"My father told me to bid you farewell."

"Aye, he is right. You can leave me now. I will release you from your promise to love me. You are no longer my va.s.sal. I let you go."

It was little more than a joke to him. He knew as well as I did that you cannot release a girl from her promise to love a man. She either gets herself free or she is bound for life.

"I'm not free," I whispered. "My father told me to come to see you and to say good-bye. But I am not free. I never will be."

"Would you serve me still?"

I nodded.

Lord Robert smiled and leaned forward, his mouth so close to my ear that I could feel the warmth of his breath. "Then do this one last thing for me. Go to Lady Elizabeth. Bid her be of good cheer. Tell her to study with my old tutor, John Dee. Tell her to seek him out, and study with him, without fail. Then find John Dee and tell him two things. One: I think he should make contact with his old master, Sir William Pickering. Got that?"

"Yes," I said. "Sir William. I know of him."

"And two: tell him to meet also with James Crofts and Tom Wyatt. I think they are engaged in an alchemical experiment that is near to John Dee's heart. Edward Courtenay can make a chemical wedding. Can you remember all of that?"

"Yes," I said. "But I don't know what it means."

"All the better. They are to make gold from the basest of metal, and cast down silver to ash. Tell him that. He'll know what I mean. And tell him that I will play my part in the alchemy, if he will get me there."

"Where?" I asked.

"Just remember the message," he said. "Tell it back to me."

I repeated it, word for word, and he nodded. "And finally, come back to me just once, for one last time, and tell me what you can see in John Dee's mirror. I need to know. Whatever becomes of me, I need to know what will happen to England."

I nodded, but he did not let me go at once. He put his lips to my neck, just below my ear, a little brush of a kiss, a little breath of a kiss. "You're a good girl," he said. "And I thank you."

He let me go then, and I stepped back, backward and backward from him as if I could not bear to turn away. I tapped on the door behind me, and the guard swung it open. "G.o.d bless you and keep you safe, my lord," I said. Lord Robert turned his head and gave me a smile which was so sweet that it broke my heart even as the door closed and hid him from me.

"G.o.d speed, lad," he replied evenly, to the closing door, and then it was shut and I was in the darkness and the cold and without him once more.

In the street outside I took to my heels and started to run home. A shadow suddenly stepped out of a doorway and blocked my way. I gasped in alarm.

"Hush, it's me, Daniel."

"How did you know I was here?"

"I went to your father's shop and he told me you were taking books into the Tower for Lord Robert."

"Oh."

He fell into step beside me. "Surely you don't need to serve him now."

"No," I said. "He has released me." I very much wished that Daniel would go away so that I could think of the kiss on my neck and the warmth of Lord Robert's breath against my ear.

"So you won't serve him again," he said pedantically.

"I just said," I snapped. "I am not serving him now. I am delivering books for my father. It just happened to be to Lord Robert. I did not even see him. I just took them in and gave them to a guard."

"Then when did he release you from his service?"

"Months ago," I lied, trying to recover.

"When he was arrested?"

I rounded on him. "What does it matter to you? I am released from his service, I serve Queen Mary now. What more d'you need to know?"

His temper rose with mine. "I have a right to know everything that you do. You are to be my wife, your name will be mine. And while you insist on running from court to Tower, you put yourself into danger, and the rest of us into danger too."

"You're in no danger," I retorted. "What would you know of it? You've never done anything or been anywhere. The world has turned upside down and back again while you have stayed safe at home. Why should you be in danger?"

"I've not played off one master against another, and shown a false face and spied and given false witness, if that's what you mean," he said sharply. "I did not ever think those were great and admirable acts. I have kept my faith and buried my father according to my faith. I have supported my mother and my sisters, and I have saved money against the day of my marriage. Our marriage. While you run around the dark streets, dressed as a pageboy, serve in a Papist court, visit a condemned traitor, and reproach me for having done nothing."

I pulled my hand away from him. "Don't you see he's going to die?" I shouted, and then I was aware that the tears were streaming down my face. Angrily, I rubbed them away with my sleeve. "Don't you know that they're going to execute him and no one can save him? Or at best they'll leave him in there to wait and wait and wait and die of waiting? He can't even save himself? Don't you see that everyone I love seems to be taken from me, for no crime? With no way of saving them? Don't you think I miss my mother every day of my life? Don't you think I smell smoke every night in my dreams and now this man... this man..." I broke off in tears.

