“Chris, you’re guilty! You’re an atheist!”
In the 16th Century your faith, or lack of it, could get you killed…
Christopher Uptake, an outspoken free-thinker, is easy prey. The penalty for atheism, in Elizabethan England, is death.
A scholarship boy, Chris is sent from home to undergo a grim, rigid schooling. He hopes University will be better, but the rules are as strict and the teaching as dull.
Chris escapes to the noise and life of the streets, and to the colour of the theatre he loves. His talent attracts the patronage of wealthy Edmund Brentwood.
But Brentwood, a Catholic, is involved in dangerous Tudor politics.
Enter a ruthless spy-master, who hunts down and destroys Catholics, and who threatens Chris with arrest, torture and execution as a heretic, unless he spies on his friend.
Chris tries to warn Brentwood, but learns that his patron is also a dangerous man.
Caught up in these plots, can Chris escape with his life?