Ex Libris

Chapter One

Anyone wishing to purchase a book in London in the year 1660 had a choice of four areas. Ecclesiastical works could be bought from the booksellers in St. Paul's Churchyard, while the shops and stalls of Little Britain specialised in Greek and Latin volumes, and those on the western edge of Fleet Street stocked legal texts for the city's barristers and magistrates. The fourth place to look for a book-and by far the best-would have been on London Bridge.

In those days the gabled buildings on the ancient bridge housed a motley assortment of shops. Here were found two glovers, a swordmaker, two milliners, a tea merchant, a book binder, several shoemakers, as well as a manufacturer of silk parasols, an invention that had lately come into fashion. There was also, on the north end, the shop of a plummassier who sold brightly-coloured feathers for the crowns of beaver hats like that worn by the new king. Most of all, though, the bridge was home to fine booksellers-six of them in all by 1660. Because these shops were not stocked to suit the needs of vicars or lawyers, or anyone else in particular, they were more varied than those in the other three districts, so that almost everything ever scratched on to a parchment or printed and bound between covers could be found on their shelves. And the shop on London Bridge whose wares were the most varied of all stood halfway across, in Nonsuch House, where, above a green door and two sets of polished window-plates, hung a signboard whose weather-worn inscription read:

NONSUCH BOOKS

All Volumes Bought & Sold

Isaac Inchbold, Proprietor

I am Isaac Inchbold, Proprietor. By the summer of 1660 I had owned Nonsuch Books for some eighteen years. The bookshop itself, with its copiously furnished shelves on the ground floor and its cramped lodgings one twist of a turnpike stair above those, had resided on London Bridge-and in a corner of Nonsuch House, the most handsome of its buildings-for much longer: almost forty years. I had been apprenticed there in 1635, at the age of fourteen, after my father died during an outburst of plague and my mother, confronted shortly afterwards with his debts, helped herself to a cup of poison. The death of Mr. Smallpace, my master-also from the plague-coincided with the end of my apprenticeship and my entry as a freeman into the Company of Stationers. And so on that momentous day I became proprietor of Nonsuch Books, where I have lived ever since in the disorder of several thousand morocco- and buckram-bound companions.

Mine was a quiet and contemplative life among my walnut shelves. It was made up of a series of undisturbed routines modestly pursued. I was a man of wisdom and learning-or so I liked to think-but of dwarfish worldly experience. I knew everything about books, but little, I admit, of the world that bustled past outside my green door. I ventured into this alien sphere of churning wheels and puffing smoke and scurrying feet as seldom as circumstances permitted. By 1660 I had travelled barely more than two dozen leagues beyond the gates of London, and I rarely travelled much within London either, not if I could avoid it. While running simple errands I often became hopelessly confused in the maze of crowded, filthy streets that began twenty paces beyond the north gate of the bridge, and as I limped back to my shelves of books I would feel as if I were returning from exile. All of which-combined with nearsightedness, asthma and a club foot that lent me a lopsided gait-makes me, I suppose, an improbable agent in the events that are to follow.

What else must you know about me? I was unduly comfortable and content. I was entering my fortieth year with almost everything a man of my inclinations could ask for. Besides a prospering business, I had all of my teeth, most of my hair, very little grey in my beard, and a handsome, well-tended paunch on which I could balance a book while I sat hour after hour every evening in my favourite horsehair armchair. Each night an old woman named Margaret cooked my supper, and twice a week another poor wretch, Jane, scrubbed my dirty stockings. I had no wife. I had married as a young man, but my wife, Arabella, had died some years ago, five days after scratching her finger on a door-latch. Our world was a dangerous place. I had no children either. I had dutifully sired my share-four in all-but they too had died from one affliction or another and now lay buried alongside their mother in the outer churchyard of St. Magnus-the-Martyr, to which I still made weekly excursions with a bouquet from the stall of a flower-seller. I had neither hopes nor expectations of remarriage. My circumstances suited me uncommonly well.

What else? I lived alone except for my apprentice, Tom Monk, who was confined after the conclusion of business hours to the top floor of Nonsuch House, where he ate and slept in a chamber that was not much bigger than a cubbyhole. But Monk never complained. Nor, of course, did I. I was luckier than most of the 400,000 other souls crammed inside the walls of London or outside in the Liberties. My business provided me with £150 per year-a handsome sum in those days, especially for a man without either a family or tastes for the sensual pleasures so readily available in London. And no doubt my quiet and bookish idyll would have continued, no doubt my comfortable life would have remained intact and blissfully undisturbed until I took my place in the small rectangular plot reserved for me next to Arabella, had it not been for a peculiar summons delivered to my shop one day in the summer of 1660.

On that warm morning in July the door to an intricate and singular house creaked invitingly ajar. I who considered myself so wise and sceptical was then to proceed in ignorance along its dark arteries, stumbling through blind passages and secret chambers in which, these many years later, I still find myself searching in vain for a clue. It is easier to find a labyrinth, writes Comenius, than a guiding path. Yet every labyrinth is a circle that begins where it ends, as Boethius tells us, and ends where it begins. So it is that I must double back, retrace my false turns and, by unspooling this thread of words behind me, arrive once again at the place where, for me, the story of Sir Ambrose Plessington began.

The event to which I refer took place on a Tuesday morning in the first week of July. I well remember the date, for it was only a short time after King Charles II had returned from his exile in France to take the throne left empty when his father was beheaded by Cromwell and his cronies eleven years earlier. The day began like any other. I unbarred my wooden shutters, lowered my green awning into a soft breeze, and sent Tom Monk to the General Letter Office in Clock Lane. It was Monk's duty each morning to carry out the ashes from the grate, brush the floors, empty the chamber-pots, cleanse the sink and fetch the coal. But before he performed any of these tasks I sent him into Dowgate to call for my letters. I was most particular about my post, especially on Tuesdays, which was when the mail-bag from Paris arrived by packet-boat. When he finally returned, having dallied, as usual, along Thames Street on the way back, a copy of Shelton's translation of Don Quixote, the 1652 edition, was propped on my paunch. I looked up from the page and, adjusting my spectacles, squinted at the shape in the doorway. No spectacle-maker has ever been able to grind a pair of lenses thick enough to remedy my squinch-eyed stare. I marked my place with a forefinger and yawned.

'Anything for us?'

'One letter, sir.'

'Well? Let us have it, then.'

'He made me pay tuppence for it.'

'Pardon me?'

'The clerk.' He extended his hand. 'He said it was undertaxed, sir. Not a paid letter, he said. So I had to pay tuppence.'

'Very well.' I set Don Quixote aside, remunerated Monk with a show of irritation, then seized the letter. 'Now off with you. Go fetch the coal.'

I was expecting to hear from Monsieur Grimaud, my factor in Paris, who had been instructed to bid on my behalf for a copy of Vignon's edition of the Odyssey. But I saw immediately that the letter, a single sheet tied with string and embossed with a seal, bore the green stamp of the Inland Office rather than the red one of the Foreign Office. This was peculiar, because domestic mail arrived at the General Letter Office on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. For the moment, however, I thought little of this oddity. The Post Office was in a state of upheaval like everything else. Already many of the old postmasters-Cromwell's busiest spies, so the rumours went-had been relieved of their positions, and the Postmaster-General, John Thurloe, was clapped up in the Tower.

I turned the letter over in my hand. In the top, right-hand corner a stamped mark read '1^st July', which meant that the letter had arrived in the General Letter Office two days earlier. My name and address were inscribed across it in a secretary hand, slantwise and hectic. The writing was blotched in some places and faint in others, as if the ink was old and powdery or the goose quill splayed at the nib or worn to a stump. The oblong impression of a signet ring on the reverse bore a coat of arms with the legend 'Marchamont'. I cut the frayed string with my penknife, broke the seal with my thumb and unfolded the sheet.

I still possess this strange letter, my summons, the first of the many texts that led me towards the ever-receding figure of Sir Ambrose Plessington, and I reproduce it here, word for word:

28^th June

Pontifex Hall

Crampton Magna

Dorsetshire

My good Sir:

I trust you will forgive the impertinence of a Lady writing to a stranger to make what will seem, I have no doubt, a peculiar request; but circumstances force the expediency upon me. These melancholy affairs are of a pressing nature, but I believe you can play no small part in their resolution. I dare not enumerate further details until I have your more private attentions, and must therefore, with regret, depend entirely on your trust.

My request is for your presence at Pontifex Hall at the earliest possible convenience. To this end a coach driven by Mr. Phineas Greenleaf will be waiting for you beneath the sign of the Three Pigeons in High Holborn, at 8 o'clock in the morning of the 5^th of July. You have nothing to apprehend from this journey, which I promise shall be made worth your while.

Here I must break off, with the assurance that I am, dear Sir, with gratitude,

Your most obliging servant,

Alethea Greatorex

Postscriptum: Let this caution regulate your actions: neither mention to anyone your receipt of this letter, nor disclose to them your destination or purpose.

That was all, nothing more. The strange communication offered no further information, no further inducements. After reading it through once more, my first response was to crumple it into a ball. I had no doubt that the 'melancholy' and 'pressing' business of Alethea Greatorex involved disposing of a crumbling estate entailed upon her by a late indigent husband. The sorry appearance of the unpaid letter suggested the impecunious condition of its author. No doubt Pontifex Hall comprised among its meagre charms a library with whose modest contents she hoped to appease her creditors. Requests of this variety were not unusual, of course. The sad business of assigning values to the dire remains of bankrupt estates-mostly those of old Royalist families whose fortunes had tumbled low during Cromwell's time-had three or four times fallen within the compass of my duties. Usually I purchased the better editions myself, then sent the rest of the worm-eaten lot to auction, or else to Mr. Hopcroft, the rag-and-bone man. But never in the course of my duties had I been engaged under such secretive terms or required to travel as far as Dorsetshire.

And yet I didn't discard the letter. One of the more cryptic phrases-'I dare not enumerate further details'-had snagged my imagination, as did the plea in the postscript for secrecy. I pushed my spectacles further up the bridge of my nose and once again fixed the letter with a myopic squint. I wondered why I should feel I had something to 'apprehend' from the journey and how the vague promise that it would be worth my time might fulfil itself. The profit to which the words alluded seemed at once grander and vaguer than any vulgar financial transaction. Or was this simply my imagination, anxious as usual to weave and then unpick a mystery?

Monk had disposed of the rubbish in the ash-can and was now returning through the door with a few lumps of sea coal clattering in his pail. He set it on the floor, sighed, picked up his broom and brushed apathetically at a beam of sunlight. I laid the letter aside, but a second later took it up to study more closely the secretary hand, an old-fashioned style even for those days. I read the letter again, slowly, and this time its text seemed less explicable, less certainly the appeal of a financially embarrassed widow. I spread it on the counter and studied the crested seal more closely, regretting the haste with which I broke it, for the legend was no longer decipherable.

And it was at this point that I noticed something peculiar about the letter, one more of its strange and, for the moment, inexplicable traits. As I held the paper to the light I realised that the author had folded the paper twice and sealed it not with wax but a rust-coloured shellac. This was not unusual in itself, of course: most people, myself included, sealed their letters by melting a stick of shellac. But as I gathered the flakes and tried to reconstruct the image impressed by the matrix I noticed how the shellac was mingled with a substance of a slightly different colour and composition: something darker and less adherent.

I moved the letter into the beam of light falling across my counter. Monk's broom rasped slowly across the floorboards, and I became aware of his curious gaze. I prised at the seal with the blade of my penknife as gently as an apothecary slicing the seed pod of a rare plant. The compound crumbled and then sprinkled over the counter. A beeswax was clearly distinguishable from the shellac into which, for whatever reason, it was mingled. I carefully separated a few of the grains, puzzled that my hand seemed to be trembling.

'Is there something wrong, Mr. Inchbold?'

'No, Monk. Nothing at all. Back to work with you now.'

I straightened and gazed over his head, out of the window. The narrow street was busy with its morning commerce of bobbing heads and revolving wheels. Dust was raised from the carriageway and, caught in the slats of morning sunlight, turned to gold. I lowered my eyes to the flakes on the counter. What, if anything, might the mixture mean? That Lady Marchamont's matrix bore a residue of wax? That she had closed another letter with a beeswax only moments before sealing mine with shellac? It hardly made sense. But then neither did the alternative: that someone had moulded her original wax seal, broken it, then closed it with shellac impressed by a counterfeit seal.

My pulses quickened. Yes, it seemed most likely that the seal had been tampered with. But by whom? Someone in the General Letter Office? That might explain the delay in its delivery-why it was available on a Tuesday instead of a Monday. There were rumours that letter-openers and copyists worked out of the top floor of the General Letter Office. But to what purpose? So far as I knew, my correspondence had never been opened before-not even the packets sent by my factors in Paris and Oxford, those two bastions of Royalist exiles and malcontents.

It was more plausible, of course, that my correspondent was the true object of this scrutiny. Still, I was struck with the oddity of the situation. Why, if she had something to fear, should Lady Marchamont have entrusted her correspondence to a means of conveyance as famously unscrupulous as the Post Office? Why not send the summons with Mr. Phineas Greenleaf or some other messenger?

As I folded the letter along its creases and tucked it in my pocket I felt no uneasiness, as perhaps I should have done. Instead I felt only a mild interest. I was curious, that was all. I felt as if the peculiar letter and its seal were merely parts of a difficult but by no means incomprehensible puzzle to be solved by an application of the powers of reason-and I had tremendous faith in the powers of reason, especially my own. The letter was just one more text awaiting its decipherment.

And so on a sudden impulse I arranged for an incredulous Monk to tend to the shop while I, like Don Quixote, prepared to leave my shelves of books and venture into the country-into the world that, so far, I had managed to avoid. For the rest of the day I served my usual customers, helping them, as always, to find editions of this work or commentaries on that one. But today the ritual had been altered, because all the while I felt the letter rustling quietly in my pocket with soft, anonymous whispers of conspiracy. As instructed, I showed it to no one, nor did I tell anyone, not even Monk, where I would be travelling or to whom I proposed to pay my visit.

Chapter Two

One day after the receipt of my summons, in the hour before dawn, three horsemen entered London from the east. They came in sight of the spires and chimneystacks as the stars paled and the clouds were mantled here and there with light: a trio of black-clad riders galloping along the riverside towards Ratcliff. Their journey must have been a long one, though little of it is known to me except those few leagues at the end.

They had landed on the Kent coast, in Romney Marsh, two days earlier, after crossing the Channel in a fishing smack. Even with calm weather and a level sea the crossing must have taken a good eight hours, but the landing would have been carefully timed. The boat's master, Calfhill, had been under scrupulous instructions and knew every shoal, cove and customs official along fifty-mile stretches of either coast. They put in to shore in darkness, at high tide, with the prow bouncing in the swell, the sail struck low as Calfhill stood in the bows grasping a long pole. At that hour the customs sheds further along the line of beach would have stood empty, but only for another hour, perhaps less, so they were forced to work quickly. Calfhill dropped anchor and, when the flukes bit, stepped over the gunwales and into the knee-deep water, which must have been icy even at that time of year. They disembarked without a torch or flare and scraped the boat across the shingle to the high-water line, where three black stallions had been tethered among the screen of osiers. The horses, snickering and stamping in the darkness, were already saddled and bridled. The beach was otherwise empty.

For the next few minutes Calfhill hovered, anxious and suspicious, as the men tiptoed back into the waves and scrubbed the pitch from their faces and hands. Overhead a skein of plovers sailed inland. Smells of thyme and pastured sheep blew out to sea. Only a few minutes remained before daylight, but Calfhill's passengers worked as punctiliously as if making their morning toilets. One of them even paused to polish a few of the gold buttons on his coat-some kind of black livery-with a wetted handkerchief, then, stooping, the toes of his boots. His efforts were fastidious.

'For heaven's sake,' Calfhill murmured under his breath. He understood the risks, of course, even if his passengers did not. He was an 'owler', a smuggler whose usual freight was the sacks of wool he shipped to France or the crates of wine and brandy he transported back. Nor was he averse to smuggling passengers-an even more profitable trade. Huguenots and Roman Catholics, like the hogsheads of brandy, came to England, while Royalists went the other way, into France. And now it was the Puritans who were fleeing England, of course; Holland was their destination. In the past six weeks he had smuggled at least a dozen of them out of Dover or the Romney Marsh and across to Zeeland or on to pinks anchored near the North Foreland; a few others he smuggled off the pinks and into England to act as spies against King Charles. It was dangerous work, but he calculated that if all of this distrust and deception held out (as he knew it would, human nature being what it was) he would be able to retire to a sugar plantation in Jamaica within four years.

But this latest assignment was a peculiar one, even for an owler of Calfhill's experience. Two days earlier in Calais, in a tavern in the basse ville where he normally received information about his consignments of brandy, a man named Fontenay approached him, paid half of an agreed sum-ten gold pistoles-and gave him patient instructions. It would be another good night's work. Fontenay had since disappeared, but then, at dusk the previous day, the strangers met him, as promised, in the sheltered reach from which, disguised as a fisherman, he normally set out with his hogsheads and-so far as he could ever determine their identities-the occasional Royalist agent or Romish priest. His new passengers had been puffing heavily as they clambered aboard. He caught a good view of one of them in the moonlight: a corpulent figure, red-faced as an innkeeper's wife, with hooded eyes, a sensuous mouth, and a gross, well-fed belly that would have done credit to a London alderman. Hardly a seafaring man. Would he take ill in the smack, as so many of them did, and retch over the gunwales? Amazingly, he did not. But throughout the ensuing voyage the three men spoke not a word, neither to Calfhill nor to each other, even though Calfhill-something of a linguist, as his trade required-attempted to draw them in English, French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish.

