A voice still light and girlish. And yet almost, you might think, still a little unsure. Something I recognised in myself. Too much time spent with books, my tad would say – himself all Welsh and voluble.
‘I’m very well, Your Highness,’ I said. ‘And, um, I trust you also-?’
Looking up in time to perceive movement in her face, a small twist of a small, strawberry mouth. Nothing that could be construed as a smile.
‘So,’ she said, ‘your cold is better then?’
The high nose, the wide-spaced eyes. The hand had fallen away. Above her, the weak sun was trembling like the yolk of a fresh-cracked egg.
‘Um… cold?’
‘The ailment’ – her voice firmer now, the mouth suddenly resembling her father’s fleshy bud, but all I could think of was a knife-slash in wax – ‘which prevented you joining us last weekend.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Better, yes, thank you, madam. Yes… much better.’
‘So worrying, a cold.’ The Queen wore a fur cloak over riding apparel, and a fur hat. ‘Especially when we perceive the long winter grinding to its end.’
‘Certainly best kept within one’s own walls,’ I said carefully. ‘That is… rather than taken out and, um, given to other people.’
‘Or bears,’ said the Queen.
Her dark grey eyes half-lidded. Shuttered rooms, and I thought, Oh dear God.
My friend, Robert Dudley, mocks me for it.
Merely what happens in the wild, John. Bears, dogs, they’re all killers, and so are we. Part of us. What we are. We’re a fighting race, everything we have we’ve fought for and killed for. Sometimes we’re the bear and sometimes the dogs, depending upon whether we’re fighting to keep what we have or to grab more.
I point out to him that successful warfare is, and always has been, about cunning, intelligence and invention rather than blind savagery. Reminding him of the machinery I’ve fashioned to this end, the navigational aids to speed our supremacy on the seas. I insist, with a passion, that we have nothing to gain from observing the conflict of bears and dogs and only our humanity to lose. In war, I say, we fight to get it over, not to prolong agony in the cause of amusement.
Dudley shrugs.
Admit the truth, John. You’re a man of books, you simply have no stomach for it.
Well, yes: the anguished roaring and the frenzied yelps, those pitiful echoes from the ante-chambers of Hades… such barbarity I can live without.
But then, with a benign, faintly sorrowful smile, my friend and former student chooses his spot and inserts his blade.
You should see the Queen, John. Clapping her little hands and bobbing in her chair at each snap of the bloodied jaws. Oh my, the Queen has ever loved a bear-baiting…
Let no-one forget, in other words, whose daughter this was. The feelings of pity and distaste, I can cope with those, suppress them when necessary. But some involuntary disclosure of contempt… who dares risk that?
Thus, when invited to a banquet, to be attended by Her Majesty and followed by bear-baiting, I’d swiftly developed a cold.
Her perfume coloured the air. Always roses, as if the wave of a royal hand could alter the seasons. I saw my older cousin, Blanche Parry, the Queen’s First Gentlewoman, staying well back amongst the company of guards and courtiers and smirking hangers-on. Watching us, like to a white owl in a tree. Blanche had ever mistrusted me.
‘I’m afraid that, with a cold, I wasn’t a pretty sight,’ I said lamely. ‘My nose-’
‘-was in a book, as usual, I expect,’ the Queen said.
‘Yes,’ I said, humbled. ‘I expect it was.’
A hanging moment.
And then the Queen tilted her head back and laughed, and it was like to a flock of skylarks upon the air. After a breath, the whole company erupted, as if everyone’s throat had been released from some social ligature. Only Blanche Parry kept on watching me, unsmiling, as the Queen laid a gloved hand on my arm and steered me meaningfully away from her train.
‘I shouldn’t tease you, John.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s what it was.’
‘Sometimes,’ she said, as we passed into the orchard, ‘I think you know me – through your art, no doubt – better than anyone.’
My art? Dear God.
‘Though also,’ she said quickly, ‘through experiences of adversity which are common to us.’
I nodded, grateful for that. Her father’s daughter and her sister’s sister, and yet, unlike either of them, Elizabeth had heard the key turning from the other side. All too aware, at the time, of the black cards dealt to the Lady Jane Grey, at just sixteen. Awakening to the swish of the phantom axe, just as I would roll from the flames’ roar. How secure was she feeling, even now? Did she even know about the wax doll?
‘John, you invited me once, as I recall, to see your library.’
‘Um… yes, I believe I did… yes.’
Thinking at the time that she’d taken it the wrong way, or at least feigned as much. At twenty-six, she was only a few years younger than I.
‘The truth of it is,’ she murmured, ‘I had been most strongly advised to avoid your library.’
‘Avoid my… books?
Because of their heretical content?
‘Advised by someone who was recalling your efforts to persuade my late sister of the benefits of a national library.’
‘Oh…’
Breathing again. So that was it. The cost. It hadn’t worked on Mary, and I could certainly think of members of the present Privy Council for whom the provision and maintenance of a Library of England would be regarded as good money down the jakes.
‘It just seemed to me a tragedy,’ I said, ‘how many valuable works have disappeared in the years since the Reform. Many of them secretly sold by unscrupulous abbots and the like. But there’s no doubt that the, um, the founder of a national library would forever be remembered as the greatest patron of learning that this country had ever-’
‘ Tush, John-’ The Queen punched me on the upper arm. Her eyes dancing with merriment, a modest cluster of red-gold curls escaping from the fur hat. ‘It will happen. When we have sufficient funds to spare to do it properly. Meanwhile, we applaud your private efforts… how many books is it now?’
‘Nine hundred… and twelve.’
‘And twelve, ’ the Queen said solemnly. ‘A goodly collection.’
I may have blushed. It seemed ridiculous that I could remember the exact number. Most of them were scattered all over my mother’s house and my aim, when I could raise the money, was to build an extension to accommodate thousands more essential volumes.
‘John -’ the Queen, her moods ever mercurial, was looking into my eyes now with a sudden concern – ‘you seem tired.’
‘Working long hours, Your Highness, that’s all.’
‘To what end? May I ask?’
The Queen had long been fascinated by matters of the hidden, and we were well out of the hearing of her company. She and I alone in my mother’s high-walled orchard, not more than twenty yards from the riverbank, the sun making pin-lights among the ice-pearled apple-tree boughs.
Idyllic, except for the pikemen guarding its entrance. You could never lose the bloody pikemen.
‘John, last year we spoke of the Cabala. You gave me to think that the old mysticism of the Jews… that this would help us penetrate the innermost chambers of the heavens.’
I hesitated. My present work did, in part, have its origins in that rich and complex Hebrew mechanism for communion with higher realms. And, yes, my aim – never a secret – was to discover the levels to which the essence of earthly things, the composition and structure of all terrestrial matter, is ordered by the heavens. I was now in search of a code, maybe a single symbol which would explain and define this relationship. But many a score
