Lester Furnival doesn't know it yet but she's dead.

She's been dead for a month when her husband Richard meets her on Westminster Bridge.

Richard's friend Jonathan Drayton has been commissioned to paint the mysterious healer, Clerk Simon. Drayton doesn't like the picture.

Simon thinks it's the best painting anyone has done of him in hundreds of years ...

Clerk Simon's sympathetic magic, bi-location and attempted immortality make his eventual downfall the more dramatic.

Once again Charles Williams shows his profound knowledge of the world invisible.

Charles Williams was a member of the Inklings - the celebrated literary society which included C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien - and he was also a member of the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross an offshoot of the Order of the Golden Dawn, made infamous by Aleister Crowley.