Текст книги "The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez"

Автор книги: Ann Swinfen

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Chapter Twelve

I must have blacked out only briefly, but the next thing I knew I was being heaved along by my shoulders, there was shouting and lights were springing up in the other cottages. Andrew had his hands under my armpits and was dragging me towards the horses.

‘I can walk,’ I gasped.

With that he let me go and we both ran, careless of any noise, desperate to reach the horses before the men reached us. Andrew gave me a leg up, then sprang on to his own horse. We were away up the lane before my feet were in the stirrups. My sight was blurred and my head throbbed, but Hector followed Andrew’s horse without hesitating.

Behind us men were running, but we were away.

Never had I been more thankful for Hector’s speed. When I had ridden away from Hartwell Hall during the night, I was not sure whether or not I would be followed. Now, due to my own carelessness, the men in the fishing village knew that they had been seen. We had noticed no horses, but there must surely be one or two in the village. There had been outbuildings behind the cottages, some of them probably barns.

I cursed myself for having ruined everything at the last minute. My instinct had been right. I had guessed which was the boat that would smuggle the men in. We had stayed out of sight until they had landed and I had caught a quick but clear view of their faces. If we had just managed to ride away without being noticed, everything would have worked out so well that even Phelippes would have been pleased with me.

I crouched low over Hector’s neck and urged him on, passing Andrew and flying on towards Rye. He gave a delighted whoop and spurred after me. Clearly for him it was just an adventure, spiced with the thought of pursuit. Yet the whole purpose had been stealth. I tried to think, but my thoughts were swept away by the speed and the pounding of my heart. Despite myself, despite my aching head, I began to enjoy the race through the night. The moonlight, the silver-black gleam of the sea over to our right, the sharp clean smell of wet rocks and seaweed, all gave the ride the quality of a dream, of some adventure from a knightly romance. Almost I forgot the unpleasant reality behind the dream. Almost.

The town wall of Rye was coming into sight, and on the steep approach up to the gatehouse, I slowed Hector. Andrew was not far behind, pulling up knee to knee with me and laughing.

‘That was a fine race, Master Alvarez. You are good enough on a horse to be a trooper.’

‘I have a very fine horse.’

‘Aye. I thought poorly of him when we first left London, but he’s a very Bucephalus.’

‘He is indeed. Now, do you have the captain’s pass?’

A sleepy gatekeeper shot back the bolts for us and, grumbling, let us through.

‘He’ll no sooner be back in bed than he’ll be turned out again,’ said Andrew.

‘I hope so. I hope they believe us.’

When we reached the inn, Andrew offered to see to both horses while I went to wake Phelippes and the captain. I think perhaps he did not relish the thought of that task. Certainly it was still well before dawn and they would not welcome the summons any more than the gatekeeper had.

‘I will come and care for Hector when I have explained all,’ I said. I could not neglect him after such a ride.

Once inside the inn I found a servant asleep in a chair and shook him awake. He was reluctant to rouse two such important guests from their beds, but when I told him it was on the Queen’s business, he lit a candle and went stumbling away to find them, still half asleep. I sat down in the chair he had vacated and found that my legs were trembling. I also noticed that there was a great gash in my right leg, where I must have collided with something sharp behind that cottage in the dark. I put my hand up to the side of my head, for I realised that it was still throbbing painfully. My fingers came away sticky with blood.

Phelippes and the captain of the guard came down the stairs together just as I was wiping my head with my handkerchief.

‘Kit!’ Phelippes’s voice was sharp with alarm. ‘You are injured! Have you been attacked?’

‘No, no,’ I said hastily. ‘I fell over something sharp, metal, in the dark. It was stupid of me, because they heard me.’

‘Who heard you? Did you see anything in that village?’

Wrapped in a loose gown of dull grey, Phelippes looked somehow younger and less intimidating than usual. The captain had pulled on breeches but his night shift poked out from the neck of his doublet, which was buttoned awry.

‘They have brought two men in,’ I said, ‘using that boat I noticed, the larger one. I think they must be the two men you were expecting, but they heard me fall. I’m afraid it will have alerted them. You must make haste if you want to catch them.’

‘Did you see them well enough to describe them?’

‘I only caught a glimpse.’

I described the two men as best I could from that brief moment when the light from the house door had shone on them.

