SIMON’S BRAIN HAD SYNTHESIZED A HOST OF IDEAS ACROSS THE AFTERNOON, and he pursued Alex and Lucy to the car as soon as he could free himself from the other pair. His was an eclectic mind that could select details from a variety of sources and see their connection—a trait he had shared with Will, which explained one aspect of their friendship. These impressions worked on him now, and at the risk of frustrating Cupid he needed to consult Alex about them.
He suggested they find a quiet corner for a coffee, but Alex was concerned to get Lucy home and warm. She’d started to look a little drained about half an hour ago, and he wanted nothing to eclipse the special qualities of the day. Prompted by a tenderness that was not altogether welcome, or even visible to the lady herself, he suggested Simon meet him shortly at Chelsea, after he had dropped her at her flat across the river.
“I’m on call at the Brompton, so it’s best I’m not too far away.”
Lucy tended to be undemanding because of her conditioning since childhood that no one would consider her wishes. But she was just now strangely stubborn and wouldn’t be spoken for, taking a decisive part in her direction with Alex for the first time. Her health may have flung them together originally, but it was suddenly intrusive.
“Alex, I’ve had a gentle day and I’m not tired. I’d love to join you both for coffee.” She looked up at him with expressive eyes, so that Alex’s objections melted.
“Only if you promise to let me light a fire and put you in a chair beside it.”
Thus she found herself comfortably settled with a pot of tea and Alex’s—or more probably his son’s—cat, Minty, on her lap, in a sunny high-ceilinged living room overlooking the trees in the square. She was taking in his taste, the details of the original gray marble fireplace, the fact that the room was just untidy enough to make it feel easy to relax; and she was very content. Alex was busy in an unbustling way in the kitchen, and she turned now to address both men and share some thoughts that had been gathering in her own mind for an hour or so, about their afternoon.
“Strange, at the church, didn’t you think? Not to have any remaining sign of Dee, no hint of his grave anywhere? And nothing of the house left standing, except for a bit of old garden wall. It’s as though all his earthly life was a dream, and only his spiritual self remains. The church has changed enormously since the early seventeenth century.” She said this with a note of sadness, but also insistence.
“Such stuff as dreams are made on?” Alex laughed. “But I liked the rather mythic account in the guidebook, that someone years later remembered him having raised a storm for Sir Everard Digby! A fitting piece of magic for the original Prospero!”
Simon was going to say something flippant to Lucy about the heavy-handed restoration of the Victorians in churches up and down the country, but he stopped short and changed direction. He had been watching her with growing interest, and suddenly flashed a look of recognition as Alex rejoined them and set a coffeepot down.
“Do you know, Lucy, I think you were right. I do know your face—it’s distinctive.” She looked at him mischievously and understood it was a compliment. “All through lunch I’ve been trying to work it out. Now I’m sure I saw you at the pub—the Phene Arms—a few weeks ago. I believe I gave you a thorough vetting…” He laughed self-consciously.
Lucy nodded slowly, and it registered: the man who winked at her on the rainy day of her hot-footed return. “Yes! Not in it—but I was passing on my way back to the Brompton. You’ve a good memory.” She’d thought he was cute then, and his face must have subconsciously remained with her.
“The odd thing is, I was on my way to lunch with Siân that day. I should have dragged you off the street to join us—a perfect stranger! But seriously, you two really clicked.”
Alex spoke. “That was nice. She’s a lost soul at the moment—and not always at her best with other women. But I thought she enjoyed herself today—for the most part.”
“She’s been through some pain, though.” Lucy looked from Alex to Simon and back, and didn’t want to pry. “She was your brother’s girlfriend…?” It was only half a question. She’d put unspoken facts together around the lunch table.
“More than three years they were together. But they parted in May. Not that they would have, if it had been up to Siân.” Alex was more pensive than his words suggested.
“She seemed to be making a fresh start—or trying to.” Simon looked at Alex, and changed his tone to one of grim humor. “There’s nothing like an early death in tragic circumstances to elevate you to quasi-divine status. A typical James Dean gesture from Will! Poor girl will never get over him now.”
“But he’d want her to,” Lucy offered.
“Yes, he would.” Alex smiled sadly at her, and closed the discussion. “Simon, what were you thinking about this new man of hers?”
“My mother used to say, if you can’t find something nice to say about someone, don’t say anything.” Simon threw his head back and laughed. “So, that would consign me to stony silence, I’m afraid.”
“There is something about him,” Lucy said to both faces. “But is it because you just don’t like him for Siân?”
