So began my harassed and vagabond life, my tumultuous exile from Nonsuch House. I had no idea, at first, where I might flee. As I climbed the stairs to my bedchamber I contemplated leaving London altogether, but soon I thought better of it. I had set foot outside of the city on barely more than a half-dozen occasions: twice to the book fair in Ely, three times to the one in Oxford, and once as far as Stourbridge, also for a book fair. Then, too, there had been the longer and much more arduous journey to Pontifex Hall, where it seemed that all of my problems had begun.
I thought of taking refuge in Wapping instead, but quickly decided against giving poor Biddulph any more grist for his mill, which already ground out quite enough fear and conspiracy on its own. So as I filled a small leather book bag with a change of clothing I thought next of a few of my other customers. There were several of them-quiet, gentle scholars-who would, I believe, gladly have taken me for a night or two, or even longer if I wished. But what excuses might I have offered them? I buckled the bag and slung it over my shoulder. No: there was only one place in London left for me to go; only one place for fugitives like me.
When I returned downstairs Monk had opened the shop, and several customers-cheery, familiar faces-were browsing among the shelves. I nodded to them and then whispered to Monk that I must leave Nonsuch House for a number of days and that the shop was once again in his hands. He glanced at my book bag but showed very little surprise. I supposed that after the events of the past few nights he had come to expect these sudden caprices from his master. I felt a pang of guilt at deserting him-as if I, of all people, might have saved or protected him. Then I took a last look round the shop and slipped outside, where I quickly lost myself among the thick crowds pressing five-deep along the footpaths of the bridge.
Five minutes later I had crossed under Southwark Gate, where the traffic was slightly thinner. After glancing over my shoulder I stumbled with my thorn-stick down the footpath to the landing-stairs along the river, where I engaged a sculler. The waterman grinned and asked me where I wished to go.
'Upriver,' I told him.
He watched me suspiciously as he unshipped his sculls and shoved off from the pier, no doubt because I had pulled the canvas tilt over the wooden hoops and now, despite the sunny weather, sat hunched under the canopy, which reeked of mildew. I peeped out from under this shroud to confirm that no one had followed me down to the landing-stairs. The river downstream was empty except for a couple of fishing smacks anchored in the shallows, busily shortening sail and awaiting the drawbridge's next ascent. Beyond their masts Nonsuch House rose above the piers, before dwindling into the soft haze as if disappearing into thin air.
'What's your pleasure, sir? Where shall I take you?'
'Alsatia,' I replied. Then I ducked back inside the canopy and didn't emerge until our bow had scraped against the landing-steps of the coal-wharves beneath the Golden Horn.
I took a room at the Half Moon Tavern, which stood in Abbey Court, more or less the centre (as far as I could ever tell) of the labyrinth of courts and bystreets that was Alsatia. My room was on the topmost floor and could be reached only by means of a narrow, twisting staircase, up which I was guided by the proprietress, Mrs. Fawkes, a small, dark-haired woman whose quiet and gentle manner seemed more akin to a nunnery than a tavern in the middle of Alsatia. I had signed her guest-book as 'Silas Cobb', then paid a shilling for two nights in advance, which entitled me, she explained in her soft voice, to breakfast and supper as well as a bed. And should I require anything else for my pleasure-ale, tobacco, the services of a chambermaid-I must not hesitate to let her know immediately. Her sloe-coloured eyes had been modestly lowered as she made the allusion to the young ladies whose faces had peered at us from curtained doorways as I followed her upstairs. I assured her that I anticipated no such needs.
'In fact…' I was fishing in my pocket for another shilling, which I slipped into her palm. 'It is urgent that I not be disturbed during the course of my stay. Not by anyone, day or night. Do you understand?'
I suspected from Mrs. Fawkes's reaction that such requests were not unusual among her guests.
'Of course, Mr. Cobb,' she whispered, smiling at me before shyly dropping her eyes to the chatelaine at her waist, then to the black cat that had followed us up the stairs. 'Not a soul shall disturb you. Not as long as you reside under my roof. You have my word.'
Once she and the cat had departed I placed my bag on the bed and looked round the room. It was as small and Spartan as a monk's cell, furnished with nothing more than a ladder-back chair, a table and a four-post bed with a fatigued mattress. But it was clean enough and would suit me perfectly well. Through its tiny window I could see the bell-tower of Bridewell Prison and, far beyond it, the north end of London Bridge, a sight that cheered me greatly and seemed to make my exile-as I already thought of it-slightly more bearable. I sat down on the bed, drew a shaky breath and congratulated myself on my choice.
I had been depressed and utterly baffled when I arrived in Alsatia an hour earlier. I was exhausted after the ordeal of the night and possessed no plan other than to seek refuge, like so many others, in its precincts. I first considered taking a room at the Golden Horn, then at the Saracen's Head, but each time I ruled it out. In either place I might have encountered Dr. Pickvance, and I didn't yet know the nature of his relationship with Henry Monboddo. Besides, the Half Moon Tavern looked slightly more respectable-if that was the word-than either of the other establishments. It had just opened its doors when I arrived, and Mrs. Fawkes was bidding farewell to several richly dressed gentlemen, attended by the black cat that followed her everywhere like a witch's familiar.
The premises otherwise seemed empty except for the young ladies who peered at us from their curtained-off rooms.
Yes, I told myself as I lay down on the bed: I would be safe here. All the same, I removed the firelock from my book bag and set it beside the bed.
I fell asleep almost immediately and didn't wake until early evening, by which time the first yellow lights were kindling on London Bridge. My fob-watch informed me I had slept for almost ten hours.
I rolled out of bed and, still befuddled by sleep, withdrew two small vials from my bag: two of the three purchases I had made before renting the room. Inside the first vial was a decoction of bramble leaves bought from an apothecary named Foskett, who informed me how the preparation, created in his own laboratory, was a superb remedy for sores in the mouth or else those on what he winked and called the 'secret parts'. I winked back at him, winced emphatically, and allowed him to believe what he wished.
After bringing a kettle of water to the boil I poured the decoction of bramble leaves inside, stirred it, then mixed in those of the second vial, three grams of lye purchased in the same shop. I was fully awake now, hands trembling as I replaced the caps. When the mixture had cooled I poured it into the washbasin and used it to drench my hair, my beard and even my eyebrows. Whether he knew it or not, Foskett's preparation did more than heal venereal complaints. The shaving-glass confirmed that both my hair and my beard had turned from a greying brown to jet-black. For good measure I trimmed my beard into a sharp point, in the fashion favoured by Cavaliers.
I then turned to my last purchase of the morning, a suit of clothes from a haberdasher in Whitefriars Street. I folded and tucked away my sober bookseller costume-my threadbare doublet, my breeches with their seat worn almost through, my laddered stockings-and donned the new suit, piece by piece. First a gold-buttoned purple surcoat; then a pair of beribboned breeches with matching silk stockings; finally a black velvet hat with a dangling purple ribbon and a cocked brim. I would be conspicuous enough, to be sure, but not recognisable by anyone-scarcely even by myself-as Isaac Inchbold. No, I thought as I inspected the image given back by the darkened window: no one would know me as I went about my business tonight.
Satisfied with these effects, I sent for my supper. A short time later it was delivered to the room by one of the so-called chambermaids, a big-hipped, damask-cheeked girl with a country accent. She placed it on the table, accepted a tuppence and my thanks in return, then made her discreet exit without so much as a glance in my direction. The meal, fried haddock and parsnips, was quite tasty, and I ate with a great appetite. I also consumed with relish a cup of double ale. A few minutes later I was descending the staircase with the pistol tucked into the waistband of my new breeches.
At this hour the Half Moon was filling with patrons whose harsh laughter, interspersed with the shrieks of a fiddle, drifted up the stairs. The creaking treads attracted the attention of a couple of the residents in the curtained rooms whose disembodied faces, also plump and damask-cheeked, emerged from the folds of the curtains, or whose curtains had been drawn back to reveal candlelit rooms with looking-glasses and vases of bright flowers. Smells of perfume and tobacco smoke wafted towards me, followed by a few muffled chuckles. I ducked my behatted head, but not before catching another snatch of my reflection in one of the looking-glasses: a black-haired bravo with his buttons glinting and his hat tipped at a rakish angle. Only my trusty thorn-stick-which I had been loath to abandon-proclaimed my former identity. Later I would wonder at the concatenation of strange events that had fetched me up here, but for the moment I didn't stop to ponder how it had come to pass that I, a law-abiding citizen, a humble bookseller, should now be descending the steps of a brothel in the middle of Alsatia, at nightfall, in disguise.
The sky had darkened by the time I emerged into Abbey Court. I looked round for a moment, taking my bearings from a sun-faded signpost on the corner, before walking north towards Fleet Street. On the way I passed Arrowsmith Court and through its narrow opening caught a glimpse of the Turk's grisly visage leering back at me. The windows of the Saracen's Head glowed orange, but those in Dr. Pickvance's rooms were shuttered and dark. I kept walking north, the firelock chafing at my thigh and poking my hip. Across the ditch, in Blackfriars, lines of washing hung between the newly built tenements, pale swallowtails of smocks and shifts, like the bunting from some vanished procession. In Whitefriars Street a fox darted across my path, snout lowered, brush raised. It seemed an omen of some sort, as did the snatch of boldly chalked graffiti I saw, seconds later, on a collapsing hoarding: the same symbol-the horned man-that I had seen twice, also in Alsatia. Except that it wasn't a horned man or the devil, I suddenly realised, but a man in a winged hat. For the mark was not only the alchemical symbol for quicksilver, I knew, but also the astrological symbol for the planet Mercury.
I almost dismissed the sign and resumed walking. After all, our city was full of charlatans casting horoscopes and scribbling prophecies. Indeed, the newssheets were full of accounts of King Charles consulting our most famous astrologer, the great Elias Ashmole, to cast a horoscope to determine the most auspicious date for the sitting of Parliament. But then I recalled that Mercury, the messenger of the gods, the patron of merchants and traders such as myself, was the name given by the Romans to Hermes Trismegistus. And Hermes Trismegistus was the author of the Corpus hermeticum, in which was found, of course, The Labyrinth of the World.
I stood before the hoarding, staring as if spell-stopped at the brief scrawl. Was this some kind of grotesque hoax? A coincidence? A clue? Like all else I had discovered, it seemed impossible to interpret.
I turned round and began walking rapidly northwards, the balls of lead clattering in the pocket of my breeches. The breeze had strengthened, and coal-ash dashed in a quick gust across the cobbles, stinging my cheeks. I quickened my pace. A minute later Fleet Street opened before me, and I raised an arm to hail an empty hackney-coach.
Once again my destination was St. Olave's, through whose gate I stepped, some thirty minutes later, to find the churchyard empty except for a single mourner at the far end, nearest Seething Lane, and a sexton digging a fresh grave by lamplight. The mourner, his back turned, seemed not to notice me; nor did the sexton, the top of whose head was barely visible above the lip of the grave. His spade was rasping in the wet London clay and chiming whenever the metal struck a stone.
I had no message to leave for Alethea. Earlier, as I ate my supper in the Half Moon, I debated whether or not I should tell her how my shop had twice been invaded by persons unknown and that I had therefore left Nonsuch House in fear of my safety. But in the end I decided not to. Alethea, like Biddulph, entertained quite enough wild fancies without needing further ones added to them. I also decided not to tell her of my residence at the Half Moon.
Although I had been instructed to check the strongbox each evening, I had yet to receive a letter from Alethea via this means, and so I was surprised and even a little gratified to find a piece of paper inside it. I sprang open its lock, as quietly as possible so as not to alert the mourner, who seemed to be studying Seething Lane, as if waiting for someone to come through its gate and into the churchyard. I angled the paper into the light of the grave-digger's flickering lantern and began reading what proved to be the information that I had been waiting for these past few days. Preparations for my journey, she wrote, were now complete. A coach-and-four would be waiting for me at the Three Pigeons in High Holborn the next morning at seven o'clock. Her name was signed with a flourish at the bottom.
I locked the strongbox, but instead of destroying the piece of paper I creased it along the folds and slipped it inside my pocket. But I had already decided I would obey its request and make certain I was aboard the coach the next morning. I didn't relish the thought of showing myself abroad during the daytime, but perhaps Huntingdonshire would be safer for me than London.
Five minutes later I was back in the street, pressing forward through the darkness, pausing briefly at each fork or intersection to peer down narrow, tenement-lined streets in search of an empty hack. None appeared. No one did. So I picked my way through the darkness, through streets as empty as if abandoned after the onset of plague or war.
Only after another twenty minutes did I reach an opening and enter the broad sweep of the Strand. From there it was just a short walk to Alsatia, which, outcast that I was, I had already begun to think of as home.
The coach's progress through the Chislet Marshes was a slow one. Foxcroft guided the horses through the mud of the coastal road until they reached one of the De Quester posting-inns. There the exhausted Barbs were exchanged and the arduous journey recommenced. White fogs hovered all day in the ditches and over the flooded hopfields, but Foxcroft dared not light a lantern for fear of Lord Stanhope's ruffians. Nor did he light one as dusk arrived. The coach made its way blindly along overgrown cattle droves and paths that slunk through decrepit orchards.
By this time his unexpected passengers had been reduced to two. The only member of the strange trio who had spoken a word, the larger of the men, had disembarked in Herne Bay. Foxcroft's remaining companions were now huddled under a blanket, crouched low among the sacks of mail. A half-dozen times he had tried unsuccessfully to draw them into conversation. He fed them all the same, cheese and black bread from the inns, along with cups of cider. He even offered them swigs from his own wineskin, which were declined with brief shakes of the head. The woman would sometimes turn her head to peer at the road behind, but the man, a thin little fellow, sat perfectly still. Some sort of bejewelled cabinet the size of a large sugar-loaf was clutched to his breast.
'What's that, hmm? A treasure chest?'
Silence from the back. Foxcroft shook the reins and the horses stepped up their pace, tossing their heads and blowing white plumes into the air. In a few minutes they would reach the high road to London, where the dangers increased of Stanhope's ruffians. But if the coach was ambushed the attackers might be appeased, he reckoned, by a prize like the chest. It was for that reason alone that Foxcroft was suffering their presence in his coach. The pair of them might spare him another dented crown.
'Yours, is it?' He had twisted round in his seat. 'I say, very nice.'
Still no reply. In the darkness he could barely make out their two heads, only inches apart. The thin little man stared fixedly at his feet. Perhaps they spoke no English? Foxcroft knew as well as anyone that these days London was full of foreigners, Spaniards for the most part, all of them either spies or priests, often both. The infestation was a sign of the times. The Spanish King and his ambassador lorded over old James. First that modern-day Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, had been sent to the chopping-block for daring to fight the Spaniards on their own ground. Next King James had begun turning priests loose from the gaols and even daring to talk about marrying his son to, of all people, a Spanish princess! And now, worst of all, the old dolt was too niggardly to send an army to help his very own daughter even though her husband's lands in Germany were being invaded by hordes of Spaniards.
Still, he reassured himself, neither of his passengers looked at all Spanish. The woman, from the little he could glimpse of her, looked uncommonly attractive despite her bedraggled appearance. She was also young, scarcely more than a girl. What on earth was she doing with such a milksop, unless it had something to do with the box the fellow was clutching to his scrawny breast?
After another hour the smells of the country gave way to those of the city, silence to intermittent noise. The coach-and-six crossed the high road to London in darkness, then swiftly bore riverwards in the direction of Gravesend. Foxcroft intended to cross the river from Gravesend to Tilbury on a horse ferry, then ride into London along the north shore, where Stanhope's bruisers would scarcely expect to find him. If all went well he would reach the Ald Gate by the time it was creaking open, and from there it would be a short jaunt through the streets to the De Quester offices in Cornhill. What he might do with his other cargo, however, his two mysterious passengers, he had no idea.
He need not have worried himself. When the coach finally reached Gravesend it was obliged to wait almost two hours for the next ferry to Tilbury. He arranged for a new team and then tramped the streets until he found an alehouse that was open, in whose tap room he emptied three pintpots and demolished a pigeon pie, before returning to the posting-inn in time to watch the ferry disgorge its handful of passengers. His own passengers were quite forgotten at this point, and not until he had paid his two shillings and reached the middle of the black waters did he suddenly remember them. When he turned round in the box-seat he was surprised to discover that they had vanished into thin air, along with their glittering cargo.
As it happened, Vilém and Emilia were in a boat of their own at that moment, travelling upstream towards London, which lay some twenty miles to the west. The small barge had pushed off from the dock at Gravesend almost an hour earlier and, after threading its way among the pinks and merchantmen riding at anchor before the custom-house, reached the middle of the swirling current. From there it would be at least three hours to the dock at Billingsgate, the barge-master had informed them, even on a flowing tide. And from Billingsgate it might then take them as much as another hour to reach their final destination.
Emilia shivered and huddled deeper inside the canvas tilt as the water slapped and gurgled against the hull. Four more hours of cold and fear. But at long last she knew where they were going. They were bound, Vilém told her, for York House, a mansion in the Strand, near Charing Cross, where they would be met by Henry Monboddo. Vilém had been instructed to hand over the casket containing the parchment to Monboddo and no one else. Monboddo was experienced in such dealings, Vilém insisted, as the boat wallowed in the current. He was a friend of Prince Charles, and at present he was furnishing the galleries of York House to the extravagant but discriminating tastes of its new owner, George Villiers, the Earl of Buckingham.
Emilia watched the lights of Gravesend dim and disappear as the river turned north. The name was a familiar one. Rumours in Prague had set him to work fitting a fleet of men-o'-war to sail into the Mediterranean to attack Spain. But whether the ships had been fitted, whether or not they ever sailed, the attack never took place.
'So that is who the books are intended for, then? The Earl of Buckingham?'
Vilém shook his head, then raised his eyes from the casket wedged between his boots and glanced in the direction of the barge-master, who was grunting rhythmically as he leaned on his pole. Bewhiskered, wearing a leather jerkin, he had greeted them suspiciously in the barge-room a short time earlier, squinting at the pair of them-and then even more insistently at the casket-in the weak candle-light. Sir Ambrose had warned Vilém that the boatmen on the Thames were in the pay of the Secretary of State or Count Gondomar, the Spanish Ambassador, so to ensure discretion he paid the fellow an extra two shillings. This act only made the grizzled old rogue even more suspicious; as did the request to travel upriver without a lantern.
'No, not Buckingham,' he whispered, leaning closer. 'He, like Monboddo, is only an intermediary, an agent for another party, someone even more powerful.'
'Yes?' She too had leaned forward. Someone more powerful than the Lord High Admiral? The canvas awning stretched over their heads smelled of mildew and a glazing of salt. Outside, the cold wind was flapping its stiffened sides. 'Who, then?'
For the wealthiest and most discriminating collector in all of England, that was who. Because Monboddo and Sir Ambrose had furnished not only the libraries of Frederick and Rudolf but also, Vilém explained, that of their own countryman, England's finest connoisseur, the Prince of Wales himself. Young Prince Charles was not an iconoclast like his sister Elizabeth with her Puritan pastors poised at the ready to sniff out any sign of popery or turpitude. No, Charles loved images and other relics as much as his sister despised them. It was well known that he hoped to purchase the great Mantua Collection from the impoverished Gonzagas, but less well known, according to Vilém, was the fact that he was equally determined to lay his hands on the treasures of both the Bibliotheca Palatina and the Spanish Rooms. For these thousands of books, manuscripts and assorted curiosities were not only valuable in themselves, prize additions to the Royal Library in St. James's Palace, but they were also the only means left of keeping the rampaging Spaniards at bay and thereby preserving religious toleration and freedom across half of Europe.
'Oh?' Emilia saw rearing before her eyes the desiccated serpents, the mummified heads with their grotesque grins. 'How might that be?'
Vilém had begun rubbing his palms slowly together. She could sense his excitement. The absence of Sir Ambrose seemed to have done him good: he had not spoken this much in weeks.
'I need not tell you,' he whispered, 'that both collections are in danger of falling into the hands of either the Spaniards or Cardinal Baronius, if the soldiers don't destroy them first, I should say, or the looters in the marshes. But the Prince proposes to purchase the whole lot from his brother-in-law-the complete contents of both libraries, along with the treasures from the Spanish Rooms. At what price I have no idea, but his financier, Burlamaqui, has been raising funds for the past three months. Frederick will then use the money to equip armies and repel the invaders from both Bohemia and the Palatinate.'
She was surprised by this plan, remembering Vilém's alarmed reaction to rumours about secret inventories, about deals struck with bishops and princes-'turkey buzzards', he called them-who had sent their agents and emissaries scuttling to Prague ahead of their armies so they might pick at the carcass of Bohemia while there was still something left of it.
'So the rumours in Prague were true, then? Frederick was seeking to sell the collections after all?'
'Yes, yes-but the strategy is more involved than that,' he replied quickly, 'more complicated than an exchange of books for musket-balls. The collection will remain intact, and the crates of books and manuscripts will themselves become the means by which the Catholics will be forced from both Bohemia and the Palatinate. Or that is the plan, one that Sir Ambrose worked out with Buckingham and the Prince of Wales. But the business must be carried out in the utmost secrecy,' he added solemnly.
She drew the blanket, stolen from the De Quester coach, more tightly round their shoulders. 'Because of the Spaniards.'
He nodded. 'Neither King Philip nor Gondomar must know of the plan, that much is obvious. Burlamaqui is raising the funds in secret because many of them come through his connections with bankers in Italy and Spain. Nor must the plans for the Prince's betrothal to the Infanta go astray. Such double-dealing is distasteful, true enough, but cheap at the price, I think, because the Infanta's hand is worth all of £600,000. Such a sum will buy many books and paintings, will it not? To say nothing of how it will keep a good many soldiers-the best mercenaries in Europe-in powder and shot for years to come. Ingenious, is it not, using the King of Spain's own money to snatch back Bohemia and the Palatinate? To secure the Bibliotheca Palatina as well as the treasures of the Spanish Rooms?'
She followed his gaze as he squinted through the opening in the tilt. Were they alone on the water, or was that another barge in the distance, barely visible in the light of one of the guard-boats? So far the river had been empty except for the odd collier or a convoy of smacks heaped with their catches of mackerel. Each time one of them approached Emilia and Vilém leant back inside the tilt and averted their faces. But for the past ten minutes they had seen no one.
'But there's more to the plan than that,' he resumed after a moment. 'The situation is complicated. Other interests must be considered.'
The arrival in England of the books and other treasures also had to be kept secret from King James himself. The sale could not be completed through what Vilém called the 'normal channels'-a continent-wide network of brokers and financiers-because then it would have been discovered by the numerous agents of the Earl of Arundel, one of England's wealthiest collectors of statues and other artefacts, including books. Arundel was a Howard, a Roman Catholic, a member of the powerful family whose hatred for Buckingham was as well known, he said, as its close ties with the Spanish Ambassador. Neither was it a secret that for the past few years King James had been little more than Gondomar's creature, the plaything of the Spaniards. Did she need reminding that he received an annual pension of 5,000 felipes from the King of Spain? That he sided with Philip over the rebellion in Bohemia? That he lent no support to his daughter and her husband, his own flesh and blood? That he betrayed them to the Catholics just as he had betrayed Raleigh two years earlier? And so the King and most of his courtiers and ministers, including Arundel, were not made privy to the plot. Arundel would have reported it at once to Gondomar, Gondomar would have reported it to King James, and King James-'an old fool in his dotage'-would have regarded it as nothing more than an act of robbery.
'Yes, yes,' he finished, 'and no doubt he would regard a man like Sir Ambrose as nothing more than a common pirate. No doubt Sir Ambrose would meet the same fate as Sir Walter Raleigh…'
The barge nosed round the bend and into the waters of the Long Reach. At Greenhithe a few fishing smacks had left the dock and were heading downstream into the estuary. Emilia watched them riding against the tide with their fore-and-aft sails luminous as ghosts. Vilém had fallen silent. She shifted her weight on the hard thwart, wondering how much of what he said was true and how much an elaborate fiction.
