“You will have to marry Philip of Spain?”

She nodded. “He, as well as any other,” she said. “I can make a treaty with him that will hold. He knows, his father knows, what this country is like. I can be queen and wife with a man like him. He has his own land, his own fortune, he does not need little England. And then I can be queen of my own country and wife to him, and a mother.”

There was something in the way she said “mother” that alerted me. I had felt her touch on my head, I had seen her with the children that tumbled out from dirty cottages.

“Why, you long for a child for yourself,” I exclaimed.

I saw the need in her eyes and then she turned away from me to the window and the view of the cold river again. “Oh yes,” she said quietly to the cold garden outside. “I have longed for a child of my own for twenty years. That was why I loved my poor brother so much. In the hunger of my heart I even loved Elizabeth when she was a baby. Perhaps God in his goodness will give me a son of my own now.” She looked at me. “You have the Sight. Will I have a child, Hannah? Will I have a child of my own, to hold in my arms and to love? A child who will grow and inherit my throne and make England a great country?”

I waited for a moment, in case anything came to me. All I had was a sense of great despair and hopelessness, nothing more. I dropped my gaze to the floor and I knelt before her. “I am sorry, Your Grace,” I said. “The Sight cannot be commanded. I can’t tell you the answer to that question, nor any other. My vision comes and goes as it wishes. I cannot say if you will have a child.”

“Then I will predict for you,” she said grimly. “I will tell you this. I will marry this Philip of Spain without love, without desire, but with a very true sense that it is what this country needs. He will bring us the wealth and the power of Spain, he will make this country a part of the empire, which we need so much. He will help me restore this country to the discipline of the true church, and he will give me a child to be a godly Christian heir to keep this country in the right ways.” She paused. “You should say Amen,” she prompted me.

“Amen.” It was easily said. I was a Christian Jew, a girl dressed as a boy, a young woman in love with one man and betrothed to another. A girl grieving for her mother and never mentioning her name. I spent all my life in feigned agreement. “Amen,” I said.

The door opened and Jane Dormer beckoned two porters into the room, carrying a frame between them, swathed in linen cloth. “Something for you, Your Grace!” she said with a roguish smile. “Something you will like to see.”

The queen was slow to throw off her thoughtful mood. “What is it, Jane? I am weary now.”

In answer, Mistress Dormer waited till the men had leaned their burden against the wall, and then took the hem of the cloth and turned to her royal mistress. “Are you ready?”

The queen was persuaded into smiling. “Is this the portrait of Philip?” she asked. “I won’t be cozened by it. You forget, I am old enough to remember when my father married a portrait but divorced the sitter. He said that it was the worst trick that had ever been played upon a man. A portrait is always handsome. I won’t be taken in by a portrait.”

In answer, Jane Dormer swept the cloth aside. I heard the queen’s indrawn breath, saw her color come and go in her pale cheeks, and then heard her little girlish giggle. “My God, Jane, this is a man!” she whispered.

Jane Dormer collapsed with laughter, dropped the cloth and dashed across the room to stand back to admire the portrait.

He was indeed a handsome man. He was young, he must have been in his midtwenties to the queen’s forty years, brown-bearded with dark smiling eyes, a full sensual mouth, a good figure, broad shoulders and slim strong legs. He was wearing dark red with a dark red cap at a rakish angle on his curly brown hair. He looked like a man who would whisper lovemaking in a woman’s ear until she was weak at the knees. He looked like a handsome rogue, but there was a firmness about his mouth and a set to his shoulders which suggested that he might nonetheless be capable of honest dealing.

“What d’you think, Your Grace?” Jane demanded.

The queen said nothing. I looked from the portrait back to her face again. She was gazing at him. For a moment I could not think what she reminded me of, then I knew it. It was my own face in the looking glass when I thought of Robert Dudley. It was that same awakening, widening of the eyes, the same unaware dawning of a smile.

“He’s very… pleasing,” she said.

Jane Dormer met my eyes and smiled at me.

I wanted to smile back but my head was ringing with a strange noise, a tingling noise like little bells.

“What dark eyes he has,” Jane pointed out.

“Yes,” the queen breathed.

“He wears his collar very high, that must be the fashion in Spain. He’ll bring the newest fashions to court.”

The noise in my head was getting louder. I put my hands over my ears but the sound echoed louder inside my head, it was a jangling noise now.

“Yes,” the queen said.

“And see? A gold cross on a chain,” Jane cooed. “Thank God, there will be a Catholic Christian prince for England once more.”

It was too much to bear now. It was like being in a bell tower at full peal. I bowed over and twisted round, trying to shake the terrible ringing out of my ears. Then I burst out, “Your Grace! Your heart will break!” and at once the noise was cut off short and there was silence, a silence somehow even louder than the ringing bells had been, and the queen was looking at me, and Jane Dormer was looking at me, and I realized I had spoken out of turn, shouted out as a fool.

“What did you say?” Jane Dormer challenged me to repeat my words, defying me to spoil the happy mood of the afternoon, of two women examining a portrait of a handsome man.

“I said, ‘Your Grace, your heart will break,’” I repeated. “But I can’t say why.”

“If you can’t say why, you had better not have spoken at all,” Jane Dormer flared up, always passionately loyal to her mistress.

“I know,” I said numbly. “I can’t help it.”

“Scant wisdom to tell a woman that her heart will break but not how or why!”

“I know,” I said again. “I am sorry.”

Jane turned to the queen. “Your Grace, pay no heed to the fool.”

The queen’s face, which had been so bright and so animated, suddenly turned sulky. “You can both leave,” she said flatly. She hunched her shoulders and turned away. In that quintessential gesture of a stubborn woman I knew that she had made her choice and that no wise words would change her mind. No fool’s words either. “You can go,” she said. Jane made a move to shroud the portrait with its cloth. “You can leave that there,” she said. “I might look at it again.”

While the long negotiations about the marriage went on between the queen’s council, sick with apprehension at the thought of a Spaniard on the throne of England, and the Spanish representatives, eager to add another kingdom to their sprawling empire, I found my way to the home of John Dee’s father. It was a small house near the river in the city. I tapped on the door and for a moment no one answered. Then a window above the front door opened and someone shouted down: “Who is it?”

“I seek Roland Dee,” I called up. The little roof over the front door concealed me; he could hear my voice, but not see me.

“He’s not here,” John Dee called back.

“Mr. Dee, it is me. Hannah the Fool,” I called up. “I was looking for you.”

“Hush,” he said quickly and slammed the casement window shut. I heard his feet echoing on the wooden stairs inside the house and the noise of the bolts being drawn, and then the door opened inward to a dark hall. “Come in quickly,” he said.

I squeezed through the gap and he slammed the door shut and bolted it. We stood face to face inside the dark hallway in silence. I was about to speak but he put a hand on my arm to caution me to be silent. At once I froze. Outside I could hear the normal noises of the London street, people walking by, a few tradesmen calling out, street sellers offering their wares, the distant shout from someone unloading at the river.