WITH THE CRAB APPLE AND MAGNOLIA BLOSSOMING IN THE SMALL FRONT garden it was easily the prettiest house in the terrace. A willowy blond figure came to the door, pecked his cheek, and Alex disappeared inside with an orchid. Lucy watched from his car, felt a small wave of panic, her thoughts as arrhythmic as her pulse. This was his past; and her first taste of what a future could be like.
Terrified of becoming dependent on the unparalleled emotions she was experiencing with Alex, she’d completely run away since her return from New York. She had spent only two nights with him, and those so tightly coiled that she defied physical contact. She needed to let things calm down, and find her single self again, so she’d taken refuge in her obligation to catch up on long overdue work in the editing suite. Then came the milestone of her twenty-four-hour test at Harefield the previous Friday, six months after the transplant. He’d exchanged a shift on a weekend day to drive her, and he’d waited while she had the wires and monitors attached, stayed with her throughout the wearying ordeal. She was brittle, unwell, fractious with him: but he’d been here before, seen it all, and he took it in stride. At times his patience with her was almost an irritation. Did she want to make him angry?
When Alex dropped her back at Battersea after the tests, his face mildly confused, Grace was a fury. “Don’t play with people’s emotions, Lucy. You’re not the only person who’s ever been hurt. Isn’t it time to leave the wounded child behind and live like a woman?”
That had stung. It was unprecedented from her closest friend, who’d never spoken to her that way before. And, oh God, yes! She felt the blow—knew its truth. Who understood better than she how well Alex hid his own feelings, what a consummate performer he was? Wasn’t it his habit to relegate his private pain in the interests of anyone who, he perceived, depended on his strength? Yet the humanity of the man was, for her at least now, always to the fore. Grace had accused her—with justification—of being too selfishly immersed in her own drama. She could see she was repeating the patterns of her past, twisting back on herself in looping coils. But what would lead her out? Nevertheless—or possibly because of this—she’d avoided Alex in the days leading to the Easter break, burying herself in work and knowing he would do the same. She hadn’t glanced at the Dee material for the whole fortnight since her return.
In a moment—too quickly for her to prepare—he reappeared at the door with his son and a weekend bag. Lucy saw that Anna was securing back the latch, following her ex-husband toward the car; and she gulped in some air. Alex’s voice was incongruously even as he made the introductions and packed the trunk; everyone was saying “hello,” Anna commenting cheerfully on their luck with the early April weather for the Easter weekend. Lucy removed her sunglasses, shook hands, and even managed a smile, the panic subduing slightly. Alex explained to his son that his brand-new state-of-the-art skateboard had just come to him courtesy of Lucy, from Bloomingdale’s in New York, and the boy beamed appreciation at her. Love was sent to Henry, Max climbed willingly into the backseat, was thrilled the roof was down, passed Lucy a CD; and they were off. Anna waved them away. It was over; had been absurdly uncomplicated. Alex squeezed her hand knowingly between gear changes; and a few tears escaped quietly behind her glasses.
As they arrived in Longparish—Lucy and Max having sung their hearts into the wind for the whole journey—she greeted Henry with a hug of such feeling that she knew she had transferred the apology due to the son to his father. Alex’s smile said he understood her reservations and insecurities better than she. Cloistering herself in the kitchen, she baked treats she couldn’t possibly eat on her strict diet, but Max was entranced. She kept occupied, spending the early part of Good Friday afternoon reading in the warm, sheltered garden with Henry, while Max and his father went skateboarding.
Alex had handed her a large envelope before taking off with his son, and she now drew out a beautiful A4 illustration. It was of a crystal sphere with mountains depicted at its heart, the whole embraced by the arms of a great tree, like a transparent globe. The text underneath captioned it the Axis Mundi, something she’d asked him about before going to New York. She hadn’t understood his reference to it, but now became engrossed by the image before her. It was the center of the world, the place where heaven was believed to meet the earth. On a second, smaller sheet she saw his own pen-and-ink drawing of the symbol of medicine, the caduceus, with a note in his distinctive hand explaining that the rod was a depiction of the axis itself, and the serpents the channel by which the healer crossed the axis from this world to bring back knowledge from the higher world. Number thirty-four was connected to it according to various attributions, and Alex’s note briefly explained how Dante had chosen it to complete his Inferno precisely because it represented this crossing point, the middle of the earth, the brush with hell—and then the emergent point for spiritual realization, “back to the stars.” Into the center and out again, she thought, while Henry was pruning some bushes: the road to Jerusalem. The labyrinth.
Late in the day Henry took Alex into the library, and though they didn’t at all close her out, she felt they might appreciate some privacy. She went to look for Max, and decided to give this time to him, learning all about the Sims on his computer. She listened to the boy’s talk of his adored grandmother—who had taught him some French—and his uncle, whom he missed so much. She was still occupying this special, private space with him when Alex and Henry emerged from the library to check on them. Neither wished to be dislodged from his or her spot at the desk, so, as Simon and Grace were due tomorrow, and Siân would be arriving on Easter Sunday morning, the senior Stafford men departed to rearrange some furniture upstairs.