The boat was poled forward on the tide, a length at a time, round another bend and into the Erith Reach with its roadsteads on one side, the bell-foundries and anchorsmiths on the other. Daylight was still more than an hour away, but so too was London even though the wind had swung round to the west. She scented the first traces of its musk and smoke, what smelled like the foul hide of an ancient beast. Spires and the rhombic shapes of warehouses, dark and silent, loomed and fell away, as did the merchantmen against whose monstrous hulls the splashes of the pole were echoing. She turned her head and peered past the barge-master's dark form. Was someone behind them in the river, pulling a pair of oars?
She turned to Vilém, but he seemed to have noticed nothing. He was bent almost double, eyes fixed on the casket.
The casket contained a Hermetic text, fourteen pages of an ancient manuscript bound in arabesque-a text more valuable, he said, than all of the other crates of books put together. It was a copy made two hundred years earlier from an even more ancient document brought to Constantinople by a refugee, a Harranian scribe fleeing the persecutions of the caliph of Baghdad. When Constantinople was invaded by one of the caliph's descendants, Mehmet II, the Ottoman Sultan, it was saved by another scribe who smuggled it from the Monastery of Magnana before the library and scriptorium could be pillaged by the Turks. And now almost two centuries later the parchment was being smuggled to safety yet again, escaping another conflagration, another war of religion, this time in the Kingdom of Bohemia.
Emilia knew nothing about the Corpus hermeticum. The name reminded her, though, of some of the books she stumbled across in the castle in Breslau on the night of the feast, those whose titles suggested impious pursuits. But Vilém swore there was nothing impious about the Hermetic texts. Indeed, parts of them were even thought to foretell the coming of Christ. Together they consisted, he explained, of some two dozen books, along with who knew how many others that had disappeared over the centuries following other invasions, other wars. Some of the books dealt with philosophical subjects, others with theology, still others-the ones that attracted the most readers and commentators-with the arts of alchemy and astrology.
None of this made the least bit of sense to Emilia. How could a manuscript of fourteen pages-a few scraps of goatskin scribbled with a mixture of lampblack and vegetable gum-possibly be valuable enough for someone to kill for?
Vilém was still talking as the boat wound its way along the edge of the Hornchurch Marshes, twisting and then righting itself in the currents that eddied dangerously at each bend. His words tumbled out of him so quickly she could barely follow them. The Corpus hermeticum described a whole universe, he said, a magical place whose every part, from the moons of Jupiter to the smallest mote of dust, formed the threads of an ever-radiating web in which each atom was connected to every other atom. The parts also attracted and otherwise influenced one another so that a subtle but intimate connection existed between, say, the flow of the blood in the body and the flight of the stars through the heavens. These amazing influences could be detected by means of secret signs inscribed across the surface or in the core of every living thing and, once detected, could be manipulated and exploited so that wounds would be healed, diseases cured, events foretold or forestalled-the destinies of entire kingdoms interpreted or even changed. The man able to read these bristling hieroglyphics, these secret scriptures, was therefore a magician possessed of stupendous powers, capable of turning the influences of the heavens to his own ends. And any book purporting to describe these secret marks, to catalogue and explain them… well, the value of any such volume would be past measure.
'So the parchment is a magical book of some sort?' she managed to interrupt at last. 'And that is why Prince Charles wants it?'
'So it would seem, yes. No doubt he wants it to ornament his library in St. James's Palace. But perhaps there is another reason as well.' Vilém raised his eyes from the casket. 'For the manuscript now possesses political as well as magical powers.'
The place of the Corpus hermeticum in the pantheon of literature was now more complex, he explained. Rome had grown suspicious of the Hermetic texts. Some of the books may well have predicted the coming of Christ, if interpreted in a charitable light by the Vatican's consultors. But other Hermetic teachings were a threat to orthodoxy. Of special concern were those passages on the structure of the universe and the divinity of the sun. After all, Copernicus himself had quoted from the Asclepius at the outset of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, the heretical volume that dethroned the earth in favour of the sun. But even worse were the political dangers now coming from those who fingered the pages of the Hermetic texts, which were currently appearing in dozens of new editions and translations. Philosophers like Bruno and Duplessis-Mornay had dreamed of ending the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants by promoting the philosophy of Hermeticism as a substitute for Christianity. But to the authorities in Rome the Hermeticists were, like the Jews, supporters of the Protestant cause who wished to erode the powers of the Pope. The suspicion was not without foundation. By the year 1600, when Bruno was martyred, the books had become the lodestone for all manner of heretics and reformers. Dozens of sects and secret societies began burgeoning all over Europe, like mushrooms in nightsoil: occultists and revolutionaries, Navarrists and Rosicrucians, Cabalists and magicians, liberals, mystics, fanatics and false Messiahs of every hue, all demanding spiritual reform and prophesying the downfall of Rome, all quoting the ancient writings of Hermes Trismegistus as their authority for a universal reformation.
'The Counter-Reformation is losing its footing,' Vilém explained, 'despite the armies of Maximilian and the bonfires of the Inquisition. A Pandora's box has been opened which Rome is trying to slam shut by whatever means. Sorcery and magic now rank with dogmatic heresy. Cabalist literature has been put on the Index and in 1592 Francesco Patrizzi, one of the translators of the Corpus hermeticum, was condemned by the Inquisition. The Jesuits at the Collegio Romano have begun an Index of their own, a list on which the works of Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa have been placed alongside those of Galileo. Johann Valentin Andreae, founder of the Rosicrucians, has been pronounced a heretic by the Cardinals of the Inquisition. Traiano Boccalini, Andreae's mentor, a supporter of Henry of Navarre, was murdered in Venice, while Navarre himself, the polestar of all of these hopes, was assassinated in Paris. But the movement is Hydra-headed and unstoppable. With Navarre's death came a new hope, a new axle round which everything else could gather and spin.'
'The Elector Palatine,' murmured Emilia. 'King Frederick.'
'Yes.' He gave another shrug. 'Another hope that proved a sad delusion.'
A few lights along the shoreline wavered slowly past. The barge had shunted into Gallion's Reach, avoiding the landing piers that projected into the ink-black water. The boat's wake as it passed stirred to life the strings of moored lighters whose hulls bobbed in the swell. Beyond the jetties and mud banks lay nameless hamlets and tumbledown cottages. They had been in the barge for over two hours now, but the river had narrowed only slightly. At times the shore seemed to vanish.
'So the parchment is a danger to orthodoxy.' She was beginning to understand the stakes involved, or thought she did. 'Rome hopes to suppress it, to stamp out its heresies before they can take hold.'
'Very possibly. At the moment Rome is terrified of any threat to its dogma, of a split that would undermine its fight against Protestantism. Galileo with his moons was one such threat, but four years ago he was silenced by the Holy Office, warned by Cardinal Bellarmine not to write another word in defence of the heretic Copernicus. The appearance of another document in support of Copernicanism or any other heresy would, however, be a drastic blow, especially at this time.'
'And especially if it came from an authority as great as Hermes Trismegistus.'
'Yes. So the manuscript will be locked away in the secret archives of the Bibliotheca Vaticana if the cardinals and bishops lay their hands on it. Perhaps it will even be destroyed.' Once more he lowered his gaze to the cabinet between his feet. 'Except there is something else,' he said slowly, 'something I fail to understand. For in the past few years the authority of Hermes Trismegistus has been challenged, even destroyed. Not by the theologians of Rome, but by a Protestant, a Huguenot.'
There had been a recent dispute, he said, between a Protestant scholar, Isaac Casaubon, and a Roman Catholic, Cardinal Baronius, Keeper of the Vatican Library-the man who, Vilém claimed, now wished to cart off to Rome both the Bibliotheca Palatina and the manuscripts in the Spanish Rooms. Years ago the Cardinal had published a massive study about the history of the Church, the Annales ecclesiastici, in which Hermes Trismegistus was described as one of the Gentile prophets along with Hydaspes and the Sibylline oracles. This treatise was much admired by Vilém's teachers, the Jesuits in the Clementinum, but since then it had been soundly refuted by Casaubon, a Switzer, a Huguenot who had come to England at the invitation of King James. And Casaubon's magnum opus, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI, published six years earlier in 1614, was said to prove beyond doubt that the whole of the Corpus hermeticum was a forgery composed not by some ancient Egyptian priest at Hermoupolis Magna but instead by a band of Greeks living in Alexandria in the century after Christ. These men had cobbled together a mishmash of Plato, the Gospels, the Jewish Cabala, together with a few scraps of Egyptian philosophy, and had managed to hoodwink scholars, priests and kings for more than a thousand years.
Vilém was shaking his head morosely as they swayed from side to side with the motions of the barge. It made no sense. Why should Sir Ambrose have been so intent on smuggling The Labyrinth of the World out of Prague? Sir Ambrose, a good Protestant, certainly knew the work of Casaubon. And why, too, if it was a fake, should the Cardinal wish to suppress it? Because that was who had pursued them from Prague, Vilém now told her: the agents of Cardinal Baronius.
'Can it not be opened?' Emilia, too, had returned her gaze to the cabinet. 'Is there a key for the lock?'
He shook his head again. 'Only the one kept by Sir Ambrose. I know of no other.'
The barge had now reached the deep waters and rushing currents of Woolwich. The skeletal frames of the Navy's half-finished men-o'-war could be seen in the dry-docks slipping past on the larboard side. Emilia had shifted to the opposite side of the barge, from where she could watch the waters behind them. Figures with flares and lanterns were moving back and forth in the yard entrances and among the wooden cranes whose profiles reared against the sky. As they shunted astern she thought she caught sight of another barge in the brief funnels of light, or rather a glimpse of a canvas tilt beneath which other figures could be seen. About a hundred yards of water separated them. She thrust her head out from under the awning.
'How much further before Billingsgate?'
The barge-master plunged his pole into the water, leaned on it, then raised it hand over hand. 'Eight miles or so,' he grunted before plunging it again. The boat yawed to starboard and he very nearly lost his balance. 'Two more hours,' he added after a moment. 'And that's if the tide doesn't turn.'
Emilia retreated under the awning and peered at the waters ahead. The ox-bow of the next reach with its dangerous currents lay before them. The Greenwich Marshes looked desolate, but moored along the other bank were a half-dozen Indiamen, the lanterns on their taffrails lighting thickets of masts swaying overhead. Behind them lay the East India Company's storehouses. As the barge approached the wharves, moving south now, Emilia turned her head to see the boat behind them lit by a ship's lantern. It had gained several lengths, perhaps more, since Woolwich. Two watermen were perched in the stern, while their passengers-a trio of shadowy figures-were huddled under the tilt. When she turned to Vilém she saw that he was holding something in his palm.
'Take one.'
'What?'
'It's them,' he whispered. 'The Cardinal's men.' He extended his hand a few inches. 'Eight miles. We won't make it…'
One of the East India warehouses loomed to starboard, its smell of molasses carried to them by the stiffening breeze. In its brief light she could see what he was holding: the leather pouch given to him by Sir Ambrose. Strychnos nux vomitica. Instinctively she shrank against the canvas.
'And as for the casket…' The light slid away and they were in darkness. A gull screeched overhead as he stooped, still clutching the pouch, and then raised the casket to his lap with a soft grunt. 'It will have to go overboard, I fear. Those are the instructions.'
'Whose instructions?'
No answer. He was staring fixedly at the chest. She glanced up. More wharves crowded the banks and mazes of buildings pressed up behind them. The boat slewed sideways and a wave broke over the bows, showering her cheeks and soaking her petticoats. They had gained speed but lost control in the treacherous current. The barge-master cursed and struggled to keep the vessel on a steady course, using the pole as a rudder. Their own wake overcame them as they slowed, and the barge weltered even more. After a moment the current slackened and the waterman wearily began poling again. But their pursuers had gained another few lengths.
The next hour passed with Emilia perched on the edge of the thwart, swivelling to look astern first and then at the waters ahead. Another sharp ox-bow untwisted before them at Greenwich, along with more fierce currents that set the barge moving from side to side and the barge-master cursing all over again. The sky flushed with a few hints of pink and orange and the tide slowed. Soon the river began to fill with traffic, with dozens of lighters fighting their way to the Legal Quays below the Tower, and with eel-ships and oyster-boats on their way to Billingsgate. Armadas of shallops and pinnaces dodged and feinted among them, sweeping downstream with their sails puffed. Their pursuers closed the gap but then receded after Shadwell as they were slowed in the Lower Pool by the traffic swirling about like flocks of angry birds.
A few minutes later, straining her eyes, Emilia saw the arches of London Bridge girdling the river. When she turned round she saw the tilt-boat breaking into view again. The barge-master pushed hard, dripping with sweat, but it was no use. When they finally drew even with the crowded quays in front of the custom-house, the boat was only two lengths behind. The Cardinal's men had crawled from under the tilt, and in the awakening sunlight she could see their tanned brows, their jet-black livery with its stripes of gold. All three wore lace ruffs, and one of them-the man crouched over the prow-was clutching a dagger. When she turned to Vilém he was kneeling on the floor of the barge with the casket in his hands.
'Too late…' He was crawling out from under the tilt and into the bows, where he struggled to raise the casket to the gunwales. 'We won't reach York House,' he grunted. 'We won't even reach Billingsgate!'
'No!'
Emilia clambered over the thwarts, barking her shins, then caught him in a clumsy embrace and laid a hand on the casket, before he pushed her backwards. He hoisted the cargo and once more leant over the gunwales with the treasure outstretched in his hands.
Emilia picked herself up from the boards, but at that moment the barge was bumped in the stern by the tilt-boat. She heard the master curse as the barge slewed sideways and then an instant later broadsided an oncoming skiff. The collision was violent. The last thing she saw as she was thrown to the deck was a pair of boots disappearing over the gunwales.
'Vilém!'
The barge was rocking wildly from side to side by the time she raised herself. They had been boarded. She heard, rather than saw, two of the Cardinal's men scuffling with the barge-master. The poor old devil defended himself valiantly with his pole before the dagger slit his leather jerkin, then his belly. He sank to his knees with a last oath and then tumbled over the stern as the barge was struck again, this time on the starboard quarter by a fishing smack knocked off course by the careering skiff. The Cardinal's men tumbled into one another's arms before sprawling full-length in the stern. The knife clattered to the boards.
'Emilia!'
The smack was floating past, drifting upstream with its sail flapping, while the mast crazily pendulated and the master fought hard to keep his balance in the stern. Emilia caught a glimpse of Vilém prone on the teetering deck, tangled in nets and half-buried in an avalanche of silvery fish.
'Emilia! Jump!'
The smack was moving more quickly now, skimming past the floundering barge as the wind caught in her half-furled bunts. She stepped hurriedly on to one of the rocking thwarts and was bracing herself to leap, when a hand on her skirts tugged her backwards. But at that point the barge was rammed by the fourth and last boat, a wherry filled with a dozen passengers. Then the hand disappeared and she found herself plunging towards the smack through five feet of spray and air.
The countryside in flood. Rain had fallen steadily throughout the night and was still pouring down as the sky above Epping Forest changed shade from charcoal to cinder-grey: so heavily that the fishponds and flint-pits were overflowing their banks. Overnight the mossy woodlands had become a morass. The worst of the storm had passed, but a strong gale was still blowing from the southwest, and still the rain came down. Oak and beech trees stood in the middle of rivers as if stranded; the splintered trunks of others, felled by winds or lightning, lay across the most windswept stretches of the road from London.
In the middle of the forest, near the cottages of its game keepers and vermin-killers, four horses could be seen splashing along the Epping Road, drawing behind them through the mud and water a leather-topped coach. It was a little past seven o'clock in the morning. The horses were bound northward through Essex, staggering and straining, their wet manes flapping like pennants and the wheels of the coach flinging great divots of mud into the air. But at the lowest point in the road, where the water from the flint-pits stood the deepest, the coach halted with a violent lurch. The driver, who had already cleared the trunks of three trees from his path that morning, bawled a curse at the horses and cracked his whip over their rumps. They struggled for a moment, but the coach failed to move.
'What's happening?' I had lifted the leather flap to peer through the window. The droplets spattering my face felt like spindrift on the high seas.
'Stuck in the mud,' complained the driver as he hopped into the road with a splash. His boots squelched and sucked as he nearly lost his balance. He was already soaked to the skin. 'Not to worry, sir,' he growled into his collar as he pulled his hat low on his brow. 'I'll have us out in a tick.'
I sat back and removed an oatcake and a wedge of black cheese from my pocket. We had been on the road for more than an hour, since before first light. I had found the coach-and-four waiting for me as promised in the underground stable-yard of the Three Pigeons, its horses already harnessed. I was expecting to see Phineas again but had not been disappointed to discover that a different driver would transport me to Wembish Park, a burly man who introduced himself as Nat Crump. He was proving a more garrulous companion than Phineas, though one equally ill-tempered. As I sat in the back of the vehicle-different from the one that had carried me to Pontifex Hall-I chewed my breakfast and listened to his curses, cries of encouragement and rueful observations about the inclement weather.
'Should have taken a different road,' he was saying as he thrust a thick branch beneath one of the rear wheels and tried to jemmy it free. He urged the horses forward, their traces taut and creaking. The coach gave a small lunge and the iron-shod wheels groaned mulishly, but we moved only a few inches before settling back into the mud. I was alarmed to see that water had risen as high as our rear axle. Crump and the horses stood knee-deep. 'Should have gone through Puckeridge,' he explained, bracing himself for better leverage. 'Higher ground over that way.'
'Puckeridge?' I was rocking with the motion of the coach. Overhead, elm branches were thrashing wildly. 'Well, why on earth did you not, then?'
'Orders,' he said with an angry grunt of exertion. 'I was ordered not to, wasn't I?' He paused and glanced in my direction. He appeared to regard the whole business as some fault of mine. 'I was told to ride through the forest.'
'Oh? And why was that?'
He had gripped a spoke and the wheel rim and now began forcing the branch with a dripping boot. The foremost horses reared a pace forward at his command but then splashed down foursquare in the mire. This time the wheels hadn't budged so much as an inch. He cursed again as he waded arduously forward.
'Why?' He had begun scraping mud from before the wheels with the end of his stick. 'For the same reason that we're not taking Lord Marchamont's coach, that's why. Because it's safer.'
He laughed mirthlessly but then paused in his labours long enough to swing a thick arm proprietorially at the surrounding woodlands. His hat had fallen into the water and I saw how his thatch of blond hair was flattened to his skull by the rain. Earlier, in the poor light of the stable-yard, I almost thought I recognised him but decided that, as with so many things these days, I could no longer trust my instincts. I also thought he seemed to be surprised by my appearance-by my darkened hair and clipped beard-but supposed it was because I didn't answer my description. Whatever the case, he had taken me aboard without any fuss.
'Through the forest,' he was explaining between gasps and grunts. He had found another branch to use as a fulcrum and then waded to the rear of the coach, where he was working again on the wheel. The coach was rocking back and forth like a boat on the tide. 'Won't be followed if we go this way.'
I raised the leather flap on the rear quarter-light and peered into the bough-canopied lane that twisted away behind us. The morning was still half dark. Through the grey air I could see a couple of fallow deer watching us from the copsewood, a buck and a doe, both poised to bolt. But there was no human life to be seen, not even the poachers for which Epping Forest was notorious. The dreadful weather was keeping the roads empty. We had met only the occasional London-bound wagon or pony-cart since reaching the Epping Road.
'Giddap! Go on!'
One of the branches splintered and snapped with a loud crack, and suddenly the vehicle pitched jerkily forward, almost sprawling me on to the floor. The window-flap had flown open and through it I could see our wheels tossing breakers on to the muddy bank. Crump fought for a handhold on the side of the coach and pulled himself aboard. Then we were on our way again, ploughing north into a dense screen of trees and rain. I settled back for what promised to be a long ride. We did not expect to arrive at Wembish Park until the next afternoon.
Onward we rolled for the rest of the morning, the miles swaying slowly past. I dozed in and out of wakefulness, exhausted because I hadn't arrived back in Alsatia until after midnight and then, because the Half Moon after dark was as noisy as a witch's Sabbath, had slept only in snatches. Feet trod the stairs at all hours, fiddles squealed in the tap room, dancers disported themselves up and down the corridors amid shrieks of laughter. There was peace at last an hour or two before dawn, but all too soon I was roused by a knock on my door and the voice of one of Mrs. Fawkes's chambermaids informing me through the woodwork that my hackney-coach was waiting.
My journey to Wembish Park began under a familiar omen. As the coach approached Chancery Lane I had seen another chalk figure scrawled on a wall-one of the hieroglyphs I now remembered from my Hermetic studies that Marsilio Ficino had called a 'crux Hermetica'. Beneath, also crudely in chalk, faded by the rain, was a single sentence, like a caption: We the Invisible Brethren of the Rose Cross.
I had leaned back in my seat, puzzled, wondering if I had read the legend right. Was it a hoax of some sort? For it seemed far too strange, too cryptic, to be genuine. I had heard of the secret society known as the Brothers of the Rose Cross, of course. I stumbled across their strange story the other day as I was flipping through a few of my treatises on Hermetic philosophy. I was only surprised that Biddulph's narrative with its secretive Protestant conspirators had not included them. From what little I could make of them, the Rosicrucians were a secretive band of Protestant alchemists and mystics who had opposed the Catholic Counter-Reformation earlier in the century. They supported Henry of Navarre as the champion of their faith and then, after Henry's assassination in 1610, Frederick V of the Palatinate. Their graffiti and placards mushroomed on the walls of Heidelberg and Prague in 1616 or 1617, about the time, that is, when Ferdinand of Styria was named king-designate of Bohemia. The Rosicrucians must have regarded Ferdinand, a pupil of the Jesuits, with terror and loathing, but their placards and manifestos were strangely optimistic, prophesying a reformation in politics and religion throughout the Empire. These reforms were to be brought about through magical arts such as those taught by Marsilio Ficino, the first translator into Latin of the Corpus hermeticum. By means of the 'scientific magic' in the Hermetic texts and in Ficino's Libri de Vita, the Rosicrucian Brethren hoped to turn the debased and blackened debris of modern life-the world of religious strife, of wars and persecutions-into a kind of Golden Age or Utopia, in much the same way as they hoped to manufacture gold in their laboratories out of lumps of coal and clay.
Their desire for reformation was understandable enough, I supposed. What did the Rosicrucian see as they gazed back over the last hundred years of European history but slaughter-benches drenched in Protestant blood? There was the massacre of Huguenots in Paris on the Feast of St. Bartholomew and the bonfires at Smithfield and Oxford during the reign of Queen Mary. There were the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and the Holy Office, along with the wars of the Spaniards in the Low Countries, where Sir Philip Sidney lost his life. There were the Lutheran clergymen expelled from Styria and the bonfire of 10,000 Protestant books in the city of Graz, from which Kepler was banished. There was Copernicus, bullied and silenced, and Galileo, summoned to Rome in 1616 for examination before Robert Bellarmine, one of the cardinals of the Inquisition who had burned the Hermetic philosopher Giordano Bruno in the Campo de' Fiore. There was Tommaso Campanella tortured and imprisoned in Naples. There was William the Silent murdered by Spanish agents and Henry IV stabbed by Ravaillac on the Pont Neuf.
In the end, though, the Rosicrucians themselves became a part of this tragic litany. They discovered neither the philosopher's stone nor their cherished Golden Age, because in 1620 King Frederick and the Bohemian Protestants were crushed by the armies of the Catholic League. Undoubtedly most Brothers of the Rose Cross were superstitious charlatans and foolish idealists, but I had felt a sorrow for these men who had wished to ward off with their books and chemicals and feeble magic spells what they saw as the evils of the Counter-Reformation, of Spain and the Habsburgs, only to be swallowed up themselves in the horrors of the Thirty Years War.
But this morning as the coach jolted past Chancery Lane something else about the Rosicrucian Brethren had struck me. I realised that their manifestos had appeared in Prague at roughly the same time that Raleigh's fleet-financed by another band of zealous Protestants-was setting sail for Guiana. Indeed, the most famous of the Rosicrucian tracts, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, a copy of which I discovered on my shelves, was published in Strasbourg in 1616, the same year that Raleigh was released from his cell in the Bloody Tower. So I wondered again if Sir Ambrose with his Hermetic text was some sort of link between these two doomed ventures, the first with Raleigh in Guiana, the second with Frederick in Bohemia. I had no idea; but the other day as I glanced through my copy of The Chemical Wedding I noticed something else about the text, something even more dramatic than its date, for engraved both in its margins and on the title page were tiny Mercury symbols, exact duplicates of these figures scribbled on the walls of London.
