Sovereigns of Shadow and Light

Two years later. A warm, golden June afternoon had settled over the historic gardens of Blackwood Hall. The ancient fifty-acre estate on Hampstead Heath was an earthly paradise of blooming white climbing roses, lavender borders humming with bumblebees, and soaring three-hundred-year-old English oaks whose wide canopies cast dappled, dancing shade across the rolling emerald lawns. On a large woven wool blanket spread beneath the shade of a colossal cedar tree,…