpenter. She can share with your housekeeper,” Lady Dudley said abruptly. “She is a woman known to my lord, that he rescued from Calais. I daresay he will let me know what she is to do, shortly.”

Lady Philips raised an eyebrow at Amy’s abrupt tone, which all but named me as Robert Dudley’s whore. Mrs. Oddingsell curtseyed and went to the stairs but I did not immediately follow her. “I need some things for the child,” I said uncomfortably.

“Mrs. Oddingsell will help you,” Robert Dudley’s wife said icily.

“There are some baby clothes in the paupers’ cupboard,” Lady Philips said.

I curtseyed. “It was very kind of his lordship to give me a place on his ship from Calais,” I said clearly. “The more so since he had not seen me for so long, since I had been in royal service to the queen. But I am a married woman now, my husband a doctor in Calais, and this is my husband’s son.”

I saw that they both understood me and had heard the reference to royal service.

“My lord is always good to his servants, however lowly,” Amy Dudley said unpleasantly, and waved me away.

“And I need proper clothes for my son,” I said, standing my ground. “Not from the paupers’ cupboard.”

Both women looked at me with renewed attention. “I need clothes for a gentleman’s son,” I said simply. “I will sew him his linen as soon as I can.”

Lady Philips, not at all sure now what cuckoo she had welcomed into her house, gave me a cautious smile. “I have some things put by,” she said carefully. “My sister’s boy wore them.”

“I am sure they will suit the purpose excellently,” I said with a pleasant smile. “And I thank you, your ladyship.”

Within a week I was desperate to leave, the bleak countryside of Sussex in winter seemed to press on my face like a pane of cold glass. The Downs leaned over the little castle as if they would crush us into the unresponsive chalky earth. The sky above the hills was iron gray, filled with snow. Within two weeks I had developed a headache which plagued me all the hours of daylight and would only leave me at night when I would fall into a sleep so deep that it could have been death.

Amy Dudley was a welcome and regular guest here. There was some debt between Sir John Philips and my lord which was repaid by his hospitality to Lady Dudley. Her stay was indefinite, no one remarked when she might leave, or where she might go next.

“Does she not have a house of her own?” I demanded of Mrs. Oddingsell in frustration.

“Not one that she chooses to use,” she said shortly and closed her lips tight on gossip.

I could not understand it. My lord had lost most of his great lands and fortune on his arrest for treason, but surely his wife must have had family and friends who would have kept at least a small estate for him?

“Where did she live when he was in the Tower?” I demanded.

“With her father,” Mrs. Oddingsell replied.

“Where is he now?”

“Dead, God rest his soul.”

Without a house to command or lands to farm, Lady Dudley was a woman of complete idleness. I never saw her with a book in her hand, I never saw her even write a letter. She rode out in the morning with only a groom for company on a long ride which lasted until dinner. At dinner she ate little and with no appetite. In the afternoon she would sit with Lady Philips and the two of them would gossip and sew. No detail of the Philips household, neighbors and friends was too small for their comment. When Mrs. Oddingsell and I sat with them I nearly fainted from sheer boredom as Lady Philips retold the story of Sophie’s disgrace, and Amelia’s remark, and what Peter had said about it all for the third time in three days.

Mrs. Oddingsell caught me yawning. “What ails you?” she demanded without sympathy.

“I am so bored,” I said frankly. “She gossips like a farmer’s wife. Why would she be interested in the lives of dairymaids?”

Mrs. Oddingsell gave me a quizzical look but said nothing.

“Does she have no friends at court, does she have no news from my lord, if she must tittle-tattle all afternoon?”

The woman shook her head.

We went to bed early, which was just as well for me, and Amy Dudley rose early in the morning. Ordinary days, ordinary to the point of boredom, but she went through them with an air of cold detachment, as if it were not her own precious life utterly wasted in nothings. She lived her life like a woman performing in a long pointless tableau. She went through her days like an automaton – like those I had seen in the treasure cases at Greenwich. A little golden toy soldier which could beat a drum or bend and straighten to fire a cannon. Everything she did, she did as if she were ticking along to do it on invisible wheels and her head turned and she spoke only when the cogs clicked inside her. There was nothing that brought her alive. She was in a state of obedient waiting. Then I realized what she was waiting for. She was waiting for a sign from him.

But there was no sign of Robert though January went into February. No sign of Robert though she told me he would come soon and set me to work, no sign of Robert though he clearly had not been arrested by the queen; whatever the blame for the loss of Calais, it was not to be laid at his door.

Amy Dudley was accustomed to his absence, of course. But when she had slept alone for all those years he had been in the Tower, she had known why she was alone in her marital bed. To everyone – to her father, to his adherents and kin – she was a martyr to her love for him, and they had all prayed for his return and her happiness. But now, it slowly must dawn on her, on everyone, that Lord Robert did not come home to his wife because he did not choose to do so. For some reason, he was in no hurry to be in her bed, in her company. Freedom from the Tower did not mean a return to the tiny scale of his wife’s existence. Freedom for Lord Robert meant the court, meant the queen, meant battlefields, politics, power: a wider world of which Lady Dudley had no knowledge. Worse than ignorance, she felt dread. She thought of the wider world with nothing but fear.

The greater world which was Lord Robert’s natural element was to her a place of continuous threat and danger. She saw his ambition, his natural God-given ambition, as a danger, she saw his opportunities all as risk. She was, in every sense of the word, a hopeless wife to him.

Finally, in the second week in February, she sent for him. One of his men was told to ride to the court at Richmond where the queen had entered her confinement chamber to have her child. Her ladyship told the servant to tell his lordship that she needed him at Chichester, and to wait to accompany him home.

“Why would she not write to him?” I asked Mrs. Oddingsell, surprised that Lady Dudley would broadcast to the world her desire that he should come home.

She hesitated. “She can do as she chooses, I suppose,” she said rudely.

It was her discomfiture that revealed the truth to me. “Can she not write?” I asked.

Mrs. Oddingsell scowled at me. “Not well,” she conceded reluctantly.

“Why not?” I demanded, a bookseller’s daughter to whom reading and writing was a skill like eating and walking.

“When would she learn?” Mrs. Oddingsell countered. “She was just a girl when she married him, and nothing more than a bride when he was in the Tower. Her father did not think a woman needed to know more than to sign her name, and her husband never spared the time to teach her. She can write, but slowly, and she can read if she has to.”

“You don’t need a man to teach you to read and write,” I said. “It is a skill a woman can get on her own. I could teach her, if she wanted it.”

Mrs. Oddingsell turned her head. “She wouldn’t demean herself to learn from you,” she said rudely. “She would only ever learn for him. And he does not trouble himself.”

The messenger did not wait, but came home straightaway, and told her that his lordship had said he would come to us for a visit shortly and in the meantime to assure her ladyship that all was well with him.

“I told you to wait for an answer,” she said irritably.

