I sighed, but before I could respond, Arthur Gregory emerged from his tiny office with a sheaf of papers in his hands. He beamed at me. Like Phelippes he looked tired, but he seemed cheerful enough.

‘Kit! I thought I heard your voice. It’s good to see you again. We’ve missed you.’

It was just what the stable boy Harry had said. I had not thought my presence had been much felt here. I stood up and bowed to Arthur.

‘I’m glad to see you too.’

He glanced at my stocking feet and smiled.

‘Master Phelippes fetched you across London in this terrible weather, did he?’

‘He did.’ I glared at Phelippes. ‘He seems to think he cannot deal with these reports himself.’

‘Indeed he can’t. He has even had me deciphering some of those in the easier codes, the familiar ones, and you know how slow I am. I have no head for breaking new codes, like you.’

‘It isn’t only reports from our own agents, then?’ I turned to Phelippes.

‘No. We have intercepted a number of messages passing between Madrid and Philip’s agents in his various domains. Including some to Mendoza in Paris. Mendoza always means trouble. One of our sea captains came in this morning with a fresh bundle of despatches he captured on a Spanish vessel heading for the Caribbean. We haven’t had a chance to decipher them yet. I thought you could start with those, given your fluent Spanish.’

‘I haven’t agreed yet to return,’ I said, although I knew I was in retreat.

‘It need not be for long.’ Phelippes’s voice had taken on a persuasive note I had not heard before. He must really need my help.

‘Tell my patients that,’ I said. ‘Are they to defer all illness until Master Phelippes says I may return to the hospital?’

‘It would be the same arrangement as before.’ He looked relieved. He knew he was winning. ‘You would still work at the hospital in the mornings, then come here in the afternoons. Sir Francis will arrange it all with the governors.’

I put my head in my hands and sighed.

‘I’m sure he will. Very well,’ I said. ‘I will come.’

Chapter Two

Arthur Gregory helped me to move my table back near the window, for the benefit of the light, and we piled all the packets except the one from the Caribbean ship on to the table against the wall. All the time we were rearranging the office, Phelippes ignored us, his head down and his short-sighted eyes close to his papers. I felt a growing irritation that he could just assume I would take up my position as before in the corner of his office. During the final weeks of my service to Walsingham in the previous year I had often needed to work alone in dangerous situations. Then during the recent few months, free of them all, I had revelled in my rediscovered independence. Now, here I was, back like any junior clerk, scribbling away at my desk.

‘Will this do?’ I said finally, in a loud voice. ‘I am not in your way?’

Phelippes looked up and peered at me across the intervening space. Then he put on his spectacles and looked vaguely around the room at what we had done.

‘Aye. That will do. Have you looked at the Caribbean despatches yet?’

‘Not yet,’ I snapped. I looked at Arthur and raised my eyebrows in despair. He simply grinned and clapped me on the shoulder.

‘Good to have you back.’

The papers he had previously been carrying he had placed on my desk while we were moving the furniture. Now he pointed toward them.

‘Perhaps you should look at these as well, to be sure I have made no mistakes. I’ll get back to carving some new seals. King Philip has been employing a lot of new agents and they all have their own seals. It’s difficult to keep up with copying them.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll check them for you.’

Arthur’s real talent lay in his ability to carve exquisite forged seals that even the owners of the originals would not have been able to recognise as false. Without his skills, Walsingham’s activities must surely have failed long before now, for much of what we did involved intercepting enemy despatches, opening and deciphering them, then resealing them and sending them on their way. Without Arthur’s immaculate seals our interference would soon have been noticed. This way England’s enemies were not alerted by the disappearance of their despatches, but at the same time we kept abreast of their correspondence. I often thought it was fortunate that Arthur was an honest man. Had he turned his talents to crime, he could have become very rich indeed.

As well as intercepting foreign correspondence, Phelippes’s office served as the centre point for the entire complex web of Walsingham’s informers, agents and spies. At its height, the service had five hundred agents, in addition to friendly sea captains and merchants in many countries, and England’s ambassadors, who kept their eyes and ears open and passed on any information they came across. Indeed, the service itself was the eyes and ears of the English state. Without it the Queen would have been assassinated long before this and the country overrun by foreign troops. I shuddered when I remembered the invasion of Portugal when I was ten. The Spanish troops had flooded across the country looting, raping and slaughtering with savage intensity. Their officers did nothing to restrain them. I had heard that some of those same officers had been shocked at the bestiality of their own soldiers, yet they had not tried to stop it. The cruelty inflicted upon the Protestant Netherlanders by the Spanish troops under the Duke of Alba, about the time I was born, had been on the same scale and it was said that in the New World the Spaniards had come near to wiping out the native people. I had no illusions about what would befall England if a Spanish army succeeded in invading.

I helped myself to a handful of uncut quills and a pot of ink from one of the shelves on the wall above the coffer where my wet cloak lay in a heap, and chose several different types of paper from another shelf, then I sat down at my old desk and tapped the reports and Arthur’s papers into neat piles. Like Phelippes, I could work best when all the tools of my trade were in immaculate order. Taking my penknife out of the purse at my belt, I began trimming and shaping the quills to my satisfaction. Arthur had returned to his room. Apart from the scratch of Phelippes’s pen and faint sounds from Arthur’s miniature gouges as he carved a new seal, a comfortable silence fell over the room. Now and then the fire would spit or the coals would collapse inwards. My boots were still steaming, but my stockings were drying.

I drew Arthur’s papers towards me. They dealt with activities witnessed by one of our agents in Rome. There had been much coming and going of Spanish envoys to the Vatican, who were clearly seeking papal support for whatever schemes Philip was currently plotting. The agent had managed to bribe one of the servants in the papal service to bring him news. It did not amount to much. Philip wanted gold for some great enterprise, but Pope Sixtus was as parsimonious as our own Queen and was resisting Spanish blandishments. Arthur had made a few minor mistakes in deciphering, but nothing which altered the sense of the two reports, which more or less repeated the same information.

When I had corrected them, I carried them over and placed them in the pile on Phelippes’s desk where he gathered together the reports from our own agents. Back at my own desk I reached for the packet taken from the Spanish ship heading for the Caribbean. They were tied together with a bit of tarred string. This must have been done by the English sea captain, for they would never have been sent out from the Escorial like that. The smell of the tar brought back vividly my own terrible sea journey from Portugal and I held the string in my hand, my eyes closed, trying to push away the memories. I dropped it on the floor and gritted my teeth. I must concentrate on the task in hand.