Gregory was a young man, younger than Phelippes. He bowed and smiled shyly as I bowed in return.

‘But I have no talent for breaking codes, Master Alvarez,’ he said. ‘It is a mystery to me. I believe Master Phelippes is some kind of magician.’

‘Nonsense, Arthur.’ I could not tell whether Phelippes was pleased or annoyed by the comment. It seemed to me he was a man whose kept his feelings well hidden. ‘Here are the three originals of the letters I have decoded this morning. Wait.’ He took back one of the sheets. ‘We’ll see how good Master Alvarez’s skills are.’

Arthur Gregory withdrew to his tiny room and Phelippes cleared a space for me on one of the tables, laying out paper, quill, pen-knife and ink.

‘Let us see what you make of this. I will tell you only that it is in French.’

I sharpened the quill, handed back the pen-knife, and pressed the paper flat with my left hand. Two symbols appeared so often I was sure they were dummies, that is, meaningless symbols dotted amongst the true symbols to create confusion. Phelippes turned over an hour-glass, then carefully lifted the seal on another letter with the tip of his pen-knife. I began to lay out the symbols in a grid, omitting the dummies. The sand trickling through the hour-glass unnerved me. I had not asked for this employment, but a certain pride demanded that I should not fail in it.

In the end it did not prove very difficult. I could guess that certain of the words might be ‘Your Majesty’, ‘army’, ‘invade’, ‘Duke of Guise’, ‘supporters’ – all in French, of course. The sand was not yet halfway through the glass when I handed my deciphered version of the letter to Phelippes. I had written it out roughly in French, then more neatly in English. The contents were of no great moment, talking vaguely of gathering support amongst the English exiles in Paris and Dieppe and a promise of financial support from Spain (which even to my inexperienced eye looked unconvincing). The letter was signed ‘Thomas Germin’.

Phelippes seemed surprised that I had finished so quickly. He read through both my French and English versions, then nodded.

‘Good. That was well done. Take the original to Arthur now, for resealing.’

I knocked at the other door and went in. There was barely room for me inside, for Gregory’s desk spanned the width of the room and the door barely cleared the back of his chair. He was as meticulous as Phelippes, it seemed, for there was one neat row of seals along the back of his desk and in front of them a row of sticks of seal-wax in many different shades. Along the wall there were shelves holding more seals and a collection of blanks. An array of tiny tools – like those an etcher or engraver might use – was laid out on the lowest shelf.

‘Master Phelippes says this is to be sealed now.’

‘Did you pass the test?’

‘I think so.’

He smiled warmly at me. ‘It is good work, you know. We strive to keep England safe.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I do understand.’

Phelippes looked up from his work as I returned. ‘I will select more letters now for you to decipher,’ he said. ‘To allay suspicion we must work from the earliest dates first.’

I looked at him in dismay. ‘But I cannot stay now. I am expected at the hospital this morning. My father and I were about to leave when Poley came.’ I would not give him the distinction of calling him ‘Master’ Poley.

Phelippes frowned. ‘That is inconvenient, but perhaps you had better go today. Sir Francis will come to some arrangement with the governors of St Bartholomew’s. Unless I send word to the contrary, I will expect you tomorrow afternoon.’

He turned back to his papers and I understood that I was dismissed.

I found my way to the back stairs and out of the house, encountering no one but a scullery boy. Clearly Sir Francis’s servants were used to all manner of strange people coming and going by this back route, for he paid me no attention. I hurried back across London to home and found, as I expected, that my father was gone.

‘He left straight after breakfast.’ Joan looked at me curiously, clearly keen to know where I had been and what I had been doing. ‘He said you were to go to the hospital as soon as you came home.’

‘I’ll be off,’ I said, cutting myself a hunk of bread. I was hungry after my ordeal and it was already past midday. ‘Is there no cheese?’

‘Where it usually is,’ she said tartly, banging into the corner of the kitchen with her broom.

I found the cheese in the hanging meat safe, cut a piece to top my bread, and headed out of the house, eating as I went. Although the epidemic was over, there was always much work to be done at the hospital, so I had no chance to speak to my father in private until we had eaten that evening and Joan had gone out to visit friends.

‘Well,’ said my father, ‘how did matters go with Sir Francis? Why did he want to see you?’

‘I am to work at code-breaking for him. They have a lot of documents that need deciphering. They seem to think they can take me away from my work with you. Can they do that?’

He frowned. ‘I suppose a man as powerful as Sir Francis can do what he chooses with the likes of us. But I shall miss your help.’

‘Perhaps it will just be for a short time. There is a senior code-breaker there already, Thomas Phelippes. I think there is too much work for him at the moment.’

‘Let us hope so.’

I did not feel that revealing Phelippes’s name was breaking my promise to keep silent about the content of the work, but I was troubled that I could not talk to my father about it. I carried too heavy a burden of secrets already and needed to share it.

Lying awake in bed that night, my mind buzzed with the disturbing events of the day. I feared Poley. It was clear that he would use his knowledge of my disguise to blackmail me whenever he chose. If my position had been fraught with danger before, it was perilous now, with such knowledge in the possession of a man I was convinced was unscrupulous and self-serving. As for the work for Sir Francis and Master Phelippes, well, it seemed straightforward enough, even interesting. I loved the challenge of deciphering codes and the secret nature of the work did not trouble me, though I would have liked my father to know how I was to be employed. My life was composed of secrets. I thumped the pillow under my head and drew the blankets up around my ears, for my chamber up under the pitched ceiling was bitterly cold, draughts from the gaping shutters running over my face like water. In the end, far into the night, I slept.

e

That summer when I was twelve was long and languorous. The vividness with which it remains in my memory seems to be some special quality of that summer, and not purely because it was the last one. It must have been early June when my father took us up to my grandparents’ solar. He stayed longer than usual, I remember, as if he too were affected by the special quality of the light that year as it gilded the white-washed walls in the early morning, or grew roseate and dreamy when the sun sank in the evenings, sliding sleepily down into the unseen Atlantic. I remember sitting with him one slow evening under an ancient olive tree as bent and gnarled as an old man, a tree which my grandfather said had been planted by the Romans who once farmed this land. I was reading aloud to my father in Italian from that fearful book Il Principe by Niccoló Machiavelli, because my father believed I should understand the true motives of princes and men of power. The shadows of the olive leaves danced across the page, for a light breeze always started up in the evening, and I found that the words seemed to tremble in the uncertain light, making it difficult to read. I glanced at my father and saw that he had fallen asleep, his head propped against the twisted trunk of the tree and his mouth a little open.