Ned was dazzled by her smile, as bright as the winter sun.

“Yes,” she said. “Very well.”

LONDON, DECEMBER 1648

James took ship from France on a cold December morning with a westerly wind filling the sails of the Thames barge that took him into the pool of London. He disembarked with papers that showed him to be a wine merchant, coming to trade with the Vintners’ Company of London. He was waved ashore by an exciseman whose main concern was to check the hold of the ship, and had no time for anyone who did not have gossip to tell from the extraordinary royal courts in exile in France and the Low Countries.

“No, I heard nothing,” James spoke with a slight French accent. “What matter, eh? Can you direct me to the Vintners’ Hall?”

“Behind the watergate, and Three Cranes Wharf.” The man waved his hand.

“And how may I know Three Cranes Wharf?”

“Because there are three cranes on it,” the man said with exaggerated patience.

James, satisfied the exciseman would remember the French wine merchant, hefted his bag over his shoulder and climbed the damp steps set into the quay wall of Queenhithe. The quayside was crowded with vendors of little goods, porters, hawkers, and pedlars. James disappeared among the people trying to sell him things that he did not want, and took Trinity Lane up the hill, and then a roundabout route to his destination: a small counting house off Bread Street. When he reached the door with the curiously wrought door knocker he tapped twice and let himself inside.

In the gloom he could see a middle-aged woman rise up from the table where she was weighing small coins in the dim light from the barred window. “Good day, sir. Can I help you?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “I am Simon de Porte.”

“You are welcome,” she said. “Are you sure that no one followed you from the docks?”

“I am sure,” he said. “I turned several corners and I stopped and doubled back twice. There was no one.”

She hesitated as if she was afraid to trust him. “Have you done this before?” she asked, and then she saw how weary he looked. His handsome young face was grooved with lines of fatigue. Clearly, he had done this before; clearly, he had done it too many times.

“Yes,” he said shortly.

“You can put your bag in the cellar,” she said, gesturing to a hatch in the floor under her chair. Together, they pushed her table to one side and she gave him a candle to light his way down the wooden ladder. At the foot was a small bed, a table, and another candle.

“If there’s a raid, bolt the hatch from the inside. There is a secret way into the cellar next door, behind that rack of wine,” she said. “And from there, in the opposite wall, there is a low delivery door out to the next lane. If someone comes, and you need to escape, then go that way quickly and quietly and you might get away.”