Poley! How could I forget Poley? I understood by now that he had brought me into Walsingham’s service as part of his efforts to show himself an agent faithful to England’s cause. Phelippes had needed another code-breaker and Poley had found him one, young and biddable, easy to manipulate. Congratulations to Master Poley. But if I tried to break away, would Poley betray me? If it suited his purposes, he would not hesitate. But where did Poley stand in the present projection? Sir Francis had placed Poley in Babington’s household as a spy, but what if Poley was already a part of that group of conspirators, and was passing information about Sir Francis’s network to them? I had seen him in Babington’s company long before it was said he had been placed there. And if all the conspirators were rounded up and sent to trial, as Walsingham hoped? Did that include Poley?

These thoughts went round and round in my head as I rode north. And when I could shake myself free of them, thoughts of Simon rushed in. I had not seen him since before my first trip to Lichfield and I found I was longing for him. And with the longing, certain forbidden ideas came into my head. What if I were to reveal my true identity to him? He might reject me in horror, as a monster, a man-woman, the repulsive thing against which the church thundered and the law shook its horrified finger. A woman who did not keep to her inferior position but dared to ape the finer species, her superior in every way.

Man.

No. I did not think Simon would be horrified, but certainly he could no longer be the easy companion he had been. He might not even like me. A man does not look for the same qualities in a woman as he values in a man. I would lose his friendship and it might not be replaced in him with the feeling that now knotted itself in my stomach and turned my legs to water. I had never known anything like this before. I was beginning to accept with my mind that I was in love with Simon, but I was unprepared for these physical signs of weakness over which I seemed to have no control. Even in his absence I could not suppress them.

How I wished I had not lost my mother and sister. I wanted another woman to talk to, but in my male world there was only Sara Lopez, and I did not feel I could talk to her of this, although I was not quite sure why. Certainly I could not talk to my father. Much as I loved him, I did not think he would understand my feelings. Besides, he would fear the danger I would place myself in if I should reveal myself as a woman. And he did not like Simon, merely because he was an actor. He would not regard an English mountebank as even worth considering as the suitor of a Portuguese professor’s daughter. My father’s pride had been humbled since we had come as refugees to England, but certain moral standards he would not relax, and that was one of them.

I was still lost in the maze of these thoughts when I reached Lichfield and found myself a room again at the Swan. Once I had seen to Hector, I walked round to the White Hart, where I asked for Sir Anthony.

‘Come in, lad, come in!’ he said, waving me to a chair. ‘Edward, see whether the landlord can find some food for the boy. He looks hungry to me.’ He beamed at me, clearly in high spirits.

As the servant went out in search of food, which I would not refuse, he said, ‘I’ve forgotten your name, lad.’

‘It is Simon, sir.’

‘Well, Simon, the letter is not quite ready, but it would be too late to take it tonight anyway. Can you read?’

‘Certainly, sir,’ I said stiffly.

‘I’ll wager you’ve never read anything like this!’ He beckoned me over and held out to me the top sheet from a pile of papers.

It was covered with the symbols of one of Curll’s simplest ciphers. I could read it straight off, even without a key. It was a long paragraph listing possible ports where ships from France could land men.

‘Clever, isn’t?’ he said. ‘Takes me the devil of a time to work out, though.’

‘Is it a secret language, sir?’ I asked innocently.

‘Yes, I suppose you could call it that. Secret, certainly. It’s what they call a “cipher” or a “code”. Ah, here’s Edward with a tray.’

I ate the excellent game pie and gooseberry fool with relish. It would save me paying for a meal at my inn. When I had finished, I stood, turning my dreadful cap in my hands.

‘Shall I come back tomorrow morning, sir?’

Babington ran his hands through his hair and flipped through his papers.

‘To be quite honest with you, Simon, I do not think this will be finished until the evening. Come about dusk and I’ll have it ready for you. Then you can start for Chartley first thing the next morning.’

‘Should I wait for an answer, sir?’

‘See what Curll says. It may take some time. Perhaps you should stay up there for a day or two, if Curll thinks best.’

I bowed my way out. Despite a bad start, it seemed things were falling into place now.

Having the next day to myself, I strolled about the little town, visiting the marketplace and buying a new cap with some of the money from the purse I had been given. It was still a cap suitable for a messenger boy, but at least it was clean and not as hot. When I passed the great pond near the cathedral, I threw the old cap in and waited for it to sink. A couple of mallards swam over to investigate, thinking it some curious form of vegetable life, but they soon scorned it and it sank at last.

During the afternoon I spent some time on my knees in the cathedral. I love the cool bare spaces of these English cathedrals. The churches I had known in Portugal had been a riot of colour, so full of statues and draperies and candles and side altars and crucifixes that my mind was always distracted. The space here was like a quiet grove of great trees, ancient beeches, perhaps, with their trunks soaring high above me and meeting overhead in a glorious intertwining of the branches in the roof of the nave. Yet at the same time the patterning of the ribbed vaulting was like the physical manifestation of a mathematical problem, elegant and pure, a problem which had been solved by those long-ago stone masons in a breathtaking union of tree and stone, art and reason, nature and mathematics.

It set me to thinking about symmetry in nature, the beautiful symmetry of the most humble leaf, or the complex spiral at the centre of a daisy. Yet mankind is not symmetrical. Yes, we seem symmetrical, our bodies’ symmetry mapped from one side to the other down the central line from nose to crotch. Yet we are not. Even our faces give us away with their tiny asymmetries. The real secret of man’s deviation lies within, however. I was not a surgeon, but my father had instructed me in the anatomy of the human body that I might be a better physician, and I had read his Vesalius, one of the few books he had managed to bring with him from his considerable library.

Is it the asymmetry of our internal organs that makes us restless, never quite at ease in the world? The Bible says Eve ate the forbidden fruit of knowledge and thus mankind was cast out from Eden. But what if that asymmetry, that sense of being slightly askew from nature was the real root of the trouble?

I stayed in the cathedral until it was time to go back to the White Hart, letting its peace wash over me. I prayed that what I was doing was right, that God would give me some sign if I should abandon this task now. But He gave no sign. I emerged from the cathedral blinking in the setting sun. I felt quiet. Not at peace exactly, but as though I must simply move through the next hours not thinking, but simply doing.

Phelippes and Gregory should be near now. If they had left the day after me, they should reach Lichfield this afternoon or evening, but they would ride on to Stowe-by-Chartley without stopping. It would have been a hard ride for Phelippes. I hoped they would be there when I reached the village tomorrow, otherwise I would have to wait about, and that might cause comment.