There is no point complaining that he always does whatever the queen wants, that he never opposes her. You don’t get to be a favorite at a tyrant’s court without beheading your principles every day. All I can do is to try to keep him on Katherine’s side.
“Sir Robert, this is cruel to my sister and to her little boys. They have done nothing. She has done nothing. Someone else commissioned this book—perhaps even friends of yours—but she did not. Someone wrote it—not her. Someone published it—not her. Can’t you ask for her to be free? Even if you have to arrest these others?”
He shakes his dark head. “The queen won’t listen to me about this,” he says. “She won’t listen to anyone. She has the right to grant pardon only where it pleases her.”
“Margaret Douglas our cousin has been forgiven for far worse!”
“That is Her Majesty’s decision. It is within her power.”
“I know that!” I say. “She is—”
He throws his hand up to remind me that he cannot hear anything that is critical of the woman who rules us both.
“She is determined,” I continue, and as he turns and goes I whisper to myself: “Determined to be vile.”
I am at the gatehouse with Thomas Keyes, who is watching the gate and the guard on duty from the little window, when I hear the clatter of horses, and Thomas says: “That’s your sister’s advocate, under arrest, poor fellow.”
He lifts me up onto a stool so I can peep out of the window to see, and not be seen. Hales rides in on a poor horse and behind him I see another man, his face downturned, in the center of an armed guard.
“My God! And that is my uncle John. John Grey, who was keeping my sister!”
Thomas leaves me, taking up his black staff of office. I hear his shout of challenge and then he opens the gate to them, admits them, and comes back to me, putting his great staff back in the corner and loosening his leather belt.
“But what have they done?” he asks me, his kind face puzzled. “Is it just for writing their book?”
“Yes,” I say bitterly. “You know my uncle would never do anything against Elizabeth. He has been loyal to her forever. And John Hales himself says that all he was trying to do was to prove the case for a Protestant to succeed. He wasn’t calling for Katherine to take Elizabeth’s place, just for her to be named as heir if Elizabeth should die without a son.”
“The Privy Council will see that,” Thomas says hopefully.
“Unless they close their eyes very tight,” I say bitterly.
GREENWICH PALACE,
SUMMER 1564
Elizabeth summons me to her bedchamber as she is dressing for dinner. She is seated before her table; her mirror of Venetian glass is before her, her red wig planted on its stand, candles all around her while her ladies meticulously, carefully paint her face with ceruse. She remains perfectly still, like a marble statue, as the mixture of white lead and vinegar is spread flawlessly from her hairline to her neck and down to her breasts. Nobody even breathes aloud. I freeze like all the other statues in the room until she opens her eyes, sees me in the mirror, and says, without moving her lips where the ceruse is drying, “Lady Mary, look at this.”
Obedient to the downward cast of her eyes, I step forward and when she blinks her permission, I take up the little book that is open before her.
The title is the Monas Hieroglyphica and the author is John Dee. It seems to be dedicated to the Holy Roman Emperor and the long preface challenges the reader to consider that the symbols of the planets are meaningful in themselves, and can be read as a language or as a code.
I look up and meet Elizabeth’s dark gaze in the mirror. “Look through it,” she orders through her closed lips. “What do you think?”
I turn the small pages. They are covered with designs and astronomical symbols and tiny print explaining what each one means, and how each fits with each other. I can see that there are some mathematical pages, demonstrating the connection between the symbols, and some that look more like philosophical writing, or even alchemy.
“I can’t understand it at first sight,” I say frankly. “I should have to study it for many days to understand it. I am sorry, Your Majesty.”
“I can’t understand it either.” Elizabeth exhales and a puff of white powder blows against the mirror. “But I think it is an extraordinary work. He brings together the symbols of the ancients, and the studies of the Muslims—he speaks of a universal world that exists alongside this one, behind this one, that we can sense but rarely see. But he thinks that these symbols describe it, and there is a language that can be learned.”
I shake my head in bewilderment. “I could read it carefully, if you wish, and write a digest,” I offer.
She smiles only slightly, so as not to crack the paint. “I shall read it with the author himself,” she says. “He is at my command. But you can sit and listen to our learned conversation, if you wish. I just wanted to see what you made of it, at first sight.”
“I have not had the privilege of your learning,” I say tactfully. “But I should be glad to know more. If I might listen to you, I am sure I would understand more.”
“But I hear on all sides that your sister Jane was such a scholar,” she says. “I hear that Roger Ascham is telling everyone that she was the greatest scholar of her time. He’s writing a book memorializing her. Everyone seems to want to publish these days—don’t they have enough to do?”
“He met her only once or twice,” I say, swallowing the desire to defend Jane against this old jealousy. “He hardly knew her.”
“I studied with the queen Kateryn Parr, too, remember,” Elizabeth says, brooding over long-ago rivalries.
“And I,” says Lady Margaret Douglas from the back of the room, desperate to join in and remind Elizabeth of her kinship. Elizabeth does not even turn her head.
“I am sure she never read anything like this book by Dr. Dee,” I say, trying to return Elizabeth to the present.
“Yes,” she says. “I daresay she would not have understood it.”
They paint her lips and darken her eyelashes and her eyebrows. They drop belladonna into her eyes to make them darken and sparkle. I stand holding the book, waiting to see if I am dismissed. This is not my night to serve her; it is not my night to paint the whited sepulcher that is this old queen. Tonight I should be free to do what I wish; but she keeps me here while she worries if I am clever enough to understand something that is unclear to her, fretting that my long-dead sister was a better scholar.
“At any rate, you don’t think it is heresy?” She rises from the table and they hold the skirt of her gown to her feet so that she can step in, and they can draw it up and tie it at her waist.
“I could not give an opinion,” I say guardedly. “Your Majesty would be the best judge of that. But I have always heard you speak well of John Dee.”
“I have,” she confirms. “And I am glad he has come back to England with such learning! I shall start to read his book tomorrow. You may join us.”
I curtsey as if I am most grateful. “Thank you, Your Majesty. I shall look forward to learning from you both.”
John Dee, dark-eyed, dark-gowned like a scholar, is surrounded by papers. Each one scrawled with a symbol, one pointed to the other, each one annotated with a dozen little notes. I see that he draws little hands with an accusing finger towards a paragraph that he wants us to note well. Elizabeth, his book open on her lap, sits among this scholarly storm, her eyes bright with attention. Thomasina, like an exquisitely dressed lapdog, kneels at her feet. I sit on a stool to one side; I will never cringe on the floor while Elizabeth sits.
John Dee speaks of the symbols of the stars: whatever is shown in the heavens is matched by what happens on the earth. “As above, so below,” he says.
“So can you foretell the marriages of princes?” Elizabeth asks.
“With great accuracy, if I had their dates, time, and location of their birth, which would tell me their astral house,” Dee replies.