"Excuse me?"

"You are in pursuit of the Winter King,” said the Dame.

"The winter king?"

"You know of him."

"No. Well, yes. There was a novel of Kraft's. That novelist who."

"Ah, he."

"The Winter King. I read it. I must have. I don't remember it."

"No? You will want to know the tale. The whole tale."

"Oh?” He thought that in British English want meant need, or had once.

"It's quite a tragic one,” her sister said. “Best to hear it before you go."

He said nothing, unable to refuse. Dame Frances clapped her hands before her like a concert singer about to begin. “King James I, who feared so many things, who wanted to secure everyone's good opinion, was angling for a Spanish marriage for his son, Henry, to protect him from the Catholic powers. Then Henry, whom everyone loved and admired, parfit gentil knight, died suddenly."

"A fever,” said her sister. “From sweating after a game of tennis. So they said."

"And so then James married his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, to the German prince palatine, Frederick, who was—or was likely to be when he was a bit more secure—the leader of the Protestant powers in Europe. A very suitable match. Two young people, quite attractive, it's said, certainly energetic and with a great deal of dash—actually they seem to me a very Shakespearean couple—they are married with great pomp in the winter of 1613, and go back to Frederick's capital, Heidelberg. Which is extensively modernized and beautified with gardens, grottoes, statues. They seem a sublimely fortunate pair.

"Then.” She lowered her chin, looking at him above her glasses, mouth solemnly pursed. “The Holy Roman emperor, an aged nonentity named Matthias, dies. He was not only emperor but also the Catholic king of a largely Protestant Bohemia. The crown of Bohemia is, theoretically at least, elective, and when the archduke of Austria—a devout activist Catholic who is certain to be elected the next emperor—wins the Bohemian crown for himself as well, a group of Protestant nobles in Prague revolt. From a high window in Prague castle the archduke's surrogates are thrown..."

"The Defenestration of Prague,” Pierce said. Long, long ago they had asked Axel on television: By what name do we know the event that took place in Prague in 1618 and began the Thirty Years’ War, and what does the word mean? Defenestration: throwing-out-of-the-window. “For heaven's sake."

"The Bohemians then turn to Frederick and elect him their king instead. And he accepts. And for a single winter, while the imperial armies gather force and the German Protestant princes waver and argue, and James in London offers no help atole, the two of them, Frederick and Elizabeth, reign in Prague castle. Then, in one sharp, quick battle, the emperor's forces defeat him utterly. Utterly. He barely escapes, his reign is over, he and his queen flee into exile, and all is as though it had not bean. Soon his home country is devastated. Thirty years of war begin, the first European world war.

"And the question is: why did he do it? Why did he think he could? And why did anyone else think so? Answer that, and it will lead you back to that sign, and poor John Dee."

She said it as though she herself knew the answer very well, and her sister too, who now lowered her knitting and said—like a character in a play, filling in an audience by telling another character what both of them know very well—"Why, was it not poor Alexis who first put this question to you? And challenged you to answer it?"

"Alexis,” said the Dame, putting a finger to her chin in thought. “In service of his Dictionary. Do you think so?"

"Yes.” The thing she knitted had grown noticeably longer.

"So long ago,” said the Dame, regarding Pierce. “I knew so little."

"You don't mean,” Pierce said at last, “an author, a sort of author, named St.-Phalle? Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle?"

Dame Frances blinked. “Oh, did you know him?"

"Well, no. I mean I didn't know him."

Dame Frances bent inquiringly to her sister, who said loudly, “He didn't know him."

"Poor old dear,” said Frances. “I knew him, oh not well, but for quite a long time. Yes. You mean this fellow.” She went again to her shelves, and drew out a large book, bound in imitation leather, that bore on its spine the sign of the Monas.

"He used often to come to the institute,” she said dreamily, opening the book. “When he was in good health, in the days I first began to work there. Always busily collecting references and making memoranda. For his books. Though this may have bean his only one, in fact."

Pierce had in his life seen three copies of that book. This one of hers; before that, the one in the Blackbury Jambs Free Library, that Fellowes Kraft had so often taken out; and before that, the one sent to his house, unasked for, by the state librarian in Lexington, Kentucky, a woman surely of the Yates type, a chain to her glasses.

"But you see he wasn't a scholar atole, really,” she said. “He was a sort of antiquarian, a jackdaw, collecting shiny bits of this and that, whatever caught his fancy. Indeed he looked rather like a jackdaw. That was how he seemed to me then, at any rate. I was very young."

Pierce stood, unable to stay seated, and came closer as she turned the pages of the Dictionary she held. Soon she would come upon the entry for the Invisible College.

"I imagine he took a bit of a fancy to you,” her sister said, resuming her knitting. “So many of the older ones did."

Frances closed her eyes, so as not to hear this, and went on. “We did rather stay in touch. He ceased to come round, later on, and I learned where he kept himself, a couple of rooms in Notting Hill. Now and then if convenient I'd look in. Bring him some beef tea. Fetch him a book. For his researches.” She smiled: a gentle, a wholly gentle and knowing smile.

"Notes,” said her sister. Her scarf was long enough to strangle her with.

"He'd write me little notes. Peculiar little notes pointing out small things. Only when I found them recently in a box, all clipped together—you see I am of the jackdaw clan myself—they seemed to make a kind of story or narrative, like the clues of a scavenger hunt."

She shut the book, not perhaps noticing Pierce's index pointing to the entry, the picture, his mouth open; and she replaced it, not in the place from which she had drawn it. “I have bean,” she said to him confidentially, as though she might be overheard, or as though she said something that might be thought unkind, “so embarrassed by the sort of person one can encounter, when doing the work that I do. Those who believe that age-old conspiracies are still afoot, reaching back to the Pyramids; that the Rosicrucians are now about, and working on our behalf; that there is a story ongoing. I supposed him to be one such. But he was something different, I think. He was a Rosicrucian, you see; he believed himself to be one. But he also knew the secret to being a Rosicrucian: that you can only strive and hope and wish to be one. That is what a Rosicrucian is; it is all that one is."

Two Siamese cats had come into the room, and now wound themselves around the Dame's thick legs, looking at Pierce as though they too were in on the joke.

"The great genealogy of knowledge,” Dame Frances said, sighing. “The transmission of occult understanding from master to master. All of them longed to be part of it, you see. To be tapped, to be taken in, taught the secret language. The Invisible College. But there were no masters, no brothers. It was never anything but a chain of books; all that it ever was. Books and their readers. And Plato said: We think, when we read a book, that we hear the voice of a person; but if we try to question a book, it can't answer."