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the length of the Italian peninsula, snatching teaching jobs when I could find them and living in the roadside inns and cheap lodgings of travellers, players, and pedlars when I could not, that I would end up the confidant of kings and courtiers, the world would have thought them insane. But not me—I always believed in my own ability not only to survive but to rise through my own efforts. I valued wit more than the privileges of birth, an enquiring mind and hunger for learning above status or office, and I carried an implacable belief that others would eventually come to see thatI was right. This lent me the will to climb obstacles that would have daunted more deferential men. So it was that from itinerant teacher and fugitive heretic, by the age of thirty-five I had risen almost as high as a philosopher might dream: I was a favourite at the court of King Henri III in Paris, his private tutor in the art of memory, and a reader in philosophy at the great Collège de Sorbonne. But France too was riven with religious wars, like every other place I had passed through during my seven-year exile from Naples, and the Catholic faction in Paris under the Guise family was steadily gaining strength against the Huguenots, so much so that it was rumoured the Inquisition were on their way to France. At the same time, my friendship with the king and the popularity of my lectures had earned me enemies among the learned doctors at the Sorbonne, and sly rumours began to slip through the back streets and into the ears of the courtiers: that my unique memory system was a form of black magic and that I used it to communicate with demons. This I took as my cue to move on, as I had done in Venice, Padua, Genoa, Lyon, Toulouse, and Geneva whenever the past threatened to catch up; like many religious fugitives before me, I sought refuge under the more tolerant skies of Elizabeth’s London, where the Holy Office had no jurisdiction, and where I hoped also to find the lost book of the Egyptian high priest Hermes Trismegistus.

    T HE ROYAL BARGE moored at Windsor late in the afternoon, where we were met by liveried servants and taken to our lodgings at the royal castle to dine and rest for the night before progressing to Oxford early the next day. Our supper was a subdued affair, perhaps partly because the sky had grown very dark by the time we arrived in the state apartments, requiring the candles to be lit early, and a heavy rain had begun to fall; by the end of our meal, the water was coursing down the tall windows of the dining hall in a steady sheet.
    “There will be no boat tomorrow if this continues,” Sidney observed, as the servants cleared the dishes. “We will have to travel the rest of the way by road, if horses can be arranged.”
    The palatine looked petulant; he had clearly enjoyed the languor of the barge.
    “I am no horseman,” he complained. “We will need a carriage at the very least. Or we could wait here until the weather clears,” he suggested in a brighter tone, leaning back in his chair and looking covetously at the rich furnishings of the palace dining room.
    “We have no time,” Sidney replied. “The disputation is the day after tomorrow and we must give our speaker enough leisure to prepare his devastating arguments, eh, Bruno?”
    I turned my attention from the windows to offer him a smile. “In fact, I was just about to excuse myself for that very purpose,” I said.
    Sidney’s face fell. “Oh—will you not sit up and play cards with us awhile?” he asked, a note of alarm in his voice at the prospect of being left alone with the palatine for the evening.
    “I’m afraid I must lose myself in my books tonight,” I said, pushing my chair back, “or it will not be a disputation worth hearing.”
    “I’ve sat through few that were,” remarked the palatine. “Never mind, Sir Philip, you and I shall make a long night of it. Perhaps we may read to each other? I shall call for more wine.”
    Sidney threw me