Daniel caught me by the shoulders, not in an embrace, but with a firm grip to hold me at arm's length so that he could read my face with a long, impartial, measuring glance. "This man is nothing to do with the death of your mother," he said flatly. "Nothing to do with someone dying for their faith. So don't dress up your l.u.s.t as sorrow. You have been serving two masters, sworn enemies. One of them was bound to end up in there. If it was not Lord Robert then it would have been Queen Mary. One of them was bound to triumph, one of them was bound to die."

I wrenched myself from his grip, pulling away from his hard unsympathetic eyes, and started to trudge for home. After a few moments I heard him come after me.

"Would you be weeping like this if it had been Queen Mary in there, with her head on the block?" he asked.

"Ssshhh," I said, always cautious. "Yes."

He said nothing, but his silence showed his great skepticism.

"I have done nothing dishonorable," I said flatly.

"I doubt you," he said, as coldly as me. "If you have been honorable it has only been for lack of opportunity."

"Wh.o.r.eson," I said under my breath so he could not hear, and he marched me home in silence and we parted at my doorway with a handshake which was neither cousinly nor loving. I let him go, I would have been glad to throw a large volume at his retreating upright head. Then I went in to my father and wondered how long it would be before Daniel came to see him to say that he wanted to be released from our betrothal, and what would happen to me then.

As fool to the queen I was expected to be in her chambers every day, at her side. But as soon as I could be absent for an hour without attracting notice, I took a chance, and went to the old Dudley rooms to look for John Dee. I tapped on the door and a man in strange livery opened it and looked suspiciously at me.

"I thought the Dudley household lived here," I said timidly.

"Not any more," he said smartly.

"Where will I find them?"

He shrugged. "The d.u.c.h.ess has rooms near the queen. Her sons are in the Tower. Her husband is in h.e.l.l."

"The tutor?"

He shrugged. "Gone away. Back to his father's house, I should think."

I nodded and took myself back to the queen's rooms, and sat by her feet on a small cushion. Her little dog, a greyhound, had a cushion that matched mine; and dog and I sat, noses parallel, watching with the same brown-eyed incomprehension, while the courtiers came and made their bows and applied for land and places and favors of grants of money, and sometimes the queen patted the dog and sometimes she patted me; and dog and I stayed mum, and never said what we thought of these pious Catholics who had kept the flame of their faith so wonderfully hidden for so long. Well-hidden while they proclaimed the Protestant religion, hidden while they saw Catholics burned, waiting till this moment, like daffodils at Easter, to burst forth and flower. To think that there were so many believers in the country, and n.o.body knew them till now!

When they were all gone she walked up to a window embrasure where no one could hear us and beckoned for me. "Hannah?"

"Yes, Your Grace?" I went to her side at once.

"Isn't it time you were out of your pageboy livery? You will be a woman soon."

I hesitated. "If you will allow it, Your Grace, I would rather go on dressed as a pageboy."

She looked at me curiously. "Don't you long for a pretty gown, and to grow your hair, child? Don't you want to be a young woman? I thought I would give you a gown for Christmas."

I thought of my mother plaiting my thick black hair and winding the plaits around her fingers and telling me I would become a beauty, a famously beautiful woman. I thought of her chiding me for my love of rich cloth, and how I had begged for a green velvet gown for Hanukkah.

"I lost my love of finery when I lost my mother," I said quietly. "There's no pleasure in it for me without her to choose and fit the dresses on me, and tell me that they suit me. I don't even want long hair without her here to plait it for me."

Her face became tender. "When did she die?"

"When I was eleven years old," I lied. "She took the plague." I would never risk revealing the truth that she had been burned as a heretic, not even with this queen who looked so gravely and sorrowfully into my face.

"Poor child," she said gently. "It is a loss that you never forget. You can learn to bear it, but you never forget it."

"Every time something good happens to me I want to tell her. Every time something bad happens I want her help."

She nodded. "I used to write to my mother, even when I knew that they would never allow me to send my letters to her. Even though there was nothing in them that they could have objected to, no secrets, just my need for her and my sorrow that she was far from me. But they would not let me write to her. I just wanted to tell her that I loved her and I missed her. And then she died and I was not allowed to go to her. I could not even hold her hand and close her eyes."

She put her hand to her eyes and pressed her cool fingertips against her eyelids, as if to hold back old tears.

She cleared her throat. "But this cannot mean that you never wear a gown," she said lightly. "Life goes on, Hannah. Your mother would not want you to grieve. She would want you to grow to be a woman, a beautiful young woman. She would not want her little girl to wear boy's clothes forever."

"I don't want to be a woman," I said simply. "My father has arranged a marriage for me, but I know I am not yet ready to be a woman and a wife."

"You can't want to be a virgin like me," she said with a wry smile. "It's not a course many women would choose."

