I wasn’t at ease. I’d always thought of happiness as something calm and reassuring, like a warm coat on a winter’s day – the absence, for a while, of fear; a little pleasure, a new plant or a pasty; something interesting to chew on in my work. This was different. This was more like finding that a layer of my skin had been stripped away, so that everything I felt, I felt more sharply.I went to the booksellers’ row round St Paul’s churchyard the Saturday after we got back, and it was thin of company. The poor scholars were still there, in their shabby black, and the foreign visitors too, but the young lawyers from the Inns of Court had gone home for the harvest holidays, and the gallants snickering over the latest Italian translations – the ones with the special illustrations, that the shopmen brought out from under counters, quietly – were likewise in the country. I spotted Martin Slaughter quite easily. Spotted him, and then stopped dead for a moment feeling oddly shy. Seeing him as a stranger might do, slight and inconspicuous with his brown hair and brown doublet – until, I thought, you noticed something quick and definite in his movements.
