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would not explain why.’
    ‘But you are a scholar. Surely he knows that?’
    ‘I won’t do, apparently. He is looking for someone with a knowledge of ancient languages, ancient texts. A man of learning and discretion, he said, for a sensitive task. I told him I knew just the fellow.’ He beams, slinging an arm around my shoulder, all geniality again. ‘He told me to bring you to Plymouth when I came. Think, Bruno – I don’t know what he wants, but if you could do him some sort of service, it might smooth our way to a berth aboard his ship.’
    I say nothing. When he invited me on this journey to Plymouth, he showered me with flattery: he could not dream of going without me, he said; he would miss my conversation; there was no one among his circle at court he would rather travel with, no one whose company he prized more highly. Now it transpires that he wants me as a sort of currency; something he can use to barter with Drake. Like a foolish girl, I have allowed myself to be sweet-talked into believing he wanted me for my own qualities. I also know that I am absurd to feel slighted, and this makes me all the more angry, with him and with myself. I shrug his arm off me.
    ‘Oh, come on, Bruno. I cannot think of going without you – what, left to the company of grizzled old sea dogs for months on end, with no conversation that isn’t of weevils and cordage and drinking their own piss? You would not abandon me to such a fate.’ He drops to one knee, his hands pressed together in supplication.
    Reluctantly, I crack a smile. ‘Weevils and drinking our own piss? Well then, you have sold it to me.’
    ‘See? I knew you would not be able to resist.’ He bounces back to his feet and brushes himself down.
    Our friendship has always been marked by good-natured teasing, but his earlier words have stung; perhaps this is truly how he views me. Nothing without patronage.
    ‘Seriously, Philip,’ I turn to look him in the eye. ‘To risk the Queen’s displeasure so brazenly – are you really willing? I am not sure that I am.’
    ‘I swear to you, Bruno, by the time we come home, the sight of the riches we bring to her treasury will make her forget on the instant.’ When I do not reply, he leans in, dropping his voice to a whisper. ‘You do realise the money Walsingham pays you is not charity? He pays you for information. And if the Baron de Châteauneuf has as good as banished you, how can you continue to provide it?’
    ‘I will find a way. I always have before. Walsingham knows I will not let him down.’
    ‘Come, Bruno!’ He gives me a little shake, to jolly me along. ‘Do you not yearn to see the New World? What good is it to dream of worlds beyond the fixed stars if you dare not travel our own globe?’ He pushes a hand through his hair so that the front sticks up in tufts, a gesture he makes without knowing whenever he is agitated. ‘You’re thirty-seven years old. If you want nothing more from life than to sit in a room with a book, I can’t think why you ever left the cloister.’
    ‘Because I would have been sentenced to death by the Inquisition,’ I say, quietly. As he well knows. But how do you explain to a man like Sidney the reality of a life in exile? ‘And what of your wife and child?’ I add, as he stretches again and turns as if to leave.
    He looks at me as if he does not understand the question. ‘What of them?’
    ‘Your first child is due in, what, three months? And you mean to be halfway across an ocean.’ With no good odds on returning, I do not say aloud. Even I know that Francis Drake’s famous circumnavigation returned to England with only one ship of six and a third of the men. But Sidney is as irrepressible as a boy when he sets his heart on something; he clearly believes there is no question but that we will return triumphant with armfuls of Spanish gold.
    He frowns. ‘But I have done my part. She will have the child whether I am there or not, and there will be nursemaids to take