“Is that not astrology?” I ask him, warningly.
He nods at my caution. “No, for I am not looking to foretell harm,” he says. “It is illegal to foretell the death of a prince, but it is harmless to foresee their happiness.” He turns his bright look on Elizabeth. “May I choose the best day for your marriage, as I did for your coronation?”
Elizabeth laughs affectedly. “Not mine, good philosopher. You know that I am not that way inclined. I have just been forced to disappoint the archduke Ferdinand. I told him I would rather be a spinster milkmaid than a married queen!”
“Celibacy is a calling,” John Dee replies, and I fight to keep my face grave at the thought of Elizabeth as a nun. I don’t dare to look at Thomasina, who keeps her head down.
At a little distance from our charmed circle the ladies sigh with boredom and shift position. The courtiers stand against the walls, talking among themselves, and one or two lean back against the paneling for weariness. Nobody is allowed to sit, though John Dee has been reading from his book for two hours.
Dee takes up another page and shows it to the queen as William Cecil enters the room quietly and bows.
“Forgive the interruption to your studies,” he says in a low voice. “But you wanted to know as soon as the Queen of Scots gave permission for Lady Margaret Douglas’s husband to enter Scotland.”
The boy my pretty kinsman Henry Stuart, yawning in a corner, catches the whisper of his mother’s name and looks up, but Elizabeth and Cecil are head-to-head.
“Queen Mary has never agreed?” she exclaims, hiding her beam behind a painted fan.
Cecil bows. “She has.”
She takes his sleeve and pulls him closer. Only Thomasina and I can hear their whispered conference. “But I only asked because I was certain she would refuse him admission to his Scots lands,” she whispers. “I only asked in order to distract and trouble Mary while she was negotiating with Don Carlos of Spain.”
“You have won more than you intended, then,” Cecil says smoothly. “You have outwitted her. For she has given permission to both the Earl of Lennox and his son to enter Scotland, and as papists they are certain to divide her from her Protestant advisors. Shall they go, or would it be safer to keep the youth here?”
Elizabeth beckons to Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, a fair-headed boy as beautiful as a girl. He is a cousin of mine, since he is the son of Lady Margaret Douglas, but I can’t say we share much family feeling. I have never liked his mother, who revels in Elizabeth’s unfairness—she goes free while my sister is imprisoned; her stock rises while my sister’s falls. I swear that she thinks of herself as heir to the throne while everyone knows that it should be Katherine.
Henry Stuart himself came back from France to serve like a little bird in the cage of court: he warbles away to please the queen but the cage door never opens. His mother would put him anywhere that he might be seen: she thinks he is irresistible. It is an open secret that she hoped he would marry Mary Queen of Scots, but the queen managed to resist his rosy-lipped promises in the first days of her widowhood. Now he bows low to Elizabeth, and he nods to me; but we neither of us waste much time on the other. He is a vain young man with little interest in any woman of any size. What he knows to perfection is how to please older indulgent women who enjoy the company of a pretty boy, like his mother or the queen. All he likes for himself is to get drunk and range around the town looking for trouble with other pretty boys. Either way, I do not attract his attention, and he does not waste any on me.
“You may tell your father that he has his passport from the Queen of Scots, at my request,” Elizabeth says to Henry Stuart. He flushes like a girl and drops to one knee. Elizabeth smiles on him. “Will you want to go to Scotland with him?” she asks.
“Not to leave you!” he exclaims, as if his heart might break. “I mean, forgive me, I spoke too swiftly. I will do whatever you command, whatever my father commands. But I don’t want to leave this court for another. Does one go from the sun to the moon?”
“You will have to go, if your father needs you,” Elizabeth rules.
His eyes shine as he flicks his long fringe out of his eyes; he is as adorable as a golden spaniel puppy. “May I not stay?”
Elizabeth reaches out to him and sweeps the blond locks from his rose-petal face. “Yes,” she says indulgently. “I cannot spare you. Your father, Lord Lennox, shall go and settle his business on his lands and you shall stay safe as a little bird in the nest with me.”
Cecil raises his eyebrows at the queen’s doting tone, and says nothing. Henry Stuart presumes to catch Her Majesty’s hand and presses it to his lips. Elizabeth smiles and allows him to take the liberty.
“I shall never leave you,” he swears. “I couldn’t bear it.”
Certainly, I know that he won’t, for Thomas Keyes has orders not to let him out of the gate. But this is the masque of courtly love, and that is more important than any mundane truth.
“I know you never will,” Elizabeth purrs, like a fat cat with the pleasure of his attention.
“I am not like Robert Dudley! Isn’t he going to Scotland to marry the queen?” Darnley asks, dropping poison on the sugarloaf.
Elizabeth’s face convulses under the paint. “He goes for love of me,” she rules.
WHITEHALL PALACE,
LONDON, AUTUMN 1564
James Melville, a softly spoken Scots charmer, deployed by Mary, his queen, to inveigle Elizabeth into declaring her as heir, comes to our court at the end of the summer. The days are warm, but the nights are getting cooler; the leaves are changing color and blazing in bronze and gold and red. Elizabeth, who loves the hot weather, lingers over her summer pleasures and insists that we go out on the royal barge to see the sunset on the river, even though the twilight brings a cold wind down the valley.
The queen summons the Scots diplomat to sit beside her throne at the center of the barge. I am on one side, Kat Ashley, restored to favor, on the other. Thomasina the dwarf is standing on a box in the prow so that she can see the flow of the silvery stream ahead. I turn my gaze away from her. I don’t like to see her standing up like a child to wave at the fishermen, at the rowers of the wherries.
Elizabeth is head-to-head with the Scots advisor. Whatever she is saying, she hopes to keep it secret. But I can read his discreet smile as clearly as my sister Jane could read Greek. I know exactly what she is telling him—she is telling him that he has to persuade Mary Queen of Scots to marry Robert Dudley, and in reward she will be given my sister Katherine’s rights: she will be named as Elizabeth’s heir. She is promising him that Katherine will be kept under house arrest until that day, that any campaign for her will be silenced, that any publications will be suppressed. Elizabeth is favoring Mary Queen of Scots as her heir, and my sister will be ignored by everyone until it is agreed.
I dare not glance across at Kat Ashley, who must disapprove of this madness as much as Melville, as much as William Cecil, as much as the reluctant bridegroom, Robert Dudley himself. I dare not look at any of the ladies for fear of someone winking at me. None of us thinks that when the moment comes for him to leave, Elizabeth will bring herself to let her lover go. None of us thinks that Mary will be grateful for a castoff. None of us thinks that Robert Dudley—even with his immense ambition—will dare to reach as high as a queen who is not already compromised by his lovemaking. But Elizabeth gives every appearance of being determined; and she whispers and whispers earnestly to the Scots ambassador, until, finally, he nods in agreement, bows, and steps back.
Elizabeth leans back in her chair and smiles at her beloved Kat. “He’ll do it” is all she says. “He will convince her. And she will take Dudley.”