She was challenging him to make the simple connection between pagan iconography and Christian myth, but he latched on to the painting instead and ignored any parallels. The professor and Angelo were concentrating, but she noticed that Temple seemed absent and far from self-composed beside them.

“Adonis was a principal figure for Dee.” She focused her flashlight. “This rose represents both his soul and his heart. The Rosicrucians were intent on turning darkness into light, winter to summer—a different view of resurrection.” Lucy’s words hung in the air, and everything meant something further for her about Will.

“Yes, very different. So, what were the Rosicrucians after?” Walters asked her.

“Religious enlightenment, partially through magic. It gave them a mathematical approach to the physical world. Mathematics acquainted them with the second world, the celestial world. But above that is a third—supreme heaven, the supercelestial world. This is higher than Paradise, and you could reach it only with the help of angelic conjuration. They imagined that, once they’d reached this higher level through magic, they would be one with the angel hierarchy, where all religions were one. Dee believed this, and thought he’d made contact with good angels. Sadly for Dee, only Edward Kelley spoke to them, passing messages, and he was unreliable. But the movement as Dee conceived it included all religious attitudes, Protestant and Catholic, Jewish and Muslim. All were one at the level of the angels.”

If Lucy hoped this message of commonality and greater spiritual aspiration for all would affect these men, she was disappointed. She looked at them—one grasping his middle as though he had crippling indigestion, the other sure of his own rightness and his own messages from his own “angels,” looking back at her unblinking. She grinned, determined to push her luck with him.

“The three worlds are fascinating, don’t you agree? In the physical world we use our earthly body, and in the celestial world, we need our spirit and unselfish emotions. But only in higher paradise do we exercise our intellect. Adam and Eve dwelled in demi-paradise, Eden, but when Eve seized the fruit of knowledge, she was asking for access to the highest heaven. Woman it was, who wanted to lift us from ignorance and have true knowledge; and an ignorant man, it surely is, who could still believe true knowledge should be a male preserve.”

Walters looked at her with irritation. He’d heard this claptrap, pro-feminist, pro-humanist heresy before, which argued that man had the capacity to be god if he were enlightened by knowledge; that he was divine himself. Women, by this dictum, were to be congratulated for wanting to be better educated! But female academics had infiltrated the system, upset the balance, caused moral decay and permanent chaos in the home, changed the basis of marital relationships, and decreased in their respect for men. Walters wanted to get to the prize quickly, however, so he decided to indulge her.