Now, still in silence, they were staggering towards the snorting stallions, the dry osiers crackling underfoot. Calfhill found himself wondering for the dozenth time which country-or which party within which country-they represented. All three seemed to be gentlemen, which was unusual, because in Calfhill's experience spying was not exactly a gentleman's occupation. Most of the men he smuggled were a foul-mouthed bunch of villains-bravos, bungs, cutpurses, nose-slitters, ruffians of every description, all of them recruited in the worst bawdy-houses and taverns of London or Paris and then paid a slave's wages to betray their friends and countries, which most were only too eager to do. But these fellows? They looked too soft for such rough-and-tumble recreations. The palms of the fat one, as he handed over the remaining coins, had been smooth and plump as those of a lady. Before he applied the pitch, a measure at which he baulked at first, his smooth chops had smelled of shaving soap and perfume. And their black livery, their coats, waistcoats, breeches and doublets, all were of a fine cut, even decorated, a bit ostentatiously, with a few gold frogs and ribbons. So what desperate mission could have tumbled them from their wine-cellars and dinner-tables and sent them to venture life and limb in England?

The three of them were now, at long last, ready to depart. The fat one swung clumsily on to the horse at his fourth attempt-he was accustomed to the aid of a mounting-block, Calfhill supposed-and then, without so much as a nod or a wave, guided the Percheron up a steep knoll. He was an abysmally poor rider, Calfhill could see that right away. He swayed from side to side, head bobbing, fat legs limply bouncing at every step. A man more familiar with carriages and sedan-chairs, Calfhill guessed. The unfortunate horse strained towards the cornice of grass, cleared it with a desperate surge, and began making his way inland at a canter.

His duties at an end, Calfhill turned and began bumping the boat back into the water. He was in a hurry because in that same auberge in Calais he had been approached by a second man besides Fontenay, and now six tods of the finest Cotswold wool were waiting for him in a cove two miles further down the coast. He would be met among the reeds by three men and paid five pistoles to smuggle the wool to the French coast, where he would be paid five more. But now as the keel scraped across the beach he heard a sound behind him. Turning, he saw that one of the three riders was still on the beach, his horse facing the water.

'Yes?' Calfhill straightened and took a few clattering steps over the shingle. 'Forgot something, have you?'

The black-clad rider said nothing. He merely tugged at the reins and swung his horse round towards the hill. Almost as an afterthought, he twisted in his saddle and with a flash of gold brocade produced from the folds of his cloak a firelock pistol.

Calfhill gaped as if at a cunning trick, then took a step backwards. 'What the devil-?'

The man discharged the weapon without ceremony. There was a surprisingly soft explosion and a small puff of smoke. The lead ball struck Calfhill square in the chest. He staggered backwards like a clumsy dancer, then lowered his head and blinked curiously at the wound, from which blood spurted as if from the bung-hole of a wine cask. He raised his hands to staunch it, but the front of his doublet had already darkened and his face was as white as a goose. His mouth opened and closed as if forming one last outraged objection. It never came, for with a smooth, almost balletic manoeuvre he executed a half turn and crumpled into the reeds at the water's edge.

The man tucked the pistol away and, five minutes later, reached his two companions, who were waiting for him beyond the crest of the rise. For a mile the three of them followed one of the sheep tracks on the downlands. Then they swung inland on to a narrow post-road. By this time a half-dozen sand crabs were scuttling across the shingle towards Calfhill's body, over which the tallest osiers were bent like mourners. His corpse would not be discovered for several more days, by which time the trio of riders had entered the gates of London.

Chapter Three

The only way to reach Crampton Magna in those days was to follow the road from London to Plymouth as far as Shaftesbury and then turn south along an ill-defined and seldom-used network of trackways leading towards the distant coast. On its way to Dorchester, one of the most rustic of these passed round the edge of a village of ten or twelve timber-built houses with sooty, moss-dripping thatches, all crouched in a snug fold of low hills. Crampton Magna-for this, at last, was it-also contained a decrepit mill with broken sluices, a single inn, a church with an octagonal spire, and a shrunken, peat-coloured stream that was forded in one spot and crossed in another, some hundred yards below, by a narrow stone bridge.

The sun was declining into the hills when the coach in which I was travelling came in sight of the village and then scraped and jostled across the bridge. Five days had passed since I received my summons. I leaned through the open door-window and looked back at the houses and church. There was a faint smell of woodsmoke on the air, but in the failing light and stretching umber shadows the village appeared unnaturally empty. All day the laneways from Shaftesbury had been deserted except for the occasional herd of black-faced sheep, and I felt by now as if I had arrived on the verge of a desolate precipice.

'Have we much further to go before Pontifex Hall?'

My driver, Phineas Greenleaf, emitted the same low, bovine grunt which had greeted most of my enquiries. I wondered for the dozenth time if he was deaf. He was an old man, lethargic of movement and lugubrious of manner. As we rode I found myself staring not at the passing countryside but, rather, the wen on his neck and the withered left arm that protruded from its foreshortened coat-sleeve. Three days earlier he had been waiting for me, as promised, at the Three Pigeons in High Holborn. The coach had been by far the most impressive vehicle in the tavern's stable-yard, a commodious four-seater with a covered box-seat and a lacquered exterior in which I could see my undulant reflection. A fussy coat of arms was painted on the door. I had been forced to revise my impression of the impecuniosity of my prospective hostess.

'Am I to see Lady Marchamont?' I had asked Greenleaf as we cleared the stable-yard's narrow coachway. I received his noncommittal grunt in reply but, undaunted for the moment, ventured another question: 'Does Lady Marchamont wish to buy some of my books?'

This enquiry had met with better luck. 'Buy your books? No, sir,' he said after a pause, squinting fiercely at the road ahead. His head was thrust forward beneath his shoulders, giving him the appearance of a vulture. 'I should think Lady Marchamont has quite enough books already.'

'So she wishes to sell her books, then?'

'Sell her books?' There was another baffled, ruminative pause. His frown deepened the wrinkles cut like cuneiforms across his brow and cheeks. He removed his hat, a low-crowned beaver, and wiped at his brow, exposing a naked skull that was spotted like a quail's egg. At length, replacing the hat with his shrunken child's hand, he allowed himself a grave chuckle. 'I shouldn't imagine so, sir. Lady Marchamont is most fond of her books.'

That was more or less the extent of our conversation for the next three days. Further questions were either ignored or else answered with the customary grunt. His only other articulations proved to be the sepulchral snores that hindered my sleep on our first night in Bagshot and our second in Shaftesbury.

Our progress had been maddeningly slow. I was a creature of the city-of its smoke and speed, its pushing crowds and whirling iron wheels-and so our leisurely advance through the countryside, across its vacant heaths and through its tiny, nameless villages, was almost more than I could bear. But the saturnine Greenleaf was in no hurry. For mile after mile he sat erect in the box-seat with the reins loose in his hands and the whip dangling between his knees like an angler's rod above a trout stream. And now, after Crampton Magna, the trackway deteriorated badly. The last leg of our journey, though only a mile or two, lasted another hour. No one, it seemed, had passed this way in years. In places the road was overcome by vegetation and all but disappeared; in others the left rut stood at a greater height than the right, or vice versa, or both were littered with sizeable stones. The branches of unpruned trees scored the coach's top, unkempt hedges of beech and quickthorn its doors. We were in constant danger of tipping over. But at long last, after the coach squeezed across another stone bridge, Greenleaf pulled at the reins and laid aside his whip.

'Pontifex Hall,' he growled as if to himself.

I thrust my head through the window and was blinded for a second by the lurid brushstrokes painted across the low shoulder of the sky. At first I saw nothing but a monumental arch and, at its top, a keystone upon which, squinting, I could read a few letters of an inscription: L T E A S RI T M N T.

I raised my right hand to shield my eyes from the sun. Greenleaf clucked his tongue at the horses, who lowered their heads and advanced wearily, tails switching, hoofs crunching the gravel that, a few yards before, had replaced the dirt lane. The carved writing-cast in shadow, pleached with ivy and spotted mustard-and-black with moss-was still illegible but for a few letters: L TTE A S RIPT M NET.

One of the horses snorted and drifted a step sideways, as if refusing the gate, then reared in its traces. Greenleaf jerked at the reins and shouted opprobriously. An enormous house hove suddenly into view as we entered the shadow of the arch. I dropped my hand and thrust my head further through the quarter-light.

For the past few days I had been trying to form a mental picture of Pontifex Hall, but none of my fantasies measured up to the building framed like a painting between the heavy piers of the arch. It was set on a long green sward split by an ochre sweep of carriageway flanked on either side by a row of lime trees. The sward dipped and rose until it reached an enormous façade of rubbed brickwork divided by four giant pilasters and a symmetrical arrangement of eight windows. Above, the low sun picked out a brass weathercock and six circular chimney shafts.

The coach shunted forward a few more paces, traces jingling. As promptly as it appeared, the vision now transformed itself. The sun, all but lost behind the hipped roof, suddenly cast the scene in a different light. The sward, I now saw, was rank and overgrown, pitted here and there, like the carriageway, with old excavations and heaped with pyramids of earth. Many of the lime trees were diseased and leafless, while others had even been reduced to short stumps. The house, whose long shadow stretched towards us, fared no better. Its façade was pockmarked, its mullions splintered, its dripstones snapped off. Some broken window-panes had been replaced in makeshift fashion by straw and strips of cloth; one of them had even been invaded by a thick stem of ivy. A broken sundial, a dry fountain, a stagnant pond, a rank parterre-all completed the portrait of ruin. The weathercock as we trotted forward flashed a minatory glint. My anticipation, roused a moment before, drained abruptly away.

One of the horses whinnied again and shied sideways. Greenleaf jerked the rein sharply and uttered another guttural command. Two more halting steps on the gravelled carriageway; then we were swallowed by the arch. At the last second before it closed over our heads I glanced upwards to the wedge-shaped voussoirs and, above them, the keystone: LITTERA SCRIPTA MANET.

Ten minutes later I found myself standing in the middle of an enormous chamber whose only light fell through a single broken window giving on to the scrubby parterre, which in turn gave on to the fractured fountain and sundial.

'If you would be good enough to wait here, sir,' said Greenleaf.

His bootfalls resounded through the cavernous building, up a creaking flight of stairs, then across a floor above my head. I thought I heard the intonation of voices and another, lighter step.

A moment passed. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the dim light. There seemed to be no place to sit. I wondered if I was being slighted or if this strange hospitality-being left alone in a darkened room-was simply the way of noble folk. I had already decided from its dilapidated condition that Pontifex Hall was one of those unfortunate estates overrun by Cromwell's army during the Civil Wars. I had no love of Cromwell and the Puritans-a gang of iconoclasts and book-burners. But I had no special love of our puffed-up noblemen either, so I had been quietly amused by accounts in our newssheets of rampaging London apprentices showering these grand old homes with cannon-balls and grape-shot, then turning their pampered inhabitants into the fields before liberating the wine from their cellars and the gold leaf from the doors of their carriages. The once-stately Pontifex Hall must, I supposed, have suffered this undignified fate along with so many others.

A board creaked under my boot as I turned round. Then the toe of my crippled foot struck something. I looked down and saw a thick folio spreadeagled below me, its pages fluttering in the light breeze from the broken window. Beside it, in similar states of disarray, lay a quadrant, a small telescope in a corroded case, and several other instruments of less discernible function. Scattered among them, badly creased, corners furling, were a half-dozen old maps. In the poor light their coastlines and speculative outlines of continents were unrecognisable.

But then… something familiar. An old smell was permeating the room, I realised: one I knew better, and loved more, than any perfume. I turned round again and, looking up, saw rows of book-lined shelves covering what seemed to be every inch of the walls, which were girdled halfway up by a railed gallery, above which more books pressed upwards to an invisible ceiling.

A library. So, I thought, face upturned: Greenleaf had been right about one thing at least-Lady Marchamont possessed plenty of books. What light there was cast itself across hundreds of shelved volumes of every shape, size and thickness. Some of the volumes I could see were massive, like quarried slabs, and were attached to the shelves by long chains that hung down like necklaces from their wooden bindings, while others, tiny sextodecimos, were no larger than snuff-boxes, small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, their pasteboard covers tied with faded ribbons or locked with tiny clasps. But that was not all. The overspill from the shelves-two hundred volumes or more-had been stacked on the floor or was colonising adjacent corridors and rooms; an overflow that began in soldierly ranks only to scatter, after a few paces, into wild disorder.

I looked about in amazement before stepping over one of the advancing columns and kneeling carefully beside it. Here the smell-of damp and rot, like that of mulch-was not so pleasant. My nostrils were offended, as were my professional instincts. The soft throb and glow roused in my breast by the gilt letters of four or five different languages winking at me from scores of handsomely tooled bindings-the sight of so much knowledge so beautifully presented-swiftly flamed out. It seemed that, like everything else about Pontifex Hall, these books were doomed. This wasn't a library so much as a charnel-house. My sense of outrage mounted.

But so, too, did my curiosity. I picked one of the books at random from its collapsing rank and opened the battered cover. The engraved title-page was barely legible. I turned another crackling page. No better. The rag-paper had cockled so badly because of water damage that, viewed side-on, the pages resembled the gills on the underside of a mushroom. The volume disgraced its owner. I flipped through the stiffened leaves, most of which had been bored through by worms; entire paragraphs were now unintelligible, turned to fluff and powder. I replaced the book in disgust and took up another, then another, both of which were likewise of use to no one but the rag-and-bone man. The next looked as though it had been burned, while a fifth had been faded and jaundiced by the rays of some long-ago sun. I sighed and replaced them, hoping that Lady Marchamont had no expectations of restoring the fortunes of Pontifex Hall by means of a sale of scraps like these.

But not all of the books were in such a sorry state. As I moved towards the shelves I could see that many of the volumes-or their bindings at least-were of considerable value. Here were fine morocco leathers of every colour, some gold-tooled or embroidered, others decorated with jewels and precious metals. A number of the vellums had buckled, it was true, and the morocco had lost a little of its lustre, but there were no defects that a little cedarwood oil and lanolin couldn't mend. And the jewels alone-what looked to my inexpert eye like rubies, moonstones and lapis lazuli-must have been worth a small fortune.

The shelves along the south wall, nearest the window, had been devoted to Greek and Roman authors, with an entire two shelves weighed down by various collections and editions of Plato. The library's owner must have possessed both a scholar's eye and a deep purse, because the best editions and translations had obviously been hunted down. Not only was there the five-volume second edition of Marsilio Ficino's Latin translation of Plato-the great Platonis opera omni printed in Venice and including Ficino's corrections to the first edition commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici-but also the more authoritative translation published in Geneva by Henri Etienne. Aristotle, meanwhile, was represented not only by the two-volume Basel edition of 1539, but by the 1550 edition with its emendations by Victorius and Flacius, and finally by the Aristotelis opera edited by the great Isaac Casaubon and published in Geneva. All were in reasonable condition, give or take the odd nick or scrape, and would fetch a fair price.

The other classical authors were done equal justice. Standing on tiptoe or squatting on my haunches, I removed volume after volume from the shelf and inspected each one before carefully replacing it. Here was Plamerius's edition of Pliny's Naturalis historia, bound in red calfskin, and the Aldine edition of Livy, along with the Historiarum of Tacitus, edited by Vindelinus and wrapped in a delicate chemise. There was also the Basel edition of Cicero's De natura deorum, bound in olive morocco with a pretty repoussé design… Dionysus Lambinus's edition of De rerum natura… and, most amazing of all, a copy of the Confessiones of St. Augustine in the blind-tooled brown calfskin I recognised as that of the Caxton binder. There were, besides, dozens of thinner volumes, commentaries and expositions such as Porphyry on Horace, Ficino on Plotinus, Donatus on Virgil, Proclus on Plato's Republic…

I was walking and gazing now, my errant hostess completely forgotten. Not only was the wisdom of the ancients represented, but so were the advancements in learning made earlier in our century. There were books on navigation, agriculture, architecture, medicine, horticulture, theology, education, natural philosophy, astronomy, astrology, mathematics, geometry and steganography or 'secret writing'. There were even quite a number of volumes containing poetry, plays and nouvelles. English, French, Italian, German, Bohemian, Persian, it didn't seem to matter. The authors and titles scrolled past, a roll-call of fame. I stopped and ran my fingers across a shelf of quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays; nineteen of them in all, bound in buckram. But there was not, I noticed, a collection of the folio edition of his plays that, as any bookseller knew, William Jaggard had printed in 1623. This struck me as out of keeping with the exhaustive urge for assimilation, for completeness, elsewhere so evident. Nor did there appear to be anything else printed after 1620. In the large collection of herbals, for example, there were copies of De historia plantarum by Theophrastos, Agricola's Medicinae herbaria, and Gerard's Generall Historie of Plants, but not any of the more recent works such as Culpeper's Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, Langham's Garden of Health, or even Thomas Johnson's enlarged and far superior 1633 edition of Gerard. What did this mean? That the collector had died before 1620, his ambitious dreams unfulfilled? That for forty years or more the magnificent collection had lain undisturbed, unsupplemented, unread?

By now I was standing before the north wall, and here the collection grew even more remarkable. I reached up to touch a few of the wobbly bindings. The light from the window was fading quickly. A large section on the left appeared to be devoted to the art of metallurgy. At first there were the sort of works I would have expected to see, such as Biringuccio's Pirotechnia and Ercker's Beschreibung allerfürnemisten Mineralischen Ertzt, bound in pigskin and featuring beautiful woodcuts. A little out-of-date, but respectable books none the less. But what was I to make of many of the others interspersed among them-Jakob Böhme's Metallurgia, Isaac of Holland's Mineralia opera, a translation of Denis Zachaire's True Natural Philosophy of Metals-books that were almost manuals of devilry, the products of inferior and superstitious minds?

Other inferior and superstitious minds were found further along the shelf. The wisdom and good taste governing the selection now deteriorated into an indiscriminate and omnivorous consumption of authors of scurrilous reputation, men who placed their faith too readily-and somewhat impiously-in the occult operations of nature. The faded ribbon-pulls protruded from the gilt backs like impudent pink tongues. Squinting in the poor light, I pulled down a French translation of the works of Artephius. Next to it was Alain de Lisle's commentary on the prophecies of Merlin. Soon matters grew even worse. Roger Bacon's Mirror of Alchymy, George Ripley's Compound of Alchymy, Cornelius Agrippa's De occulta philosophia, Paul Skalich's Occulta occultum occulta… All of these volumes were the work of jugglers, charlatans and mystery-men who had nothing to do, as far as I could see, with the pursuit of true knowledge. On the shelves below were dozens of books on various forms of divination. Piromancy. Chiromancy. Astromancy. Sciomancy.

