The other part of the Marrano community scraped a living as craftsmen or dealers in secondhand goods or pawnbrokers. Their homes were clustered around Bishopsgate, just outside the northeast city wall, near Bedlam and Petty France, where the Huguenot refugees had settled.

My father and I fell somewhere between these two groups. By birth and education we belonged to the professional group, but we were much poorer and our hospital cottage in Duck Lane would have fitted inside one room of Dr Añes’s grand house. Still, the other men respected my father and from time to time we would be invited to dinner by one of them. Not only had Dr Nuñez provided us with passage on one of his ships when we escaped from Portugal, but Dr Lopez had secured my father’s position at the hospital and his wife Sara had taken us into her home when we first arrived, destitute, in London.

Soon after I had begun work once more in Phelippes’s office, we were invited to dine at the Lopez home. The weather was still very cold and I was concerned for my father. It was a long walk to Wood Street, where Ruy had bought a fine house amongst the English merchants. My father at sixty was beginning to show his age. The extra burden of work falling on his shoulders since I had gone back to working for Walsingham had started to tell on him, and now he had the first signs of a chest infection.

‘Are you sure we should go today?’ I asked. ‘I could send a message to tell Sara that you are not well.’

‘I am well enough,’ he said stubbornly. ‘It would be discourteous to cry off now. It is nothing but a slight cough. I have been treating it myself. Besides, it is good for us to mix in company from time to time.’

This last remark surprised me, for my father had become something of a recluse since we had come to England, unlike the old days when he had been part of a gregarious and sociable group at the university of Coimbra. Usually it was he who demurred at going anywhere. I had only once persuaded him to come with me to the festivities at the Theatre last Christmas. By ‘mixing in company’ I wondered whether he meant that I should strengthen my ties to our own community. Much of my time nowadays was spent amongst the English, both in Seething Lane and, whenever I had any leisure, with Simon’s fellow players in Master Burbage’s company. I had seen little enough of them lately, my time being so occupied between my patients and my intelligence work, though I knew from Simon that they were rehearsing new plays for when the playhouses opened again in the better weather.

As it was impossible to convince my father that he should stay at home, I persuaded him to wear gloves and wrap a thick scarf around his head and his physician’s cap. We set off into the snow, which was still falling, even in March. Just inside the city gate we found a street vendor selling hot chestnuts.

‘How many for a farthing?’ I asked.

He scooped up a shovelful for me to see. I nodded and he gave them to me a screwed up cone of paper. We were close to the grid where the Newgate prisoners beg passersby to give them food, so I bought another farthing’s worth and pushed the chestnuts through the grid into the frantically grabbing hands.

‘Now,’ I said to my father, ‘we don’t need to eat these, for we’ll be royally fed at the Lopez house.’

‘I wondered why you bought them.’

‘Here, put them in your pockets and keep your hands warm with them.’

Although he laughed and protested, I filled his pockets with the hot nuts, allowing myself just one to eat.

‘You grow more like your mother every day,’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘Best not to say that aloud. Best not even to think it.’

‘But I do think it, Caterina.’

I felt myself grow cold and looked about to make sure no one had heard.

‘Not Caterina any longer, Father. Christoval. Kit.’

He sighed. ‘I wish it did not have to be so.’

‘It is better this way. How else could I earn my living? Now come, we don’t want to be out in the snow any longer than we need.’

The Lopez house was well heated with generous fires in every room and heavy curtains as well as shutters over the windows to keep out any vicious serpents of cold air. There were thick carpets on the floors and the well polished furniture glowed in the light of many candles. Sara took me aside before we joined the others and gave me a quick hug. When she had taken us in five years ago, I was a terrified child of twelve. Although I had already assumed my disguise as the boy Christoval, she soon discovered that I was in fact Caterina, though she had kept her word and never revealed the truth to anyone, not even her husband, Ruy.

‘So, you are back working for Walsingham again,’ she said.

‘Aye. Not willingly, but there is much work to be done and I could not refuse.’ I grimaced. ‘Secrets and plots and foreign intrigue. I’ve no wish to be involved, but it seems my skills are needed.’

‘I am afraid Ruy is becoming ever more entangled in just such affairs. You know that he is now appointed ambassador to Dom Antonio?’

I nodded. Dom Antonio was the claimant to the throne of Portugal, the focus of the hopes of our Marrano community, for he was himself half Jewish. If he could be restored to power, and the Spanish monarch driven out of Portugal, many of my countrymen dreamed of returning home. The Queen, I knew, saw Dom Antonio as a useful counter against the King of Spain, but she was famously cautious and I wondered whether he would ever see his throne or his country again.

‘Dom Antonio is living out at Eton,’ Sara said, ‘and Ruy is for ever back and forth, treating him and plotting with him.’

‘Is he ill?’

Sara smiled a little sardonically. ‘Only the illness brought on by years of self-indulgence – an excess of wine, an excess of food, and an excess of women. He is a poor leader for us to rest our hopes on.’

The dining table was much as I remembered it from our last visit, the strange foreign wood gleaming richly in the light of many candles. The two heavy candelabra which Ruy had bought from Drake’s looted Spanish treasure held pure beeswax candles more than two feet high. As before, we drank from fine Venetian glass, but today our food was served on silver-gilt plates. More of profits from Drake’s privateering expeditions.

‘As I see it,’ Ruy said, with a smug smile, ‘What Drake achieves is a better balance in the economy of the world. The Spanish steal gold and silver from the barbarians of the New World and make of them objects of great beauty. However, had they no plunder from the Americas, Spain would be the poorest country in Europe without food and wine enough to feed her own people. Therefore she uses the gold to buy provisions from the rest of us.’

‘She does not so much buy, of late,’ said Dr Nuñez, somewhat bitterly, ‘as steal provisions from us. My ship Fair Wind just escaped being impounded with all her cargo in Bilbao last month.’

Ruy bowed his head in acknowledgement.

‘Quite so, Hector. Spain buys or steals provisions from the rest of Europe. Drake then steals gold, silver and jewels from the Spaniards, to restore the balance.’

‘So the only losers are the native peoples of the Americas?’ I said, emboldened to speak out by Ruy’s expensive wine.

‘They too are recompensed,’ Ruy said, raising an ironic eyebrow. ‘For do the Spanish not repay them with missionary priests, who draw them into the arms of the Holy Catholic Church?’

There was a ripple of somewhat uneasy laughter at this. All those sitting around the table had a painful relationship with the church of Spain, and tales were rife of the tortures inflicted on the Indians to force them into accepting the conquistadors’ idea of Christianity.

‘At any rate,’ said my father, ‘these dishes are very fine, Ruy. You were lucky to get them.’

Ruy tapped his nose with his finger. ‘I have an arrangement with Drake. Once the Queen has chosen her portion of the spoils, Drake grants me a private view of the remainder, before it goes on sale. After he has chosen his personal items, of course.’