‘Hmm,’ Phelippes said. ‘One of them sounds like Ballard, but he has a passport, so why should he enter the country this way? Unless he wants us to think he is still abroad. The other isn’t Maud, though. Maud is a much smaller man than you describe. What has happened to Maud?’

There was no answer for that.

‘Where is Andrew?’ the captain said. He had noticed me looking at his doublet and was buttoning it up again.

‘Seeing to the horses. We rode back as if the Devil himself was after us. The horses will be tired.’

‘I’ll rouse the rest of my men. Do you want us to go after them and arrest them?’ He turned to Phelippes, who was tapping his teeth with his thumbnail.

‘No. I want Ballard to run free for the moment. The other one – I’m not sure who he can be. What I’d like you to do, captain, is to use a few of your men, perhaps only two, to follow them at a discreet distance and see where they go. Do you think you can do that? Without them realising?’

He nodded. ‘I have two who can follow without being noticed. I’ll speak to them now. What would you like the rest of us to do?’

‘I think we will spend a quiet day today, rather than be seen rushing back to London. If we are watching them, they may well be watching us. Let them think we had nothing to do with the noise Kit made. Perhaps it was rival smugglers from another village! We will do a little more investigating in the neighbourhood, a little more questioning. That way it will seem that we have discovered nothing so far. We’ll go in the opposite direction, over to the Marsh. I know we were told that it would not be safe for a stranger to land there, but who’s to know we were told? We’ll ride over to Tenterden and the Isle of Oxney, and make a nuisance of ourselves there, well away from your men tracking Ballard and his companion.’

The captain turned and went back upstairs. Phelippes looked at me with his lips pursed.

‘You had better clean up that blood, Kit, then get some rest for what is left of the night.’

‘Thank you, sir. But I’ll just see that Hector is settled first.’

‘Hector?’

‘My horse, sir.’

He shook his head and smiled at the idea that something as functional as a horse might have a name. For Phelippes a horse was nothing more than a means of transport. Then he too went back upstairs.

On my way to the inn stable, I went through the dining parlour and filched two more apples. I reckoned Andrew’s horse deserved one too.

By the time I reached them, Andrew had both horses rubbed down and fed, but they welcomed the apples greedily.

‘What a night!’ His eyes gleamed in the light from the stable lantern. ‘More excitement than a month of being a trooper.’

I grinned back at him. ‘I could have done without the shock when I fell over whatever that was behind the cottage.’

‘It scared me too. Your head is bleeding. You’d best have it seen to.’

‘I’ll see to it myself. When I’m not working for Phelippes, I am a doctor at St Bartholomew’s’

He whistled softly, causing Hector’s ears to swivel toward us.

‘And you ride like a trooper.’

‘My grandfather bred horses. I could ride almost before I could walk.’

‘Well, between us we’ve managed to spice up a dull mission. What did the great men say?’

‘Phelippes and your captain? They are sending two of your men to follow the strangers and see where they go, but not to arrest them yet. Phelippes thinks he knows who one of them is.’

‘And the rest of us?’

‘The rest of us are going to create a diversion, making a nuisance of ourselves over in Kent, round the Isle of Oxney, so it looks as though we have discovered nothing.’

He laughed. ‘Clever!’

‘Oh, Phelippes is a very clever man. Now we’d best get to our beds for what’s left of the night. Thank you, Andrew, for your help tonight. If you had not dragged me away from that cottage, I hate to think what might have happened to me.’

As I spoke I had a sudden clear picture of what would have happened. Those ruffians would have captured me, and when they discovered I was a girl – what then? I shuddered.

‘All in a night’s work,’ he said cheerfully.

Compared with the excitement of the night, the next day was exceedingly dull. After breaking our fast late because of our lack of sleep, we set out for Tenterden. In the town and then round the villages on and near the Isle of Oxney, we rode about asking questions doggedly and calling the greatest possible attention to ourselves. It was strange country. The Isle was no longer quite an island, but it was easy to see that once it had been, before this part of the marsh had been drained. Even now the whole area was crisscrossed with ditches and streams, and even where the road ran along a raised embankment, it felt temporary and unstable.

One of the troopers had been born in a village a little north of here and told us that what looked like dry ground now, in high summer, would revert to salt marsh and sea in winter.