“My lady, he said he would see you soon. And the princess…”

Her head snapped up. “The princess? Which princess? Elizabeth?”

“Yes, the Princess Elizabeth swore that he could not go while they were all waiting for the queen’s child to be born. She said they could not endure another confinement which might go on for years. She could not abide it without him. And my lord said yes, he would leave, even a lady such as her, for he had not seen you since he came to England, and you had bidden him to come to you.”

She blushed a little at that, her vanity kindled like a flame. “And what more?” she asked.

The messenger looked a little awkward. “Just some jesting between my lord and the princess,” he said.

“What jesting?”

“The princess was witty about him liking court better than the country,” he said, fumbling for words. “Witty about the charms of the court. Said he would not bury himself in the fields with wife.”

The smile was quite wiped from her face. “And he said?”

“More jests,” he said. “I cannot remember them, my lady. His lordship is a witty man, and he and the princess…” He broke off at the look on her face.

“He and the princess: what?” she spat at him.

The messenger shuffled his feet and turned his hat in his hands. “She is a witty woman,” he said doltishly. “The words flew so fast between them I could not make out what they said. Something about the country, something about promises. Some of the time they spoke another language so it was secret between themselves… Certainly, she likes him well. He is a very gallant man.”

Amy Dudley jumped from her chair and strode to the bay window. “He is a very faithless man,” she said, very low. Then she turned to the messenger. “Very well, you can go. But next time when I order you to wait for him, I don’t want to see you back here without him.”

He threw a look at me which said very plainly that a servant could hardly command his master to return to his wife in the middle of a flirtation with the Princess of England. I waited till he had left the room and then excused myself and hared down the gallery after him, Danny bouncing along on my hip, clinging to my shoulder, his little legs gripped around my waist, as I ran.

“Stop! Stop!” I called. “Tell me about the court. Are all the physicians there for the queen? And the midwives? Is everything ready?”

“Aye,” he said. “She is expected to have the child in the middle of March, next month, God willing.”

“And do they say that she is well?”

He shook his head. “They say she is sick to her heart at the loss of Calais and the absence of her husband,” he said. “The king has not said he will come to England for the birth of his son, so she has to face the travail of childbed all alone. And she is poorly served. All her fortune has been thrown away on her army and her servants have not even been paid and cannot buy food in the market. It is like a ghost court, and now she has gone into confinement there is no one to watch over the courtiers at all.”

I felt a dreadful pang at the thought of her ill-served and me kicking my heels with Lady Amy Dudley, and doing nothing. “Who is with her?”

“Only a handful of her ladies. No one wants to be at court now.”

“And the Princess Elizabeth?”

“She rode in looking very grand,” the messenger said. “Very taken with my lord.”

“Who says so?”

“Nobody needs to say so. It is known to everyone. She does not trouble to hide it. She shows it.”

“How does she show it?”

“Rides with him every morning, dines at his right hand, dances with him, her eyes fixed on his face, reads his letters at his elbow, smiles at him as if they had a secret jest, walks with him in the gallery and talks low, walks away from him, but always looks back over her shoulder, so that any man would want to chase her and catch her. You know.”

I nodded. I had seen Elizabeth when she had someone’s husband marked down for her own. “I know well enough. And he?”

“Very taken with her.”

“Will he come here, d’you think?”

The messenger chuckled. “Not until the princess lets him. He was at her beck and call. I don’t think he could force himself away from her.”

“He’s not a greensick boy,” I said with sudden irritation. “He could decide for himself, I should hope.”

“And she is not a greensick girl,” he said. “This is the next Queen of England and she cannot take her eyes from our lord. So what d’you think might come of that?”

In the absence of any work to do in the household, I found that I spent all my time with the child, Danny, and all my thoughts were with his father. I decided to write to Daniel and address the letter to my father’s old shop in London. If Daniel came looking for me, or sent anyone to seek me, that would be one of the places he would visit first. I would send a copy of it to my lord and ask him to forward it to Calais. Surely there must be emissaries going to the city?

Dear Husband,

It is strange that after all we have been through we should once more be separated, and once again I am in England and you in Calais, but this time I think you are in greater danger than me. I pray every night that you are safe and well.

I had the good fortune to be offered a place on the English ship belonging to Lord Robert and in the hurry of battle I thought it best to take it. I wish now I had found my way to you, but Daniel, I did not know what to do. Also, I had another life to consider. The mother of your child was killed by a French horseman before me, and her last act was to put your son in my hands. I have him with me now and I am caring for him as my own. He is safe and well though he does not speak yet. If you can reply to me you might tell me what should I do? Did he used to talk? And what language does he know?

He is eating well and growing well, and learning to walk more strongly. We are living at Chichester in Sussex with Lord Dudley’s wife until I can find myself a place. I am thinking of going to court or to the Princess Elizabeth, if she will have me.

I wish very much that I could ask you what you think would be the best thing for me to do. I wish very much that you were with me here, or that I were with you. I pray that you are safe, Daniel, and I tell you now, as I should have told you before, that I never stopped loving you even when I left your home. I loved you then, I love you now. I wish we had stayed together then, I wish we were together now. If God ever grants me another chance with you, Daniel, I would want to be your wife once more.

Your wife (if you will let me call myself that),

Hannah Carpenter

I sent the letter to my lord, with a covering note.

My lord,

Your wife has been very kind to me but I am trespassing on her hospitality here. Please give me permission to come to court or to see if the Princess Elizabeth will take me into her service.

Hannah Green

I heard nothing from Daniel, and I had hardly hoped for it, though I could not tell if it was the silence of distance or the silence of death. In his silence I did not know if I was a widow, an errant wife, or just lost to him. I also waited for a message from my lord and heard nothing.

Waiting to hear from Lord Robert, I was able to recognize that his wife was waiting for him too. Both of us would look up eagerly when we heard a horseman cantering up the lane toward the house. Both of us would gaze out of the window when the early wintry evenings swept down around the castle and another day was gone with no word from him. As each day went by I saw her hopes of him die away. Amy Dudley was slowly but surely being forced to acknowledge that whatever love he had felt for her, when he was a young man and she a young woman, had been worn out by his years of ambition when he had followed his father’s train and left her behind, and then eroded completely by his years in the Tower when his first thought had been to keep himself alive. In those years, when he had fought to keep his wits together and not go mad under the loneliness of imprisonment and the fear of his death sentence, his wife was the very last thing he considered.

I was waiting for him, but not like a resentful woman in love. I was waiting for him as the man who could set me free from this sleeping daze of domestic boredom. I was accustomed to running my own shop, to paying my own way, to earning my own money. To live off another person’s reluctant charity was very galling to me. And I was used to living in the world; even the tiny dull world of English Calais was more exciting than life in this country house where nothing changed but the weather and the seasons and, God knew, they moved as slowly as years, as decades. And I wanted news of the queen, of her confinement, of the long-waited coming of her child. If she had a son now, the English people would forgive her the loss of Calais, the awful winter that England had suffered this year, even the illness which was plaguing the country in this season of cold weather and rain.