The latter invitation was rather a sudden one from Alex, Calvin having gone away again unexpectedly—to Jerusalem, no less—altering the plans he’d made quite out of the blue to take Siân back home to meet his family in Nantucket. Very unsatisfactory, Lucy had thought. Siân was unsure what to think. That Alex had lent support to the idea of Siân’s going with Calvin at all had surprised Lucy; but it seemed even more strange that he was so nonjudgmental about the subsequent change of plans. That had truly amazed her. Perhaps it was the present state of equipoise? Since their return from New York—and Calvin’s delivery of Will’s documents to his college elders—warfare had ceased. They had been given the originals as before, while Lucy and Alex had privately created double-sided copies for their own investigation. The precious embroidered bag she had not yielded up—not even to Alex’s keeping: it remained in her possession. But nothing more was heard from their adversaries, and if Alex felt annoyance that they had something that didn’t belong to them, he remained silent. Still, Lucy didn’t trust Calvin as far as she could throw him, and she was relieved Siân would be coming to them after visiting her mother in Wales. She should get free of him, Lucy thought, and she struggled with Alex’s equanimity. She had learned to respect his judgment in virtually any circumstance, yet she couldn’t help feeling he was a bit blind to something in Calvin, perhaps because of their kinship. She couldn’t make sense of it any other way.
At the end of an active day Max was drooping, and went up to his attic bedroom without being asked at precisely nine o’clock, leaving the other three to their conversation. Alex had poached a salmon and served it with tarragon hollandaise, leaving Lucy to wonder why he always apologized for his culinary efforts.
“Who are you comparing yourself with, Alex? You’ve never given me a bad dinner. You’re a fine cook, and your hands smell like an herb garden.” She kissed them quickly, and was struck that these were among the first kind words she’d offered him since her trip. She needed to talk, which Henry could see, and he excused himself to his own room with a good book, locking up as he passed. But they had cleaned and cleared everything before either could break the silence with more than a monosyllable. Eventually she laced her arms around his hips, and searched his eyes. It was a holiday, and he hadn’t shaved. She loved this face, touched the mild show of stubble—it belonged to her Alex, hinted he wasn’t always rigidly in control. She relaxed a little, but still felt tongue-tied. He began.
“You were superb today. Max enjoyed being with you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me he was so sweet, that it would be that easy?”
Alex laughed. “You didn’t ask me. Don’t let him fool you—he’s no angel. But I think we’re fairly lucky.”
“I’ve been impossible, Alex.”
“Impossible,” he agreed, with light humor. “Very guarded.”
“Full retreat.” She was trying to laugh at herself.
“You did warn me…” He knew from her resigned smile that she was worn out with her own self-torment. She seemed haunted by the inevitability of a psychological fall from paradise, determined to sacrifice any joy that might blossom in a strong relationship just to avoid the tumults and stresses of the emotional state that she was sure must also be inescapable. Her distress pained him, and he leaned his forehead down to her. “Lucy, what do you want? Can I help?”
She took a moment, then spoke artlessly. “Could you take me to bed, and make love to me?”
This time Alex led her to his own room. In France, desire and the frustrations of a long delay had hushed her anxiety, and she’d responded to him as naturally as breathing. But in the intervening weeks there had been time to intellectualize. Even now, while she wanted to trust her senses, she was observing herself from a distance. She saw Alex undressing her quietly, caressing her without a hint of possessiveness, but she was choked by the urge to withhold her feelings. She understood their happiness was at stake, and willed her heart to let go.
Alex read the thoughts darkening her eyes, turning the brown steel-gray. He lay beside her on his back and threaded an arm under the arc of her waist; his other hand stroked her slight, feminine shape for what seemed to her an eternity, until her diaphragm rose and fell evenly. His breath was warm at her temple.
“What word, or color, describes the feelings you have when I touch you here?” His fingers found her breasts and the raw, scarred tissue between them.
She smiled, turned her face to him. “Closeness.”
“Mm. And here? On your tummy?”
“Warm. Intimate.” She stretched like a cat, curled her spine slightly.
He raised himself a little to explore the dreamscape of her body—her hips and abdomen, the undulation of her waist, her delicate throat and nipples, the small of her back and the curve of her bottom, using different pressures, his tongue, his fingertips, the mildly abrasive skin of his unshaved face, sometimes a thumb. He didn’t rush; and Lucy had to attend closely to the erotic sensations to discern and then articulate her response. There was more gentle laughter than breathy sighing. He leaned up higher, kissed her lips, and placed the flat of his hand delicately inside her thigh, folding her leg back with care, stroking upward. She caught her breath and stretched her arms above her head. “Violet, and indigo, and pinprick holes of starlight after a storm.”
“Unfair. That’s more than one word. You’re allowed one. Concentrate…” His fingers had begun to caress her silkiness, then gently pushed inside her; and she could hardly breathe. He heard his name. “What’s this word?” His body was hard but his voice was so soft.
“Sublime…Alex, I want you…”
He entered her, moving slowly. “And now?”
“Elysium.” Lucy’s breathing was lost as her passions quickly unlocked; and when his kiss blotted all the sound from her mouth she thought her heart might burst. He broke free just long enough to wander to her ear, whisper an inquiry for the word. “I can’t find one,” she cried out and pulled him deeper into her body; and with his gentle movements, his mouth on hers, her breathing came in quicker gasps. No kiss, from any lover, had ever been so demanding, and insistent, and arousing.
“Lucy, what’s the word now?” But a soft flush mottled her chest, and he knew she’d let go. From Lucy, this gesture of trust was everything. They were through it.
“Release, Alex. Epopteia.” It was no more than a sigh. She had no breath for words: could only just get air into her lungs. Their bodies were so closely entwined she could feel the tremble, but didn’t know which of them was shaking. She locked his eyes, his body, in hers, and their movement and breathing became an unaccompanied plainsong. “Colors unknown even to the rainbow,” she whispered.
