My gaze slid past him to John Dee. “No,” I said flatly.

John Dee looked directly at me, his dark eyes meeting mine with honesty. “Hannah, I do not pretend that my ways are not dark and tortuous,” he said simply. “But you for one should be glad that I was there at St. Paul’s when you were arraigned to answer.”

“I was glad that my innocence was recognized,” I said staunchly. “And I don’t want to go in there again.”

“You will not,” he said simply. “My word on it.”

“So will you scry for us?” my lord pressed me.

I hesitated. “If you will ask a question for me,” I bargained with them.

“What is it?” John Dee asked.

“If my husband is alive or dead,” I said. “It’s all I want to know. I don’t even ask the future, if I shall see him again. I would be happy just to know that he is alive.”

“You love him so much?” Lord Robert asked skeptically. “Your young man?”

“I do,” I said simply. “I cannot rest until I know that he is safe.”

“I shall ask the angels and you shall scry for me,” John Dee promised. “Tonight?”

“When Danny is asleep,” I said. “I couldn’t do it while I was listening for him.”

“At eight o’clock?” Lord Robert asked. “Here?”

John Dee glanced around. “I will ask the men to bring up my table and my books.”

Lord Robert noticed the smallness of the room and made an impatient noise. “She always does this,” he said irritably. “She never puts my friends in the best chambers. She is sick with envy of them, I shall tell her…”

“There is plenty of room,” Dee said pacifically. “And she is bound to resent you coming with a great train when she will have wanted you to herself. Should you not go to her now?”

Lord Robert went reluctantly to the door. “Come with me,” he said. “Come, both of you, and we’ll take a glass of ale to wash down the dust from the road.”

I hung back. “I cannot come,” I said when he held the door for me.

“What?”

“She does not receive me,” I said awkwardly. “I am not invited to sit with her.”

Robert’s dark eyebrows snapped together. “I told her that she was to keep you with her as her companion until we decided where you should live,” he said. “Where do you dine?”

“At the table for the maids. I am not seated with your wife.”

He took a rapid step toward the stairs and then he checked himself and came back. “Come,” he said, holding out his hand to me. “I am master here, I do not have to argue to see my wishes done. Just come, and you shall dine with me now. She is a stupid woman who does not reward her husband’s loyal servants. And a jealous woman who thinks that a pretty face is safer seen from afar.”

I did not go to his outstretched hand. I smiled at him steadily, keeping my place in the window seat. “My lord,” I said. “I imagine you are going back to court within a few days?”

“Yes,” he said. “What of it?”

“Shall you take me with you?”

He looked surprised. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought.”

I felt my smile turn into a giggle. “I thought not,” I said. “So I may have to stay here for some weeks yet?”

“Yes. And so?”

“And so I would rather not spur your wife’s irritation into rage if you are going to blow in and out again like a spring wind that spoils the peace of the orchard.”

He laughed. “Are you at peace, my little orchard?”

“We are in a state of quiet enmity,” I said frankly. “But I would rather that, than the open warfare you would bring. Go and sit with her now, and I will meet you back here tonight.”

Robert patted me on the cheek. “God bless your caution, Hannah. I think I should never have given you to the king. I would be a better man today if I had kept your counsel.”

Then he ran downstairs whistling, and it made me shiver when I heard the wind at the castle windows whistle back at him.


I watched Amy at dinner. She never took her eyes off her husband throughout the prolonged meal. She ached to be the center of her husband’s attention but she had no skills to fascinate him. She knew nothing of the gossip of the court, she had not even heard of half of the names that he mentioned. I, seated below the salt, kept my eyes on my plate to prevent myself from looking up and laughing at a story about a woman I knew, or interrupting to ask him what had become of one young courtier or another.

Lady Amy did not even have the native wit to invite him to talk, even if she knew nothing herself. She pursed her lips whenever he spoke of a woman, she looked down in disapproval when he laughingly mentioned the queen. She was downright rude to John Dee whom she clearly regarded as a turncoat from the defeated Protestant cause. But she was no enthusiast for news of the Princess Elizabeth either.