Simon reacted quickly: “I don’t trust him. Period. Did you see his eyes when you gave that key to Lucy? He wanted it—plain as the nose on his face.”
“It’s a bit Treasure Island, isn’t it?” Alex was incredulous. “I was surprised how much it fascinated Will; but I think that had something to do with his relationship with our mother, and his interest in her family and his place within it. He always felt that he was very like her. I think his curiosity was some sort of quest toward his identity. Calvin could surely only want it if he thought it unlocked the Queen’s jewels. Which is very unlikely.”
“But the information about Dee is illuminating.” Simon looked for any mute commands from Alex, but none came. “I don’t know anything about him, but I was able to get that document of Will’s checked—the original that came with the key. Did he tell you?” Alex shook his head. “My cousin does radio carbon dating at Oxford. There’s a margin of error, of course, but he gave it a leeway from about 1550 to 1650.”
“Which places it closely enough in Dee’s time.” Alex stood up and crossed the room to a box file on a bookshelf. He returned with it and drew out a heavy folded leaf of aging vellum in front of them both. “This is the original—Will left it here with me for safekeeping and took a copy on the road with him. That’s among his things, too. Calvin was asking me about it in the church.”
Lucy had listened attentively, but now spoke with surprising strength. “Alex, this has nothing to do with me, so perhaps I shouldn’t say anything. But like Simon, I didn’t feel at ease with Calvin. He has a way of not looking at you openly—or rather, shifting his eyes away again quickly, as though he can’t meet your gaze. I agree with you, Simon. He wanted to take the key. And silly as it sounds, I had to stop myself from giving in to his intensity and just handing it over to him. My own impression is that it must unlock something he’s particularly curious about, and perhaps he even knows what that is.”
“‘The most precious jewel,’” Simon reminded them with amused mockery.
Alex laughed. “Any precious jewel would have been plundered long ago. The house in the country belonged to my mother’s family; and there are some old books and a few pretty things. But they weren’t rich. I’m sure anything of value would have been redeemed before now.”
“Could I look at this?” Lucy put the cat softly from her lap and leaned toward the vellum, which Alex passed to her with care. A card dropped from the pleat inside and fell to the floor. Lucy picked it up without looking at it properly and placed it on the table, keeping her attention on the vellum. She knitted her brows. “So this is sixteenth century?” A thought crossed her mind that she should possibly handle it with gloves.
“Or early seventeenth.” Simon came and crouched beside her to look at it again. “It hardly looks like a conventional treasure map.”
“But this is only part of it.” Lucy spoke with authority, which surprised them both. “Whatever the key unlocks contains another piece.”
They stared at her. “And how does Cassandra know this?” Alex couldn’t help a dry inflection.
“I’m not sure. But I feel I’m right.” Lucy’s voice contained no mystical tones or any petulance; but it was firm. “This is the ‘key piece,’ if you like, so if there is another page, this one is dominant.”
Alex listened carefully to what she said but made no comment.
“Will e-mailed some notes about it among the other ideas from Rome.” Simon sat down on the floor, drew his knees up, and rested his chin on his arms. “I’ve started going through them, since we got into his iBook a couple of weeks ago. Most of it is a dyslexic tangle—that convoluted stuff about alchemists and light we read, which I printed off here. But he did seem to be focused on the Inquisition—mainly because of the carbon dating, and these first words here, about the Field of Flowers, and the flames. He’d worked out that the Campo de’ Fiori was the site of religious burnings during the relevant period, apparently. He’d made a list of names, and some facts about them. A man called Bruno seems to have been their most colorful victim—perhaps he chattered with angels too, so to speak.” Simon looked at each of them, and added: “And if this Dr. Dee was talking to angels, the Inquisition would have been interested in knowing the details of that as well.”
“Just like Calvin.” Alex laughed, without much humor. “Perhaps he’s the modern Inquisition.”
His pager went off, and he walked to the phone in the kitchen, but Simon’s words followed him.
“That’s not funny. Could Calvin have had any interest in hacking Will’s computer?”
Simon looked at them both, realizing they were all aware of a tacit sense of unease about him. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that perhaps; but that Sator Arepo stuff is just the kind of thing he’d be into.”
Here Lucy interrupted. “Sator stuff? Simon, do you mean the word square?” She was still playing with the words in her mind, from two evenings before.