He laughed and kissed her softly, their senses too heightened for more. “Then you understand. You are a goddess. Celestial.” He kissed her between every phrase.
And she did understand. She was somewhere she’d never been. She was beloved.
She stretched down for the quilt, and they dissolved into each other.
THOUGH IT WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING OF THE SECOND WEEK IN APRIL, Saturday’s sunshine held, and the fruits of Lucy’s Good Friday baking provided a four o’clock tea where the garden offered a windbreak. Simon and Grace lifted it to a higher epicurean level with an excellent champagne, and the company at The Old Chantry declared an afternoon off. Max was content, having led Lucy and his father around the countryside on bikes in the morning sunshine. The little boy was shocked—but Alex not in the least surprised—to discover Lucy was almost fitter than father or son, and she felt very smug about all the miles she’d notched up on her exercise bike since her operation. She teased Alex that she was planning to run with him and Courtney for the hospital in the next London Marathon.
Max was now playing with a friend from the village, and Simon’s impatience took over. He’d fished for explanations about Calvin since hearing of Siân’s ordeal, and he wanted the question resolved now, before her arrival tomorrow.
“I’m curious too, Alex. How are you so calm about it?” Lucy knew Alex’s style was to weigh all the evidence before making cursory judgments, whereas Simon would act first and think about the repercussions afterward. But she took Siân’s pain very personally. Purely from instinct, she felt protective toward Siân, which made her livid with Calvin.
Alex had filled his father in the day before on the assault, and Henry commented now: “It does look bad, Alex.”
His son nodded. “I know. But I was in her flat the morning after with your friend from the Met, and his forensic team, Simon, when Calvin arrived from the airport. Thrust into the maelstrom like that, he was devastated. He had no part in it, and may have been the intended victim. But whether he realized it before that moment or not, he loves Siân. When he saw her at my flat, he couldn’t speak. Then, later—well, he was truly caring. I haven’t been his supporter, but he surprised me on this.”
“You can’t feel cuddly about him, Alex!” Simon had steam escaping, and clattered his plate onto the table clumsily. “I’ve a mind to take Will’s part in this and rearrange his expensive dental work, regardless of his affections for Siân. Maybe she wants to believe in him, but you’re too canny for that. You know the loathsome company he keeps! I wish they’d find what they’re looking for, and discover it really has some evil curse on it. My favorite Bible story is about the Ark of the Covenant falling into the hands of the Philistines. They all came down with hemorrhoids! Now that would be justice.”
Grace’s swallow of champagne hit the lawn, and Alex erupted into laughter. “A grim punishment in the days before Preparation H! Seriously, though, Simon, I sympathize with your feelings about Calvin, but I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt. For the moment. We talked for a long time when we met at the hospital for lunch. He remedied the situation with the papers as fast as he was able; they haven’t breathed a syllable to me since…”
“They shouldn’t have the damned papers,” Simon broke in heatedly.
“…and I hope he’s an ally now.” Alex finished his sentence very deliberately, then met his friend’s eyes without hesitation. “Have a little faith in me, Simon. Calvin may be misguided philosophically in my book—his belief system is thoroughly alien to mine—but he’s a genuinely spiritual man, which I can’t hold against him. It’s not my way that he’s chosen, but he’s a thinker, with a conscience.”
“And you believe he loves Siân? I wasn’t altogether convinced he was a committed ladies’ man.” Lucy was tense, feeling Alex might be withholding something.
“Interestingly enough, Lucy, I’d wondered that. But I do believe he’s in love with her. And that poor girl needs some kind of closure, to let go of the past and move on. She’s suffered enough. Let’s be as supportive as possible.” Alex exchanged a look with Henry, who nodded.
Grace had been sipping champagne, listening, but she posed a question for all of them. “Alex, if he cares for her, why drop off the planet without telling her? Was he scared? And why let her down so atrociously over the trip to the States? She was excited about it.”
“I can’t answer you, Grace. I agree the canceled trip is a blow. But Professor Walters and his group are in Jerusalem for a reason—one we might guess at with some distaste—and I’ll trust Calvin knows what he’s doing in joining them there.” Alex emptied the last of the bottle into the visitors’ glasses and changed the subject abruptly. “Now, where are you sleuths up to with the ‘Dee-files’? If we’re going to race them to the prize, it’s time for a reckoning, surely.”
Alex had concealed something, Lucy was certain. But clearly he wasn’t going to speak further. She was mulling this over when she realized she’d missed some of what Henry was saying, and tried to pick up the thread.
“…amusing dinner this week with John, my friend in the Deanery at Winchester, and he had some very interesting thoughts on these Christian Zionists of Simon’s.”
“Good God, Henry!” Simon interjected. “Please don’t call them creatures of mine.”
Henry put up one hand. “Apologies, Simon—they are odious, it seems. John knew all about them and corroborated your every word. Suffice to say, he doesn’t like their Old Testament-dependent ideas, which are prophecy-based much more than being concerned with the person of Jesus. He feels their teachings could lead to all-out war in the whole of the Middle East if they’re unchecked—a bloodbath. They’re shamelessly exploiting the tensions and anxieties of the West’s attitudes to Islam. One prays they’re being watched by the secret services. This Rapture policy you spoke of, Simon, means they don’t care for the rest of humanity—they assume a ‘join us or perish’ platform. And John is nervous that certain elements of the Evangelical movement—particularly in the United States and alarmingly close to the White House—are exporting their violently apocalyptic, but hardly Christian, theology with a strong recruitment incentive. Let’s hope your cousin isn’t caught up in that, Alex! But now, I’d like to hear about your retrieval of the documents, Lucy. You had trouble getting hold of them?”
