off. Above all I pitied Master Byrd, the queen’s master of music, obliged to keep a choir of young boys focused on performing his new Christmas compositions while competing for their attention with a leopard.
Beside me, Castelnau’s steps halted. I followed his lead and we knelt, eyes still fixed to the ground. Ahead I could see the wooden scaffolding that supported the raised platform where she sat, appraising us.
“Rise,” she commanded, at length.
I stood slowly, knowing not to look up until I was addressed directly. I took in the vast skirt of plum-coloured velvet immediately in front of me, so dark it was almost black, with a central panel of intricate gold thread sewn with cherry-red garnets, tiny seed pearls, and lozenges of onyx that glittered blackly in the candlelight. I raised my head enough that my eyes were level with the white hands folded in her lap, heavy with gold rings and holding a fan of ostrich plumes, the handle decorated with the same stones in the same arrangement as those on her gown.
“Well, Monseigneur de Castelnau,” the queen said, raising her voice so the whole court could hear the amusement in her tone, “your counterpart from Bohemia brings me a leopard. Can you better that?”
“I hope so, Your Majesty,” Castelnau said, in the special ingratiating tone he reserved for diplomacy. “A leopard is a wonder of nature, it is true, but I bring you the wonders of the heavens.”
“An extravagant claim. And is this he?” The ostrich feathers waved in my direction. A ripple of laughter spread through the audience. I felt myself blush. Castelnau seemed unruffled.
“This, Your Majesty, is Doctor Giordano Bruno, author of the most original and provocative book to be published in Europe since the Pole Copernicus printed
“He sounds more dangerous than a leopard. Come, Doctor Bruno—let me look at you.”
I swallowed hard, raised my head, and looked her in the eye for the first time.
She was fifty-one years old, but her face in its white mask of ceruse with pencilled brows and scarlet painted lips seemed ageless, like the face of a statue or a character in a classical play. It was a long face, stern and imperious, perched above its wide lace ruff, entirely fixed in its self-possession. Only the dark eyes betrayed the vivacity she was apparently famed for in her youth. They raked my face now as you might scan a page of text and returned to hold my gaze, steady and unblinking. According to Walsingham, it was she who had expressed a wish to see me in person after hearing about the events in Canterbury, and he, through Sidney, who had contrived this means of presentation without compromising my place in the ambassador’s household.
“I have heard of you. You are King Henri’s tame philosopher, are you not? The one who upsets the Catholic Leaguers and the learned doctors of the Sorbonne every time you open your mouth.”
“This is true, Your Majesty. In Paris, King Henri had to keep me muzzled like your leopard, lest I offend.”
She laughed.
“Perhaps I should try that with some of my courtiers. And is your book as radical as Copernicus?”
“More so, Your Majesty,” I said, stepping forward in my eagerness. “Copernicus did not follow his argument to its logical conclusion. If the Earth and the other planets revolve about the Sun, we may also posit that the fixed stars are not fixed. That is to say, there may be no limit to the universe. And who is to say there might not be other suns out there, with other worlds?”
From behind me, I heard disapproving intakes of breath. Queen Elizabeth only nodded, her jewels catching the light, and I thought suddenly of Mistress Blunt and Rebecca, and how much they would give to be standing in my place.
“Would they be identical to ours, do you suppose, these other worlds? What do you think, Robin?” She turned to her right, where the Earl of Leicester sat beside her on a carved chair several inches lower than her own. Another man might have been made awkward by this deliberate reminder of status, but Leicester, still impeccably handsome in his fifties, with his close-cropped grey hair and angular jaw, merely arranged himself across the chair, stretched out his long legs to the edge of the dais and smiled. “Would I still be queen?”
“Your Majesty—it is impossible to imagine a world in which you were not queen,” Castelnau cut in, with a sweeping bow.