"No," I said. "Not a virgin queen like you, I have not dedicated myself to being a single woman; but it's as if..." I broke off. "As if I don't know how to be a woman," I said uncomfortably. "I watch you, and I watch the ladies of the court." Tactfully I did not add that of them all, I watched the Lady Elizabeth, who seemed to me to be the epitome of the grace of a girl and the dignity of a princess. "I watch everyone, and I think I will learn it in time. But not yet."

She nodded. "I understand exactly. I don't know how to be a queen without a husband at my side. I have never known of a queen without a man to guide her. And yet I am so afraid of marrying..." She paused. "I don't think a man could ever understand the dread that a woman might feel at the thought of marriage. Especially a woman like me, not a young woman, not a woman given to the pleasures of the flesh, not a woman who is even very desirable..." She put a hand out to prevent me from contradicting her. "I know it, Hannah, you needn't flatter me.

"And worse than all of these things, I am not a woman who finds it easy to trust men. I hate having to sit with the men of power. When they argue in council, my heart thumps in my chest, and I am afraid that my voice will shake when I have to speak.

"And yet I despise men who are weak. When I look at my cousin Edward Courtenay that the Lord Chancellor would have me marry, I could laugh out loud at the thought of it. The boy is a puppy and a vain fool and I could never, never debase myself to lie under such a one as him.

"But if one married a man who was accustomed to command..." She paused. "What a terror it would be," she said quietly. "To put your heart in the keeping of a stranger! What a terror to promise to obey a man who might order you to do anything! And to promise to love a man till death..." She broke off. "After all, men do not always consider themselves bound by such promises. And what happens then to a good wife?"

"Did you think you would live and die a virgin?" I asked.

She nodded. "When I was a princess I was betrothed over and over again. But when my father denied me and called me his b.a.s.t.a.r.d, I knew that there would be no offers of marriage. I set away all thoughts of it then, and all thoughts of my own children too."

"Your father denied you?"

"Yes," the queen said shortly. "They made me swear on the Bible to my own b.a.s.t.a.r.dy." Her voice shook, she drew a breath. "No prince in Europe would have married me after that. To tell you the truth, I was so ashamed I would not have wanted a husband. I could not have looked an honorable man in the face. And when my father died and my brother became king, I thought I could be like a dowager, like a favorite old G.o.dmother, his older sister who might advise him, and I thought he would have children that I might care for. But now everything has changed and I am queen, and even though I am queen I find I still cannot make my own choices." She paused. "They have offered me Philip of Spain, you know."

I waited.

She turned to me as if I had more sense than her greyhound, as if I could advise her. "Hannah, I am less than a man and less than a woman. I cannot rule as a man, and I cannot give the country the heir that it has a right to desire. I am a half prince. Neither queen nor king."

"Surely, the country only needs a ruler it can respect," I said tentatively. "And it needs years of peace. I am new-come to this land but even I can see that men don't know what is right and wrong any more. The church has changed and changed again within their lifetimes and they have had to change and change with it. And there is much poverty in the city, and hunger in the country. Can't you just wait? Can't you just feed the poor and restore the lands to the landless, set men back to work and get the beggars and the thieves off the roads? Bring back the beauty to the church and give the monasteries back their lands?"

"And when I have done that?" Queen Mary asked, a strange shaking intensity in her voice. "What then? When the country is safe inside the church again, when everyone is well fed, when the barns are full and the monasteries and nunneries are prosperous? When the priests are pure in their living and the Bible is read to the people as it should be? When the Ma.s.s is celebrated in every village, and the matins bells ring out over all the fields every morning as they should do, as they always have done? What then?"

"Then you will have done the task that G.o.d called you to, won't you?..." I stammered.

She shook her head. "I will tell you, what then. Then illness or accident befalls me and I die childless. And the b.a.s.t.a.r.d of Anne Boleyn and the lute player Mark Smeaton steps up to claim the throne: Elizabeth. And the moment she is on the throne she throws off her mask and shows herself for what she is."

I could hardly recognize the hiss of her voice, the hatred in her face. "Why, what is she? What has she done to upset you so?"

"She has betrayed me," she said flatly. "When I was fighting for our inheritance, hers as well as mine, she was writing to the man who was marching against me. I know that now. While I was fighting for her as well as for myself she was making an agreement with him for when I was dead. She would have signed it on my execution block.

"When I took her into London at my side they cheered the Protestant princess, and she smiled at the cheers. When I sent her teachers and scholars to explain to her the errors of her faith she smiled at them, her mother's sly smile, and told them that now she understood, now she would receive the blessing of Ma.s.s.

