‘It were best,’ Blanche said, ‘that you were not seen too often at court.’
‘The Queen thinks that?’
‘It’s best.’
I felt a chill. Looked into her small, shrewd eyes, fine lines around them. It was my tad who, with an uncommon prescience, had advised me years ago that our kinship with Mistress Blanche would one day prove an asset, and it was true that the Queen’s most senior gentlewoman had known Elizabeth since she was a babe. Had access, more than anyone, to the innermost sanctum.
I said. ‘ You think I should keep a distance.’
My mother frowned at such disrespect, but Blanche’s expression remained constant. Constant was Blanche’s watchword.
‘I merely suggest,’ she said, ‘that it were better for the Queen if your dealings were to remain discreet. You tend to question things too much, Dr Dee.’
‘One of my failings.’
‘You must excuse my son, Mistress Blanche,’ my mother said quickly. ‘I sometimes think that John is only ever half in this world and half in some dark place of his own complicated imaginings. Not at all healthy, to my thinking.’
I pulled up a stool, my complicated imaginings telling me that this visit was about more than books.
‘As you, more than anyone, would be aware, Mistress Blanche,’ I said, ‘the Queen’s a most intelligent woman, who’s been reading manuscripts in Greek since she could barely-’
‘And I thought you an intelligent man, Dr Dee,’ Blanche snapped, ‘who would realise that it were best that the Queen should not be seen to be inquiring too deeply into certain areas of learning.’
I fell silent. My mother arose.
‘Please excuse me, Mistress Blanche. I shall prepare a warm drink before your journey back to Richmond. Also for your men.’
‘Thank you.’ Blanche looking up, a distant smile like a mist upon her face. ‘It has been good to see you again, Jane.’
My mother nodding and slipping away. Me sensing a prearrangement here, as Mistress Blanche gestured me to my mother’s chair next to the river window.
‘I’m informed, Dr Dee, that you’re to perform a service for Sir William Cecil.’
‘So it would appear.’
‘He’s a good man, for whom the Queen’s interests are always central.’
‘Indeed. His constant concern for the Queen is like to an older brother’s.’
‘And with you to Somersetshire… also goes Lord Dudley?’
‘A man whose support for the Queen -’ I watched her eyes – ‘is equally beyond question.’
‘But whose reputation is, if anything, even worse than yours,’ my cousin said. ‘If for different reasons.’
‘You don’t dice your words, do you, Mistress Blanche?’
I pushed my chair back towards the window. A tired sun hung over the river in a cradle of stringy cloud. Obviously, Dudley’s relations with Elizabeth, on whatever level, would be a source of anxiety to Blanche, even though it was said she had oft-times passed intimate letters from one to the other.
However, as the women with whom Dudley had been intimate must by now outnumber the wherries on the Thames, his reputation was no more the reason Blanche Parry was here than to collect the books on Arthur.
One thing you should know about men and women of the border – any border – is that they ever use the small and narrow roads, and it can take an endless time before their reasons are manifest. Something embedded in their nature, relating to a need for caution with strangers. Along the border of England and Wales, even quite close relatives can be strangers through many generations, and I was resigned to a lengthy and, for the most part, aimless preamble.
‘Even apart from his adventures with women,’ Blanche Parry said, ‘Dudley is deemed by some to be ungodly.’
‘What?’
‘For his study of the stars and similar interests. And… for his choice of friends.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘You mean me. Dear God, Blanche… are we not supposed to live now in enlightened times? My studies follow on directly from the work of Pythagoras and Plato, Hermes Trismegistus… Distinguished scholars, all of them.’
‘And heathens.’
‘Oh, for-’
‘Wait.’ Blanche holding up a palm, small fingers spread wide. ‘Are there not Catholics who say that the Protestant Church is itself a form of heathenism?’
‘Well, yes, there are, but that’s only to be-’
‘The Queen… the Queen, as you know, she seeks, if not a middle road, then at least a calmer situation, where each man may worship in his own way so long as he keeps the details of it betwixt himself and God. And within reason.’
Grey cloud was turning the Thames into the Styx, and I felt my patience ebb.
‘Mistress Blanche, you’re evidently not just here to sample my mother’s famous pastries. What is it you wish to say to me that Cecil hasn’t already said?’
‘I…’ My cousin looking, for the first time, uncertain. ‘… I’m here to ask that when you report from the West Country to Sir William Cecil, you’ll bear in mind the Queen’s situation – and our kinship – and report also to me.’
This I had not expected. I was wondering how to proceed without the use of the word why? when she came quickly back at me, all the Welshness in her pouring through now apace, words tumbling like mountain water over bedrocks.
‘…because Sir William, as you well know, is a pragmatist who will not permit whatever faith he has to interfere with his political judgement. You’re aware of that, we all are, but the Queen, she is ever troubled over what may be right or wrong in the eyes of God and feels a weight of responsibility, not only to her father’s legacy and what he would wish of her, but to her subjects, all of them, whom she loves, every man and woman, like her children.’
‘Yes.’
There was indeed a complexity of responsibilities here, to which no previous monarch would have felt the need to respond. Yes, we were moving, if more slowly than I would have wished, towards a new enlightenment, and yes the Queen was determined to be an essential part of that process, and yet…
‘Mistress Blanche.’ It was time to meet this good woman halfway. ‘Let me try to identify your dilemma. The question of the Arthurian succession is potentially a more complicated issue now than it was in the days of the Queen’s grandfather-’
‘When there was but one Church,’ she said.
‘The roots of the Arthurian history or legends go beyond all that. May well be pre-Christian. Is this what you’re approaching?’
‘Your family and mine,’ she said, ‘have deep roots in Wales, where the old bards sang of Arthur and his deeds in versions of the story which would indeed shock readers of Malory. Furthermore, in the days of the first Henry Tudor, the entrails of religious belief were not laid out and pulled apart for all to interpret, in the way that they are today.’
None of which would matter much to Cecil, unless it should threaten to cause a collapse in the exchequer. This, evidently, was something private. Something unspoken of outside the Queen’s immediate chambers. I waited. We were, it seemed, getting there.
‘Rumours reach us from abroad,’ Blanche said.
‘As ever.’
‘The Queen has been spending much time with Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the envoy to Paris.’
‘In relation to what?’
Blanche made no reply. I had the suspicion she didn’t know. And there wasn’t much happening around the Queen that Blanche didn’t know.
‘In France and Spain,’ she said at last, ‘the Queen is regarded with suspicion. And also with superstition.’
‘I know.’
When you spend time in Europe, you have to listen to it. All the support in Catholic-heavy France is for the Queen of Scots, newly wed to the boy king Francois.
‘Relating, principally,’ Blanche said, ‘to her mother.’
Who’d gone smiling, it was widely said, to her own execution, in anticipation of being soon united with her infernal master. The lips of Anne Boleyn still forming satanic prayers as her head was held up by the swordsman.
The talk of London and a gift to the pamphleteers of Europe, who wondered how long before the result of the unhallowed union ’twixt the Great Furnace and the witch would be called into the service of that same master.