The Queen's Fool Read online

  “When they were young and in love it passed for passion. But she was only at peace when he was in the Tower — except for when the princess was imprisoned too.”

  “What?”

  “She was ill with jealousy, then.”

  “They were prisoners!” I exclaimed. “They were hardly dancing in masques together.”

  Mrs. Oddingsell nodded. “In her mind they were lovers. And now, he is free to come and go. And she knows that he is seeing the princess. He will break her heart. It is no figure of speech. She will die of this.”

  We were at Dr. Dee’s door. I put a hand on her arm. “Are you her nurse?” I asked.

  “More like her keeper,” she said and quietly went in.

  The scrying was abandoned for the night, but the next day, when Lady Dudley kept to her room and was not to be seen, Dr. Dee asked for my help in translating a prophecy that he thought might apply to the queen. I had to read a set of apparently disconnected Greek words to him which he carefully wrote down, each one having a numerical value. We met in the library, a room cold with disuse. Robert called for a fire to be lit in the grate and a servant came in and threw open the shutters.

  “It looks like code,” I observed when they had finished and we were alone again.

  “It is the code of the ancients,” he said. “Perhaps they even knew the code for life.”

  “A code for life?”

  “What if everything was made of the same things?” he asked me suddenly. “Sand and cheese, milk and earth? What if beyond the illusion of difference, beyond their clothes as it were, there was only one form in the world, and one could see it, draw it, even recreate it?”

  I shook my head. “What then?”

  “That form would be the code of everything,” he said. “That would be the poem at the heart of the world.”

  Danny, who had been sleeping on the broad footstool beside me as I wrote, stirred in his sleep and sat up, smiling around him. His beam widened when he saw my face. “Hello, my boy,” I said gently.

  He slid down and toddled toward me, keeping a cautious hand on his chair, and then mine, to hold himself steady. He took hold of a fold of my gown and looked up attentively into my face.

  “He’s very quiet,” John Dee said softly.

  “He does not speak,” I said, smiling down at his upturned face. “But he is no fool. I know he understands everything. He will fetch things, and he knows their names. He knows his own name — don’t you, Danny? But he will not speak.”

  “Was he always like this?”

  The fear clenched at my heart: that I did not know what this child was like, and that if I admitted I did not know, someone might take him away from me. He was not my child, not born of my body, but his mother had put him into my arms and his father was my husband, and whatever I owed to my husband Daniel in terms of love and duty might be redeemed by my care for his son.

  “I don’t know, he was with his wet nurse in Calais,” I lied. “She brought him to me when the city was under siege.”

  “He might be frightened,” John Dee suggested. “Did he see the fighting?”

  My heart contracted, I could feel it like a pain. I looked at him incredulously. “Frightened? But he is only a little baby. How would he know when he was in danger?”

  “Who knows what he might think or understand?” John Dee said. “I don’t believe that children know nothing but what is taught them, as if they were empty pots for the filling. He will have known one home and one woman caring for him, and then he might have been afraid, running through the streets to look for you. Children know more than we allow, I think. He might be afraid to speak now.”

  I leaned over him, and his bright dark eyes looked back at me, like the liquid eyes of a little deer. “Daniel?” I asked.

  For the first time I thought of him as a real person, someone who might think and feel, someone who had been in the arms of his mother and felt himself thrust violently from her, into the arms of a stranger. Someone who had seen his mother ridden down by a horse and gored by a lance, who had seen his mother die in the gutter and then felt himself carried like an unwanted parcel on a boat, unloaded without explanation in England, jolted and jogged on the back of a horse to some cold house in the middle of nowhere, with no one he knew.

  This was a child who had seen his mother die. This was a child without a mother. I leaned over him, I could feel the prickle of hot tears underneath my eyelids. This was a child whose grief and fear I, of all people, could understand. I had hidden my own childhood fear behind all the languages of Christendom, in becoming fluent in every tongue. He, so much smaller, so much more afraid, had gone mute.

  “Danny,” I said gently. “I will be your mother. You will be safe with me.”

  “Is he not your child?” John Dee asked. “He looks so like you.”

  I looked up at him and I was tempted to trust him with the truth but fear kept me silent.

  “Is he one of the Chosen People?” John Dee asked quietly.

  Silently, I nodded my head.

  “Circumcised?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Not in Calais, and here it is impossible.”

  “He might need the outward sign of being one of the People,” Dee suggested. “He might need to be among his people before he can speak.”

  I looked at him in bewilderment. “How would he know?”

  He smiled. “This little one has just come from the angels,” he said. “He would know more than all of us put together.”

  Lady Amy Dudley kept to her room for the next three days while Robert and John Dee rode out hunting, read in the library, gambled small sums of money, and talked, night and day, riding and walking, at dinner and at play as to what the future of the country might be, what shape the nobility and the parliament should take, how far the borders might extend overseas, what chance the small island kingdom of England had against the great continental powers, and — John Dee’s great obsession — how England was uniquely placed to send out ships the world over and create a new form of kingdom, one which extended overseas, an empire. An empire which might dominate the unknown places of the world. He had calculated how big the world might be and he was convinced that there were great lands we had not yet touched. “Christopher Columbus,” he said to my lord. “A brave man but no mathematician. It is obvious that you cannot have a passage to China that you can broach within weeks. If you make the proper calculation you can show that the world is round but far, far greater than Columbus thought. And in that great extra quarter must be land. And how would it be if that land were to be English?”

  Often I walked or rode or dined with them and often they would ask me how things were done in Spain, what I had seen in Portugal, or what I thought might be the success of such a scheme. We were cautious not to discuss what sort of monarch might be on the throne to launch such confident and ambitious schemes. While the queen was waiting to give birth to a son and heir, nothing could be certain.

  On the evening of the third day of their visit my lord had a message from Dover, and left me and John Dee alone in the library. John Dee had drawn a map of the world after the model of his friend Gerard Mercator and tried to explain to me that I must think of the world as round, and think of this map as the skin of the world peeled off, like the skin peeled off an orange and laid flat.

  He struggled to make me see it until he laughed and said that I must be content to see angels, I clearly could not see longitude. He took up his maps and went with them to his room as Lord Robert came into the library with a piece of paper in his hand. “At last I have news of your husband, he is safe,” he said.

  I jumped to my feet and found I was trembling. “My lord?”

  “He was taken by the French who suspected him as a spy, but they are holding him with other English soldiers,” he told me. “I daresay I can arrange for him to be exchanged for other prisoners of war, or ransomed, or something.”

  “He is safe?” I asked.

  He nodded.

&n