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spleens.
    â€œWho is this young man?” asked Lord Howard.
    â€œThomas Spyre, my lord, my most worthy assistant.”
    â€œBut is he worthy of trust?” asked the Lord Admiral meaningfully.
    â€œAs I am myself, my lord,” said my master.
    Lord Howard sat down in our best chair. We all kept our silence as Nicholas and his wife, in a dazzling white apron still creased where it had been folded and stored against some great occasion, made a show of arriving with a silver pitcher and green-glass cups, none of them chipped. Mrs. Nashe set a taper candle in the middle of the table, and cocked her eyes at each of us in turn as she poured the drink.
    A lad brought a brazier of coals, placed them with tongs in our dormant hearth, and thrust kindling into the fireplace. When the landlord departed from us again we inhabited a chamber as fit as any in London—except for the sound of Titus Cox’s shallow, rattled breathing from the sickbed.
    I remained standing, as was proper, holding the chair courteously as my master sat down at the table in our second-best chair, the one twice mended with glue. William extended the beribboned scroll, and Lord Howard accepted it with no evidence of relief at recovering this state document.
    â€œMaster Titus was sick, shivering at our meeting this morning,” said Lord Howard. “He told me it was a fever that came and went, as such cold-sweats will, and that he would be fit enough to sail with the fleet.”
    â€œDrake’s fleet, my lord?” asked my master.
    Lord Howard tilted his head to eye me in the candlelight. He was a ruddy-faced man, with gray salting his beard, and a white, heavily starched collar.
    My master said, “If it please you, my lord, speak before young Thomas as you would any honest subject of our gracious Queen.”
    â€œWill Titus recover?” asked Lord Howard.
    â€œIf my lord will forgive me,” said my master, “he is beyond my power, or even the command of prayer.”
    Lord Howard broke the seal on the document. The scroll fell open, exposing black lines of writing. “As you will have guessed, this is a commission naming our friend Titus to act as surgeon to Sir Francis Drake and his fleet.”
    My master paused in the act of pouring the wine. “We took it to be a secret of state, my lord,” said my master. “I had no dream of what it was.”
    Lord Howard smiled for the first time, taking a drink from a glass cup. “It is a secret, believed in by many but known as a fact by few. Drake will sail within the week, to raid the Spanish port of Cadiz, and sack every ship.”
    Cadiz was a celebrated harbor, where the richest ships in the world found shelter. A grizzled sea scholar had once explained to me that the ancients, the Phoenicians and the Romans, had moored there in ages past. The words thrilled me. I put a hand on the back of my master’s chair, and I could feel him tense with excitement, too, a shiver running through his body.
    â€œCan this be true?” breathed William. In years past Drake had bled the Spanish treasure fleets, and set ports in the Indies alight. In his legendary ship the Golden Hind he had sailed around the world. But never had this great sea captain, the most famous Englishman alive, accepted such a daring command.
    As I stood there in the dancing hearth light I would have given my life for the chance to sail on such a voyage.
    â€œIt’s true, before God,” said Lord Howard in a matter-of-fact tone, but unable to completely hide his own thrill.
    He hesitated, and measured out his next words carefully. “It does seem, however, that Drake will sail without a surgeon.”
    Barely aware what I was doing—acting on an impulse—I bent to my master’s ear.
    I was amazed at what I was bold enough to suggest.
    William turned to look at me, his gray eyes gazing up into mine in wonderment. And then he smiled, looking at once years more