Then the coach had reached Bishopsgate, where the gates were scraped open to admit a flock of geese being driven to market for slaughter. I had pulled the window-curtain and closed my eyes, but as the coach creaked about me I found myself thinking of the dozens of alchemical works at Pontifex Hall, along with its well-stocked laboratory, and I wondered if Alethea's father, a devout Protestant, had been a Rosicrucian too. But at that point my thoughts had been interrupted as the cackling of the jubilant geese fell about my ears-the riotous clamour of creatures oblivious to the fate that lay only a few minutes away.
'Hungry, sir?'
'Mmmn…?' The voice had startled me awake, and for a few seconds I was too disoriented to move or speak.
'Shall we stop for a meal, sir?'
I pushed myself upright and peered through the window flap, confused and blinking, feeling the dislocation I always experience when I abandon the city for the country. A flat landscape was slowly reeling past, its fields and wood-lined droves half underwater. Rain was still falling in curtains, drumming across the leather rooftop.
'How long before Cambridge?'
'An hour,' replied Crump.
'No.' I fell back into the seat. 'Carry on.'
In fact it took two more hours to reach Cambridge, but by that time the rain had stopped and the sky at last blew clear. An impressive sunset one hour earlier had turned to soft pink a herd of sheep straggling across the flat chalklands. When I thrust my head through the window I had felt a damp wind pluck at my hair and noticed a mud-speckled coach-and-four trailing us at a distance; then a horseman on a blue roan trailing the coach. But I thought little of them at the time. The road as we neared Cambridge was thick with all sorts of coaches, riders on horseback, stage-wagons bound for London or Colchester. I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes.
The plan had been to stay the night in Cambridge and set out at first light for Wembish Park. To that end, Crump proposed a posting-inn called the Bookbinder's Arms, which he claimed stood by Magdalene College, overlooking the river. I readily consented. So far Crump had proved himself a remarkably capable guide.
But it was at this point that our journey suffered a bewildering setback. It might have been the growing darkness, or Crump's exhaustion, or the crowded streets with their rows of overhanging buildings. Or it might have been the reluctance of the post-horses, who were refusing each gate or unlighted bystreet and worrying at their snaffles. Whatever the reason, however, the aplomb with which Crump had found our way through Epping Forest and the fifty-odd storm-racked miles now seemed to desert him. For the next three-quarters of an hour we wound through narrow streets barely an arm's span wide, passing college after college, post-inn after post-inn, circling back upon ourselves, squinting and craning our necks, blundering across causeways and bridges only to be brought up short by ditches or cul-de-sacs, all without coming upon either Magdalene College or the Bookbinder's Arms. So at last Crump invited me to share the coach-box with him: I would watch for the inn, he said, while he concentrated on the business of driving.
There was barely room enough for two in the seat, but for a long while we rode in this fashion, our feet side by side on the footboard, our shoulders rubbing together. He had fallen silent and kept his eyes trained on the street ahead, while I twisted back and forth, looking out for signboards and, at the same time, studying him more closely. He was an ox of a man with pale eyes, blond hair and a drinker's nose that was pitted like a Seville orange. I had met him before-I was certain of that by now-but could not remember where. He might have been one of the labourers at Pontifex Hall, I thought, or one of the patrons blowing on his coffee in the Golden Horn.
For an instant a memory seemed to shimmer and rise on the edge of the horizon, but then we struck a bump in the road and I had to grasp the edge of the seat to stay aboard. As I did so, I felt a sudden pressure on my hip and, looking down, saw the butt of a pistol in Crump's waistband. I raised my eyes to his face and was alarmed to see something new-a look of worry, maybe even fear-inscribed across its weathered furrows.
'Shall we stop here?' I asked, pointing to an approaching inn whose unscrubbed stable-yard could be smelled even from this distance. We had passed its signboard twice already. 'This one looks adequate. What does it matter? They're all the same, these inns.'
'Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open,' he growled, working his mandibles fiercely and giving the reins a hard shake. 'You might miss something.'
The St. George & Dragon slipped past, as did the Shepherd's Crook, the Shoulder of Mutton, the Faggot of Rushes, the Merrie Lion, the Leathern Bottle, the Sow & Pigs, plus at least a half-dozen other inns and taverns, all of which Crump refused to consider. I decided I would jump down on to the street and make my own way-with or without Crump-to one of the other inns. But just as I rose from the seat and balanced myself on the footboard, steadying myself to leap over the wheel and on to the bridge, I suddenly caught sight of the Bookbinder's Arms, a pale hulk with flickering windows and a steep roof that rose against the sky like a ziggurat. It stood directly across the river from us, on the opposite side of a narrow bridge on to which Crump was guiding the horses.
'There,' I told him. I could now hear the familiar gurgling roar of water, the River Cam funnelling between the pylons of the bridge. 'See it? The Bookbinder's Arms.'
But Crump made no reply. Jaw tightly set, he glanced over one of his enormous shoulders again, shook the reins, and the horses moved forward at a swift trot. Perhaps he hadn't heard me over the roar of the water. I pointed at the building and then made to tap him on the forearm-we were nearing the end of the bridge and would pass the inn at this pace-but my fingers touched something cold and hard instead. Looking down, I saw the pistol gripped in his right hand.
'Giddap! Go on! Giddap!'
The horses plunged forward across the bridge so quickly that I was almost thrown from my seat. When I righted myself I heard Crump's oath and, turning my head, saw that we were no longer alone. The mud-spattered coach-and-four was approaching from the opposite side, blocking our path, and ahead of it a blue roan with a horseman astride was charging towards us.
I turned in confusion to Crump. He grimaced, cursed again, then raised his pistol in the air and pointed it at the figure rearing in the stirrups. The roan veered sideways into the stone balusters as the weapon discharged itself with a bright shower of sparks, stinging my left cheek. Our own horses bolted forward, panicked by the report, the coach swaying wildly behind them. I clung to the edge of the seat as Crump fumbled with the reins and another cartridge for his pistol. In a few more seconds we would draw level with the other coach.
'For God's sake help me!' Crump was thrusting the pistol and its cartridge towards me. The hub of one of our wheels ground against the balustrade, and our heads came together as the coach lurched violently sideways. 'They'll kill us!'
But I didn't take the pistol, which clattered on to the bridge behind us. Instead I recoiled from him as the coach righted itself, then I twisted round in the seat and hoisted myself with a clumsy bound on to the rocking coach-top, where I crouched for a second on my haunches, gripping the edge. Then, without heeding Crump's shouts or looking downwards, I leapt over the balustrade and into the swirling din of the rain-swollen Cam. But as I hit the waters with a splash and was sucked below the surface, then through the middle arch, then downriver past the Bookbinder's Arms, it wasn't the thunder of the flooded river I was hearing but the echo of Crump's wooden teeth clicking together like rattlebones.
For I had remembered, at long last, where I'd seen him before. But then for a long time, as the current carried me downstream, I remembered nothing at all, because suddenly the whole world had gone black and silent.
From Magdalene Bridge the River Cam flows northeast towards the Isle of Ely, several miles below which, on the edge of the peat fens, crosscut by ancient Roman drainage canals, its waters run into the Great Ouse and then seaward to the Wash, thirty miles to the north, where they flow towards a desolate horizon. With the day's downpour the fens were even more flooded than usual, and that evening the river's current was turbulent and swift. How many miles it might have swept me downstream I had no idea. I only know that I awoke sodden and chilled on the floor of a lighter that was being poled against the current by a fenman on his way to market, an ancient turf-cutter named Noah Bright. Stars were reeling overhead and muddy embankments wavering past. I coughed up a lungful of water and fetched my breath in ragged gasps. It might have been hours or even days later.
Of the journey back to Cambridge I have only the vaguest memories: the old fenman leaning on his pole; the motion of the lighter in the water as a dark riverscape slid over the gunwale of the boat; the sweet odour of the sun-dried peat against which my cheek was pressed. Bright kept up a spirited monologue as he poled us along, though what he might have been talking about I have no idea, for I barely listened or responded. I was thinking all the while about Nat Crump, about what I had seen when our heads clashed together on the bridge: the set of wooden teeth bared like a cur's with fear and anger.
An accident in Fleet Street. Cart-horse dropped down dead, sir…
The discovery had been a shock. Even now I had no idea what to make of it. But Crump had been the driver of the hackney-coach in Alsatia, that much I knew at once. Crump was the one who took me on that apparently fortuitous detour to the Golden Horn. I was as certain of that, at this moment, as I was of anything.
An accident in Fleet Street…
For I could no longer know anything, I realised, except that a few days ago someone named Nat Crump had followed me to Westminster, to the Postman's Horn, where he picked me up from the street, to all appearances at random, and then delivered me to within sight of the Golden Horn, also apparently at random. But the journey must have been carefully planned and executed so that the elaborate design would appear as an accident, a coincidence, a rare piece of good luck. Which meant that everything that had happened since the first trip to Alsatia, as well as everything that had followed so smoothly from it-the auction, the copy of Agrippa, the catalogue-had also been staged. As, of course, had the journey to Wembish Park. I was being led astray, coaxed into ever-deeper and more dangerous waters. Even if the house actually existed I had no doubt that it, like all else, would be nothing more than a blind. But a blind for what? For whom?
We seem to have reached a dead end…
And the loquacious turf-cutter, Noah Bright, who was rearing above me in the stern? What of him? He seemed to be watching me closely as he spoke, bending upon me a pair of eyes as bright and alert as an old pointer dog's. I had managed to explain that I was a bookseller from London, Silas Cobb by name, who had come to browse among the shops and stalls of Cambridge's Market Hall, but who had toppled into the river after enjoying the hospitality of one of the town's numerous taverns. I had no idea if he believed my hasty fibs-or if I could trust him. Suddenly I was suspicious of everyone. I wondered if the old fenman wasn't yet another Crump or Pickvance, an actor brought on stage to play a part, a marionette whose strings were twitched from behind canvas flats by someone else. Had he found me in the river only at random, by pure chance? Or was even my leap overboard under some sort of precise control, determined by a set of indices whose author and purpose remained a mystery? I wondered where the limits of this control might lie. I wondered if Biddulph with his tales about the Navy Office and the Philip Sidney had been arranged for me like everything else. If the graffiti had been scrawled on the walls of London and the curiosities placed in their dusty cabinet for my eyes alone…
'What the devil…?'
The lighter had skidded sideways in the current, yawing frantically to starboard. Water splashed over the gunwales and the load of peat wobbled unsteadily beside me. I raised my head to see that Bright had ceased poling and was squatted in the stern, peering anxiously across the flooded river. Turning my head I saw the faint lights of Cambridge in the waters ahead of us. We must have been a good mile or more north of Magdalene Bridge. The lantern teetered on the thwart and threatened to tumble into the waves. I turned my attention back to Bright, a wave of gooseflesh creeping across my nape and shoulders.
'What is it?'
'Over there,' he whispered, nodding to the embankment. 'There's something on the riverbank.'
I turned my head again and saw a dark shape half-hidden among the waterlogged sedge: what looked like some sort of amphibious creature that had crawled halfway out of the water. Light from the lantern played towards it as Bright sank the pole in the mud and pushed off, carefully drifting the nose of the lighter across the treacherous current. He almost lost his balance but managed to hold the course, ruddering with his pole as we wallowed in the onrushing water. A few seconds later the keel slid with a soft rasp into the mud. I could see an arm outstretched in the sedge. Bright raised his pole from the water with a grunt.
It was a man, spreadeagled facedown on the bank, his legs submerged in the swollen river. Bright swung the pole boom-like across the edge of the bank, but even before it prodded his shoulder and rolled him on to his back it was obvious he was dead. In the ghastly light of the lantern I could see that his throat had been cut from ear to ear, almost enough to sever the head, which flopped horrifically sideways. I felt my gorge rise in my throat and looked away, but Bright was disembarking, splashing knee-deep through the water and holding the lantern aloft. No sooner had he reached the body than the current struck both of them, but before the lantern was extinguished and the body rolled into the sedge I caught a swift glimpse of the face-of the bulbous nose and, beneath it, the pair of wooden teeth tightly clenched as if in some inarticulate rage.
One of my earliest memories is of watching my father write. He was a scrivener, so writing was his profession, an affair governed by all sorts of precise and complex rituals. I can still picture him hunched as if in supplication over his battered escritoire, his hair hanging over his face, a turkey quill pivoting back and forth in his slender hand. In appearance he was, as I am, unimposing, a small man with dark garb and the morose, worried eyes of a puffin. But to watch him at work was to marvel at the genius of the scribe's hand. I used to stand beside his desk, holding aloft a candle as he mixed his ink or trimmed his quills with a penknife as carefully as if performing the most delicate surgery. Then he would dip the tapered point into the ink-horn and, magically, begin inscribing the chalked and pumiced parchment spread on the desk before him.
What was my father writing? I had no idea. Those were the innocent days before my hornbook taught me how to decipher the bowing heads and flourishing limbs of his curious ink-figures, and so at the time they were as irresistible and beguiling as the hieroglyphics of the Pharaohs. In fact my poor father must have been writing passages of the dullest possible sort. Letters patent, court rolls, parish registers: that type of thing. The scrivener led a life of rare drudgery. Only when I was older did I realise that my father's back was permanently bowed from hunching over his desk and his eyes dim because he was too poor, much of the time, to afford a candle. His labours in the tiny garret room that served as his study were relieved once a week when he visited the shops of ink-makers and parchment-sellers, or when he delivered the fruits of his efforts to the Inns of Chancery in whose pay he was so precariously kept. As I grew older I sometimes accompanied him on these forays through the streets of London. With the rolled-up parchments tucked under his arm or inside a weather-worn scrip strapped round his neck he would present himself at Clement's Inn, or one of two dozen others, and I would sit in quiet anterooms, watching through the doorway as my hunchbacked father in his dirty ruff shyly and with trembling hands unscrolled his wares on the desk of thin-chopped unsmiling law clerks.
How well I remember those voyages, even now. Hand in hand through the streets the pair of us would roam, into strange and forbidding buildings, worlds of power and privilege far removed from our tiny house and my father's ink-stained escritoire. Twice we were even ushered by silk-clad pages into the Signet Office in Whitehall Palace itself. Most often of all, though, on these weekly odysseys we visited Chancery Lane, because it was here, on the east side of the street, near the gaming-house in Bell Yard-another favourite haunt of my poor father, alas-that the Rolls Chapel stood.
My father, a man with atheistical leanings, often joked that the Rolls Chapel was the only church he ever attended. And from the outside the building did indeed look exactly like a church. It had a stone bell-tower, hexagonal in shape, together with stained-glass windows that overlooked the barristers and magistrates bustling up and down Chancery Lane. Inside a nail-studded oak door was a chancel and a long nave filled with row upon row of pews. Yet the pews were filled not with pious parishioners and their prayer-books but with heavy morocco-bound books and stacks of paper and parchment three feet high. And those who came inside-little groups that huddled in the northwest corner-prayed not to God but the Lord Chancellor, or rather to the Master of the Rolls, his adjutant, who heard suits from where he perched priest-like on his bench in the chancel. For the Rolls Chapel may have been a church at one time-built, my father told me, for the converted Jews of England-but it had long since been converted itself, and now it housed in its bell-tower and in the crypt under its grey flagstones the voluminous records of the Court of Chancery.
I crossed my childhood ghost-the tiny Isaac Inchbold dressed in his russet frock and moth-holed hose-as I took my place on a pew beside the door on the morning after my return from Cambridge. The sun in the stained glass was casting across the flagged aisles the brilliant blossoms of light I remembered so well from those distant mornings when I sat kicking my feet against a prie-dieu and awaiting my father's descent from the tower or ascent from the crypt. Now, as then, the Rolls Chapel was silent and smelled mustily of old parchment and ancient stone.
But it was far from empty. From where I sat I could see dozens of clerks and scriveners threading carefully amongst the kneeling-stools and choir stalls, while my pew was shared by a congregation of a dozen gentlemen, most of whom looked like Cavaliers. And behind the worm-eaten chancel screen, before a small audience of lawyers in horsehair wigs, the Master of the Rolls, a fat man in scarlet robes, was holding court. I removed my fob-watch for inspection, then returned my anxious gaze to the tiny door to the bell-tower through which a clerk had vanished a few minutes earlier. Above the door was a sign: 'Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum.' I sighed and replaced the watch. I was in a desperate hurry, for I was in grave danger-and so, too, was Alethea.
It was now two days since my departure for Cambridge. I had arrived back in Alsatia the previous night after spending another entire day on the road. I had made haste for London because a terrible thought had occurred to me, one that set my nape and sideburns prickling. I realised that all of the strange concatenations-everything that some unknown person or persons had staged for me-led straight back to the cipher in the copy of Ortelius, a text I was obviously meant to discover and solve. Which meant that whoever was laying the trap had access to Pontifex Hall and its laboratory. Which meant that he was most probably one of only two people, either Phineas Greenleaf or Sir Richard Overstreet, or perhaps the two of them in league together. Whatever the case, the culprit had access not only to Alethea, but also to her trust. And one of them, most likely Sir Richard, had murdered Nat Crump.
Yet the events of the past few days had still perplexed me. I could not begin to guess why Crump should have been killed, nor how the various other strands-the break-ins at Nonsuch House, Henry Monboddo and his mysterious client, the Orinoco expedition-were connected to the errant parchment itself, the alpha and omega of the mystery, the Holy Grail that seemed to be receding ever farther beyond my grasp.
But then suddenly I had realised how I might cut through the Gordian knot after all-how I might get to the bottom of the mystery of Henry Monboddo and Wembish Park… and then, through them, to the identity of whoever lay at the heart of the whole affair. For the villain had not quite covered his tracks. The answer lay not at Wembish Park, I knew, but here in London, in Chancery Lane-in a few lines of text inscribed on a roll of parchment.
I arrived in the Rolls Chapel that morning, still in disguise, after a fruitless trip to Pulteney House, which had looked dark and deserted. I explained my mission to a clerk seated at a desk by the baptismal font, who informed me with a sneer that what I wanted was impossible, for all of the clerks superintending the Close Rolls were, I must understand, very busy at the minute. No one could requite my desire, he explained, for another few days at least.
'The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion,' he explained with a shrug of his narrow shoulders.
'I beg your pardon?'
'The land settlements,' he said in a tone of derisive hauteur. 'The clerks are researching land entitlements so the estates confiscated by Parliament can be restored to their rightful owners.'
'But that's why I'm here!'
'Is it, indeed?' He peered over the edge of his desk, giving me a frank scrutiny from head to toe, quite rightly sceptical, I suppose, that a person of such a humble and even shabby aspect could have any possible connection with an aristocratic estate, confiscated or not. 'Well, you will just have to wait your turn like everyone else.' He nodded at the slumping gallery of Cavaliers. Then slowly his eyes returned to me. 'Unless, that is, of course…'
The fellow had coughed delicately into his tiny lace-beruffed hand and tossed a furtive glance in the direction of the chancel. With a mental sigh I reached for a shilling. I knew, of course, that greed was essential to a lawyer's craft, but I had not realised that the vice had filtered down to their clerks as well. When the coin was granted only a dubious glance I was forced to add another. Both coins were conjured into thin air. He returned his gaze to the papers on his desk.
'Be seated over there, please.'
Then, for a whole hour, nothing. Two suits were heard in the chancel and their plaintiffs dismissed. Clerks and lawyers shuffled to and fro, rootling among the volumes on the pews or in the vestry to my right. The brilliant garden of light crept slowly across the flagstones until it almost reached the toes of my boots, which, as of old, were tapping impatiently at the padded prie-dieu on the floor in front of me. At last I heard my name called and, looking up, saw a clerk, a thin young fellow, standing in the tiny door to the bell-tower.
'You may see the enrolments now, if you please,' the clerk at the desk informed me. 'Mr. Spicer will show you the way.'
The climb was a difficult one. There was no hand-rail other than a frayed rope, and so narrow was the stairwell that my shoulder rubbed against the sandstone newel at every step. I twisted round it and ascended in pursuit of the nimble Mr. Spicer, but after a dozen steps I imagined the tons of stone pressing in upon me and felt the same freezing tremors of panic as in my priest-hole a few days earlier. I have always detested enclosed spaces, which remind me, I suppose, of that eternal confinement shortly to claim me. To make matters worse, young Mr. Spicer saw no need for a candle, and so I was forced to wriggle upwards through a musty darkness relieved only by the occasional arrow-slit window.
Panting heavily, I reached the top at last to find Spicer waiting in a small hexagonal room. I realised at once why he had not lit a candle on the way up, for the room was stacked with sheaves of parchment, some of which had been sewn head to foot and rolled into fat spools several feet in diameter. Scattered about, and so numerous that they took up most of the floor space, were dozens of wooden boxes from which protruded even more parchments, some of them sallowed, others new.
My eyes flitted over the rolls and boxes, over the parchment tags with their bright seals of wax hanging down like tassels. It was the world of my father the scrivener. But I was intrigued by the sight for a quite different reason, for I knew that the answer to my persecutor's identity would be here among these documents. How many documents had I studied thus far in search of answers? Rate-books, patents, parish registers, auction catalogues, editions of the Corpus hermeticum and tales of Raleigh's voyage-all of which had led me further and further astray. But now at long last I was about to discover the truth. It would be inscribed here, I knew, somewhere among these parchments.
'Every last will, patent, writ and charter in the country is enrolled here,' Spicer was explaining with some pride as he caught my transfixed gaze. 'These documents are the overflow from the crypt and vestry. In the crypt there are already more than 75,000 parchments of them on something like a thousand rolls.'
He picked his way to his desk and stooped to scrape open a deep drawer, from which he removed, with an exaggerated grunt, an enormous folio bound in leather. It must have been a good foot thick.
'I am a busy man,' he sighed, taking his seat, 'as I hope you will appreciate. So if you wouldn't mind…'
'Yes, yes. Of course. I shall come straight to the business.' I stepped forward, leaning on my stick. 'I'm in search of a title deed.'
'You and everyone else,' he muttered under his breath. Then with a creak of leather he opened the cover of the cartulary and took up his magnifying lens. 'Very well. A title deed.' He licked his thumb and riffled through the heavy pages. 'What year was it enrolled? The season would be helpful too, if you can. Summer? Autumn?'
'Ah, well… now there, I fear, is the rub.' I attempted an ingratiating smile. 'I'm not quite certain when the transaction took place.'
'Is that so. Well, what is the name of the purchaser, might I ask?'
'Another rub, I fear.' I hoisted my smile a little higher. 'That is precisely what I'm hoping to find, you see-the name of whoever owns the property.'
'But you have no date of purchase? Not even a rough guess? No? Well then,' he said through pursed, renunciatory lips as I shook my head, 'you have rather put the cart before the ass, if you don't mind me saying so. You must know one or the other, the name or the date. Surely you can understand that.' The enormous cover, held ajar, creaked again and then fell shut with a gentle thud. 'As I say, Mr. Inchbold, I am a busy man.' He was stooped over again, replacing the cartulary in its drawer. 'I trust you can find your own way down the stairs.'
'No-wait.' I was not going to be dismissed that easily. 'I have a name for you,' I said. 'Two names, if you please.'
Yet Spicer was unable to find mention in his book of any property in Huntingdonshire belonging to either Sir Richard Overstreet-the first name I had him search for among the tidy columns that ran up and down the rag-paper pages-or Henry Monboddo. However, he eventually discovered in his cartulary a record for a property in the name of someone named not Henry, but Isabella, Monboddo. Almost an hour had passed by this time. I was leaning forward, trying to read upside-down the print that someone, one of Mr. Spicer's predecessors, had inscribed in a neat chancery hand. The house was a jointure, he explained in a bored monotone, settled on Isabella by her husband who was named-yes, yes-Henry Monboddo. He bent forward with his nose pressed to the reading-glass. A freehold estate named Wembish Park.
'That's it,' I stammered. 'Yes, that's-'
'The jointure was granted,' he continued as if oblivious, 'in a will made by Henry Monboddo in the year 1630. Since then it has been compounded by Parliament, later confiscated, then restored to its owner under the terms of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion.'
