Simon wasn’t sure he’d kept pace with Alex, but he nodded, checked his notes, went on. “The white rose specifically concerns purity and innocence, acceptance, unconditional love. It is about feminine, and sometimes necessarily passive, energy, and it is chosen for the initiation of all new members into the Old Wisdom. The boar slaying Adonis is the winter slaying summer—which is the key philosophy for the Rosicrucians. When Adonis, the Sun, is slain by the boar, the flowers appearing from his blood prompt resurrection—which is very sexual and female too, as Henry said. And you know who was a founding father of the Rosicrucians, Alex?”

There was no need to answer. “That’s a fine piece of unexpected research, Simon. What an other-worldly emissary. And how oddly timed. Your account makes me feel he was waiting for you. Surely his appearance is no coincidence.” But who sent him? Alex was wondering. Did other people know something about this day? “What about St. George?”

“The Rosy Cross brothers took off in Germany early in the seventeenth century, directly after Dee’s mission to Prague in the 1580s, which Queen Elizabeth and Leicester encouraged. Dee in person spread the Elizabethan movement of scientific, mystical, and poetic ideas. The ‘Rose Cross’ name comes from the St. George Cross and English chivalry—the garter was the prestigious medieval honor in Europe, and still is.”

Impatiently, and quite unusually for her, Grace suddenly prized the phone from Simon to speak briefly to Alex, wanting to impart to him the whole of what she had taken from their extraordinary exchange that afternoon, which had made an enormous impact on her.

“Alex, about the rose: Dee chose it—as others had before him—because it’s the symbol that ties us together as a whole brotherhood of mankind. And if we can understand its message, and then we combine the dew, as you said—the divine breath—with the spirit of the rose, it performs some expression of magic to transmute the human soul into gold, and perform an act of healing. That’s the theory, and I love the very idea of it.”

Alex had listened to her intently, without judgment, appreciative of the philosophy behind it. “Thank you, Grace. That’s beautifully expressed.”