Peter Elkington himself came down to the Thames that cold, gray February dawn they set sail, bringing along his own son, George--a pudgy, pampered adolescent in a silk doublet. Young George Elkington regally ignored Brian Hawksworth, a snub only one of the two still remembered. As the sails slowly dissolved into the icy mist, Brian climbed atop his uncle's shoulders to catch a long last glimpse. No one dreamed that only one of the four would ever see London again. Letters smuggled back in cipher kept the Levant Company informed of progress. The party reached Tripoli without incident, made their way successfully overland through Arabia, and then hired passage on an Arab trader for her trip down the Persian Gulf. The plan seemed to be working perfectly. Then came a final letter, from the Portuguese fortress of Hormuz, a salt-covered island peopled by traders, overlooking the straits between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, gateway to the Arabian Sea and India's ports. While waiting at Hormuz for passage on to India, the English party had been betrayed by a suspicious Venetian and accused of being spies. The Portuguese governor of Hormuz had nervously imprisoned them and decreed they be shipped to Goa for trial. After waiting a few more months for further word, Peter Elkington finally summoned Brian Hawksworth to the offices of the Levant Company and read him this last letter. He then proceeded to curse the contract with Captain Hawksworth that rendered the Levant Company responsible for Brian's education should the expedition meet disaster. Peter Elkington admitted his plan had failed, and with that admission, the Levant Company quietly abandoned its vision of direct trade with India. But Brian Hawksworth now had a private tutor, engaged by the Levant Company, a tousle-haired young apostate recently dismissed from his post at Eton for his anti-religious views. This new tutor scorned as dogmatic the accepted subjects of Latin, rhetoric, and Hebrew--all intended to help Elizabethan scholars fathom abstruse theological disputations--and insisted instead on mathematics, and the new subject of science. His anti-clerical outlook also meant he would teach none of the German in fashion with the Puritans, or the French and Spanish favored by Catholics. For him all that mattered was classical Greek: the language of logic, pure philosophy, mathematics, and science. The end result was that the commoner Brian Hawksworth received an education far different from, if not better than, that of most gentlemen, and one that greatly surpassed the hornbook alphabet and numbers that passed for learning among others of his own class. To no one's surprise, Brian Hawksworth was his father's son, and he took naturally to marksmanship and fencing. But his first love came to be the English lute, his escape from the world of his tutor's hard numbers and theorems.