'Restored to Isabella Monboddo?'
'That is correct. She is described as the relict of Henry Monboddo.'
'The relict? But when did Monboddo die?'
'These are not parish records, Mr. Inchbold. The cartulary does not tell us such things.'
'Of course,' I murmured placatingly. I was trying to make sense of the information. Monboddo dead? Did Alethea not know? I leaned forward even further. 'So… Isabella Monboddo is the owner of the estate?'
'Was the owner. Wembish Park appears to have changed hands since the recent land settlement.'
He was hunched low over the page now, like a jeweller examining stones of rare quality through his lens. From where I sat I could see the columns shrink and swim beneath it. Then he turned the page with a sharp crackle and, laying the glass aside, looked up for the first time in twenty minutes.
'Yes,' he said, 'it's been sold. Quite recently, from the looks of it. The deed was enrolled only a few weeks ago. Though of course it may have been registered in the county with the Clerk of the Peace up to a month before that. We're a little behind in our work-'
'Yes, of course, all of the land settlements…' I was hardly daring to breathe. 'To whom was it sold?'
'Ah. Well.' He indulged himself with a smile. 'That the cartulary does not tell us.'
'But the deed?' I could barely contain my urge to wrench the register from his hands and read the entry for myself. 'You say it's been enrolled?'
'Of course it's been enrolled. It's the law, you understand.'
'Well, in that case, where is it found?'
Spicer seemed to ignore the question. He took up his reading-glass and once again hunched his back, applying himself like a laborious schoolboy to the page. After a few seconds he plucked up one of his quills and with elaborate care trimmed its nib and then copied on to a scrap of paper rummaged from one of the drawers a bristling thicket of numerals that, still leaning forward, I was barely able to decipher: CXXXIIIW. DCCLXXVIII. LVIII.
'There you are,' he said, sliding the cryptic message across the top of the desk towards me with the tip of an index finger. 'This, I believe, is what you wished to learn.'
I took up the paper and held it by the edges, careful not to smear the ink. I frowned and raised my eyes to Spicer. He was watching me with a complacent smile.
'What do you mean? What is this?'
'The crypt, Mr. Inchbold.' The cartulary gave a valedictory flump as its cover was slammed shut. Spicer's smile had disappeared. He replaced the quill in the ink-horn and then slipped the reading-glass into a drawer. 'That is where you'll find what you're seeking. In the crypt.'
The sun had shifted to the west windows by the time I picked my way down the narrow staircase and into the nave. The chapel was even emptier now; I could see only a pair of clerks in hushed conference in the chancel. I sculled along the aisle on my thorn-stick, faint from hunger because I had not eaten since the previous day. But there was no time for food. Bracing myself against a pew I swung my club foot over a stool, holding tightly to the slip of paper. Yes, there was too much to do before I could think about my belly.
The door to the crypt stood at the front of the church, near the chancel beneath which I supposed it extended. It bore the same legend as the one leading to the bell-tower, 'Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum', and creaked open on to a set of steps equally shallow and narrow. There was no light, so far as I could see, except a muted glow at the bottom. I ducked my head beneath the scarred wooden mullion and, taking a deep breath like a diver, began a slow descent.
I was to be met in the crypt by a clerk named Appleyard who would decipher the paper and locate the deed. But I had already guessed that the numerals referred to the shelf mark of the roll in question. As I descended I could see that the shelves and cases in the catacomb below were all numbered, as were the boxes and the scores of rolls bound with ribbons and crammed on to the shelves. Still, it would have been impossible to locate the roll on my own. As my eyes adjusted to the poor light I saw that the crypt was a vast labyrinth extending far beyond the chancel to encompass the area beneath the nave and then, for all I could tell, Chancery Lane and perhaps even a good part of London as well. Narrow corridors barely two feet in width and overhung by the rolls of parchment-some as big around as saucers, others thin as pipe stems-slithered away into darkness on either side, then divided into other, equally cramped tributaries. It was only because I was short and my belly of modest dimensions that I was able to pick my way along the widest of these passageways towards the thin glow of lamplight and, squatted within it, the tiny desk occupied by Mr. Appleyard. The lamp had been trimmed low and Mr. Appleyard was fast asleep.
It took a minute or two to rouse him. He was a frail-looking old man with a coronal of white hair over his ears and a bald dome that had yellowed to the colour of the parchments surrounding him. Twice I shook him gently by the shoulder. On the second occasion, he snorted and coughed, then jerked erect with pale eyes ablink.
'Yes?' His hands were fumbling on the desk. 'What is it? Who's there?'
I slipped the paper on to the desk and explained that I had been sent from the tower by Mr. Spicer. 'I'm searching for a deed,' I explained. 'My name is Inchbold.'
'Inchbold…' His hands froze in mid-air above the blotter. Then he paused for a moment, frowning deeply and tapping the tip of his nose with a forefinger as though lost in some private reverie. 'Of the Inchbolds of Pudney Court? In Somersetshire?'
I was surprised by the question. 'The attachment is a distant one.'
'Of course. But your attachment to Henry Inchbold, I think, is not so distant. Correct? Your voice no less than your name is very like his.'
Now I was quite taken aback. 'You remember my father?'
'Very well indeed. A fine selection of scripts. The ascenders in his court hand were, I recall, most emphatic in their execution.' He shrugged and offered a toothless smile. 'You see, in those days I still enjoyed the pleasures of sight.'
Only then did I realise that Appleyard with his fumbling hands and blinking gaze was as blind as Homer. I felt my heart slip. Was this some joke on the part of Spicer? How would a blind man-even a man with a memory evidently as prodigious as Appleyard's-lead me through the wanderings of the crypt?
'But I take it, Mr. Inchbold, that you have not come to discuss your father.'
'No.'
'Nor Pudney Court either. Or is that perhaps the deed you seek? I remember it as well, you know. A fine example of the floreate charter hand before the so-called reform of penmanship in the thirteenth century. Reform,' he repeated disdainfully. 'An emasculation, I call it.'
'No,' I replied, 'not Pudney Court either. A property in Huntingdonshire.'
'Ah.' His sallowed head was bobbing.
'A house called Wembish Park. I believe it was recently sold.' I retrieved the slip of paper from the desk. 'Mr. Spicer has given me the shelf mark. Shall I read it to you?'
The paper was decoded much as I suspected. The parchment would be found on shelf number CXXXIII, which stood in the west wing of the crypt. Hence the W in the code, Appleyard explained. Roll number DCCLXXVIII was one of those on which deeds for the present year had been enrolled. The deed itself would be the fifty-eighth parchment, which meant that it would have been enrolled roughly halfway along, 'so far as I remember, mind'. He was feeling his way through the corridor in front of me as he spoke, ticking off the shelves as he passed them, moving so swiftly that I had some difficulty keeping pace. I was carrying my stick in one hand, and in the other the lantern, which he had advised me not to drop unless I wished to see its flames engulf four hundred years of legal history.
'Here we are,' he said at last, after burrowing like a mole along a branching series of ever-narrowing aisles. 'Shelf number one-thirty-three. Correct?'
I held the lantern aloft. Its glow lit the legend inscribed on a yellowed and curling paper fixed to the end of the shelf: CXXXIIIW.
'Correct,' I replied.
'Well, then, the rest is up to you, Mr. Inchbold. You are conversant in Latin, I trust?'
'Of course.'
'And the law hands? Chancery? Secretary?'
'Most of them.'
'Of course. Your father…' He was struggling with the roll, which I helped him lower from where it had been shelved. It was an awkward bundle, surprisingly heavy, and had been fastened with a red ribbon. 'You must read it here. I regret there is no better place. But this corridor and the next should be long enough.'
'Long enough?'
'You will have to unroll it, of course. Mind the lantern, though. That is all I ask of you.'
With that he shuffled away down the corridor, humming to himself and leaving me to squat on the floor, bones cracking, with the curious prize clutched in my arms. As I untied the ribbon-slowly, like someone unwrapping a precious gift-I could hear the subdued thunder of traffic trundling overhead. So the crypt extended under Chancery Lane. Was that how the old clerk found his way through the corridors? By sound? Or had he been gifted, like the blinded Tiresias, with preternatural powers?
The ribbon came undone, and I slipped it into my pocket for safekeeping. Then, having fixed the tail of the roll against the wall and weighed it down with my thorn-stick, I began carefully to unroll the enormous spool. After a minute I reached the entrance to the corridor, moving on hands and knees, feeling like Theseus crawling through the labyrinth with Ariadne's golden thread unravelling behind him. Then I entered the next corridor, which after a few paces made a dog's-leg at a 120-degree angle. Then the next, dog-legging in the other direction. Shelves crowded to either side of me. The roll grew thinner, its tail longer. What would I discover at its end? A Minotaur? Or a passage out of the labyrinth and into the light of day? The floor declined slightly as I crept forward. 66… 65… 64… 63…
At last I reached it, midway through the roll and midway along the corridor. I caught my breath as it unfurled, even though the fifty-eighth deed on Chancery Roll DCCLXXVIII was utterly indistinguishable, at first glance, from the others: a piece of parchment, perhaps eighteen inches in length, with a seal suspended on a tag at the foot, which had been slit and then stitched to the head of the previous document. Well? What had I been expecting to see? I propped the lantern on the floor and seated myself cross-legged beside it with the parchment spread across my lap.
I had thought as I unrolled the documents that within seconds of reaching the deed I would know the culprit's name. But as I studied it front and back, it must have been a full minute before the import of the document finally struck me. The first thing I noticed were the signatures on the dorse, both illegible. Those of the witnesses, I supposed: law clerks, very likely. I turned the roll over, holding my breath. Still there was no revelation, though immediately I noticed the jagged line at the top of the page. As I ran my forefinger over the crude serration-the parchment was obviously an indenture, cut in two-a memory shot briefly to life, then abruptly faded. I had seen a similar document, an indenture very like this one. But I could not, in that brief second, remember where or when.
Sciant presentes et futuri quod ego Isabella Monboddo…
The first line, inscribed in black ink, leapt from the page. The lettering had been executed by a scrivener whose talents, I decided, fell short of my father's, though it was done in the elegant curves and dagger-sharp strokes of chancery script. So mesmerised was I by the script that it was another few seconds before I realised what exactly I was reading.
Sciant presentes et futuri quod ego Isabella Monboddo quondam uxor Henry Monboddo in mea viduitate dedi concessi et hac presenti carta mea confirmavi Alethea Greatorex…
But then, as the words unravelled from the page, I understood. Yet I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Squinting in the poor light of the cramped corridor I held the document so close to the lantern that its edge touched the casing. My eyes swept across the dense thicket of figures, returning to the top of the page to read it through again:
Let men present and future know that I, Isabella Monboddo, sometime wife of Henry Monboddo, have in my widowhood given, granted, and by this my present charter confirmed, to Alethea Greatorex, Lady Marchamont of Pontifex Hall, Dorsetshire, relict of Henry Greatorex, Baron Marchamont, all lands and tenements, meadows, grazing lands and pasture, with their hedges, banks and ditches, and with all their profits and appurtenances, which I have in Wembish Park, Huntingdonshire…
But I could read no more. The document dropped from my fingers and I slumped against a shelf, numb with shock, still not quite daring to comprehend what I had read. My foot must have struck the roll, for the last thing I remembered was the sight of it tumbling a few feet along the slight decline of the corridor before beginning its long unravelling, gathering its own momentum as one by one the documents unfurled and snaked into the darkness of the next corridor.
York House stood less than a mile upriver from Billingsgate, where the storehouses and manufactories overhanging the embankment gave way to mansions that pushed themselves like palisades from the Thames. One after another they drifted past, each with an arched gateway framing a riverfront garden and a barge moored below. York House was found at the westernmost edge of the row, near the New Exchange, at the point where the river bent south towards the dingy clutter of Whitehall Palace. The eddies of current heaved and flexed about its stone steps that led to an arched watergate, on either side of which a stone wall encrusted with limpets held back the high tides. Tarred wooden bollards beside the steps made fast a multi-oared barge whose lacquered hull, in the morning sunshine, gave back a warped riverscape. Beyond the gate sprawled the garden: drooping willows, pollarded aspens, a forlorn pomegranate, all throwing spindly shadows across a knot garden filled with the shrivelled husks of last summer's flowers. Sparrows hopped about the box hedge, pecking for seeds and leaving hieroglyphics in frost that the low sun had not yet melted.
As she breasted the stairs, Emilia was surprised to see how the mansion-one of the largest on the river, late home of the Lord High Chancellor-appeared to be in ruins. Empty window sockets and a gap-toothed balustrade looked down on piles of stone blocks littered before the west wing. Baskets of bricks and roof slates stood against the wall of the east wing, halfway up whose crumbling surface a wooden scaffold jutted. Pulleyed ropes hung downward from the platforms like nooses, wagging in the breeze. From inside the house came the sound of hammers.
It was now eight o'clock. The post horn of one of Lord Stanhope's departing mail-coaches was sounding in Charing Cross as Emilia followed Vilém across the garden to the tradesmen's entrance. Her left knee and ribs were aching from her brush with the gunwales of the fishing smack an hour earlier. At the last second Vilém had grasped her arm and pulled her aboard the smack as it knifed past on the current. When it docked at Billingsgate the two of them had disembarked and, limping and dripping, made their way through the fish market to the other side of London Bridge. A scull was waiting. The Cardinal's men seemed to have disappeared into the thicket of masts and sails.
Progress to York House had been a slow one on account of the tide, which had turned by the time the watermen pushed off from the stairs beside the Old Swan Tavern. Vilém had chosen the two burliest specimens and a sleek-looking pair-of-oars, but the journey upriver still took almost an hour. To make matters worse, the watermen had trouble finding the house. Essex Stairs… the Strand Bridge… Somerset Stairs-all had looked exactly the same as the boat slipped past. One of Emilia's hands gripped the wet fustian of Vilém's coat. He had been oblivious, perched in the bows with his head raised as if sniffing the breeze. But at one point, halfway along the row, he nodded at one of the mansions.
'So that is Arundel House.'
Turning to look at the palace sliding past on their starboard side she saw a wintry-looking garden filled not with people, as she first thought, but dozens of statues. A cluster of robed figures was standing erect beneath the trees, frozen as if at a stroke, gesturing arms immobile, sightless marble eyes gazing across the river to Lambeth Marsh. Others wrestled together, while still others lay supine in the grass like corpses on a battlefield, staring at the clouds, their arms and torsos fractured in the middle of heroic postures. She could see yet more ruins under the wings of the house, a promiscuous heap of rubble, what looked from this distance like the fragmentary remains of urns and pediments whose shards had been bleached bone-white by ancient suns. Above them, on the keystone of the arch, the inscription: 'ARVNDELIVS'.
The name was familiar. She craned her neck as the garden slowly receded in their unfurling wake, trying to remember what Vilém had said a few hours earlier about Arundel and the Howards, about their rivalry with Buckingham.
'From Constantinople,' Vilém was now saying, almost in a whisper. 'The finest collection in all of England, if not the whole world. Arundel has an agent at the Sublime Porte who ships them to London by the crate-load. He suborns the imams. He convinces them that the statues are idolatrous so they can be removed from the palaces and triumphal arches. Most of the other statues are from Rome, where Arundel has good connections with the papal authorities.'
'And good connections with Cardinal Baronius?'
Vilém nodded grimly. 'Arundel and his agents have been working for Baronius, spreading their sticky web, trying to catch whatever they can of the treasures from the Spanish Rooms and the Bibliotheca Palatina. Reports from Rome say a deal has been struck. In return for Arundel delivering the Hermetic manuscript, the Pope will sanction the export of a number of statues on which the Earl has set his heart. Included among them is an obelisk from Egypt that now lies on the site of the Circus of Maxentius. Also a few ornaments from the Palazzo Pighini. Arundel plans to erect them in his garden, I fancy. A fine sight they would make. Monuments to Rome in the heart of London.'
Now, pushing aside draping willow branches, ducking among the aspens, Emilia hurried to catch Vilém, who was three steps ahead, the cabinet clutched awkwardly in his arms as he crept round the knot garden of York House. There was a side entrance beside a basket of bricks, under the scaffold, cast in shadow. When Vilém knocked hesitantly on the door, a cacophony of yelps and snarls arose from within. Both of them shrank backwards, Vilém fumbling with the cabinet. Claws scrabbled angrily against the inside of the door.
'Quiet, quiet! No, no! Achille! No!'
But the muffled voice from behind the door did little to silence the beasts. A few seconds later came the rasp of a judas, and Emilia caught the wink of an imperious eye.
'Who knocks?'
Vilém, apparently thinking better of announcing himself, made no reply, only hoisted the cabinet high enough for the eye to see. Then came more howling and the sound of crossbars sliding in their wooden grooves. Seconds later the door squealed open a crack to reveal four snouts, clamorous and slobbering. A pack of buckhounds. Emilia stumbled backwards, her heels slipping in the frost.
'Achille! Anton! No!'
The hounds spilled outside, leaping over one another's lithe backs like a troupe of acrobats. Emilia recoiled another step but tripped over the basket, then one of the tumultuous hounds. Its tail struck the hollow of her knee and she collapsed with a cry to the grass. Seconds later she felt on her throat and hands the hot breath of the pack, then their noses and tongues.
'Salt,' explained a calm voice from somewhere high above. 'They adore the taste of salt. Obviously, my dear, you've been perspiring.' Hands clapped loudly. She looked up through a chaos of ears and tails to see a liveried figure tickling the jowls of one of the capering hounds. 'Here, lads. Here, my boys! Auguste! Achille! Anton! Good boys!'
'We have come on important business,' Vilém was saying from where he cowered beside the door, holding aloft the cabinet as two more of the hounds, lean and spotted, stood on their hind legs and pawed at his belly and chest like children patting his pockets for sweets. 'We would speak to Mr. Monboddo!'
'Do come in, please,' said the footman, sniggering. 'Mind the carpet, though, won't you? That's it. The Earl is most particular where his carpets are concerned. Oriental, as you can see. Very fine, this one. Hand-knotted. All the way from Turkey.' He was ushering the hounds inside. 'A gift from the Grand Vizier!'
The walls of the corridor were lined with busts and marble figures like the ones in the garden of Arundel House, their ancient noses and lips obliterated like those of syphilitics. Some were still inside wooden crates packed with straw, where they looked like poets and emperors reposing in their coffins. Marbles snatched from Arundel, Emilia supposed. Further on, portraits in their heavy frames leaned towards them from hooks on the wall; others still in paper wrapping bound by twine sat upright on the floor.
Emilia barely registered any of them as she passed. The baying of the canine pack, its numbers now enlarged, was deafening in the close quarters. Excited tails thumped the walls and thwacked the canvases. Pink tongues drooled glittering necklaces across the Vizier's carpet, which seemed to stretch endlessly in front of them.
'Good boys,' the servant in his mallard-green tunic was shouting above the din. 'Stout lads! Hearty fellows!'
They were led through a succession of rooms, each one in poorer repair than the last. The interior of the house, like the exterior, seemed to be in a state of either destruction or reconstruction, it was difficult to tell which. They followed the footman up a flight of stairs, along another corridor, and finally into a large room bursting with more busts and fragmentary urns, more wooden crates, more portraits propped against a half-finished oak wainscot.
'If you will wait here, please.'
The servant disappeared with the hounds flinging themselves about him in frantic orbits, their claws clicking like dice on a gameboard. The sash had been raised and the room was freezing-cold. Emilia's heart sank. She turned round to reach for Vilém's hand, but he had already crossed the room and was squatting beside a half-finished line of shelves. The shelves were lined with books, some of which had been packed into three crates, also stuffed with straw, that stood in the corner furthest from the window. Vilém was lifting a volume from the shelf when a warped floorboard creaked. Emilia turned round to catch sight of a white ruff, a black cloak and a wink of gold earring.
'From Hungary,' boomed the voice. 'The Bibliotheca Corvina.' The tone was deep and golden, like that of an orator or politician, though the speaker, from what Emilia could see of him in the poor light, was short, almost squat. 'Or I should say from Constantinople, where it was taken by the Vizier Ibrahim after the Turks invaded Ofen and pillaged the Corvina in 1541.'
Vilém, startled, had almost dropped the book on the floor. Now he was rising to his feet, awkwardly. From down the stairs came the echoic yelp of a dog, then the bang of a door.
'Corvinus's ex-libris is found on the inside,' the basso profundo was continuing. 'The purchase was negotiated by your friend Sir Ambrose. I believe he discovered it among the incunabula in the Seraglio.' The dark head turned to appraise the room: Emilia only very briefly, the jewelled chest in the middle of the floor more keenly. 'Is Sir Ambrose not with you this morning?'
Vilém shook his head, still clutching the book. 'No. There's been some difficulty. He-'
'Neither is the Earl, I regret to say. Pressing business at the Navy Office. A pity, Herr Jirásek. I believe Steenie very much wished to show you round the library himself. Though perhaps I might be of service instead?' The warped board gave another angry squawk as he stepped forward and made a polished bow. 'Henry Monboddo is my name.'
Only when Monboddo straightened and stepped another pace forward on the warped board and into the glow of the sash-window-an actor striding centre stage, Emilia thought-did the ruff, cloak and earring finally resolve into a complete person. He was scarcely taller than Vilém but still gave off an air of unmistakable imperium, one enhanced not only by his voice-a heavy millstone grinding bolts of velvet-but also an aquiline nose, a neatly cropped beard and a head of black hair as thick and glossily oiled as the highly prized pelt of some aquatic animal. There was also, Emilia thought, a raffish gleam in his dark eyes, as if he had glimpsed in some corner of the room, over Vilém's shoulder perhaps, some ridiculous but titillating object or scene that only he could appreciate.
'I must apologise on behalf of the Earl,' he was continuing, 'for the condition of the house. But improvements must be made if it is ever to do justice to his collections of marbles, paintings and, of course, his books.'
'It's a… a most impressive collection,' stammered Vilém.
'Yes, well… dare I say, mein Herr, that you have brought your hogs to a fair market?' He chuckled softly at that, a phlegmatic rumble that seemed to rise from the bottom of his blacked boots. But a moment later he looked altogether more serious. 'Not quite so impressive a collection, I fear, as Arundel's. But of course everything will be more favourably disposed once the shelves and cabinets'-he gestured with a broad sweep at the rickety shelving-'have been completed. You see, this entire house will be devoted to them, every last closet and chamber. Steenie purchased the lease from Sir Francis Bacon. At present he is in the process of negotiating the purchase of another property, Wallingford House, also very convenient for Whitehall Palace. Viscount Wallingford is selling it at a most favourable price.' Laughter welled up again, thick and rich as molasses. 'A deal has been struck, you understand. Wallingford is selling it for just £3,000 in exchange for the life of his sister-in-law, Lady Frances Howard.'
At this point the raffish eyes seemed to glimpse in the gloomy peripheries of the chamber a scene more preposterously endearing than ever. His broad features flirted with a mocking grin that gave him the look, Emilia suddenly thought, of a schoolboy contemplating some glorious prank. She looked quickly away, unnerved, and saw through the window Buckingham's lacquered barge casting off from the landing-stairs, then slipping into the middle of the current, bows pointed downstream. Two figures sat inside, clad in green livery.
'Perhaps you have heard of Lady Frances? No? The Earl of Arundel's cousin,' he explained, clasping his hands over his velvet, fob-chained belly as if stifling another rich chortle. 'Now she sits in the Tower, all forlorn, waiting for the axeman to come tapping at her door. Possibly news of this dreadful little scandal has reached Prague? The poisoning of poor old Sir Thomas Overbury? The disgrace of Somerset? No, no, no,' he was waving a ruffed hand through the air, looking more serious now, 'of course it has not. And why should it? You Bohemians have more important matters to consider than our petty squabblings here in London. But come…' He gestured with a flourish. 'May I have the honour of showing you something of Steenie's treasures?'
