The Queen's Fool Read online

  “Do you not know the Grey sisters?”

  “Hardly at all,” I said. “They are the king’s cousins. They say that Lady Jane does not want to marry, she lives only to study her books. But her mother and her father have beaten her till she agreed.”

  My father nodded, the forcible ordering of a daughter was no surprise. “And what else?” he asked. “What of Lord Robert’s father, the Duke of Northumberland?”

  “He’s very much disliked.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “But he is like a king himself. He goes in and out of the king’s bedroom and says that this or that is the king’s own wish. What can anyone do against him?”

  “They took up our neighbor the portrait painter only last week,” my father remarked. “Mr. Tuller. They said he was a Catholic and a heretic. Took him off for questioning, and he has not come back. He had copied a picture of Our Lady some years ago, and someone searched a house and found it hidden, with his name signed at the foot.” My father shook his head. “It makes no sense in law,” he complained. “Whatever their conviction, it makes no sense. When he painted the picture it was allowed. Now it is heresy. When he painted the picture it was a work of art. Now it is a crime. The picture has not changed, it is the law which has changed and they apply the law to the years when it did not exist, before it was written. These people are barbarians. They lack all reason.”

  We both glanced toward the door. The street was quiet, the door locked.

  “D’you think we should leave?” I asked, very low. I realized for the first time that now I wanted to stay.

  He chewed his bread, thinking. “Not yet,” he said cautiously. “Besides, where could we go that was safe? I’d rather be in Protestant England than Catholic France. We are good reformed Christians now. You go to church, don’t you?”

  “Twice, sometimes three times a day,” I assured him. “It’s a very observant court.”

  “I make sure I am seen to go. And I give to charity, and I pay my parish dues. We can do nothing more. We’ve both been baptized. What can any man say against us?”

  I said nothing. We both knew that anyone could say anything against anyone. In the countries that had turned the ritual of the church into a burning matter no one could be sure that they would not offend by the way they prayed, even by which direction they faced when they prayed.

  “If the king falls ill and dies,” my father whispered, “then Lady Mary takes the throne, and she is a Roman Catholic. Will she make the whole country become Roman Catholic again?”

  “Who knows what will happen?” I asked, thinking of my naming the next heir as “Jane” and Robert Dudley’s lack of surprise. “I wouldn’t put a groat wager on Lady Mary coming to the throne. There are bigger players in this game than you and I, Father. And I don’t know what they are planning.”

  “If Lady Mary inherits and the country becomes Roman Catholic again then there are some books I shall have to be rid of,” my father said anxiously. “And we are known as good Lutheran booksellers.”

  I put my hand up and rubbed my cheek, as if I would brush smuts away. At once he touched my hand. “Don’t do that, querida. Don’t worry. Everyone in the country will have to change, not just us. Everyone will be the same.”

  I glanced over to where the Sabbath candle burned under the upended pitcher, its light hidden but its flame burning for our God. “But we’re not the same,” I said simply.

  John Dee and I read together every morning like devoted scholars. Mostly he commanded me to read the Bible in Greek and then the same passage in Latin so that he might compare the translations. He was working on the oldest parts of the Bible, trying to unravel the secrets of the real making of the world from the flowery speech. He sat with his head resting in his hand, jotting notes as I wrote, sometimes raising his hand to ask me to pause as a thought struck him. It was easy work for me, I could read without comprehension, and when I did not know how to pronounce a word (and there were many such words) I just spelled it out, and Mr. Dee would recognize it. I could not help but like him, he was such a kind and gentle man; and I had a growing admiration for his immense ability. He seemed to me to be a man of almost inspired understanding. When he was alone he read mathematics, he played games with codes and numbers, he created acrostics and riddles of intense complexity. He exchanged letters and theories with the greatest thinkers of Christendom, forever staying just ahead of the Papal Inquisitions, which forbade the very questions that everyone’s work suggested.

  He had invented a game of his own that only Lord Robert and he could play, called Chess on Many Floors, for which Mr. Dee had invented a chessboard on three levels made of thick beveled glass, where the players could go up and down as well as along. It made a game of such difficulty that he and Lord Robert would play the same round for weeks at a time. Other times he would retreat into his inner study and be silent for all the afternoon or all the morning and I knew that he was gazing in the scrying mirror and trying to see what might exist in the world just beyond our own, the world of the spirits which he knew must be there, but which he glimpsed only occasionally.

  In his inner chamber he had a small stone bench, with a little fireplace hollowed out of the stone. He would light a charcoal fire, and suspend above it great glass vessels filled with herbs in water. A complicated network of glass tubes would drain liquor from one bottle to the other and then would stand and cool. Sometimes he would be in there for hours and all I would hear, as I copied page after page of numbers for him, was the quiet clink of one flask against another as he poured liquid into a vessel, or the hiss of the bellows as he heated the little fire.

  In the afternoons Will Somers and I practiced our sword fighting, leaving aside the comical tricks and concentrating on proper fighting, until he told me that I was a commendable swordsman for a fool, and that if I ever found myself in trouble I might use a sword to fight my way out: “Like a proud hidalgo,” he said.

  Although I was glad to learn a useful skill, we thought that the lessons would have been for nothing since the king continued to be so sick; until in May we were commanded to the great wedding feasts at Durham House in the Strand. The duke wanted a memorable wedding for his family and Will and I were part of an elaborate dinner entertainment.

  “You would think it a royal wedding,” Will said slyly to me.

  “How, royal?” I asked.

  He put his finger to his lips. “Jane’s mother, Frances Brandon, is King Henry’s niece, the daughter of his sister. Jane and Katherine are royal cousins.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And so?”

  “And Jane is to marry a Dudley.”

  “Yes,” I said, following this not at all.

  “Who more royal than the Dudleys?” he demanded.

  “The king’s sisters,” I pointed out. “Jane’s own mother. And others too.”

  “Not if you measure in terms of desire,” Will explained sweetly. “In terms of desire there is no one more royal than the duke. He loves the throne so much he practically tastes it. He almost gobbles it up.”

  Will had gone too far for me. I got to my feet. “I don’t understand,” I said flatly.

  “You are a wise child to be so dense,” he said and patted my head.

  Our sword fight was preceded by dancers and a masque and followed by jugglers, and we acquitted ourselves well. The guests roared with laughter at Will’s tumbles and my triumphant skill, and the contrast between our looks: Will so tall and gangling, thrusting his sword wildly this way and that; and me, neat and determined, dancing around him and stabbing with my little sword, and parrying his blows.

  The chief bride was as white as the pearls embroidered on her gold gown. Her bridegroom sat closer to his mother than to his new bride and neither bride nor groom spoke so much as one word to each other. Jane’s sister had been married to her betrothed in the same ceremony and she and he toasted each other and drank amorously from the same loving cup. But when the shout went up for a toast for Jane and Guilford, I could see that it cost Lad