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of marching boots echoed down in the street, approaching closer, stride by stride. My master stretched himself to his full height, his mouth set in a determined line—but he had gone pale.
    â€œI will not abandon my patient to the rats behind your kitchen,” responded my master. “Bring us some wine, too.”
    â€œYou could be arrested,” said Nicholas, steadying his breath with effort. “For failing to resurrect him, or for preventing him from dying, both. Or either. Forgive me, but the Hart and Trumpet is mentioned at Court as a place where a scholar can order Canary wine in Latin, and be understood.”
    Nicholas was a fretful soul, but in his way he was no fool. Everyone knew that there was only one rack left in all of England. Torture was rarely used to force confession from outlaws in our Queen’s frequently merciful reign. That one rack, made for stretching joint from joint, causing pain beyond imagining, was kept in the Tower, just a few minutes’ march away.
    We could not be put into chains simply for treating a man in disfavor with the Star Chamber, that deliberative body at the heart of our Queen’s government. The cheerful beer-banter and laughter in the tavern downstairs fell silent, and the sound of heavy feet resounded from below.
    â€œNicholas,” said my master, “you are the most white-livered man I have ever known.”
    Our landlord straightened his back and set his mouth. “I, my lord, am not the one with a document of state hidden in my robe.”
    But before my master could respond, and better hide the scroll he had accepted from our landlord, heavy feet thundered up the stairs.
    The door was flung open, and a helmeted pikeman thrust his head into the room. The crested, highly polished helmet gleamed in the light from our lamp. He gave us a measuring look. Then he stepped back, and had a quiet word with a shadowy figure.
    A man in a long, sea-dark cape stepped into the room.

Chapter 9
    Any Londoner would have recognized him.
    All of us had seen Howard of Effingham, the Lord Admiral of the Queen’s navy, as he arrived for one of his audiences with the Queen, plumed and silked in the bow of a royal barge. One of the most powerful men in England, he was renowned as a man who liked his starched collar and Flemish linen as well as any man, but who could plot a ship’s course and trim a sail, too.
    His cape was dripping with the rain that must have begun falling again in the street, and his high, flare-topped boots were beaded with wet. The plume on his cap was bright copper red, a long, sweeping feather that showed no ill effect from the evening damp. He kept one hand on the pommel of the rapier at his hip, and gave my master a correct bow in return to my master’s own flourish-and-leg, a courtly act of homage.
    â€œI know you by reputation, Doctor Perrivale,” said the Lord Admiral. “You saved my predecessor’s life when his own wife had given him up for dead, and it pleases me to meet you at last.”
    â€œBring us a pitcher of your best Rhine wine, Nicholas,” said my master, bowing his thanks to Lord Howard for this compliment. “And quick-red coals for our hearth.”
    Nicholas scuttled sideways, bowing and looking up through his eyebrows, his shadow lurching and following him out of the room. A pikeman at the door shut the barrier fast, and I heard the pike-butt strike the floor as the guard positioned himself at the top of the stairs.
    Lord Howard approached the sickbed. He stood there, not moving or making a sound, while a spatter of rain crossed our roof.
    At last he gave a long sigh. “Can he hear us?”
    â€œThe sick can hear, my lord,” said my master, “within their sleep.”
    Lord Howard sighed again, and turned to study the rows of books on the shelf, volumes of the ancient medical authority Galen in Latin, and anatomies from Padua and Verona—diagrams of wombs and