The Queen's Fool Read online

  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.

  “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