‘Was he always like this?’

The fear clenched at my heart: that I did not know what this child was like, and that if I admitted I did not know, someone might take him away from me. He was not my child, not born of my body, but his mother had put him into my arms and his father was my husband, and whatever I owed to my husband Daniel in terms of love and duty might be redeemed by my care for his son.

‘I don’t know, he was with his wet nurse in Calais,’ I lied. ‘She brought him to me when the city was under siege.’

‘He might be frightened,’ John Dee suggested. ‘Did he see the fighting?’

My heart contracted, I could feel it like a pain. I looked at him incredulously. ‘Frightened? But he is only a little baby. How would he know when he was in danger?’

‘Who knows what he might think or understand?’ John Dee said. ‘I don’t believe that children know nothing but what is taught them, as if they were empty pots for the filling. He will have known one home and one woman caring for him, and then he might have been afraid, running through the streets to look for you. Children know more than we allow, I think. He might be afraid to speak now.’

I leaned over him, and his bright dark eyes looked back at me, like the liquid eyes of a little deer. ‘Daniel?’ I asked.

For the first time I thought of him as a real person, someone who might think and feel, someone who had been in the arms of his mother and felt himself thrust violently from her, into the arms of a stranger. Someone who had seen his mother ridden down by a horse and gored by a lance, who had seen his mother die in the gutter and then felt himself carried like an unwanted parcel on a boat, unloaded without explanation in England, jolted and jogged on the back of a horse to some cold house in the middle of nowhere, with no-one he knew.

This was a child who had seen his mother die. This was a child without a mother. I leaned over him, I could feel the prickle of hot tears underneath my eyelids. This was a child whose grief and fear I, of all people, could understand. I had hidden my own childhood fear behind all the languages of Christendom, in becoming fluent in every tongue. He, so much smaller, so much more afraid, had gone mute.

‘Danny,’ I said gently. ‘I will be your mother. You will be safe with me.’

‘Is he not your child?’ John Dee asked. ‘He looks so like you.’

I looked up at him and I was tempted to trust him with the truth but fear kept me silent.

‘Is he one of the Chosen People?’ John Dee asked quietly.

Silently, I nodded my head.

‘Circumcised?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not in Calais, and here it is impossible.’