* * *

John Dee, charged with heresy, conjuring and calculing, disappeared into the terrible maw of the Bishop’s Palace in London. It was said that the coalhouses, the woodstores, the cellars, even the drains below the palace were serving as cells for the hundreds of suspected heretics waiting to be questioned by Bishop Bonner. In the neighbouring St Paul’s Cathedral, the bell tower was crammed with prisoners who scarcely had place to sit, let alone lie down, deafened by the ringing of the bells in the arches over their heads, exhausted by brutal interrogation, broken by torture and waiting, with dreadful certainty, to be taken out and burned.

I could hear nothing of Mr Dee, not from Princess Elizabeth, nor from any of the gossips around court. Not even Will Somers, who usually knew everything, had heard of what had happened to John Dee. He scowled at me when I asked him and said, ‘Fool, keep your own foolish counsel. There are some names better not mentioned between friends, even if they are both fools.’

‘I need to know how he fares,’ I said urgently. ‘It is a matter of some . . . importance to me.’

‘He has disappeared,’ Will said darkly. ‘Turns out he was a magician indeed that he could vanish so completely.’

‘Dead?’ My voice was so low that Will could not have heard the word, he guessed the meaning from my aghast face.

‘Lost,’ he said. ‘Disappeared. Which is probably worse.’

* * *

Since I did not know what a lost man might say before he disappeared I never slept more than a few hours every night, waking up with a start at every sound outside the door, thinking that they had come for me. I started to dream of the day they had come for my mother, and between my childhood terror for her and my own fears for myself I was in a sorry state.

Not so the Princess Elizabeth. She might never have heard of John Dee. She lived her life at the court with all the Tudor glamour she could exploit, walking in the garden, eating her dinner in the hall, attending Mass sitting one place behind her sister, and always, always, meeting the glance of the king with an unspoken promise.

Their desire for each other lit up the court. It was an almost palpable heat. When she walked into the room everyone could see him tense like a hound when he hears the hunting horn. When he walked behind her chair she would give a little involuntary shiver, as if the very air between them had caressed the nape of her neck. When they met by accident in the gallery they stood three feet apart, as if neither of them dared to go within arm’s length, and they skirted each other, moving one way and then another as if in a dance to music that only they could hear. If she turned her head to one side he would look at her neck, at the pearl swinging from her earlobe, as if he had never seen such a thing before. When he turned his head she would covertly steal a glance at his profile, and her lips would part in a little sigh as she looked at him. When he helped her down from the saddle of her horse, he held her against him after her feet had touched the ground and the two of them were shaking by the time he released her.