Kat Ashley’s box in Elizabeth’s London house held the first draft of a pamphlet urging Englishmen to rise up against the Catholic queen and put the Protestant princess on the throne.

Cardinal Pole started to look around Elizabeth’s friends and acquaintances for who might have a press that would have printed such a pamphlet in secret. I thought of the sheeted press in the printer’s shop off Fleet Street and wondered how soon it would be before they came for me.

The cardinal, inspired by God, determined and intelligent, was following a trail which would take in many English Protestants, many friends and servants to Elizabeth, and would lead him inevitably to me, as to many others. Whenever one man was arrested and taken for questioning there was another man who might mention that the queen’s fool was always with the princess. That someone had told someone that the queen’s fool would run an errand or take a message, that she was known by sight to Sir William Pickering, that she was a trusted retainer of the Dudley family for all that she was said to serve the queen.

If Cardinal Pole took me to his quiet thickly curtained room and made me stand before his dark polished table and tell him of my history I knew he would pick it apart in a moment. Our flight from Spain, our arrival in England, my father’s disappearance leaving his press behind: everything pointed to our guilt as Marranos, Jews trying to pass as Christians, and we could be burned for heresy in Smithfield as well as we could have been burned in Aragon. If he went to my father’s shop he would find texts which were forbidden and heretical. Some of them were illegal because they questioned the word of God, even suggesting that the earth moved around the sun, or that animals now lived which had not been made by God in six days at the beginning of the world. Some of them were illegal because they challenged the translation of the Word of God, saying that the apple of knowledge was an apricot. And some of them were illegal simply because they could not be understood. They dealt in mysteries, and the cardinal’s church was one that insisted on control of all the mysteries of the world.

The books in the shop would see us hanged for heresy, the printing press see us hanged for treason, and if ever the cardinal made a connection between my father’s best customers, John Dee and Robert Dudley, and me, then I would be on the scaffold for treason with the noose around my neck in a moment.

I spent three days in bed, staring at the white ceiling, shivering with fear though the sunshine was bright on the lime-washed walls and bees bumbled against the glass of the window. Then in the evening of the third day, I got up from my bed. I knew the queen would be preparing to walk into the great hall and sit before a dinner that she could not bear to eat. I got myself to her rooms as she rose from her prie-dieu.