The Enterprise of England Read Free Page B

captured on a Spanish vessel heading for the Caribbean. We haven’t had a chance to decipher them yet. I thought you could start with those, given your fluent Spanish.’
    ‘I haven’t agreed yet to return,’ I said, although I knew I was in retreat.
    ‘It need not be for long.’ Phelippes’s voice had taken on a persuasive note I had not heard before. He must really need my help.
    ‘Tell my patients that,’ I said. ‘Are they to defer all illness until Master Phelippes says I may return to the hospital?’
    ‘It would be the same arrangement as before.’ He looked relieved. He knew he was winning. ‘You would still work at the hospital in the mornings, then come here in the afternoons. Sir Francis will arrange it all with the governors.’
    I put my head in my hands and sighed.
    ‘I’m sure he will. Very well,’ I said. ‘I will come.’

Chapter Two
    A rthur Gregory helped me to move my table back near the window, for the benefit of the light, and we piled all the packets except the one from the Caribbean ship on to the table against the wall. All the time we were rearranging the office, Phelippes ignored us, his head down and his short-sighted eyes close to his papers. I felt a growing irritation that he could just assume I would take up my position as before in the corner of his office. During the final weeks of my service to Walsingham in the previous year I had often needed to work alone in dangerous situations. Then during the recent few months, free of them all, I had revelled in my rediscovered independence. Now, here I was, back like any junior clerk, scribbling away at my desk.
    ‘Will this do?’ I said finally, in a loud voice. ‘I am not in your way?’
    Phelippes looked up and peered at me across the intervening space. Then he put on his spectacles and looked vaguely around the room at what we had done.
    ‘Aye. That will do. Have you looked at the Caribbean despatches yet?’
    ‘Not yet,’ I snapped. I looked at Arthur and raised my eyebrows in despair. He simply grinned and clapped me on the shoulder.
    ‘Good to have you back.’
    The papers he had previously been carrying he had placed on my desk while we were moving the furniture. Now he pointed toward them.
    ‘Perhaps you should look at these as well, to be sure I have made no mistakes. I’ll get back to carving some new seals. King Philip has been employing a lot of new agents and they all have their own seals. It’s difficult to keep up with copying them.’
    ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll check them for you.’
    Arthur’s real talent lay in his ability to carve exquisite forged seals that even the owners of the originals would not have been able to recognise as false. Without his skills, Walsingham’s activities must surely have failed long before now, for much of what we did involved intercepting enemy despatches, opening and deciphering them, then resealing them and sending them on their way. Without Arthur’s immaculate seals our interference would soon have been noticed. This way England’s enemies were not alerted by the disappearance of their despatches, but at the same time we kept abreast of their correspondence. I often thought it was fortunate that Arthur was an honest man. Had he turned his talents to crime, he could have become very rich indeed.
    As well as intercepting foreign correspondence, Phelippes’s office served as the centre point for the entire complex web of Walsingham’s informers, agents and spies. At its height, the service had five hundred agents, in addition to friendly sea captains and merchants in many countries, and England’s ambassadors, who kept their eyes and ears open and passed on any information they came across. Indeed, the service itself was the eyes and ears of the English state. Without it the Queen would have been assassinated long before this and the country overrun by foreign troops. I shuddered when I remembered the invasion of Portugal when I was ten. The Spanish troops