‘Of course, of course.’ He patted my shoulder, which surprised me, for he usually kept himself physically distant from those who worked for him. ‘Go back to your patients. I am sorry it has been necessary to keep you from them.’

For a moment I glimpsed again the kindly man behind the stern façade, the man I had known at Barn Elms and once or twice in private conversation. I gave him a hesitant smile.

With a sense of light-headed relief, like a condemned man at the last moment set free, I ran down the stairs, across the palace courtyard, and along the bank, where the glitter of the summer sun, cast in abundance across the river, shone more precious to me than all the ranked jewels of the courtiers whispering in palace corners. I was glad to go, taking a wherry back up-river to Blackfriars Stairs, then walking through to Duck Lane. Despite the stench of the animal pens and the slaughterhouse, it felt like a true home-coming. I wondered what Sir Francis had meant by being of service to Dr Nuñez or Dr Lopez, though I recalled what Phelippes had once told me about the usefulness of their trade in spices. I hoped that none of them – Walsingham, Phelippes, Lopez, Nuñez – would find me useful in their dark business again.

The door to our house in Duck Lane stood open to let in a little cooling breeze and ease the heat within doors. Joan was sweeping the step and raised her eyebrows when she saw me come bounding along the lane.

‘So you are back then,’ she said impudently, ‘I hope you have been enjoying yourself with your fine friends.’

Having known me since I was a shivering brat of twelve, she presumed too much upon her position, but I was so happy at having shaken the dust of Chartley and Seething Lane from my heels that I could not chide her.

‘Is my father in?’

‘Aye, just back from the hospital.’

Seeing me framed in the doorway, my father rose from his chair and came towards me, his arms outstretched. I flung myself into his embrace. After the sinister affairs in which I had been entangled, I felt suddenly safe again.

He kissed my forehead and ruffled my hair.

‘All is well?’ he asked cautiously.

‘All is well. And all the better for being home.’

I looked around at the humble room, which seemed even more dear after the luxuries of Greenwich Palace.

‘This is for you!’

I pressed my new gold sovereign and the rest of Babington’s purse into his hand with pride.

‘What is this?’

‘Reward for my services. And I hope that is the last of it.’

‘Books,’ he said, with a gleam in his eye. ‘We will be able to buy books!’

I laughed from sheer joy to be back where books were far more important that codes and conspiracies.

In the days that followed I was glad to be back with my father again, glad to be walking every day with him round the corner to the hospital, glad to spend most of my waking hours treating the patients who came each day to the cloisters and those more serious cases who were kept in the wards of the hospital. For me, there is no greater joy than seeing a sick person, in particular a sick child, grow well again under your care.

Now it was my calling to save life, not to send men to the gallows. And I would be able to see Simon again.

Chapter Fifteen

As far as I could, I refused to listen to the news on the street – how the men who had plotted to murder the Queen and bring French and Spanish invaders into England had been caught by Walsingham. I had returned to my work in the hospital, relieved to turn my back on Seething Lane and Walsingham’s secret service. Peter Lambert, however, seemed fascinated by the Babington case. He was passionately loyal to the Queen and in his eyes anyone who plotted against her was a vile monster. No punishment was too severe. I, who knew something of the twisted facts, the lies, the traps which had been set, was deeply uneasy. I had never been quite sure that Babington and his friends had ever really meant harm to the Queen. Knowing Poley, I was certain that they had been ensnared into something beyond their intentions. Unless, of course, my suspicions were right, that Poley was not working for Walsingham but for the traitors. To me Babington and the others (except perhaps Ballard and Savage) seemed more like boastful boys than dangerous traitors. They were nothing but bait in the trap to catch the Scottish queen.

When I suggested this to Peter, without revealing what I knew about the plots of Walsingham and Phelippes, he shook his head.

‘They readily confessed their crimes,’ he said, ‘and are to be executed by the most cruel means available. The Queen has demanded it, it’s common knowledge. Rightly so. They deserve nothing less.’

‘A man may confess anything under torture,’ I said, looked away, busying myself with packing my satchel, so that he might not read my face.

The creak of the strapado pulley. The screams. The stench of excrement. Mama, Mama!

‘They surely were not tortured,’ Peter said, ‘it is against the law!’

He was shocked, and I could not bring myself to tarnish his innocence. What did Peter and his kind know of men like Topcliffe and Waad? Or if they suspected, they blocked their ears to it. Had they not heard of the pamphlet defending the use of torture to examine traitors, written by the lawyer Thomas Norton, he who was known as ‘Rackmaster Norton’? I thought it was common knowledge.

‘What of the Scottish queen?’ I asked. I had kept my own ears shut long enough. Better to hear it now, and an end to it.

‘The Scottish queen, who conspired with them, is to be tried later,’ he said. ‘That is what they are saying in the alehouses. There is no doubt of her guilt. She is certain to be executed.’

I turned away. The whole affair sickened me and I was ashamed of my part in it. I hoped I would be able to avoid hearing any more, but a kind of ghoulish excitement infected the city. People were in a high state of relief that a plot to destroy us all had been foiled, and the release from fear made them cruel. They looked forward to watching the executions. There was talk of it every day, even in the hospital.

‘Will you come with us to watch the traitors die?’ Peter asked me, the day before the executions.

I shook my head.

‘They may be traitors,’ I said, ‘but I find no pleasure in seeing any man die.’

He shrugged and went off whistling, no doubt taking me for a squeamish Stranger who had not a good, full-blooded Englishman’s stomach for patriotic entertainment.

On the twentieth day of September, a little over a month after they were arrested, the first group of men were executed, including Sir Anthony Babington. They were hanged, but cut down before they were dead, their privates cut off and burned before their eyes, then, still living, they were disembowelled. Finally, their bodies were quartered, and the bloody sections spiked up at various gates into the City, as a warning to others who might think to conspire against Queen and State.

All that day I hid myself away in the hospital, unable to eat, my stomach twisted with revulsion and memory, but I heard later than the crowd’s first eagerness for vengeance began to wane when they saw the terrible butchery inflicted on the young men who were, after all, handsome and gallant and courageous in their suffering. When the rest of the conspirators were brought to execution the next day, the crowd turned threatening and demanded that they be hanged until they were truly dead, before the awful mutilations were inflicted.