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inquisitor, and of some renown. It is worth your while to know, that Thomas Phelippes is his son. For the sake of the engagement, I have told them you are known to him. That is not a lie, for so you shall be, presently.
    â€˜Laurence Tomson tells me that you have made remarkable progress in steganography. When you can compose a cipher of your own, that Phelippes cannot solve, then I will believe it.’
    And with those words, that stage was passed; Hew found himself dismissed.
    The further north they rode the thicker came the mud that clogged the horses’ hooves and splattered over flanks to stop the roll of carts, the furrowed slough of months of rainfall burying their wheels. As the merchants slowed, Hew drove Grey Gelding on, and in space of half an hour, left them far behind. He was conscious of the loss of progress as the path went on, stony, sparse and narrow as the grey horse tired. He could not gather speed, in darkness or in rain, norhope to find momentum in the coming days. Therefore he determined to drive on to Caxton, so to steal a march upon the road ahead. For did not forget the purpose of his ride, the leaden hopes and faces left at Leadenhall.
    He felt a fond affection for the Phillips family, by force of their simplicity, their failure to collude in the conspiracies around them, to be caught up in intrigues. They had little understanding of the secrets of their son, or the work he did for Walsingham, though they were staunchly proud of it. Only William Phillips sometimes fostered doubts. Once, in failing health, he had confessed to Hew, ‘It would not give me ease, to see Thomas in the custom house. I do not say, you see, that he would not be honest. There are in that place so many more temptations . . . a thousand ways a man can treat to serve himself and not the state. . . . I do not say he would, but he has wit and will, and only God can know what he may choose do with them. He keeps his secrets close. I cannot know his heart. And that, you see, is troubling in a son.’
    The house at Leadenhall rang out clear and shrill when all his children came, though that was rare enough. They were brought up in the country, on the Lavenham estate where the second son kept watch upon his sheep, and on the Suffolk cloth men in whose cloths he dealt. A third son travelled for his father’s business over sea, to markets which had shrunk and shrivelled hard in recent times. His letters were read out, a source of news and comfort, though little was divulged in them beyond the price of wool. However slim the thread, his mother spun it deftly, woven into gossip to share out among her friends. The letters were antithesis to those that came to Walsingham, so little were they filled of matter and of worth. And yet beneath the ink was carried on a life, the filtered, fractured figment of an absent son.
    William, on the whole, preferred to be in London, wife Joan at his side, and without that brood, to which she seemed to him unreasonably attached. Wherever else he ventured, Frances was the one most often in his company, and the only one he could not dowithout. In London, she kept house, as well as his accounts, and when the younger children came, she kept them too, as quiet in their place as might be effected, and as well amused.
    Together in one bed slept the five youngest sons, and Frances shared a second with the daughters of the house, in a narrow closet next to Joan and William’s own. From the boys’ bedchamber led a ladder to the storeroom in the loft, where a feather mattress had been laid for Hew.
    â€˜It is quiet, at night,’ Frances had said, ‘and at least, warm.’
    Packed to the rafters with sheep’s fleece and fells, the loft was close and suffocating in the summer months. In winter, Hew had shivered to the scrabble of the mice, who made their nests and burrows in the pelts, until Frances had extended there the service of the cat, a sleek and savage mouser by