Текст книги "The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez"

Автор книги: Ann Swinfen

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Chapter Two

On the evening of the Sabbath, a week or two after my visit to the Marshalsea, we overtook the Lopez family as they turned out of Wood Street, heading, as we were, for the Nuñez home. I fell into step with Sara, who was leading her small son Anthony by the hand.

‘A blessed Sabbath to you, Kit,’ she said.

‘Shalom.’

It was our custom to gather on the Sabbath at the house of Dr Hector Nuñez on Mark Lane, not far from the Tower. Many of our people lived in this part of London, in Aldgate and Tower Wards, and the Nuñezes’ large house had been established as a place for meetings and services long before my father and I came to England. No doubt we would have settled here too, if my father had not been given the house in Duck Lane as part of his salary from the hospital. It was a good bargain for the governors of the hospital. Duck Lane was known locally, with savage irony, as ‘Paradise’.

‘I wish that we lived in Wood Street,’ I said enviously.

Sara gave me a sympathetic look.

‘Ah, yes. I remember those houses in Duck Lane. We lived in one for a few weeks after we were married.’

I grimaced. Ours was an ancient building, one of a row of small houses which leaned drunkenly together in an alley behind the hospital. The wind whistled through holes in the walls where the daub had been pecked out by birds, or else had shrunk and fallen away. Depending on the direction of the wind, the single chimney (added after the house was first built) either smoked, dousing the fire in its own soot and ash, or else sucked the flames so high that our fuel burned away twice as fast as it should. There was bulbous, cracked glass in the downstairs windows, and nothing but ill-fitting shutters upstairs.

‘But then you moved to Wood Street,’ I said.

‘No, for several years we were in Little Britain, round the corner from your house. It was one of the hospital houses, too, but larger, with a private garden at the back.’

‘I know them. Much better than our hovel.’

The Lopez family now leased a house cheek by jowl with some of London’s  richest merchants. Dr Roderigo Lopez no longer worked at the hospital, for he had a private clientele amongst the great courtiers and was physician to the Queen’s Majesty herself. I could hardly believe that a man who moved in such circles would consent to know people like us, but he maintained his ties with the community and was always courteous to my father, if somewhat condescending.

‘He’s perhaps five years older than I am,’ my father had told me some time ago, when I asked about this. ‘We knew each other as young men in Portugal. Though of course Ruy came to England long ago, and was taken under the wing of Hector Nuñez and Dunstan Añez.’

I nodded. They were the two leaders of our people in London. Dunstan Añez was Purveyor of Groceries and Spices to Her Majesty the Queen and a man of substantial fortune. Ruy Lopez’s wife, Sara, was Dunstan’s daughter and more than twenty years younger than he.

Now I walked beside her in silence for a while, our footsteps muffled by snow. Attending service at our makeshift synagogue always made me uneasy, not only because of the risks we ran if the authorities caught us. For the lie that was my life seemed to loom more monstrous there. It was like a growth in my throat, like those cancerous growths against which we physicians have no weapons, but must behold helplessly, aware of our weakness. We know we are unable to offer the patient anything but the dulling effects brought by syrups of poppy or meadowsweet, effective for a brief time during surgery, but little relief in the long enduring pain as a body consumes itself. My secret, my lie, which had seemed an innocent enough stratagem for concealment and escape when it began, had recently started, like a cancer, to eat away at me from within.

Does God exist? I had first begun to doubt Him in those last months in Portugal. On the ship off Finisterre my doubts hardened in me, the first seed of that growth in my throat. For if God did indeed exist, why did He not strike me down, liar that I was, when I joined the men and boys in our makeshift synagogue?

‘You are very quiet today, Kit,’ Sara said.

I shook my head to drive away these terrifying thoughts. Sara had always been good to me, welcoming me as a lost and motherless child when we arrived in London, taking us into her home until Dr Nuñez found a position for my father, feeding me on nourishing food, for she said that I looked like a fledging fallen from a nest. It was she who began at once to teach me English. Born in Crutched Friars in London, she spoke English more naturally than Portuguese. I had a quick ear and was eager to learn, for I never wanted to return to Portugal.

‘Sara,’ I said, for we were passing the north end of London Bridge and I was suddenly reminded of the last time I had crossed it, ‘have you ever heard of a man called Poley?’