For the next thirty minutes Monboddo swaggered through chamber after chamber with the pair of them in tow, listening to his burly voice booming off crumbling plasterwork and warped wainscot. The treasures made an impressive sight even if York House itself did not. Monboddo would unswaddle each, then lift it to the light, his swart face beaming with pride. He seemed to know, intimately, the provenance of each, whether it had come from a library in Naples after Charles VIII's Italian campaign of 1495, or from a church in Rome following its sack by von Frundsberg in 1527, when the Landsknechts invaded the Sancta Sanctorum and pillaged the tomb of St. Peter itself-or from any one of a dozen other battles, lootings and assorted atrocities. He recounted all of these stories of bloodshed, theft, betrayal and destruction with hearty relish. To Emilia, lagging behind, gazing at canvases sliced from their frames and marbles prised from their plinths, it seemed that beauty and horror had been fused together in Buckingham's precious objets, as if behind every glint of gilt or gemstone lay a story of violence and suffering. She was unnerved by the sight of Monboddo's hands as he fondled each item; of each thick knuckle with its floccus of black hair. They seemed not so much the hands of a collector or a connoisseur-hands trained to touch vases or violins-as the brutal paws of a lecher or a strangler.
The horrid perorations rolled over her. Carthage. Constantinople. Venice. Florence. Cities of beauty and death. Heidelberg. Prague. She had turned to the window and between the glazing-bars caught a glimpse of the river's tawny back with a couple of sails teetering along. The barge and its occupants had disappeared downstream.
'… And now it has made its journey from Bohemia to London,' Monboddo's Jovian voice was finishing its latest dreadful litany, 'just as the pair of you have done.' His full lips in their fringe of jet beard twisted into an indulgent smile as he set a goblet back inside its straw-filled crate. 'It was a gift to Steenie from King Frederick, an acknowledgement of his support for the Protestant cause in Bohemia. Arrived only a few months ago, one step ahead of yet another battle. But no need to tell you two about that little commotion, is there?'
His glossy black stare had come to roost on Vilém, who slowly shook his head. All at once Monboddo's features became solemn and formal.
'Speaking of which…' His eyes now dropped to the cabinet that Vilém was still clutching in his arms. 'I believe we have some business, Herr Jirásek. A matter of some other errant treasures? But let us discuss details over breakfast, shall we? You look worn out, my dears!'
Chairs were brought, then a table was laid with plates of food-roasted pig's pluck, a peasant's dish for which Monboddo apologised, explaining with a wink how Steenie was fond of such humble fare since his mother had been a maidservant. Neither Vilém nor Emilia managed to eat more than a few bites, but Monboddo's appetite, undaunted by the meanness of the dish, stopped his mouth long enough to allow Vilém to tell his story. Patiently and without faltering he told of the Bellerophon's wreck, of the Star of Lübeck and the liveried pursuers, of the looters on the beach, of Sir Ambrose's plans to hire salvors with diving-bells to raise the crates, and his arrangements for another ship to transport the salvage.
When Vilém finished, not so much reaching a conclusion as blundering suddenly into a bewildered and anxious silence, the house seemed to have fallen completely still. Through the window there came the distant gong of a church bell and a cool, scentless breeze. As the arras curtains gave a lazy shrug Emilia heard the sound of oars in the water and, seconds later, caught sight of a long barge nosing its way beneath the watergate, a frieze of figures aboard. Carefully she returned her gaze to Monboddo.
He was leaning back in his silk-upholstered chair, nodding a black boot in the air. It almost seemed that he was flirting with another smirk, even trying hard not to laugh, as if Vilém were telling some involved but amusing story, some ribald anecdote whose comic outcome he already knew. He belched softly and wiped his beard with the back of his hand. His dark eyes rose from the nodding boot and came to roost on Vilém. A scull lisped in the water and the boot ceased its restless motions.
'Well, well,' he said in a philosophical tone, expelling a sigh from his deep chest, 'a blow to the cause, that much is certain. A tragedy indeed. To escape Ferdinand's armies only to be shipwrecked on the shore of England! Oh, dear me, Steenie will be most upset, I can assure you of that. As of course will the Prince of Wales. Most upset. And I understand from what Steenie tells me of his little plot that Burlamaqui has already come up with most of the money. The Lord only knows where from, or what fantastic tale he might have told to his Italian bankers. But all is not lost, is it? By no means. Diving-bells, you say? A submarine?' He seemed to find the thought richly amusing. 'Well, Sir Ambrose is nothing if not resourceful. And the parchment… well… that at least has survived, has it not?'
His gaze had dropped to the cabinet that seemed to crouch between Vilém's feet. Vilém was perched on the edge of his chair, straight-backed and anxious.
'Yes,' he said slowly, 'the parchment. We made certain of it.'
'Yes, yes. The parchment,' Monboddo repeated. 'The Labyrinth of the World. There is that at least to be thankful for.'
His voice trailed dreamily away. He was studying the new plasterwork of the ceiling, a pattern of swirls and lobes incorporating Buckingham's coat of arms. Through the window behind his head Emilia could see a pair of green-liveried figures warping the sleek barge along the bottom of the landing-stairs. There were others in the boat now, also in livery. The hull struck one of the bollards with a hollow thud. Then the arras shrugged and the sight abruptly disappeared.
'Do you have the key, I wonder?' The bass voice was casual.
Vilém seemed to start. He raised his head, looking as if he were sniffing the air for some elusive scent, like a buck in a forest clearing who hears the soft snap of a twig.
'The key, sir?'
'Yes. The key to the chest. Has Sir Ambrose entrusted you with it by any chance? A pity,' he said in the same casual tone when Vilém, eyes wide, shook his head with nervous vigour. 'A great pity. It would have saved us a deal of effort.'
Then with a lazy motion and a creak of his silk-upholstered chair he leaned backwards and grasped in his hairy paw a tool-an iron crowbar-propped on the window-sill.
'Well, then, what do you think, my dears?' He waggled the tool in the air. 'Dare we open it?'
'No,' Vilém stammered. 'We must wait for…'
But Monboddo had already leaned forward and seized the casket in his thick paws. Vilém rose shakily from his chair. There came, from outside and below, the sound of feet crunching through the frost in the garden.
The cabinet took several minutes to prise open. It was a sturdy piece, having been fashioned from the wood of a mahogany tree felled on the shores of the Orinoco. It was also very valuable-one of the most valuable of Rudolf's many cabinets in the Spanish Rooms. The jewels encrusting its surface included, diamonds from Arabia, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and emeralds from Egypt, along with 24-carat gold that had been mined in the mountains of Mexico and shipped across the ocean on the Spanish treasure fleet. Yet Monboddo the great connoisseur showed scant respect for either its beauty or its value. He had struck three violent blows across its lid and hinges before Vilém could intervene.
'Stop this, I say.' He had taken hold of Monboddo's burly arm as it drew back for yet another blow. 'Stop this before-' But he was sent sprawling across the floorboards as the larger man twisted round and gave him a violent push.
'A man must kill a few hogs,' Monboddo growled into his ruff as he struck the lid another blow, 'if he wishes to make a blood pudding.'
He was on his haunches beside the cabinet, grunting and red-faced like someone at his close-stool. Beads of sweat had formed in the deep furrows of his brow. He inserted the end of the crowbar under the hasp, then the staple, then the hook of the padlock, trying to force one of them free.
'Damn!'
The crowbar slipped and the lock rattled. The lid screeched as if in protest and then gave a dense ring as Monboddo reared back and struck it another furious blow with the iron bar. One of the jewels shattered and its fragments, bright and blue as damselflies, skittered across the floor and into the corner. Vilém, picking himself up from the boards, murmured another protest. Emilia stepped backwards a pace. She could hear, from below, the bang of a door and the sudden, fierce commotion of the hounds.
'Achille! Anton! No, no, no, no, no!'
Monboddo was kneeling on the cabinet now, cursing under his breath as he fitted the flat beak of the bar under the hasp and then forced the other end downwards with both hands, using his weight for leverage. His head trembled with the strain. Then the hasp's golden hinges gave another squeak as the metal warped and one of the pins popped free.
'Ha! We shall have it yet, my dears!'
The buckhounds were on their way upstairs, thumping and yelping. Emilia thought she could hear behind them, beneath their excited clamour, the sound of spurred boots treading the first of the steps. She looked to Vilém, but he was staring at the cabinet. A second pin had popped free. Monboddo was noisily freeing the bar from the warped hasp, head lowered like a bull, puffing heavily as he readied himself for another try. The cabinet gave a soft rattle as if its contents were shifting.
'Auguste! Aimé! No! No!'
The first of the hounds bounded into the chamber, followed by three companions, one of which knocked over a suit of rusted armour suspended on a wooden rack. A buckler and a visored helmet gonged to the floor, then skidded and spun towards Monboddo. He didn't so much as bat an eye. Four more hounds burst into the chamber, lunging at the scraps of food on the table. A plate was knocked to the floor and shattered. The spurred boots reached the corridor.
'By God-!'
With a loud groan the hasp broke free from its hinges. Monboddo gave another crow of triumph. He was still on his thick hams, bent over the cabinet, sweat dripping from his nose; Vilém knelt beside him, his face curiously pale. Emilia squinted in the poor light. She felt frozen, trapped in the eye of this whirlwind of rumbling boots, leaping hounds, clattering plates and armour. The cabinet gave another rattle as Monboddo grasped it between his hairy, looter's paws. Then, slowly, he raised the lid.
'Achille!'
Inside was another cabinet, exactly the same in every detail as the first, from its polished mahogany and gold hinges to its brilliant jewels. Monboddo raised it in his hands, holding it to the light and inspecting the ornate sides, brow knit. A nuzzling hound was thrust aside. Vilém was still beside him, head cocked, also looking puzzled. Monboddo lifted the lid of the second box to expose a third, even smaller, then a fourth, smaller still-a series of wooden shells that he tossed aside one by one.
'What? What's this?' He had reached a fifth casket, which was barely larger than a snuff-box. He swung his bullish head to face Vilém, who had turned even paler. 'What is the meaning of this? A joke? What have you done?' He hurled the tiny casket against the wall, where it shattered to expose a sixth. 'Do you toy with me? The parchment! Where is it, damn you!'
The spurs had ceased their jingling and now the hounds fell silent. Arduously Monboddo pushed himself upright, his boots crunching broken glass. Emilia, staring at the litter of boxes, felt Vilém recoil beside her.
'Gentlemen!' Monboddo had turned to face the door. 'Bad news, my good sirs. It would appear that Sir Ambrose and his friends have enjoyed a small joke at our expense.'
He gestured with his crowbar at the mahogany cabinets. Emilia, raising her head, saw three men in the doorway, the gold on their dark livery lit by the sash-window. Then a board creaked piteously and the first of them stepped into the chamber.
Was there ever a summer when the rains fell so heavily? Whenever I look back on those days it seems that rain is streaming from a leaden sky. The sun disappeared for weeks on end behind sullen scuds of cloud; it might have been October or November instead of July. In London the gutters filled and flowed, feeding the swollen Thames. The window-sills and clothes-lines no longer bore their swags of laundry, for there was never enough sunshine to dry anyone's linen. In the countryside the rivers overflowed their banks, running in torrents across stunted fields, sweeping away roads and bridges. Fasts were observed and days of humiliation observed, because in time it was decided that the incessant rains must be the Lord's angry judgement on the people of England for failing to punish the regicides. Before the year was out the traitors would be hunted down in Holland and hanged at Charing Cross, Standfast Osborne among them. Huge crowds thronged Whitehall and the Strand to watch the spectacle, and a thousand voices cheered as the bodies were cut down and the butchers stepped forward to begin their work. One by one the bellies of the regicides were expertly slit and the dripping lengths of viscera thrown on to bonfires that sizzled and snapped under the bleak October rain. Nothing like it had been seen since the days when Queen Mary martyred Protestants in Smithfield, or Queen Elizabeth Jesuits at Tyburn. Even death was considered a punishment too soft for Cromwell, so his carcass was excavated from its tomb in Westminster Abbey and hauled in a cart to Tyburn, where it was hanged and then beheaded. The rotted corpse was buried under the scaffold while the skull was slathered with pitch and stuck on a pike on Westminster Hall, from where it glowered at the crowds hurrying past the bookstalls and printsellers below. Small boys threw stones at it, others laughed and cheered as the ravens fought over the eye-sockets. Revenge, revenge-everyone in those days was bent on revenge.
And was I, too, bent on revenge? Was it that which made me embark, feverish and ill, on that final, fateful journey? Was it retribution that I hoped to find as I set out from Alsatia, in the midst of the deluge, in the back of a mail-coach jostling along the Strand and into Charing Cross, heading slowly westward?
I remember the sodden morning of my departure, in contrast to those preceding it, in vivid detail. It was still only July, but already the scaffolds were being built for our little auto-da-fé. Or perhaps it was the beginning of August. I had lost all track of time. How many delirious days had passed since I had returned to Alsatia from the Rolls Chapel? Four or five? As much as a week? I recalled very little of those intervening days, and nothing at all of my journey back to the Half Moon Tavern from that dark labyrinth under Chancery Lane. How did I return, by hack or by foot? What must the hour have been when at last I found myself, dazed and alarmed, inside my tiny room?
The next few days-or the next week-had passed horribly. I fell into a nightmarish sleep, from which I awoke now and again, sweating and sore, unable to move, tangled in clammy bed-linen like a panicked beast trapped in a net. At one moment the chamber seemed unbearably hot; the next, it was freezing-cold. I was hungry and thirsty but too weak, when I tried, to rise from the bed. I have vague memories of footfalls along the corridor. At some point after dusk I was aware of a jingling of keys, the sighing of hinges and, in the doorway, the alarmed face of a chambermaid. Mrs. Fawkes must have arrived shortly thereafter. I seem to remember someone else, a man, shuffling about on the squeaking floorboards. He inspected my tongue, whoever he was, and pressed his ear to my chest and the back of his hand to my brow. It seems I was agued; the result, doubtless, of my little excursion in the Cam, along with my exertions, my travels, my lack of food. I have always possessed a weak constitution. My body as much as my mind craves regularity and custom. To cap it all, my asthma had worsened. My chest was making a braying noise that seemed to alarm all concerned. In one of my few lucid moments it occurred to me how my clients would wonder and exclaim at the news that Isaac Inchbold, the respectable bookseller, had died in a brothel.
Yet Mrs. Fawkes had no wish to let me die; perhaps she was mindful of the reckoning. And so it was that over the next few days I suffered all manner of attentions from a succession of her chambermaids. Every few hours I was spoon-fed broths and gruels, and my aching limbs were rubbed with chamois-leather gloves. I was bled by a barber-surgeon, in whose cup my drained blood looked as bright and volatile as quicksilver. In time I was made to totter down the stairs and into a sweating-house-a hitherto unknown facility-where I bathed in a cistern whose ordinary function (judging from the cavorting pink nymphs painted on the tiles above) was something less salubrious. But the bath seemed to help, as did everything else, and in time I felt better.
One morning when the rainclouds were prowling the horizon I rose from my sickbed, dressed my shrunken limbs in the Cavalier clothing that someone had thoughtfully laundered and folded, then took hold of my thorn-stick and hobbled down the stairs to pay Mrs. Fawkes for her hospitality. Through the windows of each landing I could see, sinking into the rooftops, steadily shrinking as I descended, the turrets and pennants of Nonsuch House, all looking exact and familiar, but also unreal, as if the building were an apparition or a model of itself, or something glimpsed in a dream. The drawbridge was lifting itself skyward in a languid pantomime. At the last turn, the scene vanished from sight, and all at once, wobbling on my stick, I felt choked with grief, hopelessly cut off from my past.
'But, Mr. Cobb…' Mrs. Fawkes had seemed startled by the sight of the gold sovereigns I pressed into her palm. 'But… where will you go, sir?'
'My name is Inchbold,' I told her. I had had enough of lies. 'Isaac Inchbold.' I had turned and was already halfway to the door. Rain was falling heavily now. I watched a stream of water pulsing along the middle of the street. 'I shall go to Dorsetshire,' I told her, realising for the first time what dark skein my fevered brain had been slowly spooling as I lay sweating and trembling in my bed. 'I have urgent business in Dorsetshire.'
Six post roads left London in those days: six roads that radiated like the cords of a great web, at whose centre crouched the Postmaster-General and his superior, Sir Valentine Musgrave, the new Secretary of State. Between the radiation of the new royal monopoly, woven into its meshes, was a finer, almost invisible grid of by-posts and 'common carriers': independently run couriers who served the small market towns and remote areas of the kingdom that the coaches of the Postmaster-General had yet to penetrate. These were woefully primitive and disorganised, but spying and smuggling-and the shipping or receiving of unlicensed books-would have been tricky to accomplish without them. In 1657 Cromwell had tried without success to suppress them, and now I supposed they would become the modus operandi of the new King's numerous enemies, the secret channels for new forms of dissent. I caught the first of what would be a half-dozen of them somewhere to the west of Salisbury: a small, slow vehicle, barely more than a covered wagon, that ran a whimsically irregular route through the countryside, through ten miles of detours, flooded hamlets and forced stops, until it was time to wait three hours for the connecting coach to trundle into town, an even smaller vehicle heaped high with demijohns of Tewkesbury mustard and Hampshire honey. But the last coach I caught-the one that finally delivered me to Crampton Magna-was considerably larger and swifter than the others. It also had a familiar symbol, a crux Hermetica, painted on the door in sun-faded gold, just visible between streaks of mud the colour of mature rust.
It was late in the afternoon by this point, and I had been four days on the road. The other passengers had disembarked long before. I stood under the dripping awning of a tobacconist-cum-post-office, staring in disbelief at the image, wondering if I was hallucinating, if the fevers had not yet left my body. Was there no escaping the radius of signs and vectors, not even here, in this anonymous hamlet, miles from anywhere?
'Mercury,' explained the driver, a huckle-backed old fellow named Jessop, when he caught me staring at the door. He was hitching the horses to the harness and the harness to the poles. 'Letter-carrier to the gods. The coach was part of the old De Quester fleet,' he added with some pride, thumping the spattered door with a finger-shy hand. 'More than forty years old but still going strong. The Mercury symbol was part of De Quester's coat of arms.'
'De Quester?' Where had I heard the name before? From Biddulph?
'Matthew De Quester,' he replied. 'I purchased the coach from the company when it lost its charter. This was a good many years ago. Well before your time, I shouldn't wonder, sir.'
With an effort he clambered into the coach-box and signalled for me to follow. I climbed aboard, filled with dread and dismay. For the next few hours, as the exhausted horses stumbled hock-deep through the mire, I wondered if I was ever to get to the bottom of these strange matters, if whatever mysterious truth that Alethea harboured was destined always to escape me. All of my investigations seemed to have added up to so much dross. I felt like the alchemist who, after hours of labours, after endless alembications, decoctions and distillations, is left not with the dazzling lump of gold of which he dreams, but rather the caput mortuum, a worthless crust, the residue of burnt chemicals. In the past few days I had begun to doubt my powers of reason. I who considered myself so rational and wise suddenly found that I knew nothing and doubted everything. All comforting certainties seemed to have disintegrated.
'Here at last, sir.'
Jessop's voice startled me from my gloomy reverie. I glanced up to see a church tower looming over a huddle of bleak cottages. Lanterns and voices were approaching.
'Crampton Magna.' He had twisted to the ground with a splash. 'The end of the line.'
It was to be another twelve hours before I reached my destination. At the village inn, the Ploughman's Arms, none of the five taciturn patrons could be persuaded to undertake the journey to Pontifex Hall. I had just resigned myself to a long walk in the rain when I was approached by a newcomer, a young man with a freckled face who pledged to take me in the morning, if I pleased to wait. His father, he explained, was the gardener at Pontifex Hall.
The bartender seemed taken aback by the request for a room, but at closing-time I was ushered up a creaking flight of stairs and into a tiny chamber whose walls were festooned with cobwebs and whose linen had yellowed with age. It looked as if no one had opened the door, let alone slept in the bed, for a good many years. But I toppled gratefully on to the lumpy bolster all the same, then into a series of restless and interconnected dreams from which I awoke hours later, heartburned and unrefreshed. Through a lone window that showed an expanse of dirty thatch and a corner of the church I could see that it was raining still, as hard as ever. I doubted my young driver would appear in such weather. But after I trudged downstairs to eat a substantial breakfast, then took my easement in a foul-smelling jakes, a small two-wheeled chariot forded the flooded stream and approached the inn at a brisk trot. The final leg of my long journey could at last begin.
What would I say to Alethea when I saw her again? For the past few days I had rehearsed in my head any number of accusing speeches, but now as Pontifex Hall drew steadily closer I realised that I had no idea what to say or do. Indeed, I had no idea what I hoped to achieve other than perhaps to cause some dramatic scene that would bring the whole affair to its conclusion. I also realised with a flutter of panic that, in grasping the nettle in so bold a manner, I could well bring myself into danger. I thought of the corpse of Nat Crump in the river and of the men who ransacked my shop and then pursued me to Cambridge. Once again the doubts took hold. Were these really the same men who had murdered Lord Marchamont? Or were they instead, like all else, the inventions of Alethea? Perhaps she, and not Cardinal Mazarin, was their mysterious paymaster, the one who set them on my trail. After all, she had traduced the entire situation, had she not? And she had betrayed me.
After a time the horses slowed and I looked up to see the archway opening its wide piers and the house behind it swivelling slowly to face us. Above the piers loomed the familiar inscription. The ivy had been cut back and the words chiselled afresh on the keystone. I could see that a number of improvements had already been made. The dead lime trees had been hewn down and replaced with saplings, the ivy was cut back, the road freshly gravelled. The hedge-maze also looked more defined: a great swirl of green hedges, seven feet tall, that stretched away in a hieratic geometry. I had the sense of a gradual peeling away or exfoliation, of old things renewed. Pontifex Hall seemed to have changed as much as I had. On the north side of the house a small garden had been planted with eyebright and mouse-ear, along with dozens of other herbs and flowers. All had burst into bloom, their leaves and petals shivering in the wind. I recalled none of them from my previous visit.
'The physic garden, sir,' explained the boy, catching my gaze. 'It hasn't bloomed, say the villagers, in more than a hundred years, not since the monks left. The seeds were buried too deep; at least, that's what my father reckons. Nothing grew until he ploughed the soil in the spring.' For a second he regarded me shyly from under the brim of his hat. 'It's like a miracle, isn't it, sir? As if the monks had returned.'
No, I thought, strangely moved by the sight: it was as if the monks had never truly vanished, as if through the years of exile something of them had persisted and endured, lost but redeemable, like the words of a book that awaits the reader who, by blowing at the dust and opening the cover, will revive the author.
'Shall I wait for you here, sir?'
The chariot had reached the house, whose broken dripstones were slobbering torrents of water. I could hear the eaves gulping overhead. The house, despite the improvements, looked as morose and forbidding as ever. What would become of the underground watercourse, I wondered, with so much rain? I hoped that the engineer from London had arrived to perform his crucial task.
'One moment, please.'
I twisted down from the chariot and looked more carefully about the grounds. There were no signs of occupation or industry. The windows with their broken panes-those, at least, had not been replaced-looked dark. Perhaps the house was deserted? Perhaps I was too late?
But then I smelled it: a wraith of scent on the damp morning air, sweet and pungent, as slight and swift as a hallucination. I looked up again and saw in one of the opened windows-that of the strange little laboratory-the silhouette of a telescope. My stomach gave a languid heave of fear.
'No,' I told the boy, feeling a pulse begin to beat in my throat. 'I shall have no need of you. Not yet.'
I stepped under the pediment. The smell of the pipe smoke-of fire-cured Nicotiana trigonophylla-had already vanished. I raised my stick to strike the door.
'Inchbold!'
The voice was accusing. The door, which had opened to expose the dour mask of Phineas Greenleaf, now began to shut as the dull eyes flickered after the departing chariot. I stepped hastily forward and fumbled for the brass knob.
'Wait…'
'What is it?' he demanded in the same stern tone. 'What brings you here?'
This was not the reception I expected, even from Phineas. I thrust my club foot into the shrinking aperture. 'Urgent business,' I replied. 'Allow me inside, if you please. I come to pay my respects to your mistress.'
'In that case, Mr. Inchbold, you come too late,' he hissed through his gapped teeth. 'I regret to say that Lady Marchamont is not at home.'
'Oh? And is her ladyship at Wembish Park, then, may I ask?' I gave the knob an impatient twiddle. 'Shall I find her there, perhaps?'
'Wembish Park?'
