The dot of light from the sun moved over the floor in the heavy gloom of the aisle until it struck the refracting mirror. For a fleeting moment—literally seconds—the watery image of the angel, first seen in the former front banqueting room of the White Hart Hotel on St. George’s Night, two months before, reappeared to the enchantment of the group. It lacked the definition it had attained in its first incarnation, when Alex had used lasers and prisms in pitch-darkness, but the effect was tantalizing. “Lucy as an angel” appeared and disappeared in the south transept of Chartres Cathedral as the sun crossed the meridian and moved on, repeating a journey that had been similarly noted on this spot—sans angel—for hundreds of years. Gentle applause, which was thought not too boisterous for the religious setting, accompanied the vision.

“Not angles, but angels,” Alex repeated.

Unrelated observers left, but Amel Azziz—who had arrived with Zarina Anwar via Eurostar in time to watch—twinkled at Max. It was obvious that the boy had been brilliantly rehearsed by his father, but nevertheless he was impressed. Now he humorously countered Grace—who had made an offer to the child of an immediate job in television—with a suggestion of his own: that Max come and learn beside him in the operating room in the “proper medical field” of myocardial surgery. Alex laughed at the pair of them.

A tall man with Henry now came to shake Max’s hand. “Max, Alex! A most majestic vision!—as Ferdinand told Prospero.” Richard Proctor, Alex’s godfather, had arranged consent for the demonstration with a longstanding friend, Monsignor Jérôme.

Alex laughed. “Well, despite the constraints with the ambient light and the fact that the solstice is tomorrow, we seem to have raised some spirits—literally. Prospero would have approved, I think: ‘Spirits, which by mine art I have called to enact my present fancies.’”

“Could they really have done this, Alex? Made a hologram in the late sixteenth century?”

Alex, with hands in his pockets, shook his head. “How shall we know? We found these items together in one of the boxes. Whether this was their intention…But Dee was an astute mathematician who could easily have plotted the angles, and he experimented with the mirrors given him by Mercator. Bruno was interested in the sun—very poignantly, I’d guess, when he was in the darkness of his Inquisition cell without paper and ink. He’d worked out so many secrets of the solar system philosophically rather than scientifically. Both men rediscovered how the ancient Greeks and Egyptians had used sunlight to make statues speak. It’s pure conjecture, Richard—but Dee created similar illusions for the theater. I think it’s what the accompanying diagram was illustrating—though we have the advantage of hindsight. But it is possible. Whether by design, by accident, or by angelic intervention—there’s another question.” Alex laughed.