On my way to the inn stable, I went through the dining parlour and filched two more apples. I reckoned Andrew’s horse deserved one too.

By the time I reached them, Andrew had both horses rubbed down and fed, but they welcomed the apples greedily.

‘What a night!’ His eyes gleamed in the light from the stable lantern. ‘More excitement than a month of being a trooper.’

I grinned back at him. ‘I could have done without the shock when I fell over whatever that was behind the cottage.’

‘It scared me too. Your head is bleeding. You’d best have it seen to.’

‘I’ll see to it myself. When I’m not working for Phelippes, I am a doctor at St Bartholomew’s’

He whistled softly, causing Hector’s ears to swivel toward us.

‘And you ride like a trooper.’

‘My grandfather bred horses. I could ride almost before I could walk.’

‘Well, between us we’ve managed to spice up a dull mission. What did the great men say?’

‘Phelippes and your captain? They are sending two of your men to follow the strangers and see where they go, but not to arrest them yet. Phelippes thinks he knows who one of them is.’

‘And the rest of us?’

‘The rest of us are going to create a diversion, making a nuisance of ourselves over in Kent, round the Isle of Oxney, so it looks as though we have discovered nothing.’

He laughed. ‘Clever!’

‘Oh, Phelippes is a very clever man. Now we’d best get to our beds for what’s left of the night. Thank you, Andrew, for your help tonight. If you had not dragged me away from that cottage, I hate to think what might have happened to me.’

As I spoke I had a sudden clear picture of what would have happened. Those ruffians would have captured me, and when they discovered I was a girl – what then? I shuddered.

‘All in a night’s work,’ he said cheerfully.

Compared with the excitement of the night, the next day was exceedingly dull. After breaking our fast late because of our lack of sleep, we set out for Tenterden. In the town and then round the villages on and near the Isle of Oxney, we rode about asking questions doggedly and calling the greatest possible attention to ourselves. It was strange country. The Isle was no longer quite an island, but it was easy to see that once it had been, before this part of the marsh had been drained. Even now the whole area was crisscrossed with ditches and streams, and even where the road ran along a raised embankment, it felt temporary and unstable.

One of the troopers had been born in a village a little north of here and told us that what looked like dry ground now, in high summer, would revert to salt marsh and sea in winter.

‘There’s hardly a winter goes by when it doesn’t flood,’ he said. ‘Then the island is cut off again. You see over there?’ He pointed ahead with his whip to a small gentleman’s estate on the edge of one of the larger waterways which led down to the Rother, one of the rivers which flowed into the port of Rye.

‘That place is known as Kingsgate now. It was there that King Henry embarked for the Field of the Cloth of Gold. His army and his court encamped on those fields before they left. I’ve heard my grandfather talk about it.’

The estate looked sleepy under the summer sun, but I tried to picture the fields filled not with cows but with pavilions and pennants, with royal servants running to and fro, and the king’s ships tied up at what was now a rotting and dilapidated quay. It added a little interest to what was otherwise a very boring day.

That evening Phelippes decided that we could start for London the next morning, having allowed time for the conspirators and the men shadowing them to get well ahead of us. So, on an unpleasantly hot day we set off for home, making our stops again at Hawkhurst and Knoll, and reaching Seething Lane late in the evening of the third day. In the bustle of the stableyard I had only time for a brief farewell to Andrew before the troopers rode off to their quarters in the Tower nearby.

‘Anytime you want another bodyguard,’ he said, ‘I’m your man. I’d rather be creeping around spying and galloping through the dark than doing routine manoeuvres on a parade ground.’

I shook my head with a smile. ‘If the invasion comes, you’ll be doing more than manoeuvres, I’m afraid.’

‘At least it will be more exciting. Take care of yourself, Doctor Alvarez!’ With that, he rode off with the rest. I knew he did not believe I was a doctor. I was beginning to doubt it myself.

After a day’s rest, I was back to my former routine – hospital in the morning, Seething Lane in the afternoon, and, when I could slip away, visits to Simon’s company at the playhouse, where I could put aside all thoughts of treason and conspiracy. I was getting to know more of the players now. There were three boys beside Simon who took the women’s parts, but he was the oldest and most experienced. His voice was changing but fortunately it was not mutating through the swoops and croaks some boys endure. Instead it was simply deepening gradually, though I thought it would always remain quite light. He would eventually sing tenor, not bass. And even while it deepened, he could still pitch it so that it sounded like a woman’s. In my crazier moments, I wondered whether he could teach me to pitch my voice lower, so that it would sound more like a man’s. Fortunately it had always been quite low. It seemed that our voices would meet somewhere in the middle of the musical scale, for I sang alto rather than soprano.

Guy Bingham and I would often make music together during these visits. He would find me a lute or a recorder, and he was teaching me the viol. As well as their chief musician, in charge of three or four others, he was also one of their comic actors, yet his face resembled a mournful monkey’s. Simon told me quietly one day something of Guy’s history.

‘He was left an orphan very young and lived by begging and stealing on the streets. Then he found employment as a scullery boy. He said it was like entering heaven. A warm bed and three meals a day. The mistress of the house heard him singing at his work and discovered his musical talent. She had him trained and he became the household musician until she died a few years later.’

‘Was he out on the streets again?’

‘No, he joined a band of musicians attached to my lord Leicester’s household. He married, and had three little girls in four years. Then the plague came and took his whole family. He doesn’t talk about it, but I think he went a little mad. He was thrown out of Leicester’s household, but Master Burbage found him and took him on.’

‘It seems a strange life for a comic actor.’

‘Oh, you’ll find that most comic actors have some great sadness in their lives. The comedy is a protection, a shell. It helps to arm them against memory.’

‘I see.’ I could understand that. ‘The more I learn about your world, Simon, the more it resembles mine.’ Then, lest he guess too closely what I meant, I added, ‘This world of Walsingham’s service, of spies and informants, coded letters, projections, agents and double agents. Nothing is what it seems. Like the playhouse.’

‘I hope our pretence is for worthwhile ends, to explore all corners of the human condition. We do not do it to deceive and entrap.’

I could see he was a little offended by what I had said.

‘No, I did not mean that. What I was trying to say – I’m confused and not saying this well. Both play with reality. Turn shadow into substance and substance into shadow.’

I wanted to say: And make a girl appear a man. A girl who is beginning to feel that this friendship of ours is more than simple comradeship. Or at least she wishes it could be.

Instead, I changed the subject. ‘I am surprised you all spend so much time here in the playhouse, even when you are not rehearsing or staging a play.’

Simon himself was not appearing that day, yet here he was.