She began to shake her head, then paused. ‘Poley? I’m not sure. I think, perhaps, Ruy might have mentioned that name once.’

But the men, talking earnestly about some shipment of pepper which had been delayed, were drawing ahead of us and she could not catch her husband’s attention.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘I was called to attend one Poley at the Marshalsea a little while ago. He had eaten bad oysters and thought someone had poisoned him.’ I hesitated, not sure how to put into words my reservations about the man. ‘He was no Catholic priest, and it is priests – is it not? – who are mostly held there, before they are exiled or executed.’

‘And other traitors.’ Sara shivered, and I think it was not simply the bitter cold of the day, for all of us lived on the edge of fear, the whispered betrayal, the knock on the door in the night. She glanced down at Anthony, but he was watching his sisters arguing behind us, glancing over his shoulder and tugging at his mother’s hand.

‘Well,’ I said, remembering those eyes and the man’s sudden unexpected lunge towards me, ‘traitor he might be. I saw him not at his best, but I can imagine he might be one of those who smiles at your face while slipping a knife between your ribs from behind.’

We had no opportunity to speak further then, for Sara’s brother William joined us and we all made our way together to the Nuñez house. At the door I took Anthony’s hand and led him to the men’s portion. The house was built round an old hall, two or three hundred years old, I suppose, though later wings had been added and it was now a fine City house, fitting for a doctor and merchant of Hector Nuñez’s standing, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and partner in the Spice Trust. This hall suited our purposes well, for the main part served for the men, while the women occupied the minstrels’ gallery. Dr Nuñez’s wife, Beatriz Fernandez, baked the unleavened bread for Passover with her own hands, and would rather go hungry than eat food which had not been prepared according to the strictest dietary rules. Most of us lived too close to the Christians to observe the traditional customs. We could not be as careful as she. Our community had no rabbi, and the services bore little resemblance to those I remembered in Portugal, though there, too, services had been conducted in secret.

‘We must make shift to do the best we can,’ my father explained to me.

In Portugal we had passed for New Christians, Catholics, loyal to the Pope of Rome. Here in London we were Protestant refugees, like the Huguenots who had flooded into England since the bloody massacres in France. A hunted creature will take on any colouring it can to escape death.

Yet is it any wonder that I questioned the existence of God as I stood among these men, murmuring and swaying to prayers which seemed to me empty of meaning? They call us Marranos, we who change our faith as we change our country, or seem to do so. It is an old Spanish word which means ‘pig’, an insult whose significance is not lost on us. We think of ourselves as Anusim, the ‘Forced Ones’, driven under duress to take whatever is the dominant religion in the country where we live. It is only thus that we can survive.

That Sabbath day I felt more than usually uneasy all through the service. Perhaps it was the brief conversation with Sara about the man at the Marshalsea, the man Poley. For some reason I could not shake off the thought of him.

As we came outside into the bitter air, I was eager to be away. We do not linger long after service, talking to our friends and neighbours as you will see the Christians do after a church service, for it is better for us not to be seen gathered together in large numbers. Indeed, when we attended church at St Bartholomew’s, my father and I, as we must in order to obey the law, we behaved like the good Protestants we pretended to be, exchanging news and gossip with our neighbours – the butchers of Smithfield and the bakers of Pie Lane and the women who look after the daily needs of the patients at the hospital.

Now we turned to walk away from Mark Lane a little behind the Lopez family, who were making their way somewhat slowly through a group of men emerging from an inn, well-dressed men, gentlemen indeed. Young and full of high spirits, and genial with wine, calling out that they had just won a bet on a horse race. I saw Dr Lopez glance at them sharply before looking away, so that I followed his glance.

There in the midst of the group, with his arm round the shoulders of a handsome youth with bright eyes and a gallant air, was the man Poley. At first I thought I had conjured him up out of my own imaginings. How could that sick prisoner from the Marshalsea, though certainly rich, be here in easy company with such gentlemen as these?

‘Ah, Robyn, sweet Robyn!’ the handsome young man cried. ‘You shall dice with me for the colt, now that he has won his race. Come back to my lodgings, and we shall see which of us is the man that fair and fickle Dame Fortune shines upon.’

He stumbled somewhat over this speech, for he was more than a little drunk.