‘There’s hardly a winter goes by when it doesn’t flood,’ he said. ‘Then the island is cut off again. You see over there?’ He pointed ahead with his whip to a small gentleman’s estate on the edge of one of the larger waterways which led down to the Rother, one of the rivers which flowed into the port of Rye.

‘That place is known as Kingsgate now. It was there that King Henry embarked for the Field of the Cloth of Gold. His army and his court encamped on those fields before they left. I’ve heard my grandfather talk about it.’

The estate looked sleepy under the summer sun, but I tried to picture the fields filled not with cows but with pavilions and pennants, with royal servants running to and fro, and the king’s ships tied up at what was now a rotting and dilapidated quay. It added a little interest to what was otherwise a very boring day.

That evening Phelippes decided that we could start for London the next morning, having allowed time for the conspirators and the men shadowing them to get well ahead of us. So, on an unpleasantly hot day we set off for home, making our stops again at Hawkhurst and Knoll, and reaching Seething Lane late in the evening of the third day. In the bustle of the stableyard I had only time for a brief farewell to Andrew before the troopers rode off to their quarters in the Tower nearby.

‘Anytime you want another bodyguard,’ he said, ‘I’m your man. I’d rather be creeping around spying and galloping through the dark than doing routine manoeuvres on a parade ground.’

I shook my head with a smile. ‘If the invasion comes, you’ll be doing more than manoeuvres, I’m afraid.’

‘At least it will be more exciting. Take care of yourself, Doctor Alvarez!’ With that, he rode off with the rest. I knew he did not believe I was a doctor. I was beginning to doubt it myself.

After a day’s rest, I was back to my former routine – hospital in the morning, Seething Lane in the afternoon, and, when I could slip away, visits to Simon’s company at the playhouse, where I could put aside all thoughts of treason and conspiracy. I was getting to know more of the players now. There were three boys beside Simon who took the women’s parts, but he was the oldest and most experienced. His voice was changing but fortunately it was not mutating through the swoops and croaks some boys endure. Instead it was simply deepening gradually, though I thought it would always remain quite light. He would eventually sing tenor, not bass. And even while it deepened, he could still pitch it so that it sounded like a woman’s. In my crazier moments, I wondered whether he could teach me to pitch my voice lower, so that it would sound more like a man’s. Fortunately it had always been quite low. It seemed that our voices would meet somewhere in the middle of the musical scale, for I sang alto rather than soprano.

Guy Bingham and I would often make music together during these visits. He would find me a lute or a recorder, and he was teaching me the viol. As well as their chief musician, in charge of three or four others, he was also one of their comic actors, yet his face resembled a mournful monkey’s. Simon told me quietly one day something of Guy’s history.

‘He was left an orphan very young and lived by begging and stealing on the streets. Then he found employment as a scullery boy. He said it was like entering heaven. A warm bed and three meals a day. The mistress of the house heard him singing at his work and discovered his musical talent. She had him trained and he became the household musician until she died a few years later.’

‘Was he out on the streets again?’

‘No, he joined a band of musicians attached to my lord Leicester’s household. He married, and had three little girls in four years. Then the plague came and took his whole family. He doesn’t talk about it, but I think he went a little mad. He was thrown out of Leicester’s household, but Master Burbage found him and took him on.’

‘It seems a strange life for a comic actor.’

‘Oh, you’ll find that most comic actors have some great sadness in their lives. The comedy is a protection, a shell. It helps to arm them against memory.’

‘I see.’ I could understand that. ‘The more I learn about your world, Simon, the more it resembles mine.’ Then, lest he guess too closely what I meant, I added, ‘This world of Walsingham’s service, of spies and informants, coded letters, projections, agents and double agents. Nothing is what it seems. Like the playhouse.’

‘I hope our pretence is for worthwhile ends, to explore all corners of the human condition. We do not do it to deceive and entrap.’

I could see he was a little offended by what I had said.

‘No, I did not mean that. What I was trying to say – I’m confused and not saying this well. Both play with reality. Turn shadow into substance and substance into shadow.’

I wanted to say: And make a girl appear a man. A girl who is beginning to feel that this friendship of ours is more than simple comradeship. Or at least she wishes it could be.

Instead, I changed the subject. ‘I am surprised you all spend so much time here in the playhouse, even when you are not rehearsing or staging a play.’

Simon himself was not appearing that day, yet here he was.

