“Just chill, sweetheart. You’re shattered—as am I. And not even a night of bingeing as an excuse. My mind was solving riddles through broken sleep. It was like a collision between Bilbo Baggins and Oedipus Rex! I was even trying to work out the numerology of certain words. I must be going mad.” He looked at her remarkable face, saw that it was blanched of all color, and immediately recalled Alex’s quiet dictum to make sure Lucy ate something regularly and took her pills on time. “And if we admit to it, we’re both thrown by this business with Roland. The circumstances seem odd, though we should keep it in perspective and wait until tomorrow before we panic. But, Lucy, for God’s sake, have some compassion and eat something for me, or your boyfriend’s going to shoot me such a look of disdain when we get back. I’d rather Will’s worst temper than Alex’s controlled displeasure.”

Lucy picked at the salad on her plate and swallowed her immunosuppressants. “I’ve been thinking, Simon. Alex is thirty-four, like the magic number in the Tablet of Jupiter. The clues about being ‘loyal’ and ‘true’ indicate the knot which is the Stafford insignia. When I consider the documents, I’m beginning to think they tell our story.”

“And we’re having this conversation on Thirty-fourth Street, which is spooky. What are you getting at, Luce?”

“You told me you were with Alex one night, at Will’s computer, when that Sator Square we were looking at on the plane just appeared?” Simon nodded. “There seems to be a pattern about the Venus and Adonis story in some of the sheets, don’t you agree? The beautiful young man, pursued by Venus?”

“Go on.”

“Is that Will and Siân? She’s desperate to tie him, he runs off on a wild hunt—and here’s the strange thing—literally is gored on the bridge, in the thigh, like Adonis. Alex told me the injury was brutal, though it’s not what killed him. But it’s odd, you’ll allow? When Venus pursued her wounded lover, the white roses she trod on pricked her feet, and her blood turned them red in pure love. You remember Will’s white roses. Though we’ve never determined why he sent them.”

Simon was intrigued by the connection of ideas. “Strange leaps, Lucy. But Philip Sidney died of a wound to his thigh too—gave away his greaves to a soldier who needed them. And obviously more than his greaves, as it was a musket ball in his thigh which turned horribly gangrenous. It took him days to die.”