Sciomancy? I propped my thorn-stick against a shelf and reached for the book. Ah, 'divination by shadows'. I clapped it shut. Such nonsense seemed wholly out of place in a library otherwise dedicated to more noble subjects of learning. I replaced the book and, without looking at it, drew down another by its ribbon-pull. Too bad the worms hadn't feasted themselves on these pages, I thought as I opened it. But before I could read the title-page, a voice from behind suddenly interrupted me.

'Lefèvre's edition of Ficino's translation of the Pimander. An excellent edition, Mr. Inchbold. No doubt you own a copy yourself?'

I started and, looking up, saw two dark shapes in the doorway to the library. I had the uneasy impression, all of a sudden, that I had been watched for some time. One of the shapes, that of a lady, had advanced a few steps and now, turning round, lit the wick of a fish-oil lamp perched on one of the shelves. Her shadow feinted towards me.

'Allow me to apologise.' I was hastily restoring the book to its place. 'I should not have presumed-'

'Lefèvre's edition,' she continued as she turned round and blew out the taper-stick, 'marks the first time the Corpus hermeticum was gathered together between two covers since it was collected in Constantinople by Michael Psellos. It even contains the Asclepius, of which Ficino possessed no manuscript copy so was unable to include it in the edition prepared for Cosimo de' Medici.' She paused for only the briefest of moments. 'Will you take some wine, Mr. Inchbold?'

'No-I mean, yes,' I replied, making an awkward bow. 'I mean… wine would be-'

'And some food? Phineas tells me you've not eaten tonight. Bridget?' She turned to the other figure, a serving-maid still hovering in the doorway.

'Yes, Lady Marchamont?'

'Fetch the goblets, will you.'

'Yes, m'lady.'

'The Hungarian wine, I think. And tell Mary to prepare a meal for Mr. Inchbold.'

'Yes, m'lady.'

'Quickly now, Bridget. Mr. Inchbold has made a long journey.'

'Yes, m'lady,' murmured the girl before scurrying away.

'Bridget is new to Pontifex Hall,' Lady Marchamont explained in an oddly confidential tone, slowly crossing the library with the lantern squeaking on its hinges and turning her eye-sockets to dark hollows. She seemed disinclined to perform introductions, as if she had known me for ages and considered it perfectly ordinary to discover me crouched in the darkness like a housebreaker, thumbing greedily through these shelves of books. Was this, too, the way of aristocrats? 'One of the servants,' she added, 'from the family of my late husband.'

I fumbled for a reply, failed, and instead watched in stupefied silence as she approached in her muted flourish of lamplight, the thin drift of taper smoke rising ceilingward behind her. Oh, how precisely I remember this moment! For this is how, and where, everything began… and where it would end such a short time later. Through the broken panes of window had come the sounds of a watch of nightingales in the overgrown garden and the scratching of a dead branch at one of the mullions. The library itself was silent but for her slow footfalls-she was wearing a pair of leather buskins-and then a loud slap as one of the books piled on the floor toppled from its rank, knocked sideways by her skirts.

'Tell me, Mr. Inchbold, how was your journey?' She had drawn to a stop at last, her half-visible expression apparently vague and vexed. 'No, no. We must not begin our acquaintance with a lie. It was terrible, was it not? Yes, I know it was, and I do apologise. Phineas is dependable enough as a driver,' she said with a sigh, 'but, yes, a dreadful companion. Poor fellow hasn't read a book in his entire life.'

'The journey was pleasant,' I murmured weakly. Yes: our association was a series of lies, despite what she said. Lies from beginning to end.

'I regret I cannot offer you a place to sit,' she was continuing, gesturing at the library with a sweep of her arm. 'Oliver Cromwell's soldiers burned all of my furniture to cook their dinners and warm their feet.'

I blinked in surprise. 'A regiment was quartered here?'

'Fourteen or fifteen years ago. The estate was forfeited for acts of treason against Parliament. The soldiers even burned my best bed. Twelve feet high, Mr. Inchbold. Four beech-framed posts, with yards and yards of hanging taffeta.' She paused to offer me a wry smile. 'I should think that must have kept them warm for a time, don't you?'

She was standing before me, or nearly so, and I could see her more clearly in the sallow lamp glow. I was to meet her on only three short occasions, and my first impression-it now surprises me to recall-was not especially favourable. She must have been roughly my own age, and though she was pleasing enough, even noble, in appearance, with a flawless brow, a sharp aquiline nose, and a pair of dark eyes that suggested a strong determination of will, these advantages had been eroded by negligence or poverty. Her dark hair was thick and, unlike mine, had not yet begun to grey, but it was worn loose and rose upwards from her crown in an unruly and unbecoming nimbus. Her gown had been made from a good-enough material, but the nap had long since worn off, and it was of an obsolete cut and, even worse, stained like an old sail. She was wearing some sort of calash or hooded mantle, which might have been silk, though it was not one of those pretty bird's-eye hoods such as one sees on the heads of fashionable ladies promenading through St. James's Park, for it was black as jet-stone, like her dress, and in poor repair. She looked, from its lugubrious colour, and from the pair of black gloves that stretched halfway up her forearms, to be in mourning. All of which together served to lend her the same air of distressed splendour, I decided, as Pontifex Hall itself.

'The Puritans burned all of your furnishings?'

'Not all,' she replied. 'No. I presume some of them, the more valuable items, were sold.'

'I'm so sorry.' Suddenly the image of Cromwell's ragtag band of soldiers did not seem quite so amusing after all.

A half smile had appeared on her face. 'Please, Mr. Inchbold. No need to apologise on their behalf. Beds can be replaced, unlike other things.'

'Your husband,' I murmured sympathetically.

'Even husbands can be replaced,' she said. 'Even a man like Lord Marchamont. You knew of him?' I shook my head. 'He was an Irishman,' she said simply. 'He died two years ago in France.'

'He was of the Royal party?'

'Of course.'

She had turned from me and now strode slowly round the room, examining the books and shelves like a steward examining a prize herd or a particularly satisfactory crop of corn. I was already wondering if they belonged to her. It seemed unlikely. Books were not, in my experience, a woman's business. But how, in that case, had she known about Ficino and Lefèvre d'Étaples and Michael Psellos? I felt a wary excitement shudder softly and cautiously engage.

'These are all I have left,' she said as if to herself. She had begun running her gloved fingertips across the spines, much as I had done a few minutes earlier. 'Everything I own. These and the house itself. Though I may not own Pontifex Hall for so very much longer.'

'Was it Lord Marchamont's?'

'No, his estate was in Ireland, and there's also a house in Hertfordshire. Dreadful places. Pontifex Hall was my father's, but after our marriage Lord Marchamont was named heir presumptive. We had no children, and it was entailed upon me in his will. There…' She was pointing to the window, from which the light had all but drained. The parterre outside was lost in shadow and our two reflections. 'Four leather-covered chairs sat there, next to a table and the beautiful old walnut scriptor where my father used to write his letters. And a hand-knotted turkey carpet on the floor, with monkeys and peacocks and all sorts of oriental designs woven into it.' Slowly her gaze returned to me. 'Now I wonder what could possibly have become of that? Sold as booty, I shouldn't wonder.'

I cleared my throat and voiced the thought that had occurred to me a moment earlier. 'Quite a miracle your books have survived.'

'Oh, but they did not survive,' came her swift reply. 'Not all of them. A number were missing when I returned. Others, as you can see, have been badly damaged. But, yes, quite a miracle. The soldiers would have burned the lot of them, and not only because of the cold winters. Some would have been considered popish, or diabolical, or both.' She nodded at the shelf behind me. 'Ficino's translation of the Pimander, for example. Fortunately they were hidden away.'

'What do you mean?'

'By my father. A long story, Mr. Inchbold. All in due time. You see, each one of these books has its own history. Many of them survived a shipwreck.'

'A shipwreck?'

'And others,' she continued, 'are refugees. Do you see these chains?' She was pointing to a group of volumes tethered by their bindings to the shelves. The loops of chain reflected dully in the gloom. I nodded. 'These books were already rescued once before, that time from the colleges in Oxford. From the chain libraries,' she explained, sliding one of them, a folio, from the shelf. She ran a gloved hand over its vellum cover-a loving gesture. The chain rattled thinly in protest. 'That was during the last century.'

'They were rescued from Edward VI?'

'From his commissioners. They were smuggled out of the college libraries and escaped the bonfires.' She had opened the enormous volume and began riffling idly through the pages. 'Quite amazing how determined kings and emperors have been to destroy books. But civilisation is built on such desecration, is it not? Justinian the Great burned all of the Greek scrolls in Constantinople after he codified the Roman law and drove the Ostrogoths from Italy. And Shih Huang Ti, the first Emperor of China, the man who unified the five kingdoms and built the Great Wall, decreed that every book written before he was born should be destroyed.' She clapped the volume shut and replaced it with a firm push. 'These books,' she said, 'my father acquired much later.'

'Ah,' I said, hoping we were at last reaching the heart of the matter. 'So all of these are his books? And you wish to sell them.'

'Were,' she said. 'They were his books. Yes, he assembled the collection.' She paused for a second and regarded me gravely. 'No, Mr. Inchbold, I do not wish to sell them. Most definitely not. Ah,' she said, turning, 'here is Bridget. Shall we withdraw to the dining-room? I think I will be able to offer you a seat in there.'

A short time later I was sitting before a duck which Mrs. Winter, the cook-maid, had roasted on a bed of green shallots and served on a large plate. In lieu of a dining-table-another casualty of the wars, evidently-the plate was balanced precariously on my lap. I ate self-consciously, without appetite, aware of the penetrating eyes of my hostess, who sat opposite. For a second her frank gaze had taken in my shrunken and inward-turning foot that looks, I have always thought, like the miserable appendage of some villainous dwarf from a German storybook. I felt myself blush with resentment, but by then Lady Marchamont had already glanced away.

'I must apologise for the wine,' she said as she nodded at Bridget to fill my glass for a third time. 'Once upon a time my father grew his own vines. In the valley.' She gestured vaguely in the direction of one of the broken windows. 'On the slopes above the river, sheltered from the wind. They produced some excellent wines, or so I have been told. I was too young to enjoy them at the time, and the vines have since been uprooted.'

'By the soldiers, I suppose?'

She shook her head. 'No, by a different breed of vandal, a more indigenous one. The villagers.'

'The villagers?' I thought of the eerily empty village through which the coach had passed. 'Crampton Magna?'

'There and elsewhere. Yes.'

I shrugged. 'But why would anyone do that?'

She raised her goblet and gazed thoughtfully into the dark liquid. She had already explained, in the boggling and somewhat gratuitous manner that was becoming familiar, how the goblets were manufactured. Her father had been granted some form of patent for the process, which involved mixing gold and quicksilver in a crucible, then evaporating the quicksilver and gilding the glass with a thin film of the extracted gold. He had owned many patents, she explained. A true Daedalus. Now she seemed to be studying the cypher at the bottom of the cup-an entwined 'AP'-which I had myself already noticed.

'Tell me, Mr. Inchbold,' she began after a pause, 'did you by any chance see the excavations on the lawn and carriageway as you approached Pontifex Hall?'

I nodded, remembering the haphazard trenches and the black hillocks of earth beside them. 'I took them for some sort of earthworks.' She shook her great dark nimbus at me. 'Cannon-fire?'

'Nothing as drastic as that. No siege took place here. The immediate area was deemed unimportant by the armies of either side. Fortunately for us, Mr. Inchbold, or I don't expect we should be having this conversation.'

I resisted the urge to ask her why it was the two of us were having this conversation. I still had no idea why I had been summoned here, or why she was offering me a history of her peculiar and, frankly, inhospitable house. Was this another example of the strange ways of aristocrats? If she did not wish me to appraise or auction her books, then what on earth was my task to be? Surely she had no desire-no need-to purchase any more? It would be bringing owls to Athens. All at once I felt more exhausted than ever.

But it seemed I was not to discover my task soon, for she now launched into an account of the recent history of Pontifex Hall. As I clumsily dismembered the duck, she explained how after the regiment of troops departed, having chopped up the orchard and the furniture for firewood and stripped the wrought-iron railings to make their muskets and cannons, the house stood empty for a number of months. The estate had been placed in the hands of a trust which, authorised by an Act of Parliament in 1651, eventually sold it to the local Member of Parliament, a man named Standfast Osborne.

'Lord Marchamont and I were in France at the time, in exile. I moved back to England some two months ago, when the house was restored to me under the terms of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. Osborne has now been gone for almost a year. Fled to Holland. Quite prudent of him, as he was one of the regicides. When I returned from France I did not expect to be welcomed back to Pontifex Hall, because the people of this area supported the Parliamentarians. Nor was I welcomed. Already the good people of Crampton Magna look upon me, I believe, as a witch.' Her half-smile reappeared as her shoulders flexed in an indifferent shrug. 'Yes, strange as it may sound to you, a Londoner, an educated man, but true none the less. In these parts any woman who can read is fancied for a witch. And a woman who lives by herself, in a ruined house, surrounded by books and scientific instruments, without a husband or father or children to guide or control her… well, that is even worse, is it not?'

She paused, watching me carefully with her intense, close-set eyes, which, in the better light of the dining-room, I saw were a pale grey-blue. I was chewing slowly and awkwardly, a cow with its cud. My foot had been thrust under the chair, out of sight. She turned and motioned for Bridget to fill my cup.

'You may go now,' she said to her when the task was accomplished. Only when the maid's footfalls disappeared, swallowed up by the immense, echoing house, did she continue. 'I experienced great difficulties hiring servants from the area,' she said in a confidential tone. 'That is why I was forced to recruit from among Lord Marchamont's domestics.'

'But why should you have difficulties? Because of Lord Marchamont? Or because of your… politics?'

She shook her head. 'No, because of my father. You may have heard of him-he was famous enough in his day. His name was Sir Ambrose Plessington,' she added after a short pause.

This name, strange as it now seems, then meant nothing to me, nothing at all. But in my recollection the moment now seems accompanied by a ringing silence, a kind of terrible poise in which a long shadow crept forward, darkening the room, throwing its heavy pall slantwise across me. But in fact I only shook my head, wondering to myself how I could not have known of someone capable of amassing such a formidable collection.

'No, I've not heard of him,' I replied. 'Who was he?'

For a moment she said nothing. She was sitting perfectly still, hands folded in her lap. The fish-oil lamp threw her shadow on to the buckling wall behind her. I thought idly of the book on 'sciomancy' in the library and wondered what clues its author might divine in the shifting shadow of Lady Marchamont.

'Drink your wine, Mr. Inchbold,' she said at last. She had leaned forward into the jaundiced light of the lamp, and her eyes were searching my face again, as if looking for signs that I might be trusted. Perhaps I was, at this moment, almost as unfathomable to her as she was to me. 'I have something I wish to show you. Something you may well find of interest.'

In what respect? By now my curiosity was being eclipsed by impatience. But what was there for me to do? I gulped my wine and hastily wiped my hands on my breeches. Then, holding back a half-dozen exasperated questions, I followed her from the dining-room.

Chapter Four

So it was that my first confrontation with Sir Ambrose Plessington took place in a vault or crypt beneath Pontifex Hall.

After leaving the dining-room, we went back down the wide staircase, then took a number of left turns through an interconnecting series of corridors, antechambers and deserted rooms before descending another, much narrower set of steps. Lady Marchamont was holding the fish-oil lamp aloft like a constable of the watch as I flumped along behind her. The inadequate light fell on to a scarred wall across which our shadows loomed in fantastic, threatening postures. Our feet scuffed the steps that proceeded downwards into what looked like some sort of undercroft. Cobwebs tickled my scalp and lips. I brushed them aside and then hastily placed my handkerchief to my mouth and nose. With every step the stink of decay seemed to increase twofold. Lady Marchamont, however, appeared as oblivious of the stench as of the cold and darkness.

'The pantry, the buttery,' she was saying, 'all were down here, along with the footmen's chambers. We had three footmen, I remember. Phineas is the last of them. He was in my father's service more than forty years ago. It was a godsend that I was able to find him again. Or, rather, that he found me after my return. He is, you understand, very devoted to me…'

As we descended I had been expecting to enter a maze of passageways and chambers reflecting the one above the stairs. But on reaching the bottom at last we found ourselves in a low-ceilinged corridor that ran ahead in a straight line for as far as the lamp's shrunken halo of light extended. We proceeded slowly along it, picking our way over fragments of furniture, the staves of broken casks, and other less identifiable obstructions. The floor didn't seem quite level; we were descending still, proceeding down a gentle slope. Down here the walls dripped, and faint sounds of running water came to us, followed by an acrid smell. The floor seemed to be covered in grit. There was still no end to the passage. Perhaps we were in a labyrinth after all, I thought: some sort of mundus cereris like those the Romans built beneath their cities-all dark vaults and twisting tunnels-in order to converse with the inhabitants of the lower world.

Suddenly Lady Marchamont tapped one of the walls with her gloved knuckles. It reverberated like a kettledrum. 'Copper,' she explained. 'Cromwell's men stored their powder down here, so the walls and door were sheathed with copper. Not exactly the driest place in the house, I shouldn't have thought.'

'Gunpowder?'

At once I knew the identity of the acrid smell and the grit beneath my feet. I began to fret about the lamp, which Lady Marchamont was swinging to and fro with little regard. Its light now illuminated a number of sealed doors and smaller recesses on either side. I shuddered again in the cool dankness, wondering if behind these doors the skulls and shinbones of a hundred Plessingtons were heaped promiscuously together in crumbling ossuaries. We hurried along the corridor, whose terminus-if there was one-was lost in blackness.

At last we reached our destination. Lady Marchamont stopped before one of the doors and, after struggling with a set of keys, forced it open. A pair of rusted hinges creaked portentously.

'Please,' she said, turning to me with a smile, 'do step through, Mr. Inchbold. Inside you will find the mortal remains of Sir Ambrose Plessington.'

'Remains…?' I made to retreat, but it was too late for resistance. Lady Marchamont had my wrist and was tugging me across the threshold.

