“We’re part of this riddle, Alex. You and I are supposed to solve it. Didn’t Alexander cut the Gordian knot, or something?”

He laughed. “Oddly enough, our family insignia is a knot: for the Staffords. I think my parents were having a quiet joke when they named me Alexander. It’s been part of the Stafford heraldry since at least the fifteenth century. But that’s not my mother’s side of the family.”

“Yet the Staffords seem to be included in the mystery somehow. A Stafford was the ambassador to France at some point during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. He was the contact with the Hermeticist Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in no less a place than the Campo de’ Fiori—the ‘Field of Flowers’—which is what that very first document Will was given must be referring to, and I think Will realized it. I read about it while researching Dee, and I think Simon mentioned it too. The connection with the Stafford name struck me. I’ll check my notes. I’m wondering if he was a relative.”

Then she looked at him with a flash of insight. “The knot garden. The roses. The moon globe. Diana’s realm. Let’s take a look.”

Lucy’s finger looped along the spiral Diana had created in her fountain. Made of mirrored glass, it picked its shiny path through a pattern of blues and ruby reds all mosaicked from broken china plates so carefully color-matched that Lucy realized they’d been purposely broken. The fountain was shallow, edged with shells; and Lucy was reminded of the Lady of Shalott working in reflections to weave her embroidery, as the silver shards reflected the sky and the landscape all around it. She traced the route to Venus in the center, and thought of Alex’s gentle fingers curving along her scar around her breast, circling her heart. The motion itself was sensual, mesmerizing, a gesture of mystery.

She turned to him to say something, but he was lost in thought, looking at the altered sundial, and she hesitated. He read her empathy, and invited her into his mind.