A haze had settled over the entire parish. But most troubling to Hugo Blackwood was the behavior of his dutiful wife, Orleanna, a raven-haired, doe-eyed beauty. After a day of acting distant and appearing unnerved, she had taken to her bed in sickness. On the advice of her physician, he hired a nurse to tend to her while he was away at court. After two days, the nurse refused to treat Orleanna any longer, but would not explain why, leaving shaken. Blackwood, when he visited his wife’s bedside, found only a woman in confused distress, beseeching his help. So sudden, the light gone from her eyes, her chest heaving to draw breath. Tormented and feverish, she spoke to people who weren’t there.

“Can nothing be done?” he said, sponging at her brow with a cold compress. “My love, my love.”

Orleanna was the muse behind all of Hugo Blackwood’s successes, the fire in the furnace of his ambition. She was the daughter of one of his mentors and grew up in a home of learning and study. Intelligent and also savvy, Orleanna was the more ambitious of the two of them; she desired for her husband success in every form. He still marveled, daily, that he had won her affection; and every day since their wedding, he endeavored to reward her support.

She glowed as though lit from within, and Blackwood was a doting husband. Were it not for Orleanna’s attractive nature, the way she drew people to her, Blackwood would have been perfectly happy never attending or hosting another social event. Indeed, it was her influence that made him seek out a compelling and charismatic personality such as John Dee. Orleanna Blackwood possessed, in the parlance of the day, “the intellect of a man,” to the point that Blackwood sometimes would remind her, in social settings, to mind her role; privately, their far-ranging discussions sometimes ran into the late hours, fired by candlelight and a draught or two of wine. Extraordinary figures such as Dee delighted her, and whereas other wives were content—nay, encouraged—to mix only among those of their fair gender, Orleanna thrived in the acquaintance of learned men. This made Blackwood selfish; she made him possessive, though not to a fault. It is human nature to want to possess beauty, to celebrate purity, to safeguard uniqueness.

Dee himself had once told her that she was born in the wrong era, that she was a woman who existed “centuries before her time.” Privately, Orleanna dismissed Dee’s compliment as mere polite chatter, but Blackwood knew she had drawn deep satisfaction from his evocation of her.