"And then she comes to Ma.s.s like a woman forced against her conscience. Hannah! When I was no older than her I had the greatest men of England curse me to my face and threaten me with death if I did not conform to the new religion. They took my mother from me and she died ill and heartbroken and alone, but she never bowed the knee to them. They threatened me with the scaffold for treason! They threatened me with fire for heresy! They were burning men and women for less than I was saying. I had to cling to my faith with all my courage and I did not renounce it until the Emperor of Spain himself told me that I should do so, that I must renounce it, because to keep it was my death sentence. He knew they would kill me if I did not renounce my faith. But all I have done to Elizabeth is to beg her to save her own soul and be my little sister once more!"

"Your Grace..." I whispered. "She's only young, she will learn."

"She's not that young."

"She will learn..."

"If she is going to learn then she chooses the wrong tutors. She conspires with the kingdom of France against me, she has a band of men who would stop at nothing to see her inherit. Every day someone tells me of another foul plot, and always, the tendrils come back to her. Every time I look at her now, I see a woman steeped in sin, just like her mother, the poisoner. I can almost see her flesh going black from the sin from her heart. I see her turning her back on the Holy Church, I see her turning her back on my love, I see her rushing toward treason and sin."

"You said she was your little sister," I reminded her. "You said you loved her as if she was your own child."

"I did love her," the queen said bitterly. "More than she remembers. More than I should have done, knowing what her mother did to mine. I did love her. But she is not the child that I loved any more. She is not the little girl that I taught to write and read. She has gone wrong. She has been corrupted. She is steeped in sin. I cannot save her; she is a witch and the daughter of a witch."

"She's a young woman," I protested quietly. "Not a witch."

"Worse than a witch," she accused. "A heretic. A hypocrite. A wh.o.r.e. I know her for all these. A heretic because she takes the Ma.s.s; but I know her to be a Protestant, and she is forsworn with her eyes on the Host. A hypocrite because she does not even own to her faith. There are brave men and women in this land who would go to the stake for their error; but she is not one of them. When my brother Edward was on the throne she was then a shining light of the reformed religion. She was the Protestant princess in her dark gowns and her white ruffs and her eyes turned down and no gold or jewels in her ears or on her fingers. Now he is dead she kneels beside me to see the raising of the Host, and crosses herself, and curtsies to the altar, but I know it is all false. It is an insult to me, which is nothing; but it is an insult to my mother who was pushed aside for her mother, and it is an insult to the Holy Church, which is a sin against G.o.d himself.

"And, G.o.d forgive her, she is a wh.o.r.e because of what she did with Thomas Seymour. The whole world would know it; but that other great Protestant wh.o.r.e hid the two of them, and died in hiding it."

"Who?" I asked. I was appalled and fascinated, all at once, remembering the girl in the sunlit garden and the man who held her against a tree and put his hand up her skirt.

"Katherine Parr," Queen Mary said through her teeth. "She knew that her husband Thomas Seymour had been seduced by Elizabeth. She caught them at it in Elizabeth's chamber, Elizabeth in her shift, Lord Thomas all over her. Katherine Parr bundled Elizabeth off to the country, out of the way. She faced down the gossip, she denied everything. She protected the girl - well, she had to, the child was in her house. She protected her husband, and then she died giving birth to his child. Fool. Foolish woman."

She shook her head. "Poor woman. She loved him so much that she married him before my father was cold in the ground. She scandalized the court, and she risked her place in the world. And he rewarded her by tickling a fourteen-year-old girl in her house, under her supervision. And that girl, my Elizabeth, my little sister, wriggled under his caresses and protested that she would die if he touched her again, but never locked her bedroom door, never complained to her stepmother and never found a better lodging.

"I knew of it. Good G.o.d, there was such gossip even I, hidden away in the country, heard of it. I wrote to her and said she should come to me, I had a home, I could provide for us both. She wrote me very sweetly, very fair. She wrote to me that nothing was happening to her and that she did not need to move house. And all the time she was letting him into her chamber in the morning, and letting him lift the hem of her gown to see her shift, and one time, G.o.d help her, letting him cut her gown off her, so that she was all but naked before him.

"She never sent to me for help, though she knew I would have taken her away within the day. A little wh.o.r.e then, and a wh.o.r.e now, and I knew it, G.o.d forgive me, and hoped that she might be bettered. I thought if I gave her a place at my side, and the honor which would be hers, then she would grow into being a princess. I thought that a young wh.o.r.e in the making could be unmade, could be made anew, could be taught to be a princess. But she cannot. She will not. You will see how she behaves in the future when she has the chance of a tickling once again."

"Your Grace..." I was overwhelmed by the spilling out of her spite.