‘Why, Anthony,’ said Poley affably, ‘you know that you are always the winner.’ Then, as if my own eyes compelled him, he looked across the narrow street and met them with a bold stare. He smiled. Not at me, but to himself, secretly. And I averted my face and hurried after my father.

‘Ah, good morning to you, Kit. Have you worked those problems I set you?’

My mathematics tutor, Thomas Harriot, peered at me cheerfully through an untidy mop of hair. He constantly ran his hands through it, in despair at his own or his students’ inability to follow the crystal clear steps of logic to a perfect solution. And when success was achieved, he would push his hair up from behind, so that it stood on end like the crest of some exotic bird brought to England by one of the Queen’s sea captains.

‘I have,’ I said, hooking out a stool with my foot and sitting down opposite him. ‘I think I have established the correct proofs. The third one took me some time.’

He grinned mischievously.

‘That was meant to test you. And you solved it? Excellent, excellent!’

He took the sheets of paper from me and ran his eye over my careful workings. When his hand pushed up that crest of hair, I knew my solutions met with approval. Four years ago, when we had first arrived in London, my father used some of his small salary to provide tutors for me in music, mathematics and philosophy, while training me in natural philosophy and medicine himself. Now that I was working with him at St Bartholomew’s, the only studies I kept up were in mathematics. Two years ago I had been taken on by Harriot, a considerable honour, for he was recognised as the most gifted mathematician in England, though he had enemies. I suppose there will always be people who find mathematics a mystery akin to magic, and are suspicious of those who practice it.

‘Well done, Kit. I was not sure whether I was asking too much of you. Look, I have just acquired this new work on optics. You read Italian, do you not? Optics is throwing up some interesting mathematical problems. You may borrow it, if you like.’

‘Oh, yes!’ I was like a fledging bird, its mouth gaping. New knowledge, scholarship, was food for my hungry mind. I would never be able to attend university, so I gobbled up whatever scraps fell my way. I ran my fingers lovingly over the book, a squat little volume bound in dark green leather.

For the next hour, Harriot and I discussed the theories in the book and also worked on some problems in three-dimensional geometry. I had become interested recently in how artists can best represent three-dimensional objects on the flat plane of their canvases, and whether there might be useful mathematical solutions to the problem. My sessions with Harriot were a constant joy to me, refreshing as cool water in the desert. Here I had no need to think about the deceits of my life or the conflict of my beliefs. Here nothing mattered but the pure mind, separate from the distractions of body and soul. I went home whistling, with the precious book on optics tucked into my satchel. I had intended to discuss with my teacher the mathematics of musical harmony, but the thought of a precious new book to read had put it quite out of my mind.

For the next few days I forgot the man Poley, glimpsed so unexpectedly in the street, forgot even the fascination of optics, for there was an outbreak of the bloody flux in the western outskirts of London. I laboured with my father from dawn until late into the night, administering medicines to strengthen the gut. The sickness spread to our patients in the hospital, and to those who came in from the countryside to wait patiently in the old abbey cloisters until we could attend to them. The flagstones in the cloister were puddled with vomit and liquid, bloodstained faeces amongst the churned snow. Twice a day, one of the hospital servants threw a bucket of water over them, but the stench remained.

‘We must make up more of the tincture to heal interior bleeding, Kit.’ My father was heavy-eyed after three long days of labour in the wards. ‘If you will pound the herbs I will make up the mixture.’

I nodded. I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the base of a copper pan which hung beside the hearth. Even in its distorted image I could see that my own face was drawn with weariness. Before we had returned late from the hospital, Joan had gone to her bed, leaving a pot of soup on a trivet near the fire and on the table, covered with a cloth to keep off the flies, a slab of pie fetched from the pie man round the corner.

‘I think we should eat first, Father.’

I pulled out his carved chair and beckoned.

‘Oh, very well.’ He gave a laugh which was part sigh. ‘We are both so tired we may make a mistake. Is the soup hot?’

‘It soon will be.’

I hung the pot on its hook and swung it over the fire, then threw on another log. The fire spat out a shower of sparks, but began to burn up brightly and I held out my hands to it. Walking home through the snow I had become more chilled than I realised. My boots were sodden and I prised them off with stiff fingers. Soon we were both spooning up the soup eagerly. Joan was not a particularly skilled cook, but the soup was substantial and warming, flavoured with a mutton bone and thick with carrots and onions. Between us we finished the entire pot.

