My grandmother was urging us indoors, away from the heat, as the carriage was driven around to the back of the house, where the servants would unload the luggage we had brought with us.

‘Come, sit down,’ she said. ‘There is cool fruit juice, and some of the fig pasties Isabel is so fond of.’

While Isabel and Felipe and I drank the juice gratefully and ate the pasties with more greed than manners, she sat down with my mother and took both her hands.

‘You are pale, my dear. Are you ill?’

My mother shook her head. ‘It’s nothing but the heat. It came early in the city this year. I’m glad to be home here amongst the mountains.’

My grandmother was Jewish by descent, that is, her family belonged to the novos cristãos, those who had accepted baptism. Her ancestors had been driven from Spain by the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in the previous century. Like the other Spanish Jews they had been forced by King João II to pay eight crusados apiece just to stay in Portugal for eight months. It proved to be a lucrative source of income for him, for there were fifty thousand of them. Many used the short period of grace to arrange passage to more tolerant countries like the Netherlands or the Ottoman Empire. My grandmother’s grandfather was one of the few rich enough to buy permission to reside permanently in Portugal, a concession which lasted just four years before the Spanish monarchs persuaded the new king, Manuel, to expel all Jews from the country.

My grandmother had told me all this the previous summer. Until then I had been ignorant of our family history, knowing only that we were set apart from other Portuguese, somehow strangers in our own land.

‘It was during the reign of Manuel,’ she said, ‘that the forced conversions of Jews to Christianity began. You are old enough now, Caterina, to understand these things. It was then my family converted, but it did not stop the persecutions and massacres, nor the coming of the Inquisition.’

She smiled.

‘But our history is not all sadness. Your grandfather and I married for love, which was very unusual at the time. You should know that the old Christian Portuguese aristocracy had a horror of tainting their blood with any New Christian pollution, but Grandpapa inherited his estate young – he was wealthy, independent, stubborn, and in love. My own parents were unsure about the match, but I think that they felt I would be safe, married to one of the old nobility, so they allowed our marriage to take place. My one regret is that your mother is our only child.’

‘But now you have us,’ I said.

‘Indeed. Now we have you.’

The case of my father was different. He came from an urban background, a novos cristãos family from Lisbon, wealthy merchants who traded with the Levant and along the new sea routes to east and west opened up by Prince Henry the Navigator and his successors.

Oh, Portugal was a great nation for a time, not the sad occupied country she has become. My father’s family had always produced doctors as well as merchants so, while his elder brother entered the family shipping business, my father studied medicine, first at Salamanca and then at Bologna, before returning to Portugal and taking up his position teaching and practising medicine in Coimbra. As a child in Lisbon my father had witnessed massacres of New Christians, so he was always careful. When we attended one of the secret synagogues, we made our way in small groups, never more than three together; Isabel and I would go with our mother and then, looking down from the women’s gallery, see my father’s and Felipe’s bowed heads below us, never acknowledging them or speaking to them until we were safe at home again.

e

Now, in Sir Francis Walsingham’s house in Seething Lane, Master Phelippes led me into an adjoining room, smaller than the room we quitted but also laid out as an office. There were three tables, two of them stacked with packets of papers secured with cord. The third, under the window, held just a few sheets covered with writing, a pile of blank paper, an inkwell and pen-knife, an hour-glass, a pewter pot holding untrimmed quills, and one quill already neatly trimmed. Everything was lined up with rigid precision. Phelippes sat down behind this table, with his back to the window, and motioned me to a chair in front of him.

‘You will see why I need an assistant.’ He gestured toward the tied bundles of documents. ‘More than twenty packets of letters and other documents have been delivered this week, all in cipher and all to be transcribed and copied before they are despatched on their way.’

I must have looked at him blankly, for he sighed, removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Then he hooked the wires over his ears again and clasped his hands together on the table in front of him.

‘As Sir Francis has explained, our work here is of the most secret nature. You must reveal nothing, nothing of it to anyone beyond this building. Do you understand? Not even to your father. To do so could result in peril to the state and to the Queen herself. And would almost certainly send you to the Tower. Do you understand?’

I shivered and swallowed. His words were like the grip of icy hands around my throat. I understood, certainly. His manner left no room for doubt. One did not speak lightly of imprisonment in the Tower.

‘I understand.’ My voice croaked.

He fixed me with a piercing gaze, then nodded, as if he was satisfied.

‘Very well. You will have to know something about the work in order to carry it out satisfactorily. I am told that you are fluent in both French and Spanish. The letters will mostly be written in these languages, though some will be in English.’

I nodded, as if I understood. So they were letters. Were they perhaps despatches from the intelligencers Sir Francis was said to employ all over Europe? But then they would surely be in English. And why so many all at once?

As if he suspected what was passing through my mind, Phelippes glanced aside at the bundles of documents, then looked back at me.

‘These letters have been accumulating at the French embassy here in London for nearly a year. Ever since the Scottish queen was forbidden to hold communication with the outside world in the wake of the Parry conspiracy.’

I caught my breath in an audible gasp. It was common knowledge that the Parry conspiracy had nearly succeeded in assassinating our Queen and putting the Scottish queen Mary on the throne, backed by an invasion from France financed by Mary’s cousin, the Duke of Guise. Parry’s head, what was left of it, was one of those still spiked above the gate to London Bridge, through which I had passed a few weeks before with Simon Hetherington.

‘But how . . .’ I said, ‘I mean, why do you have all these letters now?’

‘One of Sir Francis’s agents – you do not need to know who – has infiltrated the conspiracy of Catholic exiles and priests in France who are plotting the overthrow of the Queen, with the additional aid of Spain. He has been entrusted with carrying these letters to Chartley Manor in Staffordshire, where the Scottish queen is now held. However, before they are delivered, they must all be deciphered and copied, then resealed. We have devised a method of passing the letters secretly, which Mary and her fellow conspirators believe to be safe.’

‘Won’t they be suspicious? If the seals must be broken . . .’

Phelippes smiled. It transformed his face, making him look younger.

‘Arthur!’ he called, ‘come here a minute.’

A door on the far side of the room opened. I had thought it was a cupboard and indeed from the glimpse I had of what lay beyond it hardly seemed more than a cupboard.

‘Arthur,’ said Phelippes, ‘this is Christoval Alvarez, our new code-breaker.’ He turned to me. ‘Arthur Gregory can forge and replace a seal so perfectly that even the seal-maker himself would believe it genuine. He has a fine hand at copying other men’s writing as well.’