His expression had turned innocent, even confused. Was it that he played his part so well, or did Alethea not make him privy to her secrets?
'Allow me inside,' I repeated as my thorn-stick insinuated its way against the stone jamb. 'Or shall I knock down the door?'
This was an idle threat for someone of my stature, but one I found myself obliged to make good when the door suddenly swung shut in my face. I applied a shoulder to the solid oak, bellowing curses, before trying a boot to no better effect. I would probably have broken my toe or collarbone had I not thought to try the brass doorknob. As the catch clicked I heard a muffled curse from within, then the door flew wide and again I found myself confronted by Phineas. This time he was even less cordial. He came at me with his teeth bared, threatening to cast me out of the door like the insolent cur I was. I advanced across the threshold and struck him on the haunch with my stick, then after several more physical discourtesies the two of us found ourselves grappling together on the tiled floor.
And so began my final visit to Pontifex Hall. What a scene it must have made, shameful and comic, two grotesques feebly wrestling in the deep chasm of the atrium, elbows and curses flying. I am by no means a brawler. I abhor violence and have always taken pains to avoid it. But put a coward to his mettle (as the saying goes) and he will fight like the devil. So as I engaged my geriatric opponent I found that the bites and punches-the whole brutal dockside repertoire-came all too readily. The toe of my club foot found its mark in the middle of his belly and my teeth in his thumb when he tried to throttle me. The ignominious proceedings concluded when I put him 'in chancery', choking him in a headlock and pummelling his nose with my fist. Not until I saw the bright spurt of blood did I allow him to slither away, moaning like a bull calf and dabbing at his horror-struck face with the back of his hand. Yes, yes, it was a shameful scene, but I regretted it not a whit. Or not, at least, until I heard a voice call my name from somewhere high above. I rolled over with a groan-Phineas had landed a few solid blows of his own-and peered upwards up to see Alethea leaning over a banister at the top of the staircase.
'Mr. Inchbold! Phineas! Stop this at once!' Her voice came echoing down the stairwell. 'Please-gentlemen!'
I staggered to my feet, panting and scuffling, flinging droplets of rain like an ill-mannered hound clambering from a duck pond. A gust of wind through the yawning doorway swung the glass chandelier, which belatedly announced my arrival with a series of dissonant chimes. My stockings made a squishing noise as I awkwardly shifted my stance, and so fogged were my spectacles that I could barely see through them. I was aware of having lost a certain advantage. Wiping at my beard, I felt a righteous fury at my predicament. I must have looked both a ruffian and a fool.
But Alethea seemed not at all surprised either by my appearance or my conduct, or even by the fact of my sudden arrival. Nor did she seem angry as she descended, merely puzzled or distracted, as if awaiting something further, the true climax that had yet to happen. For a second I wondered if she had somehow been expecting my arrival on her doorstep. Was even this wild gambit, my flight into Dorsetshire, part of her mysterious design?
'Please,' she said as her eyes returned to me, 'can we not be civil?'
I gaped at her, a spasm of laughter rising in my gut, bitter as wormwood. I could hardly believe my ears. Civil? All at once my anger, along with my well-rehearsed speeches, returned in a flash. I lunged a step forward and, waving the stick like a pike, demanded to know what she called 'civil'. All of the lies and games, were they civil? Or having my every step dogged? Or my shop ransacked? Or Nat Crump murdered? Was all of that, I demanded with furious hauteur, was all of that what she dared call civil?
I believe I continued for some time in this vein, venting spleen like a wronged lover, accusing Alethea of everything I could think of, my voice rising to a shriek as I punctuated each misdeed with another rap of my stick. How I bellowed and roared! My bravura delivery impressed me; I had not thought myself capable of mustering so fiery and commanding a tone. Through the corner of my eye I could glimpse Phineas crawling across the tiles, leaving asterisks of blood in his wake. Halfway down the stairs Alethea had frozen in mid-step, clutching the banister, her eyes wide with alarm.
Slowly my tirade petered out. Ira furor brevis est, as Horace writes. I was panting with exhaustion, fighting back sobs and tears. I had caught my reflection in an oval looking-glass propped against the wall: a tottering Cavalier, starved and tattered, his chops hollow and his eyes feverish. I had quite forgotten the transformation, the work of the ague in tandem with Foskett's concoctions. I looked like the frantic spectre of someone returned from the dead to wreak unholy vengeance-a likeness that was not, perhaps, so far from the truth.
Alethea allowed a moment to pass, as if gathering her thoughts. Then to my surprise she denied none of the charges-none except for the murder of Nat Crump. She even seemed disturbed by the news of the coachman's death. It was true, she said, that she engaged him to pick me up outside the Postman's Horn and drive me past the Golden Horn. But of his murder in Cambridge she knew nothing.
'You must believe me.' Her features worked themselves into an agitated smile of reassurance. 'No one was to be killed. Quite the contrary.'
'I don't believe you,' I murmured peevishly, as my fury lapsed into a sulk. 'I no longer believe a word you say. Not about Nat Crump or anything else.'
She was silent for a moment, twisting a strand of hair and thinking. 'He must have been murdered,' she said at last, more to herself than anyone else, 'by the same men who killed Lord Marchamont. By the men who followed you to Cambridge.'
'The agents of Henry Monboddo,' I snorted.
'No.' She was shaking her head. 'Nor were they the agents of Cardinal Mazarin. Those were also lies, I regret to say. You are right-so much of what I told you was a lie. But not everything. The men who killed Lord Marchamont are real enough. But they are agents of someone else.'
'Oh?' I was hoping to sound scornful. 'And who might that be?'
She had reached the bottom of the stairs by now, and I caught another whiff of Virginia tobacco. And of something else as well. At first I took the pungent scent wafting from her clothes for bonemeal and thought she had been tending the knot garden. But a second later I knew it for what it was: chemicals. Not the garden, then, but the laboratory.
'Mr. Inchbold,' she said at last, as though delivering a prepared speech, 'you have learned much. I am most impressed. You have done your job well, as I knew you would. Almost too well. But there is much left to learn.' As she extended a hand, I blinked in alarm at the fingertips, which looked strangely discoloured. 'Please-won't you come upstairs?'
I refused to budge. 'Upstairs?'
'Yes. To the laboratory. You see, Mr. Inchbold, that is where you will find it. In the laboratory.'
'Find what?'
'Lock the doors, Phineas.' She had turned round and begun climbing, lifting her skirts and swaying up the steps. 'Allow no one inside. Mr. Inchbold and I have matters to discuss.'
'Find what?' I was bellowing again, feeling the anger rise inside me. Somehow I had been wrong-footed. Yet again I had lost my advantage. 'What are you talking about?'
'The object of your search, Mr. Inchbold. The parchment.' She was climbing still, ascending the great marble helix. Once more her voice echoed in the vast well. 'Come,' she repeated, turning to beckon me. 'After so many troubles do you not wish to see The Labyrinth of the World?'
Borax, sulphur, green vitriol, potash… My eyes roved over the legends inscribed on the vials and bottles littered among the bubble-shaped still-heads with their coiled glass tubes. Yellowish chemicals, green ones, white, rust, sky-blue. The stink was even stronger and more tart than I remembered. My membranes prickled and my eyes began to water. Oil of vitriol, aqua fortis, plumbago, sal ammoniac…
Reaching for my handkerchief I paused in mid-gesture. Sal ammoniac? I glanced again at the vial, at the colourless crystals, remembering the recipes for sympathetic ink, for inks that, like those made with sal ammoniac, could only be read if the page was heated by a flame. I felt a soft thrill of excitement briefly rouse itself; I also felt dizzy, as if my fever were returning.
'Ammonium chloride,' explained Alethea, catching my gaze. She was standing beside me, breathing audibly on account of our climb. 'Essential to alchemical transformations. The Arabs made it from a mixture of urine, sea salt and chimney soot. The first mention of it is found in the Book of the Secret of Creation, a work that the Muhammadans in Baghdad attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.'
I nodded dumbly, remembering my researches of a week or two earlier. But by now I had spotted something else in the room, the vial marked 'potassium cyanide', which was sitting three-quarters empty on the table before the open casement. Beside it stood the telescope, still on its tripod, pointed at the heavens. The copies of Galileo and Ortelius had been removed and replaced by another volume, a slimmer one half-buried in the detritus of the laboratory, a score of pages bound in a cover of tooled leather.
'The laboratory belonged to my father,' Alethea explained as she crossed to the table. 'He built it in the undercroft, where he conducted many of his experiments. But I've moved what little equipment remains into this room.' She paused briefly to lean across the table and pick up the vial of potassium cyanide. 'I required better ventilation for my purposes.'
I watched nervously as she unstoppered the poison. I was still trembling from my outburst in the atrium. I was also embarrassed. It had all been so unlike me. I wondered briefly if I ought to apologise-and then had to bank down yet another wave of anger and self-pity.
She had set the vial back on the table and begun rummaging among the other objects. She seemed to be shifting into and out of focus, so I lifted my spectacles from the bridge of my nose and wiped at my eyes with the handkerchief, which came away smudged with blood. When I replaced the spectacles she was turning round, the leather-bound volume-a volume bound in the style known as arabesco or arabesque-in her hands.
'Here, Mr. Inchbold.' She extended the book. 'You find it at last. The Labyrinth of the World.'
I made no move to accept the volume. By now I was wary of her talent for drawing the wool over my eyes; for making me feel like an awkward schoolboy. I would not be made a fool of again, I told myself. Besides, at this point I was more interested in that tiny bottle of poison, which I seemed to remember had been fuller before. Once again I considered the stories about the fine ladies of Paris and Rome poisoning their husbands. But then I felt her eyes searching mine and so asked, grudgingly, where she found it.
'I didn't find it anywhere,' she replied, 'because it was never lost in the first place. Not in the way that you understand. It's been at Pontifex Hall all the while. It's been here in the house, carefully hidden, for forty years.'
'It's been in your possession all this time? You mean to say that you hired me to locate a book that-'
'Yes and no,' she interrupted, opening the front cover. 'The parchment has been in my possession, that much is true. But matters are not quite so simple as that. Please…' She motioned me forward. The bitter scent of almonds had added itself to the mélange of smells. In the poor light I could see the ex-libris embossed on the volume's inside cover: Littera Scripta Manet. 'Stand over here, if you please. You're just in time to see the last wash.'
'The last wash?' Once again I didn't budge, only watched as she took up the vial again and sprinkled a measure of crystals into a solution of what appeared to be water.
'Yes.' She was unstoppering another bottle. 'It's in palimpsest. Do you know what that means? The parchment has been reinscribed, so the writing must be recovered by chemical means. The process is a most delicate one. Also highly dangerous. But I believe I've finally discovered the proper reagents. I made potassium cyanide by adding sal ammoniac to a mixture of plumbago and potash. The process is described in the work of a Chinese alchemist.'
I crept forward, made curious almost despite myself. I had heard stories of palimpsests, those ancient documents that had been discovered in monastic libraries and suchlike: old texts effaced from parchments on to which new ones had been inscribed. Greek and Latin scribes were known to recycle parchment whenever they ran short, erasing one text by soaking the leaves in milk and then scrubbing at the ink with a pumice-stone before reinscribing the surface, now blank, with a new one, so that one text lay dormant and hidden between the lines of another. But nothing disappears for ever. Over the centuries, because of atmospheric conditions or various chemical reactions, the effaced text sometimes returns, barely legible, to deliver its forgotten message between the interstices of the new script. So it was that a number of ancient books had been occulted and then discovered, centuries later: the frolics of Petronius interrupting the earnest Stoicism of Epictetus, or priapeia insinuating their bawdy verses between the Pauline Epistles. Littera scripta manet, I thought: the written word abides, even under erasure.
I was leaning forward, squinting at the cockled page. Alethea had opened the window even wider and was now prising the lid from another vial, this one marked 'green vitriol'. So was that, I wondered, how Sir Ambrose had come upon The Labyrinth of the World? Between the lines of another text? I was intrigued. What bookseller has not dreamed of finding a palimpsest, some text that for a millennium has been lost to the world?
'I tried an Aleppo gall at first.' She was carefully mixing the solution. I coughed gently into my handkerchief. The bitter smell had grown even stronger. 'The tannin should have bitten deeply into the parchment even after the gum arabic was dissolved. I thought a tincture of crushed gall might bring it back to the surface but…'
'Tannin?' I was trying to recall what I knew about ink, which was hardly anything at all. 'But the ink will be made from carbon, will it not? From a mixture of lampblack or charcoal? That was how the Greeks and Romans made their ink, after all. So an oak gall will be of little use if you wish to-'
'That's true,' she murmured absently. 'But this text was not inscribed by the Greeks or Romans.' She was bent over the volume, adding a tincture to the surface of the parchment, across which I could see lettering, which appeared to be Latin, or perhaps Italian, inscribed in black. Her hair was whipped by the breeze and the door slammed shut. 'It was written much later than that.'
'At Constantinople?'
'Not at Constantinople either. Would you open the door, please? Cyanide becomes toxic when it vaporises. Next I tried a deliquescent sal ammoniac,' she continued, adding another drop. 'I made a solution by heating ammonium chloride and trapping the gas in oil of vitriol. I thought that the iron could be recovered if the tannin could not. The iron in the ink would have corroded over time, but I hoped to restore its colour if possible. But that method also failed. The erasure seems to have been made almost too well. You can understand that the process has been most time-consuming. It's taken several weeks altogether. Quite a number of successive washes.'
'Which is why I was hired,' I muttered. I was feeling ill now, I could barely stand. 'As a decoy. A pawn.'
'You created a diversion.' Another drop was added. I stumbled towards the window, bumping into her chair. Alethea, bent over the volume, seemed not to notice. 'You bought me several weeks of precious time,' she said. 'You see, not everything that I told you in Pulteney House was a lie. There is indeed a buyer for the parchment, someone willing to pay a handsome sum. But there are also those-our new Secretary of State is one-who wish to take it without paying. I believe his men paid you a visit the other night.'
I knocked the telescope from its tripod as I swung the casement wide. A pawn. A diversion. That's what I had been-nothing more. My head reeled as it had done in the crypt of the Rolls Chapel. She began describing in the same absent tone the whole grotesque ruse-the cipher, the graffiti, the curios in the coffee-house, the volume of Agrippa, the auction catalogue. All planted for me to find. All intended to lead me further and further away from Pontifex Hall and The Labyrinth of the World. And to lead others astray as well. For why should she have sent her letters through the General Letter Office unless she wished them to be opened by the agents of Sir Valentine Musgrave?
'But there are others involved,' she was saying in a distracted voice. 'Agents of powers even more treacherous than those of the Secretary of State. They too had to be led astray. Secret knowledge can be a dangerous thing. In the end even my father wanted to destroy the parchment. It was a curse, he said. Too many people already had died for it.'
I was barely listening now. Overcome by nausea I thrust my head between the mullions and sucked at the cool air. The rain was sibilant against the brickwork, and above my head the gutters roared. I could see beneath me the pointed roof of the pediment sluicing yet more rain. Then my spectacles blurred, and when I wiped them with my handkerchief I thought I glimpsed a coach beyond the stone arch, far in the distance-something barely visible as it moved through the dense foliage and rising mist. But then I was startled by an exclamation from behind me. I turned round to see Alethea holding the book aloft. Between two rows of black lettering another line, smudged and indistinct, had appeared in bright blue.
'At last,' she said. 'The reagents are beginning to take effect.'
'What is it?' The blue characters, a series of figures and letters, dipped and swam before my eyes. Again my anger began to dissipate and I found myself intrigued. 'The Hermetic text?'
'No,' she replied. 'A different one. One copied by Sir Ambrose.'
'Sir Ambrose made the palimpsest?' I could feel my hairline dampening with sweat. I sank into the chair, trembling, bewildered by the turn of events.
She nodded and once more the dropper hovered above the page. 'He was the one who copied the text and then effaced it. You see, he had already discovered two palimpsests in Constantinople. One was an Aristotelian text, the other a commentary on Homer by Aristophanes of Byzantium. Both were concealed behind parchments of the Gospels, but the old lettering had begun seeping back. It's called "ghosting", as if the former text had returned to haunt its successor. He realised soon enough how it would be the perfect disguise.'
'Disguise?'
'Yes. To hide one text within another.' More blue characters had appeared on the page, bleeding into it like ink across blotting paper, though from where I sat I could read none of them. 'It was the perfect way to smuggle a text. Especially if the reinscription was considered valueless.'
'What do you mean? Smuggle a text from where?'
From among the contents of the Imperial Library in Prague, she gradually explained as she continued her work, bent over the table as if performing delicate surgery. This had been in the year 1620, at the outset of the warring between the Protestants and Catholics. Frederick had been elected King of Bohemia one year earlier, a Protestant on a Catholic throne, and so his followers across Europe had suddenly gained access to the contents of the magnificent library assembled by the Emperor Rudolf. The nuncios and ambassadors scuttling back to Rome and her allies among the princes of the Catholic League were alarmed at this turn of events, because a library is always, like an arsenal, a locus of power. After all, had not Alexander the Great planned a library at Nineveh that he claimed would be as much an instrument of his rule as his Macedonian armies? Or when one of Aristotle's other students, Demetrius Philareus, became counsellor to Ptolemy I, monarch of Egypt, what did he advise the King to do but collect together all of the books that he could on kingship and the exercise of power? So the idea of Rudolf's great collection in the hands of Rosicrucians, Cabalists, Hussites, Giordanisti-heretics who for years had been undermining the power not only of the Habsburgs but of the Pope as well-set the tocsins ringing all over Europe. Thus as the armies of the Catholic League marched on Prague in the summer and autumn of 1620, one of their foremost aims, Alethea claimed, was the recovery-and the suppression-of the library.
'Dozens of heretical books were held in the collection,' she continued, 'copies of them had been burned in Rome and placed on the Index. Now the floodgates were about to burst. No sooner had Frederick arrived from Heidelberg than scholars from all over the Empire began their pilgrimages to Prague. The cardinals in the Sant'Uffizio realised they would soon lose control over who was allowed to read what book or manuscript. Knowledge would have been disseminated from Prague in a great explosion, fostering sectaries and revolutionaries both within Rome and without, creating still more heresies, still more books for the bonfires and the Index. The library in Prague had become a Pandora's box out of which, in the eyes of Rome, a swarm of evils was about to fly.'
I was sitting beside the window, letting the breeze cool my brow. The rain was falling harder than ever. The ceiling in the corridor had begun to leak and the vials and cuvettes were chiming together on the table. Heretical books? I scratched at my beard, trying to think.
'What manner of evil?' I asked when she fell silent, bent over the parchment. 'A new Hermetic text that the Holy Office wished to suppress?'
She shook her head. 'The Church no longer had anything to fear from the writings of Hermes Trismegistus. You of all people must know that. In 1614 the antiquity of the texts had been challenged by Isaac Casaubon, who proved beyond a doubt that they were forgeries of a later date. In the end, of course, Casaubon, for all his brilliance, turned his magnificent guns upon himself. With his book he hoped to refute the papists, Cardinal Baronius in particular. But instead he merely succeeded in destroying one of their greatest enemies.'
'Because the Corpus hermeticum was used by heretics like Bruno and Campanella to justify their attacks on Rome.'
'And dozens more besides them. Yes. But with one stroke Professor Casaubon did away with a thousand years of magic, superstition and, in the eyes of Rome, heresy. After the texts had been dated, a new one was valueless, hardly of interest to anyone except a few half-mad astrologers and alchemists. It therefore made the perfect disguise.'
'Disguise?' I shifted uneasily on my chair, still struggling to understand. 'What do you mean?'
'Have you not guessed, Mr. Inchbold?'
She laid the thin volume aside, and before the wind riffled the pages I saw that the top half of the front one was now covered in the blue script, the ghost of a former text summoned back to life by her poisonous concoction. She dabbed carefully at the ink with a piece of blotting paper and then closed the cover. The wind had begun whistling in the necks of the flasks, raising an eerie chorus. A piece of dislodged slate clattered against the gutter and fell to the ground. The casement slammed shut. Alethea pushed back her chair and rose from the work-table.
'The Labyrinth of the World was only the reinscription,' she said at last, 'only the surface text. It was a forgery like the others, an invention used by Sir Ambrose to occult another text, one that was much more valuable. One in which the cardinals in the Holy Office would have interested themselves.' Carefully she stoppered the vial of cyanide. 'Many others as well.'
'Which text? Another heresy?'
'Yes. A new one. For if one world died in 1614, another was being born. In the same year that Casaubon published his attack on the Corpus hermeticum, Galileo printed three letters in defence of his Istoria e dimostrazioni, which had been published a year earlier in Rome.'
'His work on sunspots,' I nodded, perplexed. 'The work in which for the first time he defends Copernicus's model of the universe. Though I fail to see what-'
'By 1614,' she continued, oblivious, 'Ptolemy had been vanquished along with Hermes Trismegistus, his fellow Egyptian. Together the two of them were responsible for more than a thousand years of error and delusion. But the cardinals and consultors in Rome were less willing to accept the downfall of the astronomer than the shaman, and so the letters that Galileo published in 1614 are a plea for them to read the Bible for moral instead of astronomical lessons, to continue their practice of reading the Holy Scripture allegorically wherever it conflicts with scientific discoveries. All in vain, of course, since in the next year one of the letters was laid before the Inquisition.'
'So the text is one published by Galileo?' I was remembering Salusbury's translation of the Dialogo, the volume responsible for the astronomer's persecution by the Pope, the one whose contents Galileo had been forced to recant. 'One suppressed by Rome after the Holy Office banned Copernicanism in 1616?'
She shook her head. She was standing before the window with her hand resting lightly on the telescope, which she had carefully replaced on its tripod. Through the fogged panes I could see that the coach toiling through the mud had drawn a little closer. Nearer to the house I could make out through the curtains of rain the whorled outlines of the hedge-maze; even from this height, it looked hopelessly confused, an endless warren of curlicues and cul-de-sacs.
'No,' she replied, taking a small bucket from the work-table and picking her way into the corridor. 'This particular document was never published.'
'Oh? What is it, then?'
Water was not so much dripping as streaming through the ceiling. I watched as she stooped and placed the bucket beneath, in the middle of the puddle, then straightened.
'The parchment will keep for now,' she said. 'Let us continue our talk elsewhere.'
I took a last look through the window-the coach had disappeared behind a stand of trees-and followed her to the top of the staircase. Who was inside the vehicle? Sir Richard Overstreet? All at once I felt even more uneasy.
I gripped the banister and began to descend. I was about to say something, but after only two steps she stopped and turned round so quickly that I almost bumped into her.
'I wonder,' she said, looking at me with a kind of avid amusement, 'how much you know about the legend of El Dorado.'
The smell of the library was in sharp contrast to that of the laboratory. Everything about the cavernous chamber was precisely as I remembered, only now the pleasantly musty air was spiced with the familiar aromas of cedarwood oil and lanolin, as well as a resinous tang of new wood, for a few of the shelves had been repaired and the railing in the gallery replaced. The scents reminded me of my own shop, for smells always return us to the past more keenly and swiftly than any other stimulation. All at once I felt the same gust of heartsickness as on that last morning in the Half Moon Tavern. It might have been years rather than days since I last saw my home.
Alethea was motioning for me to take one of the leather-upholstered chairs beside the window. These too were new, as was the walnut table separating them and the hand-knotted rug, complete with monkeys and peacocks, on which they sat. I shuffled across the floor and obediently creaked into one of the chairs. Phineas was nowhere to be seen. Even his trail of blood had disappeared. For a second I entertained the notion that the disgraceful altercation had been only a product of my feverish imagination.