‘I hope this pie is safe,’ my father said, judiciously cutting it into two equal pieces.

‘Safe? Joan will have bought it from Goodman Quiller. His meat is clean, if sometimes a little tough.’

‘I am thinking of the sickness. If the bloody flux has spread to the butchers, the meat may be contaminated.’

I cast a wary glance at my piece of pie. Butcher Quiller’s wife had a light hand with pastry – her pastry put Joan’s to shame – and the meat looked fine grained and free of gristle. A quivering golden jacket of clear jelly encased the meat inside the pastry. My stomach groaned with hunger. Even the soup had barely taken the edge off it. I poked the pie tentatively with the tip of my knife.

‘Do you think it is safe?’

‘Don’t worry.’ He smiled at me. ‘There’s been no sign of illness yet amongst the butchers. I am going to eat mine.’

With that he set to, and I ate my own share greedily. Afterwards we worked at renewing our supplies of medicines until well past the calling of midnight by the Watch in the street.

The next day we rose at dawn after little sleep, but when we reached the hospital soon afterwards there were already fresh crowds gathered in the old cloisters, begging for treatment. Grimly, we got to work. For the most part, my father passed the babies and children to me, and there were many of them that morning. A young woman, poorly dressed, her eyes red and swollen with weeping, held out a tiny bundle to me.

‘My baby, doctor, he’s been vomiting for two days and passing bloody stools. He won’t feed.’ She gave a shuddering gasp. ‘He isn’t dead, is he?’

The woman wasn’t much older than I, perhaps eighteen, and the baby, when I unwrapped the dirty cloth in which his naked form was wrapped, was tiny and emaciated. For a moment I feared that he was dead, but then he stirred and made a faint mewing cry like a distressed kitten. He was as filthy as the cloth, smeared with blood and faeces. In my work with my father I have had to grow accustomed to many unpleasant sights, but even so my stomach heaved at the sight.

I told the woman to sit down on a stool and sent one of the hospital servants to fetch a basin of warm water and rags, and one of the small pieces of blanket we keep for babies. As I washed the child, I saw even more clearly how thin he was, his ribs standing out stark under the skin like a row of twigs, his rapid heart beat visible to the naked eye. Even as I washed him, he vented a thin stream of diarrhoea, but his stomach was so hollow I could not believe there was much left inside.

The mixture we had made up the night before was too strong for a baby, so I diluted it with goat’s milk, something my father had introduced into the hospital, having found in Portugal that it answered well in the treatment of delicate stomachs. The hospital authorities had viewed it with suspicion at first, but by now it was accepted practice. This infant was too young to drink from a cup or even to take the medicine from a spoon, but we have pottery vessels with a spout, onto which we fit a finger cut from a thin leather glove, with a hole pierced in the end. Sick babies can usually be persuaded to take medicine in this way. As the child had been refusing to eat, I made the mixture more palatable by stirring in a little honey.

At first I feared all my efforts would come to nothing, for the baby twisted his head away and whimpered, refusing to suck from the leather-tipped spout, but at last I managed to squeeze a little on to his tongue. The taste of the honey must have pleased him, for he took the rest readily enough.

‘You must stay here for the rest of the day,’ I told the mother. ‘The child will need another dose this afternoon and again this evening. Keep him wrapped in this clean blanket and if you need a fresh one, ask one of the women servants. I will see you again later.’

‘Will he live?’ The tears had dried on her face and her eyes were bright with hope.

‘I think there is every chance. Now that he has taken both the medicine and the milk. Keep him warm. Do you have family waiting for you at home?’

She shook her head. ‘I lost my first child. Dickon is my only one. And his father is at sea.’

‘Stay here today, and you will be given bread and soup in the refectory. Say that Dr Alvarez sent you.’

I stroked the tuft of fine black hair on the baby’s head, then turned aside to the next patient.

It was a long day and I lost count of how many patients I saw who were suffering from the bloody flux. There were, as well, some of the usual cases needing treatment. A blacksmith’s apprentice with a nasty burn on his hand. A packman whose pony had trodden on his foot. A woman who said she had fallen downstairs, although I had seen the same woman before and knew that she fell regularly against her husband’s fist when he was drunk, but feared him too much to admit to it. However, the day ended well, with the sick baby over the worst, no longer bleeding or vomiting but feeding normally. I told the mother to return the next day so that I could be sure he was cured, but I went home in the comforting thought that, despite my weariness, I had done a good day’s work at my chosen profession. In bed that night I read the same page of Harriot’s book on optics three times, the beautiful Italian words dancing before my eyes. In the end I abandoned it and blew out my candle. My head was too thick to grasp the finer points of the argument.

