Those masked men arrived at this town like dark spirits invoked.

Sheriff Ingalls and SAIC Macklin were out of the church now. Flames raced across the roof of the old wooden building. The deputies were clearing everyone back.

Solomon, mind racing, waited for the two lawmen to come to him.

Sheriff Ingalls said, “What happened? You were in there. Who did this?”

Solomon looked at Hugo Blackwood standing on the sidewalk, brushing ash from his shoulders.

Sheriff Ingalls said, “Answer me, goddammit! These people are going to riot.”

“Answer him, Agent,” said Macklin sharply.

Solomon stepped up to the two men, his back to the Klansmen across the street, making it clear that he was talking about them. “I saw who set the fire,” said Solomon. “It was two of those concerned citizens over there.”

The sheriff looked at the men, then back at Solomon, unhappily.

Solomon said to him, “If word of that gets out, you’ll get your riot, by God. You’ll see this whole town in flames. You need to do what you should have done before, and that is get those Klansmen out of this town. Or else I tell these church people what happened.”

SAIC Macklin said, “Solomon, you’ll do no such thing—”

“I will tell them what I saw.” He stared down the sheriff. “Your choice. Your town. Your way.”

Sheriff Ingalls looked at Macklin as though blaming him, then scowled deeply at Solomon, jabbing his thumbs deeply into his gun belt. “You son of a bitch,” he said. Then he started across the street to hassle the Ku Klux Klan.

Leaving Solomon looking at his superior, Macklin.

Macklin said, “You telling him the whole truth and nothing but, Agent?”

“Yes, sir,” said Solomon, before starting back to Hugo Blackwood. “As far as you know.”

Chapter

1582. Mortlake, Greater London.

Hugo Blackwood had not slept or eaten in days. Orleanna lay in a catatonic state in their bedchamber. She had been visited by three doctors and a priest, each departing deeply dismayed, unable to offer either a diagnosis or a cure. Her malady was somewhere in the netherworld between a disease of the body and a disease of the spirit. Neither discipline could diagnose the cause of her sickness, nor recommend a cure. She existed in a realm of suffering beyond the reach of medicine and religion—the very schism Dee had endeavored to reconcile.

As did Blackwood. He was at his wit’s end, unable to understand what accursed illness had ensnared his love, only that he had played some unknowing role in its divination. And this knowledge haunted him, darkening every thought, cursing every moment. He wasn’t ready to mourn her, and had already decided that her demise would lead inexorably to his own.