At the rush of cold air and the sound of the door, Joan swung round and my father opened his eyes. He looked confused for a moment, then stood up and came to me, holding out his arms. We hugged each other.

‘Kit! Home at last! We did not know when you would be here.’

‘I reached London this afternoon, but had to report to Sir Francis.’ I put down my baggage on the coffer and closed the door. Rikki had followed me in and stood looking about him with interest.

‘Wisht!’ Joan rushed over, flapping her apron and aiming a kick at him. ‘There’s a dirty stray followed you in off the street.’ She made a grab for the door and pulled it open. ‘Be off with you!’

‘No!’ I caught hold of Rikki’s collar as he shrank away from her and began to retreat. ‘He’s mine. At least, he’s with me. Leave him be, Joan.’ I closed the door again.

‘A dirty cur like that? Get him out of my kitchen, Master Alvarez.’

I was tempted to say that it was not her kitchen but my father’s. However, that was not the way to deal with Joan.’

‘If he is dirty, that is no more than I am, after weeks of travelling. Besides, he is injured. He took a sword thrust meant for me and saved my life. I will wash him tomorrow.’

Joan turned to my father, her hands on her hips. ‘Dr Alvarez, we cannot have a filthy cur in the kitchen. He is probably carrying the plague.’

Rikki was listening to this conversation, looking from one to the other of us.

‘If he carried the plague, I would have it by now,’ I said. ‘I have ridden for days with him in front of my saddle, his body up against mine. I’ve no symptoms – not as yet, anyway.’

Joan looked at me sceptically, her mouth pursed up with disapproval, but my father laughed. ‘Leave them be, Joan. We are just happy to see Kit safely home. You say the dog is with you, Kit. Do you mean to keep him?’

‘Yes,’ I said, finally making up my mind and all the more stubbornly in the face of Joan’s objections. ‘His master is dead and he came to me. The least I can do is give him a home.’

‘Dead, is he?’ Joan muttered, turning back to her cooking. ‘Dead of the plague, most like.’

‘No,’ I said sharply. ‘He was murdered.’

I should not have said that, but I was suddenly exhausted and cold and could not tolerate her complaints any longer. I sank down on to a bench and Rikki pressed himself against my leg. I heard my father draw a sharp breath.

‘Murdered! You say he saved your life, the dog?’ he said.

‘Aye, but that was later. I will tell you about it tomorrow. Tonight I am too tired.’

The next morning I did tell my father what had happened in the Low Countries, when we were on our way to the hospital and out of earshot of Joan. The first problem in owning a dog had already presented itself. I did not feel Rikki would be safe left with Joan, who would probably drive him out, whatever my father or I said. Yet I could not take him into the wards of the hospital. I had him on the lead, which he did not like, and hoped I could leave him with the doorkeeper in his lodge.

My father’s reaction to the account of my journey was silence at first. Then he said, ‘I do not like the way Sir Francis is using you, as if you were one of his agents. When you went to work there first, it was as a code-breaker and translator, in the office of Master Phelippes.’

And as a forger, I thought, but did not say aloud.

‘It seems to me,’ he went on, ‘that he is sending you into unnecessary danger. I know he does not realise that you are but a girl. Yet what he asks is too much even for a boy as young as you. You are not yet eighteen.’

‘Nearly,’ I said, a little stung by those words: ‘but a girl’.

‘I believe he often uses students,’ I said, ‘for it’s common for them to travel about in Europe. No one finds that suspicious. And they would be of an age with me.’ I recalled that Simon had told me that Marlowe had worked for Walsingham while still a student at Cambridge.

‘In any case,’ I added, ‘I see no reason for him to use me again. This time he had no one else available to go with Nicholas Berden. And Berden is very experienced.’

‘Hmph. Was it not he who led you into danger, near the Spanish army?’

‘Only following instructions from Walsingham. Besides, thanks to Rikki here, I came to no harm.’

Wanting to divert him from these thoughts, I drew a heavy purse out of my doublet and handed it to him. ‘I did not want to give you this in front of Joan, in case she asked for more wages!’

He looked at the purse in surprise, feeling the weight of it in his hand. ‘What is this?’

‘Payment from Sir Francis. He did not expect me to work for a month unpaid. Buy yourself some warm clothes for this cold weather.’

‘Books!’ he said, his eyes gleaming.

As I knew he would.

My life fell back into its old pattern, working every day at the hospital with my father and Dr Stevens where, as I had expected, the wards were already filled with patients suffering from the usual winter complaints, ranging from coughs and sore throats through to chest infections and pneumonia. And, as in every winter, we did our best, but we lost some, mainly those who were already weakened by poverty and a poor diet. When I asked Peter Lambert to prepare scurvy water for pauper children with rickets, I thought of Captain Thoms and his sailors and wondered how their preparations for the invasion were faring.

Christmas came and I spent it again with the players. My time away and my experiences in the Low Countries had somehow created a distance between us, so that things were not as easy as they had been. Marlowe spent some of the time with us, and I noticed that he and Simon were on very good terms, something I did not like. Yet, what could I say? They were part of the same world, this world of the playhouse, despite the fact that Marlowe had come there from Cambridge. It seemed that he had great ambitions as a playwright, though Burbage had not yet agreed to mount one of his plays, which he said were too elaborate and too expensive.

Marlowe had other irons in the fire. He was carefully cultivating Sir Francis’s younger cousin, Thomas Walsingham, as his patron, and travelled down to Kent to spend part of the Christmas festivities at his estate. As far as Thomas Walsingham was concerned, Marlowe was not part of the disreputable world of the playhouse, but a gentleman poet, a university man. Certainly Marlowe dressed the part and I often wondered how he came by the money for such finery. His own family was humble, his stepfather nothing more than a bricklayer, so whence the riches? Some may have come from Thomas Walsingham, some from work for Sir Francis, but perhaps some came from a more disreputable source.

When I raised this with Simon, during the time Marlowe was down in Kent, it led to our first real quarrel.

‘How dare you suggest such a thing!’ Simon shouted at me, his face flushed and furious. ‘Marlowe is an honourable man.’

The angrier Simon became, the colder I grew. ‘I find it strange that he has so much coin to throw about,’ I said, in a hard, level voice. ‘He has neither family nor occupation. If it were anyone but your beloved Marlowe, you too would be suspicious.’

‘He is not my beloved Marlowe,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I just do not like to see an honest man accused.’

‘I did not accuse him,’ I said. ‘I merely raised the question. And I wonder why that makes you so angry.’

‘He probably won it at cards,’ Simon blustered, ‘or by betting on horses. That is what gentlemen do.’

‘Ha!’ I said, stung. ‘What do you know of what gentlemen do?’ I thought briefly of my own life in the highest ranks of Coimbra society before I came to England, but I could not speak of it.

‘Why do you not ask,’ Simon jeered, ‘when he comes back to London? “I am curious, Kit Marlowe, about your riches. Will you settle an argument between Simon and me?” That way we will know.’