I was thirteen at the time. Mum was hesitant at first. “It’s all the way across the Aegean,” she said. “But you know Lorenzo’s family,” I said. “I know, you are safe with them; safer with them than anybody else, except for me.” Traffic was terrible on the way to the airport, but neither of us were concerned. Not making it, I’d be spared the anxiety of the flight, and for mum it meant no more restless nights pondering the fate of her child as a cast away across the Aegean.

Harry Oxford had just arrived home. He was lodging in the flat of a 34 year-old man named Gia on Devonshire Street in Marylebone, London. Gia was hunched at the kitchen table, sipping an espresso. Harry sat down next to him with a cold glass of orange juice. “It’s a tradition for me, coffee before bed,” Gia said. “It’s the closest I feel to being home in Sicily.” He stroked the cup that held his coffee, like a priest the cloth that shields their altar.

There is nothing more precious than life. Some say that the ending is a new beginning, and that the new beginning, wherever it might take us, is the most precious. But in the face of death I find such wisdom hard to believe. I woke up with a headache. Nothing abnormal; the doctor’s been hearing my complaints for decades. I had a text message from mum, again, nothing unusual, as being so in awe of a new day, she often sends me a photo of a butterfly or a bumblebee larking about nature.

While the pensioner of Ghent and his eminence were exchanging very low bows and a few words in voices still lower, a man of lofty stature, with a large face and broad shoulders, presented himself, in order to enter abreast with Guillaume Rym; one would have pronounced him a bull-dog by the side of a fox. His felt doublet and leather jerkin made a spot on the velvet and silk which surrounded him.

Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago to-day, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple circuit of the city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal. The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which history has preserved the memory. There was nothing notable in the event which thus set the bells and the bourgeois of Paris in a ferment from early morning.