“Do we agree, the whole message yields ‘William Shakespeare’—who was, incidentally, forty-six years old when the King James was printed?”

“‘Is’t not strange, and ten times strange?’ Is it a deliberate code?”

“My feeling is that Shakespeare is implicated in the documents—how, I can’t imagine. But it doesn’t help with this question of ‘more,’ does it?”

Lucy sat glassy-eyed for a moment. “Did Will get this far?”

“Maybe you know?” Alex was teasing her, but without malice. “I would love to discover what he did with his hours after he visited the cathedral and walked the labyrinth. Messages he left me suggest he had things to say; and when I went through his effects, the card from Chartres was there—the one my mother left him about the venison—along with a brasserie lunch receipt, and he had his hair cut; he’d sketched a stag, or a deer, on a small sheet of artist’s paper; and you know he ordered Siân some flowers a little before three. But the ferry didn’t leave until very much later. What was in his head in the intervening hours?”

Lucy looked at him. “I wish I could tell you, Alex. I’m not Will. I just have a rather resonant piece of him with me. But if my instincts are anything, I’d say a few things seem particular. These flowers he ordered Siân—did you say before they were roses?”

“White ones. For her birthday—which was still a month off.”

Lucy nodded. “I smelled roses in the labyrinth—probably the perfume you gave me wafting back in the warm air; but maybe that’s a phenomenon of the labyrinth too—or maybe not. Could that rose upstairs be six months old? Would it fade so perfectly? Might it have been here when Will was?”

Alex shrugged. “Possibly he picked it, you mean?”

“That was the autumn equinox. So, there’s an equinox rose, the venison. And the stag. That’s interesting, don’t you think? Isn’t the hart a device of Diana the moon goddess?” She wasn’t waiting for his answer. “And there was a hart on the bodice of the woman in your miniature—the painting. I’d say Will might have come back here. Is it on the way to the ferry?”

“Ish. What are you thinking?”

“Was your mother signposting him?” She looked at him seriously, suddenly struck with an idea. “What was the wording of her legacy to him—with the key?”

“Something like: ‘For Will when you’re someone you’re not now…’” And Alex followed her thoughts. “I suppose that’s you now, Lucy. If you think like a poet instead of a scientist. Perhaps the key really was meant for you.”

“They took the gold copy you had made for my birthday.”

“No matter. When we get home, you must have the original silver one again.”