Continued from Part Four.

Kind hands pass him a hot tea. He sits on the edge of what was the Royal Court, sipping and watching the ghosts… Many kind faces came to life in this, now-unstructured space – but it was heavily structured then… It takes but little effort to re-animate its dancing atoms…

Sir Francis Drake is a clever man. The naval mastermind who out-thought and fought the Spanish Armada detects that things in the Queen’s Royal Court are not exactly as they seem…

To start with, The Queen, herself: undoubtedly physically strong – though she pretends not, perhaps? – She seems vulnerable, even fragile, in the face of the effects of the terrible Tilbury vision: ‘The drowned man and the ghost with the white face’. What is he to make of that? Elizabeth, the person, is known to be both clever and resolute; never failing to show courage in the face of adversity. Look how she rallied the land-troops at the Kent Fort, when the clever Spaniards had re-grouped at Calais, ready to invade England with overwhelming force, the day after…

Drake smiles, knowing he and Hawkins’ strategy had rendered the Armada captive within the harbours of Calais, and that the fireships had devastated the frozen fleet, sparing the Sovereign from defeat, humiliation and execution.

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