“Did anyone follow you? Did you tell anyone you were looking for me?”

My heart thudded at the question. I felt my hand go to my cheek as if to rub off a smut. “Why? What has happened?”

“Could anyone have followed you?”

I tried to think, but I was aware only of the thudding of my frightened heart. “No, sir. I don’t think so.”

John Dee nodded, and then he turned and went upstairs without a word to me. I hesitated, and then I followed him. For a groat I would have slipped out of the back door and run to my father’s house and never seen him again.

At the top of the stairs the door was open and he beckoned me into his room. At the window was his desk with a beautiful strange brass instrument in pride of place. To the side was a big scrubbed oak table, spread with his papers, rulers, pencils, pens, ink pots and scrolls of paper covered with minute writing and many numbers.

I could not satisfy my curiosity until I knew that I was safe. “Are you a wanted man, Mr. Dee? Should I go?”

He smiled and shook his head. “I’m overcautious,” he said frankly. “My father was taken up for questioning but he is a known member of a reading group – Protestant thinkers. No one has anything against me. I was just startled when I saw you.”

“You are sure?” I pressed him.

He gave a little laugh. “Hannah, you are like a young doe on the edge of flight. Be calm. You are safe here.”

I steadied myself and started to look around. He saw my gaze go back to the instrument at the window.

“What d’you think that is?” he asked.

I shook my head. It was a beautiful thing, not an instrument I could recognize. It was made in brass, a ball as big as a pigeon’s egg in the center on a stalk, around it a brass ring cunningly supported by two other stalks which meant it could swing and move, a ball sliding around on it. Outside there was another ring and another ball, outside that, another. They were a series of rings and balls and the furthest from the center was the smallest.

“This,” he said softly, “is a model of the world. This is how the creator, the great master carpenter of the heavens, made the world and then set it in motion. This holds the secret of how God’s mind works.” He leaned forward and gently touched the first ring. As if by magic they all started to move slowly, each going at its own pace, each following its own orbit, sometimes passing, sometimes overtaking each other. Only the little gold egg in the center did not move, everything else swung around it.

“Where is our world?” I asked.

He smiled at me. “Here,” he said, pointing to the golden egg at the very center of all the others. He pointed to the next ring with the slowly circling ball. “This the moon.” He pointed to the next. “This the sun.” He pointed to the next few. “These are the planets, and beyond them, these are the stars, and this-” He gestured to a ring that was unlike all the others, a ring made of silver, which had moved at his first touch and made all the others move in time. “This is the primum mobile. It is God’s touch on the world symbolized by this ring that started the movement of everything, that made the world begin. This is the Word. This is the manifestation of ‘Let there be light.’”

“Light,” I repeated softly.

He nodded. “Let there be light.” If I knew what made this move, I would know the secret of all the movement of the heavens,” he said. “In this model I can play the part of God. But in the real heavens, what is the force that makes the planets swing around, that makes the sun circle the earth?”

He was waiting for me to answer, knowing that I could not, since nobody knew the answer. I shook my head, dizzied by the movement of the golden balls on their golden rings.

He put a hand on it to steady it and I watched it slow and stop. “My friend, Gerard Mercator, made this for me when we were both students together. He will be a great mapmaker one day, I know it. And I-” He broke off. “I shall follow my path,” he said. “Wherever it leads me. I have to be clear in my head and free from ambition and live in a country which is clear and free. I have to walk a clear path.”

He paused for a moment and then, as if he suddenly remembered me, “And you? What did you come here for?” he asked in quite a different tone of voice. “Why did you call for my father?”

“I didn’t want him. I was looking for you. I only wanted to ask him where you were,” I said. “They told me at the court that you had gone home to your father. I was seeking you. I have a message.”

He was suddenly alight with eagerness. “A message? From who?”

“From Lord Robert.”

His face fell. “For a moment I thought an angel might have come to you with a message for me. What does Lord Robert want?”

“He wants to know what will come to pass. He gave me two tasks. One, to tell Lady Elizabeth to seek you out and ask you to be her tutor, and the other to tell you to meet with some men.”

“What men?”

“Sir William Pickering, Tom Wyatt and James Croft,” I recited. “And he said to tell you this: that they are engaged in an alchemical experiment to make gold from base metal and to refine silver back to ash and you should help them with this. Edward Courtenay can make a chemical wedding. And I am to go back to him and tell him what will come to pass.”

Mr. Dee glanced at the window as if he feared eavesdroppers on the very sill outside. “These are not good times for me to serve a suspect princess and a man in the Tower for treason, and three others whose names I may already know, whose plans I may already doubt.”

I gave him a steady look. “As you wish, sir.”

“And you could be more safely employed, young woman,” he said. “What is he thinking of, exposing you to such danger?”

“I am his to command,” I said firmly. “I have given my word.”

“He should release you,” he said gently. “He cannot command anything from the Tower.”

“He has released me. I am to see him only once more,” I said. “When I go back and tell him what you have foreseen for England.”

“Shall we look in the mirror and see now?” he asked.

I hesitated. I was afraid of the dark mirror and the darkened room, afraid of the things that might come through the darkness to haunt us. “Mr. Dee, last time I did not have a true seeing,” I confessed awkwardly.

“When you said the date of the death of the king?”

I nodded.

“When you predicted that the next queen would be Jane?”

“Yes.”

“Your answers were true,” he observed.

“They were nothing more than guesses,” I said. “I plucked them from the air. I am sorry.”

He smiled. “Then just do that again,” he said. “Just guess for me. Just guess for Lord Robert. Since he asks it?”

I was caught and I knew it. “Very well.”

“We’ll do it now,” he said. “Sit down, close your eyes, try to think of nothing. I will get the room ready for you.”

I did as he told me and sat on a stool. I could hear him moving quietly in the next room, the swish of a closing curtain, and the little spitting noise of flame as he carried a taper from a fire to light the candles. Then he said quietly: “It is ready. Come, and may the good angels guide us.”

He took my hand and led me into a small box room. The same mirror we had used before was leaning against a wall, a table before it supported a wax tablet printed with strange signs. A candle was burning before the mirror and he had put another opposite, so that they seemed like innumerable candles disappearing into infinite distance, beyond the world, beyond the sun and the moon and the planets as he had showed them to me on his swinging circular model; not all the way to heaven but into absolute darkness where finally there would be more darkness than candle flame and it would be nothing but dark.

I drew a long breath to ward off my fear and seated myself before the mirror. I heard his muttered prayer and I repeated: “Amen.” Then I gazed into the darkness of the mirror.