I thought that when my lord had first met her he must have loved the unspoiled freshness of her, when she was a young girl who knew nothing of the court or of his father’s sly progress to power. When she was a simple squire’s daughter in Norfolk with big blue eyes and large breasts pressing against the neck of her gown, she must have seemed to be everything that the ladies of court were not: honest, unsophisticated, true. But now all those virtues were disadvantages to him. He needed a wife who could watch the direction of change, could trim her speech and style to the prevailing tides, and could watch and caution him. He needed a wife who was quick in understanding and skilled in any company, a wife he could take to court, and know he had a spy and an ally among the ladies.

Instead he was burdened with a woman who, in her vanity, was prepared to insult the chaplain of one of the most powerful priests in the country, who had no interest in the doings of the court and the wider world, and who resented his interest.

“We’ll never have another Dudley if she does not make more effort with him,” one of the upper maids whispered indiscreetly to me.

“What ails her?” I demanded. “I’d have thought she would be all over him.”

“She can never forgive him for going to court in his father’s train. She thought his imprisonment would teach him a lesson. Teach him not to overreach himself.”

“He’s a Dudley,” I said. “They’re born to overreach themselves. They’re from the greediest most ambitious line in the world. Only a Spaniard likes gold better than a Dudley, only an Irishman desires more land.”

I looked down the table at Amy. She was eating a sweetmeat, the sugared plum distending her mouth as she sucked on it. She was staring straight ahead, ignoring her husband’s intense conversation with John Dee. “You know her well?”

The older woman nodded. “Yes, and I’ve come to pity her. She likes a small station in life and she wants him to be small too.”

“She’d have done better to have chosen a country squire then,” I said. “For Robert Dudley is a man with a great future, not a small one, and he will never allow her to stand in his way.”

“She will pull him down if she can,” the woman warned.

I shook my head. “Not her.”


Amy had hoped to sit up late with her husband, or to go to bed early together, but at eight o’clock he made excuses and he and John Dee and I gathered in John Dee’s room with the door closed, the shutters across the window and only one candle lit and glowing in the mirror.

“Are you happy to do this?” John Dee asked.

“What are you going to ask?”

“If the queen will have a boy child,” Robert said. “There is nothing more important to know than this. And if we can win back Calais.”

I looked toward John Dee. “And if my husband lives,” I reminded him.

“We will see what is given us,” he said gently. “Let us pray.”

I closed my eyes and at the rolling gentle sounds of the Latin I felt myself restored, returned. I was at home again, at home with my gift, with my lord, and with myself. When I opened my eyes the candle flame was warm as well as bright on my face and I smiled at John Dee.

“You still have your gift?” he asked.

“I am sure of it,” I said quietly.

“Watch the flame and tell us what you hear or what you see.”

The candle flame bobbed in a little draft, its brightness filled my mind. It was like the summer sunshine of Spain, and I thought I heard my mother calling me, her voice happy and filled with confidence that nothing would ever go wrong. Then abruptly I heard a tremendous banging that made me gasp and leap to my feet, jolted out of my dream with my heart thudding in fear of arrest.

John Dee was white-faced. We were discovered and ruined. Lord Robert had his sword from his belt and a knife from his boot.

“Open up!” came the shout from the barred door and there was a great blow against the wood which made it rock inward. I was certain that it was the Inquisition. I crossed the room to Lord Robert. “Please, my lord,” I said rapidly. “Don’t let them burn me. Run me through, before they take me, and save my son.”

In one fluid movement he was up on the window seat, pulled me up beside him and kicked out the windowpane. “Jump out,” he advised me. “And run if you can. I’ll hold them for a moment.” There was another terrible blow on the door. He nodded at John Dee. “Open up,” he said.

John Dee flung open the door and Lady Amy Dudley fell into the room. “You!” she exclaimed as soon as she saw me, half out of the window. “As I thought! Whore!”

A servant behind her raised a mace in a half apologetic gesture. The Philipses’ elegant linenfold door panels were splintered beyond repair. Robert slammed his sword back into the scabbard, and gestured to John Dee. “Please, John, do shut what is left of the door,” he said wearily. “This will be halfway round the county by dawn.”

“What are you doing here?” Amy demanded, striding into the room, her eyes taking in the table, the candles, their flames guttering in the draft from the window, the holy symbols. “What foul lechery?”