The Queen's Fool Read online

  It was a long prayer in Latin, I understood it despite Mr. Dee’s English pronunciation of the words. It was a prayer for guidance and for the angels to come and protect the work we would do. I whispered “amen” and then I opened my eyes.

  The candles were all out. The mirror was a pool of darkness, black reflected in black, I could see nothing.

  “Show us when the king will die,” Mr. Dee whispered from behind me.

  I watched, waiting for something to happen, my eyes staring into the blackness.

  Nothing.

  “The day of the king’s death,” Dee whispered again.

  In truth, I could see nothing. I waited. Nothing came to me. How could it? I was not some sibyl on a Greek hillside, I was not some saint to whom mysteries were revealed. I stared into the darkness until my eyes grew hot and dry and I knew that far from being a holy fool I was a fool pure and simple, looking at nothing, at a reflection of nothing, while the greatest mind in the kingdom waited for my answer.

  I had to say something. There was no going back and telling them that the Sight came to me so seldom and so unheralded that they would have done better to leave me leaning against the wall of my father’s shop. They knew who I was, they had promised me sanctuary from danger. They had bought me and now they expected some benefit for their bargain. I had to say something.

  “July,” I said quietly, as good a reply as any.

  “Which year?” Mr. Dee prompted me, his voice silky and quiet.

  Common sense alone suggested that the young king could not live much longer. “This year,” I said unwillingly.

  “The day?”

  “The sixth,” I whispered in reply, and I heard the scratch of Lord Robert’s pen as he recorded my mountebank prophecy.

  “Tell the name of the next ruler of England,” Mr. Dee whispered.

  I was about to reply “Queen Mary,” echoing his own tranced tone. “Jane,” I said simply, surprising myself.

  I turned to Lord Robert. “I don’t know why I said that. I am most sorry, my lord. I don’t know…”

  John Dee quickly grasped my jaw, and turned my head back to the mirror. “Don’t talk!” he ordered. “Just tell us what you see.”

  “I see nothing,” I said helplessly. “I am sorry, I am sorry, my lord. I am sorry, I can’t see anything.”

  “The king who comes after Jane,” he urged me. “Look, Hannah. Tell me what you see. Does Jane have a son?”

  I would have said “yes” but my tongue would not move in my dry mouth. “I cannot see,” I said humbly. “Truly, I cannot see.”

  “A closing prayer,” Mr. Dee said, holding me in my chair by a firm grip on my shoulders. He prayed again in Latin that the work should be blessed, that the visions should be true, and that no one in this world nor in any other should be harmed by our scrying.

  “Amen,” I said, more fervently now that I knew this was dangerous work, perhaps even treasonous work.

  I felt Lord Robert rise to leave the room and I pulled away from Mr. Dee and ran after him.

  “Was it what you wanted?” I demanded.

  “Did you tell me what you thought I wanted to hear?”

  “No! I spoke as it came to me.” That was true of the sudden word “Jane,” I thought.

  He looked sharply at me. “Do you promise? Mistress Boy, you are no use to John Dee nor to me if you choose your words to please me. The only way you can please me is by seeing true and saying true.”

  “I am! I did!” My anxiety to please him and my fear of the mirror were together too much for me and I gave a little sob. “I did, my lord.”

  His face did not soften. “Swear?”

  “Yes.”

  He rested a hand on my shoulder. My head throbbed so much that I longed to lean my cheek against the coolness of his sleeve but I thought I should not. I stood stock-still like the boy he called me, to face his scrutiny.

  “Then you have done very well for me,” he said. “That was what I wanted.”

  Mr. Dee came out of the inner chamber, his face alight. “She has the Sight,” he said. “She has it indeed.”

  Lord Robert looked at his tutor. “Will this make a great difference to your work?”

  The older man shrugged. “Who knows? We are all children in darkness. But she has the Sight.” He paused, and then turned to me. “Hannah Verde, I must tell you one thing.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You have the Sight because you are pure in heart. Please, for yourself and for the gift you bear, refuse any offers of marriage, resist any seduction, keep yourself pure.”

  Behind me, Lord Robert gave a snort of amusement.

  I felt my color rise slowly from my neck to my earlobes to my temples. “I have no carnal desires,” I said in a voice as low as a whisper. I did not dare to look at Lord Robert.

  “Then you will see true,” John Dee said.

  “But I don’t understand,” I protested. “Who is Jane? It is Lady Mary who will be queen if His Grace dies.”

  Lord Robert put his finger on my lips and at once I was silent. “Sit down,” he said and pressed me into a chair. He drew up a stool and sat beside me, his face close to mine. “Mistress Boy, you have seen today two things that would have us all hanged if they were known.”

  My heart raced with fear. “My lord?”

  “Just by looking in the mirror you put us all in danger.”

  My hand went to my cheek as if I would wipe away smuts from a fire. “My lord?”

  “You must say not a word of this. It is treason to cast the horoscope of a king, and the punishment for treason is death. You cast his horoscope today and you foretold the day of his death. D’you want to see me on the scaffold?”

  “No! I…”

  “Do you want to die yourself?”

  “No!” I could hear a quaver in my voice. “My lord, I am afraid.”

  “Then never say one word of this to anyone. Not even to your father. As to the Jane of the mirror…”

  I waited.

  “Just forget all you saw, forget I even asked you to look in the mirror. Forget the mirror, forget the room.”

  I looked at him solemnly. “I won’t have to do it again?”

  “You will never have to do it again unless you consent. But you must forget it now.” He gave me his sweet seductive smile. “Because I ask it of you,” he whispered. “Because I ask it of you as your friend, I have put my life in your hands.”

  I was lost. “All right,” I said.

  The court moved to Greenwich Palace in February and it was given out that the king was better. But he never asked for me, nor for Will Somers, he did not ask for music nor for company, nor did he ever come to the great hall for dinner. The physicians, who had been in full-blown attendance with their gowns flapping, waiting in every corner of the court, talking amongst themselves and giving carefully guarded replies to all inquiries, seemed to slip away as the days wore on and there was no news of his recovery, and not even their cheerful predictions about leeches cleansing the young man’s blood and poison carefully administered killing his disease, seemed to ring very true. Lord Robert’s father, the Duke of Northumberland, was all but king in Edward’s place, seated at the right hand of an empty throne at dinner, taking the chair at the head of the council table every week, but telling everyone that the king was well, getting better all the time, looking forward to the finer weather, planning a progress this summer.

  I said nothing. I was being paid as a fool to say surprising and impertinent things but I could think of nothing more impertinent and surprising than the truth — that the young king was half prisoner to his protector, that he was dying without companions or nursing, and that this whole court, every great man in the land, was thinking of the crown and not of the boy; and that it was a great cruelty, to a boy only a little older than me and without a mother or a father to care for him, to be left to die alone. I looked around me at the men who assured each other that the young man of fifteen, coughing his lungs out in hiding