Lucy found the whole experience rather intense, touching off as it had some very personal emotions. She needed some space, and while Grace put further questions to Alex about the woman who’d owned the land, she departed for the sanctuary of Diana’s kitchen, ostensibly to make more tea and a pot of coffee; but her head was swimming. While the kettle heated on the Rayburn, she stepped into Diana’s small study off the main living room, without feeling at all that she was intruding. There on her desk, reinstated to its position of precedence, was the tiny portrait of the sixteenth-century lady with her beautiful bodice of trees, and insects, and stags. Lucy picked it up and confronted the dark beauty, wondering who she was, and what her story would add, if they knew it.

The kettle was not yet singing, so she changed rooms and seated herself at Alex’s laptop, where she and Max had got better acquainted the day before. She entered: “Emilia Lannier, 1592,” and was offered alternative spellings, but her eyes danced across the excerpted data that immediately attracted her. Rushing back to the kitchen, she almost burned her hand in her haste to pour the boiling water; then she flew to the garden in an excited state.

“Lucina was the midwife to Adonis,” Henry was telling Grace, his glasses propped on his nose while he read from her chosen page, “and she liberated him from his confinement in the sacred myrrh tree—just as Prospero does with Ariel from the pine.”

But everyone now looked up at Lucy as she set both pots on the table.

“What is it?” Simon asked her.

“I think,” she told them with a twinkle, “that the portrait which was taken from you, and returned, is of the Lord Chamberlain’s pretty mistress, Emilia.”

Alex had only recently learned how the painting had come back to them—and at whose behest; but he had told them nothing of it. He eased back into his Lloyd loom chair and folded his arms, puzzled. “Go on.”

“Dark Lady or no, she was embarrassingly pregnant to the Lord Chamberlain in 1592, and was hastily married off to a musician called ‘Lannier’—although she called her son Henry, after his real father. Wouldn’t that be a perfect time to make a gift of a parcel of out-of-the-way land, that belonged not so tellingly to him, but to his sister?”

“That’s the year thirty-four Elizabeth,” Alex nodded. “But, how did it come after that, to us?”

“Perhaps there’s a link between her, and either Shakespeare, or Dee, or one of Dee’s children,” Simon said.

“She knew everything,” Lucy asserted. “And perhaps the ‘bequest’ in that document you were looking at is spiritual—and included the portrait. She was connected to Dee’s circle, I believe.”