"She talks about the sterility of now, and how people need the ineffable. She points to rampant crime and goalless youth. She's going to make a religion where nobody hurts anybody else. It's the American dream. She knows Scripture inside and out, she's covered all the Pseudepigrapha, Apocrypha, the works of Augustine, Marcion, Moses Maimonides; she's convinced that the prohibition against sex destroyed Christianity, which is hardly original with her, of course, and certainly appeals to the women who listen to her, you know...."

"Yes, I understand all that, but she must have felt some sympathy for Wynken."

"Wynken's books weren't a series of visions to her as they are to me."

"I see."

"And by the way, Wynken's books are not merely perfect, they are unique in a number of ways. Wynken did his work in the last twenty-five years before the Gutenberg printing press. Yet Wynken did everything. He was scribe, rubicator, that is, the maker of the fancy letters, and also the miniaturist who added all the naked people frolicking in Eden and the ivy and vine crawling over every page. He had to do everystep himself at a time when scriptoria divided up these functions.

"Let me finish Wynken. You have Dora now in your mind. Let me go to Wynken.

Yeah, you have to get those books."

"Great," I said dismally.

"Let me bring you right up to date. You're going to love those books, even if Dora never does. I have all twelve of his books, as I think I told you. He was Rhineland Catholic, forced into the Benedictines as a young man, and was in love with Blanche de Wilde, his brother's wife. She ordered the books done in the scriptorium and that's how it all started, her secret link with her monk lover. I have letters between Blanche and her friend Eleanor. I have some incidents decoded from the poems themselves.

"Most sad of all, I have the letters Blanche wrote to Eleanor after Wynken was put to death. She had the letters smuggled out to Eleanor, and then Eleanor sent them on to Diane, and there was another woman in it, but there are very few extant fragments of anything in her hand.

"This is what went down. They used to meet in the garden of the De Wilde castle to perform their rites. It wasn't the monastery garden at all, as I'd once supposed. How Wynken got there I don't know, but there are a few mentions in some of the letters that indicate he simply slipped out of the monastery and followed a secret way into his brother's house.

"And this made sense, of course. They'd wait till Damien de Wilde was off doing whatever such counts or dukes did, and then they'd meet, do their dance around the fountain, and make love.

Wynken bedded each of the women in turn; or sometimes they celebrated various patterns. All this is recorded more or less in the books.