“That was peculiar, Henry. Our suspicions ran amok when Alex told us that Calvin was in Boston at the same time as Roland. But it was all a red herring. Will’s things were at Roland’s loft all along. He couldn’t have been more helpful.” Lucy thought afresh of their touching encounter, the emotions it had triggered in her, and she smiled at Alex now with a meaning that was purely personal to her.
“He was distraught to learn of Will’s death,” Simon added. “He had no idea—thought he’d gone away to Mexico or South America for a year. He’ll be writing to you.”
Henry nodded sadly at them. It was painful, yet quite a relief to be involved in something that brought his wife and son so close to him again. “But, he didn’t have the key you were looking for?”
“I’m afraid not,” Simon answered. “He knew nothing of it. He had only the package and a note from Will about holding on to it until it was needed. He enclosed a white rose inside the dossier bag, which Lucy believes came from Diana’s garden.”
Alex had been pondering Henry’s new interest in the quest with some fascination, but he now looked at Lucy. “A white rose? The symbol of female secrets. I think the ‘rose’ is as important as the number thirty-four.”
“So are the keys, I believe,” Grace said with enthusiasm. “Simon and I scoured the sheets while you were editing your documentary, Lucy”—she looked at her friend—“and we think the first page is about St. Peter—‘the rock’—holding the keys to heaven. One was gold and the other silver. Also ‘Martha,’ two pages later, was Mary Magdalene’s sister, and legend says she went to France. Keys were her symbol too.”
Alex opened the folio of copy papers and a blank book on the tea table. “The keys to heaven are gold and silver? Then our pair must reflect them.” He noted down the ideas, and shuffled the sheets into order. “That makes it vital to find the second key, Lucy, with the ruby. Perhaps whatever our keys unlock here is an entry point to heaven, and we still need the silver key.” Alex left his champagne largely untouched, his thoughts drifting.
“And we still have it,” she told them. “They’ve forgotten about it, and I haven’t reminded them!”
Alex was a little worried by this reminder, but he nodded and consulted the papers again. “Presumably, the ‘symbol of our union’ is in France, like Martha? Chartres, perhaps.”
“Or the knot garden at L’Aigle?” Henry suggested. “A knot represents either marriage or loyalty.”
“The family motto has something to do with this?” Alex turned to his father.
“‘Loyal and True,’ Alex. Not true for Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who changed sides during the Wars of the Roses more often than horses. But his cousin Humphrey was our ancestor—ever constant to York. It cost him his life under Henry Tudor. You reminded me last night about the Stafford ambassador to France, Lucy—who knew Giordano Bruno. I had to check our own little family history in the library this morning, but yes, he was our ancestor, Edward. John Calvin was godfather to one of his sons.”
“You see, Henry,” Lucy spoke gently, “that the Staffords are as much a part of the story as the Dees.” She smiled at him, feeling Diana had surely thought as much.
“But,” he resumed, with a warm look at her, “a knot with either Cupid, or Venus and Mars, represents the tie of love—‘war subdued by love,’ your mother taught me, Alex. You know after St. Martin’s she did her diploma in art appreciation at the Sorbonne—where I met her when I was doing a stint for NATO in the Provost Marshal’s office,” Henry explained to the others.
Alex was pensive. He remembered his parents’ history—and the family fighting on the white rose side at Bosworth. Did it mean anything? “The Stafford badge has a knot and a swan?”
“And the cross of St. George. But remember the Gordian knot—the cuff links your mother gave you, in the shape of a knot, when you graduated?”
Alex was thinking that, although she’d given the key to Will at her death, he himself had been written into her family mystery from his birth. He looked at his father without speaking, nibbled some cake, picked up the sheets. “Siân’s white roses. Will was a Yorkist—a knight ‘loyal and true.’ A blind? Or a legitimate strand to consider? Lucy?”
Lucy glanced at Alex, caught in her own thoughts. She was considering the roses on Diana’s tea service, with a cup in her hands. “I’m beginning to understand those white roses. Sunflowers track the sun, but white roses come alive under the moonlight. Something different is going to happen, I think, when night is the real day, and a woman has power again—like Queen Elizabeth in John Dee’s time. Maybe now, while the second Elizabeth is Queen.”
Lucy had said something which touched everyone, but she went on quickly. “And I was thinking just now of the second text, about ‘uxorious Henry’—the too-many-times-married Henry VIII.” She laughed. “From my research into Elizabeth, I discovered that her mother, Henry’s wife number two, wore a ‘hart’ around her neck, and was thought to be able to change into the shape of a hare. The lines, ‘Maids are May when they are maids’ are from As You Like It; and Anne Boleyn was executed in May, wearing a gray dress. Do you think that’s what this riddle is referring to? ‘A Lady of Light’ was St. Lucy, and I was born in February, the time of Candlemas.”
“But the papers also ‘came to light’ on your birthday, February the third, here in the garden—another journey started on the thirty-fourth day of the year.” Alex poured tea into her cup, and left them all briefly to recharge the pot. When he returned a moment later, carrying the fresh tea and an old, yellowing file, he thought it appeared as though Lucy had a spell cast over her.
“What you said, Alex. I hadn’t thought of it that way.” She looked at him in slight confusion as he sat again. “Princess Elizabeth, Dee’s patron, was Anne’s child. She and I are both ‘King’s daughters,’ so to speak. My Sicilian grandmother and English grandfather met during the liberation in the war. From him I get my patriality and my English surname.”