At last a note came from court.

I shall be with you next week. RD

Amy Dudley reacted coolly, with great dignity. She did not ask them to turn the house upside down to prepare for his arrival, she did not summon tenants and neighbors for a feast. She saw that the silver plate and the pewter trenchers were given an extra polish, and that the best linen was laid out for her bed, but other than that, she made no special provision for the return of the lord. Only I saw that she was waiting like a dog waits for his master’s step on the threshold; no one else would have noticed the tension in her body every day, from daybreak, when he might come early, till dusk, when he might arrive late. She took to going to bed as soon as it grew dark, as if the days of waiting were so unbearable that she wanted to sleep through the hours when he was not likely to arrive.

Finally, on Friday, when there was nothing to put before him but carp from the moat, we saw his train coming down the lane, his standard at the head of a trotting column of riders, smartly in step, two by two, all bright and smart in his livery, and Robert before them all, like a young king; and riding behind him – I squinted my eyes against the low winter sun shining toward me – was John Dee, the reverend and respected Catholic chaplain to Bishop Bonner.

I stepped up to the window of the upper gallery where I had been playing with Danny, so that I could see Robert Dudley’s welcome. The front door of the house was torn open and Amy Dudley was on the top step, her hands clasped before her, the picture of demure self-control, but I knew she was raging to be with him. I could hear the rest of the household flinging themselves down the stairs and skidding on the polished floorboards to be in their places when the honored guest walked into the hall.

Lord Robert pulled up his horse, jumped from the saddle, threw the reins to a waiting groom, tossed some remark over his shoulder to John Dee and bowed and kissed his wife’s hand as if he had been away for a couple of nights and not for most of their married life.

She dropped a cool curtsey and then turned to Mr. Dee and nodded her head, wasting little politeness on the bishop’s curate. I smiled, I did not think Robert would like to see his friend slighted, she was a fool to snub him.

I picked up Danny, who came to me eagerly with his beaming smile, but saying nothing, and made my way down the great stairs to the hall. The household was assembled, lined up as if they were an army for inspection, Sir John Philips and his lady at the head. My lord stood illuminated in the doorway, his broad shoulders brushing the doorframe, his smile confident.

As always his sheer glamour amazed me. The years of imprisonment had scarred him with nothing worse than a deep groove on either side of his mouth and a hardness at the back of his eyes. He looked like a man who had taken a beating and learned to live with the knowledge of defeat. Apart from that shadow, he was the same young man whom I had seen walking with an angel in Fleet Street five years ago. His hair was still dark and thick and curling, his look still challenging and bright, his mouth ready to grin, and his whole bearing like that of the prince he might have been.

“I’m very glad to be with you,” he said to them all. “And I thank you all for the good service you have done to me and mine while I have been away.” He paused. “You will be anxious for news of the queen,” he said. He glanced up the stairs and saw me dressed as a woman, for the first time ever. His amazed stare took in the cut-down gown which I had sewn with the help of Mrs. Oddingsell, my dark hair smoothed back under my hood, the dark-headed child on my hip. Comically, he looked and then looked again at the sight of me, recognized me despite the gown, and then shook a baffled head; but continued his speech.

“The queen is in her confinement chamber and expecting to give birth to a son. The king will return to England when the baby is born; in the meantime he is protecting the borders of his Spanish lands in the Low Countries, and has sworn to retake Calais for England. The Princess Elizabeth has visited her sister and wished her well. The princess is in good health, good spirits and great beauty, praise God. She has told the queen that she will not marry any Spanish prince, nor anyone of the king’s choosing. She will remain a bride of England.”

I thought it an odd way to give news of the queen, but the servants were glad to hear it and there was a murmur of interest at the princess’s name. Here, as in the rest of the country, the mood against the queen was very strong. Losing Calais was blamed on her, since she had taken us into war with the French against the tradition of her family, and against the advice of her council. They blamed her for the hunger in the country and for the bad weather, they blamed her for not having a child earlier, they blamed her for the deaths of the heretics.

A healthy son was the only thing that would redeem her in their eyes, and some of them did not want even him. Some of them, perhaps most of them now, would have her die childless and the crown go straight to the Princess Elizabeth – another woman, and though they were sick of queens, this was a good Protestant princess and one who had already refused to marry a Spanish prince and who now swore that she had no inclination to marry at all.

There was a little murmur at the news and they began to disperse. Robert shook John Philips warmly by the hand, kissed Lady Philips on her cheek and then turned to me.

“Hannah? Is that really you?”

I came down the stairs slowly, conscious of his wife behind him, still standing in the doorway.

“My lord,” I said. I reached the bottom step and dropped him a curtsey.

“I would never have known you,” he said incredulously. “You are more than a girl, Hannah. You are a woman grown, and out of your breeches at last! Did you have to learn how to walk all over again? Show me your shoes! Go on! Are you in high heels? And a babe in your arms? This is a transformation!”

I smiled but I could feel Amy’s eyes boring into me. “This is my son,” I said. “I thank you for saving us from Calais.”

His face clouded over for a moment. “I wish I could have saved them all.”

“Have you any news from the town?” I asked him. “My husband and his family may still be there. Did you send my letter onward?”

He shook his head. “I gave it to my pageboy and told him to give it to a fisherman who goes out deep into the French seas, and asked him to pass it to a French ship if he met with one, but I could do no more for you. We have heard nothing of the men who were captured. We have not even begun peace proposals. King Philip will keep us at war with France for as long as he can, and the queen is in no position to argue. There will be some exchange of prisoners, and men sent home, but God knows when.” He shook his head as if to dislodge the memories of the fall of the infallible castle. “You know, I have never seen you in a gown before. You are transformed!”

I tried to laugh but I could see Amy coming to claim her husband.

“You will want to wash and change out of your riding clothes,” she said firmly.

Robert bowed to her.

“There is hot water in your bedchamber,” she said.

“Then I’ll go up.” He glanced over his shoulder. “And someone must show Dee where he is to lodge.” I shrank back, but my lord did not notice. He called out: “Here, John – look at who we have here!”

John Dee came forward and I saw that he was more changed than Robert. His hair was graying at the temples, his eyes were dark with fatigue. But his air of confidence and his inner peace were as strong as ever.

“Who is this lady?” he asked.

“I am Hannah Carpenter, Mr. Dee,” I said guardedly. I did not know whether he was going to acknowledge that we had last met in the most terrible place in England when I was on trial for my life and he was my judge. “I was Hannah Green. The queen’s fool.”

He looked quickly at me again and then a slow sweet smile spread from his eyes to his lips. “Ah, Hannah, I would not have known you in your gown.”

