The flames of his torch flickered on the rough stone. Spiders scurried from the light, rats scuttled from the soft padding of his footfalls. This was a kingdom of darkness, a realm of silence. He had no business here, this man from the air, this refugee from the sun. Yet, here he was. And he had every business here.

A door loomed ahead of him at the end of the passage, ancient oak thick with webs, its studs rough with rust. He slid the dagger from the small of his back, the lethal blade flashing silver in the guttering torchlight. He tapped its tip against the metal. A padlock. How apt. And he found himself smiling. One twist of the steel and the old iron gave way, cracking loudly in that silence. He put his hand to the door, then his shoulder, and it swung wide under his weight, the hinges growling with anger at the intrusion of this stranger.

He held his torch high, taking in the small chamber that lay before him. There was a crucifix set high in the far wall, nails driven anew through the Lord's hands to anchor it to the crumbling masonry. There was a table, oak again and covered in cobwebs, dense and complex as damask. An inkwell – empty now save for rainbow echoes of the ink it once held caked around its mouth – held a quill, its feathers frowsty with age. He touched it and it disintegrated, dissolving into dust. At the far end of the table stood a chair. And on the chair, sitting watching him, a man. He had been dead for years, all life gone, all light extinguished. His hands stretched out ahead of him, as if he had been about to rise when something had stopped him.

The intruder rested his torch in the iron bracket and bent to peer at the keeper of the chamber. He wore full armour, rust-brown and obsolete, the spiky work of the master smiths of Augsburg, the rivets no longer holding the plates, the hinges welded with the passing of the years. Over the breastplate, below the corrupted mass of mail, the tabard had lost its colour, but he knew the heraldry like he knew his own face. The quarters of Diencourt and Holand, the silvered bars of Rotherfield and the snarling lion of Burell. He glanced down. There it was, on the ankle now, the once plump calf long withered to nothing letting it fall from the knee, the faded blue of the garter. Evil to him who evil thinks. He smiled. The time of evil was nearly at an end. It had been a long time coming, but justice would prevail and God would be in his Heaven again.

He probed with his dagger, lifting the metal chain of office that still lay across the shoulders of the dead man. He stooped to look into that face. It was not human now, a mask of death with holes for eyes and the brown teeth jagged in the jaw. The hair was home to the spiders, white straw wild over the shoulders. He glanced down to the table where the rats had long ago gnawed the fingers and left the parchment, rolled and old, to the dust of the ages. His dagger tip clinked against the silver lupellus, the wolf-dog at the apex of the chain. He snatched it, ripping it from the dead man's breast. This was what he had come for. This would be his talisman in the days that lay ahead. It was a trinket, nothing more. But its power was immense. He could feel it as he took the torch again, feel it as he eased the door back, closing the dead man again in the utter blackness of his tomb. Feel it as he made for the light, for the world he was about to change forever.

'Have you actually met the Queen, Marlowe?' Robert Cecil was asking. Mr Secretary was now Sir Robert, a member of Her Majesty's Privy Council and a married man. But he still had to look up to everybody. A careless nursemaid had dropped him as a child and his back was crooked, his feet wayward and his gait clumsy.

'No, Sir Robert. I have not had that exquisite pleasure.'

Cecil looked at the man at the far end of the table with those penetrating hazel eyes of his. He was Christopher Marlowe, the scholar, an alumnus of Corpus Christi in the increasingly Puritan town of Cambridge. That was good. He was also the Muses' Darling, all fire and air, the playwright who had dared God out of his Heaven. That was not so good. And he was, on the third side of the coin that few men even knew existed, Francis Walsingham's man, a projectioner of cunning, an agent of Her Majesty as elusive as quicksilver. For all he was now the Queen's Spymaster, Robert Cecil couldn't read a man like Kit Marlowe.

'Well, I doubt you will now,' he said, 'but she has a job for you nonetheless.'

'I am flattered, sir,' Marlowe said, his face a mask of theatricality when he wanted it to be, 'but I fear I must decline.'

Cecil jerked his head back and looked at Marlowe with basilisk's eyes. A taller man would have leapt to his feet, but Cecil stayed in his chair; to rise would merely accentuate his little stature and he would have to look up to Marlowe all the more. 'Decline?' he repeated. 'Why?'

'I have chained myself to Master Henslowe at the Rose,' Marlowe told him. 'I owe him a play.'

'Really?' Cecil sneered. 'What is it this time?' Marlowe smiled. He wasn't about to share his genius with the Queen's Imp, Walsingham's successor or no. 'It's a rewrite of Ralph Roister Doister,' he said, folding his arms. 'Long overdue, I think you'll agree.'

'If I knew a rat's fart about the drama, Marlowe, I probably would. But that's precisely why you're here.'

'It is?'

Cecil sighed and rang a small silver bell on the table in front of him. 'Won't you have a seat, Marlowe?' A liveried flunkey appeared from nowhere, in the crimson of Her Majesty. 'Claret? A sweetmeat or two?'

Marlowe shook his head, smiling. He was in a declining mood this morning. Cecil clicked his fingers and the flunkey disappeared. The Spymaster looked out of his Whitehall window, his eyes following the road that ran like an arrow to Westminster, the abbey's turrets a pale grey in the morning sun, the bulk of St Stephen's Hall looming behind it like a thundercloud. 'Her Majesty,' he said, 'is going on another Progress this summer. She was with my father at Theobald's last month, but her plans for July are rather more extensive.'

Marlowe frowned. He knew, as all men knew, about the Queen's Progresses. They were the stuff of legend; Gloriana, conqueror of Spain's mighty Armada, riding in pomp at the head of a glittering and adoring procession. She rode a horse as white as milk, her robes all cloth of gold, with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. It was as though Cecil was reading Marlowe's mind. 'She shall have music wherever she goes,' he said.

Kit Marlowe had the voice of an angel, soaring to the fan-vaulted ceiling of the great cathedral at Canterbury, carrying the genius of Byrd and Tallis to the ear of God above. He laughed. 'Surely, Her Majesty can do better than me as choirmaster,' he said.

'Don't be flippant, Marlowe.' Cecil wasn't laughing. He wasn't even smiling. 'Whatever you've heard about the royal Progresses, they are as carefully orchestrated as a galliard. Or perhaps, more accurately, as any of the Duke of Parma's battle plans. On the surface, you'll be going ahead of her to arrange for revels – masques, music, fireworks, a few laughs. She particularly likes it when people fall over, so it doesn't need anything too sophisticated in that line. But, in reality ...'

Reality. Marlowe was the man who had conjured the love affair of Dido and Aeneas. He had invented the...