I look at him, alarmed; there had been no mention of this in the invitation. I glance up to the top of the mainmast, where a pennant with a gold crest flutters above the lookout platform. I hope he has not just volunteered us for shinning up rigging and swabbing decks.
Knollys looks him up and down, taking in the silk doublet, the lace cuffs, the ornaments. He smiles, but there is an edge to it.
‘Good – the wine is strictly rationed. I must say, Philip, I am surprised Her Majesty has allowed you to leave court for so long. In the circumstances.’
Sidney looks away. ‘Someone has to bring Dom Antonio to London. He wouldn’t make it in one piece on his own. You know Philip of Spain has a price on his head.’
‘Even so. Given that you and she are at odds at present, I’m amazed she trusts you to come back again.’ Knollys laughs, expecting Sidney to join in.
There is a pause that grows more uncomfortable the longer it continues. Sidney studies the horizon with intense concentration.
‘Tell me,’ I say, to relieve the silence, ‘what kind of man is Francis Drake?’
‘Stubborn,’ says Sidney, without hesitation.
‘A man of mettle,’ Knollys offers, after some consideration.
‘I have sat on parliamentary committees with him over the past few years,’ says Sidney, ‘and he is as single-minded as a ratting dog when he has his mind set to something. Pragmatic too, though, and damned hard-working – as you’d expect from a man raised to manual labour,’ he adds, examining his fingernails.
‘There is a combative aspect to him,’ Knollys says thoughtfully, ‘and a fierce ambition – though not for personal vanity, I don’t think. It’s more as if he enjoys pitting himself against the impossible. He can be the very soul of courtesy – I have seen him treat prisoners from captured ships with as much respect as he would pay his own men. But there is steel in him. If you cross him, by God, he will make you pay for it.’ He sucks in a sharp breath and seems poised to expand on this, but apparently thinks better of it.
‘Is he an educated man?’ I ask.
‘Not formally, though he is learned in matters that concern the sea, naturally,’ Knollys says. ‘But in his cabin he keeps an English Bible and a copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, as well as the writings of Magellan and French and Spanish volumes on the art of navigation. He is excessively fond of music and makes sure he has men aboard who can play with some skill. Why do you ask?’
‘Only that he is Europe’s most famous mariner,’ I say. ‘I am intrigued to meet him – he has changed our understanding of the world. I imagine he must be a man of extraordinary qualities.’
Knollys nods, smiling. ‘You will not be disappointed. Now, the two of you can watch the sights while I go about my business. God willing we shall have calm seas and a good wind and we will be in Plymouth inside two days.’
He waves us vaguely towards the front of the ship. I follow Sidney up a few almost vertical stairs to the high deck. As soon as Knollys has turned his back, Sidney disregards his command; he greets the nearest sailor heartily and presses him with questions about his business – why does he tie that rope so, what does it signify that the topsails are still furled, what is the hierarchy of men in the crew, where is the farthest he himself has been from England – barely pausing to draw breath, until the poor fellow looks about wildly for someone to save him from this interrogation.
Smiling, I leave them to it and find myself a quiet spot at the very prow. I do, as it happens, know one end of a ship from the other – I spent part of my youth around the Bay of Naples – but I reason that the more useless I make myself appear, the more I will be left to my own devices. What does pique my interest here is the art of navigation; I should like to have the opportunity to talk to Knollys about his charts and instruments, if he would allow. Since sailors for centuries have calculated their position by the stars with ever more precise calibrations, and since for those same centuries all our charts of the heavens have been based on erroneous beliefs about the movement of the stars and planets in their spheres, I am curious to know how navigators and cartographers will adapt to the new configuration of the universe, now that we know the Sun and not the Earth lies at its centre, and that the fixed stars are no such thing, their sphere no longer the outer limit of the cosmos. I wonder if these are ideas I could discuss with an experienced sailor like Knollys. He circumnavigated the globe with Drake in 1577, according to Sidney, on the voyage that made them famous and wealthy men; surely in the course of such a journey the calculations they made must have added up to confirmation that the Earth turns about the Sun and not the reverse? Drake and the men who sailed with him are forbidden by the Queen from publishing accounts or maps of their route, for fear they would fall into the hands of the Spanish, but perhaps Knollys might be persuaded at least to discuss the scientific discoveries of his travels with me in confidence, as one man of learning to another.
Ahead the Thames gleams like beaten metal as clouds scud across the face of the sun and their shadows follow over the water; in this light, you could almost forget it is a soup of human filth. I rest my forearms on the wooden guardrail and look down. I must check myself; with my state so precarious, it behoves me to be wary of what I say in public, until I know how it may be received. Knollys is, by all accounts, a good Protestant, like his brother-in-law Leicester and Sidney, but I would be a fool to imagine that these ideas of the Pole Copernicus have been accepted by more than a very few. Only two years ago I was openly ridiculed at the University of Oxford for expressing such a view in a public debate. Just because the Inquisition cannot reach me in Elizabeth’s territories, it does not follow that all Englishmen are enlightened.
We make steady progress along the river as it widens towards the estuary, here and there passing clusters of dwellings little more than shacks, where fishing boats bob alongside makeshift jetties. To either side the land is flat and marshy, pocked with pools reflecting the pale expanse of the sky. London gives you a sense of being hemmed in, pressed on all sides; there the sky is a dirty ribbon glimpsed if you crane your neck between the eaves of tall houses that lean in towards one another across narrow alleys, blocking the light. As we move further from the city, I feel my shoulders relax; the air freshens and begins to carry a tang of salt, and I inhale deeply, relishing this new sense of space. The sounds grow familiar: the snap of sailcloth, the creaks and groans of moving timber, the rhythmic breaking of waves against the hull as we rise and fall, the endless skwah-skwah of the gulls.
After supper, while Sidney settles to cards with Knollys and his gentlemen officers, I excuse myself and return to the deck. The wind is keener now and I have to wrap my cloak close around me against the cold, but I had rather be here in the salt air than confined in the captain’s cabin, with its fug of tobacco smoke and sweet wine. Directly ahead, the sun has almost sunk into the water, leaving the sky streaked orange and pink in its wake. To our right, or what Sidney insists I call starboard, the English coast is a dark smudge. To the left, on the other side of the endlessly shifting water, lies France, and I narrow my eyes towards the distant clouds as if I could see it.
The boards creak behind me and Sidney appears at my side, a clay pipe clamped between his teeth. He takes out a tinder-box from the pouch at his belt and battles for some moments to light it in the wind.
‘Thinking again, Bruno?’
‘It is a living, of sorts.’
He grunts, takes the pipe from his mouth, puffs out a cloud of smoke and stretches his arms wide, lifting his chest to the rising moon.
‘Nothing like fresh sea air.’
‘It was before you arrived.’
He leans with his back to the rail and grins. ‘Leave off, you sound like my wife. She always complains about the smell of a pipe. Especially