“And he is Dr. Dee now,” my lord said casually. “Bishop Bonner’s chaplain.”

“Oh,” I said guardedly.

“And is this your son?” John Dee asked.

“Yes. This is Daniel Carpenter,” I said proudly, and John Dee reached forward and touched my little boy’s fingers with his own. Comically, Danny turned his head away and pressed his face into my shoulder.

“How old is he?”

“Nearly two.”

“And his father?”

I frowned. “I parted from my husband at Calais, I don’t know if he is safe,” I said.

“You have no… sense of him?” John Dee asked me, his voice low.

I shook my head.

“Dr. Dee, Hannah will show you to your chamber,” Amy’s voice broke in abruptly, speaking of me as if I were her servant.

I led the way up the stairs to one of the small bedchambers on the first floor, John Dee following me. Lord Robert sprang up the stairs two at a time behind us, we heard the door bang as he went into his room.

I had barely showed John Dee where he was to sleep, the cupboard where he could put his clothes, and poured hot water for him to wash, when the chamber door opened and Lord Robert came in.

“Hannah, don’t go,” he said. “I want to hear your news.”

“I have none,” I said coolly. “I have been here, as you know, all this long while, with your wife, doing nothing.”

He gave a short laugh. “Have you been bored, Mistress Boy? It cannot be worse than married life, surely?”

I smiled. I was not going to tell Lord Robert that I had parted from my husband within a year of our marriage.

“And have you kept your gift?” John Dee asked quietly. “I always thought that the angels would only come to a virgin.”

I thought for a moment, I could not forget that the last time I had seen him he had been advising Bishop Bonner. I remembered the woman who had cupped her torn fingers in her lap. I remembered the smell of urine in the little room and the wet warmth in my breeches, and my shame. “I don’t know, sir,” I said, my voice very small.

Robert Dudley heard the constraint in my tone and looked quickly from me to his friend. “How now?” he asked sharply. “What’s this?”

Dr. Dee and I exchanged an odd complicit glance: that of the secret torturer to his unproclaimed victim, that of a horror shared. He said nothing.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Odd sort of nothing,” Lord Robert said, his tone hardening. “You tell me, John.”

“She was brought before Bonner,” John Dee said briefly. “Heresy. I was there. The charges were dismissed. She was released.”

“My God, you must have pissed yourself, Hannah!” Robert exclaimed.

He hit the mark so precisely that my cheeks burned red and I gripped Daniel’s son against me.

John Dee shot a brief apologetic look at me. “We were all afraid,” he said. “But in this world, we all do what we have to do, Robert. We all do the best we can. Sometimes we wear masks, sometimes we can be ourselves, sometimes the masks are truer than the faces. Hannah betrayed no one and was clearly innocent herself. She was released. That’s all.”

Lord Robert leaned over and gripped Bishop Bonner’s most orthodox, most rigorous chaplain by the hand. “That’s all indeed. I would not have wanted her racked, she knows much too much. I am glad you were there.”

John Dee did not glow in return. “No one was there by choice,” he said. “There were more innocents than this one that went to be scourged and burned.”

I looked from one man to the other, wondering where the allegiances truly lay. At least now I knew enough not to ask, and not to trust any answer.

Lord Robert turned back to me. “And so do you have your gift still, even though you have lost your virginity?”

“It comes so rarely that it is hard to tell. But I had a true seeing in Calais, after my wedding: I foresaw the horsemen riding through the streets.” I shut my eyes against the memory.

“You saw the French coming into Calais?” Lord Robert asked incredulously. “Dear God, why didn’t you warn me?”

“I would have done if I had known what it was,” I replied. “Don’t doubt me. I would have come at once if I could have understood what I was seeing. But it was so unclear. It was a woman being cut down as she ran from them and calling out…” I broke off. I would not tell even these trusted men that she called me to take her son. Danny was mine now. “God knows I would have warned that woman… even though… I would not want anyone to suffer that death.”

Robert shook his head and turned to look out of the window. “I wish to God I had been warned,” he said moodily.

“Will you scry for me again?” John Dee asked. “So that we can see if your gift remains true?”

I looked at him in utter disbelief. “Are you seeking the advice of angels?” I asked the Inquisitor’s chaplain. “You? Of all men?”

John Dee was not at all perturbed by the sharpness of my tone. “I do not change my beliefs. And we need guidance all the more, in these troubled times. But we must ask discreetly. There is always danger for those who seek knowledge. But if we could know that the queen will give birth to a healthy child we would be better able to plan for the future. If she is to be blessed with a son, then Princess Elizabeth should change her plans.”

“And I should change mine,” Lord Robert remarked wryly.

“Anyway, I don’t know if I can do it,” I said. “I have only seen the future just once, in all the time I was in Calais.”

“Shall we try this evening?” Lord Robert asked. “Will you try and see if it comes easily, Hannah? For old times’ sake?”

My gaze slid past him to John Dee. “No,” I said flatly.

John Dee looked directly at me, his dark eyes meeting mine with honesty. “Hannah, I do not pretend that my ways are not dark and tortuous,” he said simply. “But you for one should be glad that I was there at St. Paul’s when you were arraigned to answer.”

“I was glad that my innocence was recognized,” I said staunchly. “And I don’t want to go in there again.”

“You will not,” he said simply. “My word on it.”

“So will you scry for us?” my lord pressed me.

I hesitated. “If you will ask a question for me,” I bargained with them.

“What is it?” John Dee asked.

“If my husband is alive or dead,” I said. “It’s all I want to know. I don’t even ask the future, if I shall see him again. I would be happy just to know that he is alive.”

“You love him so much?” Lord Robert asked skeptically. “Your young man?”

“I do,” I said simply. “I cannot rest until I know that he is safe.”

“I shall ask the angels and you shall scry for me,” John Dee promised. “Tonight?”

“When Danny is asleep,” I said. “I couldn’t do it while I was listening for him.”

“At eight o’clock?” Lord Robert asked. “Here?”

John Dee glanced around. “I will ask the men to bring up my table and my books.”

Lord Robert noticed the smallness of the room and made an impatient noise. “She always does this,” he said irritably. “She never puts my friends in the best chambers. She is sick with envy of them, I shall tell her…”

“There is plenty of room,” Dee said pacifically. “And she is bound to resent you coming with a great train when she will have wanted you to herself. Should you not go to her now?”

Lord Robert went reluctantly to the door. “Come with me,” he said. “Come, both of you, and we’ll take a glass of ale to wash down the dust from the road.”

I hung back. “I cannot come,” I said when he held the door for me.

“What?”

“She does not receive me,” I said awkwardly. “I am not invited to sit with her.”

Robert’s dark eyebrows snapped together. “I told her that she was to keep you with her as her companion until we decided where you should live,” he said. “Where do you dine?”

“At the table for the maids. I am not seated with your wife.”

