Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2: The Queen’s Fool, The Virgin’s Lover, The Other Queen. Philippa Gregory
Elizabeth looked up and saw me. ‘Oh, Hannah.’
‘Kat dragged me in,’ I said. ‘I think I should go.’
‘Wait a moment,’ she replied.
Kat Ashley planted her big bottom against the wooden door and leaned back.
‘Would you see better if Hannah were to help you?’ Elizabeth demanded of John Dee.
‘I cannot see without her,’ he said frankly. ‘I don’t have the gift. I was only going to prepare the astrological tables for you; that is all I can do without a seer. I did not know that Hannah would be here today.’
‘If she would look for you, what might we see?’
He shrugged. ‘Everything. Nothing. How would I know? But we might be able to tell the date of the birth of the queen’s baby. We might be able to know if it is a boy or a girl, and how healthy, and what its future might hold.’
Elizabeth came towards me, her eyes very bright. ‘Do this for us, Hannah,’ she whispered, almost pleading with me. ‘We all want to know. You, as much as anybody.’
I said nothing. My knowledge of the queen’s growing despair in that darkened room was not one that I wanted to share with her flirtatious half-sister.
‘I dare not do it,’ I said flatly. ‘Mr Dee, I am afraid. These are forbidden studies.’
‘It is all forbidden now,’ he said simply. ‘The world is forming into two bands of people. Those who ask questions and need answers, and those who think the answers are given to us. Her ladyship is one who asks questions, the queen is one who thinks that everything is already known. I am in the world of those who ask: ask about everything. You too. Lord Robert as well. It is breath of life to question, it is like being dead when one has to accept an answer which comes with the dust of the tomb on it and one cannot even ask “why?” You like to ask, don’t you, Hannah?’
‘I was brought up to it,’ I said, as if excusing a sin. ‘But I have learned the price. I have seen the price that scholars sometimes have to pay.’
‘You will pay no price for asking questions in my rooms,’ Elizabeth assured me. ‘I am under the protection of the king. We can do as we wish. I am safe now.’
‘But I am never safe!’ burst from me.
‘Come, child,’ John Dee urged me. ‘You are among friends. Do you not have the courage to exercise your God-given gift, in the sight of your Maker and in the company of your friends, child?’
‘No,’ I said frankly. I was thinking of the faggots of wood that had been piled up in the town square of Aragon, of the stakes at Smithfield, of the determination of the Inquisition to know only what it feared and see only what it suspected.
‘And yet you live here, in the very heart of the court,’ he observed.
‘I am here to serve the queen because I love her, and because I can’t leave her now, not while she is waiting for her baby to be born. And I serve the Princess Elizabeth because … because she is like no other woman I have ever met.’
Elizabeth laughed. ‘You study me as if I were your book,’ she said. ‘I have seen you do it. I know you do. You watch me as if you would learn how to be a woman.’
I nodded, granting her nothing. ‘Perhaps.’
She smiled. ‘You love my sister, don’t you?’
I faced her without fear. ‘I do. Who could not?’
‘Then would you not ease her burden by telling her when this slow baby will come? It is a month late, Hannah. People are laughing at her. If she has mistaken her dates, would you not want to tell her that the baby in her belly is growing well and due this very week, or the next?’
I hesitated. ‘How could I tell her I knew such a thing?’
‘Your gift! Your gift!’ she exclaimed irritably. ‘You can tell her you just saw it in a vision. You don’t have to say the vision was conjured in my rooms.’
I thought for a moment.
‘And when you go to see Lord Robert again you could advise him,’ Elizabeth said quietly. ‘You could tell him that he must make his peace with her for she will put her son on the throne of England, and England will be a Catholic and Spanish power forever. You could tell him to give up waiting and hoping for anything else. You could tell him that the cause is lost and he must convert, plead for clemency and set himself free. That news would mean that he could plead for his freedom. You could set him free.’
I said nothing but she understood the rise of colour in my cheeks. ‘I don’t know how he can bear it,’ she said, her voice low, weaving a spell around me. ‘Poor Robert, waiting and waiting in the Tower and never knowing what the future will bring. If he knew that Mary would be on the throne for the next twenty years and her son after her, don’t you think he would sue for his freedom and set himself at liberty again? His lands want him, his people need him, he’s a man that needs the earth under his boots and the wind in his face. He’s not a man to be mewed up like a hooded hawk for half of his life.’
‘If he knew for certain that the queen would have a son, would he be able to get free?’
‘If a prince was born to her she would release most of them in the Tower for she would know that she was safe on the throne. We would all give up.’
I hesitated no longer. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.
Elizabeth nodded calmly. ‘You need an inner room, don’t you?’ she asked John Dee.
‘Lit with candles,’ he said. ‘And a mirror, and a table covered with a linen cloth. There should be more, but we’ll do what we can.’
Elizabeth went into her privy chamber beyond the audience room and we heard her drawing the curtains and pulling a table before the fireplace. John Dee set out his astronomical charts on her desk; when she came back he had drawn a line through the queen’s date of birth and the date of birth of the king.
‘Their marriage was in Libra,’ he said. ‘It is a partnership of deep love.’
I looked quickly at Elizabeth’s face but she was not scoffing, thinking of her triumph over her sister in her flirtation with Philip, she was too serious for her petty triumphs now.
‘Will it be fruitful?’ she asked.
He drew a line across the thin columns of dizzying numbers. He drew another downward, and where the lines intersected he leaned forward to read the number.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘But I can’t be sure. There will be two pregnancies.’
Elizabeth drew a little gasp like the hiss of a cat. ‘Two? Live births?’
John Dee consulted the number again and then another set of numbers at the foot of the scroll. ‘It is very obscure.’
Elizabeth held herself very still, there was no outward sign of her desperation to know.
‘So who will inherit the throne?’ she asked tightly.
John Dee drew another line, this time horizontally, across the columns. ‘It should be you,’ he said.
‘Yes, I know it should be me,’ Elizabeth said, reining in her impatience. ‘I am the heir now, if I am not overthrown. But will it be me?’
He leaned back, away from the pages. ‘I am sorry, Princess. It is too unclear. The love that she bears him and her desire for a child obscures everything. I have never seen a woman love a man more, I have never seen a woman long more intensely for a child. Her desire is in every symbol of the table, it is almost as if she could wish a child into being.’
Elizabeth, her face like a beautiful mask, nodded. ‘I see. Would you be able to see more if Hannah would scry for you?’
John