I crossed and uncrossed my legs, waiting for Alethea to speak. In those days I knew a little about the myth of El Dorado, or 'the Golden One', that will-o'-the-wisp that for the best part of a century had lured countless adventurers into the dangerous labyrinth of the Orinoco river. It is mentioned by chroniclers of the Spanish conquests such as Fernándo de Oviedo, Cieza de León and Juan de Castellanos, all of whose works I had briefly consulted in those first few days after my return from Pontifex Hall, and all of whom tell conflicting versions of the story. Rumours of El Dorado had reached the ears of the conquistadores soon after Francisco Pizarro's conquest of Peru in 1530: a city of gold governed by a valiant one-eyed chieftain, el indio dorado, whose practice it was to paint his body each morning in the dust of gold fished from the Orinoco, or perhaps from the Amazon… or perhaps from one of their hundreds of tributaries snaking through the jungles. The Spaniards were intrigued by the rumours, and in 1531 a captain named Diego de Ordás received a capitulación from the Emperor Charles V to ascend the Orinoco in search of this new Montezuma and his city of gold. Although he found no sign of it, other would-be discoverers were undaunted, and for the next few decades one conquistador after another set off into the jungle like knights-errant in the romances of chivalry so popular at the time. One of them, a man named Jiménez de Quesada, tortured any Indians he found by burning the soles of their feet and dropping bacon fat on their bellies. Under these encouragements his victims told stories of a hidden city of gold-now sometimes called either 'Omagua' or 'Manoa'-in the middle of the Guianan jungle, or perhaps even, like Tenochtitlán, in the middle of a lake.
But Quesada found nothing, nor did his niece's husband, Antonio de Berrío, a veteran explorer of the Orinoco and its tributaries whom Sir Walter Raleigh captured after the sack of Trinidad in 1595. That same year the Englishman, fired by the legends, ascended the Orinoco with a hundred men and provisions for a month. Only when the supplies were exhausted did he return to England, taking with him the son of an Indian chieftain and leaving behind to explore the river two of his most trusted crewmen. One of them was captured by Spanish soldiers, though not before he sent back to England a crude map showing the supposed site of a gold mine at the confluence of the Orinoco and Caroní rivers. But it would be another twenty years before Raleigh returned to Guiana for his disastrous final voyage, this time in the company of Sir Ambrose Plessington.
The serving-girl, Bridget, had entered the room with a pot of tea whose fragrant steam was curling through the air. I was gnawing at my lower lip as I perched in the chair, studying the rows of atlases overhead. I could see Martin Waldseemüller's Universalis Cosmographia and several editions of Ptolemy's Geography, including the one by Gerardus Mercator. Alethea, catching my gaze, set down her cup and pushed back her chair.
'A number of these maps and atlases are extremely rare,' she said, rising to her feet. 'Some are among the rarest and most valuable items in the entire collection. This one, for example.' She was standing on tiptoe, reaching for one of the volumes, which she then proceeded to flump on to the table between us, rattling our teacups. I was startled to see the water-damaged copy of Ortelius, the Theatrum orbis terrarum, the same volume I had inspected in the laboratory: the one from which I had cut the cipher. 'Do you know it?'
'I sell copies of it, yes,' I replied as she opened the buckram cover. I cocked my head and tried to read the colophon. 'This is the Prague edition?'
'Yes, published in the year 1600.' She began riffling through the crimped pages. 'It's extremely rare. Only a few copies were ever printed. Ortelius had travelled to Bohemia at the invitation of the Emperor Rudolf. Unfortunately he died in 1598, soon after his arrival in Prague. Some of the physicians claimed that he died of an ulcer of the kidneys, which Hippocrates tells us is nearly always fatal in old men.' Slowly she turned over one of the pages. 'Others believed that the great Ortelius was poisoned.'
'Is that so?' I glanced at the atlas, recalling the rumours mentioned by Mr. Barnacle. The volume was now open at a sheet displaying the legend 'MARE PACIFICUM'-the very point at which I had discovered the cipher. 'Why should that have been?' I was trying to remember what Mr. Barnacle had said about voyages through the islands in the high latitudes. 'Because of the new method of map projection?'
She shook her head. 'No such method of projection has yet been perfected. How those rumours started I have no idea, unless they were the invention of whoever murdered Ortelius.'
'So Ortelius was murdered?'
She nodded. 'After his death the plates from which the maps were engraved disappeared from the printshop. Or I should say one plate disappeared, that from which this particular map was engraved.' She tapped the rippled sheet with her forefinger, 'You see, the map of the New World in the Prague edition of the Theatrum orbis terrarum is different from those in any of the others.'
I was still scanning the page, wondering if I ought to believe her account any more than Mr. Barnacle's. There was an elaborate cartouche-'AMERICAE SIVE NOVI ORBIS, NOVA DESCRIPTIO'-and a representation of the Pacific Ocean, complete illustrations of islands and fully rigged galleons. Everything on the sheet looked precisely the same as on those dreamy afternoons at Molitor & Barnacle, including the scales of latitude and longitude.
'Map making is a speculative art,' she said as she turned the atlas 180 degrees on the table to face me. Again she tapped it with her finger, this time just above the cartouche. 'Look here. What do you see?'
Beneath her index finger I could make out a cluster of a half-dozen islands and the legend 'Insulæ Salomonis'. I shrugged and looked up. 'The Solomon Islands,' I replied cautiously.
'Precisely. But no one knows if the Solomon Islands are actually found at the spot where Ortelius places them. Indeed, no one even knows if they truly exist or if they were only the fantasy of Alvaro de Mendaña, who claimed to have sighted them in the year 1568. He named them the Islas de Solomón because he believed them to be the islands on which King Solomon mined the gold for his Temple in Jerusalem. But King Solomon must have been a better navigator than Mendaña, because the Spaniard never again found the islands. He made a second voyage in search of them in 1595, but with no luck. His pilot, Quirós, made a third in 1606, and many have searched since then. But they appear to have sunk into the ocean one and all, like Atlantis. They remain as elusive as Terra australis incognita, which Mendaña and Quirós had also hoped to discover.' Her finger had drifted down the page before stopping to the left of the cartouche, where I could read the inscription 'TERRA AUSTRALIS'. The rest of the space, a large continent whose coast ran down the map's two-hundredth meridian, was blank and featureless. 'Another mythical land portrayed by Ortelius.'
'The continent described in Ptolemy's Geography,' I said, wondering what such legendary islands had to do with Galileo or the libraries of Prague.
'And in Arab and Chinese documents as well. Rumours of its existence have circulated for centuries. The Spaniards sent numerous expeditions to discover it, all in vain, though in 1606 Quirós discovered a landmass, in fact only islands, that he named Australia del Espiríto Santo. Afterwards it was sought by the Dutch, likewise in vain until a number of their ships bound for Java were blown off course and made landfalls along the coast of an enormous island guarded by coral reefs. Twenty years later some of their ships explored a coastline that stretches from the tenth parallel of latitude below the equator to the thirty-fourth. So it now appears that Terra australis incognita is something more than a myth. And if Terra australis incognita exists, then who is to say that the Islas de Solomón do not also exist?' She leaned forward and with her forefinger traced a path across the Pacific to the right-hand side of the sheet. 'Look here. You'll see that the Prague edition includes an interesting variant.'
I peered closely at the page. The light from the rain-streaked window was so dim I had to strain my eyes to see its image. But there, some thirty or forty degrees of longitude west of Peru, a dozen parallels south of the equator, in the middle of Ortelius's vast Mare Pacificum, was a tiny rectangular island marked 'Manoa'. This particular detail was not included on any of Mr. Smallpace's editions, of that I was certain.
'But I thought Manoa was in Guiana or Venezuela.'
'As did everyone else. But to Ortelius it was an island in the Pacific Ocean, that great cavity left in the earth when the moon broke free. It would be found to the west of Peru and to the east of the fabled Islas de Solomón, on the 280th meridian east of the Canary Islands, which is what Ortelius, following Ptolemy, uses as his prime meridian. Or that, at least, is where Manoa is placed in the Prague edition of 1600.' She rose to her feet and carefully slid the volume back on to its shelf. 'You see, none of the other editions of Ortelius portrays Manoa,' she explained as she returned to her chair, 'either in the Pacific or anywhere else. That is what makes the Prague edition unique. And that, of course, is what Sir Ambrose found so intriguing.'
'But there were other maps of Manoa,' I protested, remembering Raleigh's map, engraved in Amsterdam by Hondius, that I used to explore with my fingers as I crouched between the shelves in Mr. Molitor's shop.
'Yes, but most were crude affairs. Manoa was located all over the continent. But after Mercator it became possible for navigators to make use of latitude and longitude when plotting their courses. They could steer a straight course over a long distance without continually adjusting their compass readings. All that was needed was a ruler, a divider and a compass. Mere child's play.'
'Yes,' I nodded. 'Except for the minor detail that no one knows how to find the longitude at sea.'
'Yes, there is the rub,' she replied, returning to the shelf. 'Finding latitude is easy enough, even below the equator where the Pole Star cannot be sighted. One merely finds the sun's altitude at noon by means of a sundial or suchlike. But longitude is as difficult a proposition as squaring the circle.'
It was the ancient problem, I knew, that bedevilled all mariners. Longitude is merely another name for the time difference between two places. In principle its calculation, as I understood it, was a simple enough exercise. Whether over London or the Solomon Islands, or anywhere else on earth, the sun always reaches its maximum altitude at twelve o'clock, the local noon. Thus if a navigator in the Solomon Islands could know, at the moment of his local noon, the precise time in London, he could calculate the longitude of his position by the difference between the two times, since each hour equals fifteen degrees of longitude. That was all well and good, but how could someone possibly know the time in London when he finds himself stranded halfway round the world, on the shores of the Solomon Islands?
'Not even the ancients with all of their wisdom could solve the problem,' Alethea was saying. 'Ptolemy in his Geography discusses the method of Hipparchos of Nicaea, who advocates using observations of lunar eclipses as a way of measuring the differences in local time east or west of a fixed point. Then Johann Werner of Nuremberg'-she pointed to a volume on the wall-'proposes in his edition of Ptolemy the so-called lunar-distance method by which the moon and the zodiac form a celestial clock that determines local time at every point round the globe. But neither of these methods succeeds either at sea or in distant lands to which reliable timekeepers cannot be transported.'
'Which is why Mendaña and Quirós were unable to find the Solomon Islands when they returned to the Pacific.'
'Precisely. Because in 1568 Mendaña recorded them at the 212th meridian east of the Canary Islands, only to find when he returned to search for them in 1595 that the 212th meridian was as troublesome to locate as the islands themselves.'
'So Ortelius's map is valueless,' I said. 'It's no more accurate than any of the others.'
She resumed her seat and poured two more cups of tea, which was a rare drink in those days, one I had sampled only two or three times before. It seemed to set my nerves on edge. My hand was trembling as I reached for the cup.
'No doubt the scale of longitude is nothing more than informed guesswork,' she replied at length. 'But the island? Is that also a fiction? And, if so, why should the map have been suppressed?'
'Who suppressed it, then? The Spaniards?'
'So Sir Ambrose believed. And they would have had good reason to do so. Prague would have been the last place on earth where the King of Spain and his ministers would have wished such a secret document to appear. Its colleges were rife with Protestants, Hermeticists and Jews, along with every sort of mystic and fanatic. Exactly the sort who, twenty years later, so terrified the cardinals in the Holy Office. And so the great Ortelius was poisoned and his map suppressed.'
She closed the book and regarded me carefully. I could hear someone crossing the atrium and rain splashing from the downspouts. A large pool of water was enlarging about the sundial, and more was spilling over the cracked rim of the fountain. In the distance, beyond the stunted orchard, I saw the dip-well and cress-pond, also overflowing, their swollen surfaces pocked and bubbling. I shuffled my feet nervously on the carpet, remembering the approaching coach.
'That might have been the end of the story,' she said at last, 'except for one small detail. It concerns a ship, Mr. Inchbold. A Spanish galleon. One discovered quite by accident in the waters of the Caribbean.' Thunder crackled louder now and rain dashed against the window. 'Perhaps in your investigations you have learned something about it? It was called the Sacra Familia.'
Streaks of lightning were followed by mortar-bursts of thunder. In the midst of one of the loudest crashes Bridget appeared in the library doorway with a fish-oil lamp. She set it on the table and removed the tray of tea, her shoes scuffing along the tiles. Alethea too had crossed the floor. For several minutes she worked busily at the shelves, standing on a step-ladder and plucking down books like someone picking apples in an orchard. But then she returned to the table clutching an armful of volumes, which she began scattering in an avalanche across its surface. I caught one of the tumbling books before it slipped over the edge and was surprised to see Duplessis-Mornay's De la vérité de la religion chrétienne, the work of Hermetic philosophy translated into English by Sir Philip Sidney.
'… republished in new editions and translations,' she was saying over the din of the rain as the books tumbled over each other and on to the table. 'The Apologia of William of Orange, The Spanish Colony by Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Relaciones of the English informer Antonio Pérez…'
As she sorted through the pile, I caught a glimpse in the lamplight of the treatise by Las Casas, the Spanish priest who had catalogued atrocities committed by the conquistadores among the Indians.
'Even the printers and booksellers had joined the fight against Spain. These books and dozens of others, all were smuggled by their thousands into every corner of the Spanish Empire to rouse bands of defeated rebels and other malcontents in Catalonia, Aragon and Calabria. They were even translated into Arabic and smuggled into Africa to be read by the Moriscos whom Philip III banished from Spain. Now thousands of Moriscos, like the rebels in Calabria and Catalonia, were poised to pluck up their arms and once more fight the Castilians. Only this time all of Protestant Europe would be fighting at their side.'
So it was that I found myself listening for a second time to the story of Raleigh's expedition, to the tale of scheming bishops and princes from all across Europe making secret plans for a coup de main against their common enemy, the King of Spain. But on this telling King Philip had lost something of his omnipotence. The English and Dutch spies along the waterfront of La Coruña and in the limestone alleyways of Cádiz were reporting that his navy had not yet recovered from the destruction of the so-called Invincible Armada, whose loss in '88 was but the first straw in the wind foretelling the end of his vast empire. The galleons were not being replaced or repaired because timber stocks on the Iberian peninsula had been badly depleted, and because there was no money to build them anyway-for spies in the House of Trade had reported that bullion imports from America had dropped from nine thousand tons per annum to a little more than three thousand. Philip was heavily in debt to the hombres de negocio as a result, as were dozens of merchants and shipowners in Seville who could only watch helplessly as silver collapsed and the galleon trade shrank. A major European war-a war the Spaniards could not possibly win-would put an end once and for all to the Spanish convoys which twice each year swept the treasures of the New World five thousand miles across the Atlantic to Andalucía. All that was wanting was the quickmatch to light the powder-train-a match that was due to be struck by Sir Ambrose and the soldiers on board the Philip Sidney.
But the planned mission ended in débâcle. I listened again to the story of how the daring enterprise was scuppered by informers in the Navy Office and on board the Destiny herself. At least, the enterprise failed until the Philip Sidney, sailing homeward through the Windward Passage, came upon the remnants of the Mexican fleet, which had been scattered along the coast of Cuba by one of the fierce storms that Spanish navigators call a huracán. What followed was an accident, a rare stroke of good fortune in the midst of disaster. Indeed, Sir Ambrose might never have stumbled across the convoy, Alethea said, had it not been for a peculiar smell reported by the deckhands while the ship was in soundings some ten leagues west of the Spanish harbour at Santiago de Cuba.
'A smell?' I remembered Biddulph's description of the aromatic galleon. 'What manner of smell?'
'Perfume,' she replied. 'The entire sea smelled of perfume, or perhaps incense. Can you imagine anything so strange? At first the men on board the Philip Sidney thought it nothing more than a hallucination, for hallucinations are common enough at sea. Most have to do with colours, such as when the waves look green so that the ship appears to be moving across fields of grass. Yet no one on board the Philip Sidney had ever known the like of this particular hallucination, not even Sir Ambrose. Then, as the smell grew stronger, a sailor in one of the fighting-tops spotted something on the horizon.'
'A galleon,' I murmured.
'A fleet of galleons,' she replied.
It was the convoy from New Spain, three weeks out of Veracruz: fourteen galleons shaping their course northeast-by-north through rough seas towards the Tropic of Cancer and then the higher latitudes, the 40s and 50s, to escape the northeasterly Trades. Fourteen ships alone on the shimmering water that funnelled and whirlpooled between Hispaniola and the Cabo Maisí, most of them so heavily laden that their lower gunports were all but under water. They should have been met already by the armada de la guardia de la carrera which would escort them as far as the Canaries, but the squadron had failed to arrive, probably on account of the same winds that for the previous two days had battered the convoy along the coast of Cuba. Now thirteen of the ships were huddled together in formation like a pod of whales as they rounded the windswept cape, but the fourteenth was listing badly. Already it had fallen several bow-shots off the pace.
'The Sacra Familia,' I prompted when she paused.
She nodded slowly. 'At first the galleon seemed no more than an apparition. As the Sidney drew closer the strange scent grew stronger and the mariners could see that she looked golden in colour, as if her mast-heads and yard-arms were glowing in the sun or lit by St. Elmo's Fire. Only the threat of keelhauling could convince the most superstitious of the sailors to stay at their posts. But Sir Ambrose knew the smell almost at once. It was not perfume, he realised, but sandalwood, a tree whose oil is used to make soaps and incense. A tree whose golden heartwood King Solomon is said to have used to build his Temple in Jerusalem.'
'The Sacra Familia was carrying a load of sandalwood?' I was puzzled but also disappointed by the revelation, by the reduction of this magical vessel, the subject of so many myths, to a cargo ship, a mere transatlantic mule.
'Not a load, though at first Sir Ambrose thought as much. But then he saw that, despite her list, the galleon was riding high in the water. He realised that the Sacra Familia carried no sandalwood and no silver or gold from the mines of New Spain; no load of any kind, even though she was sailing with the Mexican fleet. You see, the smell was coming from the galleon herself,' she explained, 'from her planks and masts. She had been built from stem to stern of sandalwood, exactly like Solomon's Temple. And so at once Sir Ambrose forgot about the other thirteen ships in the fleet and gave the order to pursue the galleon instead.'
Thirteen ships gorged with silver from the Mexican mines, or perhaps gold bullion, or bales of Chinese silk from Manila. I tried to imagine the scene. The wealthiest convoy on earth bound unescorted across five thousand miles of treacherous ocean for the Gulf of Cádiz. Yet Sir Ambrose forsakes them-and forsakes his holy mission-to pursue another ship, one with an empty hold. A galleon made from sandalwood.
'Such wood may have been fine for Solomon's Temple,' Alethea had resumed, 'but it's hardly suitable for ships. The heartwood is so heavy it barely floats. This must explain why she was lagging so far behind the other ships. It also explains why the Philip Sidney caught her so easily. It was like an Arabian stallion overtaking a mule.'
'But why sandalwood? Why not oak or teak?'
'That is precisely what Sir Ambrose had asked himself. And then he realised. He realised that the Sacra Familia had not sailed from Veracruz with the rest of the fleet. He knew at once that she had travelled from much farther afield.'
'The Pacific,' I murmured, thinking of Biddulph's bamboo rats, his belief that the ship had come through the Strait of Magellan, that narrow passage of shoals and islands at the bottom of the globe.
'He knew that the galleon must have been built from oak once upon a time,' she was continuing, 'because the shipwrights in La Coruña would never have built a ship from sandalwood, no matter how badly their timber stocks were depleted. But at some point a shipwright must have found himself with no choice in the matter. Sir Ambrose understood that the Sacra Familia had been wrecked and then rebuilt by her carpenters in a land where no oak trees grew, a land where sandalwood was the only timber to hand. This must have been on one of the islands of the Pacific, which is the only place where one finds sandalwood forests.'
Yet not even Sir Ambrose realised the significance of this fact until the galleon was overtaken in the hour before dusk. This had been a league off the desolate eastern shore of the Cabo Maisí. The Sacra Familia stood no chance at all, even without a cargo, for the Philip Sidney was the most formidable man-o'-war ever to sail the seas, and her crew was well prepared for battle. At Sir Ambrose's command the soldiers began tallowing the ends of their pikes and the marksmen scrambled into the fighting-tops with their muskets and serpentines. Below decks the gunners filled the wooden cartridges with powder and primed the cannons before roasting fireballs on the brazier like so many enormous chestnuts. But the battle was over almost before it started, because the Sacra Familia was unable either to fight or to flee. Her powder was still wet from the storm and her bottom was barnacled and so fouled with the weed the Portuguese call sargaço that her rudder budged only with the greatest effort. The English ship had come within cannon-range barely an hour after sighting her, at which point a 32-pounder was sent careering across the galleon's beak-head. There was no reply, so two rounds of grapeshot shredded her sails, to say nothing of what they did to the yardmen putting on more canvas in a vain attempt to hoist sail and escape.
The remainder of the battle lasted less than an hour. The marksmen opened fire from above, while fire-pikes were thrown from the decks and flaming arrows shot from slurbows. One of the arrows sailed through a scuttle and started a fire in the forward deckhouse, from which sailors could be seen leaping into the sea. Then more men jumped as the fire spread rapidly through the hull. By this time the galleon was being driven towards the cape, towards a coral reef on which sat, like a gibbeted corpse, the battered shell of an ancient galleon whose name, Emperador, was still legible on her rotting escutcheon. The Sacra Familia joined her soon afterwards and then broke apart in several fathoms of water just as the longboats of the Philip Sidney were being despatched with a boarding party of fifty soldiers carrying rope-ladders and grappling-hooks. The few Spaniards who didn't drown were eaten by the sharks, though not before they were seen throwing overboard or into the flames the galleon's log, her collection of portolan charts, the wooden traverse board, a derroterro-everything that might have betrayed the secret of her voyage. In the end, only the rats survived the wreck, enormous bamboo rats that deserted the ship and swam for the banana plantations along the shoreline.
'Dusk had fallen at this point, and a bright sunset foretold the end of the storms. Sir Ambrose took soundings and ordered his men to drop anchor a mile off the cape, where the Sidney rode out the last of the storm. The galleon burned all night on the reef, and in the morning a party was sent to survey the wreckage and scavenge what was left of her. They were forced to work quickly. The flames would have been seen from the shore and word of the wreck would soon reach Santiago if the smell had not warned the Spaniards already, for by sunrise the wind had turned to the southeast and now the smoke was flowing inland with the smell of sandalwood.'
'And was anything found?'
'For several hours, almost nothing. Nothing that might have rewarded the men for their dangerous work in the shark-infested waters. There was no sign of the log and portolan charts, documents for which the Navy Office would have paid a handsome sum. By noon there was little left of the galleon but her keel, and what the fire had spared the wind and waves dispersed. Sir Ambrose was about to order his men to return-a Spanish frigate had been spotted along the coast-but then a party of them raised something from the shallows. It was scorched and waterlogged but still intact.'
'Yes?' I was holding my breath. 'What was it?'
'A sea-chest,' she replied. 'But not just any sea-chest, for it was made of the same wood as the ship. Carved on one of the sides was the coat of arms of a man named Pinzón.'
'The captain,' I said eagerly.
She shook her head. 'Francisco Pinzón was the navigator, and a famous one at that, a graduate of the School of Navigation and Cartography in Seville. He had been the pilot of the Quirós expedition in search of the Solomon Islands in 1606. He must have thrown the chest overboard with all else, but it survived both the fire and the wreck, because sandalwood is as durable as it is beautiful. Once opened, it was found to be filled with books, for the distinguished Señor Pinzón was apparently an avid reader. Most were stories of knightly endeavour, but there was another book inside the chest besides these tales of chivalry, one that told its own tale of a dangerous and impossible quest.'
'The copy of Ortelius.'
'Yes. The Prague edition of the Theatrum orbis terrarum, a book so rare that in those days not even Sir Ambrose had seen a copy. He had just opened the cover when suddenly one of the salvors rushed into the cabin. Something else had been found in the water.'
It was another clue: dozens of scraps of paper from a log or journal that someone had attempted to shred before throwing overboard. The pieces were painstakingly collected from the water, then Sir Ambrose dried the scraps and carefully reassembled them on the desk in his cabin. The task took the better part of the afternoon and was made difficult because many of the scraps were missing or else illegible. At first he could take his bearings from only a few words: TOLEDO, LONGITUDO, IUPITER. By this time the Spanish frigate was scarcely a league away, and a larger fleet had been sighted off the coast of Hispaniola. But the Philip Sidney would not be caught. She weighed anchor and soon after nightfall had reached the islands of the Bahamas. And so it was there among the palmed cays, in dark waters infested with both sharks and pirates, that Sir Ambrose finished assembling what remained of the scraps and, with them, the secret of the Sacra Familia.
'Was it another map?' I asked.