He took a rapid step toward the stairs and then he checked himself and came back. “Come,” he said, holding out his hand to me. “I am master here, I do not have to argue to see my wishes done. Just come, and you shall dine with me now. She is a stupid woman who does not reward her husband’s loyal servants. And a jealous woman who thinks that a pretty face is safer seen from afar.”

I did not go to his outstretched hand. I smiled at him steadily, keeping my place in the window seat. “My lord,” I said. “I imagine you are going back to court within a few days?”

“Yes,” he said. “What of it?”

“Shall you take me with you?”

He looked surprised. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought.”

I felt my smile turn into a giggle. “I thought not,” I said. “So I may have to stay here for some weeks yet?”

“Yes. And so?”

“And so I would rather not spur your wife’s irritation into rage if you are going to blow in and out again like a spring wind that spoils the peace of the orchard.”

He laughed. “Are you at peace, my little orchard?”

“We are in a state of quiet enmity,” I said frankly. “But I would rather that, than the open warfare you would bring. Go and sit with her now, and I will meet you back here tonight.”

Robert patted me on the cheek. “God bless your caution, Hannah. I think I should never have given you to the king. I would be a better man today if I had kept your counsel.”

Then he ran downstairs whistling, and it made me shiver when I heard the wind at the castle windows whistle back at him.

I watched Amy at dinner. She never took her eyes off her husband throughout the prolonged meal. She ached to be the center of her husband’s attention but she had no skills to fascinate him. She knew nothing of the gossip of the court, she had not even heard of half of the names that he mentioned. I, seated below the salt, kept my eyes on my plate to prevent myself from looking up and laughing at a story about a woman I knew, or interrupting to ask him what had become of one young courtier or another.

Lady Amy did not even have the native wit to invite him to talk, even if she knew nothing herself. She pursed her lips whenever he spoke of a woman, she looked down in disapproval when he laughingly mentioned the queen. She was downright rude to John Dee whom she clearly regarded as a turncoat from the defeated Protestant cause. But she was no enthusiast for news of the Princess Elizabeth either.

I thought that when my lord had first met her he must have loved the unspoiled freshness of her, when she was a young girl who knew nothing of the court or of his father’s sly progress to power. When she was a simple squire’s daughter in Norfolk with big blue eyes and large breasts pressing against the neck of her gown, she must have seemed to be everything that the ladies of court were not: honest, unsophisticated, true. But now all those virtues were disadvantages to him. He needed a wife who could watch the direction of change, could trim her speech and style to the prevailing tides, and could watch and caution him. He needed a wife who was quick in understanding and skilled in any company, a wife he could take to court, and know he had a spy and an ally among the ladies.

Instead he was burdened with a woman who, in her vanity, was prepared to insult the chaplain of one of the most powerful priests in the country, who had no interest in the doings of the court and the wider world, and who resented his interest.

“We’ll never have another Dudley if she does not make more effort with him,” one of the upper maids whispered indiscreetly to me.

“What ails her?” I demanded. “I’d have thought she would be all over him.”

“She can never forgive him for going to court in his father’s train. She thought his imprisonment would teach him a lesson. Teach him not to overreach himself.”

“He’s a Dudley,” I said. “They’re born to overreach themselves. They’re from the greediest most ambitious line in the world. Only a Spaniard likes gold better than a Dudley, only an Irishman desires more land.”

I looked down the table at Amy. She was eating a sweetmeat, the sugared plum distending her mouth as she sucked on it. She was staring straight ahead, ignoring her husband’s intense conversation with John Dee. “You know her well?”

The older woman nodded. “Yes, and I’ve come to pity her. She likes a small station in life and she wants him to be small too.”

“She’d have done better to have chosen a country squire then,” I said. “For Robert Dudley is a man with a great future, not a small one, and he will never allow her to stand in his way.”

“She will pull him down if she can,” the woman warned.

I shook my head. “Not her.”

Amy had hoped to sit up late with her husband, or to go to bed early together, but at eight o’clock he made excuses and he and John Dee and I gathered in John Dee’s room with the door closed, the shutters across the window and only one candle lit and glowing in the mirror.

“Are you happy to do this?” John Dee asked.

“What are you going to ask?”

“If the queen will have a boy child,” Robert said. “There is nothing more important to know than this. And if we can win back Calais.”

I looked toward John Dee. “And if my husband lives,” I reminded him.

“We will see what is given us,” he said gently. “Let us pray.”

I closed my eyes and at the rolling gentle sounds of the Latin I felt myself restored, returned. I was at home again, at home with my gift, with my lord, and with myself. When I opened my eyes the candle flame was warm as well as bright on my face and I smiled at John Dee.

“You still have your gift?” he asked.

“I am sure of it,” I said quietly.

“Watch the flame and tell us what you hear or what you see.”

The candle flame bobbed in a little draft, its brightness filled my mind. It was like the summer sunshine of Spain, and I thought I heard my mother calling me, her voice happy and filled with confidence that nothing would ever go wrong. Then abruptly I heard a tremendous banging that made me gasp and leap to my feet, jolted out of my dream with my heart thudding in fear of arrest.

John Dee was white-faced. We were discovered and ruined. Lord Robert had his sword from his belt and a knife from his boot.

“Open up!” came the shout from the barred door and there was a great blow against the wood which made it rock inward. I was certain that it was the Inquisition. I crossed the room to Lord Robert. “Please, my lord,” I said rapidly. “Don’t let them burn me. Run me through, before they take me, and save my son.”

In one fluid movement he was up on the window seat, pulled me up beside him and kicked out the windowpane. “Jump out,” he advised me. “And run if you can. I’ll hold them for a moment.” There was another terrible blow on the door. He nodded at John Dee. “Open up,” he said.

John Dee flung open the door and Lady Amy Dudley fell into the room. “You!” she exclaimed as soon as she saw me, half out of the window. “As I thought! Whore!”

A servant behind her raised a mace in a half apologetic gesture. The Philipses’ elegant linenfold door panels were splintered beyond repair. Robert slammed his sword back into the scabbard, and gestured to John Dee. “Please, John, do shut what is left of the door,” he said wearily. “This will be halfway round the county by dawn.”

“What are you doing here?” Amy demanded, striding into the room, her eyes taking in the table, the candles, their flames guttering in the draft from the window, the holy symbols. “What foul lechery?”

“Nothing,” Robert said wearily.

“What is she doing here with you? And him?”

He stepped forward and took her hands. “My lady, this is my friend and this my loyal servant. We were praying together for my prosperity.”

She broke from his grasp and struck at him, her hands clenched into fists, pounding against his chest. “She is a whore and he is a dealer in black arts!” she cried. “And you are a false deceiver who has broken my heart too many times to count!”

Robert caught her hands. “She is a good servant of mine and a respectable married woman,” he said quietly. “And Dr. Dee is chaplain to one of the most important churchmen in the land. Madam, I beg you to compose yourself.”

