She got to her feet at once, without surprise, and went quickly down the room. I half-ran beside her. ‘Has this happened before?’ I asked.

She nodded.

‘Is she ill?’

‘Easily distressed by him.’

I took that in, made allowances for a servant’s loyal lies. ‘Was she always like this?’

‘When they were young and in love it passed for passion. But she was only at peace when he was in the Tower—except for when the princess was imprisoned too.’

‘What?’

‘She was ill with jealousy, then.’

‘They were prisoners!’ I exclaimed. ‘They were hardly dancing in masques together.’

Mrs Oddingsell nodded. ‘In her mind they were lovers. And now, he is free to come and go. And she knows that he is seeing the princess. He will break her heart. It is no figure of speech. She will die of this.’

We were at Dr Dee’s door. I put a hand on her arm. ‘Are you her nurse?’ I asked.

‘More like her keeper,’ she said and quietly went in.

* * *

The scrying was abandoned for the night, but the next day, when Lady Dudley kept to her room and was not to be seen, Dr Dee asked for my help in translating a prophecy that he thought might apply to the queen. I had to read a set of apparently disconnected Greek words to him which he carefully wrote down, each one having a numerical value. We met in the library, a room cold with disuse. Robert called for a fire to be lit in the grate and a servant came in and threw open the shutters.

‘It looks like code,’ I observed when they had finished and we were alone again.

‘It is the code of the ancients,’ he said. ‘Perhaps they even knew the code for life.’

‘A code for life?’

‘What if everything was made of the same things?’ he asked me suddenly. ‘Sand and cheese, milk and earth? What if beyond the illusion of difference, beyond their clothes as it were, there was only one form in the world, and one could see it, draw it, even recreate it?’

I shook my head. ‘What then?’

‘That form would be the code of everything,’ he said. ‘That would be the poem at the heart of the world.’

Danny, who had been sleeping on the broad footstool beside me as I wrote, stirred in his sleep and sat up, smiling around him. His beam widened when he saw my face. ‘Hello, my boy,’ I said gently.

He slid down and toddled towards me, keeping a cautious hand on his chair, and then mine, to hold himself steady. He took hold of a fold of my gown and looked up attentively into my face.

‘He’s very quiet,’ John Dee said softly.

‘He does not speak,’ I said, smiling down at his upturned face. ‘But he is no fool. I know he understands everything. He will fetch things, and he knows their names. He knows his own name—don’t you, Danny? But he will not speak.’