I could hear myself speaking but I could hardly make out the words. I could hear the scratching of his pen as he wrote down what I was saying. I could hear myself reciting a string of numbers, and then strange words, like a wild poetry which had a rhythm and a beauty of its own; but no meaning that I could tell. Then I heard my voice say very clearly in English: “There will be a child, but no child. There will be a king but no king. There will be a virgin queen all-forgotten. There will be a queen but no virgin.”
“And Lord Robert Dudley?” he whispered.
“He will have the making of a prince who will change the history of the world,” I whispered in reply. “And he will die, beloved by a queen, safe in his bed.”
When I recovered my senses John Dee was standing by me with a drink which tasted of fruit with a tang behind it of metal.
“Are you all right?” he asked me.
I nodded. “Yes. A little sleepy.”
“You had better go back to court,” he said. “You will be missed.”
“Will you not come, and see Lady Elizabeth?”
He looked thoughtful. “Yes, when I am sure it is safe. You can tell Lord Robert that I will serve him, and I will serve the cause, and that I too think the time is ripe now. I’ll advise her and be her intelligencer during these days of change. But I have to take care.”
“Are you not afraid?” I asked, thinking of my own terror of being observed, my own fear of the knock on the door in darkness.
“Not very,” he said slowly. “I have friends in powerful places. I have plans to complete. The queen is restoring the monasteries and their libraries must be restored too. It is my God-given duty to find and restore the books to their shelves, the manuscripts and the scholarship. And I hope to see base metal turn to gold.”
“The philosopher’s stone?” I asked.
He smiled. “This time it is a riddle.”
“What shall I tell Lord Robert when I go back to see him in the Tower?” I asked.
John Dee looked thoughtful. “Tell him nothing more than he will die in his bed beloved of a queen,” he said. “You saw it, though you did not know what you could see. That’s the truth, though it seems impossible now.”
“And are you sure?” I asked. “Are you sure that he will not be executed?”
He nodded. “I’m sure. There is much for him to do, and the time of a queen of gold will come. Lord Robert is not a man to die young with his work unfinished. And I foresee a great love for him, the greatest love he has ever known.”
I waited, hardly breathing. “Do you know who he will love?” I whispered.
Not for a moment did I think it would be me. How could it be? I was his vassal, he called me Mistress Boy, he laughed at the girl’s adoration that he saw in my face and offered to release me. Not even at that moment when John Dee predicted a great love for him did I think that it would be me.
“A queen will love him,” John Dee said. “He will be the greatest love of her life.”
“But she is to marry Philip of Spain,” I observed.
He shook his head. “I can’t see a Spaniard on the throne of England,” he predicted. “And neither can many others.”
It was hard to find a way to speak with the Lady Elizabeth without half the court remarking on it. Although she had no friends at court and only a small circle of her own household, she seemed to be continually surrounded by apparently casual passersby, half of whom were paid to spy on her. The French king had his spies in England, the Spanish emperor had his network. All the great men had maids and men in other households to keep watch for any signs of change or of treason, and the queen herself was creating and paying a network of informers. For all I knew, someone was paid to report on me, and the very thought of it made me sick with fear. It was a tense world of continual suspicion and pretend friendship. I was reminded of John Dee’s model of the earth with all the planets going around it. This princess was like the earth, at the very center of everything, except all the stars in her firmament watched her with envious eyes and wished her ill. I thought it no wonder that she was paler and paler and the shadows under her eyes were turning from the blue to the dark violet of bruises, as the Christmas feast approached and there was no goodwill from anyone for her.
The queen’s enmity grew every day that Elizabeth walked through the court with her head high, and her nose in the air, every time she turned away from the statue of Our Lady in the chapel, every time she left off her rosary and wore instead a miniature prayer book on a chain at her waist. Everyone knew that the prayer book contained her brother’s dying prayer: “Oh my lord God, defend this realm from Papistry and maintain thy true religion.” To wear this, in preference to the coral rosary that the queen had given her, was more than a public act of defiance, it was a living tableau of disobedience.
To Elizabeth, it was perhaps little more than a showy rebellion; but to our queen it was an insult that went straight to her heart. When Elizabeth rode out dressed in rich colors and smiling and waving, people would cheer her and doff their hats for her; when she stayed home in plain black and white people came to Whitehall Palace to see her dine at the queen’s table and remark on her fragile beauty and the plain Protestant piety of her dress.
The queen could see that although Elizabeth never openly defied her, she continually gave the gossipmongers material to take outside the court and to spread among those who kept to their Protestant ways:
“The Protestant princess was pale today, and did not touch the stoop of holy water.”
“The Protestant princess begged to be excused from evening Mass because she was unwell again.”
“The Protestant princess, all but prisoner in the Papist court, is keeping to her faith as best as she can, and biding her time in the very jaws of the Antichrist.”
“The Protestant princess is a very martyr to her faith and her plain-faced sister is as dogged as a pack of bear-baiters, hounding the young woman’s pure conscience.”
The queen, resplendent in rich gowns and delighting in her mother’s jewels, looked tawdry beside the blaze of Elizabeth’s hair, the martyr whiteness of her pallor and the extreme modesty of her black dress. However the queen dressed, whatever she wore, Elizabeth, the Protestant princess, gleamed with the radiance of a girl on the edge of womanhood. The queen beside her, old enough to be her mother, looked weary, and overwhelmed by the task she had inherited.
So I could not simply go to Elizabeth’s rooms and ask to see her. I might as well have announced myself to the ambassador from Spain who watched Elizabeth’s every step, and reported everything to the queen. But one day, as I was walking behind her in the gallery, she stumbled for a moment. I went to help her, and she took my arm.
“I have broken the heel on my shoe, I must send it to the cobbler,” she said.
“Let me help you to your rooms,” I offered, and added in a whisper, “I have a message for you, from Lord Robert Dudley.”
She did not even flicker a sideways glance at me, and in that absolute control I saw at once that she was a consummate plotter and that the queen was right to fear her.
“I can receive no messages without my sister’s blessing,” Elizabeth said sweetly. “But I would be very glad if you would help me to my chamber, I wrenched my foot when the heel broke.”
She bent down and took off her shoe. I could not help but notice the pretty embroidery on her stocking, but I thought it was not the time to ask her for the pattern. Always, everything she owned, everything she did, fascinated me. I gave her my arm. A courtier passing looked at us both. “The princess has broken the heel of her shoe,” I explained. He nodded, and went on. He, for one, was not going to trouble himself to help her.