Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2: The Queen’s Fool, The Virgin’s Lover, The Other Queen. Philippa Gregory
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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.
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 passers-by, 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 centre 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