He rang the bell, and a servant cracked open a window. “Here to see the master, love?”

“I am.”

“Bit early, are you? Never mind, dear. Why don’t you come round the front and I’ll let you in?” Obviously, she had taken him for someone else, someone who had an appointment at that hour.

None of it was exactly high-security. The woman had not even asked his name. Cambridge had changed little since he had been a student there in the seventies.

Inside the master’s lodge, the broad, red-carpeted stairs led past a portrait gallery of Trinity luminaries from centuries past: a bearded George Trevelyan, a clean-shaved William Whewell, an ermine-collared Christopher Wordsworth. At the top of the stairs, to the left, was a pink-carpeted drawing room with paneled walls that were painted white, so as not to compete with the portraits that adorned them. Past this room was a much larger one, with dark-wood floors covered with a number of large Orientals. Staring at Janson as he entered was a full-length portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, painted during her life, with meticulous attention to the details of her dress and flatteringly little to her ravaged face. Isaac Newton, on the adjoining wall, was brown-wigged and imperious. A smirking fourteen-year-old, one Lord Gloucester, stared brazenly at both from his oil pigments. All told, here was one of the most impressive collections of its kind outside of the National Portrait Gallery. It was a pageant of a very particular elite, both political and intellectual, that had shaped the country, had directed its history, could claim some responsibility for both its achievements and its failures. The glowing visages belonged largely to bygone centuries, and yet Peter Novak’s own portrait would not have been out of place. Like all true leadership, his stemmed from a sense of his own obligations, a profound and profoundly moral sense of mission.

Janson found himself staring, rapt, at the faces of long-departed kings and counselors, and he started when he heard the sound of a man clearing his throat.

“My heavens, it is you!” Angus Fielding trumpeted, in his slightly reedy, slightly hooting voice. “Forgive me—I’ve been looking at you looking at the portraits and wondering whether it was possible. Something about the shoulders, the gait. Dear boy, it’s been far too long. But, really, this is the most delightful surprise I could imagine. Gilly told me that my ten o’clock was here, so I was preparing to talk to one of our less promising graduate students about Adam Smith and Condorcet. To quote Lady Asquith, ‘He has a brilliant mind, until he makes it up.’ To think what you’ve saved me from.”