The two of them had sat on the floor at Alex’s London flat on the previous two Sunday afternoons, with gloved hands, surrounded by the texts of the astonishing documents Lucy had unwrapped in the silver-wrought chest at Longparish. A strange birthday present, Alex had called it: eighteen leaves of ancient vellum, which had kept them from their dinner on the snowing night of her birthday; each one of those sheets crisscrossed with riddles and clues to some other, equally obscure find. The first of them was the one Will had a copy of—some kind of original of the text that had come to him, bequeathed with the key. There was now, as she had thought before, a quire of them, inscribed front and back. The whole legacy had been buried under the giant mulberry in Alex’s family garden, exactly as she had said, with only a golden Elizabethan “angel”—a coin of considerable value—buried with them as a bedfellow. Henry had suggested it was Dee’s way of paying the ferryman—an angel that assured the box’s survival down the passage of centuries. It had been there, clearly, for four hundred years—the coin having been dated from its mint mark of “0” to around 1600. All of the paperwork was still legible, fairly uncorrupted, spotted with only the smallest amount of mildew—not even particularly deep in the ground, Alex had retold them as they sat mesmerized by the lines of verse and the intersecting patterns on the reverse. No one had known anything about them being there, it seemed. Alex told them both, with a healthy dose of skepticism, that the tree was alleged to have been a cutting from the great mulberry of Shakespeare’s—which itself had been a gift from King James when he was obsessed with seeding the silk industry. He’d imported the wrong genus of mulberry, and Morus nigra, the black tree, refused to support the silk-worms. But the ancient tree was wonderful, and Alex remembered coming back into the house with stained hands and mouth throughout his childhood as the first flush of berries every season enticed two little boys to gorge themselves. He could still taste them. Why it was the mulberry—why Lucy had made the leap of understanding—was a riddle itself. All she had been able to say, from that day to this, was that the portrait had told her.

She blocked the thoughts of Alex and his space now as she kissed her friend.