A little later that day, in Barr's house up on the heights of the Morningside Hills, where many famed scholars and teachers live backyard to backyard, Taffy B. Barr stood before her open refrigerator, one arm akimbo. On the counter by her lay a heap of tomatoes, a brain-shaped cauliflower, a cantaloupe and a clutch of beets with spreading red-veined greens. She had forgotten why she had opened the refrigerator and was pondering or pausing to see if the reason would return to her when the phone rang. She shut the great vault (the light within winking off and plunging the foodstuffs within again into darkness) and answered. It was Frank, calling from his office, with a plan to announce.

"Frank, let's talk,” she said when he paused.

"We're talking."

"At dinner."

"I need to find my passport,” he said. “I move it from place to place in order to remember where I put it, but it associates logically with nothing else. It's sui generis."

"Frank. It's a bad idea."

"It's a good idea. My best in months."

"Okay. We'll talk."

"Love you."

"Love you too."

Taffy hung up the phone; she looked up at the clock on the wall (a Regulator) and down at the vegetables on her counter, and remembered: aioli.

She'd tried, his good wife, at dinner that night and at the breakfast and lunch that followed, to talk him out of it, and failed. And so (Frank Barr in Kennedy Airport said to himself) the youth arose, and took a plane. No youth any longer, but still hale; he patted ritually the pocket where his pills were kept.

He would stop in Athens and be met there by an old—no, better say a former—graduate student of his, a woman dark and sloe-eyed enough to be Greek but in fact a Jewess from Schenectady. Zoe. Zoe mu sas agapo. Thence to Egypt, from where the gods of Greece had come at first, where the Greek wise men used to go to consult with the priests of Isis and Osiris, to sleep in the temples of Asclæpius and there dream a good dream. His colleagues had written that they might leave the conference for a day or two, rent a Land Rover, hire a guide. Make an expedition up the Nile to the temple island of Philæ. Would Frank like to come? He would. And may he (Frank Walker Barr prayed, to no particular god or goddess) dream there a good dream of his own.

6

Rosie—I am going on the train today to meet Frances Yates, Dame Frances Yates, you've heard me talk about her. If anybody can tell me what I'm supposed to do next, she can. She lives with her sister and her dogs and cats an hour from London, and we're to have tea. I can't explain here how it happened. Excuse the postcard. Pierce

"Now tell me where you've been,” she said, clasping her hands before her as though in supplication. “And where you mean to go."

Everyone who's seen her says she looked just like Margaret Rutherford, but in her shabby overcoat buttoned one button wrong (she'd just come in from the potting shed) and her hair coming loose from its great pins, she was the White Queen more exactly.

"Well,” Pierce said, “I've been to Glastonbury, and..."

"You've bean to Glostonbrie?” Her mobile eyebrows rose. “Why, you might be in search of the Grail."

He had gone to Glastonbury, the first of all his memory places, or Kraft's, starred in the guide, and site of more than one scene in Kraft's last novel. The Isle of Avalon. He would enter many churches in the coming months, very many, and of them all it was this ruined one alone that didn't inspire in him an awful trepidation: guilt, threat, pity. Its nave and transept frozen grass, its lead roof the leaden English sky. Nice. He had imagined, without thinking it through, that the places he was to go to would be somehow lost in remoteness, fallen and neglected, like ziggurats in Yucatán. This was so mown and tidied, so worked up and mapped and labeled and furnished with souvenirs, that what mystery it might once have had could not reach him, and for that he was grateful. In Kraft's old guidebook, he read about Joseph of Arimathea, Aldhelm and Dunstan, Arthur and Guinevere. He walked the ruins, the vanished cloister, fratery, library. He went out to Chalice Hill and the Holy Well. The masonry of the Well has been the cause of much discussion. Possibly it is connected with the Druids, associated with ancient rituals of sun and water. Certainly it is orientated, as has been proved by measurements on Midsummer Day. The stones are placed in wedge formation, as in the Pyramids. Sir Flinders Petrie was of the opinion that the Well might have been rock hewn by Egyptian colonists in about the year 200 BC.

Well, okay. He let the icy bloodred waters flow over his hand (chalybeate, radioactive, neverfailing) and then went up the bare Tor on a spiral track (the ascent from Chilkwell Street is easy) toward the tower on top. Soon the air was sharp as knives in his throat.

"You didn't quite reach it,” said the Dame. She let her folded hands fall in her lap, his own spirit or lame body dropping from the unscaled height. “Well. A shame. You have such a view from there. That's the reward."

"Panoramic,” her sister said. In all her books, Dame Frances credits her sister, indispensable helper and friend. It was she, lean and sharp faced as the Red Queen, who brought the tea, then sat, picked up her knitting. “Your friend Dr. John Dee knew that spot well, of course."

"Our friend Dr. Dee,” said Frances, and they both smiled at Pierce.

From the top of the Tor John Dee could have seen all the way to Wales, from where his people came. In Kraft's last unfinished book, he can also see from there a great ring of landscape giants, signs of the Zodiac marked out for miles around in the earth of Somerset by churchyards, knolls, river bends, rock outcroppings. Later Pierce found this supposed zodiac and its giants described where Kraft had doubtless found it too—in the pages of the Dictionary of Deities, Devils, and Dæmons of Mankind, by Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle.

When Dee at the end of his life returns to the well and the Tor, the Zodiac in the earth is gone, can't be seen any longer from the hill's height. In Kraft's story. Just earth after all.

"But,” the Red Queen asked the White Queen, “how would he,” indicating Pierce in the chair opposite, “have come to know of John Dee atole? It seems quite unlikely."

"Well, of course John Dee has a history in America,” said the White Queen. “He went to America.” She bent her head to Pierce. “With the group you there call the Pilgrims."

He could only regard her, goggling probably, trying to remember Dee's death date—1609? Not later, surely.

"Not the man himself,” she said, buttering toast. “But his thought, and his mark. Oh yes. John Winthrop was a devotee of Dee and his learning—you weren't aware? He brought a whole alchemical library with him to the New World, and he used Dee's Monas as his personal sign.” She bit into her toast with large strong teeth, lifting her eyebrows merrily at him. He began to suspect that she knew very well she was being unsettling. “Think what its adventures might have bean, thereafter."

"Yes.” Among them his own chapter of the Invisible College, in the mountains of eastern Kentucky twenty-five years before; himself, his cousins, his heroes.

"And where do you go next?” she asked. “On your quest."

"I'm going next to Germany,” Pierce said. “Heidelberg."

At this name she and her sister turned slowly to look on one another with unreadable expressions, unreadable to him, British expressions of alarm, or astonishment, or amusement, or all of those and more. As one their looks returned to him, and both at once said, “Ah: the Winter King."