‘Say rather: When they are needed.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘I can see that your role as a physician will be valuable to them. But remember, if your ships are fired on, as surely they will be, cannon fire makes no distinction between soldiers and gentlemen observers who come merely to see a puppet king crowned. And there will be fighting ashore as well. Will you stay aboard ship? I doubt it, for I know you. Nay, you will be in the thick of it, tending the wounded, and, like cannon at sea, cannon and crossbow and musket on land will make no distinction between soldier and physician.’

‘I will promise you to set up my hospital tent well out of range of the guns.’ I spoke as lightly as I could. Burdened with my other knowledge, I had carefully pushed thoughts of the fighting to the back of my mind. ‘Come, Simon, you should be cheering me on my way with good wishes for our success. And besides,’ I said, as the import of his words struck me, ‘why do you call Dom Antonio a puppet king?’

‘Oh, now, Kit, you cannot tell me that he will be anything else? When English money and English ships and English lives have put him on the throne? When the Queen herself bears a quarter of the expense?’

‘She wants to follow up the success of the Armada by crushing Spanish power.’

‘I am sure she does. But once she has put that weak and vain man on the throne, she will not sit back gracefully and allow him free rein. You may count on it, she will expect to be paid back every penny tenfold in taxes and trade concessions. King Antonio will be tied hand and foot to Her Majesty.’

I could say nothing to this. I knew a little about some of the conditions attached to the expedition. I did not expect Simon to have guessed so much and deduced more. Yet he was clever and well-informed. He too attended the discussions of politics and world affairs, as I did, held by Raleigh at Durham House. I should not have been surprised.

I turned the conversation then and we talked generally of how he and the other players were faring under their new patron, and whether the good weather would last so that they could begin performing at the Theatre in a week or two’s time. And whether this year the harvests would be better, and hunger less amongst the poor.

‘What of your patients at St Bartholomew’s?’ Simon said. ‘Surely you will be away for months. Are you not troubled for them?’

‘Numbers are much less, now that the winter is past,’ I said. ‘The deputy superintendent has arranged for a retired physician to come in two days a week. They will manage without me. It will be a swift expedition, a few weeks. I shall soon be back.’

He still looked troubled, and I found my heart beating uncomfortably fast. Did Simon indeed care whether I went or stayed? But I was afraid to confront the thought. I was never sure what he felt about me, and would not stop to examine what I felt about him. Instead I turned our conversation again to what he and his fellow actors were planning for the coming weeks. At first he seemed reluctant to leave the matter of the Portuguese expedition, but at last he began to talk of a new play and a new boy actor he was training to undertake women’s roles. We shared a cold pie Joan had left in the hanging meat safe, and I hoped I had successfully put an end to his disquieting questions.

However, before he went, he threw a comradely arm around my shoulders and gave me a rough hug. I felt my heart jump in my breast and knew he would not have done such a thing, had he known I was a girl. My boy’s disguise had been for so long my sanctuary, where I had felt safe and at ease. In this role, this actor’s part, I could share Simon’s companionship, sit with him virtually alone of an evening while my father slept, with a freedom that the truth would have destroyed in a moment. And yet, and yet, my sanctuary was beginning to feel like a prison.

‘Take care of yourself, Kit, in the company of those pirates and lunatics! And come safe home again.’

At that moment I very nearly broke down and gave away my secret.

Chapter Three

Next morning, very early, I took leave of my father. He gave me his blessing, his eyes shining with hope at the prospect of all this expedition might gain for us. If it had done nothing else, the Counter Armada, as it was beginning to be called, had restored to him something of his old strength of body and mind. His movements were vigorous and in the last few weeks there had been no signs of those wandering wits which had so frightened me in recent months. My dog Rikki, accidentally acquired last year in the Low Countries, sensed that something was wrong and howled mournfully as I closed the door on them.

The previous evening I had packed my knapsack with two changes of light-weight clothes, recalling as I did so the thick garments I had taken with me on my first mission for Sir Francis to the Low Countries in the winter of 1587. Then I had been warned of the bitter cold. Now I was returning to a country I knew well, where the heat of summer would have overtaken us before the expedition returned, and I hardly had clothes thin enough for the weather we would encounter on shore. Aboard ship there would be some hope of a cooling breeze, but even the lightest of my English clothes would be hard to bear in the full heat of a Portuguese summer. The cool cotton fabrics we had known there, a legacy of Arab days, were unknown in London, where the thinnest materials were the silks and fine linens, too costly for me to afford.

As well as clothes I packed a pair of summer shoes that I wore normally at the hospital, my physician’s gown, and two books. One was the volume of Sidney’s poetry which Simon had given me for my seventeenth birthday. I was never sure how he had managed to obtain it, for it had been privately printed and circulated simply amongst the circle of Sidney’s friends. There was talk of a public edition being printed, but nothing had come of it yet. The other book had been given me the previous Sunday by the rector of St Bartholomew’s church, the Reverend David Dee. It was a small, rather badly printed copy of the four gospels, produced in Geneva. He was not himself a Genevan, deploring their extreme Protestantism, but they were very active in producing inexpensive books of piety.

‘I am sure you will have many tedious and idle hours at sea, Kit,’ he said, with a slightly repressive smile. ‘This may help to pass them. You have told me that you wish to read the Bible for yourself, and this is the most important part, the life and works of Our Lord. It may also be a consolation for you, in the difficult times which lie ahead, for I fear there will be fighting.’

‘Aye, Father,’ I said. ‘I fear there will.’

The Reverend Dee was a somewhat difficult man. My father, amongst those of higher rank in the parish, respected him for his learning and certainly his sermons were models of well-argued prose, straight from the Oxford Schools. However, he had one over-riding passion, and those afflicted by this particular passion are rarely loved by their neighbours. He was a builder. I was not privy to the details of his vision, but I knew – for he often dwelt on it in his sermons – that he fervently deplored the destruction of so much of the ancient and beautiful priory of St Bartholomew’s and dreamt of restoring it. After so many of the monastic buildings had been pulled down in the time of King Henry, a huddle of cottages had been built on the glebe land, mainly from the broken stone and timber of the priory buildings. They were an unlovely collection, but they provided housing in the parish for a number of families. The Reverend Dee wanted to eject the tenants, pull down the cottages and replace them with an extension to the church and other parochial buildings. As a result, he was regularly at loggerheads with the tenants, who had countered by laying charges of lewd behaviour against him.