“Not at all! I know you’re an Enlightenment man, Alex, but we should try to understand your forebear through the lens of his own time, if we can, to appreciate the considerable impact he made on Elizabethan England. He was a true Renaissance man, with a thorough knowledge of astronomy and history, an authority on navigation and, by all accounts, an outstanding lecturer. If Drake and Gilbert found their way to the New World, it was because Dee helped them. I’m not sure if I can do justice to him, really.”

“Well, I know absolutely nothing, and we have an hour at least to get to Hampshire in this weather! Give me a taste of the man.” He was in particularly playful spirits today, and Lucy relaxed thoroughly to enjoy them.

“The first thing I should explain about John Dee, Alex, is that a lot of what we know—or if you like, how we see him—comes from Meric Casaubon, a seventeenth-century scholar who was determined to destroy any positives in his reputation. Casaubon is the reason we still can’t quite look at Dee without preconceptions. He thought Dee was deluded, and that his practices were ‘dark,’ as he put it. He published the most salacious details of Dee’s life. Not that he had a lot to go on there, but he did manage to dig up some oddities.”

Alex grinned. “Not an evenhanded biographer then?”

Lucy shook her head. “Far from it. But what might be most of interest to us is that Casaubon was privy to an extraordinary stash of Dee’s personal documents, which he happened on in the strangest manner.”

He looked at her, intrigued. “Go on.”

“In the early seventeenth century it was Sir Robert Cotton—think Cottonian Manuscripts in the British Library—who was for some unexplained reason inspired to go and dig in the grounds of Dee’s house in Mortlake. And he got lucky…”

Alex just looked at Lucy. “So the possibility of our key, and some other find related to it, is entirely in keeping.” Her eyes affirmed this. “Why bury everything? Was he really writing such dangerous ideas?”

“Cotton discovered a cache of papers which were damp-ridden, but still legible, and from among these came all the transcripts of Dee and Kelley’s communications with angels, which Cotton’s son later passed on to Casaubon.”

“With angels.” Alex’s voice was in its familiar ironic register, and it made Lucy giggle. She repositioned her body in the seat, turning more toward him.

“You’re on a promise—to grant him the perspective of his own time and remember that many of his sixteenth-century contemporaries cherished similar beliefs and ideas!”