To my shame, tears began to fill my eyes.

‘I just enjoy his company, Father. He is, truly, a decent, well brought-up young man. Not a mountebank at all. You should come to the play one day. The theatre is changing. It’s no longer crude entertainment for the rougher element of London streets. There are men like Thomas Kyd who are writing wonderful plays, plays written in beautiful poetry, serious plays.’

He looked unconvinced, but he must have seen my tears, for his voice softened.

‘Very well, Kit. You may occasionally meet this Simon Hetherington, but you must be careful. If he should ever suspect . . . you do understand just how serious it would be? You would be in his power. If he reported you to the authorities, you could be burned for heresy.’

‘I understand,’ I said. I did not say that one man, a treacherous and possibly treasonous man, already knew that I was a girl and would betray me whenever it suited him. And in my heart I knew that for the first time in my life I would disobey my father. I would see Simon whenever I chose.

I slept late the next morning, exhausted from lack of sleep and the fears of the previous day, so that when I woke at last my father had gone to the hospital and Joan to the market. The weather had turned warm and spring-like again after the storm. Bright sunlight flooded in through my window when I threw back the shutters. A sparrow flew past, its beak loaded with nesting materials, while from the direction of the river there was a sudden clamour of gulls which heralded the dumping of waste overboard from one of the ships in the docks.

My heart lifted in sudden happiness. Here I was with a whole day to myself! I could use it how I chose, a luxury that was almost unknown to me. I dressed slowly in clean clothes and a pair of respectable shoes, and took time to comb my hair which curled tightly now that I wore it cut short like a boy’s. It was tangled and it took me time to tug the comb through the knots. The sounds of London going about its daily business floated up from the street – the lowing of a herd of cattle being driven to Smithfield, the clatter of carts bumping over the ruts in the lane, hawkers shouting their wares. When I heard the milkmaid calling, I ran downstairs for the jug and out into the street.

‘Morning, Master Kit,’ she said, filling my jug from the barrel carried on the back of her donkey.’

‘Morning, Jess. Isn’t it a lovely day?’ I sounded as obsessed with weather as the English.

‘It is that. Not working at the hospital today?’

‘I have a holiday.’ I smiled, feeling that same quivering lift to my heart as I gave her the farthing for the milk.

She grinned back. ‘You’re lucky, then. No holiday for me.’

‘Well, it’s rare for me. I shall make the most of it.’

‘You do that.’ She chirruped to the donkey and went on her way, singing out her cry of ‘Milk! Sweet milk! Come and buy your sweet milk!’

I went back inside and decided I would cook myself porridge and serve it with milk while it was still fresh. Even on the stone shelf in the pantry it would soon go sour in the heat of the day. It was fresh now, that was why we always bought from Jess, whose father’s farm was just north of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. She rose to milk just after dawn and brought the milk into the city straight afterwards, And she carried it in a covered barrel, unlike some of the sluttish milkmaids who used open pails that were always crawling with flies.

The porridge was good, almost as good as the Barn Elms porridge. It was one of the few things I knew how to cook. The milk was sweet and creamy. I filled up with bread and hard cheese. It was yesterday’s bread, a little stale, but Joan had clearly not been to the baker yet today. She did not bake her own bread, for we had no bread oven. When the fireplace had been added to the house many years ago, replacing the central hearth and smoke hole, it seemed the hospital authorities had not thought it worthwhile going to the expenses of building a bread oven, when just round the corner there was a row of pie shops, which also baked bread for the parish.

My meal was part breakfast, part midday dinner. I would not wait for my father to come home to eat, in case he tried to dissuade me from going to the theatre. That hostility of his the night before had taken me by surprise. We had occasionally attended the theatre in Coimbra, but then life had been much easier in those days, we had mixed with other people. There had been not only plays but concerts and some parties – rather polite, sober parties amongst the families of my father’s university colleagues. When I thought about it, I realised that he had never been to a play or a concert or a party here in London. It was as though he had withdrawn into his shell, like snail touching salt. Our home, the hospital, the meetings for worship at the Nuñez house, these made up his world. A few times we had been invited to dinner with the Lopez or Nuñez family, but he was often reluctant to go, since we could hardly entertain them in Duck Lane.

I had been to the play perhaps three times in our four years in London, before Simon invited me to The Famous Victories of Henry V. But never with my father. Sara Lopez, taking pity on me, I suppose, had sometimes invited me to join their family party at the theatre. I preferred it when her husband Ruy did not join us, for he had a way of commented loudly during the play, comparing it unfavourably to the plays he had attended in Portugal. He so often made these disparaging comparisons that I had once asked my father why Ruy Lopez had moved to England. He had smiled grimly.

‘Like us, he had no choice.’

Today, however, I was on my own, free to visit the theatre and even go behind the stage into those mysterious dim caverns I had glimpsed briefly before. And I would meet the members of the company who worked such magic upon the stage. I wondered whether Thomas Kyd would be there. And surely the great actor and manager James Burbage. And there were the others Simon had mentioned when he pointed out their lodgings – the Burbage sons, Richard and Cuthbert. The great comic actor Tarleton I knew had joined the Queen’s Men.

I threw a light cloak round my shoulders and stepped out into the street. The very houses, the crumbling, low-built houses of Duck Lane, appeared to be smiling at me. All the way across the city, the citizens seemed to share in my own holiday mood. Perhaps the reason the English talk so much about the weather is because it is so changeable, and with the changes, their mood changes too. In Portugal we knew that once summer came we could be assured of almost continual sunshine until autumn closed in. There would be sudden storms of rain, and they were always welcome, for without rain the crops would wither and perish, but the rain would soon pass and the exhausting heat would return.

Here in England I had grown to love the shifting pattern of the days, sunshine to showers, showers to sparkle of raindrops glistening on every surface under a shy sun, and a rainbow in the sky. Oh, the skies! I could have watched the cloud patterns endlessly. Sometimes the skies were as dappled as the back of a trout swimming in a clear stream. Sometimes the clouds piled up like the ramparts of some ancient castellated city. Sometimes the colour of the sky was the soft blue of a newborn baby’s eyes, but within hours – or minutes – would mutate into pigeon grey, then darken almost to night black. And the sunsets. I have never seen such sunsets. Looking up river, especially in autumn, I would see gold and crimson and fiery orange draped across the sky like a monarch’s robes, but more splendid than any earthly king’s.

And as the seasons and the sky, the frost and snow, the sun and rain played out a kind of dance, so our very minds took on the cast of the weather, mine as much as anyone’s. When the long winter nights closed in and the sky was pregnant with rain or snow, I could feel it pressing down on my head like a tangible weight. But now, with the spring sunshine lighting up a city washed clean by the storm, not only the world but everyone I passed seemed infected with gaiety. Apprentices whistled as they went about their masters’ business. The street hawkers cried their wares in cheerful voices. Strangers smiled at each other in the street. I smiled myself.