“It’s not the thirty-fourth degree of latitude or longitude: at least, I don’t believe so. But time does have a part to play. Alex realized that my birthday is the thirty-fourth day of the year. So I started thinking, the thirty-fourth degree of the zodiac would be four degrees of Taurus—the sign connected with April and May, and the Minotaur.”

“And the labyrinth,” Alex agreed.

Lucy continued. “It would fall around April twenty-third or twenty-fourth—depending on the exact degree in any one year. There’s a text that asks, what are men when they woo? They’re April—and December when they wed—in As You Like It. Now consider, the twenty-third would be St. George’s Day—and it was originally a pagan feast, the day of Green George, or the Green Man. And, in a riddling kind of language, ‘green’ could be the middle name of Iris—as the middle color of the rainbow.”

All eyes were fixed on Lucy—straining to make her leap of discovery.

“Henry, the St. George’s Cross is specifically on the Stafford badge?” He confirmed this; and she asked simply, “Whose ‘alpha’ and ‘omega’ was St. George’s Day?” Lucy challenged them to catch her.

Alex’s head was askew. Lucy’s huge brown eyes swam, were hypnotic—and he enjoyed their power. “William Shakespeare, of course! That’s inspirational, Lucy. And that’s the very text in Mum’s own handwriting—‘Taurus four, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.’ It must be a Sabian symbol—Shakespeare’s personal Sabian symbol for the degree of his birthday.”

“Sabian symbol, Alex?” Grace was mystified.

“Created by Marc Edmund Jones in the 1920s, Grace. Each of the three hundred and sixty degrees of the zodiac inspires a phrase or a picture, an intuitive approach to that part of the individual sign, and Mum had a copy.”

Everyone was lost in thought, until finally Henry voiced their unspoken question. “So, where do you need to be, and what will happen, on April the twenty-third?”

But it was nearly two hours later when Max—avoiding setting the table—called in high-pitched excitement to Lucy and his father. At Alex’s laptop, he’d been arranging the scanned-in pictures on the reverse of all the documents, marrying images by matching the lines of a maze. When he’d finished, a whole plotted labyrinth swam before them all. And unmistakably, a face watched from within it.

“Well,” Alex grinned, “I think the man from Stratford is trying to tell us.”

31