‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then when Mr Dee has chosen the books he wants to see, you can bring them there, to my rooms. All right?’

I nodded.

‘How is your father’s shop prospering?’ he asked. ‘Selling many books? Many customers coming?’

‘Some,’ I said cautiously. ‘But it is early days for us yet.’

‘Your gift does not guide him in his business, then?’

I shook my head. ‘It is not a gift. It is more like folly, as he says.’

‘You speak out? And you can see what others cannot?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And what did you see when you looked at me?’

His voice was pitched very low, as if he would lead me to whisper a reply. I raised my eyes from his boots, his strong legs, his beautiful surcoat, to the soft folds of his white ruff, his sensuous mouth, his half-lidded dark eyes. He was smiling at me, as if he understood that my cheeks, my ears, even my hair felt hot as if he were the sun from Spain on my head. ‘When I first saw you, I thought I knew you.’

‘From before?’ he asked.

‘From a time to come,’ I said awkwardly. ‘I thought that I would know you, in the days ahead.’

‘Not if you are a lad!’ He smiled to himself at the bawdiness of his thought. ‘So what condition will I be in when you know me, Mistress Boy? Am I to be a great man? Am I to command a kingdom while you command a bookshop?’

‘Indeed, I hope you will be a great man,’ I said stiffly. I would say nothing more, this warm teasing must not lull me into thinking that it was safe to confide in him.

‘What d’you think of me?’ he asked silkily.

I took a quiet breath. ‘I think that you would trouble a young woman who was not in breeches.’

He laughed out loud at that. ‘Please God that is a true seeing,’ he said. ‘But I never fear trouble with girls, it is their fathers who strike me with terror.’

I smiled back, I could not help myself. There was something about the way his eyes danced when he laughed that made me want to laugh too, that made me long to say something extraordinarily witty and grown-up so that he would look at me and see me not as a child but as a young woman.

‘And have you ever foretold the future and it came true?’ he asked, suddenly serious.

The question itself was dangerous in a country that was always alert for witchcraft. ‘I have no powers,’ I said quickly.

‘But without exerting powers, can you see the future? It is given to some of us, as a holy gift, to know what might be. My friend here, Mr Dee, believes that angels guide the course of mankind and may sometimes warn us against sin, just as the course of the stars can tell a man what his destiny might be.’