Alex’s eyes smiled. She rarely said a thing about her family, so such details were a revelation to him. “Perhaps this quest is simultaneously about them, and us. Her, and you? But I want to throw something else into the mix. Anne’s sister, Mary Boleyn, had a son and a daughter almost certainly by Henry VIII—though their surname was Carey. Mary’s son was Henry—named for his true father, the King—and he was Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain, all-important patron to Shakespeare’s acting company.”
“Of course—the Lord Chamberlain’s Men,” Henry said.
“And Henry Carey was Elizabeth’s brother, as much as cousin. But Mary Boleyn’s daughter—Shakespeare’s patron’s sister—was granted all the manor and lands of Longparish. They’d belonged to Wherwell Abbey until the Dissolution. So this house—which has been in our family for generations, and started as a chantry—was on land belonging to her. She was the King’s illegitimate daughter.” Alex now opened the small file he’d brought from the house, and drew out some papers with care.
Simon had been holding his glass still. “This suggests a relationship between your family, Dee’s descendants—or even Dee himself—and a group who were possibly connected with Shakespeare through the Lord Chamberlain, Alex.”
“I believe so, Simon. Put simply, Shakespeare’s patron’s sister owned this land, so I conjecture that she gave this house—or the land it’s on—to one of my ancestors. But for what reason…?”
“In Catholic England a chantry was a holy place, don’t forget.” Grace looked carefully at the oldest part of the building. “A chapel dedicated to a soul’s passing—a place to keep the soul’s spirit safe.”
“True,” Alex said, and he noticed Lucy was staring. “But there’s more.”
He carefully unfolded a tattered document, comprised of several sheets of vellum. “Dad gave this to me yesterday,” Alex explained, “and it belongs with the deeds to the house. You can just about make out the name near the top here.” He pointed carefully to a line of the document, close-written in an old-style hand that was demanding for modern eyes to read. Grace was out of her chair in a second.
“‘Given by this hand,’” she leaned over him to help, and read aloud: “‘in the thirty-fourth year of the reign of Elizabeth, by the Grace of God of England, France and Ireland, Queen’…”—she followed Alex’s finger as it skipped several words—“‘to Mistress Lanyer.’” Grace’s eyes were suddenly surprised. “Thirty-four years of Elizabeth must have been 1592 or ’93, Alex. She came to the throne late in 1558.”
Alex noted Grace’s comment with interest. “One of the best candidates for Shakespeare’s ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets,” he told them all after a moment, “was Henry Carey’s mistress, Emilia Lannier, whose maiden name was Bassano. She was a musician whose family came from Venice, a brilliant woman of unusual beauty and exoticism, who later published an epic poem exonerating Eve. You’d have liked her, Lucy,” Alex enthused. “She could have furnished Shakespeare with a strong feminist viewpoint when he needed it—if she did indeed have his ear, and he her sexual favors, as some historians believe.”
“How did you put all this together, Alex?” Lucy asked him, almost in distress.
“It was only yesterday when I realized that one of the books that was taken in the break-in was an early, valuable copy of her published poem. This house may have been connected with her—perhaps a bequest from Henry Carey via his sister, who owned all the lands? The deeds seem to support that, though there are some frustrating blank spaces in them beyond this period.”
“Alex, I thought you were a scientist.” Grace had plopped down back in her chair exhausted with the excitement, and was just cutting a piece of lemon cake for herself and Henry when her humor bubbled up again. “You’re not bad on your history—or literature for that matter.”
He laughed with a hint of embarrassment. “Not really, Grace. I was the science child in an arts family. I had to at least try to keep up. Mum took Will and me to countless productions of Shakespeare plays as soon as we could sit still. My education was probably a little light when it came to Winnie-the-Pooh and Alice, but I can get by without program notes at the Globe. And anyhow,” he added, “I’ve been over the ground again in this last couple of weeks, like all of you!”
“Don’t listen, Grace,” Lucy teased, suddenly thinking there was a lot of Dr. John Dee in his many times great-grandson. “Alex knows as much poetry as I do. And I know nothing about stem cells.”
Alex’s father had sat quietly, closing his eyes in the unseasonably warm sunshine. Now he smiled at her enigmatically. “In my experience, Lucy, men of science often know more about the arts than we humanities students know about their discipline. But don’t put him on a pedestal. Alex isn’t keen on heights.”
Henry’s expression was opaque, and she was unsure what he meant. Had Anna placed him up too high, so that he would inevitably fall?
Henry continued speaking. “Each of these interpretations could be valid. Queen Elizabeth, Lucy, and Katherine Carey—and how intriguing if Shakespeare’s ‘dark lady’ is connected with the house. Your mother would have enjoyed that, Alex, and she’d have known.” Henry was full of regret that he’d never appreciated the fascination of her family until this time. “What has ‘May’ to do with the riddle?”
“I believe time will have a part to play,” Alex said. He looked hard into all the pensive faces. “Simon, you’re uncommonly quiet.”
Simon had indeed been strangely mute, but he answered Alex with animation. “Yes, I’ve been so absorbed in all of this new information, I almost forgot. Grace and I found a connection with your magic number in the text that begins ‘Over one arm the lusty coursers rein.’ It’s the thirty-fourth line of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Lucy pointed out the references to these lovers in several texts.” Simon paused to read aloud the appropriate page. “But here’s the weird thing. The painting Venus and Adonis in the National Gallery—Grace has a copy here with her—is cataloged as NG34. It was the thirty-fourth painting acquired by the Gallery in the early nineteenth century. It represents the waning love between Philip and Mary Tudor, and Mary was Henry VIII’s daughter too. Venus begged Adonis not to hunt—which I guess was about her not wanting Philip to stray.”
