“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.