My mind was not on the wherryman’s grumbles, however, but on the documents I carried in my satchel. I kept touching it, as if to reassure myself that they were still there. What, I wondered, would Sir Francis say about the Scottish queen’s reply to Babington? I knew that Phelippes thought it might not be quite enough to condemn her, though if you put it together with Babington’s letter, it was clear that she was privy to the plan to assassinate the Queen. Under the terms of the Act of Surety, if a person knew of such a plan and did not report it, then they were guilty of treason.

I found Sir Francis in a small office near the Queen’s private quarters, surrounded as usual by neat stacks of paper. I gave him Phelippes’s letter, the transcription of Mary’s letter, and the copy of the letter in cipher which Phelippes had had me forge in Curll’s hand. I heard Sir Francis cluck his tongue in annoyance when he caught sight of Phelippes’s gallows sketch.

‘Foolish,’ he said, ‘foolish.’

He turned to me. ‘Now, Kit, you must put a lock on your tongue. Not a syllable to anyone, not even your father, about what you have heard and seen these last few months.’

‘I understand, sir.’

‘Wait here. I need to apprise Her Majesty of the contents of this letter and of everything that has been taking place at Chartley. Phelippes asks me to discover whether Babington is in London. I shall send out Thomas Cassie and Nicholas Berden to hunt for him. The man is as slippery as a Thames eel.’

With that he hurried off to the Queen. I knew Phelippes’s servant Cassie quite well. Berden I had met only once. He was one of Sir Francis’s most active and successful spies, who worked mainly in Paris, though he was back in London now. I wished them the joy of finding a man who seemed to change his lodgings as often as he changed his shirt.

Sir Francis was soon back.

‘I shall send a letter to Thomas by royal messenger,’ he said. ‘He can use post horses and be in Chartley in less than two days. I want to be sure that Thomas does not arrest Babington yet, should he still be in the area. Not until we are sure about our evidence. If we track him down in London, we will keep him under constant surveillance. We’ll give him the space to commit himself a little further.’

He sat down at his desk to write.

‘Now here are two letters, Kit, which I want you to take back to Seething Lane and give to Mylles. The first is to be sent on to Thomas immediately by fast messenger. The other is my instructions to Mylles as to how he is to deploy Berden and Cassie. I want you to stay with Mylles and help in any way he sees fit.’

I nodded. ‘Am I to stay in these clothes, sir? And continue to play the part of a messenger boy?’

I was very conscious of how grubby I was. The clothes Phelippes had given me had been somewhat unsavoury from the start. By now they were grimed with sweat and the dust of my journeys to and from Chartley.

Sir Francis looked at me properly for the first time since I had arrived in Greenwich and laughed.

‘No, I think you may discard those . . . garments. After you have seen Mylles, go home and tell your father that you are back in London. Then you may wash and don the clothes you normally wear when you work with us. Not a physician’s gown, please!’

I smiled at his mild attempt at a joke and took the letters he handed me. It would be a relief to be clean again.

By the time I had seen Mylles and reached Duck Lane, my father had returned from the hospital. He embraced me, then held me at arm’s length.

‘You are not looking at your best, Kit.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But I am given leave to come home to wash and change into clean clothes. Then I must go back again.’

He shook his head at this, but did not argue. He had accepted that Walsingham ruled my life now.

‘I think it will all be over soon, Father. Then we can take up our lives as before.’

‘I am glad to hear it. While you are changing, I will tell Joan to make you a meal. You look as if you have not been eating.’

‘I have been travelling a good deal,’ I said, ‘and there has not been much time for regular meals. I would be glad of Joan’s cooking, plain as it is.’

As I started up the stairs, he called after me, ‘That actor fellow has been round here, asking for you. I told him I did not know where you were.’

I nodded, without turning round, but my heart gave a skip.

The next few days were busy but frustrating. Although I was allowed to go home at night, I spent my entire time with Francis Mylles, either at Seething Lane or at his house on Tower Hill. The unbearable heat broke at last in a series of thunderstorms, just when the farmers would have been preparing to harvest the grain crops. Word came in from the country that, despite the good weather earlier in the summer, the harvest was largely ruined. It would mean another year of shortages and rising prices, perhaps even famine amongst the poor.

Berden and Cassie combed London for Babington, but found no sign of him. Gifford too seemed to have disappeared. Mylles had arranged to meet him late in the evening of the twenty-second of July and waited until one o’clock the following morning, but Gifford never appeared. Reporting in later that day, Cassie said he had not seen Gifford for several days, but had heard that he had ridden out into the country with Ballard. As Gifford was our main means of keeping a watch on Ballard, his disappearance also meant we lost track of Ballard, one of the key conspirators and one of the most dangerous.

That was on the Saturday. By Sunday, Mylles was becoming seriously concerned. For all we knew, Ballard had discovered Gifford was Walsingham’s agent and left him lying dead in a ditch somewhere. Ballard was a man who would not hesitate to use his knife if he saw need of it. The burden of all this responsibility was beginning to tell on Mylles, who would normally have been able to turn either to Phelippes or to Sir Francis himself for guidance, but Phelippes had still not returned from Chartley and Sir Francis was attending the Queen, who – so we gathered – was in a state of anxiety over the whole business that left her sharp tongued and short tempered.

Mylles knew he was not to arrest Babington yet, but he feared that if Ballard was not arrested he would slip away again to France, probably from the very fishing village where I had seen him land. Yet if he were arrested, it might scare the other conspirators into hiding.

‘It is impossible to know what to do, Kit,’ he said to me that Sunday evening. ‘If I send Berden or Gifford (could we find him) to arrest Ballard, they will be known immediately for Sir Francis’s men. I dare not use the city pursuivants, for you know what they are like. They will make so much hullaballoo that half London will be alerted. We must keep our activities secret even from the city authorities. I wish Thomas Phelippes were here.’

Soon after this, however, Berden discovered Babington in London.

‘I have spoken to one of his servants,’ he said, when he arrived at Mylles’s house to report. ‘Sir Anthony is to give a great celebration dinner for his friends at the Castle tavern in Cornhill on Thursday. All is to be of the most lavish. It seems they are celebrating the success of their plans.’

‘Too soon,’ I said, ‘too soon.’

‘They are a gaggle of arrogant young coxcombs,’ Berden said crossly, but he had reason. He had hardly slept in the last week. ‘We will need several men to watch the inn. There are doors leading into various streets. One of them provides a way through an alley to Threadneedle Street and the Royal Exchange. It is so busy round there it would be easy for any of them to slip away and be lost in the crowd. And I think we should book a room next to theirs on Thursday and place a man there to keep watch.’

He sat down and blew out his breath.