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always had about him, still swimming with delight. And feeling half reassured that he didn’t think Father was becoming a vengeful, cruel stranger, though not sure I completely agreed. Still feeling twinges of unease and uncertainty; but willing, more than willing, to do whatever John Clement said, because he said he loved me and because I loved him. “You said,” I whispered, with my face so close to his chest that I could smell the warm man-smell of him, trying to focus on the questions I needed answers to but not sure any more what they were, “that there were things Father wanted you to be able to tell me . . . was that just about the College of Physicians? Or was there something else?”
                 He hesitated. For a moment I thought I saw his eyes flicker, as if there was something he wanted to hide. But then he smiled and shook his head. “No. Nothing else,” he said firmly. “Nothing for you to worry about.”
                 We huddled together, looking up at the house, knowing it was time to go back. I knew I should feel nothing but joy, but this snatched meeting was so unexpected, and so incomplete, that my pleasure in it was bittersweet too, and tinged with sadness. So what I found myself saying, as we turned back up the path, arm in arm, was “You know, I miss the innocence of before . . . the time when there was nothing more to worry about than putting on a play that made us laugh after supper . . . when there was nothing worse than a weasel in the garden . . . when Father did nothing more dangerous than hearing court cases about ordinary street crimes . . . and when everything he wrote was just a clever game, instead of a war of words . . .”
                 “My darling girl, I think what you’re saying is that you miss Utopia,” John quipped, and I thought for a moment that he might be laughing at me. That was the title of Father’s most famous book, written in the summer that John went away, in which a fictional version of my teacher— known in the book as “my boy John Clement”—had been given a minor role. It was the story of a perfect world, as perfect in its way as our own contented past.
                 I didn’t feel like laughing back. “Well, I do miss it,” I said defiantly. “Who wouldn’t?”
                 But the wind had got into his cloak and was tugging at his beard, and he was very busily fidgeting his accoutrements back into submission.
                 “Let’s go,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard, stepping ahead of me, “before we get blown away.”
                 But he had heard, after all, because a few steps later he added, rather bleakly, over his shoulder: “Nostalgia is dangerous. Never look back.”
                 Or perhaps I’d imagined the chill, because by the time we got up to the door and stopped to catch our breath, now we were out of the wind, he was smiling again, and his face was as softly radiant as I could have hoped. He smoothed down the hair escaping out of my cap, and touched a finger to my lips.
                 We might have lingered for longer on the threshold, glowing with wind and love. But suddenly the sound of two lutes in duet began drifting out into the late afternoon.
                 “Listen!” he said, with a music lover’s delight, pushing open the door to hear where the sound was coming from. I didn’t need to rush. I knew exactly what a mangled lute duet signified in our house in Chelsea. Father was home.
     

             4
                 The hall was crowded with new arrivals. But one head stood out among the rest—that great dark lion’s head, with the square jaw and long nose and the piercing eyes that could see the secrets in your soul, the head of the man with the glorious glow about him that fixed every other pair of eyes on him wherever he went. When Father threw back his head and laughed—as