All three together had spent the greater part of the afternoon at the Alveston Manor in Stratford in Walters’s suite, conferring over texts. Lucy looked carefully at the originals again, feeling a renewed pleasure in touching them. She was amused that her captors had missed the patterned labyrinth on the reverse of the sheets—and thus failed to notice the face, which was so clear once the lines married. Only a bright seven-year-old had immediately seen the relevance of that, and she decided not to enlighten them now. But on the other hand, they had possession of Diana’s remarkable family Bible, dating from the seventeenth century—an object that had filled Lucy with strength just to hold. It made her feel sick that they had plundered it, pored over it; that it had in fact supplied the thieves with a vast amount of annotation that she and Alex had lacked. But it had kept back several of its secrets from the unfaithful too. Several of the words she had noticed, picked out on the embroidered document case, were written again here: throughout Proverbs, all of the items about wisdom, and pearls, and rubies, were marked, and the lines of verse that concluded each parchment were copied out here, on the half-title page of the Bible, surrounding the mysterious Tablet of Jupiter square, which fired Lucy’s thoughts. Did it suggest there was some counting to be done with these words, as with the psalm Alex had decoded? She felt that with study, it would yield up a clear message.

In addition, there was a tiny reproduction of the so-called rainbow portrait of Queen Elizabeth painted by hand into the inside back cover, with references in the margin to “Astraea,” the goddess of justice, as Henry had suggested. It was also dotted with marginalia from Proverbs about the pearls and rubies and Wisdom—always called “she.” So, it dawned on Lucy, Queen Elizabeth, bedecked in pearls and rubies, had been packaged as the living embodiment of Wisdom, downplaying any negatives about being a female ruler; perhaps Dee was one of her propagandists—the original agent of “spin”? And, Lucy realized, something significant must have been anticipated by Dee in this, their own current age, under the dominion of another wise and powerful woman to come, just as Henry alluded. Frustratingly, it posed many new riddles, and she thought quietly on this while she sat drinking tea. Not one word about any of it, though, did she share with her present company.