‘I’m sorry, Senhora,’ said my mother. ‘I did not see you in the dark.’

‘Jaime will come soon,’ said the woman in a voice as flat and dull as the stones of the prison. She nodded her head, up and down, jerky as a marionette. ‘Yes, Jaime will come. Then I will cook his dinner and we will go to my sister. He said we would go to my sister.’ She gave a strange shrill laugh and strained up towards my mother. ‘Have you brought Jaime? He has been gone so long, so long.’

Then she started muttering to herself and rocking there on the floor, clutching a bundle of clothes to her. We stepped back to the door.

‘Poor creature,’ said my mother. ‘Her wits are wandering. I think they must have taken Jaime away for ever. Come over here, Caterina, away from the draught. We’ll gather some of this straw together and sit on it.’

‘It’s horrible,’ I said, ‘filthy. We can’t sit on that.’

‘It is better than cold stone,’ she said brusquely. ‘If you have nothing worse to suffer than dirty straw, God will truly have spared you.’

Reluctantly I did as I was bid. The straw was infested with lice and fleas which were soon crawling over my shuddering flesh, but my earlier tiredness suddenly rolled over me again as I sat there amongst the stinking straw. I found myself lying with my head in my mother’s lap, and slept.

I suppose it was morning, or some time the next day, when they brought us a bowl of slops, some stale bread, and a jug of muddy water. The old woman seemed not to want anything, but my mother persuaded her to take a little. Her name, she said, was Francesca, and she did not know how long she had been in the prison. It was certainly months, perhaps even years. Her talk rambled still, but she did not seem as crazed as she had in the night. She had been brought here with her son, who was thirteen, accused of Judaizing, and put to the question. They had taken Jaime away and she was still waiting for him to return. They had stripped him first, and it was his clothes she kept always beside her. I saw my mother take note of this, and I realised what she was thinking, for I was shivering in my thin shift. I did not want to wear a dead boy’s clothes, which had mouldered here perhaps for years, but I was very cold.

They left us alone for several days. I could not be sure, but it must have been nearly a week. By then my mother had broached the subject of the clothes to Francesca, who became frantic and refused.

‘But Jaime can have them again when he returns,’ my mother pleaded. ‘You see how cold my son is. Look, I will give you this gold earring for the use of them until then.’ She held up one of my gold tear-drops.

Francesca laughed wildly. ‘What use is gold to me? Keep your gold.’

She would not part with the clothes, for which I was partly grateful and partly regretful.

When next a guard brought our food, I heard my mother whispering to him, and the following day he brought cheese and figs and new bread and wind-dried ham and a small flask of wine. I saw my mother hand him one of my earrings, and I started forward, my stomach groaning in expectation of the food, but my mother batted my hand away.

‘Now, Francesca,’ she said winningly. ‘You see all this good food? It shall all be yours, in exchange for the loan of Jaime’s clothes to my son here.’

Francesca fought with herself and her hunger for an hour at least before at last she agreed, handing over the rancid, sweat-stained garments, and huddled in the corner, muttering over the food. Curling my lip with distaste, I pulled on a pair of breeches the colour of horse dung and a grey tunic whose frayed sleeves hung down past my hands. At least my own shift protected me from contact with them about my body. Our long confinement in the dark cell had caused my eyes to adjust to the scant light, and I could see that I might be able to pass for a boy.

‘We must choose a name for you,’ said my mother, ‘and use it even when we are alone. Something pious and Christian.’

‘Christoval,’ I said. It was the first boy’s name that came into my head.

‘Christoval Alvarez.’ She tried it on her tongue. ‘Yes, that will do very well.’

I looked enviously to the dark corner where Francesca was mumbling over the food. She did not appear to be eating it. Instead she had made it into a pile and was crooning to herself.

It became obvious in the next few days that she was keeping the food for Jaime. I tried to steal a little of it before it grew mouldy in the damp which clung to the stone walls of the cell, but my mother caught me and made me put it back.

‘The food is not yours,’ she said. ‘If Senhora Francesca chooses not to eat it, that does not mean it is yours to steal.’

I complained bitterly, for I was hungry and could not bear to see the food rotting away, but my mother would not relent.

It is strange how need will drive a creature. I would swear that the gap under the door was no more than half an inch, but before the week was out the rats had smelled the food and found their way somehow into the cell. Whenever she was awake, Francesca mounted guard over the food, though the rats became bold in their hunger and bit her. When at last she fell asleep they ran about the cell, squeaking for joy over their booty, or fighting each other viciously over a fragment of ham. I sat pressed against the wall, my knees drawn up and my arms about them in an attempt to make myself as small as possible so they would not come near me. Before three days had passed, the rats had devoured every crumb, but I still wore Jaime’s clothes, which clung to me with the dead boy’s smell.

Chapter Five

English Fleet, 1589

For two days, out in mid Channel, our ships had fought against cross-winds that blew us first back east, up towards Dover, then down, out past Cornwall, as if determined to blast us all the way to Virginia. By the time we had finally reached the tip of Cornwall and then the Atlantic, the fleet was scattered over several miles of sea, unable to keep together, the driving rain and mist so thick the Victory might have been alone on the deserted ocean. Our rag-tail army spent the time hanging over the side of the ship, emptying into the sea the little they had been given to eat. I felt queasy myself, as much from the sight of them as from the motion of the ship, but I managed to keep on my feet and attend to the occasional patient, although my nights were wretched, huddled in my corner between the water cask and the ropes, under a piece of patched sail I had found and draped over the top of my hideaway to provide some protection against the rain. Dr Lopez – and even, to my disappointment, Dr Nuñez – had metamorphosed into Portuguese aristocrats, and were too busy discussing affairs of state with Dom Antonio to exercise their medical skills. Besides, tending the men kept my mind off what lay ahead.

I had other more immediate concerns. Living with my father but otherwise keeping myself at a distance from others, even those in Phelippes’s office, I had not found it difficult to hide my sex. I was still slender and flat-chested, I was still young enough to be beardless, even had I been a young man, and the thick padded doublet I wore, sometimes further covered by my physician’s gown, helped to disguise my shape. When I had travelled abroad with Nicholas Berden to the Low Countries, we sometimes shared a room, but slept in what we wore by day, all but our boots. However, in the close proximity of the ship, it was far more difficult to conceal my personal and private needs, so during those first days at sea I hardly slept, snatching brief moments of rest sitting in my partially sheltered corner of the deck. I began to grow frightened at what would happen to me if it should be discovered that I was a girl. I had known this before ever we set out, but I had pushed this particular difficulty to the back of my mind. Now it confronted me every day. Would it be possible even for my father’s friends to protect me, if my deceit became known? They might turn against me, horrified that they had been tricked all these years.