This prompted Alex to move the discussion to something that intrigued him, and was a little less personal. “That very text, Lucy, has the clue I mentioned to you and Simon on the phone,” Alex told them. “The words are about the element of the moon, and the miniatures and enamels.” He passed the sheet back to her. “The element of the moon is Woman, in one sense, but the riddle concerns the element selenium. It’s used to make traffic lights and enamel paints because it has a soft, luminous quality. And it’s very important in medicine now, because it seems to play an important role in the prevention of some kinds of cancer, and crucially, for a healthy immune system. We have a long way to go with it, but trials are about to start to see if it could help patients with HIV. The odd thing is,” he said with a slight frown, “it’s the thirty-fourth element in the periodic table, which didn’t even exist in Dee’s day.”

“Maybe an angel told Dee all about it then?” Lucy raised her eyebrow at him.

Alex laughed. “That begs a question, doesn’t it? Who actually wrote them, these papers? Was it Dee? And should we assume that the second batch have all been added by later hands? Perhaps one generation after another of the women in Mum’s family, because she has certainly added this last one. There are seventeen of them, plus the simple tiled number square; just as there were seventeen of the first batch plus the Tablet of Jupiter.”

“That’s becoming a resonant total,” Simon added.

“Is it that the time is now ‘ripe,’ as Lear would say? After four hundred years, we are approaching the answer at this moment,” Alex suggested.

“And seventeen women and their partners—assuming you’re right about one text for each generation, Alex—mean that thirty-four people produced you and Will.” Lucy didn’t want to say more than this, but she felt heavy in her head, experienced a feeling of wildness in her heart—a not unpleasant palpitation. The circumstances, she thought, have to be exact; and so they are. Will’s death, her life: she was his rescue and resurrection, figuratively speaking, and he hers. It offered a meaning below the obvious one in the texts that only she and Alex could be sensitive to. But there had to be a present-day correspondence too, a reason why these documents and ideas were arriving in the consciousness of this moment. She was sure it concerned the Rapturists, which meant that they were inevitably involved.

“THIS IS BAB EL RAMEH, CALVIN,” FITZALAN WALTERS TOLD HIM AS THEY looked at the golden stone of the ancient structure. The afternoon sun turned a brilliance of color on its fascia, creating a rose-gold glow over the Roman arches now filled in with smoother blocks of stone.