‘He might need the outward sign of being one of the People,’ Dee suggested. ‘He might need to be among his people before he can speak.’

I looked at him in bewilderment. ‘How would he know?’

He smiled. ‘This little one has just come from the angels,’ he said. ‘He would know more than all of us put together.’

* * *

Lady Amy Dudley kept to her room for the next three days while Robert and John Dee rode out hunting, read in the library, gambled small sums of money, and talked, night and day, riding and walking, at dinner and at play as to what the future of the country might be, what shape the nobility and the parliament should take, how far the borders might extend overseas, what chance the small island kingdom of England had against the great continental powers, and—John Dee’s great obsession—how England was uniquely placed to send out ships the world over and create a new form of kingdom, one which extended overseas, an empire. An empire which might dominate the unknown places of the world. He had calculated how big the world might be and he was convinced that there were great lands we had not yet touched. ‘Christopher Columbus,’ he said to my lord. ‘A brave man but no mathematician. It is obvious that you cannot have a passage to China that you can broach within weeks. If you make the proper calculation you can show that the world is round but far, far greater than Columbus thought. And in that great extra quarter must be land. And how would it be if that land were to be English?’

Often I walked or rode or dined with them and often they would ask me how things were done in Spain, what I had seen in Portugal, or what I thought might be the success of such a scheme. We were cautious not to discuss what sort of monarch might be on the throne to launch such confident and ambitious schemes. While the queen was waiting to give birth to a son and heir, nothing could be certain.

On the evening of the third day of their visit my lord had a message from Dover, and left me and John Dee alone in the library. John Dee had drawn a map of the world after the model of his friend Gerard Mercator and tried to explain to me that I must think of the world as round, and think of this map as the skin of the world peeled off, like the skin peeled off an orange and laid flat.

He struggled to make me see it until he laughed and said that I must be content to see angels, I clearly could not see longitude. He took up his maps and went with them to his room as Lord Robert came into the library with a piece of paper in his hand. ‘At last I have news of your husband, he is safe,’ he said.