'There…'

She was pointing to a corner of the tiny room, where a battered oak coffin sat on a low trestle-table. I recoiled, trying to free my arm, but then saw to my relief that her father's 'remains' were textual, not corporeal; for the coffin, whose lid had been propped open, was filled not with bones but rather with piles of documents, great sheaves of which threatened to spill over.

'Everything is here.' Her tone was reverential as she picked her way carefully forward. 'Everything about my father. About Pontifex Hall. Rather, very nearly everything…'

She had hung the lamp on a wall sconce and now knelt before the coffin on a bed of rushes that had been strewn across the dirt before the trestle-table. The coffin, I now saw, was caked with dirt. She began withdrawing the documents one by one, riffling through and then replacing them. The mantle hung over her shoulders like a pair of folded wings. Some sort of archive, I supposed, hanging back in the doorway until she beckoned me forward.

'The estate papers,' she explained. 'The inventories, the indentures, the conveyances.' She might have been delving her gloved hands in a trunk filled with moonstones and amethysts instead of these heaps of yellowed documents. 'It was for these that Standfast Osborne purchased the estate, you see.' Her voice echoed harshly against the bare walls. 'For its muniments. He cared nothing for the house, as you can see all too plainly. But the coffin was hidden safely away. Lord Marchamont saw to that.'

The room was airless and cramped, its walls encrusted with what I took to be deposits of saltpetre. The flame, glowing feebly now, lit generations of cobwebs, all of them thick with dirt. I have been troubled all my life with asthma-the upshot of having my lungs kippered by the coal smoke of London. Now, standing in the doorway to this strange vault, I felt a familiar gurgle beneath my breastbone.

'They were kept here, in this room,' I managed to ask, leaning on my thorn-stick, 'for all those years?'

'Of course not.' Her winged back was still turned to me. 'They would have been found in an hour. No, they were buried in a plot in the churchyard at Crampton Magna. In this coffin. Ingenious, no? Beneath a headstone inscribed with the name of one of the footmen. Here…' She turned, extending a single sheet in her gloved hand. 'This is the order that sealed our fate.'

The paper was of heavy linen, its edges curling and faintly seared. I took it and, tipping it into the light of the lamp and bringing it to within two inches of my nose, saw the impression of a Parliamentary seal and, below, the inscription, slightly faded, in a thick chancery hand:

Be it therefore enacted, That all the Manors, Lands, Tenements and Hereditaments, with every of their Appurtenances whatsoever, of he the said Henry Greatorex, Baron Marchamont, were seized or possessed of, in Possession, Reversion or Remainder, on the 20^th day of May, in the year of our Lord 1651, and all rights of entry into the said Manors, Lands, Tenements or Hereditaments…

'The order for the seizure of the estate,' she explained. She handed me another paper, or, rather, a small sheaf. This gathering, tied with a faded and fraying ribbon, was less obviously official and inscribed in a formal secretary hand which, though I didn't know it at the time, was that of Sir Ambrose Plessington himself, who first appeared to me, therefore, between the lines of a lengthy text, a list of his accoutrements: 'An Inventorie taken of all the Cattelse and Chatteles moveable and unmoveable of Ambrose Plessington, Knt, of Pontifex Hall, in the Parish of St. Peter's, valued and prized in the presence of four Bailies…'

I set my stick aside and untied the ribbon. The remainder, six pages in all, inscribed on both sides, consisted of a formidably long list of Sir Ambrose's possessions, of his furniture, paintings, draperies, silver and plate, along with more esoteric items such as telescopes, quadrants, calipers, compasses and several cabinets whose contents-preserved animals, shells and corals, coins, arrowheads, fragments of urns, objets d'art of all kinds, and even two automata-had been enumerated individually. One of the most valuable of all was a 'Kunstschrank' whose surface was inlaid with diamonds and emeralds, though what might have been inside this glittering ark-valued at an astonishing £10,000-the inventory declined to report. The entire contents of the house were valued on the last page at £155,000; an incredible sum that was enormous enough in 1660, and one that in June of 1622, the date of the inventory, must have been well and truly boggling. Not even the treasures of the late King Charles, that great connoisseur, had fetched so high a price when Cromwell stripped them from the royal palaces and then sold them to the ravening princes of Europe.

Lady Marchamont had caught my astonished gaze. 'Of all of these items,' she said in a quiet voice, 'you can see that almost nothing now remains. All were taken from us or were destroyed by the troops. Only this trunk and these papers bear witness to what Pontifex Hall used to be. To everything my father built.'

'But the library…' I had returned to the front of the list and was now scrolling slowly through it for a second time. 'I see no mention of your father's books.'

'No.' She took the paper from me and, after tying the ribbon, replaced it in the coffin. 'This particular inventory does not include the contents of the library. A separate one was compiled for that.' She turned round and, after further riffling, disinterred a larger sheaf. 'Extremely detailed, as you can see. It contains the price paid for every book, along with the bookseller or agent from whom each was purchased. An interesting record, but there's no time to study it now. For the moment…' She set it aside and delved carefully into the coffin, turning over heavy sediments of paper. 'For the moment, Mr. Inchbold, you must read something else. During his lifetime my father received letters patent in a number of countries, from several kings and emperors. But these ones may be of particular importance.'

Importance to what? What had my presence at Pontifex Hall to do with this foul subterranean vault and its scraps of old paper? With kings and emperors? Lady Marchamont had already turned round and handed me three or four documents. The first was a parchment and at its foot bore in cracked red wax the impression of an enormous seal whose circumference read, in characters that were barely perceptible,

Romanum Imperatores Rudolphus II

Caesarum Maximus Imp: Rex

SALVTI PUBLICAE

I held the paper closer to the light. Above the seal, inscribed in heavy gothic script, were several paragraphs in German, what my limited knowledge of that language told me amounted to a commission to search for books and manuscripts in the regions of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Glatz. It was dated 1610. For a few seconds I rubbed the cockled edge of the document between my finger and thumb, enjoying the furry texture of the membrane, as soft and smooth as a lady's cheek. Then I turned it over, carefully, with a quiet, satisfying crackle, and jabbed with a thumb at the nose-piece of my spectacles.

The next document, dated a year later and impressed with the same seal, was of similar import but extended the commission beyond the Czech lands to include Austria, Styria, Mainz and both the Upper and the Lower Palatinate, as well as-most remarkable of all-the lands of the Ottoman Sultan. The final three pages granted, respectively, a patent of Imperial nobility, a pension of 500 thalers per annum, and a doctorate in philosophy from the Carolinum. This last document was inscribed in Latin and embossed with a coat of arms. I looked up to see Lady Marchamont's eyebrows knit together as if in close attentiveness to my reaction. The light from the lamp spluttered and, to my alarm, nearly extinguished itself.

'It's in Prague.'

'Prague?' My questioning gaze had returned to the skins, which my hands were shuffling nervously.

'The Carolinum,' she said in a clipped tone, as though repeating a simple lesson to an obtuse child. 'It's in Prague. Bohemia. My father spent a number of years there.'

'In the Carolinum?'

'No. In Bohemia. After Rudolf moved the Imperial Court from Vienna to Prague.'

I was still studying the parchments. 'Sir Ambrose was in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor?'

She nodded, apparently pleased at the note of awe inflecting my voice. 'At first, yes. As one of the agents hired to procure books for the Imperial Library. Afterwards he was in the service of the Elector Palatine, furnishing the Bibliotheca Palatina in Heidelberg.'

She stooped and once more began to sift through the papers in the coffin. For the next ten minutes I was obliged to wheeze over and fumble through a dozen-odd other documents, all of them patents for various monopolies and inventions-new methods of essaying gold or rigging ships-together with the title-deeds for freehold properties scattered across England, Ireland and Virginia. More dog-eared pages of Sir Ambrose's busy life. I was barely paying attention as Lady Marchamont thrust each one into my hands with the zeal of a street-corner Quaker. But soon I found myself squinting at a document of a different sort, another letter patent with the Great Seal of England embossed at its foot, but one whose designs were grander than the others:

This Indenture, made the 30^th day of August, in Anno Domini 1616, the Fourteenth Year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord James, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, between our said Sovereign Lord of one Party, and Ambrose Plessington, Knight of the Garter, of the other Party, to build, rig, provision, and otherwise fit, and thereafter to captain and sail, the Ship known as the Philip Sidney, from the Port of London, to the Cittie of Manoa, in the Empire of Guiana…

I blinked, rubbed at my eyes with a knuckle, then continued reading. The document was a commission of £3,000 for Sir Ambrose to make a voyage in search not of books and manuscripts-as in the days of the Emperor Rudolf-but rather the headwaters of the Orinoco River and a gold mine near a city called Manoa in the Empire of Guiana. I knew something of the expedition, if it was the same one, for I was well aware of how Sir Walter Raleigh went to the scaffold one year after his disastrous expedition set off for Guiana in 1617. So had the Philip Sidney ascended the Orinoco with Raleigh's doomed fleet? And, if so, what became of the ship and her captain?

I could read no more. The letters of the patent were swimming before my tired eyes, and now my chest felt even tighter. I removed my spectacles and rubbed at my eyes with the balls of my fingers. I coughed, trying to clear my lungs of the stale air and motes of dust. Again I could hear the gentle rush of water, which now seemed to originate behind the wall of the tiny archive. I replaced my spectacles, but the letters on the page still feinted and shrank before my smarting gaze.

'I'm sorry but I…'

'Yes, of course.'

Lady Marchamont took the papers from me and returned them to the coffin. But before she slammed shut its lid I caught a glimpse of what looked like a newer document, another indenture of some sort. The top edge of the parchment was jagged, while the bottom had been folded over and fixed with a seal suspended on a parchment tag. Did she grant me on purpose, I would later wonder, this briefest of visions, this most subtle of clues? The signature beside the seal was illegible, but I was able to make out a few words inscribed at the top: 'Sciant presentes et futuri quod ego…'

But then the lid was banged shut forcefully and a second later I started at the light touch of the gloved hand on my forearm. When I turned my head she was giving me the most curious and unsettling smile.

'Shall we return upstairs, Mr. Inchbold? The air in these vaults is poor. Enough for two people to breathe for no more than thirty minutes at a time.'

I nodded gratefully and fumbled for my thorn-stick. The air suddenly seemed denser than ever, and for the first time I realised that she too was breathing heavily. Removing the lamp from its sconce she turned towards the door.

'My father ventilated the vaults with an atmospheric pump,' she continued, 'but of course the pump was stolen along with everything else.'

The hinges squealed again as she shut the door and there was a jangle of keys and silver chatelaine as she locked it. I followed the black gown along the corridor.

Sciant presentes et futuri…

I sculled through the darkness on my stick, brow drawn in puzzled concentration. Let all men present and future know what? As we climbed the stairs I found myself thinking not so much about the dozens of documents that had been thrust under my nose, but instead about the mysteriously new parchment half hidden among the other papers in the coffin, the indenture with its serried edge waiting to fit like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle into its counterpart, the twin parchment from which it had been carefully severed. Did I guess then that it might fit into a larger puzzle whose other pieces were as yet unknown and undiscovered? Or is it only now, in retrospect, that I remember it so clearly?

My chest was whistling like a tea-kettle as we climbed, my crippled foot noisily scuffing and thumping. I winced with shame, glad of the darkness. But Lady Marchamont, two steps ahead, her face half-turned towards me, appeared to notice none of these commotions. As we made our way upwards she described some of her father's services for Rudolf II, the great 'Wizard Emperor' whose palace in Prague was filled with astrologers, alchemists, bizarre inventions and, above all, tens of thousands of books. A good many of the Emperor's possessions came courtesy of Sir Ambrose, she claimed. For whenever a nobleman or scholar of means died anywhere within the borders of the Empire-from Tuscany in the south, to Cleves in the west, to Lusatia or Silesia in the east-her father had been despatched across the fraying quilt of principalities and fiefdoms to secure for the Emperor the most important and impressive items from the legacy: paintings, marbles, clocks, precious stones, new inventions of any sort, and of course the library, especially if its collection held volumes on alchemy and other occult arts, which had been Rudolf's particular favourites. In these missions, she boasted, her father had rarely disappointed.

'In one year alone he negotiated the acquisition of the libraries of Benedikt of Richnov and the Austrian nobleman Anton Schwarz von Steiner.' She paused for breath and turned to face me. 'You must have heard of these collections?'

I shook my head. We had reached the top of the steps. The tiled floor seemed to sway beneath my feet like the deck of a foundering ship. She pushed open the door for me, and I stumbled through after my shadow. Benedikt of Richnov? Anton Schwarz? There was much, apparently, that I didn't know.

'Each library contained more than ten thousand volumes,' came her voice from the darkness behind me. 'Among other treasures they included Rupescissa's work on alchemy and Finé's edition of Roger Bacon. Even manuscripts on astrology by Albamazar and Sacrobosco. Most were sent to the Imperial Library in Vienna to be catalogued by Hugo Blotius, the Hofbibliothekar, but some were taken to Prague for inspection by His Excellency. No simple task. They were transported across mountains and through the Böhmerwald in special mule-carts and wagons with sprung wheels, a new invention in those days. The wooden boxes in which they were packed had been caulked at the seams with oakum and pitch, like the hull of a warship. These in turn were wrapped in two layers of tanned canvas. It must have been an amazing sight. From front to rear the convoys were almost a mile long, with all of the books still in alphabetical order.'

Her voice echoed against the bare, unmarked walls. The words seemed rehearsed, as if she had told the story many times before. I remembered the copious shelves of occult works in her father's library and wondered if these books had some connection with either Benedikt of Richnov or Anton Schwarz, or possibly even with the 'Wizard Emperor' himself.

We were walking abreast now, quickly, winding our way back in the direction-so far as I could tell-of the library. It was impossible to determine if we had passed this same way earlier. The servants, even Phineas, seemed to have vanished. It occurred to me that two people, even a half-dozen, could easily go about their business in Pontifex Hall for days on end without so much as setting eyes on one another.

Abruptly the narration ended. 'My dear Mr. Inchbold…'

I had been hurrying to keep pace, wheezing and blowing like a grampus. Now I almost collided with her as she halted in the middle of the corridor.

'My dear Mr. Inchbold, I have imposed too long on your good nature. You must wonder why I have told you all of these things. Why I have shown you the library, the inventory, the patents…'

I straightened and found I couldn't meet her eyes. 'Well, Lady Marchamont, I must confess-'

'Oh, please.' She interrupted me with a raised hand. 'Alethea. We have no need of formalities, I hope.'

A command rather than a request. I acquiesced: she was my superior in rank, after all, whether or not her title was used. A name-a word-changes nothing.

'Alethea.' I pronounced the strange name with caution, like a man sampling an exotic new dish.

She resumed walking, though more slowly now, the thick soles of her buskins scuffing the tiles. We turned left into another, longer corridor.

'The fact is that I wished you to see something of what Pontifex Hall used to be. Can you imagine it yet? The frescos, the tapestries…' Her free hand gestured like a conjuror's at the bare walls, at the expanse of vacant corridor before us. I blinked stupidly into the darkness, able to imagine none of it. 'But even more,' she resumed in a lower voice, 'I wanted you to know what manner of man my father was.'

We had reached the library, whose darkness was now complete. I was startled once more by the touch of her hand. Turning, I saw two tiny flames, reflections from the lamp, dancing in the pupils of her close-set eyes. I looked nervously away. Sir Ambrose was, at this point, even more unimaginable than his plundered possessions.

'I have no husband, no children, no living relations.' Her voice had dropped to a whisper. 'Very little now remains for me. But I am left with one thing, one ambition. You see, Mr. Inchbold, I wish to restore Pontifex Hall to its former condition. To render it exactly the same in every last detail.' She released my arm to gesture again at the empty darkness. 'Every last detail,' she repeated with a peculiar emphasis. 'The furniture, the paintings, the gardens, the orangery…'

'And the library,' I finished, thinking of the books eroding to rags and dust on the floor.

'Yes. The library as well.' She had taken my forearm again. The lamp swung in short arcs. Our shadows wavered to and fro like dancers. Here in the vacant house with its bare walls and falling plaster her ambition seemed outlandish and impossible. 'All precisely as my father left them. And I shall do it, too. Though I expect no easy time of it.'

'No,' I replied, hoping to sound sympathetic. I was thinking of the quartered troops, of the house's devastated façade, of the great branch of ivy insinuating itself through a second-door window… of the whole dreadful picture of ruin I had seen through the archway. No easy time of it indeed.

'I shall be frank.' She had raised the lamp as if to illuminate our faces. It was burning more brightly now, but the flame served only to deepen the shadows. 'Difficulties with the hall's restoration will arise not simply because of the desecration, and not simply because, yes, if you must know, I am, shall we say, embarrassed for funds. They will arise also because certain other stakes are involved.' Her voice was casual but her eyes, grown obsidian in the dark with their expanded pupils, maintained their intense, searching gaze. 'Certain other interests. You see, Mr. Inchbold, I, like my father, have accumulated more than my share of enemies.' The pressure on my arm grew almost painful. 'You've seen from the inventory that Sir Ambrose was a man of enormous wealth.'

I nodded obediently. For a second I could see the bailies passing along this corridor and through the rest of the house, through chambers as rich as Aladdin's cave; the four of them touching vases, clocks, tapestries, secretaries, jewels of unimaginable price; their eyes growing wide; item after fabulous item added to the incredible inventory. All now vanished.

'Wealth attracts its enemies,' she said, then added in the same casual tone: 'Sir Ambrose was murdered. As was Lord Marchamont.'

'Murdered?' The word possessed its due resonance against the bare walls of the corridor. 'But by whom? Cromwell's men?'

She shook her head. 'That I cannot say for certain. But I have my doubts. The fact is that I do not know. I had hoped the muniments would offer some clue. Lord Marchamont thought he might have discovered something, but…' She shook her head again and lowered her eyes. Raising them a second later, she must have seen what she interpreted as an alarmed look on my face, for she added quickly: 'Oh, but there's no need to worry. There's nothing to fear, Mr. Inchbold. Do let me reassure you of that. Please understand. You will be quite safe. I promise you that.'

This reassurance opened a small crevice of doubt. Why should I not be safe? But I had no time to contemplate the question, for now she released my forearm and plucked up a bell. Its sound was harsh and plaintive, like an alarm.

