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time.
    ‘They are excellent, Mistress Cordiner,’ I said. ‘You made them entirely yourself?’
    She blushed a little. ‘William cut all the pieces. I stitched them and William hammered in the studs on the soles.’
    ‘You work well together, then.’ I grinned at William, who smiled back. I had never seen him look so happy. It was difficult to remember him as he had once been, in such a state of despair that he had wanted only to die.
    ‘The boots are ready to take now?’ I said.
    ‘They need a further polish,’ Liza said. ‘We can do it now, while you wait, or you can come back tomorrow. The shoes will be ready by the end of the week.’
    ‘I’ll wait,’ I said. I was impatient to feel myself fully clothed and shod.
    Within half an hour the boots were ready and Sara’s shoes wrapped in a sheet of brown paper for me to carry away. I stepped out of the shop into a bright day, determined to think nothing of Poley or the possibility that my services might not be needed at Seething Lane. Tomorrow I would take my reports to Walsingham.
     

Chapter Three
    T he following morning I rose early. It had been a restless night. What if Walsingham did not need me? My only other hope for employment was as an assistant physician in one of London’s two hospitals. I only knew St Bartholomew’s and the woman living in our house in Duck Lane had said there were no positions there now. She might have been lying, though I thought not. Despite my anger at her indifference to what had happened to my father and to me, she had seemed an honest woman. Because of my services in the past, I knew that the governors of the hospital respected me, but money was always short and they could not authorise employing an extra physician if one was not needed.
    The other hospital, St Thomas’s, lay south of the river, outside the City of London itself, in the borough of Southwark. I had been there just once. When the sailors and soldiers from our fleet which defeated the Armada were struck down by typhoid and the bloody flux, my father and I had cared for several ships’ crews docked at Deptford. When the worst of the epidemic was over, we had transferred the last few convalescent patients to St Thomas’s, the nearer hospital, before we returned to our own work at St Bartholomew’s. I had seen very little of the southern hospital, though I knew they often took on desperate cases. There might be a vacancy there. However, the summer this year had been remarkably free of the plague and other diseases of the warmer weather, so it was likely they too had no need of extra physicians. No doubt, like St Bartholomew’s, they never had money enough.
    If I was not needed in Walsingham’s service, I would approach St Thomas’s. Even if Sir Francis could offer me some code-breaking work I might do so, for I did not want my medical proficiency to grow rusty. Since childhood I had always admired and loved my father’s medical skills, honed by his studies of Arab medicine. As a girl in Portugal, I could never have hoped to become a physician. The great advantage of my boy’s disguise had meant that from the age of fourteen I had become my father’s assistant, learning his profession both in practice at his side and through the studies his set me at home. I would not, could not, sacrifice all that and what it meant to me.
    I decided to take Rikki with me to Seething Lane, but not into Sir Francis’s office. After I had rescued the dog in the Low Countries – or more truthfully, after he had rescued me – I had brought him home and in time taken him with me on my days in Phelippes’s office. He was used to lying quietly in a corner while we worked, and I certainly felt safer on the nights when I walked home in the dark, having his large protective presence by my side. More than once he had bared his teeth and seen off a potential cutpurse or attacker.
    Rikki would not be welcome around the house by Ruy on this of all days. While I was out collecting