“I will see him hanged for this!” she shouted into his face. “I will name him as a dealer with the devil, and she is nothing more than a witch and a whore.”

“You will do nothing but make yourself a laughingstock,” he said steadily. “Amy, you know what you are like. Be calm.”

“How can I be calm when you shame me before your own friends?”

“You are not shamed…” he started.

“I hate you!” she suddenly screamed.

John Dee and I shrank back against the wall and glanced longingly at the door, wishing to be away from this uproar.

With a wail she tore herself from his grip and threw herself facedown on the bed. She was screaming with grief, quite beside herself. John Dee and my lord exchanged an aghast look. There was a little tearing noise and I realized she had bitten the counterpane and was ripping it with her teeth.

“Oh, for the sake of God!” Robert took her shoulders and pulled her up from the bed. At once she went for his face with her nails, her hands clenched like a cat’s unsheathed claws. Robert grabbed her hands and bore her down till she fell on the floor, kneeling at his feet, her wrists in his grip.

“I know you!” she swore up at him. “If it is not her, then it is another. There is nothing about you but pride and lust.”

His face, suffused with temper, slowly calmed, but he kept a tight hold of her hands. “I am a sinner indeed,” he said. “But thank God, I at least am not crazed.”

Her mouth trembled and then she let out a wail, looking up into his flinty face, the tears pouring from her eyes, her mouth drooling sobs. “I am not crazed, I am ill, Robert,” she said despairingly. “I am sick of grief.”

He met my eyes over her head. “Fetch Mrs. Oddingsell,” he said briefly. “She knows what to do.”

I was transfixed for the moment, watching Amy Dudley grinding her teeth, scrabbling at her husband’s feet. “What?”

“Get Mrs. Oddingsell.”

I nodded and went from the room. Half the household was busy on the landing outside the chamber. “Go to your work!” I said abruptly, and then I ran down the long gallery to find Mrs. Oddingsell seated before a mean fire at the cold end of the chamber.

“Her ladyship is crying, and his lordship sent for you,” I said baldly.

She got to her feet at once, without surprise, and went quickly down the room. I half ran beside her. “Has this happened before?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Is she ill?”

“Easily distressed by him.”

I took that in, made allowances for a servant’s loyal lies. “Was she always like this?”

“When they were young and in love it passed for passion. But she was only at peace when he was in the Tower – except for when the princess was imprisoned too.”

“What?”

“She was ill with jealousy, then.”

“They were prisoners!” I exclaimed. “They were hardly dancing in masques together.”

Mrs. Oddingsell nodded. “In her mind they were lovers. And now, he is free to come and go. And she knows that he is seeing the princess. He will break her heart. It is no figure of speech. She will die of this.”

We were at Dr. Dee’s door. I put a hand on her arm. “Are you her nurse?” I asked.

“More like her keeper,” she said and quietly went in.

The scrying was abandoned for the night, but the next day, when Lady Dudley kept to her room and was not to be seen, Dr. Dee asked for my help in translating a prophecy that he thought might apply to the queen. I had to read a set of apparently disconnected Greek words to him which he carefully wrote down, each one having a numerical value. We met in the library, a room cold with disuse. Robert called for a fire to be lit in the grate and a servant came in and threw open the shutters.

“It looks like code,” I observed when they had finished and we were alone again.

“It is the code of the ancients,” he said. “Perhaps they even knew the code for life.”

“A code for life?”

“What if everything was made of the same things?” he asked me suddenly. “Sand and cheese, milk and earth? What if beyond the illusion of difference, beyond their clothes as it were, there was only one form in the world, and one could see it, draw it, even recreate it?”

I shook my head. “What then?”

“That form would be the code of everything,” he said. “That would be the poem at the heart of the world.”

Danny, who had been sleeping on the broad footstool beside me as I wrote, stirred in his sleep and sat up, smiling around him. His beam widened when he saw my face. “Hello, my boy,” I said gently.

He slid down and toddled toward me, keeping a cautious hand on his chair, and then mine, to hold himself steady. He took hold of a fold of my gown and looked up attentively into my face.

“He’s very quiet,” John Dee said softly.

“He does not speak,” I said, smiling down at his upturned face. “But he is no fool. I know he understands everything. He will fetch things, and he knows their names. He knows his own name – don’t you, Danny? But he will not speak.”

“Was he always like this?”

The fear clenched at my heart: that I did not know what this child was like, and that if I admitted I did not know, someone might take him away from me. He was not my child, not born of my body, but his mother had put him into my arms and his father was my husband, and whatever I owed to my husband Daniel in terms of love and duty might be redeemed by my care for his son.

“I don’t know, he was with his wet nurse in Calais,” I lied. “She brought him to me when the city was under siege.”

“He might be frightened,” John Dee suggested. “Did he see the fighting?”

My heart contracted, I could feel it like a pain. I looked at him incredulously. “Frightened? But he is only a little baby. How would he know when he was in danger?”

“Who knows what he might think or understand?” John Dee said. “I don’t believe that children know nothing but what is taught them, as if they were empty pots for the filling. He will have known one home and one woman caring for him, and then he might have been afraid, running through the streets to look for you. Children know more than we allow, I think. He might be afraid to speak now.”

I leaned over him, and his bright dark eyes looked back at me, like the liquid eyes of a little deer. “Daniel?” I asked.

For the first time I thought of him as a real person, someone who might think and feel, someone who had been in the arms of his mother and felt himself thrust violently from her, into the arms of a stranger. Someone who had seen his mother ridden down by a horse and gored by a lance, who had seen his mother die in the gutter and then felt himself carried like an unwanted parcel on a boat, unloaded without explanation in England, jolted and jogged on the back of a horse to some cold house in the middle of nowhere, with no one he knew.

This was a child who had seen his mother die. This was a child without a mother. I leaned over him, I could feel the prickle of hot tears underneath my eyelids. This was a child whose grief and fear I, of all people, could understand. I had hidden my own childhood fear behind all the languages of Christendom, in becoming fluent in every tongue. He, so much smaller, so much more afraid, had gone mute.

“Danny,” I said gently. “I will be your mother. You will be safe with me.”

“Is he not your child?” John Dee asked. “He looks so like you.”

I looked up at him and I was tempted to trust him with the truth but fear kept me silent.

“Is he one of the Chosen People?” John Dee asked quietly.

Silently, I nodded my head.

“Circumcised?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Not in Calais, and here it is impossible.”

“He might need the outward sign of being one of the People,” Dee suggested. “He might need to be among his people before he can speak.”

I looked at him in bewilderment. “How would he know?”

He smiled. “This little one has just come from the angels,” he said. “He would know more than all of us put together.”