“To her sister, Elizabeth!” Grace had taken a postcard of the painting from the basket beside her, and showed them an image that Simon passed first to Lucy and Alex, and they in turn gave to Henry.
“The line numbers of the poem could have been counted then, of course,” he was saying, “but how, in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, could they know the painting would become NG34, two hundred years on?”
Four faces stared, and a skeptical laugh escaped Alex. “You might as well add that Philip’s Spain now has a dialing code of thirty-four, when you telephone!” It was an absurd coincidence, but it was nonetheless wonderful. At some level it spun out various existentialist questions. Was life copying art to an exaggerated degree?
Lucy carried on the idea. “I love it! But add it to the previous text. ‘Where did I leave the sweet lady sleeping?’ I’ve developed real empathy for Ariadne, the sleeping lady left on Naxos by Theseus. Titian paints her watching Theseus disappear, yet also reaching for Dionysus, or Bacchus. His Ariadne doesn’t have to die, but gets a new heart from the kindest of the Three Fates—a reprieve. She’s elevated to a goddess for rescuing man from the labyrinth. That painting is one of the stars of the National Gallery too, and might solve that text, I feel.”
Alex leafed through the pile of sheets and found the right one, making a point of ticking it with his pencil, and setting it aside with those they’d discussed. “Is that five down? What about this one, concerning the River Styx? It has another reference to Venus and Adonis, but we renamed the Thames as River Styx for the night of our cruise, Lucy, and we had to pay the ferryman, and pass the grim reaper.” Alex turned to his father to explain. “For the hospitals’ Halloween night.”
“Alex,” Lucy answered him, “the ‘celestial goddess of light,’ and the man who ‘passes in reality into the Fortunate Isles of the Soul’…” They waited for her to explain her ideas, but she couldn’t express what she wanted to say. It was too strange to share. She remembered the thud of her heart when they’d seen the strange barge. She suddenly understood that was forty days and nights after her operation, and Will’s death. Like Christ in the wilderness, or Moses on Sinai, or the Egyptians’ period of purification of the mummy, it was the length of time a soul was thought to wait in limbo. Was his heart staying with her, and his soul departing for Elysium? She only said: “The whole document is our chronicle.”
And Alex’s response astonished her. He smiled softly. “Yes. It is.”
Lucy found the whole experience rather intense, touching off as it had some very personal emotions. She needed some space, and while Grace put further questions to Alex about the woman who’d owned the land, she departed for the sanctuary of Diana’s kitchen, ostensibly to make more tea and a pot of coffee; but her head was swimming. While the kettle heated on the Rayburn, she stepped into Diana’s small study off the main living room, without feeling at all that she was intruding. There on her desk, reinstated to its position of precedence, was the tiny portrait of the sixteenth-century lady with her beautiful bodice of trees, and insects, and stags. Lucy picked it up and confronted the dark beauty, wondering who she was, and what her story would add, if they knew it.
The kettle was not yet singing, so she changed rooms and seated herself at Alex’s laptop, where she and Max had got better acquainted the day before. She entered: “Emilia Lannier, 1592,” and was offered alternative spellings, but her eyes danced across the excerpted data that immediately attracted her. Rushing back to the kitchen, she almost burned her hand in her haste to pour the boiling water; then she flew to the garden in an excited state.
“Lucina was the midwife to Adonis,” Henry was telling Grace, his glasses propped on his nose while he read from her chosen page, “and she liberated him from his confinement in the sacred myrrh tree—just as Prospero does with Ariel from the pine.”
But everyone now looked up at Lucy as she set both pots on the table.
“What is it?” Simon asked her.
“I think,” she told them with a twinkle, “that the portrait which was taken from you, and returned, is of the Lord Chamberlain’s pretty mistress, Emilia.”
Alex had only recently learned how the painting had come back to them—and at whose behest; but he had told them nothing of it. He eased back into his Lloyd loom chair and folded his arms, puzzled. “Go on.”
“Dark Lady or no, she was embarrassingly pregnant to the Lord Chamberlain in 1592, and was hastily married off to a musician called ‘Lannier’—although she called her son Henry, after his real father. Wouldn’t that be a perfect time to make a gift of a parcel of out-of-the-way land, that belonged not so tellingly to him, but to his sister?”
“That’s the year thirty-four Elizabeth,” Alex nodded. “But, how did it come after that, to us?”
“Perhaps there’s a link between her, and either Shakespeare, or Dee, or one of Dee’s children,” Simon said.
“She knew everything,” Lucy asserted. “And perhaps the ‘bequest’ in that document you were looking at is spiritual—and included the portrait. She was connected to Dee’s circle, I believe.”
This prompted Alex to move the discussion to something that intrigued him, and was a little less personal. “That very text, Lucy, has the clue I mentioned to you and Simon on the phone,” Alex told them. “The words are about the element of the moon, and the miniatures and enamels.” He passed the sheet back to her. “The element of the moon is Woman, in one sense, but the riddle concerns the element selenium. It’s used to make traffic lights and enamel paints because it has a soft, luminous quality. And it’s very important in medicine now, because it seems to play an important role in the prevention of some kinds of cancer, and crucially, for a healthy immune system. We have a long way to go with it, but trials are about to start to see if it could help patients with HIV. The odd thing is,” he said with a slight frown, “it’s the thirty-fourth element in the periodic table, which didn’t even exist in Dee’s day.”
