“How d’you plead?” Bishop Bonner asked me.

“I did not look from the elevation of the Host…” I started, my voice weary and hopeless. If John Dee was not going to support me then I was a dead woman on this one charge alone. And once they started to investigate my journey across Europe and the family of my betrothed, I would be identified as a Jew and that would mean the death of me, of my father, of Daniel, of his family, and of their friends, men and women I did not even know, families in London, in Bristol, in York.

“Oh! This is nothing but malice,” John Dee exclaimed impatiently.

“Eh?” the bishop said.

“Malicious complaint,” John Dee said briskly and pushed the ledger away. “Do they really think we have the time for maids’ gossip? We are supposed to be rooting out heresy here, and they bring us the quarrels of waiting maids.”

The bishop glanced at the paper. “Sympathy with heretics?” he queried. “That’s enough for burning.”

John Dee raised his head and smiled confidently at his master. “She’s a holy fool,” he said, laughter in his voice. “It’s her task in life to ask the questions that no sane man would ask. She talks nonsense, she is supposed to talk nonsense, shall we ask her to account for singing fiddle-dee-dee? Billycock sat on billycock hill? I think we should send out a very stiff letter to say that we will not be mocked by nonsensical accusations. We will not be used for the settling of servants’ rivalries. We are hunting out enemies of the faith, not tormenting half-wit girls.”

“Let her go?” the bishop asked, his eyebrows raised.

“Sign here,” John Dee said, sliding a paper across the desk. “Let’s get rid of her and get on with our work. The child is a fool, we would be fools to question her.”

I held my breath.

The bishop signed.

“Take her away,” John Dee said wearily. He swung round in his seat to face me. “Hannah Verde, also known as Hannah the Fool, we are releasing you from an inquiry into heresy. No charge to answer. D’you have wit enough to understand that, child?”

“Yes, sir,” I said very quietly.

John Dee nodded to the jailor. “Release her.”

I pushed myself up from the chair, my legs were still too weak to hold me. The guard slid a hand around my waist and kept me on my feet. “The women in my cell,” I said quietly to John Dee. “One is dying, and the other has had her fingernails ripped out.”

John Dee burst into a crack of laughter as if I had told him the most delightfully bawdy jest, and Bishop Bonner gave forth a great bellow.

“She is priceless!” the bishop shouted. “Anything else I can do for you, fool? Any complaints about your breakfast? About your bed?”

I looked from the red roaring face of the bishop to the twinkling smile of his clerk and shook my head. I bowed my head to the bishop, and to the man I had once been honored to know, and I left them with their bloodstained hands to interrogate innocent people and send them out to be burned.


I did not see how to get back to the court at Greenwich. When they turned me roughly out into the dirty street I wandered around at the back of St. Paul’s and stumbled blindly until I felt I had put a safe distance between the tower’s ominous reaching shadow and my frightened weaving steps. Then I slumped in a doorway like a vagrant and shook, as if I had the ague. A householder shouted at me to clear off and take the plague with me, and I moved on one doorway and collapsed again.

The bright sunshine burned into my face and showed me that it was past midday. After a long time on the cold step, I pushed myself up and walked a short way. I found I was crying like a baby and had to stop once more. Step by step I went on, pausing when my legs buckled underneath me until I found my way to our little shop off Fleet Street and hammered on our neighbor’s door.

“Dear God, what has become of you?”

I managed a twisted smile. “I have a fever,” I said. “I forgot my key, and lost my way. Would you let me in?”

He stepped back from me. In these times of hardship everyone was afraid of infection. “Do you need food?”

“Yes,” I said, too low for pride.

“I will leave you something on the doorstep,” he said. “Here’s the key.”

I took it wordlessly, and staggered to the shop. It turned in the lock and I stepped into the shuttered room. At once the precious scent of printers’ ink and dry paper surrounded me. I stood, inhaling it, the very perfume of heresy, the familiar beloved odor of home.

I heard the scrape and clink of a dish on the doorstep and went to fetch a pie and a little mug of ale. I ate sitting on the floor behind the counter, hidden from the shuttered windows, my back against the warm folios, smelling the perfume of the cured-leather binding.

