‘I would be glad to be rid of my service to Walsingham,’ I said, but I kept my voice measured and cool. ‘I like it not. I want to spend my time caring for the sick, not mired in intelligencing and codes and plots.’

She held me off at arm’s length and regarded me seriously.

‘I am afraid Ruy is becoming ever more entangled in just such affairs. You are right, Kit. It is safer to have nothing to do with such matters.’

She smiled a little bitterly. ‘Ruy must have his finger in every pie where Spain and Portugal may be concerned. I do not like some of the men who bring messages to him, always muttering in corners.’ She glanced over her shoulder as she spoke, for Sara was always more frank with me than in company, but cautious of being overheard. ‘Take care, Kit, for I fear they will try to draw you in. They are in need of vigorous young men in their midst.’

We both laughed.

‘My father was somewhat concerned that Anne and I are both to sit at table tonight,’ I said. ‘He thought Dr Lopez might be planning a match between us, but I assured him that he would be looking much higher than the son of a lowly physician to the poor of London.’

Sara gave an impatient sigh. She would have been happy to live quietly in London, where she had been born, daughter of Dunstan Añez, and had spent her whole life. She would have been content, enjoying all the honour of being wife to the Queen’s physician, but her husband had always been a wild dreamer, ambitious and greedy for power and gold. The persecutions that our people have suffered can poison some men that way. They will never feel secure, however high they rise, however vast their riches.

‘Ruy has great plans for Anne,’ she said. ‘Your father need have no worries.’

I gave her a quick hug, but we had no time for further talk, and made our way to dinner. Hector and Beatriz Nuñez had arrived in our absence and soon we were all seated at the magnificent table made of some highly waxed foreign wood.

‘Yes,’ said Dr Lopez, when my father admired it. ‘I imported the timber with my last venture to the Portuguese East Indies and had it made up here in London, by the finest craftsmen.’

He ran his hand possessively over the silky, gleaming surface. It drew your fingertips, and when he was not looking I stroked it myself, loving the feel of it, smooth as a baby’s skin.

‘And these I purchased from one of Drake’s hoards, taken from a Spanish merchantman.’ He lifted one of a pair of ornate silver candlesticks, which looked as though they had been looted from a cathedral. From the way he hefted it, I could see that it was monstrously heavy.

‘These carpets were from the same hoard.’

The Turkey carpets were a rich red, a colour monarchs might wear at their coronations, woven with deep forest greens and costly indigos. We walked upon these carpets with our careless shoes, carpets which in any other household, except perhaps the Queen’s, would have been hung on the walls or laid over a table. The ones I had seen at Walsingham’s house seemed paltry rags by comparison.

‘Yes,’ Lopez said, raising a delicate Venetian glass and swirling the wine against the light, ‘I’ve found that the monopoly on the import of aniseed and sumach is proving very profitable.’

I looked down at my plate, feeling myself flush with discomfort. Dr Nuñez also seemed embarrassed at such vulgar ostentation. He was himself rumoured to have great wealth, earned both from his noble patients, including Burghley and Leicester, and his trade in spices and precious stones, but he never made show of it. His house was large and comfortable, but discreet.

As the men talked I was growing more and more sleepy, and my attention wandered. I found myself picturing strange jungles of the far east where the trees had grown which provided the wood for the table. Were they filled with monkeys, peering between the leaves with their sad faces, so like wizened babies? I imagined rainbow-coloured birds flying and screeching overhead, while about the forest floor lizards like miniature dragons darted or froze into stillness, watching every movement of the leaves with a cold unblinking stare. So many strange lands our mariners were discovering, races of people who had lived for centuries in ignorance of us as we had lived in ignorance of them.

The candlesticks – where might they have been stolen by Drake? He could have seized a Spanish treasure ship, loaded with gold and silver from the lands of the New World, so rich in precious metals and gems. But then Ruy Lopez’s silver would have been in the raw state. These candlesticks spoke of fine Spanish craftsmanship two or three hundred years old. They must come from one of Drake’s expeditions looting Spanish coastal towns, where he would have stripped every church and public building of its treasures, and every private home too, unless the terrified owner paid him a fat bribe for immunity. That seemed more likely to me than this mention of a captured merchantman.

Up and down the table, the talk was all of the possibility of a Spanish invasion here in England.

‘If they provoke us first,’ said Ruy, ‘then we shall be justified in striking back. It will be our chance to land in Portugal and set it free.’

‘And where will you obtain your army and your fleet, Ruy?’ Dr Nuñez smiled at him over the rim of his wine glass. ‘I do not think you will drive the Spaniard out of our homeland with our handful of unarmed merchant vessels and a few Portuguese exiles.’

‘Once she sees how dangerous the Spanish are to the peace of all Europe, the Queen will support our enterprise,’ Ruy said confidently. ‘She will understand that there is profit in it for England too.’

I had been hearing this kind of talk almost since we had arrived in England. I could not understand what spurred on men like Ruy. He had a distinguished position here as chief physician to the Queen herself. He had wealth, a fine house, comfort and above all safety. Why should he wish to sacrifice it all? I would not let him see my smile, but I thought to myself: The Queen knows, more than you do, what is planned against her by Spain and France. Even I know more than you do.

With difficulty I kept my eyes propped open and watched Sara’s elegant mantle clock as the hands crept towards the time when we could, with politeness, leave, and I could at last lay my head on a pillow. It was midnight by the time the talk wound down at last and my father was able to tear himself away. He had not said much, but I noticed that he listened intently to the talk of freeing Portugal from Spanish rule.

Ruy summoned two link-boys to light us home, a luxury we would have done without ourselves, but it was generous of him, even though it was also another means to demonstrate his wealth. The journey across the city seemed much safer under their protection than when I crossed it alone.

‘You would not really wish to go back to Portugal, would you, Father?’ I asked when we reached home and let ourselves in quietly. Joan slept in a little cubbyhole off the kitchen. If we woke her she would be slamming pots and pans about tomorrow.

‘It would be good to see the Spanish driven out,’ he said, not answering my question.

‘But you would not go back?’

‘I do not think there is any likelihood of Portugal being rescued from Spain through an expedition led by Ruy Lopez,’ he said with a laugh.

That was still not an answer to my question. The fear that he might even consider it made me shiver.

‘Go to bed, Kit,’ he said. ‘You are asleep where you stand.’

A little girl, perhaps five or six years old, was brought in to the hospital the next morning. Peter Lambert carried her in and laid her on a cot at the end of one of the wards.

‘See here, Kit,’ said my father, ‘she has been bitten by one of those street curs that roam about Smithfield, living off the gutter scraps. The animal cannot have been rabid, or she would have been dead before she reached us.’