When Daniel’s joy in the scholarship of Venice and Padua made my own heart leap with enthusiasm, it was because I too thought that some day everything could be known, nothing need be hidden. And either of these two books might contain the secret of the whole world, might hold the key to understanding everything. John Dee was a great scholar, if he took so much trouble to get hold of these volumes and send them in secret, they would be precious indeed. I could not bring myself to destroy them. If I burned them I was no better than the Inquisition which had killed my mother. If I burned them, I became as one of those who think that ideas are dangerous and should be destroyed.

I was not one of those. Even at risk to my life, I could not become one of those. I was a young woman living at the very heart of a world that was starting to ask questions, living at a time when men and women thought that questions were the most important thing. And who could say where these questions might take us? The tables that had come from my father for John Dee might contain a drug which would cure the plague, they might contain the secret of how to determine where a ship is at sea, they might tell us how to fly, they might tell us how to live forever. I did not know what I held in my hands. I could no more have destroyed it than I could have killed a new-born child: precious in itself, and full of unknowable promise.

With a heavy heart I took the two books and tucked them behind the more innocuous titles on my father’s shelf. I supposed that if the house was searched I could claim ignorance. I had destroyed the most dangerous part of the package: the wrapping, John Dee’s name written in my father’s hand. My father was far away in Calais and there was nothing directly to link us to Mr Dee.

I shook my head, weary of lying in order to reassure myself. In truth, there were a dozen connections between me and Mr Dee if anyone wanted to examine them. There were a dozen connections between my father and the scholar. I was known as Lord Robert’s fool, as the queen’s fool, as the princess’s fool, I was connected with everyone whose name was danger. All I could hope for was that the fool’s motley hid me, that the sea between England and Calais shielded my father, and that Mr Dee’s angels guided him, and would protect him even when he was on the rack, even if his gaolers gave him his faggot of kindling and made him carry it to the stake.

It was scant consolation for a girl who had spent her girlhood on the run, hiding her faith, hiding her sex, hiding herself. But there was nothing I could do now except to go on the run again, and my horror of running from England was greater than my terror of being caught. When my father had promised me that this would be my home, that I would be safe here, I had believed him. When the queen had put my head in her lap and twisted my hair into curls around her fingers, I had trusted her as I had trusted my mother. I did not want to leave England, I did not want to leave the queen. I brushed the dust off my jerkin, straightened my cap, and slipped out again to the street.