The next day I was glad to see that the baby was no longer so grey and gaunt.

‘He is feeding well now?’ I asked.

The mother nodded. ‘He even slept a little in the night.’ She gave me a wan smile.

‘Good. Here is a bottle of the mixture, and one of our baby flasks. Give him a third this morning, then again in the afternoon and evening. Keep him clean and warm. If he is ill again, or if you are ill yourself, come back to the hospital at once. Don’t wait two days next time.’

‘I will. God go with you, Doctor.’

She reached out and put her hand on my arm. I laid mine briefly over it.

‘And with you.’

By the end of ten days my father and I were both exhausted, but the outbreak had been halted. Fortunately it had affected none of the butchers, for then, my father predicted, it would have been carried on tainted meat throughout the city. Only a few died, two or three infants – though not the child I had treated – and one old woman, so we were content with our work.

On the first day when I had not needed to rise with the rooster, I was sitting with my father at the table in the kitchen, eating a breakfast of new bread, figs and small ale. I was holding a ripe fig which sat on the palm of my hand like a plump woman in purple skirts sinking down on to a low stool. It smelled softly of southern sunshine and was just at that perfect moment of ripeness when, as we say, it has the cloak of a beggar and the eye of a widow.

My father had made some jest about our needing to take care not to eat too many figs, and we were laughing when the knock came on the door. Joan opened it, and in walked the man Poley as if he were our landlord, come to demand overdue rent. He was finely dressed, in a doublet of slashed blue silk with silver buttons, each garnished with what looked like a ruby – but surely could not be – as large as a robin’s egg. His immaculate ruff spread wide as a trencher, and his cloak of golden velvet was lined with fur. Probably no more than coney-skin, I judged. My father scrambled to his feet and bowed, wiping his fingers on his napkin and dabbing at his mouth apologetically. My heart lurched painfully, for these obsequious manners he had learned in England were so alien to the distinguished professor of medicine at Coimbra university that I remembered from my childhood. I stood up quietly and slipped behind him into the shadows, hoping to edge away through the parlour door.

‘Dr Alvarez!’ Poley extended his hand amiably, as though bestowing a favour. ‘And young Christoval.’ He nodded towards me, for his sharp eyes had noted my attempted escape and foiled it.

‘May I?’ Without waiting for permission he sat down in my father’s carved chair while, at a gesture from him, we sank down side by side on one of the benches. I saw that I had crushed the fig to a broken pulp of seeds and golden flesh, and scraped my hand free of the mess on the edge of the table.

‘Not oysters for breakfast, then, Christoval, I see!’ He grinned knowingly and turned to my father. ‘Did your son tell you how he saved my life from a most virulent attack of food poisoning? Indeed I believe I may say that without his ministrations I might not be alive today.’

He turned to me. ‘You are surprised to see me no longer confined in the Marshalsea.’ Smiling, he tapped his nose. ‘Policy. Policy.’

I thought he smiled too much.

He stretched out his legs until his foot met and briefly fondled mine under the table. Hastily I tucked my legs back under the bench.

‘Now,’ he said, his manner quite changed. ‘To business. I have been making enquiries about young Christoval here. I learn that he is more than he seems.’

I swallowed painfully. It was as though the chill of hemlock began to seize my limbs. My father stiffened beside me.

‘Yes, I learn that young Christoval is a student of the mathematician and astronomer Thomas Harriot. He whom they call the “conjuror”.’

I opened my mouth to protest against this slur on my teacher, but he raised his hand to silence me.

‘I have spoken to Harriot,’ Poley continued, ‘and he tells me that Christoval is a gifted mathematician. Exceptionally gifted.’ He seemed always to address my father, but he watched me from the corner of his eye, and I sensed his foot groping again for mine. My heart began to pound. What did he want, this man with his genial exterior and the suggestion of threat in his voice?