“Really?” The queen arched one thin brow. “There are plenty of your countrymen in Paris, Michel, who, together with my cousin Mary, find it all too easy to imagine such a world.” Sycophantic laughter bubbled around us and died away. “Here, let me look. Robin, hold this.” She passed the ostrich fan to Leicester, who folded it in his lap. I caught his eye and he gave me the briefest of nods. I wondered if he was remembering, as I was, the last time he and I had met in a royal palace, when one of the queen’s young maids of honour had been found murdered. The queen held her hands out for the book and I placed it into them, bowing as I did so. She laid her hands flat on the cover without opening it.
“But if the universe is infinite, sir—if we are but one world among many,” she said, in a softer voice, no longer performing for the crowd, “how do we understand our place in God’s design? What is our worth, if we are no longer the masterpiece of Creation?”
I hesitated; my answers to these questions were complex and, perhaps even to this intellectually curious woman, potentially heretical. I weighed my words carefully before responding.
“Does it not rather increase our worth when we consider the enormity of Creation with new eyes? To realise that we are no longer prisoners of a fixed order, but citizens of infinity?” I could have gone further, but there was a warning light in her eyes.
“The cosmos demands order, sir, just as society demands it. If people were no longer certain of their place in the grand design …” She left the thought unfinished, but I understood. If the Earth can be so easily deposed from the centre of the cosmos, if Man can lose the sovereignty over creation that the Holy Scriptures tell us he has by God’s gift, people might lose their respect for the divine order, and a real sovereign could be toppled with the same apparent insouciance.
“Nevertheless, I shall read your book with great interest, Doctor Bruno, and perhaps we shall have the opportunity to discuss it further. I should like that. Of course,” she added, her eyes glinting in the frozen white of her face, “you know Copernicus had the good sense to wait until he was dead before committing his theory to print.”
“He did not have the good fortune to live in Your Majesty’s more enlightened realm,” I countered, permitting myself a smile that was almost flirtatious. I had noticed the same tendency in Castelnau. Despite her age and the absence of beauty, she had a curious ability to inspire among her male courtiers the same desire to impress that beauty commands.
Instead of acknowledging this as the flattery it was meant to be, she tilted her head to one side, considering the truth of it.
“Enlightened. Perhaps. Even so, there are limits.” She ran her fingertips over the embossed design on the cover. “Still, it is a brave man who will cling to his ideas in the face of all opposition. We should never have seen the New World were it not for men like that.”
“Your Majesty, my aim is to chart the unknown universe just as your explorers and cartographers have mapped this terrestrial globe,” I said, perhaps too boldly. Behind me, the whispering gradually fell silent.
“I see you are ambitious, whatever else you are,” she said, with a twitch of her brow. “Very well, then, Doctor Bruno—we shall look forward to your dispatches from these unknown territories. What think you, Lord Burghley?” She turned to her left, the strings of pearls around her neck tinkling gently against her jewelled gown with the movement. “Should you like to have infinity mapped for you?”
Beside her, the lord high treasurer smoothed his white hair and looked at me, his round face creased in consternation. I wondered if he were also remembering the murders last year, when we had first met.
“I confess the very thought of infinity makes me a little dizzy,” he said, running a hand over his velvet skullcap. “I have not the mind to comprehend it.”
“Only a fearless mind would attempt it,” the queen said. She was watching me with an expression that was difficult to read, though I fancied the ghost of a smile was hovering around the painted lips. “But remember—there is a fine line between courage and recklessness. Perhaps only time allows us to distinguish the one from the other.” She held up the book and fixed me with a significant look. “England is grateful to you, Doctor Bruno.”
I held her gaze for a moment, understanding that this was the closest she was likely to come to acknowledging the service I had rendered her. Walsingham’s foot soldiers, his army of informers scurrying back and forth across the country carrying their nuggets of intelligence like ants, were supposed to be invisible to her. But I was no longer anonymous; she had seen me, she held my book in her hands. Perhaps my dream of finding a permanent home, and a patron who would understand the scale of my ideas, had moved a step closer. Without