He shrugged. ‘Where else would we go? Our fellow players are our family. Few of us have anyone outside, being a collection of waifs and strays. And your decent citizen regards us as vagabonds.’

He did not say it, but I could read it in his eyes. Like your father.

‘We live in cramped lodgings, we have no other home to go to but here. So the playhouse provides us with home and family. In the cold of winter when we cannot stage a play, we are bereft. Homeless orphans. You will see, when winter comes.’ His mouth twisted in an ironic smile. ‘And sometimes that is not metaphorical. Actors have starved to death before now in wintertime.’

I remembered that when I had first met him it had been a cold January. Was he without employment then? I had never thought to ask. He had said that his landlady had been kind, that was why he was running errands for her brother, the keeper at the Marshalsea. Perhaps she had let him stay on, rent free, until the playhouses opened again. The next time I had seen him, he had moved here, north of the river, and the weather was warm enough for audiences to sit through a play in the open air, for even the seats in the covered galleries were as exposed to the cold as the seats in a bear pit. I realised that there were aspects of his life that were as unknown to me as my life was to him. Yet it was impossible to cross that bridge between us. The thought twisted in my stomach, so that I was glad when James Burbage pounced on us and led us away to hear a new song that Guy had composed to words by Kyd.

‘Kit, I have an errand for you.’

My heart sank at Phelippes’s words. Not another mission like the one to the Fitzgerald’s house, I prayed. The more I thought about my multiple deceits and play-acting, the more uncomfortable I felt.

‘Now that our two smuggled men are in London, I have had them watched by my servant Cassie, who knows Ballard. He was able to identify the other man as Thomas Barnes.’

Barnes. I should know that name. ‘Barnes? Was he Gifford’s cousin, who acted as courier for a time?’

‘Aye. And then disappeared. It seems he managed to slip over to France, where I suspect he has had a meeting with Thomas Morgan in the Bastille. That’s a fine prison they keep in Paris, where a man wanted here for conspiracy to kill the Queen can hold court freely.’

I could not see where this was going. ‘What is this errand for me that you have in mind?’

‘I have composed a letter to the Scottish queen in Barnes’s hand, or rather to her secretary, Curll, vowing Barnes’s allegiance to her cause and making the sort of vague promises these fellows deal in. A few hints about Morgan, and some information about Babington’s plans that could be known only to his inner circle.’

‘And to us.’

‘Aye. And to us. It is written in one of their usual ciphers and I have used their code names: “Roland” for Barnes himself, “Thomas Germin” for Morgan, and “Nicholas Cornelys” for Gifford. All these details should convince Curll that it is genuine.’

‘Stirring the pot?’

He gave a sour smile. ‘Aye, stirring the pot. Our problem is that Babington is now flitting about like a demented woman. One minute he’s in his own house near the Barbican, next he’s in lodgings at Hernes Rents in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A few days later he has taken himself off to lodge with a tailor just outside Temple Bar, on Fleet Street. Why does he keep changing his lodgings, when he has a fine house of his own in London? I do not like it. Now he has not been seen for two days. He may have left London for his estate in Derbyshire, or he may have gone to Lichfield. He was there earlier this year when he wanted to spy out the land for rescuing the Scottish woman.’

‘What has this to do with the letter supposed to come from Barnes?’

‘I want them to realise they must stop shilly-shallying and make a move. I’ve had Barnes suggest to Curll that Mary should contact Babington as the best hope for her rescue. All the correspondence has been too vague and general up to now. We need a positive commitment.’

He took off his glasses and looked at me. ‘This is where you come in. Sir Francis told you that there would come a time when your youth and honest face would be useful to us. Now is the time. I want you to go to Chartley as our messenger boy and deliver this letter. You are just a simple boy, you understand, working for Barnes. All you have to do is to deliver the letter. They may want you to take an answer. You can do that, can’t you?’

It was rare of him even to ask, though I realised he was not really asking.

‘I suppose I might,’ I said, with no great enthusiasm. ‘I suppose Sir Francis will make arrangements with the hospital, as usual.’

If Phelippes heard a note of sarcasm in my voice, he did not react.

‘It will be attended to. You leave first thing in the morning. I will draw you a map. I suppose you will want that same horse again – Horace, was it called?’

‘Hector,’ I said. ‘His name is Hector. I go alone?’

‘Of course. You are just a messenger boy. I will see that you have appropriate clothes.’