‘Dr Alvarez,’ his manner became suddenly confidential, flattering, ‘I am sent to bring this young man to Sir Francis Walsingham, who wishes to look him over, with a view to offering him employment. As a mathematician.’

l determined to put a stop to this bland assumption that we would fall in with whatever plot he was hatching, for it seemed to me that no good would come of any further dealings with Master Poley.

‘I am already employed,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘I work as an assistant physician at St Bartholomew’s.’ My father touched my arm to silence me.

‘Indeed, indeed,’ Poley said. ‘And what we have in mind would hardly take you from your duties. I would not wish to rob the poor and indigent of so promising a physician.’

He smiled that complacent smile, so that I longed to kick him hard, but I was mindful of my father’s fingers pressing into my arm.

‘No, Sir Francis would only require your services from time to time, when there is much work to be done. It need not take you often from your care of the sick.’

‘Sir Francis requires my services as a mathematician?’ It made no sense. Sir Walter Raleigh, perhaps, or one of the directors of the Spice Trust, might find me of use, if navigational calculations were needed for some new voyage. But Sir Francis? I knew little of what Mr Secretary Walsingham did, apart from keeping an eye on the Spanish and gathering information on the Queen’s enemies.

‘Come!’ Poley pushed back his chair so violently that the legs squealed in protest on the flagged floor. ‘I will explain as we go.’

‘Father?’ I looked at him, appealing with my eyes for him to forbid me to go. But he had become cowed and submissive as he had grown older. All he desired was the quiet life of an insignificant doctor, with a few investments in the spice trade so that he might lay aside a little gold to keep us both when he was too old to practice any longer. Only in dire circumstances would he defy a man as powerful as Sir Francis Walsingham. He avoided my eyes and patted my hand encouragingly.

‘Go with the gentleman, Kit.’ His voice was gentle, almost placating. ‘I am sure Sir Francis means you no harm.’

At that moment I realised that Poley had not introduced himself to my father. Was it right that my father should urge me to go with this dubious stranger, young and unprotected as I was – a man, for all we knew, who might have nothing to do with Sir Francis Walsingham?

‘Father,’ I said, ‘this gentleman has not even told us his name.’

‘But you know who I am, Kit,’ he said, and even as he spoke I did not like it that he used my familiar name. ‘I am Master Robert Poley, at your service.’ He gave my father a mocking bow and, gripping my elbow painfully, he steered me out of the door. I could barely catch up my cloak with my free hand before he had me in the street and was hustling me east, through Newgate.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked, struggling to fasten my cloak as he hurried me along with thrusts at my back.

‘To Seething Lane,’ he said abruptly, all pretence at genial manners gone now.

Seething Lane ran parallel to Mark Lane, where Hector Nuñez lived, but nearer to the Tower. I wondered whether I might be able to run off and seek sanctuary at the Nuñez house. As if he read my mind, Poley spoke again.

‘You come warmly recommended by Dr Nuñez, too, as well as the conjuror Harriot. Dr Nuñez believes you will be able to give Sir Francis good service. Such a remarkable young man!’

He gave the last word a kind of ironic flourish, then said no more. He walked fast for a man whose normal movements were languid and affected, and I had to hurry to keep pace with him. His movements, like his manner, underwent these sudden changes which I found as disturbing as the inexplicable summons to Walsingham. I recalled what I had said of Poley to Sara. There was a hint of violence in his abrupt changes.

We had nearly reached Tower Ward when I suddenly stopped dead in the street and refused to go further.

‘What if I do not wish to work for Sir Francis?’ I said, a little out of breath with the pace he had been setting, my voice sounding high and childish.

A baker’s boy with a tray of bread balanced on his head collided with me as I stopped, and cursed me as he grabbed to save his bread from falling. I ignored him and stood my ground, the London crowds parting around us where we stood like a boulder in a river. Sailors hurried up from their ships by the Custom House towards the ale-houses of the City, women knocked their market baskets against our shins, and a furtive mongrel leapt suddenly between Poley and me, grabbed one of the fallen loaves, and darted away down Little East Cheap.

‘Not wish to work for Sir Francis?’ His smile was mocking. ‘Here’s a fine opportunity many a young man would envy! A young man employed by Sir Francis might rise in service to Queen and State, even become a great man himself. Why, Sir Francis has risen from no notable family to be the second greatest councillor to the Queen, after Lord Burghley. And Lord Burghley himself was simple William Cecil not so many years since.’