'Never fear,' she said, turning back to me as the echoes died away. 'Your task will be a simple one. One that will bring you into no danger at all.'

Ah, I thought. At last. 'My task?'

'Yes.' Phineas had appeared at the end of the corridor. Lady Marchamont turned to face him. 'But I have talked too much already. Do forgive me. All of this must wait for tomorrow. You should rest now, Mr. Inchbold. You have come such a long way. Phineas?' The footman's lugubrious face hove into the yellow track of the fish-oil lamp. 'Please show Mr. Inchbold to his chamber.'

Yes, I thought, as I followed Phineas up the staircase: I had come a long way. Further, perhaps, than I knew.

I was accommodated for the night in a bedchamber at the top of the stairs, along a broad corridor lined at regular intervals with closed doors. The quarters were large but, as I expected, inadequately furnished. There was a straw pallet, a three-legged stool, an empty fireplace festooned with skeins of dirty cobwebs, and a small table, on which sat a quill, a book, a few other items. I was too exhausted to look at any of them.

For a moment I was also too exhausted to move. I stood in the centre of the room and gazed dully at its emptiness. I reflected that the peasant cottages through which I had passed on the road to Crampton Magna were probably better appointed. I thought for a second of the inventory locked in the tiny room two floors below; of its endless catalogue of carpets, tapestries, long-case clocks, wainscot chairs. In another lifetime this room-the 'Velvet Bedchamber', Alethea had called it-must have been spectacularly furnished; perhaps it was that of Sir Ambrose himself. Even now traces of its former life betrayed themselves, such as the chipped, peeling overmantel or the triangular patch of crimson flock paper high on the wall. Scraps of the glory that once was Pontifex Hall. For half-starved Puritan soldiers in their black homespun it must have made an obscene spectacle. And for someone else, apparently, a motive for murder.

I undressed slowly. Phineas, or someone, had carried my trunk into the room and placed it beside the pallet. I pawed through it for my nightshirt, which I slipped over my head. Then, using my moistened forefinger and thumb, I snuffed the tallow candle that Phineas had placed on the table, and an instant later the bedchamber was flooded through its cracked casement with deep billows of night. I closed my eyes, and sleep, with its heavy die, pressed its seal across their lids.

Chapter Five

Prague Castle, seen from a distance, was an irregular diadem that perched on the craggy brow of a rock overlooking the wattled rooftops of the Old Town across the river. At dawn its windows glinted in the morning sun, and at dusk its shadow crept across the river like the hand of a giant, then inched into the narrow streets of the Old Town to gather up the spires and squares. Seen from within, it was even more imposing, a multitude of archways, courtyards, chapels and palaces, even several convents and taverns. All were enclosed within fortified walls whose shape, from above, suggested a coffin. The Cathedral of St. Vitus occupied the castle's centre, and to the south of the cathedral stood the Královsky Palace, which was home in the year 1620 to Frederick and Elizabeth, the new King and Queen of Bohemia. Two hundred yards as the crow flies from the Královsky Palace, but through a succession of courtyards, then past a well-house, a fountain and a garden, stood what in 1620 would have been the newest and most remarkable of the castle's buildings, a set of galleries known as the Spanish Rooms. These rooms were found in the northwest corner, a short distance from where the Mathematics Tower rose above the moat. They had been built some fifteen years earlier to house the thousands of books and copious other treasures of the Emperor Rudolf II, a bronze statue of whom, ruffed and bearded, hook-nosed and melancholic, was erected outside the south front. By 1620 Rudolf had been dead for almost ten years, but his treasures remained. The books and manuscripts, among the most precious in Europe, were housed in the library of the Spanish Rooms, and at that time the castle's librarian was a man named Vilém Jirásek.

Vilém was in his middle thirties, a shy and modest man, ill-shod and unkempt, with a patched coat and a pair of spectacles behind whose lenses his pale eyes flitted and swam. Despite the coaxings of Jirí, his lone servant, he remained indifferent to his humble appearance. He was equally indifferent to the affairs of the world beyond the walls of the Spanish Rooms. Much had happened in Prague during the ten years he had worked in the library, including the rebellion of 1619 in which the Protestant noblemen of Prague had deposed the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand from the throne of Bohemia. Yet no event, however turbulent, had disturbed his scholarly labours. Each morning he shuffled out of his tiny house in Golden Lane and, exactly seventeen minutes later, arrived before his cluttered desk as the hundreds of mechanical clocks in the Spanish Rooms were tolling eight o'clock. Each evening, red-eyed and weary, he began his shuffle back to Golden Lane at the moment when the clocks struck six. In ten years he had never been known to deviate from this orbit by missing a day of work or even arriving so much as a minute late.

Vilém's post demanded such precision, of course. For the past ten years, with the help of two assistants, Otakar and István, he had been cataloguing and shelving each volume in the Spanish Rooms. The task was immense and doomed to failure, for Rudolf had been an insatiable collector. His books on the occult sciences alone numbered in their thousands. One entire room was stuffed with volumes on 'holy alchemy', another with books on magic, including the Picatrix, which Rudolf had used to cast spells on his enemies. As if these tons of books were not enough, hundreds were still arriving in the library each week, along with scores of maps and other engravings, all of which had to be catalogued and then shelved in one of the overcrowded and interconnecting rooms in which sometimes even Vilém himself got lost. To make matters worse, crates of volumes and other valuable documents were now being shipped to Prague from the Imperial Library in Vienna for safekeeping from both the Turks and the Transylvanians. So it was that the edition of Cornelius Agrippa's Magische Werke sitting on Vilém's desk on his first morning of work in 1610 still sat there ten years later, uncatalogued and unshelved, buried ever deeper beneath growing piles of books.

Or that, at least, had been the situation in the library until the spring of 1620, when it seemed that a period of respite had arrived. The river of incoming books had slowed to a trickle after the revolt against the Emperor and the coronation of Frederick and Elizabeth. A few of Frederick's crates of books had arrived the previous autumn from Heidelberg, from the great Bibliotheca Palatina, and most of these still had not been unpacked, let alone catalogued or shelved. But the other sources-monasteries, the estates of bankrupt or deceased noblemen-seemed to have dried up altogether. There were even alarming rumours that some of the most valuable manuscripts would be sold off by Frederick to finance the shabby and ill-equipped Bohemian army in what a related rumour claimed was the forthcoming war against the Emperor. Many other books and manuscripts from the Spanish Rooms would be sent for safekeeping either to Heidelberg or, in the event that Heidelberg fell, to London.

Safekeeping? The three librarians had been baffled by such stories. Safekeeping from what? From whom? They could only shrug at each other and return to work, unable to believe that their quiet routine could be disturbed by events as far-flung and incomprehensible as wars and dethronements. If the world outside was, from the little that Vilém understood of it, disordered and confused, here at least, in these rooms, a beautiful order and harmony prevailed. But in the year 1620 this delicate balance was to be upset for ever, and for Vilém Jirásek, cloistered among his stacks of beloved books, the first hint of the approaching disaster was the reappearance in Prague of the Englishman Sir Ambrose Plessington.

Sir Ambrose must have returned to Prague Castle, after a long absence, during either the winter or spring of 1620. At the time he, like Vilém, was in his middle thirties, though unlike Vilém he looked not even remotely studious. He was as thick in the middle as a butcher or a blacksmith and stood tall despite a pair of bandy legs that suggested he spent more time sitting in the saddle than at a desk. Both his brow and his beard were dark, and the latter was sculpted into the new V-shape that, like his millstone ruff, had lately come into fashion. Vilém would have known him by reputation since Sir Ambrose was responsible for a good many of the books and artefacts in the Spanish Rooms. Ten years earlier he had been Rudolf's most celebrated agent, criss-crossing every duchy, Erbgut, fiefdom and Reichsfreistadt in the Holy Roman Empire in order to bring back to Prague ever more books, paintings and curiosities for the obsessive and demented Emperor. He had even travelled as far as Constantinople, from which he returned not only with sacks of tulip bulbs (a particular favourite of Rudolf's) but also dozens of ancient manuscripts that were among the greatest prizes in the Spanish Rooms. Quite what brought him back to Bohemia in 1620, however, was no doubt a mystery to the few people in Prague-Vilém among them-who knew of his presence.

Of course, Sir Ambrose was not the only Englishman who arrived in Prague at this particular time; the city was bursting with them. Elizabeth, the new Queen, was daughter to King James of England, and the Královsky Palace had become home to her cumbersome entourage; to her hordes of hosiers, milliners and physicians, the dozens of deckhands who struggled to keep her afloat from one day to the next. Among these legions were six ladies-in-waiting, and among these ladies-in-waiting was a young woman named Emilia Molyneux, the daughter of an Anglo-Irish nobleman who had been dead for some years. Emilia was twenty-four years old at the time, the same age as her royal mistress. In appearance, too, she resembled the Queen-who was prim, pale and slight-except for a thick mass of black hair and a nearsighted squint.

How Emilia first encountered Vilém is a matter for speculation. It may have been at one of the numerous masques of which the young Queen was so fond, at a late hour when the punctilio of the court was lapsing amid the frenzy of music and drink. Or perhaps the meeting was a more sober affair. The Queen was a dedicated reader-one of her more endearing traits-and therefore might have sent Emilia to the Spanish Rooms to fetch a favourite book. Or possibly Emilia went to the Spanish Rooms on a mission of her own: she had been taught, among her other accomplishments, how to read. Whatever the case, their subsequent meetings would have been kept a secret. Vilém was a Roman Catholic, and the Queen, a devout Calvinist, detested Roman Catholics almost as much as she detested Lutherans. So devout was she, in fact, that she had refused to cross the bridge over the Vltava because of the wooden statue of the Holy Mother at its far end, and at her command all statues and crucifixes were being prised loose from the chapels of the Old Town. Even the curiosities in the Spanish Rooms had been inspected by her chaplain lest any of the shrivelled fragments should prove the bones of saints or other such popish relics. And so for Emilia to be discovered in the company of a Roman Catholic-a Roman Catholic educated by the Jesuits in the Clementinum-would have meant expulsion from Prague and an immediate return to England.

The two of them would therefore have met in Vilém's house in Golden Lane. On those evenings when her services were not required until late, Emilia would have slipped out of the Královsky Palace at eight o'clock, by the back stairs, and made her way through the courtyards without a torch or lantern, feeling her way along the walls. Golden Lane, a row of lowly cottages, lay on the far side of the castle, and Vilém's house, one of the smallest, was at the far end, cowering under the arches of the castle's north wall. But there was always a light in the window, smoke from the chimney, and Vilém to embrace her.

And he was always waiting to open the door each time she made her dark excursion, until the cold night in November when she found the window dark and the chimney smokeless. She hurried back to the palace that evening but returned the following night, then the night after that. On the fourth night, when there was still no response, she went to the Spanish Rooms, and there she discovered not Vilém, nor even Otakar or István, but someone else, an immense man in spurred boots whose long shadow, cast by an oil-lamp, was writhing on the floorboards behind him. Later she would remember the evening not so much because that was when she first met Sir Ambrose Plessington, but because that was the night when the war began.

It had been a Sunday. There were flakes of snow in the air and a skin of ice on the river. Another winter was arriving. The servants had trudged into churches whose steeples were lost in fog, then afterwards played skittles in the frost-rimed courtyards or chitter-chattered in the corridors and back stairwells. The stables and dung-heaps steamed. A herd of scrawny cows was driven, bells jingling, through the steep streets of the Lesser Town. Faggots of wood and bags of fodder were carted up to the castle along with the casks of alewife and Pilsener unloaded from the barges floating along the river. The ice had crackled against the hulls of the boats, sounding like thunder or, to the more nervous, gunfire.

Emilia had been dreading another winter in Prague, for the castle was a hard place when the weather turned. The doors in the Královsky Palace shrank in the cold and banged in the draughts, and snow blew underneath them, silting inches-deep against the furniture. Water in the well-houses froze and had to be broken by soldiers brandishing pikes. At night the wind howled through the courtyards, in reply, it seemed, to the starving wolves on the hills outside. Sometimes the wolves would slink into the Lesser Town and attack the almsfolk foraging for scraps in the middens, and sometimes an almsman would be discovered dead in the snow, half naked and frozen stiff, still clutching his staff, looking like a statue toppled from its pedestal.

But if the poor starved in the cold, the rich gorged themselves, for winter was the season when the Queen of Bohemia held her dozens of banquets. At these ceremonies the six ladies-in-waiting were expected to remain on their feet for hours on end, without food or drink, without speaking, without coughing or sneezing, as the Queen and her guests-princes, dukes, margraves, ambassadors-stuffed themselves on steaming plates of peacock or venison or wild boar, all washed down with kegs of Pilsener or bottles of wine. The topics of discussion were always the same. Did the guests support Frederick's claim to the throne of Bohemia? How much money would they send to defend it? How many troops? When might the troops arrive? Only long afterwards, when the royal party had finally eaten its fill, did the ladies-in-waiting fight the cook-maids and footmen for the greasy scraps.

It was to one of these feasts that, after the churches had emptied, Emilia and the other ladies-in-waiting were summoned. Yet another banquet had been laid in Vladislav Hall, this time in honour of two ambassadors from England. Emilia had been in bed at the time and was roused from her reading by the fierce chiming of the bell suspended on a hook beside her bed. Reading was one of her few pleasures in those years, one she indulged in bed, swaddled in blankets and propped on her pillows with a candle burning on the nightstand and the book held three inches from her nose. She had devoured hundreds of volumes since leaving London for Heidelberg in 1613-mostly tales of Arthurian romance such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, or stories of love and adventure like Torquemada's Olivante de Laura and Lofraso's The Fortune of Love. But she had also read Whetstone's biography of Sir Philip Sidney, and many of Sidney's sonnets she had reread so often that she knew them by heart, as she did those of Shakespeare, whose plays she read in dog-eared quarto editions. So passionate a reader was she that many times over the past seven years she had been chosen to read to the Queen herself-one of the few tasks in the Královsky Palace that she ever enjoyed. As Elizabeth was being put to bed after a banquet or masque, or even confined for one of her pregnancies, Emilia would take her place in a chair at the royal bedside and read a chapter or two of some chosen volume until her royal mistress fell asleep. The Queen asked to hear such soporific fare as The Chronicles of England by Holinshed or sober works of religious faith.

But her duties today would be nothing quite so agreeable as whiling away an hour or two with a fat volume on her lap. She arrived in Vladislav Hall to find the table heaped with meat and the walls lined with casks of wine. The Queen did not stint herself or her guests even though prices in the market had risen and there was talk of famine. The ambassadors must have heard the rumours, for they gorged themselves on whole chickens and knuckles of pork as if it was to be their last meal. The Queen's pet monkey, a stranger to decorum, leapt from chair to chair, chattering shrilly and accepting hand-outs. Emilia stood still and silent the whole time, barely listening as the ambassadors told their news of King James's bold plans for sending troops to defend Bohemia and rescue his daughter from the clutches of the papists. Only after two hours, growing faint, did she dare nibble at a piece of bread slipped into her pocket by one of the maidservants. The bread had gone greenish-grey with mould. It was the kind of bread she imagined people were reduced to eating during a siege-the kind of bread that, if half of the reports were true, everyone in Prague Castle would soon be eating. The crumbs were thick and pasty in her mouth. It was like chewing birdlime.

But there would be no siege, the ambassadors were assuring the Queen, nor even a war. Prague was safe. The Imperial Army was still eight miles away and Frederick's troops, all twenty-five thousand of them, were poised to block their advance. English troops were on their way, as were the Dutch, and Buckingham, the Lord High Admiral, was outfitting a fleet of ships to attack the Spaniards. Besides, winter was arriving, one of them observed as he leaned forward on his elbows and picked at his teeth with the tines of a fork. No general would be so uncivilised as to fight a war in winter, especially in Bohemia. Not even the papists, he assured the company, would be so barbaric.

But of course the ambassadors had been wrong about the Catholic armies, just as they would be wrong about King James and Buckingham's fleet of ships. The dirty plates had not even been cleared from the table and the scraps fought over by the servants before the first cannon-ball soared over the crest of the Summer Palace, just five miles distant, and skidded into the woods. The Imperial artillery had come within range of the White Mountain. The first barrage rattled the frosty air, crackling and bursting like an oncoming storm, startling the horses in their stables and sending the townsfolk scurrying home.

By that time Emilia had returned to her room on the top floor of the palace and begun tying her hood over her head, preparing for her last desperate foray into Golden Lane. Her thoughts had not been about the Imperial soldiers, those vast armies supposedly on their way to humble Bohemia and reclaim for Ferdinand the throne stolen by Frederick and Elizabeth. She was thinking about Vilém instead, and so it had taken several more explosions before she realised the sound was not that of thunder or ice breaking apart on the Vltava.

What happened next she was able to watch through the lens of a telescope, an instrument from the Spanish Rooms that Vilém had taught her to use only a fortnight earlier. The battle had begun at the Summer Palace, where the Bohemian soldiers were entrenched behind earthworks. Fog was creeping upwards from the hollows and into the game park so that only one of the palace's outbuildings could be seen, alight with petals of flame. Her hands trembled as she held the instrument to the window. Smoke was lolling upwards through the collapsed roof of the building, an exotic flower coloured mallow and orange with each burst of cannon-fire. Then one of the explosions lit the Bohemian soldiers as they fled downwards, zigzagging through the trees, leaving behind their tumbrels and gun-carriages. Further above, the first of the enemy troops-a squadron of pikemen and musketeers-reached the breastworks.

She left the palace by the back stairs less than an hour later. On the landings she pushed past clutches of kitchen-maids wailing about the invading Cossacks, then made her way into the courtyard. By this time dusk had fallen and the first of the fleeing Bohemian soldiers reached the gates. From the palace courtyard she heard their angry shouts as they pleaded with the sentries, then the sound of the gates scraping open. Some of the men had discarded their weapons-flails and sickles-others were dragging them like exhausted workers returning from a day in the fields. They were ill-fed and, with their grubby buff coats and dented breastplates, looked more like tinkers than soldiers. She dodged between them as they stumbled in their dozens across the cobbles. Then she hitched up her skirts and ran north towards Golden Lane, her path lit by explosions.

