For a while they peered inside without another motion, each separately concluding that though the box was crammed full of flower blooms, it appeared quite loosely packed with any other contents. Cautiously, however, Lucy closed her hand around the one single item that was topmost and central in the box, held in a small piece of vellum. Alex’s eyes encouraged her, and she slowly prized the wrapping from the object, taking care to damage neither one. The written scrap she passed across to Alex, and in her open palm she held a small golden jewel of simple beauty, an inch or so in length, inlaid with perhaps a dozen pearls and as many rubies, with one dark sapphire at the center. It was a shape both of them recognized: a crescent moon, above a sun, above a cross; and viewed another way, alpha at the top, omega at bottom; embracing all, the interwoven symbols of Venus and Mars—woman and man. It was the monas of John Dee.

With the modest emblem—an homage to everyone’s faith and religion from antiquity to modernity, and to the continuing hope of a brotherhood of man—resting in her hand, Alex offered the words on the fragment to Lucy. “It’s a quotation—nothing I recognize.”

She read aloud: “‘When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the outer as the inner, and the above as the below; and when you make the male and female into a single one; then shall you enter the kingdom.’”

And they looked at each other, understanding perfectly. They should put the rest away, until they could open it on just such a day.

Alex half crushed Lucy in his arms, and for the longest time, neither spoke. She knew his mind and deepest emotions were with his mother, and with Will, and with her. She knew these emotions were fragile, that he wouldn’t risk a word; and she knew this because her own thoughts, and feelings, and senses, were so close to his. Then he asked her simply, “Shall it be midsummer?”

Her eyes answered him first, then her words affirmed: “In Diana’s Garden of Eden.”

34

SHE’D SLEPT LATE—HAD HEARD THE DOOR OPEN AND CLOSE, THE SHUTTERS pushed back, in a waking dream, refusing to let it register. Near panic, she sat up so quickly she felt light-headed; but the familiar vase beside the less familiar bed made her smile. The italic fountain pen—the truest conduit of Alex’s feelings—had inscribed just eight words:

“Rosa Mundi: plucked for my love, at midsummer.”