Lady Amy Dudley kept to her room for the next three days while Robert and John Dee rode out hunting, read in the library, gambled small sums of money, and talked, night and day, riding and walking, at dinner and at play as to what the future of the country might be, what shape the nobility and the parliament should take, how far the borders might extend overseas, what chance the small island kingdom of England had against the great continental powers, and – John Dee’s great obsession – how England was uniquely placed to send out ships the world over and create a new form of kingdom, one which extended overseas, an empire. An empire which might dominate the unknown places of the world. He had calculated how big the world might be and he was convinced that there were great lands we had not yet touched. “Christopher Columbus,” he said to my lord. “A brave man but no mathematician. It is obvious that you cannot have a passage to China that you can broach within weeks. If you make the proper calculation you can show that the world is round but far, far greater than Columbus thought. And in that great extra quarter must be land. And how would it be if that land were to be English?”

Often I walked or rode or dined with them and often they would ask me how things were done in Spain, what I had seen in Portugal, or what I thought might be the success of such a scheme. We were cautious not to discuss what sort of monarch might be on the throne to launch such confident and ambitious schemes. While the queen was waiting to give birth to a son and heir, nothing could be certain.

On the evening of the third day of their visit my lord had a message from Dover, and left me and John Dee alone in the library. John Dee had drawn a map of the world after the model of his friend Gerard Mercator and tried to explain to me that I must think of the world as round, and think of this map as the skin of the world peeled off, like the skin peeled off an orange and laid flat.

He struggled to make me see it until he laughed and said that I must be content to see angels, I clearly could not see longitude. He took up his maps and went with them to his room as Lord Robert came into the library with a piece of paper in his hand. “At last I have news of your husband, he is safe,” he said.

I jumped to my feet and found I was trembling. “My lord?”

“He was taken by the French who suspected him as a spy, but they are holding him with other English soldiers,” he told me. “I daresay I can arrange for him to be exchanged for other prisoners of war, or ransomed, or something.”

“He is safe?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Safe?” I asked incredulously.

He nodded again.

“Not sick, nor injured?”

“See for yourself,” he said, handing over the three scrawled lines on the sheet of paper. “Held in the castle. If you were to write to him I could get it sent on.”

“Thank you,” I said. I read and reread the letter. It said nothing more than he had already told me but somehow in words of black ink on travel-stained paper it seemed more true. “Thank God.”

“Thank God indeed,” said my lord with a smile.

Impulsively I took his hand. “And thank you, my lord,” I said fervently. “You are kind to take the trouble for me. I know it. I am grateful.”

Gently he drew me in, put a warm hand on my waist. “Sweetheart, you know I would do anything in my power to make you happy.”

I hesitated. His hand was light, I could feel the heat of his palm through the fabric of my gown. I felt myself lean toward him. He stole a quick glance up and down the empty gallery and then his mouth came down toward mine. He hesitated, he was such a practiced seducer that he knew the power of delay to increase desire. Then he bent a little lower and he kissed me, tenderly and then with increasing passion until my arms were around his neck and he had me pressed against a wall, my head tipped back, my eyes closed, quite given up to the delicious sensation of his touch.

“Lord Robert,” I whispered.

“I’m for bed. Come with me, sweetheart-mine.”

I did not hesitate. “I am sorry my lord, no.”

“You are sorry, my lord, no?” he repeated comically. “What d’you mean, Mistress Boy?”

“I shall not lie with you,” I said steadily.

“Why not? Don’t tell me it is not your desire, for I shan’t believe you. I can taste it on your lips. You want me as much as I want you. And that is a good deal, tonight.”

“It is my desire,” I admitted. “And if I were not a married woman I would be glad to be your lover.”

“Oh, Hannah, a husband such a long way away and safely in prison need not concern you. A word from you to me, and he can stay there until there is a general amnesty. For all I care he can stay there forever. Come to bed with me, now.”

Steadfastly I shook my head. “No, my lord. I am sorry.”

“Not sorry enough,” he said crossly. “What ails you, child?”

“It is not that he might catch me,” I said. “It is that I do not want to betray him.”

“You betray him in your heart,” Robert said cheerfully. “You lean back against my arm, you tip your head, you open your mouth for my kisses. He is betrayed already, Mistress Boy. The rest is just enacting the desire. It is no worse than what you have done already.”

I smiled at his persuasive, self-serving logic. “Perhaps, but it is wrong. My lord, I tell you true, I have adored you since the day I first saw you. But I love Daniel with a true and honorable love, and I want to be a good wife to him, and faithful to him.”

“This is nothing to do with true love between us, sweetheart,” he said with his simple rake’s brutality.

“I know,” I said. “And now I want love. Lust is no good for me. I want love. His love.”

He looked at me, his dark eyes brimming with laughter. “Ah, Hannah, this is a big mistake for a woman like you, with everything to play for and nothing to lose. You are the closest thing to a free woman I have ever known. A girl educated far beyond her sex, a wife with a husband miles away, a woman with gifts, ambition, the sense to use them and the body of a beautiful whore. For God’s sake, girl, be my mistress. You don’t have to descend to being a wife.”

I could not help but laugh. “I thank you,” I said. “But I want to be a wife without descending. I want to choose Daniel when I find him again, and love him from my heart and with faithfulness.”

“But you would so enjoy a night with me, you know,” he said, partly from vanity, partly as a final attempt.

“I am very sure of it,” I said, as shameless as he. “And if I cared for nothing but pleasure then I would be begging you for tonight and every night after. But I have fallen in love, my lord, and no one but my lover will do for me.”

He stepped back and swept me a beautiful courtly bow, as low as if for a queen. “Mistress Boy, you always exceed my expectations. I knew you would make a wonderful woman but I never expected you would make a surprising and honorable woman. I hope your husband is worthy of you, I do indeed. And if he is not…”

I laughed. “If he breaks my heart a second time then I will come back to you as heartless as you are yourself, my lord,” I said.

“Oh well, it is agreed,” he said with a laugh, and went to his bed alone.

Within a few days his lordship and John Dee were ready to return to court. John Dee would go back to Bishop Bonner and would note the detail of the charges and the words of the interrogation of hundreds of men and women charged with heresy. He would see them sent for torture, and then when they confessed, he would see them sent for burning.

We walked to the stables together to check that the horses were ready for the journey, and an awkward silence fell between us. I would never ask him how he could bear to leave these innocent days in the country and go back to his work as hangman.

He spoke first. “Hannah, you know, it is better that it is me there, advising, than any other.”

For a moment I did not understand him, then I realized that it was a plot, another plot, within a plot, within the great plots. Better that John Dee was examining Princess Elizabeth’s supporters and friends than a man whose loyalties were solid to the queen and who desired to see them all burn.

“I don’t know how you can bear it,” I said simply. “The woman I saw, without her fingernails…”

He nodded. “God forgive us,” he said quietly. “I am sorry that you were taken up, Hannah.”

“I thank you for saving me, if that is what you did,” I said unwillingly.

“Did you not know that I interceded for you?”

“I did not quite understand it, at the time,” I said carefully.