“Maybe an angel told Dee all about it then?” Lucy raised her eyebrow at him.
Alex laughed. “That begs a question, doesn’t it? Who actually wrote them, these papers? Was it Dee? And should we assume that the second batch have all been added by later hands? Perhaps one generation after another of the women in Mum’s family, because she has certainly added this last one. There are seventeen of them, plus the simple tiled number square; just as there were seventeen of the first batch plus the Tablet of Jupiter.”
“That’s becoming a resonant total,” Simon added.
“Is it that the time is now ‘ripe,’ as Lear would say? After four hundred years, we are approaching the answer at this moment,” Alex suggested.
“And seventeen women and their partners—assuming you’re right about one text for each generation, Alex—mean that thirty-four people produced you and Will.” Lucy didn’t want to say more than this, but she felt heavy in her head, experienced a feeling of wildness in her heart—a not unpleasant palpitation. The circumstances, she thought, have to be exact; and so they are. Will’s death, her life: she was his rescue and resurrection, figuratively speaking, and he hers. It offered a meaning below the obvious one in the texts that only she and Alex could be sensitive to. But there had to be a present-day correspondence too, a reason why these documents and ideas were arriving in the consciousness of this moment. She was sure it concerned the Rapturists, which meant that they were inevitably involved.
“THIS IS BAB EL RAMEH, CALVIN,” FITZALAN WALTERS TOLD HIM AS THEY looked at the golden stone of the ancient structure. The afternoon sun turned a brilliance of color on its fascia, creating a rose-gold glow over the Roman arches now filled in with smoother blocks of stone.
“It’s also known as the Mercy Gate, I believe, which the old Jewish tradition says is where the Messiah will enter into the city.” Though he had been feted to holy sites and antiquities galore for two days, Calvin was truly struck by the symmetry and beauty of the ancient gateway. Sacred to three religions, it had watched successive events of human drama unfolding over time. His shirt was too heavy for the location, and sweat was prickling the back of his neck after an oven-hot April day; but the air was marginally cooler now, and the city—filled with Pilgrims for the Passover week and Easter period—offered a comparative stillness in this hour as the faithful walked to the many synagogues and churches around the great city. It made Calvin deeply emotional—a place of such history and beauty, as much as pain and strife.
“But the Golden, or Mercy, Gate is precisely where Jesus made his last entry into Jerusalem. And the next event in God’s prophetic plan is going to be the catching away of the saints, Calvin, in the presence of the Lord. And if the texts from Dee’s angels are right, it may be here, tomorrow, Easter Sunday.” FW had that special fervor in his voice that he reserved for the big places and the even bigger occasions; and in his panama hat and immaculate jacket, Calvin noticed his companion didn’t seem in the least troubled by sweat or heat.
Guy had stood a little apart from the two of them, to give them space for the experience; but now he stepped forward and said “Amen” to the professor’s assertions. “Because this is his alpha and omega, FW, right here in Jerusalem. Here he died; here he will come back to us.”
“And all the clues add to an April date,” FW said with gravity. “My heart thrills at the very idea. Will it be tomorrow that we witness the white horse, and the heavens opening? Jesus coming to get his bride, all of us faithful who are born again?”
Calvin put his sunglasses back on and scanned the edifice again, keeping his eyes from the intense light, but also from the men with him. “And in the Koran this is the Gate of Mercy, isn’t it?” he asked. “Through which the just will pass on the Day of Judgment?”
But FW was somewhere else. “He is dressed in a robe that is dripped in blood, and his name is the word of God,” he told them in a stirring voice, taking his text from his beloved Revelation. Calvin shivered in the sun.
THE AFTERNOON SHRANK AS THEY DEPLETED THE PILE OF OLD RIDDLES IN the pages before them, with proffered solutions and shrugged-off confusions. Lucy decided to ask Alex for a reference book. “There must be a complete Shakespeare here?”
He went to fetch it for her.
“And an atlas,” Simon called after him. Alex broke into a jog.
He took enough time in the house to check on the boys and to bring out sweaters and jackets, but he returned in time to hear Lucy ask his father an interesting question.
“What of Dido, Henry? What was she pleased to see?”
“When Queen Dido was jilted by Aeneas and threw herself on a funeral pyre, Juno took pity on her and sent Iris on a rainbow to release Dido’s soul, by cutting a lock of her hair. It was the rainbow she was happy to see. The idea of a person’s soul leaving their body as long as it had an object to cleave to was common in classicism; and the rainbow was the bridge to high wisdom, and the initiation into paradise.”
“Newton was musing on an iconic symbol.” Alex’s eyes engaged with Lucy’s as he helped her into an oversized cardigan. They had been introduced to this symbol of higher wisdom together; and he started to wonder whether anyone’s soul was residing in the object she’d retrieved from under the tree.
Everyone was absorbed in their own thoughts and research for some time, when Lucy, who had been busying herself in the Shakespeare volume, looked up excitedly. “Lines from his thirty-fourth sonnet—the closing couplet—are in several of the texts. ‘Ah! But those tears are pearl which thy love sheeds.’” She spoke to a circle of concentrated faces.
