‘Good,’ he said, ‘Christopher hasn’t eaten it all.’ He held up a packet wrapped in greasy paper. ‘Cold beef.’

‘You have a larder out there?’ I was smiling.

‘Aye, a  big earthenware pot. Christopher fixed it on a bracket. He is not such a fine gentleman as he would like you to think. His father was a carpenter, which is useful. He knocked up the table and stools for us.’

He closed the window and laid the packet of beef on the table beside his basket. There was a small fireplace on the inner partition wall, containing an even smaller fire, but he soon poked it up and added a shovel of sea coal. While he busied himself with a frying pan and the bacon, I began to fold the clothes into tidy piles. I straightened the beds and laid the papers – they were indeed play scripts – in a neat stack on a rickety shelf nailed above one of the beds.

‘Where do you clean your dishes?’ I asked. I looked at the rancid grease and a creeping black mould with distaste. ‘We cannot eat off these.’

‘There are some clean plates over there.’ He jerked his head towards a dark corner where there stood an ancient-looking cupboard I had not noticed. I found two chipped plates and carried them to the table. There were mouse dropping on the top of the cupboard, but inside it looked clean.

Simon slid half the bacon on to each of the plates and poured the dripping over it.

‘Help yourself,’ he said, pushing the basket towards me. He lifted out a large round loaf and sawed slices off it, directly on the table, which I noticed was scored all over where bread had been cut before.

‘You must run out of clean plates eventually,’ I said.

‘Then we take everything down to the yard at the back and wash them with water we carry over from the conduit. You saw how many stairs there are. We don’t do it every day, only when everything is dirty. Were there any clean ale mugs in the cupboard?’

I shook my head.

‘Oh, well, then we’ll just have to drink from the jack.’

He took the ale jack from the basket, pulled out the cork and passed it to me. I drank gingerly at first, doubtful of what it might be like, but it was excellent, so I drank thirstily, then handed it back.

We mopped up the bacon dripping with bread, then moved on to cold beef and cheese, and finished with the pears. They were the hard little pears that were still edible as late in the year as this and a welcome end to the meal.

‘So,’ said Simon, ‘now the soldiers are all gone from the hospital, are you working with Walsingham once more?’

‘He sent for me yesterday,’ I said, pushing my stool back from the small table so I could stretch out my legs.

‘More code-breaking?’ Simon knew what I did in Phelippes’s office, though I was sworn not to reveal the contents of the papers I worked on.

‘I thought that was what they needed,’ I said. ‘But when Cassie told me it was Sir Francis who wanted to see me, I was afraid it might be . . . well, might be something more serious.’

‘More serious?’ Simon looked puzzled, and then concerned. ‘You mean, like last year, when he sent you off, pretending to be a tutor to some gentleman’s children? And then you were a scruffy messenger boy.’

‘Aye, something like that.’ I found I was twisting one of the buttons of my doublet round and round and released it before I pulled it off. ‘He is sending me on a mission to the Low Countries, carrying despatches to the Earl of Leicester.’

Simon gave a low whistle, then stood up and piled our dirty plates on top of those on the floor. When he sat down again, he passed me the ale jack, but I shook my head.

‘I need to keep my brain clear. I am to meet Sir Francis and Nicholas Berden at Seething Lane at two o’clock, to discuss the mission.’

Simon took a long pull at the ale jack, then recorked it and placed it back in the basket.

‘It is more than simply carrying despatches, isn’t it?’

I nodded silently.

He clasped his hands on the table in front of him and leaned toward me. ‘He’s asking you to spy for him, I’ll be bound.’

I had never told Simon what I was doing on my various missions for Walsingham during the previous year, but he was no fool. He had guessed that I was caught up in foiling the Babington conspiracy, with its aim to kill the Queen, to use French troops under the Duke of Guise to invade England, and to put Mary Stuart on the throne. He knew without my telling him that as well as code-breaking and other activities with Thomas Phelippes, I had been used by Walsingham for spying.

I nodded. Perhaps if I did not speak the words, I had not, strictly, revealed anything.

‘Come, Kit,’ he said. There was a touch of impatience in his tone. ‘I swear that you can trust me. I will say nothing outside this room. I will keep your secrets. You know I would not betray you.’

I did know it, and said so.

‘At first, all I have to do is deliver the despatches from Sir Francis – and possibly from Burghley and the Queen as well – to the Earl of Leicester, somewhere in the Low Countries. I do not know where yet. I suppose they will tell me this afternoon. Leicester will inform me of any suspicions he has. Well, he talked of suspicions, but nothing more specific than that. I hope the whole mission is not a fool’s errand.’

‘And then?’

‘And then I am supposed to hang about where the soldiers gather when they are not on military duty. Ale houses, mostly, I expect. And . . . just listen, I think. See whether anyone lets anything slip.’

‘It sounds somewhat vague.’

‘I know. And what if there are traitors, and they suspect that I am one of Sir Francis’s agents? I’m no Berden or Gifford, with years of practice at this.’

‘But you are good at playing a part.’

I looked at him in alarm, but there was nothing in his air to suggest that he had guessed the part I played every day.

‘Remember last year. You had no difficulties then.’

‘Well . . .’ I also remembered how the Fitzgeralds’ fifteen-year-old daughter had tried to seduce me and felt a bubble of slightly hysterical laughter rising in my throat. I turned it into a cough.

‘I did think you might have some ideas how I should play this part.’

Simon clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back, tipping his stool on its back legs.

‘The first question is: What part are you playing? You are not meant to be one of the soldiers yourself, are you?’

‘I don’t think so.’ I was startled at the thought.

‘Probably Sir Francis has something in mind for you. How do his agents usually pass themselves off?’

‘I am not sure. I think sometimes they pretend to be merchants or traders of some kind, as it allows them to move around from town to town, or even from country to country. In fact, some of them really are traders. Sir Francis has links with all the great English merchant houses.’ I thought of the cousins of Dr Lopez and Dr Nuñez, whose trade routes and mercantile houses in Europe and the Ottoman Empire served a second purpose for Walsingham.

‘Clearly you are too young to be taken for a merchant yourself, but you could be in the service of one of the houses, carrying orders for goods, overseeing the shipping of goods. Does that sound right?’

‘Aye. I think so.’ I tried to imagine myself as a young clerk working for Dr Nuñez. It was not so unlikely. I would need to carry quills and a portable ink well. Perhaps empty my satchel of medicines and fill it with papers.

‘Then you need to think about your costume.’ Simon was staring over my head.

‘Costume?’

‘Your clothes. I’m thinking of this as we would stage it in the playhouse. You are a capable young servant, already a trustworthy clerk who can be sent on his master’s business abroad . . .’ He pondered for a few minutes.

‘If this were a comedy, we would dress you one way, if a tragedy or a history, quite another.’

‘I don’t understand.’