John Dee took my hand and patted it. “You are right. I had a greater aim in view than your life. But I am glad that you were only brushed, and not broken, by this.”

We walked into the stable yard and there was Lord Robert, watching a wagon being loaded with goods that he wanted for his rooms at Richmond: a beautiful tapestry and some fine carpets. I went up and spoke to him privately.

“Will you write and tell me how the queen does?” I asked.

“You are taking an interest in the succession?”

“I take an interest in the queen,” I said. “I had no truer friend when I first came to her service.”

“And then you ran off and left her,” he observed.

“My lord, as you know, they were dangerous times. I was safer away from court then.”

“And now?”

“I don’t expect safety. But I have to find some way to make my living and to raise my son.”

He nodded. “Hannah, I would have you stay here for the time being, but by the summer I shall want you to meet me at court. I want you to see the queen again and enter her service.”

“My lord, I am a fool no more. I have a child to care for and I am waiting for my husband.”

“My child, you are a fool indeed if you think you can argue with me.”

That checked me. “I do not mean to argue,” I said pacifically. “But I don’t want to be parted from my son, and I cannot go back into breeches.”

“You can send him to a nurse. And you can be a fool in petticoats as well as breeches. There are many fools in petticoats, after all. You will not be an exception.”

I bit the inside of my lip to keep myself calm despite my sense of danger. “My lord, he is only a baby still, and he does not speak. He is in a strange country and we neither of us know anybody. Please let him stay with me. Please let me keep him.”

“If you insist on staying with him then you will have to remain here in the country with Amy,” he warned me.

I measured the price I must pay to be Danny’s mother and to my own surprise, I found it worth paying. I would not leave him, whatever it cost me.

“Very well,” I said. I stepped back against the wall, out of the way of the porters carrying two great chairs and a table to the back of the wagon.

Lord Robert scowled at me, he had not thought I would put the child before my own ambition. “Oh, Hannah, you are not the woman I hoped you would be. A faithful wife and a devoted mother is not much use to me! Very well! I will send for you when I need you, probably May. You can bring the boy,” he forestalled me. “But come as soon as I send for you. I will need your ears and your eyes at court.”

Lord Robert rode out at noon, a cold March day, and his wife got up from her sick bed to see him go. She stood, silent again, like a woman made of snow, in the hall of the house as he clapped his hat on his head and swung his cape around his shoulders.

“I am sorry that you have been ill for all of my visit,” he said brightly, as if speaking to a little-known host. “I have not seen you since dinner that first night.”

She hardly seemed to hear him. She managed a blank smile, more like a grimace.

“I will hope that you are in better health and spirits when I come again.”

“When will that be?” she asked quietly.

“I cannot say. I will send you a message.”

It was as if his refusal to make a promise was a spell that made her come to life. She stirred, and glared at him. “If you do not come soon, I shall write to the queen and complain of you,” she threatened, her voice low and angry. “She knows what it is like to be abandoned by a false husband who runs after every pretty face. She knows what sort of woman her sister is. She has suffered from Elizabeth’s ways as I have suffered. I know about that, you see. I know what you and the princess are to each other.”

“It is treason to say such a thing,” he remarked quietly, in a pleasant tone. “And such a letter would be evidence of your treason. We have just got this family out of the Tower, Amy, don’t plunge us back in again.”

She bit her lip and the color flooded into her cheeks. “At any rate your whore shall not stay here with me!”

Robert sighed and looked across the hall toward me. “I have no whore here,” he said with elaborate patience. “I barely have a wife here, as you well know. The honorable lady, Mrs. Carpenter, will stay here until I send for her to work for me at court.”

Amy Dudley let out a little shriek of rage and then clapped her hand over her mouth. “You call what she does ‘work?’”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “As I say. And I will send for her. And I will come to visit you again.” He lowered his voice and his tone was gentle. “And I shall pray, for your sake and for mine, that when I see you again you are composed. This is no way for us, Amy. You must not behave like a madwoman.”

“I am not mad,” she hissed at him. “I am angry. I am angry with you.”

He nodded, he would not argue with her, and clearly it mattered to him very little one way or the other what she chose to call it. “Then I shall pray for you to recover your temper rather than your wits,” he said. He turned for the front door where his horse was waiting.

Lady Dudley completely ignored John Dee as he went past, though he paused and bowed, as calm as ever. When they were both gone she suddenly seemed to realize that in a moment she would be too late and she hurried out after them to the top of the steps. She flung open the big double doors and the wintry sunshine poured into the dark hall. I was dazzled and half closed my eyes, seeing her as a shadow at the top of the steps. For a moment it seemed to me that she was not on a broad stone step but on a very knife edge of life and death, and I stepped forward and put out my hand to steady her. At my touch she whirled around and she would have fallen down the stone steps if John Dee had not caught her arm and held her.

“Don’t touch me!” she spat at me. “Don’t you dare to touch me!”

“I thought I saw…”

John Dee released her and looked carefully at me. “What did you see, Hannah?”

I shook my head. Even when he drew me quickly to one side, almost out of earshot, I did not speak. “It is too vague,” I said. “I am sorry. It was as if she was balanced on the very edge of something, and she might fall, and then she nearly did fall. It is nothing.”

He nodded. “When you come to court we will try again,” he said. “I think you still have your gift, Hannah. I think the angels are still speaking to you. It is just our dull mortal senses that cannot hear them.”

“You are delaying my lord,” Lady Dudley said sharply to him.

John Dee looked down the steps to where Lord Robert was swinging into his saddle. “He will forgive me,” he said. He took her hand and was going to bow over it, but she pulled it away from him.

“Thank you for my visit,” he said.

“Any friend of my lord’s is always welcome,” she said through lips that hardly moved. “Whatever sorts of company he chooses to keep.”

John Dee went down the steps, mounted his horse, raised his hat to her ladyship, smiled at me, and the two men rode away.

As she watched them go I could feel the anger and resentment toward him bleeding out of her like a wound until all that was left was the hurt and the injury. She stood straight until they rounded the corner of the park and then she buckled at the knees and Mrs. Oddingsell took her arm to lead her inside and up the stairs to her chamber.

“What now?” I asked when Mrs. Oddingsell came out, carefully shutting the door behind her.

“Now she will weep and sleep for a few days and then she will get up and be like a woman half dead: cold and empty inside, no tears to shed, no anger, no love to give. And then she will be like a hound on a short leash until he comes back, and then her anger will spill out again.”

“Over and over?” I asked, inwardly horrified at this cycle of pain and anger.

“Over and over again,” she said. “The only time she was at peace was when she thought they would behead him. Then she could grieve for him and for herself and for the love they had shared when they were young.”

“She wanted him to die?” I asked incredulously.

“She is not afraid of death,” Mrs. Oddingsell said sadly. “I think she longs for it, for them both. What other release can there be for them?”