‘Goodman Cassie,’ I said, resigned. ‘What can you be wanting? You’d best come in out of the cold.’

Thomas Cassie’s nose was flushed scarlet with the harsh wind, which carried a gust of snow over the threshold as he stepped inside. I regarded him with a somewhat unfriendly eye. Cassie was Thomas Phelippes’s most trusted servant and we had worked together in the past.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘Don’t blame me, Master Alvarez.’ He cast an appealing glance at my father. ‘I’m afraid Master Phelippes sent me to fetch you. There’s a deal of work, he says, and you’re needed.’

‘I no longer serve Sir Francis,’ I said firmly. ‘He agreed to allow me to return to my duties at the hospital, uninterrupted by Phelippes’s work.’

‘Aye. But Master Phelippes was given to understand that, should there be another crisis, you were willing to come back to us.’

‘What crisis?’

‘Indeed, I couldn’t say, sir. All I know is that they’re looking worried in Seething Lane. It was bad enough, with Sir Philip dying and his lady almost out of her mind. The whole house in an uproar. Now there’s been a deal of packages come in, some of them on Dr Nuñez’s merchant ships.’

He shrugged. ‘That’s all I know.’

‘You’d best go, Kit,’ my father said.

Muttering crossly to myself, I scooped up the last of my stew with a chunk of bread and stuffed it in my mouth, then slung my hooded cloak around my shoulders. Through the wavy glass of the window I could see the snow coming down harder.

I reached for my satchel of medicines. ‘I’ll come straight back to the hospital,’ I told my father.

Cassie cleared his throat nervously. ‘Sir Francis has sent word to the hospital. They won’t be expecting you.’

Thoroughly angry now, I stumped out of the house after him. It seemed Walsingham and Phelippes had seized control of my life once again. My mood was not improved as we made our way east, in through the City wall at Newgate, then heading to the far side of London, to Sir Francis’s house in Seething Lane near the Tower. The wind was vicious, tearing at our cloaks, sometimes so strong we staggered, trying to keep on our feet. The increasingly heavy snow was mixed with pellets of ice that stung my face, so that I wished I had brought a scarf to wrap around my head. I clutched at the sides of my hood to hold it on, but the cruel fingers of the wind probed inside, till my ears were as numb as my nose and fingers.

It seemed hours before we reached the backstairs of Walsingham’s house, the way all of us who worked for him came and went. Cassie left me at the foot of the stairs and I climbed them, exhausted from battling the wind and snow. My sodden boots left wet patches on the fine Turkey carpets, which looked more worn than I remembered, while the portraits along the walls looked down on me as disapprovingly as ever. I wondered whether they were Sir Francis’s ancestors. No one had ever said. I tried to make out some family likeness, but the paint was dull and darkened. All that I could discern was that faint air of censure.

My reluctant tap on the familiar door was answered by ‘Enter’ in Phelippes’s well-known voice. He was sitting at his usual desk, with its regimented piles of papers and writing materials. I saw that my desk had been commandeered to hold more papers, and had been moved away from the window to a dark corner. In the dim light of late winter no one could work there. The door to the little cubbyhole used by Arthur Gregory, the seal-forger, stood open and a band of candlelight stretched out from it to where I took my stand, frozen hands on hips, as I dripped all over Phelippes’s floor.

‘Well?’ I said belligerently. ‘Why have you called me away from my work? The hospital is overflowing with winter chest complaints. I’m needed there.’

‘Good afternoon, Kit,’ he said mildly, putting on his spectacles, which he had removed for close work. He gestured expressively toward the pile of papers on my old desk. ‘You see my problem.’

‘Your problem. Not mine. I don’t work here any more.’

‘No.’ He bowed his head in brief acknowledgement. ‘But I do not think you would refuse us your assistance in the present circumstances.’

‘I am truly sorry about Sir Philip,’ I said, in a milder voice. ‘It is a great tragedy for his family as well as for the nation.’

‘It is. And Sir Francis has made himself ill, riding to the funeral in the cold.’

‘I thought he did not look well.’

‘You were there? I did not see you.’

‘Only in the crowd outside the cathedral. I saw you. How is the Lady Frances?’

‘Distraught. She knew Sir Philip from the time she was a tiny child. Adored him.’

I nodded. I had seen it for myself when they were together.

‘I am very sorry for it. And for the little girl.’

‘But that is not why I sent for you, though with Sir Francis ill, more rests on my shoulders.’

‘I did not suppose it was.’ I walked over to the small fire burning on the hearth and held out my hands to it. They were coming back to life, and painful. My cloak continued to drip.

‘Do take off your cloak, Kit,’ he said irritably. ‘And your wet boots. I don’t mind your stockings.’

I hesitated. Removing my cloak and boots would imply I was staying. It was tantamount to capitulation.

‘Oh, very well.’

I threw my cloak over a coffer near the door and prised off my boots. Set side by side in front of the fire they began to steam juicily. My stockings were wet through, but I had no intention of removing those. I wriggled my toes uncomfortably, and turned back to Phelippes.

‘Are you going to tell me what you really mean by “the present circumstances”?’

He sighed.

‘A sudden flood of reports coming in from our agents all over Europe – Spain, France, Rome, Portugal, the Spanish Netherlands. Something is afoot, but until we can decipher and transcribe and translate them we can’t be quite sure what it is. Philip of Spain is up to his old tricks, but exactly what I cannot say. While the Scottish queen was alive and her cousin the Duke of Guise was planning an invasion last year, Philip was holding back. He has long wanted to seize England again, ever since it slipped through his fingers when Mary Tudor died.’

He snorted in disgust. ‘King of England, he still calls himself! He wants to conquer the world.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘An arrogant and dangerous man.’ I moved a stool in front of the fire and sat down. My stockings began to steam as well. ‘Why do you say Philip was holding back last year?’

‘If the plot by Babington and his friends had succeeded and the conspirators put the Scottish queen on our throne with the military support of France, then England would have become a protectorate of France, a powerful alliance that would have threatened Philip’s possessions in northern Europe and many of his trade routes.’

‘So Philip didn’t want the plot to succeed?’ I hadn’t understood that before.

‘Exactly. But – as no doubt you’ve heard – Scottish Mary, in laying claim to the English throne herself, named Philip as her successor to the crown of England, in the event of her death.’

I nodded. ‘Philip King of Spain, rather than her own son, James King of Scotland.’

‘Of course not. James is a Protestant. He doesn’t bow down to the holy Catholic church and kiss the feet of the Bishop of Rome.’ His tone was contemptuous. ‘So she graciously bequeaths the throne of England to that good Catholic prince, who thinks he ought to be king of England anyway.’

‘So?’

‘So now he is beginning to move. King Philip of Spain does nothing in a hurry, but he has not forgotten the Enterprise of England. On this evidence,’ he waved his hand again at the packets of reports, ‘he is certainly planning something. From the few I have been able to decipher and read so far, envoys are buzzing around the Catholic nations and the Vatican like a swarm of bees. The sheer quantity of it amounts to a crisis. So this is where you come in.’