‘Perhaps I could collect them now,’ I said, ‘to save time in the morning.’ I did not want to find myself obliged to dress here in Phelippes’s office.

I went home with the bundle of somewhat unsavoury clothes under my arm, to find that my father had not yet returned from the hospital. It was fortunate that, while I was away in Sussex, Dr Stevens had finally employed a new assistant and had also been able to discard his cane. Unless there was a sudden outbreak of one of the summer illnesses, my father should be able to manage without me for the few days I would be absent in Staffordshire. I had begun to worry that, if Walsingham continued to demand my services, I should lose my position at St Bartholomew’s. During the last few months almost half my time had been taken up by Sir Francis’s intelligence work. Both he and Phelippes continued to say that they believed this summer would bring their projection to fruition, but I could see no real sign of it. I could understand Phelippes’s frustration and his need to prod the conspirators into action.

I scrawled a hasty note to Simon, for I had promised to come to a rehearsal of a new play tomorrow, something I had been looking forward to, for I had never seen how Burbage worked the magic which converted a sheaf of inky pages into the world of a play in which the audience could lose itself. Having met most of the actors by now, I knew that managing them, persuading them to work together and not parade their own talents at the expense of others’, must be like herding mountain goats in a thunderstorm – all rushing off in different directions.

One of our neighbours had a son who would run errands for a ha’penny. I gave him a ha’penny to take my note to the Theatre and promised him a slice of cake when he came back. While he was gone, I tried on the clothes I was to wear into Staffordshire. They were of a fairly uniform mud colour: breeches, jerkin, thick woollen hose and an ugly knitted cap. Appropriately anonymous. However, the hose itched dreadfully in this hot weather, especially where they rubbed on the partly healed gash in my leg, so I was determined to wear a thinner pair of my own. There was a light cloak in case of rain. I studied myself in the spotted mirror I kept in my chamber. With the cap pulled well down and perhaps a dirty face, I could pass for a messenger boy. Trustworthy and discreet, but too young to be a danger to anyone. It was odd how the simple clothes made me look younger. The doublet and small ruff I normally wore added several years to my age.

I turned sideways to the mirror. It was a blessing that I was almost as flat-chested as a boy. Even at sixteen and a half I had still not developed a womanly figure. All my growing had gone into height, but the day might come when it would be difficult to pass myself off as a boy. A well-padded doublet, however, can hide much. Indeed, some of our young gallants look as round-breasted as pouter pigeons. Without a doublet I felt more vulnerable, but I could always wear the cloak, unless the weather was so hot that it would arose suspicions.

The boy returned from the Theatre soon after I had changed back into my normal clothes, saying he had given the message into Simon’s hands. Between  mouthfuls of cake he added that the gentleman had wished me God speed on my journey.

‘Are you going away again, Master Alvarez?’ he asked.

‘Only for a few days, just into Staffordshire.’ I might as well have said the Spice Islands from the look in his wide eyes. So the neighbours had noticed my various absences. I hoped they would not be traced back to Walsingham.

Just after dawn the next morning I was on my way, having collected the forged letter and map from Phelippes, and Hector from the stable. It would be a long journey, about a hundred and twenty-five miles, Phelippes reckoned. At the very least it would take me three days, riding from dawn to dusk. Had I been an official messenger on state business, I could have commandeered a change of mounts at regular intervals, but I was posing as a boy sent by Barnes, so I must ride one horse all the way without tiring him.

The easiest route was to head west along the river first, as far as Windsor, then turn north on the Oxford road.

‘You must judge for yourself,’ Phelippes said. ‘It took me four days to make the journey to Chartley earlier in the year. You should be able to reach Oxford today, for you are a more experienced rider than I am. But it must be fifty or sixty miles. If you find it is late and the horse is tired, you will need to stay the night before you come to Oxford. It is a well travelled route, so there will be plenty of clean, respectable inns. In Oxford, try the Mitre. After Oxford, Warwick should be a suitable stage, not as distant as Oxford is from London. Then you should reach Lichfield by the evening of the third day. That will be the shortest stretch. The next morning you will be able to make the short ride to Chartley.’

‘How far is that?’

‘Less than twenty miles.’

‘I had not realised it was so far.’

