I nodded slowly. It was true. If the play was well written and played with the skill Simon described, I felt myself to be in a palace or on a battlefield or in a crowded street. When an army crossed the stage, I saw an army, though there might be no more than half a dozen players pretending to be many.

‘Yes, you are right,’ I said. ‘And it makes me wonder: How can we know substance from shadow? How know what is real, and what is pretence?’

I thought of Walsingham’s projections two years before, and the Babington plotters, who were – or weren’t? – puppets whose strings he pulled. Perhaps all that terrible affair was no more real than a play in the theatre, with Walsingham as playwright and Phelippes as his theatre-master. I had stepped on to the stage to play my tiny rôle, then exited into the darkness of the tiring-house.

‘A play is another kind of reality,’ Simon said seriously. ‘We make something new, a New World which is as real to me, at any rate, as the unseen world of Virginia that Raleigh speaks of so much. I do not think that is pretence or deception. It is beautiful. It has fire and passion. It is a world we create as surely as the Creator created this world we walk about in.’

I laid my hand on his arm and glanced about. ‘Be careful, Simon, what you say. Your words could be taken for blasphemy.’

He gave me a strange look, then shrugged and smiled, and pointed up at the turret above the upper stage, where the flag was flying, to show that a play was to be performed this afternoon. A man had appeared up there. He raised a trumpet to his lips and played a fanfare. The noise of the audience faded into expectation. The play began.

It was like no play I had ever seen before. At the end of it, through the clapping and cheers and the bowing of the actors, I felt numb. It was terrible and beautiful, frightening and inspiring, and I was trembling as though I had lived the actions of that man, suffered the fate of his victims, been borne along by his triumphs. I said not a word as we descended the long dark staircase and emerged into the fading summer’s afternoon, jostled and elbowed by the crowd, wrapped in my own cocoon of silence against their noise.

‘Well?’ said Simon, as we walked back along the river toward the Bridge.

‘Yes.’ I said. ‘I think I begin to understand.’

Chapter Sixteen

By the beginning of September my life had fallen back into its old familiar pattern. Phelippes hardly needed me now, so that I began to spend much more time with my friends at the playhouse and was even able to join Raleigh’s circle at Durham House once again. Marlowe, mercifully, was away on some business of his own or Walsingham’s and Poley remained imprisoned in the Tower. After the excitement and terrors of the summer months I was glad to be back enjoying the rich poetry of the new plays which were creating such a sensation in London, while the discussions at Durham House reminded me of nothing so much as those long tranquil evenings at home in Coimbra, when my father’s university friends would sit out in the garden in the twilight after dinner, amiably disputing some nice point of philosophy or listening with keen interest to the details of some new scientific discovery made by one of their number. My sister Isabel, my brother Felipe and I would sometimes creep out into the shadows and listen to them, sitting on the steps of the fountain, while bats swooped overhead, feeding amongst the umbrella pines, and the distant music of my mother playing the virginals wound its way between the deep, quiet voices of the men.

This was the life I preferred – my work at the hospital and the occasional evening at Durham House. The longer it continued the more the memories of what had happened in the Low Countries faded away, so that it seemed like a dream. Then early in September news spread rapidly through London that Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had died. It came as a shock to many. On his return from the Low Countries he had shown himself more decisive and vigorous than ever he had been abroad. Perhaps the threat to the very nation of England aroused some strength in him that he had never found before. He had built an army camp at Tilbury as defence against an attack up the Thames, the camp to which Andrew and his men had been sent. And when the danger was past, he had ridden through London in glory, as though single-handed he had defeated the Spanish. I had seen him myself, and although both he and his horse were gloriously caparisoned, there had been a feverish look to his eyes which did not bode well. I had not been surprised when I heard he had travelled north to Derbyshire, to take the healing waters at Buxton. It was on the way there that death had suddenly overtaken him. He was fifty-six, several years younger than my father.

All his life he had been loaded with honours and offices, and I knew that Sir Francis respected him, despite his failings as a leader in war. Above all, however, it was common knowledge that he was something more than another courtier in the eyes of the Queen. In the years before ever I was born, it had been rumoured that Robert Dudley hoped to marry the Queen, and there was much scandalous talk which never quite died away. Whatever the truth of it, I remembered how courteously he had received Berden and me on my first visit to Amsterdam, a courtesy not extended by his successor Lord Willoughby. And if he had laughed at my warning of a plot to poison him, he had made amends later.

Standing in my chamber at home, I took out the medal he had sent me and ran my thumb over the raised image of his head, then turned it over. non gregem sed ingratos invitus desero. Perhaps he did feel with some justice that the Hollanders were ungrateful for his efforts in their country against Parma and his Spanish troops, but nonetheless I could not forget what had happened at Sluys, all the men dead and wounded there.

How would the Queen take his death? How could anyone know the true feelings of a queen, certainly of a queen who – by all accounts – was as inaccessible as a fortress? On one of my occasional visits to Seething Lane about the middle of September, I put this to Phelippes. Having met Leicester, even dined at his table, and now carrying about with me his medal as a kind of talisman, I felt an odd personal interest in this.

‘How did Her Majesty take the Earl’s death?’ Phelippes said. ‘You have not heard? I thought it was common knowledge. She locked herself in her chamber, would allow no one to enter, took no food or drink. For days, this was.’ He shook his head in wonderment.

‘In the end, Lord Burghley ordered the door to her chamber to be broken down. That took some courage! He feared for her safety. Even for her life. No one knows what happened then, but I do not suppose he was kindly received. At the very least she was alive and has resumed her duties.’

I am sure he did not mean it unkindly, but his words chilled me. She had resumed her duties. It was difficult to think of the Queen as a person, she was a symbol, God’s anointed, ruler absolute of her country and of her church, England personified – yet she was a woman, too. A woman who had lost the man she had loved all her life.

For some reason these thoughts troubled me in the weeks that followed. Leicester, after all, had seemed no more than common flesh and blood when I had met him. He was grandly dressed, his rooms were elegant, but encased within it all had been a mortal man.