As soon as I had eaten, I put the bowl back on the doorstep and locked the door. Then I went into my father’s print shop and store room and cleared the volumes from the bottom shelf. I did not want to sleep in my own little trestle bed. I did not even want to sleep in my father’s bed. I wanted to be closer to him than that. I had a superstitious terror that if I went to bed I would be dragged from sleep by Bishop Bonner again, but if I was in hiding with my father’s beloved books then they would keep me safe.

I put myself to sleep on the bottom shelf of his books collection. I tucked a couple of folio volumes under my cheek for a pillow and gathered some French quarto volumes to hold me into the shelf. Like a lost text myself, I curled up in the shape of a G and closed my eyes and slept.


In the morning, when I woke, I was determined on my future. I found a piece of manuscript paper and wrote a letter to Daniel, a letter I thought I would never write.


Dear Daniel,


It is time for me to leave the court and England. Please come for me and the printing press at once. If this letter miscarries or I do not see you within a week, I shall come on my own.


Hannah


When I sealed it up I was certain, as I had known in my heart for the last few months, that there was no safety for anyone in Queen Mary’s England any more.

There was a tap at the door. My heart plunged with the familiar terror, but then I could see, through the shutters, the silhouette of our next-door neighbor.

I opened the door to him. “Slept well?” he demanded.

“Yes,” I said.

“Ate well? They are a good baker’s?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Better now?”

“Yes. I am well.”

“Are you going back to court today?”

For a moment I hesitated, then I realized that there was nowhere else for me to go. If I went missing from court it was tantamount to a confession of guilt. I had to go back and act the part of an innocent woman rightly freed, until Daniel should come for me and then I could get away.

“Yes, today,” I said brightly.

“Would you see this gets to the queen?” he asked, abashed but determined. He offered me a trade card, an illustrated label which assured the reader that he could supply all the books that were moral and improving and approved by the church. I took it, and thought wryly that at my last visit to the shop I had made a comment about the paucity of reading that the church permitted. Now I would not speak a word against it.

“I will put it in her hands,” I lied to him. “You can depend upon it.”


I came back to a subdued court. The maids in waiting that I slept with had thought that I had gone to my father’s shop. The queen had not missed me. Only Will Somers cocked an inquiring eyebrow at me when I came into dinner and made his way over to my bench. I shifted up, and he sat down beside me.

“Are you well, child? You’re white as a sheet.”

“I’ve just got back,” I said shortly. “I was arrested.”

Any other person in the court would have found an excuse to move elsewhere to take his dinner. Will planted both elbows on the table. “Never!” he said. “How come you got out again?”

A little unwilling giggle escaped me. “They said I was a fool, and could not be held responsible.”

His crack of laughter made all the neighboring tables turn their heads and smile. “You! Well that’s good news for me. I shall know what to plead. And that’s what they truly said?”

“Yes. But, Will, it is no laughing matter. There were two women in there, one half dead from the rack and the other with her fingernails torn out of her hands. The whole house was packed from cellar to attic with men waiting their trial.”

His face grew somber. “Hush, child, there is nothing you can do about it now. You did what you could, and speaking out is perhaps what led you there.”

“Will, I was most afraid,” I said quietly.

His warm big hand took my cold fingers in a gentle grasp. “Child, we are all of us afraid. Better times coming, eh?”

“When will they come?” I whispered.

He shook his head without saying anything; but I knew that he was thinking of Elizabeth and when her reign might begin. And if Will Somers was thinking of Elizabeth with hope, then the queen had lost the love of a man who had been a true friend indeed.


I counted the days, waiting for Daniel’s arrival. Before I had gone downriver to Greenwich, I had put the letter in the hand of a shipmaster who was sailing to Calais that morning. I recited to myself his progress. “Say: it takes a day to Calais, then say a day to find the house, then say Daniel understands, and leaves at once, he should be with me inside a week.”

I decided that if I heard nothing from him within seven days that I would go to the shop, pack the most precious books and manuscripts in as large a box as I could manage, and take a passage to Calais on my own.

In the meantime I had to wait. I attended Mass in the queen’s train, I read the Bible to her in Spanish in her room every day after dinner, I prayed with her at her bedtime. I watched her unhappiness turn to a solid-seated misery, a state that I thought she would live and die in. She was in despair, I had never seen a woman in such despair before. It was worse than death, it was a constant longing for death and a constant rejection of life. She lived like darkness in her own day. It was clear that nothing could be done to lift the shadow which was on her; and so I, and everyone else, said and did nothing.