Elizabeth looked up and saw me. ‘Oh, Hannah.’

‘Kat dragged me in,’ I said. ‘I think I should go.’

‘Wait a moment,’ she replied.

Kat Ashley planted her big bottom against the wooden door and leaned back.

‘Would you see better if Hannah were to help you?’ Elizabeth demanded of John Dee.

‘I cannot see without her,’ he said frankly. ‘I don’t have the gift. I was only going to prepare the astrological tables for you; that is all I can do without a seer. I did not know that Hannah would be here today.’

‘If she would look for you, what might we see?’

He shrugged. ‘Everything. Nothing. How would I know? But we might be able to tell the date of the birth of the queen’s baby. We might be able to know if it is a boy or a girl, and how healthy, and what its future might hold.’

Elizabeth came towards me, her eyes very bright. ‘Do this for us, Hannah,’ she whispered, almost pleading with me. ‘We all want to know. You, as much as anybody.’

I said nothing. My knowledge of the queen’s growing despair in that darkened room was not one that I wanted to share with her flirtatious half-sister.

‘I dare not do it,’ I said flatly. ‘Mr Dee, I am afraid. These are forbidden studies.’

‘It is all forbidden now,’ he said simply. ‘The world is forming into two bands of people. Those who ask questions and need answers, and those who think the answers are given to us. Her ladyship is one who asks questions, the queen is one who thinks that everything is already known. I am in the world of those who ask: ask about everything. You too. Lord Robert as well. It is breath of life to question, it is like being dead when one has to accept an answer which comes with the dust of the tomb on it and one cannot even ask “why?” You like to ask, don’t you, Hannah?’

‘I was brought up to it,’ I said, as if excusing a sin. ‘But I have learned the price. I have seen the price that scholars sometimes have to pay.’

‘You will pay no price for asking questions in my rooms,’ Elizabeth assured me. ‘I am under the protection of the king. We can do as we wish. I am safe now.’

‘But I am never safe!’ burst from me.

‘Come, child,’ John Dee urged me. ‘You are among friends. Do you not have the courage to exercise your God-given gift, in the sight of your Maker and in the company of your friends, child?’

‘No,’ I said frankly. I was thinking of the faggots of wood that had been piled up in the town square of Aragon, of the stakes at Smithfield, of the determination of the Inquisition to know only what it feared and see only what it suspected.

‘And yet you live here, in the very heart of the court,’ he observed.