The houses in Golden Lane were dark at that hour, every last one of them. Their occupants must have fled along with dozens of others from the castle. A few days earlier, when the Imperial Army reached Rakovník, the English and Palatine counsellors had decamped with their families and possessions. Had Vilém fled with them? Had he abandoned her? She knocked again on the door, this time more forcefully, but still there was no reply. Had he even abandoned his books?

The sky was still on fire a few minutes later when, after she could see no sign even of Jirí, she made her way back towards the Královsky Palace. By this time the gates to the Powder Bridge were swinging shut amid much shouting. The Queen's coach had been summoned and now stood at the ready in the palace courtyard. The drum-fire had drawn closer, and she could hear the bark of guns as the musketeers gave fire, then fell back in their ranks to reload for another bloody enfilade. Teams of horses were dragging long culverins and stubby mortars across the brow of the mountain, pulling their carriages into place for the next bombardment. She ducked her head and ran towards the Spanish Rooms, frost crunching underfoot.

The library stood in the line of fire, the windows on its west side overlooking the dark hulk of the White Mountain, which in the twilight resembled a huge crouching beast. The thousands of books were housed in the deepest recesses of the Spanish Rooms, so she first had to pick her way through the labyrinth of galleries devoted to Rudolf's other treasures, dozens of bejewelled, glass-faced cabinets that with their bizarre curiosities-the horns of unicorns, the teeth and jawbones of dragons-looked like the reliquaries of a mad priest. Except that in the past few days most of the rooms had been emptied of their cabinets, or else the cabinets of their contents. Only a few stuffed animals and reptiles could be seen hunched in lifelike postures behind their panes of glass. But the scores of mechanical clocks were missing, as were the priceless scientific instruments-the astrolabes, the pendulums, the telescopes-that Vilém had demonstrated for her a few weeks earlier. As were the paintings, the urns, the suits of armour…

She was not surprised by this desolation, having tiptoed into the Spanish Rooms two nights earlier and seen the rooms emptied of their contents. There had been no sign of Vilém then either, he seemed to have vanished along with everything else. Only Otakar remained. She had discovered him sitting on a half-filled crate of books, a bottle of wine overturned on the floor beside him. He had been weeping and was so drunk he could barely keep his head erect or his eyes open. Most of the treasures, he explained through his hiccups, were being sent away.

'For safekeeping,' he told her, rising unsteadily to his feet and sloppily refilling his cup from a second bottle, which had also been purloined from the royal wine cellar. 'Lock, stock and barrel. The King is worried that his treasures will fall into the soldiers' hands or, even worse, into those of the Emperor Ferdinand.'

'What do you mean? Where have they been sent?'

The two of them had been standing beside Vilém's desk, which for once had been cleared of its huge stack of uncatalogued books. The shelves, to her astonishment, had also been cleared of most of their books. Otakar's voice echoed against the bare walls as he spoke. He had no idea where the crates had been sent but was full of gloomy prophecies that the wine prompted him to impart. He appeared to regard the invasion of Bohemia as a personal affront, its purpose nothing other than the desecration of the library. Did she know, he asked, that in the year 1600, when Ferdinand was Archduke of Styria, he had burned all of the Protestant books in his domains, including more than 10,000 volumes in the city of Graz alone? And so now that he was Emperor he would make it his business to incinerate all of the books in Prague as well. Because every ruler celebrated his conquests by setting torch to the nearest library. Did not Julius Caesar incinerate the scrolls in the great library at Alexandria during his campaign against the republicans in Africa? Or General Stilicho, leader of the Vandals, order the burning of the Sibylline prophecies in Rome? His slurred syllables had reverberated in the empty room. Emilia had made to go, but a clumsy hand grasping at her forearm stayed her. There was nothing so dangerous to a king or an emperor, he went on, as a book. Yes, a great library-a library as magnificent as this one-was a dangerous arsenal, one that kings and emperors feared more than the greatest army or magazine. Not a single volume from the Spanish Rooms would survive, he swore, sniffling into his cup. No, no, not a single scrap would escape the holocaust!

But tonight, as the guns blazed outside, there was no sign even of Otakar. She wove her way between the naked shelves until she reached the tiny room where Vilém worked. Though the door was closed, she could see a crack of light underneath, but the room was empty except for an oil-lamp and Otakar's two exhausted wine bottles. Vilém's desk stood in its usual place before the fireplace, and the oil-lamp, trimmed low, sat beside it, almost empty of fuel. She was about to withdraw when she noticed the faintly astringent scent in the air and then saw a clutter of objects on the desk: ink bottles and goose quills, along with a book-a parchment-bound in leather. She remembered none of these things from two nights earlier. Was this Otakar's handiwork? Or had Vilém returned? Perhaps the book belonged to him. Perhaps it was one of the works of philosophy-something by Plato or Aristotle-with which he had been trying to wean her from her diet of poetry and romance.

She tiptoed to the desk to examine the litter. There was also, she saw, a pumice-stone and a piece of chalk, as if the desk were that of a scrivener. She knew all about such things, about scribes and their parchments, which were rubbed with pumice-stones and then chalked to absorb the animal fats and keep the ink from running. Two weeks ago Vilém had shown her, besides the telescopes and astrolabes, a number of ancient manuscripts, ones copied, he said, by the scribes of Constantinople. The manuscripts were the most valuable documents in the whole of the Spanish Rooms, and the monks, he told her, the most exquisite artists the world had known. He had angled one of the documents into the lamplight to show her how not even the passage of a thousand years had faded the lettering-the reds made from ground-up cinnabar, the yellows from dirt excavated on the slopes of volcanoes. And some of the most beautiful and valuable parchments of all-the so-called 'golden books' made for the collections of the Byzantine emperors themselves-had been dyed purple and then inscribed with ink made from powdered gold. When Emilia closed their boards, which were as thick as the planks of a ship, her palms and fingers glittered as if she had been running them through a treasure chest.

But now the beautiful parchments from Constantinople had disappeared along with the rest of the books. Only the one on the desk remained. She moved aside the clutch of quills and studied it more carefully. The binding was exquisite. The front cover had been elaborately tooled, its leather stamped with symmetrical patterns of whorls, scrolls and interlacing leaves-intricate designs she recognised as those decorating some of the books from Constantinople. Yet when she opened the cover she saw how, far from being dyed purple or inscribed in gold, the pages were in a poor condition, stiff and wrinkled as if they had been submerged in water. The black ink was badly faded and smudged, though the words looked to be in Latin, a language she was unable to read.

Slowly she thumbed the pages, listening to the mortars echo and grumble outside the walls. One of the cannon-balls must have struck the battlements, because the floor seemed to tremble underfoot and the window-panes rattled in their fittings. A soft diffusion of light, the fire from the Summer Palace, lay lambent on the far wall. 'Fit deorum ab hominibus dolenda secessio,' she saw at the top of one of the pages, 'soli nocentes angeli remanent…'

Another piece of mortar struck the battlements, this time much loser, and a section of the wall collapsed into the moat with a crash. She looked up from the parchment, startled by the blast, and saw the tall figure and its black, sprawling shadow. It took a few seconds for her to absorb the sight of him-the beard, the sword, the pair of bowed legs that made him look like a bear standing upright. Later she would decide that he looked like Amadís of Gaul or Don Belianís, or even the Knight of Phoebus-one of the heroes from her tales of chivalry. How long he had been there, watching her from across the room, she had no idea.

'I'm sorry,' she stammered, dropping the book to the desk. 'I was only-'

Then another piece of mortar struck the wall and the window exploded in flames.

Chapter Six

I was awakened by the sound of hammering. For a moment, staring at the ceiling, at the ribs of oak laths and timber joists exposed beneath broken plaster, I could not recall where I was. I pushed myself on to my elbows, and a strip of sunlight fell like a bandolier across my chest. I was surprised to find myself on the right side of the pallet-on what, in another life, would have been Arabella's half. In my first year as a widower I had slept on her side of the bed, but then slowly-month by month, inch by inch-I had crept back to my own half, where I remained. Now I had the disturbing impression that I had dreamt of my wife for the first time in almost a year.

I rose from the bed and, pushing my spectacles on to my nose, trudged to the casement window, eager to take my first view of Pontifex Hall by daylight. Underfoot the bare boards were cool. Pushing open the casement and looking down, I saw that I was in one of the south-facing rooms. The window gave on to the parterre and, beyond it, an obelisk that corresponded to a ruined one I had seen the night before on the north side of the hall. Beyond the obelisk was another fountain and another ornamental pond, now stagnant and shrunken, each the twin of those on the north side. Or was I facing the north side? The entire grounds of the park seemed to have been composed symmetrically, as if Pontifex Hall, even in ruin, were a mirror of itself.

No, the sun was to the left, above a wall-barely visible through the branches and leaves-that marked the perimeter of the park. So, yes, I was facing south after all. Peering down through the open casement at the sorry remains of the parterre, I realised I must be directly above the library.

I stayed at the window for a minute; the air smelled fresh and green, a pleasant change from Nonsuch House, where the stench of the river at low tide is sometimes not to be borne. The hammers ceased their tattoos and were replaced, seconds later, by a sharp knock on my door. Phineas entered with a basin of steaming water.

'Breakfast served downstairs, sir.' He began clearing a space on the table with his right hand as the water slurped at the rim of the basin clutched in his wizened claw. 'In the breakfast parlour.'

'Thank you.'

'Whenever you are ready, sir.'

'Thank you, Phineas.' He had turned to go, but I stopped him. 'That knocking, what was it?'

'The plasterers, sir. Restoring the ceiling of the Great Room.' There was something unctuous and faintly unpleasant about his manner. He exposed a row of teeth that were sharp and gapped like a thatcher's rake. 'I do hope you were not disturbed, sir?'

'No, no. Not at all. Thank you, Phineas.'

I performed my ablutions quickly, scrubbing vigorously at my beard, and then began to dress, wondering about the 'interests' and 'enemies' Alethea had spoken of. Last night I had not been frightened by these revelations, as she assumed-merely puzzled. Now, in the light of day, with the fresh breeze stirring in the sunlit chamber, the idea seemed ridiculous. Possibly the townspeople were right. Poor Alethea, I thought as I struggled with my braces. Perhaps she was stricken with lunacy after all. Possibly the deaths of her father and husband-by murder or not-had unhinged her mind. This business of restoring the hall to its former condition was without doubt an eccentric pursuit.

At last I was ready to go downstairs. Closing behind me the door to the Velvet Bedchamber, I started along the corridor. There were two doors on either side, both closed; then a third, also closed, directly ahead of me. I passed through this and into an antechamber, then into a length of corridor. Two closed doors stood on either side of the corridor, which eventually intersected with a second, also lined with closed doors.

I was confused for a second. Which turn to take? I thought I could hear the creak of a banister and Phineas's footfalls rising up as if from the bottom of a well. I considered calling out to him, but something in his manner-his banked-down insolence, his carnivorous smile-warned against it. Phineas was not my friend. So I kept to a straight line, following the corridor, club foot noisily clumping. Should I turn back, I wondered, and try one of the other doors? But I kept walking. A short distance beyond the intersection the corridor terminated at a locked door.

I turned round and retraced my steps. By now Phineas's footfalls had disappeared and all was silent but for my own hesitant steps and the occasional squeal of a naked floorboard. I realised with dismay that the doors and passageways must repeat the maze on the ground floor. The symmetry operated on a vertical as well as a horizontal axis.

I stood for a moment at the intersection before choosing the new corridor. I turned left into it and, after a dozen paces, left again. I remembered having read somewhere that one conquered labyrinths by turning always to the left. This policy seemed to be rewarded, for after a few more steps the corridor widened perceptibly and I found myself in a long gallery. On the walls I could make out dark rectangles, like shadows-the after-images of framed portraits that I supposed had been smashed or stolen by the Puritans. But there was no sign of the staircase.

I continued along the gallery, tapping my thorn-stick like a blind beggar. Soon the passage narrowed and the doors and niches disappeared. This corridor now seemed as perplexing and treacherous as the other. Should I backtrack, I wondered, and return to the Velvet Bedchamber? But could I find even that now? I was completely disoriented. But then the corridor took another left turn and at last, twenty paces ahead, came to an abrupt halt before two doors, one on either side. Both stood invitingly ajar, their brass knobs winking conspiratorially in the gloom. I paused for only a second before nudging open the one on the right and stepping inside.

I was struck immediately by the pungent smell. The acrid air tickled my nose like the stink in an apothecary's, the worst-smelling shop in London. And as my eyes adapted to the gloom I saw to my surprise that the room actually looked like that of an apothecary: every inch of its work-table and shelves was laden with alembics, blowpipes, funnels, burners, several pestles and mortars, as well as dozens of bottles and flasks filled with chemicals and powders of every colour. I had stumbled upon some sort of laboratory. Except these were not the potions of an apothecary, it appeared, but those of an alchemist. Remembering a few of the books on the library's shelves-the twaddle by charlatans such as Roger Bacon and George Ripley-I decided that Alethea must dabble in alchemy, that eccentric art supposedly invented by Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian priest and magician whose works, translated by Ficino, were also to be found on her shelves.

I felt a slight tweak of regret as I crept forward to the table. Was Lady Marchamont one of those seekers after the so-called elixir vitae, the miraculous potion that was supposed to grant eternal life? Or perhaps she hoped to discover the elusive philosopher's stone that would turn lumps of coal or clay into nuggets of gold. I had a sudden image of her bent over bubbling flasks and alembics, muttering spells in dog Latin as the bat-wings of her black cape drooped about her shoulders. Little wonder that the good people of Crampton Magna thought her a witch.

It must have been another few seconds before I saw the telescope on the window-sill. A handsome instrument, two feet in length, with vellum casing and brass ferrules, it was perched on a wooden tripod at a 45-degree angle to the floor, like a long finger pointed at the heavens. I leaned forward and tried to squint through the convex eye-lens, wondering if Alethea was an astrologer as well as an alchemist. I thought once again of the volumes of superstitious nonsense, along with the half-dozen star-atlases I had also spotted on the shelves. Or had the telescope and chemicals belonged to her father and was he the necromancer and stargazer? Perhaps Alethea was restoring his laboratory, like all else, to its original condition, one more side-chapel in the great shrine to Sir Ambrose Plessington.

But the room was not merely a shrine. The telescope was new-I could still smell its vellum-and someone had recently mixed the chemicals, for there was a powdery residue in one of the mortars and spillage on the table. A number of the vials, including one marked 'potassium cyanide', were half-empty.

Cyanide? I set the vial, filled with crystals, back on its shelf, feeling as though I had blundered across some forbidden secret. Was Alethea concocting some deadly sort of poison to deal with her mysterious adversaries? The thought was not so outlandish as it sounds. After all, in those days our newssheets teemed with alarming reports of how beautiful Parisiennes kept their poison bottles on their dressing-tables next to their perfume and powder. And in Rome priests were reporting to the Pope that young ladies had described in the confessional how they murdered their wealthy husbands with arsenic and cantharides bought from an ancient fortune-teller named Hieronyma Spara. So did Lord Marchamont meet his end in this hideous fashion-by poison? By his own wife's hand? Or was Alethea involved in some other activity, something slightly more innocent? Because from what little I understood of alchemy I knew that cyanide, a poison found in laurel leaves and the stones of cherries and peaches, was used in the extraction of gold and silver.

A wave of gooseflesh rose on my forearms. The chamber seemed chilly all of a sudden. From somewhere beyond the open window came the whinny of a horse and, below it, a clicking sound, sharp and silvery, like the clash of falchions. I turned round slowly, telling myself that my task, whatever it was, had nothing to do with this dreadful little room. The library and not the laboratory was my domain. But then I noticed something else amid the clutter.

The two volumes were almost hidden among the dozens of flasks and instruments. I reached for the one on top, expecting to see yet another alchemical treatise. But the volume turned out to be an atlas of the world, the Theatrum orbis terrarum by Abraham Ortelius. This edition had been printed in Prague in the year 1600, a few years after Ortelius's death, if I recalled. The pages were badly water-damaged but had been expertly rebound in buckram. Franked on the pastedown was an elaborate ex-libris with the motto Littera Scripta Manet.

For a moment I flipped through the tackled pages, through dozens of beautifully engraved maps. I was familiar enough with the atlas, though this particular edition was unknown to me. This was not so unusual, however, because the work had gone through dozens of editions since its first publication in 1570. I wondered how it had migrated from the library. Perhaps the great Ortelius, once the Royal Cosmographer to Philip II of Spain, had been reduced to a doorstop or a step-stool?

I set the atlas back on the table and picked up the second volume, which was newer and in considerably better condition. It was, I found, an equally distinguished work. Thomas Salusbury's translation of Galileo's Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo. Entitled The Systeme of the World: in Four Dialogues, it had been printed in London only a month or two earlier. I had ordered two dozen copies from the printer, all of which were sold in a matter of hours. Now I had scores of other orders from all over the country-and from Holland, France and Germany as well. The whole of Europe, it seemed, was clamouring to read this philosophical masterpiece, which was by far the most important and controversial book of its time, one the Jesuit priests in the Collegio Romano claimed would do more harm to Rome than Luther and Calvin combined.

I had only just finished reading the book myself. It contains a series of dialogues that pit a supporter of the Ptolemaic system, named Simplicius, against a more astute supporter of Copernicus. What happened to Galileo following its publication in 1632 is known well enough. Despite diplomatic support for Ptolemy and an enthusiastic reception across Europe, the book ran foul of the Church authorities. Pope Urban VIII, a friend of Galileo, ordered a prosecution, and so the old astronomer was summoned to Rome to stand trial before the Inquisition, charged with propagating Copernicanism, the theory holding that, contrary to the Holy Writ, the sun rather than the earth is the centre of the universe. In 1633 he was found guilty as charged, marched into the dungeons of the Inquisition to be shown the instruments of torture at the disposal of the Pope, then marched to church and made to recant his views. He was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life, while the Dialogo was placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum, the Vatican's list of forbidden books.

Snick-snick-snick…

The peculiar champing sound outside the window had grown louder. I shivered again and replaced the book, wondering what interest Alethea might have in this masterpiece of Europe's greatest astronomer. The volume seemed strangely out of place in the laboratory, for Galileo had been an enemy of the hocus-pocus and superstition bred by alchemists, occultists and other followers of the ancient shaman Hermes Trismegistus. So what connection could lie between the book and the chemicals ranged about it? Or even between Ortelius and Galileo, between the map-maker and the astronomer?