I could see that the distance, and the time it would take me to travel it, irritated him. He was anxious to set his plan in motion with the forged letter and he was used to sending trained riders with despatches, who, with their constant changes to fresh horses and their hard riding, would probably make the journey to Lichfield in just two days. Well, it could not be helped. I was not going to drive Hector too hard.

At first it was not as pleasant a ride as my journey to Hartwell Hall some weeks before. In the full heat of summer the road was covered with loose dust which flew up everywhere, filling my lungs and peppering my eyes with grit. The road to Windsor was also very busy, crowded with carts and carriages as well as riders. Even when I turned on to the Oxford road it was not much better. Once the crowds thinned out a little, however, I set Hector to an easy canter, the road was less dusty, and the miles slipped by more easily.

At midday we stopped in a grassy meadow by a stream, where I ate some cheese and a hard-boiled egg, and I let Hector graze for half an hour. As I sat with my back to a tree, I nearly fell asleep. The heavy June sunshine was thick with the drone of bees and I had slept little the previous night, anxious about the journey. If Hector had not blown a wet and grassy breath in my face, I might have slept the day away.

As it was, we were still ten miles from Oxford by late afternoon, according to the fingerpost but, despite having cantered much of the way, Hector did not seem unduly tired. I decided to carry on, holding him down to a walk the last five miles or so. We rode into Oxford, my eyes taking in greedily the honey-coloured stone of the colleges, the flower-filled gardens, and the rivers. Being high summer, it was out of term time, although I noticed several older scholars, the college fellows, in their academic gowns, which reminded me achingly of my father at Coimbra University. And there were bookshops! But I had no money for books, only the money Phelippes had given me for my lodgings.

I found the Mitre Inn, mentioned by Phelippes, and paid for a room to myself as well as stabling for my horse. It was only when I sat down to eat the mutton stew served in the inn parlour that I realised how tired I was. I had been in the saddle for twelve hours and the muscles of my legs and back made me all too aware of it. As soon as I had finished eating I retired to my chamber, along a meandering corridor linking the maze of rooms. I pulled off my boots and cap, and lay down for a minute on the bed. When I woke it was full dark. Groaning a little from my stiffening muscles, I stripped down to my shift and fell into bed. I can vouch for the comfort of the Mitre’s beds, for I did not wake again until broad daylight.

In the morning I asked the innkeeper how far it was to Warwick. He scratched his head, then called out to the potboy.

‘How many miles to Warwick, Henry?’

The potboy also scratched his head. ‘Forty, forty-five miles, I reckon, master.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Far less than I rode yesterday.’

‘Came from Lunnon, did you, lad?’

‘Aye.’

‘That’s a good way, that is.’

He looked at me respectfully, but I was glad he called me ‘lad’. It seemed I looked the part.

We left Oxford, heading north on the Banbury Road, leaving the church of St Giles on our left, and reached Warwick by the late dusk of this summer’s day. Even though it had been a much shorter ride, by now Hector was tired, and so was I. However, we found one of the inns Phelippes had suggested and by the next morning were on our way again.

The road from Warwick to Lichfield ran through fat farming country, deep in the heart of England. This whole journey had laid open England to me, for until this year I had barely stirred outside London. I did not feel particularly grateful for my service to Walsingham, but in my heart I admitted grudgingly that it had opened my eyes to my adopted country. It was not the land of my birth, which I had grown to hate. But this country, less dramatic, less ostentatious, was becoming very dear to me in recent months. I was beginning to understand why Englishmen, normally reticent and reluctant to show their feelings, could become so passionate about their love of this land. I found it difficult to put into words, but I felt somehow nourished by it, embraced by it. The countryside smiled at me, and I smiled back as I rode. This was a country worth fighting for.

My inn at Lichfield was near the cathedral, so the bells tracked the hours for me during the evening and into the night. Until I reached the city my mind had been concentrated on the long journey, but now I began to grow apprehensive of presenting myself at Chartley Manor. The name had been no more than that, a name written on letters, a place somewhere in Staffordshire. A house where the Scottish queen lived with her exiled court under strict supervision. Somehow, it had not seemed quite real. Tomorrow I would ride up to it, and present a letter which was a forgery, posing as what I was not. My whole life was a lie, in my pretended skin as a boy, but now I was play-acting again, this time as a servant boy, messenger for a renegade Catholic, who had entered the country illegally and was offering his services to the Scottish queen.