AS LUCY UNLOCKED THE MAIN SHOP-FRONT DOOR, THE COMPACT FIGURE OF Fitzalan Walters entered—trailed as usual by the broad-shouldered Lucifer, as he sometimes called Angelo. He experienced a strange frisson on seeing Lucy’s expression and physical being. The atmosphere was charged, and the air dank with an inherent smell of soot. He glanced at Temple, spoke coolly to him: “Someone trodden on your grave, Guy?” Temple was feeling too ill to argue or explain, and he supported himself against the wall, shining his flashlight at the mural, which was now occupying Lucy.

Lucy was discomforted: she noted that the details seemed less vivid, less complete, than they had been a moment ago. Then she saw that the mural was in fact screened by glass, and appeared smaller. But her eyes told Walters nothing about its apparently changed state. “The final pointer must be here somewhere,” she said with vigor. “‘I want to change the Wall, and make my Will,’ the central text says. This painting is of Adonis slain by the boar—he has an Elizabethan ruff. Perhaps the rose, in the white horse’s mouth above, or in the bridle here, marks a spot?”

Walters grappled unproductively with the electricity switches, disappointed to have such poor light to scrutinize the work before him. Water damage from the bathroom above had required them to cut the power, Lucy was telling Walters as he continued flicking switches. He could see the seepage from the top right-hand corner. What a blasphemy for such a valuable and unique work of art.

“So, Miss King, this is Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, painted about the time the poem was published?”

Lucy nodded. “It must have been a meeting place for a mystical order originally inspired by Dee—the Rosicrucians in their infancy. Shakespeare would have convened here with them, and Bacon was a leading member too. So were Spenser and John Donne, and Sir Philip Sidney before his early death—all the Elizabethan men of letters.” And maybe a brilliant woman of letters too, she thought. She shone her light over the painting and it danced on a central image of a horse and rider, the Red-Cross Knight, St. George. “Spenser writes about him in The Faerie Queen. In the painting here the horse is poised over Adonis, the Oriental ‘Lord of the Sun.’” Lucy broke off to enjoy the mural, identifying the boar on the right of the painting which symbolized winter, whose destructive powers were reversed when Adonis came back to life via the red-blooming flowers in the foreground, springing from his wound. “Venus’s love and grief causes his renewal,” she told Walters defiantly. “There are clear parallels with the Christian story. In fact, depictions of her holding the dead Adonis were the inspiration for the Pietas in art.”