I had decided that there was no connection, that their presence in the laboratory was merely adventitious, when suddenly I spotted something else. The breeze from the window, riffling the pages of the Theatrum, exposed a strange insertion, a slip of paper, halfway through the text. The paper seemed to have been imprinted with a meaningless jumble of letters, what appeared to be some barbaric language:

FUWXU KHW HZO IKEQ LVIL EPX ZSCDWP YWGG

FMCEMV ZN FRWKEJA RVS LHMPQW NYJHKR KHSV JXXE FHR QTCJEX JIO KKA EEIZTU

AGO EKXEKHWY VYM QEOADL PTMGKBRKH

At first I thought the garbled inscription was a drastic mistake of the printer or bookbinder. Yet an error of this magnitude hardly seemed possible.

I turned the page. The verso was blank, but one of Ortelius's maps-that of the Pacific Ocean and its sprinkling of islands-continued on the following recto. Could it be that the leaf insertion was a deliberate but concealed interruption of the text? No doubt it wasn't part of the original gathering at all but had been stitched inside, for whatever reason, when the book was rebound. And the planed edges of the leaves told me that the book had indeed been rebound. So had it been an accident by the bookbinder? Had a page from another work-a page whose watermark was, I noted, different from the others-found its way into the loose quire and then into the binder's sewing-frame? Tom Monk, who was all thumbs when it came to binding books, often made errors of this sort. But I doubted that incompetence was at work in this case. Some effort had gone into its production, for it seemed no ordinary scrap of paper. I thumbed quickly through the rest of the maps and, finding no more anomalies, turned back to the mysterious leaf.

If its inclusion was no accident, there was one possible explanation, of course. For the past ten years rumours had abounded about how wealthy Royalist families had concealed their valuables in the grounds of their estates before fleeing into exile, hoping to reclaim them when they returned in happier times. Such rumours were probably the cause of the excavations I had seen beside the carriageway, the ones Alethea blamed on some misguided zeal of the villagers. I put little stock in such stories but now found myself wondering if the letters comprised not a foreign language but some sort of cipher, one that had been inscribed on the page and then hidden in the copy of Ortelius's Theatrum at the start of the Civil War. Perhaps the paper held a clue as to the whereabouts of Sir Ambrose's wealth of paintings and artefacts, all of which, as Alethea claimed, had disappeared. Perhaps the cipher was, like the book's beautiful engravings, a map of some sort.

I felt as if I had been conducted from one maze-the lengths of corridor-into an even more perplexing one. There seemed no way out… unless, of course, I took the book with me or, better yet, cut out the mysterious page with the penknife I now saw on the table. But was it, under any circumstances, excusable for me, a bibliophile, to mutilate a book?

The shameful deed was completed in two or three seconds. I pressed on the book's binding with my palm and drew the point of the instrument downwards along the hinge of the leaf, close to the stitching, as if opening the belly of a fish with a gutting knife. The page came away with a soft rip. I folded it twice and, placing it in my breast-pocket, was surprised to discover how swiftly my heart was beating. Then I drew a deep breath and stepped back into the corridor.

Snick. Snick. Snick-snick-snick…

The sound was brisk and penetrating, like the champing of teeth or the cry of some peculiar bird. I turned round, the morning sun warm on my back. No, not a bird. The top half of a man's head, its brow sunburnt, had appeared through a gap in the hedge. I squinted at the curved wall of foliage and caught, below the head, the swift glint of metal.

Snick, snick, snick…

The rhythm gathered pace, each sharp syllable answered a second later by the house's brickwork. The gap in the hedge was widening as I watched. Leaves and branches tumbled away. The hedge, like the parterre, was badly overgrown or, where not overgrown, either uprooted or chopped down-a hopeless tangle of hornbeam, whitethorn, privet and holly. The head ducked and the champing beak vanished from sight.

'The springs rise over there,' Alethea said, 'to our left. Just past the orangery.'

I turned my attention from the hedge. The two of us were standing to the west of Pontifex Hall, a few yards beyond the reach of its great quadrangular shadow, which stretched towards us across the sward. Alethea was pointing past a shallow pit, clogged with debris, above which a few miserable spars rose like ancient, idolatrous forms. Heaped about them were shards of old masonry. Beyond, on higher ground, a scattering of rocks had been arranged in broken geometric patterns.

'You can still see the remains of the dip-well.'

She nodded in the direction of the concentric rings. Once again her hand had grasped my forearm, this time in a gesture of intimacy. In the fresh light her soiled gown now proved not black after all but a mallard green. The hooded mantle, still draped over her shoulders despite the heat, looked to be embroidered with tiny faded flowers.

'The springs pour out of the rocks,' she continued, 'and into the dip-well and cress-pond, both devised by my father. From there the water disappears down a drain and runs towards the wings of the hall in a network of channels. The water was tamed and used in fountains and waterfalls. Even a giant waterwheel. It stood over there,' she said, turning to point vaguely to the south of the hall.

'All built by Sir Ambrose.'

'Of course. He was granted a number of patents for water pumps and windmills.'

She fell silent. At times this morning she seemed distracted, absorbed in some private, melancholy reverie that manifested itself in silence and oblique, unfathomable glances. We skirted the devastated orangery and now stood at the edge of the stone-lined cress-pond. It was infested with duckweed, and even at this hour its surface was thick with clouds of gnats.

When her silence promised to endure, I turned to look back at the gaunt hulk of Pontifex Hall, trying unsuccessfully to imagine the fountains and waterworks in place of the weed-choked sward and overgrown hedge now confronting us. A single magpie was swaggering across it, coming in our direction. A bad omen, my mother would have said: one for sorrow, two for joy. Instinctively I looked for a second bird but, shading my eyes, saw only the leavings of the workmen hired to restore the house, a careless litter of chisels, brick hammers, bullnose planes, handsaws. Several tarpaulins, their corners pinned by bricks, shrouded thick sheets of marble. For the fireplaces, Alethea had explained. A half-finished wooden scaffold clambered awkwardly up the scarred wall of the north wing. Beneath it lounged one of the plasterers, smoking a tobacco-pipe and throwing us the occasional glance.

By now an hour had passed since I fled the chamber with the torn page tucked in my pocket, next to my original summons. On my second attempt I had negotiated the passages unerringly; the door that originally impeded my progress had proved not to be locked, but merely stiff, and I found my way downstairs in a few minutes. It was as if the alien leaf had been some sort of key or passport-a golden skein-without which I was doomed to endless wanderings above stairs. Phineas had been awaiting my arrival in the breakfast parlour. Lady Marchamont, he explained, had already eaten and was outside in the park. If I would be so good as to take a seat, then Miss Bridget would be pleased to serve me. Then Lady Marchamont was most anxious that I should join her for a walk.

The paper was crackling softly in my pocket as the two of us returned to the house, walking side by side and passing the dozens of stunted, limbless trunks that rose through the overgrowth of what was once an orchard. I had already decided that it was a cipher, some kind of encrypted message. But encrypted by whom?

The sound of the shears grew louder as we approached the ravaged hedge, and the gardener's disembodied head bobbed and floated along the irregular green parapet. A complex pattern was defining itself as more and more branches fell away. It seemed not just one hedge, but rather a dozen, all interconnected. The lines of the plantation appeared to imitate the angles of bastions, half-moons, scarps, counter-scarps, like the model of a fortress-a series of concentric rings like those of the drip-well. What was the purpose? A puzzle maze? I was shading my eyes, studying the row of unpruned hornbeam; the dark patches of yew, the newly gravelled pathway imperfectly penetrating the wall.

Yes, a hedge-maze: an 'infernal garden' like those I had read about at the castles in Heidelberg and Prague. Through the arched entrance I could see the intricate windings beginning to take shape. The plan, I supposed, had been destroyed or lost, so that now the fractured outlines of the garden formed an impossible, patternless labyrinth. The gardener had bent his head and the shears were snapping furiously. Did a premonition nudge me as we passed, or is it merely the warping eyepiece of memory-the memory of those events that were so shortly to follow-that now gives horrible resonance to the sight of that overgrown maze and the gardener with his murderous blades?

'The pipes have become blocked.' Roused from her reverie, Alethea was continuing her account. 'They were made of the hollowed trunks of elm trees, which underground have a life expectancy of only twenty-five, perhaps thirty, years. After that, they tend to collapse, or clog or leak. Then the water flows everywhere.' She pulled up short and gazed across at the scaffolded wing of Pontifex Hall. 'The foundations of the house are being undermined, you see. Water is pooling underneath, more of it every day. I am told that in a few months the entire house might collapse.'

'Collapse?' I had turned from the hedge-maze and was shielding my eyes as I peered up at the tragic spectacle of Pontifex Hall. I thought suddenly of the sounds last night in the crypt, the steady rush of unseen waters. 'Can the waters not be dammed at the source? Or conducted away?'

'The sources are too numerous for a dam. The springs rise at five or six points at least. Some of them haven't even been found. The whole building is being undermined by an underground river. So, yes, the water must be conducted away. I have an engineer in London working on plans for a new set of pipes.' She gave an exhausted sigh, then tugged my arm as she had at the door to the muniment room. 'Come.'

As we walked through the grounds Alethea described something more of the house's history. It was a replacement, she said, for one built in the time of Queen Elizabeth, which in turn was a replacement for Pontifex Abbey, an ancient foundation confiscated by Henry VIII from its little band of Carmelite friars after the Act of Dissolution in 1536. The history of the house seemed to be one of growth and destruction, of one building rising from the ashes-sometimes literally-of another, a cycle of oblivion and renewal. She indicated where the vineyard and herb garden of the dissolved abbey had extended; where its confiscated library had stood; where cupolas, bell-towers and turrets once reared high above surrounding crofts and wastes. All were now long vanished except for the odd earthwork or cairn of shattered masonry-so many scars and old bones. I was reminded, suddenly, of what she had said earlier about civilisation being founded by acts of desecration. But how in that case, I wondered, did one tell the difference between them, between acts of civilisation and those of barbarism?

'The Elizabethan house burned down some fifty years ago, killing its inhabitants, an ancient family named de Courtenay. Quite impoverished, I believe. A year after the fire, my father purchased the freehold from the family's even more impoverished heir, a cheesemonger in Dorchester. Over the course of the next five or so years he raised the current house. He designed it himself, you understand. Every last detail of its construction, both inside and out.'

So Sir Ambrose himself was the architect, the one obsessed with mazes and symmetries. Yes, a true Daedalus-as Alethea had called him-for was not Daedalus the architect of, among other things, the Labyrinth in Crete? But I was at a loss to explain the fixation with these peculiar repetitions and echoes. Mere vagary, or was there an ulterior consideration? I felt that, despite Alethea's anecdotes and the 'remains' I had seen in the underground vault, I knew almost nothing about Sir Ambrose. The seared leaves and cockled animal skins stacked in the disinterred coffin told some strange and possibly tragic tale, as did his collection of books. But at that point I could not even begin to guess what obscure thread might hold them all together. He seemed to show one face, then another, so that it was impossible to form a picture of this strange chimera. Was he a collector? An inventor? An architect? A sea captain? An alchemist? I resolved that when I returned to London I would make a few enquiries.

I realised too that I hardly knew more about Alethea. Her every account-of the library, of the house, of her father-seemed to withhold as much as it gave out. I wondered how far I should trust her. As we approached the house I deliberated whether or not I might safely confide in her, if it would be wise to tell her about my experience in the maze of corridors above the stairs, or even to ask about the copy of Ortelius. Or was silence still the most prudent course?

Before I had made up my mind, she steered me towards the door as one does a blind man.

'The library awaits us, Mr. Inchbold. The time arrives for you to learn your task.'

Chapter Seven

My task, it transpired, was to be, at least on first impression, relatively straightforward, if not exactly easy.

It had to do with Sir Ambrose's books. What else? After leading me back inside the library-which was even more spectacularly voluminous lit by the band of light streaming through its casement window-Alethea produced a list of books, a dozen in all. It had been discovered on her return, she said, that these particular volumes were missing from the library. And since she wished to complete the collection and restore the library to the condition in which Sir Ambrose had left it at his death, it was imperative that all of them be found.

'So you wish me to find replacement copies…' I was trying to read the upside-down names inscribed on the page. I felt relief-mingled, perhaps, with disappointment-that at last everything was becoming clear. Such an enormous fuss for twelve books. Craning my neck slightly I was able to make out one of the titles: Girolamo Benzoli's Historia del Mondo Nuovo. 'I see. Very well. I should be able to find copies-'

I was interrupted by Alethea, who seemed strangely nettled at my assumption.

'No, Mr. Inchbold. You do not understand. I said it was imperative that these books were returned to the library.' She rapped her finger smartly against the page, which rattled like stage thunder. 'These copies exactly, the originals. Each is identified by its ex-libris, which shows my father's arms. Here…'

Pulling a book at random from the shelf, she opened it to the inside cover, on which a black-and-white shield had been embossed. She then handed me the volume, an edition of Leonzio Pilato's Latin translation of the Iliad, whose insignia I studied more closely for fear of disturbing her temper further. The shield, I saw, was divided by a chevron and adorned at its base by a single charge, an open book with two seals and two clasps. Very appropriate, I thought. I noticed further that the device also betrayed Sir Ambrose's peculiar fondness for symmetries, because the left side of the shield-the sinister half-perfectly matched the dexter. Rather, they matched perfectly except for their colours, since the shield had been counterchanged: the sinister half was white wherever the dexter was black, and vice versa, so that the left half of the chevron was black and the right half white, while the left half of the charge was white and the right black, and so forth. The effect was a peculiar one of both reflection and contrast, of symmetry together with variation or difference. The only exception to the regime was the scroll unfurling beneath, on which was inscribed Sir Ambrose's now-familiar motto: Littera Scripta Manet. 'The written word abides.' It was a motto that seemed at once a promise and a threat.

I closed the book and looked up to find Alethea studying me with a strangely nervous empressement. Gone were the melancholy reveries of a few moments earlier; she was now alert and anxious. I handed back the book, which she carefully replaced on the shelf, before returning her attention to me.

'You wish me to find twelve books owned by your father,' I ventured. 'Twelve books with his ex-libris.' I was giving the upside-down list a dubious frown. By now I could make out several more of the titles. One appeared to be the Elegías de varones ilustres de las Indias of Juan de Castellanos, and another was Pedro de Léon's Primera parte de la crónica del Peru-both of them, like the edition of Benzoli, chronicles of the Spanish explorations of the New World. 'But that may be difficult,' I added, adopting my most professional tone, 'even impossible. A thousand things might have become of them. They could be anywhere. Or nowhere. What if they were burned by the troops in the garrison?'

A vertical line appeared between the two dark arches of her eyebrows. She shook her head and gave me the hopeless, wearied look of one forced to explain recondite matters to a difficult child. I felt myself flush-from anger, but also from something more subtle, for I noticed how the change in her appearance went beyond her obvious frustration with me. This morning her face had been powdered, her lips lightly painted, and the great crop of hair subdued, partially at least, by a coif of black lace. She was still Junoesque in both stature and demeanour-I might even say Amazonian-but none the less she looked… well… rather beguiling. I even thought I smelled some kind of sweet oil that reminded me, with dreadful incongruity, of Arabella's orange-flower perfume. Still, Alethea's charms were so contrary to those of Arabella-my quiet, modest Arabella-that I found them difficult to recognise and appreciate, face powder and crimson paint or not. I swiftly averted my gaze, catching a glimpse as I did so of a fourth title inscribed on the page: Edward Wright's Certaine Errors in Navigation.

'Please, Mr. Inchbold. You must listen very closely.' Her voice was more earnest and insistent than the case seemed to demand, with none of the patience and propriety I had so far associated with women. 'I wish to engage you to find one book. One book only. The eleven other volumes, I am happy to say, have been located. But this last, the twelfth book, has not-though not for want of trying.'

So much fuss, then, for a single book. I sighed inwardly. 'And so it is on account of this one, the twelfth, that you wish to engage me.' I was attempting to keep an edge of resignation from my voice. I had no wish to see her temper ruffle again.

'Precisely. For, you see, much depends on your finding it.'

'It seems like a great deal of trouble to bring someone all the way from London for a single book.'

'A very valuable book.'

'Even for a valuable one.'

The vertical line on her dark brow deepened. 'Mr. Inchbold, I wish to emphasise the importance of your task.'

'And so you have.'

But there was more, much more, that she had not 'emphasised'; I was certain of that. Everything she told me seemed meticulously selected from a larger, unexposed story, some intrigue at which she only hinted. Her father's enemies, for example, these 'other interests'. Did they, too, wish to claim this mysterious twelfth book? But I wondered also how much of what she said-about her father, about her husband-I should let myself believe.

I had turned my back to her and for a few calculated seconds glowered blindly through the window, past the shards of glass hanging precariously in their decrepit lead fittings. I cleared my throat softly and asked: 'And if I should refuse?'

'Then we both shall lose,' she replied evenly. 'Then my situation becomes most unfortunate.'

'There are other booksellers.'

'That's as may be. But none, I think, possesses your resources.'

That was true, or at least I liked to tell myself it was. But appeals to my vanity were no good. Nor was the appeal to my greed that followed.

'I shall pay you very well.' Her voice was coming from a few feet behind me, chiming with a note I'd not heard before. 'One hundred pounds. Will that be sufficient? Plus expenses, of course. I expect you will be required to travel.'

'Travel?' The idea appalled me. I had no wish to travel anywhere except back to Nonsuch House. A hundred pounds was a good deal of money, true enough. But what did I want with more money? I was perfectly happy as I was, with my handsome £150 a year; with my tobacco-pipe, my armchair, my books.

'One hundred pounds, mind you, simply to accept the task,' she was continuing. I could feel her eyes boring into my back. 'Then, should you find the book… as I am certain you will… one hundred more. Two hundred pounds, Mr. Inchbold'-she had adopted a tone whose levity belied the magnitude of the offer-'two hundred pounds simply to hunt down a book. My only condition is, of course, your complete discretion.'

