The Enterprise of England Read Free

chunk of bread and stuffed it in my mouth, then slung my hooded cloak around my shoulders. Through the wavy glass of the window I could see the snow coming down harder.
    I reached for my satchel of medicines. ‘I’ll come straight back to the hospital,’ I told my father.
    Cassie cleared his throat nervously. ‘Sir Francis has sent word to the hospital. They won’t be expecting you.’
    Thoroughly angry now, I stumped out of the house after him. It seemed Walsingham and Phelippes had seized control of my life once again. My mood was not improved as we made our way east, in through the City wall at Newgate, then heading to the far side of London, to Sir Francis’s house in Seething Lane near the Tower. The wind was vicious, tearing at our cloaks, sometimes so strong we staggered, trying to keep on our feet. The increasingly heavy snow was mixed with pellets of ice that stung my face, so that I wished I had brought a scarf to wrap around my head. I clutched at the sides of my hood to hold it on, but the cruel fingers of the wind probed inside, till my ears were as numb as my nose and fingers.
    It seemed hours before we reached the backstairs of Walsingham’s house, the way all of us who worked for him came and went. Cassie left me at the foot of the stairs and I climbed them, exhausted from battling the wind and snow. My sodden boots left wet patches on the fine Turkey carpets, which looked more worn than I remembered, while the portraits along the walls looked down on me as disapprovingly as ever. I wondered whether they were Sir Francis’s ancestors. No one had ever said. I tried to make out some family likeness, but the paint was dull and darkened. All that I could discern was that faint air of censure.
    My reluctant tap on the familiar door was answered by ‘Enter’ in Phelippes’s well-known voice. He was sitting at his usual desk, with its regimented piles of papers and writing materials. I saw that my desk had been commandeered to hold more papers, and had been moved away from the window to a dark corner. In the dim light of late winter no one could work there. The door to the little cubbyhole used by Arthur Gregory, the seal-forger, stood open and a band of candlelight stretched out from it to where I took my stand, frozen hands on hips, as I dripped all over Phelippes’s floor.
    ‘Well?’ I said belligerently. ‘Why have you called me away from my work? The hospital is overflowing with winter chest complaints. I’m needed there.’
    ‘Good afternoon, Kit,’ he said mildly, putting on his spectacles, which he had removed for close work. He gestured expressively toward the pile of papers on my old desk. ‘You see my problem.’
    ‘Your problem. Not mine. I don’t work here any more.’
    ‘No.’ He bowed his head in brief acknowledgement. ‘But I do not think you would refuse us your assistance in the present circumstances.’
    ‘I am truly sorry about Sir Philip,’ I said, in a milder voice. ‘It is a great tragedy for his family as well as for the nation.’
    ‘It is. And Sir Francis has made himself ill, riding to the funeral in the cold.’
    ‘I thought he did not look well.’
    ‘You were there? I did not see you.’
    ‘Only in the crowd outside the cathedral. I saw you. How is the Lady Frances?’
    ‘Distraught. She knew Sir Philip from the time she was a tiny child. Adored him.’
    I nodded. I had seen it for myself when they were together.
    ‘I am very sorry for it. And for the little girl.’
    ‘But that is not why I sent for you, though with Sir Francis ill, more rests on my shoulders.’
    ‘I did not suppose it was.’ I walked over to the small fire burning on the hearth and held out my hands to it. They were coming back to life, and painful. My cloak continued to drip.
    ‘Do take off your cloak, Kit,’ he said irritably. ‘And your wet boots. I don’t mind your stockings.’
    I hesitated. Removing my cloak and boots would imply I was staying. It was tantamount to