But the wound was nasty, a great torn and jagged place in her thigh, and it had become infected. The parents had called in some unlicensed apothecary, who had bled the child, thereby weakening her further. My father’s methods were advanced, as were those of most of the medical school at Coimbra. He did not believe in bleeding for serious wounds, despite Dr Stevens’s conviction that bleeding was the only way to cleanse the blood of any infection. He handed the child over to my care and I sent Peter to fetch the medicines I needed.

I began by cleaning out the wound with tincture of calendula officinalis, then applied a compress of plantago major and salved it with eupatorium cannabium, both of which counteract infection.

The child was unconscious with a high fever, but even so she writhed and screamed as I worked. I hate to hurt a patient, above all to hurt a child.

My hands were shaking, but I knew I must do this. An infected wound would bring her more pain. Probably death. My stomach churned and my own flesh flinched as I wiped the raw wound clear of pus and dirt.

When the wound was finally cleansed to my satisfaction, I left it open to the air, burning the stinking dressing which had covered it, and I sat up with her two nights, giving her drinks of cooling herbs and bathing her whole body with febrifuge tinctures to reduce the fever.

The first night she remained lost in the darkness of that fever, but around the middle of the second night, when the church bells were chasing each other down the air with their twelve brazen strokes, she half woke.

‘Mama!’ she cried, ‘Mama!’

Her eyes glittered in her flushed face, and her hair, dark with sweat, clung to her forehead in flattened curls.

I gathered her on to my lap and rocked her gently. On a stool beside the bed I kept a basin of the cooling tincture, with which I sponged her face and then her burning body. It seemed to ease her a little, though she gave pitiful cries still for her mother and mumbled incoherent words.

When I had done bathing her, I wrapped her in a light sheet and cradled her in my arms. She was stiff with pain and fever.

‘Hush now, my pet,’ I whispered. ‘Listen.’

We had placed her cot behind a screen, but there were other patients sleeping in the long ward, so I kept my voice low as I sang softly the lullabies our nurse had comforted us with when we were small. Gradually her body relaxed into mine and her head rested against my shoulder. She was a frail little thing, with shoulder blades trying to break through her skin, thin and sharp as incipient wings. But her spirit was strong and fought to hold on to life.

On the third day she fell into a deep natural sleep, and on the fourth she woke and cried for food. The wound was still far from healing, but it was clean and sweet and the skin had begun to draw together. She would have a scar for the rest of her life, but it would be well hidden by her skirts.

‘Good work,’ said Peter, when he came with me to hand the child back to her parents a week later. ‘I did not think she would live.’

Alys – for that was her name – clung to my hand as we walked towards the gate. I grinned at Peter. Since the day when we had cared for Sir Jonathan Langley, I had worked with him more often. He would make a fine apothecary when his apprenticeship was finished.

Alys’s parents were waiting just inside the gate. From the fine white dust ingrained in his skin and the small scars peppering his hands, I took it that her father was a stonemason. Her mother was small and thin, a little wisp of a woman, but I could see that she could barely contain herself from running forward.

‘Mama!’ Alys cried, slipping from my hand and rushing into her mother’s arms.

‘We’re that grateful to you, doctor,’ the man said, and there were tears in his eyes. ‘She’s our only one that lived.’

I mumbled something in reply, aware of an ache as I watched Alys clinging to her mother. Then, as they turned away, she suddenly ran back and clutched me about the knees.

‘God be with you, Dr Kit,’ she whispered.

I knelt down on the paving stones and hugged her.

‘And with you, Alys. And stay away from the street dogs!’

‘You did well with the child,’ my father said, as we sat together in our small parlour that evening.

I smiled at him.

‘That is why we are given our skill, isn’t it, Father? To heal the sick and restore them to life?’

I noticed then – I had been too preoccupied with the child to notice before – that he was looking tired. More than that, he seemed exhausted. My absence working for Phelippes, particularly the long hours of late, had thrown a much greater burden on him. I think that was the first time I fully realised that my father was growing old. He had been past forty when I was born, so now he was nearing sixty, and what he had endured at the hands of the Inquisition had surely shortened his life.

In the days that followed I tried to take over more and more of his work, to spare him, and I urged upon Joan the necessity of feeding him well. Between us we contrived to ensure that he ate two good meals of meat a day, and he began to look a little less worn.

However much I would have liked to spend more time relieving my father of some of his burden of work, Phelippes still needed me. When Dr Stevens returned to the hospital he required a cane to lean upon, but at least he was able to resume the care of most of his patients. Once again I was working at St Bartholomew’s in the mornings and spending the afternoons at Seething Lane. Phelippes was troubled by the fact that the conspiracy headed in England by Sir Anthony Babington was not progressing in the way he expected. Sir Anthony, it seemed, was developing cold feet. Despite the fact that he was a married man with a young child, he was expressing a wish to travel abroad.

‘In order to widened his education, he says!’ Phelippes was contemptuous. ‘He is four and twenty. If he had wanted to travel in Europe and see the sights of ancient Rome, he should have gone five or six years ago, at the age when most young gentlemen travel. Rome! I know where he will be headed in Rome. Straight to that hotbed of treason, the college for English priests. And he has the effrontery to ask Sir Francis for a licence to travel abroad for three years!’

‘It does seem strange,’ I said cautiously. ‘Not long married, and with a baby. He would leave his wife and child in England?’

‘Of course. He could hardly pursue his education with a woman and child tagging at his heels.’ Phelippes’s voice was sour with sarcasm.

‘But,’ I said, not quite sure why Phelippes was so heated, ‘will this not mean the Queen will be safe and the threat of an invasion will be over?’

He gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘Have you learned nothing, Kit? We want this conspiracy to go forward. For once we have all the threads in our hands. We know the principal players and their strengths and weaknesses. We know where the money is coming from. We know which ports they will attempt to use during an invasion and have installed covert forces there to withstand them. We are intercepting every letter in and out of Chartley, every communication with the Scottish queen, as you very well know. Up to now she has been very careful with what she, or her secretaries, put on paper, but with every week that passes, they become a little more confident, a little more careless. It is unlikely that we will ever again be in a position to have everything under our control as we have now. Of course we want the conspiracy to go forward!’

Under this blast of reasoning, I bowed my head. I had never seen the quiet and prudent Thomas Phelippes so passionate, but I understood that if all his work of the last months were to fall apart, he had some reason for passion.

He had been prowling about the room as he lectured me, but now he sat down abruptly at his desk.