Two hundred pounds for a book? Removing my spectacles I began polishing their lenses vigorously on the hem of my coat. My curiosity began to wriggle free from the strict tethers with which I had bound it. Two hundred pounds for a single book? Unheard of. Ridiculous. Half my entire stock could be had for that price. What sort of volume could possibly be worth such a sum? Even the Caxton binder's edition of St. Augustine's Confessiones-the edition I had glimpsed last night-could not possibly fetch a price as grand as that.

I replaced my spectacles and for a moment said nothing. Alethea had remained silent, awaiting my reply. Well… what did I really have to lose? It was possible I wouldn't be required to travel after all. I had all of my factors, of course: good men in Oxford, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt. And Monk could be counted on to scour the bookstalls in Paternoster Row and Westminster Hall, or anywhere else I might see fit to send him. And for all I knew the book might even be on my walnut shelves at this very minute. Well? Stranger things did happen. After all, I knew for a fact that I had a copy on my shelves of Sir Walter Raleigh's Discoverie of the large, rich, and beautifull Empire of Guiana-a fifth title that I had made out on the upside-down page a minute earlier.

I turned round to face her. Almost despite myself I extended my hand.

'Well? What, may I ask, is the name of this valuable book?'

That afternoon I was slumped back in the seat of the carriage for the return journey to London. For the first time in hours-in days-I felt myself relax. Phineas cracked his whip, the horses plunged forward, the stunted trees flew past the quarter-lights. But then as we approached the archway we came within inches of colliding with a lone horseman riding full pelt towards the house.

'Sir Richard!'

'Bloody old fool! Out of my path!'

'Yes, Sir Richard!'

Phineas jerked the reins violently sideways. The carriage lurched towards the grassy verge, where the right front wheel jarred over a rock and then slipped into a trench. I was flung forward on to the floor of the box, twisting my hip. The rider spurred his mount, a big chestnut roan, and flew past my window with a rook-like caw.

By the time I righted myself we had climbed out of the trench and were passing beneath the archway. Grimacing, I twisted round in the seat and raised the leather flap on the tiny oval rear-window. I watched the rider dismount and then bow before Alethea, who curtsied and offered her hand. She had already changed into a riding-habit in expectation of his arrival. Her visitor was a big fellow in an old-fashioned millstone ruff and a high-crowned hat with a purple ribbon that twitched in the breeze. They were framed for a second by the wings of Pontifex Hall, two figures in an oil painting. Then we turned a corner and the painting was riven by a length of broken wall and unkempt hedgerow.

'Sir Richard Overstreet,' shouted Phineas, for once volunteering some information. 'A neighbour. Betrothed to marry Lady Marchamont.'

'Is that so?'

'Before the year is out, I shouldn't wonder. A scoundrel, sir, if you ask me,' he finished with uncharacteristic passion.

'Oh?'

But Phineas had said his piece. There were to be no further divulgations. We rode on, for three more days, in gloomy silence.

But the incident left a strange effect on me. My anger and impatience had drained away to be replaced by something else. For at some point during the previous day a small breach had been prised open. Certain images of Alethea filtered back along the irregular sluices of memory. As I closed my eyes these trickling channels carried past me images of her bent over the volumes, blowing dust from their bindings or tracing her fingertips across their surfaces like someone exploring the curve of a lover's face. Once she had even raised one of the books to her lips and, closing her eyes, sniffed at it as one would at a rose.

And so as the road twisted before us and untwisted behind I felt the first twinges of a confusing and unexpected distemper, the timid quivering of a stunted and vestigial organ for which, as with an appendix, I no longer had a use; something that, like a tail-bone or wisdom tooth, had been carried over from an extinct life, quiescent and forgotten. All at once I remembered how she looked at me in the crypt, as well as the dozens of books on sorcery crammed on to the shelves of the library, and for a moment I wondered if during my stay she might not have magicked me like a witch or a wisewoman-if some heathen spell was the source of these strange quavers. But before I could contemplate this foolish notion any longer, the leaky flood-hatches had been closed by the pain in my hip. Still, the event was no less worrying for its brevity. I would remain on the alert for further symptoms.

As my seat tipped back and forth I watched the combes open and dip, the hills and trees rise to meet us, then fall away. A few clouds hung overhead, grey as gun-smoke. Again I felt myself relax. Soon I would see the golden cupolas and brass weathercocks of Nonsuch House rising into the smoke-filled London sky. Soon I would be back inside my thick walls of books, sealed off from the alarming conundrums of the world. The events of the past day would seem nothing but a strange dream from which I had gratefully awakened, unsure of where I had travelled or what might have transpired.

But I would still possess a memento of my journey, a garbled testament of its strange purpose. As we reached Crampton Magna I withdrew a piece of paper from my pocket and stared hard at the smudged words inscribed in Alethea's old-fashioned secretary hand: Labyrinthus mundi, or The Labyrinth of the World.

Rattling about in my seat, I frowned at the paper as I had when Alethea first placed it into my hands. The name sounded vaguely familiar, though I was far from certain where I might have heard of it. It was the name of a work quite different from the other errant volumes, those treatises on navigation and remote explorations of the Spanish Americas. It was a parchment that dated, she claimed, from early in the fifteenth century, when it had been copied from a papyrus original-now lost-and translated into Latin by a scribe in Constantinople: a fragment of perhaps ten or twelve vellum leaves in the ornate oriental blind-tooled binding known as rebesque or arabesco. She would say nothing more except that it was a Hermetic text, an obscure one that had never been published. But how such a parchment could be worth two hundred pounds, and how it had become the mysterious index of Lady Marchamont's fortunes, such riddles I did not wish, at this point, to consider.

How much did I know, at that time, about the so-called Corpus hermeticum? No more, I suppose, than anyone else. I was aware, naturally, of how the manuscripts first appeared in Florence some two hundred years ago, after Cosimo de' Medici sent forth bands of his agents with orders to bring back to his magnificent library whatever parchments they could lay their hands on in every church and monastery that would let them past their doors. And I knew how these explorers-mostly monks from the San Marco in Florence-had recovered scores of lost masterpieces in the fusty libraries and scriptoria of the far-flung monasteries of Monte Cassino, Langres, Corvey and St. Gall, works by such esteemed authors as Cicero, Seneca, Livy and Quintilian, and dozens more besides, all of which were quickly edited, translated and placed for study and safekeeping with the other treasures in the Medici Library. The thought of these scholar-explorers, these intrepid friars on muleback, I had always found appealing. Theirs were the humblest and yet most noble voyages of discovery, dangerous trips made decades before the sailing of Columbus and Cabot, before the mania for navigating the world took over, perilous journeys whose object was not gold or spices or trade routes but ancient manuscripts, a few dried-out animal skins whose secret worlds were brought back to life only after weeks of plodding along overgrown, bandit-infested mountain tracks.

And I knew, finally, how the greatest of all these discoveries was made in or about the year 1460, less than ten years after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, when one of Cosimo's fearless monks brought back to Florence the first fourteen books of the Corpus hermeticum. The treasure uncovered in Macedonia was as valuable-or so Cosimo believed-as the spices of India or the gold of Peru, and worth all of the other manuscripts in the Medici Library combined. The parchments reached Florence soon after the untranslated dialogues of Plato, which had been brought out of Macedonia by Giovanni Aurispa. But Cosimo ordered Marsilio Ficino, the greatest scholar in Florence, and therefore the greatest scholar in the entire world, to translate the works of Hermes first, because he believed, like everyone else, the great Ficino included, that Plato had received all of his wisdom from none other than the ancient Egyptian priest Hermes Trismegistus. For, after all, had not ancient scholars like Iamblichus of Apamea described how Plato drank down the revered knowledge of Hermes Trismegistus while visiting Egypt? So why should Cosimo read copies by this upstart Plato if he owned their originals, the works of Hermes Trismegistus himself?

As Ficino busily translated the fourteen books from Greek into Latin there arose in Florence and then throughout the rest of Europe dozens of rumours about the existence of more Hermetic manuscripts, in Macedonia and elsewhere, all still awaiting discovery. Some twenty more parchments were eventually recovered, after much bribing of priests and ransacking of temples, but all were versions or fragments of the same fourteen books, and three more besides, so that the total number of Hermetic texts in existence stood at seventeen. A century after Cosimo's death, the Greek text of the Macedonian parchments was published in Paris, and afterwards both copies of the Corpus hermeticum-the one Latin, the other Greek-went through many editions and emendations, all of which Sir Ambrose had, it seemed, dutifully collected: as many editions and translations as were printed throughout Europe in the past two hundred years.

Alethea had beckoned me forward to the shelves to show how her father owned the editions prepared by Lefèvre d'Étaples, Turnebus, Flussas, Patrizzi, Rosseli, even Trincavelli's edition of Johannes Stobaeus, a Macedonian pagan who had collected together some of the Hermetic works more than a millennium earlier. But none of these collections, she claimed, contained the eighteenth manuscript, The Labyrinth of the World, the first Hermetic text discovered in almost two hundred years.

I had watched sceptically as she stood beside the shelf and ticked them off one by one, thinking what a pity it was that, on these volumes at least, Sir Ambrose had wasted so much money. All were handsomely bound, it was true, and I could have sold most of them in a matter of days to any one of a dozen collectors. But fifty years ago the great Isaac Casaubon had demonstrated how the entire Corpus hermeticum-this supposed fountainhead of the world's most ancient magic and wisdom-was nothing more than a fraud, the invention of a handful of Greek scholars living in Alexandria at some time in the century after Christ. So of what possible value or interest for anyone was one more book, one more of these fakes?

The coach forded the thin stream, its wheels tossing curtains of water to either side. The down payment gold sovereigns-an even dozen of them-chimed softly in my pockets. I closed my eyes and didn't open them, for all I remember, until we reached the smoke of London, which I swear had never smelled so good.

Chapter Eight

The battle for Prague lasted less than an hour. Frederick's soldiers and their feeble earthworks were no match for the Imperial hordes with their 24-pound cannon-balls and flintlock muskets. The artillery ripped apart the trenches in front of the Summer Palace, then the musketeers went to work, balancing their weapons on forked rests and firing on the Bohemian infantry skidding and tumbling down the hillside. Those who escaped the musket-balls were cut down by the sabres of the cavalry who came sweeping through the game park on their war-horses a few minutes later. Those who escaped the cavalry spilled through the gates and into the castle or, failing that, leapt into the Vltava. They tried to swim the river at its bend, hoping to reach the Jewish Quarter or the Old Town, to put water between themselves and the rampaging enemy.

Others too were trying to escape across the Vltava. A convoy of overloaded coaches drawn by mules and dray-horses was jostling three abreast on the bridge, stretching all the way across the river and filling Charles Street as it wound its narrow channel through the rows of houses and towards the Old Town Square. The Queen herself was in the middle of the turbid flow, her bags hastily packed and then piled atop the roof like those of a gypsy or a tinker. A few minutes earlier she had been wrapped in a furred cape and bundled into the royal coach. Now the brocaded window-curtains did a sad shuffle as the coach teetered along the bridge, its wheels grinding against those of tumbrels and handcarts pulled or pushed by her fleeing subjects. The statues of saints wavered slowly past. They had been decapitated on her orders a few months earlier and now made an eerie sight. Then the wooden statue of the Virgin lurched into view, another wavering ghost. But the driver shouted and showed the whip to his horses. The Queen would cross into the Old Town after all, Holy Mother or not.

Emilia was also crossing into the Old Town. She had fled through the Spanish Rooms with Sir Ambrose, then through the castle; which was empty by then except for a few servants who were trundling hand-barrows piled with furs and casks of wine across the courtyards, claiming what they could before the Imperial troops breached the gates and the looting began in earnest. There would be little enough for them in the library, though. Two of its rooms were ablaze; the flames had filled the corridors with clouds of black smoke and then cast a gaudy, flickering light across the bastion garden and the onion-shaped dome of the cathedral. The cannon-ball had been heated on a brazier and so flames leapt through the wreckage of the wall seconds after it struck. Sir Ambrose had flailed at them with his cape, his enormous shadow vaulting on the wall behind him, but he was beaten back as the flames rose upwards, blackening the plastered ceiling, then the air itself. Spinning round, he had thrust out a black-gloved hand.

'Come! This way!'

In the courtyard outside he had caught the reins of a riderless horse, then leapt astride and pulled her up behind him. It was an old hackney horse, a beast more used to carts than riders, but Sir Ambrose rode it hard, spurring it down the steep descent into the Lesser Town. Emilia clung to the hind-bow of the saddle as they scrabbled along the steps, horseshoes sparking.

Before them lay the Lesser Town Square, where the river of mule-carts split into two arms at the plague column, then merged together, thicker than ever. Already she could see the pinnacled bridge tower shifting against the irregular ground of spires and vanes crowded together in the Old Town.

Where were they headed? Sir Ambrose had said little since leaving the library, merely issuing terse commands to follow him, to hold tight, to duck her head as the horse passed under each keystone. He had not even bothered to introduce himself-he had the manners of a Turk, she would discover, even at the best of times. But already she could guess who he was. She knew that the tall Englishman was the agent who had brought the Golden Books to Prague along with dozens of other parchments from Constantinople-those ancient works that Vilém claimed had not seen the light of day since the Sultan Mehmet captured the city in the year 1453. But Vilém had told her nothing of the Englishman's return to Bohemia. Evidently his visit was sub rosa, or 'under the rose', as the ambassadors termed it. She knew of his presence only because gossip in the Královsky Palace claimed he had come to Prague not to buy books for the Spanish Rooms, as of old, but to sell them, to trade them for soldiers and musket-balls.

The horse overtook the ragtag procession on the bridge, barrelling past the carts and dray-horses and cantering into Charles Street. Here on the opposite side of the river their route suddenly became more circuitous and involved, their pace even quicker. Sir Ambrose split away from the herd, kicking the horse to a gallop and guiding it through a succession of darker and narrower streets that wound deeper into the Old Town. Emilia, a poor rider, teetered out of her balance and had to grasp handfuls of his cloak to keep from tumbling into the street. The hilt of his sword pressed against her hip. It was one of those curved blades, wide at the tip, that she knew from her reading was called a scimitar-something else that Sir Ambrose must have brought back from Constantinople. She could also see a pistol tucked into a holster on his belt and another in his boot. She closed her eyes and tightened her grip.

The artillery on the mountain had fallen silent, its task complete. Now there was only the rattle of iron shoes on stone and, far in the distance, the odd bark of a musket. When she dared to open her eyes she saw the castle shunting in and out of view beneath a single volute of smoke. Much closer, scrawled on the side of one of the buildings across the street, barely legible, she glimpsed something else, a single hieroglyphic chalked on to the sooty nogging:

The image looked familiar. She had seen it quite recently but couldn't think where. On another wall? Or in a book? She turned her head as they passed it, then quickly ducked as they flew under an arch.

They rode for the next quarter of an hour, back and forth through the streets, bowling north along by-roads parallel to others down which the horse had pelted south a minute earlier. The gutters were frozen, the muck and mud hard with frost. She wondered if they were lost. They seemed to be travelling in circles, doubling back on themselves. She had never crossed the bridge before, never entered the Old Town or the Jewish Quarter, through whose deserted streets they also galloped, passing prayer-schools and synagogues.

At some point on the edge of the Jewish Quarter there came from the street behind them a loud burst of gunfire. The horse reared at the report, then lunged forward into the next street. Emilia, too, started at the sound. Had the Emperor's soldiers breached the gates and reached the Old Town so soon? There was another burst and a wasp buzzed past their heads, striking an alms-box in the wall of a synagogue and rattling its coins. By now she could smell the acrid stink of gunpowder on the wind. As the horse bolted forward she turned her head to see three horsemen in the street behind.

At first she thought they were Cossacks, the fiercest and most brutal warriors in Europe, the subject of dozens of fearful rumours in the palace's sculleries and kitchens. But the trio was not in the dress of Cossacks-the long coats and the tall astrakhan hats. They wore livery instead, cloaks and breeches as black as a Puritan preacher's but trimmed on the sleeves with a gold brocade that glinted as they flew past a rush-lit tavern. She had never seen such garb before, neither in Prague nor Heidelberg. Nor had she seen such hideous faces. Swarthy and bearded, they were twisted like gargoyles' with murderous intent. Gold brocade flashed as one of them raised his pistol. But Sir Ambrose had already pulled his own pistol from his boot and twisted round to return fire. There was a brief hiss before the match smouldered and sparked, then flashed barely six inches from her nose. Another acrid stink. Blinded, she cried out in alarm. Sir Ambrose fumbled for the pistol in his holster, spurring the horse into the next street.

She closed her eyes again, clinging desperately to Sir Ambrose. But there were no more pistol shots. A few minutes and many turns later their pursuers on their faster mounts were somehow shaken loose. When she opened her eyes the foam-flecked horse was clattering into a wide courtyard with a twin-towered church and a clocktower. They had reached the Old Town Square. Dozens of horses and pack-mules were milling about on the cobbles. Men in uniform were shouting instructions in English, German and Bohemian, while others scrambled about like dock workers.

Sir Ambrose drove the horse into their midst, cutting diagonally across the cobbles before reaching a row of arcaded houses with skinny bay windows ablaze with light. There he reined in the winded animal in front of one of the larger houses and swiftly dismounted before handing Emilia down and seizing her elbow. As she landed on the cobbles, his face, grimacing, suffused with shades of carmine and orange, looked less like that of Amadís of Gaul or the Knight of Phoebus and more like those of the black-clad pursuers. Had she been rescued, she wondered, or captured?

The house with its prettily painted façade was a confusion of swooping flambeaux and darting figures. Sir Ambrose led her to the arcade through archipelagos of dung and heaps of baggage that seemed to have been washed against the columns by a forceful tide. Donkeys were braying and flames ruffling through the air. Where was he taking her? She felt like the game-bird caught in the jaws of the retriever. She struggled briefly-her first show of resistance. Then, as they passed by an upheld torch, she saw how he was clutching something in his other hand. The gauntlet had been removed and his fingers were stained with ink. It took her another second to recognise the object as a book, the one from the library: the lone, leather-bound parchment that had been sitting on Vilém's desk. Again she tried to twist free, but then the door swung open and she was swept inside.