“‘The Lord holds the whole Creation in his hands.’ There are other suggestions as to how to translate it exactly, but yes. It’s either a magic eye that wards off evil, or some kind of private handshake between early Christians. Will knew it was probably paranoia, but he texted me that he thought he was being watched while he was abroad; and we found the so-called Sator Square on his computer, presumably put there to stop anyone reading his mail. I’ve found in his notes that he was becoming quite frantic about this. But what’s worrying me is, did Siân talk a little too much to her new man about her old one?”
Alex’s troubled gaze stayed with Simon, and he was dwelling on the words when he spoke to the phone. “Jill, it’s Alex Stafford. Does Jane want me at Harefield, or do you need me there?” He glanced up while he was waiting on the line. “Well, we know for certain someone was trying to read his e-mails…The problem’s at your end? I’ll be as quick as I can.” He put the phone down. “Maybe we should look into this, Simon. I wouldn’t put it past Calvin to be at least curious about Will’s moves. I have the feeling he’s not being entirely level with us. If Lucy’s right that he’s focused on the key, and he wants to examine it, then he could reasonably have discovered the password and account numbers—if he’s had the freedom of Siân’s flat. Have you got any time to check up on Dee?”
Lucy had been listening with her concentration partly divided between Alex’s words with Simon and the face she’d started to notice looking back at her from the card on the coffee table, which had fallen from the parchment.
“I have time,” she now spoke up. “Let me do something useful with my brain, Alex. I’m still on leave from work, but it’s my convalescence, not my dotage. Research is my job, too.”
Alex was aware of a growing fascination to know her more, and smiled. “OK, thank you. But I must take you home now. I’m sorry to break the flow. Simon, I’ll call you in a day or two? I’ve got to rush. We have a sick ten-year-old en route from Ormond Street.”
“Let me take Lucy home then. You get on. If that’s all right with you, Lucy?”
She glanced restlessly at the card and then replied more politely to Simon, “Yes, of course, thanks.”
Alex crossed the room back to her and stooped to give her a gentle squeeze. “I’ll call you in a day or two too.” He looked from her to the postcard on the table of the beautiful face that had magnetically been claiming Lucy’s eyes. He stood to go: “Guido Reni’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci. Will sent it from Rome. He read a lot of Shelley.”
The name burst from Lucy’s recent, vivid dream, and she could only stare. With instructions to them both to pull the door hard when they left, the doctor was gone.
AFTER TWENTY MINUTES OF SILENCE BEHIND THE WHEEL OF HER CAR, SIÂN now shut her front door with a flash of temper. “Did you have to go on about that key? I don’t want it anywhere around.” She swung on Calvin with surprising emotion. “I feel like it took Will away from me some of the time.”
“Yes, I think it did.”
She looked at him openmouthed. “What on earth can you mean?”
Calvin was suddenly hesitant. “What did you mean?”
“I meant that he was so preoccupied with it, he hardly seemed to notice me at times. It became a bit of an obsession.”
“Siân, I am very serious about this…”—he closed his eyes for a moment and then mouthed the single word distinctly—“…curse. My mother told me flatly that the key must pass between the women of the family. It should never have been given to Will. She said it would cause mischief.”
“You don’t really believe that? That Will’s accident was because of some curse.” Siân had lived too long around a family of nonsuperstitious minds to give this idea a moment’s credence.
“I do.” Calvin was stoical. “I’m deadly serious. The whole accident was too strange. Sudden fog. The river. You said he was a really good biker. And to die from a cranial aneurysm—my understanding is that’s often like an ancient wound coming back from the past to kill you. It usually happens if you’ve had a head injury before, and something needles it again, to set off the time bomb.” His blue-gray eyes were half-hostile to her. “It should never have happened. And I might just as seriously suggest that you two probably broke up because of that key.”
Siân’s jaw dropped. She was angry, upset, and completely astonished. She wasn’t at all swayed by his argument. Will was sporty and physical. He’d had a dozen falls or blows in the course of his life. She understood about the clot: this was no curse. But she was worried by the fact that this strangely altered man with her genuinely believed in it. She searched his face to try to understand him. He was religious—she knew that—but it had never seemed to her that he was irrational. Only that he had a strict belief system that was different from hers, made him prefer to live somewhere else and just stay the night sometimes. And now to suggest that she and Will had parted because of some ill luck attached to an inanimate object? It was ridiculous.
Calvin had been examining his fingers for a few moments, as if deciding whether to say more, and then he committed himself. “This girl Lucy certainly shouldn’t have it. It’s dangerous. It’s very unlucky. Someone who knows what they’re doing should be in control of it. It should return with me to my mom.” He closed the conversation without further explanation, and left, slamming the door heavily.