Simon had also struck gold in the atlas, scouring the meridians of longitude and latitude at thirty-four degrees. Something clicked for him, and he talked them through his awareness that the Ancient Mariner, sailing south “towards the Line,” had made Lucy and him first think of Sydney, on their plane trip. “Sure enough, Botany Bay is a later name for Stingray Bay, and it’s situated at thirty-four degrees south latitude. Lucy’s birthplace.” He looked up and grinned: “And I’ve just understood your mother, Alex. ‘Following in Eve’s footsteps’ is surely a reference to the fossilized prints found near Cape Town, of the oldest known ancestress of Homo sapiens—‘Eve.’ The whole line, from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth, is an archaeological treasure trove regarded as the cradle of man. At thirty-four degrees south latitude, naturally.”
Lucy, like the others, was hardly surprised anymore. But it brought up a problem, which she now voiced. “Does it suggest a place other than England, do you think, which might house the so-called pot of gold? Could Dee have placed this—whatever it is—on one of his travels abroad?”
“You’re right, Lucy. We’ve got some way to go with this,” Alex said. “But the number thirty-four underscores every word, every text. If we haven’t seen how in all of them, I suspect it’s our failure. We have Venus and Adonis, and Ariadne. The month of May could be significant; and roses wind through the puzzles. The first sheet—copied and handed down through every generation—answers ‘William Shakespeare’ to its riddle. And ‘rose’ is, I think, intended as a near homophone for the Latin ‘ros,’ or ‘dew,’ a prime ingredient in alchemy. In Will’s reference books I found the words below Dee’s ‘monas’ symbol, ‘God give you the dew of heaven, and fatness of the earth.’ Alchemy was a principal interest for Dee.”
“But, Alex,” Henry said, laying aside the page he was reading, “I think, crucially, roses are about female beauty and strength. The whole shape is suggestive of female allure and sexual regenerative power. I imagine they intend something hopeful and positive concerning women. My own reading this week reminded me that Queen Elizabeth—also a Virgo—was known to Dee’s circle and her literate courtiers as Astraea, the goddess of justice from the Golden Age. Then, the gods and heaven itself were on earth. Perhaps—it’s a lot to hope—Dee is expecting a new golden age, under a successor to Elizabeth, to come soon.”
He looked directly at his son, and Alex felt this was of major significance; but the discussion was cut short by a phone call, which he took inside on his cell phone. When he returned he was preoccupied.
Without any idea how she knew, Lucy guessed the call had come from Calvin, and that Alex would be secretive about it. Was this only because none of them liked him?
It was close to six o’clock and getting cold, so Alex loaded the remnants of their afternoon tea onto a tray and called the boys to arrange walking Max’s guest home. Grace and Simon put on warmer layers and wandered in the garden; Henry still had his head in Shakespeare; and Lucy took another path, lost in a goddess’s thoughts. She spent a little time around the mulberry tree, completely bare of buds though it was, and felt something pull at her. She kneeled, contemplated, and saw in her mind a lady’s gloved hand closed on something beating—like a bird, perhaps? The image disturbed but didn’t repel her. She turned back along the path and started gathering flowers. She cut perfumed narcissi for the room she shared with Alex, which recalled the days that followed her transplant; then she hunted for some early anemones for Siân’s room. She was picking them when her thoughts suddenly spilled from her mouth in a moment of illumination.
“Alex, I understand!”
The words carried such conviction that everyone came to her. She explained.
“It’s not the thirty-fourth degree of latitude or longitude: at least, I don’t believe so. But time does have a part to play. Alex realized that my birthday is the thirty-fourth day of the year. So I started thinking, the thirty-fourth degree of the zodiac would be four degrees of Taurus—the sign connected with April and May, and the Minotaur.”
“And the labyrinth,” Alex agreed.
Lucy continued. “It would fall around April twenty-third or twenty-fourth—depending on the exact degree in any one year. There’s a text that asks, what are men when they woo? They’re April—and December when they wed—in As You Like It. Now consider, the twenty-third would be St. George’s Day—and it was originally a pagan feast, the day of Green George, or the Green Man. And, in a riddling kind of language, ‘green’ could be the middle name of Iris—as the middle color of the rainbow.”
All eyes were fixed on Lucy—straining to make her leap of discovery.
“Henry, the St. George’s Cross is specifically on the Stafford badge?” He confirmed this; and she asked simply, “Whose ‘alpha’ and ‘omega’ was St. George’s Day?” Lucy challenged them to catch her.
Alex’s head was askew. Lucy’s huge brown eyes swam, were hypnotic—and he enjoyed their power. “William Shakespeare, of course! That’s inspirational, Lucy. And that’s the very text in Mum’s own handwriting—‘Taurus four, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.’ It must be a Sabian symbol—Shakespeare’s personal Sabian symbol for the degree of his birthday.”
“Sabian symbol, Alex?” Grace was mystified.
“Created by Marc Edmund Jones in the 1920s, Grace. Each of the three hundred and sixty degrees of the zodiac inspires a phrase or a picture, an intuitive approach to that part of the individual sign, and Mum had a copy.”
Everyone was lost in thought, until finally Henry voiced their unspoken question. “So, where do you need to be, and what will happen, on April the twenty-third?”
But it was nearly two hours later when Max—avoiding setting the table—called in high-pitched excitement to Lucy and his father. At Alex’s laptop, he’d been arranging the scanned-in pictures on the reverse of all the documents, marrying images by matching the lines of a maze. When he’d finished, a whole plotted labyrinth swam before them all. And unmistakably, a face watched from within it.
“Well,” Alex grinned, “I think the man from Stratford is trying to tell us.”