'No,' she replied. 'Something much more intricate than a map. Perhaps you wish to see it?' She had risen to her feet. 'What remains is still quite legible.'
I too found my feet, but the motion seemed to unsettle me and I felt dizzy once again. I wavered on my feet as I followed her across the tiles into the atrium, which was filled with an eerie storm light. The rain on the windows seemed louder now, and the chandelier was chiming noisily overhead. Water had begun trickling down the marble staircase, dripping from the banisters and puddling on the floor, but Alethea was either oblivious or apathetic, for she guided me past the little waterfall, tugging gently at my arm and saying something about an almanac. Her voice was half muffled by the rain. The floor seemed to tremble underfoot as we picked our way along the corridor, passing the Great Room and the breakfast parlour. Suddenly the crypt plunged abysmally beneath us.
'… transits, eclipses, occultations,' her voice was echoing against the copper-sheathed walls as we descended into the entombed air. As we reached the bottom of the stairs I felt water beneath my feet. It seemed to be flowing down the walls, for when I brushed against one of them my shoulder came away wet to the touch. Oily-looking waves streamed past us. Alethea was walking more swiftly now, splashing along in her buskins, still apparently oblivious to the conditions.
'Everything in the tables has been calculated with the utmost precision.' Her voice seemed distant as she strode into the darkness ahead of me, hoisting aloft the creaking lantern. From all round came the sounds of invisible water lisping and hissing as it coursed swiftly along the rocky striations. 'The almanac was compiled, you see, by Galileo himself.'
So it was that I found myself back inside the muniment room, the place where I first encountered, through his many fragments, the mysterious Sir Ambrose Plessington. I lingered on the threshold. The floor, like that in the corridor, was running with water. The sodden rushes squelched as Alethea picked her way across to the coffin, which still sat on the trestle-table, safe for the time being. As she hooked the lamp to the wall sconce I was surprised to see how the water was almost crimson in colour. A droplet of what looked like blood fell from the ceiling and spattered my knuckles.
'Venetian red,' she explained. 'I've been using it in my search for the underground waterways. I pour dye into the cress-pond in order to determine what course it takes. I suppose I might have used a colour that was less gruesome, but as it happens the dye has done its work and I've managed to track down a number of the hidden channels. An engineer is laying pipes and building drains so that the springs can be tamed and the water diverted for use in fountains.'
I wiped my hand on my doublet and stood in silence as she creaked open the lid of the coffin and began to rummage among the papers. I could hear the dull roar of the water as it carved its mysterious channel behind the stone. Tame such waters? I had to admire her optimism, the unfailing buoyancy of her dreams. Even in the midst of such wreckage she could still cling to her grandiose visions of the house. But I had to admire her, I supposed, in other ways as well. For I had come to Pontifex Hall in anger and hatred but now found, almost to my chagrin, that it was impossible to dislike her. Perhaps I was as deluded as she was; perhaps I too was dreaming and desiring even as I trod the rising waters.
'Here it is.'
Her voice startled me from my reverie. She had turned round and was extending in her hand a piece of paper, or some other backing, on to which dozens of scraps had been pasted. Yet another text, another scrap to tell the story of her father's life. As she angled it into the light of the lamp I could see three or four columns of figures, each broken by an occasional gap.
'The puzzle of the Sacra Familia,' she was saying, 'fitted together by Sir Ambrose. Can you read it? The tables predict the eclipses of each one of the Jovian satellites.'
I blinked hard at this piece of handiwork, still perplexed. 'The Jovian satellites? But I fail to understand what they have to do with-'
And then suddenly I did. The print jumped into focus and seemed to detach itself from the page. The paper was spattered with Venetian red, but I had just made out the words IUPITER and LONGITUDO, when a stone burst from the wall like the stopper from the bung-hole of a cask, followed by a reddish tide.
I stumbled backwards a step, feeling the ice-cold water seep through my boots. Another stone broke free and even more water spilled inside, unfurling like tumbling bolts of russet to curl round our feet. The cataclysm had begun. For a paralysing moment I imagined the entire wall buckling and the pair of us crushed to death beneath tons of water and shattered masonry. Then I splashed forward and snatched Alethea's hand.
'Come,' I said. 'Quickly-or we'll drown!'
But she broke my grasp and scooped an armful of papers at random from the coffin, which now balanced precariously on its stand. 'The papers,' she said. 'Help me!'
But I was not going to drown for the sake of Sir Ambrose Plessington. I stepped forward and, seizing her arm, pulled her towards the threshold. The papers clutched to her chest spilled into the water, then the ink blurred and ran on the parchment, effacing itself in the eddying current. I could see among those sodden scraps the paper recovered from the galleon-the secret of the Sacra Familia once more cast upon the waters.
It would not be retrieved a second time. I reached down the lantern and, still clutching Alethea's arm, forced the door a few inches wider. The water must have broken through elsewhere in the crypt, for in the corridor it was two feet deep and flowing in a torrent from the direction of the staircase. Thrusting the lantern aloft I tried to make out the distant stairs. Already my feet were numb. I could hear the water whorling in the corners and slapping against the copper-sheathed walls. I swung round to face her.
'Is there another way out?'
'No.' She was still struggling to salvage what remained of her father's papers, which now flowed past like trout in a brook, trailing seals and ribbons. 'Only the way we came!'
I dragged her away and waded knee-deep into the current. The water was black now instead of red. After a few steps I heard the coffin fall from the trestle-table and overturn. I pressed forward. When I raised the lantern I saw that the other doors in the tunnel had burst open under the tremendous force of the waters. Their tributaries deepened and quickened the flow. Soon the fragments of wooden barrels and hanks of old rope were washed into our path, followed by the bone-urns from some ancient ossuary. Then came the bones themselves, bobbing skulls and femurs, the jumbled remains of a hundred monks shifting and sliding towards us.
I picked my way round the grotesque flotsam with Alethea still in tow. We had no more than a minute, I reckoned, to make our escape, before the crypt filled with water. When the water reached the middle of my thighs I heard another noise, a frantic squeaking which I mistook for the hinges of the lantern until I saw dozens of rats-fat, matted creatures-swimming against the tide and using the floating casks and skulls as stepping-stones. I lost my footing, then my grip on the lantern, which toppled into the water and extinguished with a hiss. I could see nothing in the darkness but, far in the distance, a weak light from the hatchway glowing overhead. I began struggling towards it, but so weakened was I when we reached the stairs that I could barely stand. The water had risen to my chest; it took three attempts before I finally found purchase on a submerged tread. Then I gripped the banister and climbed hand over hand until, exhausted and frozen, followed by Alethea, I breasted the hatch.
The corridor was running with water, adding to the torrent in the crypt below. We staggered towards the atrium, passing on the way the breakfast parlour and the Great Room. In the latter the cornices and their brackets were streaming, as were the stalactites of lime-washed plasterwork. A segment had fallen from the centre of the ceiling exposing the laths and joists beneath. Cracks like lightning-strokes had begun appearing on the walls, spilling yet more plaster in the water. Then, over the rush of water, we heard a desperate voice-that of Phineas-summoning Lady Marchamont.
'The books!' Alethea was saying over the roar of the water behind us. 'We must rescue the books!'
But we were not to reach the library, or not just yet. For on stumbling into the atrium we discovered Phineas with his back turned towards us, endeavouring to block the entrance door as he had done against me. It was shaking in its frame under some furious assault from the outside. He had no better luck the second time, for after another blow the door burst wide with a shriek of tortured wood and a gust of wind. I heard the crystal pendants of the chandelier chiming high overhead and felt Alethea's frigid hand in mine. Our visitors had arrived at last.
It was their coach, framed in the doorway, that I noticed first: a fleet-looking vehicle with a domed roof and four horses stamping and foaming in their traces. Then I heard a crunch of gravel and a broad figure stepped through the splintered frame, followed swiftly by three men in black-and-gold livery.
'Sir Richard?' Alethea was standing stock-still and open-mouthed beside me. Was she remembering the murder on the Pont Neuf? Quickly she dropped my hand. 'What are you doing here? What is-?'
Phineas was the first to respond, scuttling forward to grapple with one of the men. But the contest was unequal, for his opponent produced from his belt a short dagger with which he artfully parried two feeble blows before driving the blade home with a swift and practised gesture. The footman crumpled without a word while his conqueror, a fat man with hooded eyes, wiped the stiletto on his breeches and advanced towards us.
'Sir Richard?' Alethea took a faltering step across the tiles. Her face had gone white. But Sir Richard directed his gaze not at his shocked affianced but at me.
'Mr. Inchbold,' he said in a level tone as he removed his hat with a sweep of his arm. 'Well, well, I find I am not misinformed after all. How resourceful you must be. I saw you drown in the river with my own two eyes, though my sources insisted otherwise. I can but hope you were as resourceful in your search.' He unfastened a brass button to expose the pistol tucked in his belt. Water eddied between his boots. 'So where is it, then?' He stepped a few paces towards us. The black-clad trio at his heels eagerly followed suit. 'The Labyrinth of the World,' he said in the same even tone. 'Where is it?'
But as he took another step, reaching for his weapon, the floor of the atrium shifted like the deck of a foundering ship and the four of them lost their balance. No sooner had they righted themselves than the chandelier broke free from its mooring with a shriek and plunged to the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces between us. Sir Richard staggered backwards, still fumbling for his pistol. I felt glass skittering against my boots and then a pair of hands in the middle of my back.
'Go!' It was Alethea. 'Run!'
All four of Jupiter's moons, even Callisto, the largest, are far too dim to be sighted with the naked eye. Galileo first saw them on a winter night in January in the year 1610, using a telescope with a magnitude of 32: four moons that orbit Jupiter in periods of one and a half to sixteen and a half days. Four new worlds that no one, ancient or modern, had ever seen before. He published his discovery in Sidereus nuncius, the 'Messenger of the Stars', and within a year the sightings were confirmed by Jesuit astronomers in Rome as well as by Kepler in Prague. They were also confirmed by a German astronomer, Simon Marius, who gave the moons their names: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
Even from the beginning the discovery provoked as much controversy as amazement. Not only were the four new satellites incompatible with the Scriptures but they also challenged Aristotle's claim in De caelo that the stars are fixed in the heavens. Worst of all, they opposed the description of the universe given in another hallowed book, Ptolemy's Almagest. Enemies of Copernicus attacked his system by arguing that if the earth is not, as Ptolemy claims, at the centre of the universe, then why should the earth, and the earth alone, possess an orbiting moon? But the revolutions of Jupiter's moons now led Galileo to recognise that the stars could orbit a planet at the same time as the planet itself orbits the sun. Jupiter and its four satellites became, for Galileo, a model for the earth and its own moon. So it was that in 1613 he wrote in the appendix to his letters on sunspots-a work opposing the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Scheiner-that the moons proved beyond all doubt the truth of Copernicanism.
But for Galileo the moons also had a practical significance that he kept a closer secret even than his Copernicanism. Galileo was a most practical man, of course. He dropped cannon-balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to refute Aristotle's theory of motion, and at the Auditorium Maximum in Padua he lectured students on the best methods of fortifying cities and constructing cannons. Now he realised that Jupiter's moons-and, more specifically, the eclipses occurring when they pass into the planet's shadow-could be used to solve the ancient problem of finding the longitude at sea; a problem for whose solution the King of Spain had offered a prize of 6,000 ducats and the States-General of Holland, not to be outdone, 30,000 florins. The truce between the two nations, signed in 1609, was soon to expire-that is, if it was not shattered by cannon-fire first. A new war would see the Spaniards and the Dutch fighting among the islands of the Pacific as well as on the old battlefields of Europe. Indeed, a few Dutch raids on the presidios of Tierra Firme had already been reported. So it was that Galileo, a devout Catholic, calculated a table of eclipses and approached Philip III through the offices of the Tuscan ambassador in Madrid. These tables-the index of Spanish fortunes in the Pacific-predicted the times and durations of the eclipses of each of the moons: eclipses that, like those of the moon, happen at the same instant anywhere on earth. Unlike lunar eclipses, however, these occur with great frequency, almost daily in the case of Io. Jupiter and its satellites therefore became, for whoever could predict their eclipses, a celestial clock telling the difference in time between any two places on earth.
'By the middle of 1615 the spies for both the War Party and the States-General were sending back from Madrid reports that Spanish ships in the Pacific had begun making trials using Galileo's tables. These tables were highly secret, of course.' Alethea was two steps ahead of me, leading the way through a darkened corridor whose carpet was an inch deep in water. 'Galileo never published a word of them.'
'And the Sacra Familia was one of the ships?'
She nodded her head. 'Sir Ambrose had read all of the reports that came to Lambeth Palace, and so he recognised the name of the ship as soon as he read it on her escutcheon.'
Pursued by Sir Richard, we had run from the atrium, splashing and sliding, into the library, where so much water had collected on the floor that the books on the bottom shelves were already half submerged, while dozens of those shelved higher had toppled to the floor. Already the pasteboard covers were wrinkling and the rag-paper pages degrading into the cast-off scraps of linen and hemp from which they were fashioned. I was stooping to salvage one of them-a futile gesture-when Alethea ordered me to keep running. We climbed the ladder to the library's gallery, then raised it beyond the reach of our pursuers. Now I could hear their boots on the stairs as we picked our way past the obstacles-collapsed plaster and fallen timbers-that littered the maze of dark corridors on the first floor.
'So the Sacra Familia had found a method of calculating the longitude at sea?'
'No,' she said, hurrying forward. 'Galileo's method fails to work at sea. On dry land or in an observatory, yes, it is the best method so far conceived. But at sea it is impossible. It is difficult enough to use a backstaff, let alone a telescope, on a moving ship, especially on a rough swell such as one finds in the Pacific. Jupiter might be spotted for a few seconds, but the slightest motion of the deck makes it impossible to train the lens on the satellites, even with the special binocular lenses that Galileo invented.'
How much longer before we were captured? From beyond the plaster walls came the sounds of thunder, or perhaps the boots of our pursuers. Or was it the water rupturing its way through the heart of the building? The floor seemed to tremble underfoot. Limping from pain, I stumbled after her. I was wet and exhausted but still curious. I demanded to know what secret it was that, in all likelihood, I was about to die for. 'What did the Sacra Familia discover?'
'An island of bamboo, sandalwood and gold,' she explained as we rounded a corner. She had taken my hand. 'The Sacra Familia was driven aground on an island somewhere in the southeast Trades that blow to the north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Or rather the island was covered not in gold but white spar, the yellow crystals that the Muhammadan alchemists call markasita, a substance never found anywhere that gold is not. It was the same island, Pinzón knew, as the one portrayed in the Prague edition of the Theatrum orbis terrarum. You see, Pinzón had been past the island once before, in 1595, on Mendaña's last voyage in search of the Islas de Solomón.'
'Mendaña missed the Solomon Islands and discovered Manoa instead?'
'Or possibly it was one of the fabled Islas de Solomón themselves. Who can say? Mendaña and Pinzón may have regarded the new island, with all of its sandalwood and white spar, as the site of King Solomon's mines. But of course, like the original Islas de Solomón, no one was able to find it again, though it was plotted in the Prague edition of the Theatrum.'
We rounded another corner and passed chambers whose doors yawned wide to show scriptors, writing boxes and a knee-hole desk. Their floors, too, were under water; the wainscots were warped and streams of water were running down the walls. Then the corridor swung left. Where were we fleeing to?
'But now the island's longitude could be determined,' Alethea was telling me. 'Galileo's tables revealed the precise time at which each of the eclipses would be seen in Toledo, which is where the Spaniards situate their prime meridian. Pinzón then recorded the exact times of the same eclipses on the island. Then, once the ship was rebuilt with sandalwood, she sailed for Spain, from which a new expedition would be despatched to locate the island, using the proper co-ordinates. But of course the Sacra Familia never reached Cádiz.' I could feel her grip tighten, then as we rounded another corner she added: 'And even had she reached Spain, her information would not have been worth the paper it was written on. In the space of a year it had gone from being one of the most valuable documents in Christendom to a dangerous heresy whose followers were burned at the stake.'
For if the moons of Jupiter were controversial, then their eclipses were even more so. Galileo did not discover them until 1612, two years after his first sighting of the moons themselves. He had begun calculating their motions by 1611, but he used the Ptolemaic instead of the Copernican tables-accepting the earth, that is, and not the sun as the centre of Jupiter's motions. Only when he refined his calculations by employing the Copernican tables did he discover how the moons were being eclipsed by Jupiter, whose shadow blotted out the light reflected from the sun. Predicting these eclipses was henceforth a simple enough task, but such predictions could not be made using the Ptolemaic tables, which caused errors both in the prediction of the time at which an eclipse begins and the position of the satellite against the stars as it enters and then emerges from the eclipse. Predicting the eclipses-these keys to the secret of the longitude-therefore entailed the acceptance of Copernicanism, a heresy for which Giordano Bruno was burned in Rome only a dozen years earlier.
What followed was a story that I knew well enough: one of ignorance triumphing over reason, of orthodoxy and prejudice over invention. In 1614 Galileo wrote to Christina of Lorraine a letter attempting to render Copernicanism consistent with the Holy Scripture. The effort was in vain, however, because the letter was laid before the Inquisition, whose dark machinery was set in motion by Pope Paul V. The cardinals in the Palace of the Sant'Uffizio summoned Galileo to Rome and, after examining him, affirmed Copernicanism as a heretical doctrine. This had been in the winter of 1616, shortly after the Sacra Familia set sail on her long voyage into the South Seas. Galileo's method was therefore not only impractical by the time the battered convoy returned to Cádiz: it was also heretical.
'In another time such a heresy might not have been so catastrophic. Come, Mr. Inchbold.'
We were moving almost blindly now. I could hear more rats, a whole pack of them, scampering and squealing underfoot.
'But in 1616 a war between the Catholics and Protestants was looming. Rome could ill afford new threats to its orthodoxies, especially ones propagated by someone as eminent as Galileo. Isaac Casaubon may have demolished the myth of Hermes Trismegistus, but now Hermetic philosophers all across Europe were catching at this new and, in the eyes of the Roman Curia, equally dangerous wisdom. Astronomy had replaced the learning of the Corpus hermeticum as the greatest danger to Church authority. Galileo was censured and his writings placed by the Jesuits on their Index along with the works of occultists such as Agrippa and Paracelsus. His project was dropped by the Spaniards, and the search for the longitude at sea-and for the mysterious island in the Pacific-came to an end.'
And so that might have been the last of the story, she claimed, had word not reached London that all was not lost when the Sacra Familia was wrecked on the reef. Other copies of her sea-chart existed. At first the reports were as spurious and untrustworthy as those regarding the island itself, though in time they were confirmed by spies in Madrid and Seville. These reports claimed that the Sacra Familia, after sailing from Veracruz, docked with the rest of the Mexican fleet in Havana, where, fearing the dire weather, her captain deposited duplicates of her charts, written in cipher, at the Jesuit mission of San Cristóbal-documents later shipped to Seville for safekeeping in the archives of the House of Trade.
'But that was not the only place the documents were housed. In March of 1617, just as Raleigh's fleet was preparing to sail for Guiana, Archduke Ferdinand of Styria concluded with the King of Spain a treaty under whose terms Philip recognised Ferdinand as the successor to the Emperor Matthias in return for the German territory of Alsace and two Imperial enclaves in Italy. The treaty brought together the two most powerful families in Europe, the two Houses of Habsburg, one in Spain, the other in Austria. The two great empires would now work together, uniting to share their armies and their knowledge, and in so doing to crush the Protestants of Europe once and for all. Among their most powerful arsenals, of course, were their libraries.'
A roof slate thundered overhead as it fell. Part of the ceiling had fallen to expose the beams of the garret overhead. Water was cascading through, spilling into our path. I heard a shout from somewhere behind us, then Alethea gripped my hand and pulled me through the cataract.
'But the arsenal in Vienna was in danger,' I gasped as we emerged on the other side.
'Yes. In 1617 the Protestant armies of Count Thurn were at the gates of Vienna.'
'And so the chart was taken to Bohemia?'
'Along with dozens of other treasures from the Imperial Library in Vienna. It was placed in the archives of the Spanish Rooms, which already held reams of Tycho Brahe's astronomical data as well as forbidden books by Galileo, Copernicus and other heretics.'
And so it was that the new plot unfolded in London: one that sent Sir Ambrose to Prague Castle in the entourage of the Elector Palatine. He was given the task of recovering as many of the volumes from the library of the Spanish Rooms as possible, but in particular he was charged with finding the sea-chart and bringing it to England. The decisive coup de main would be struck after all-albeit belatedly-against the King of Spain.
'But the plan miscarried,' I said. 'The palimpsest was never delivered to Lambeth Palace.'
'No,' Alethea replied. 'At the last moment Sir Ambrose betrayed the War Party.'
'Betrayed them?' We had stopped before a closed door, which Alethea was attempting to force with her shoulder. 'But why? Are you saying Sir Ambrose was a Spanish agent?'
'No, not Sir Ambrose. But both the Navy Office and Lambeth Palace had been infiltrated. Word of the palimpsest had already reached both Rome and Madrid.'
She was pressing with her shoulder at the door, which refused to budge. I heard a long-case clock chime from somewhere behind us, and then the sound of distant voices.
'Ven acquí!'
'Vayamos por otro lado!'
The door groaned and gave an inch. It was the same door, I realised, that had impeded my progress that long-ago morning. I lunged forward to help push. It creaked open another inch, then I felt a breeze and heard more frantic chiming: not spurs, as I thought at first, but the vials and cuvettes on their shelves in the laboratory.
'The fact that the palimpsest survived at all is a miracle,' Alethea said as we burst through a second later, then righted ourselves in another darkened corridor. 'In the end Sir Ambrose wanted it destroyed. Although he had risked his life to save it; his final wish was that it should burn.'
A chunk of plaster fell with a violent splash ahead of us, and the timbers above our head were creaking under an immense strain. We picked our way more cautiously through the corridor. Some more plaster collapsed, less than ten feet ahead of us.
'The Puritans wanted the chart,' I said. 'Standfast Osborne-'
'Yes,' she replied. 'As do the Spaniards. And now it appears that the new Secretary of State has also learned of its existence. Sir Ambrose claimed it was cursed, and he was right, because ten years ago he was poisoned by Spanish agents. They feared he would sell it to Cromwell, for in those years we were short of money and the Puritans were preparing for their holy war against the King of Spain. By then, of course, I knew that Sir Ambrose was not my true father,' she added in an undertone. 'That's who these men are, of course: Spanish agents. The same men who murdered Lord Marchamont.'
For a second I wondered if I had heard her aright. 'Sir Ambrose was not your father? But-'
'Yes,' she replied. 'That is my last deception. My real father was also murdered by Spanish agents-by Henry Monboddo, as a matter of fact. This was many years earlier. You see, Henry Monboddo was not only an art broker but also a Spanish agent. He learned of the palimpsest through the spies in Prague. But Sir Ambrose already knew of his treachery because of the failure of the Orinoco expedition, and he therefore used my father as a decoy. My mother, who had travelled from Prague with my father, died in childbirth shortly afterwards-'
'Your mother?'
'-and I was raised by Sir Ambrose as his daughter. I believe he regarded it as his duty, perhaps even as a form of penance, for betraying my father along with the greedy dukes and bishops in the War Party. My father was a Bohemian, a gentle man devoted to books and learning. But Sir Ambrose felt he could not trust him because he was a Roman Catholic.'
Voices echoed in the maze of corridors behind us. Alethea was moving more quickly now. We stepped over a fallen tapestry and passed a chamber whose window flashed with lightning. Through it I could see the lime trees stretching into the distance.
'Caray!'
'Por Dios! Las aquas han subido!'
The corridor turned to the left and we found ourselves splashing through a wide but empty saloon. I thought I heard a pistol shot from behind, followed by the shriek of splintering timber. Halfway through, my club foot slipped on the tiles and I sprawled headlong into the water. Within seconds I was back on my feet, hurrying, I was certain, to a horrible death.
'I was raised in Pontifex Hall,' Alethea was continuing as though oblivious to the dangers, 'and it was from Sir Ambrose that I learned all that I know. We were like Miranda and Prospero on their island, awaiting the tempest that would bring the usurpers to their shore. In time he even told me of the palimpsest and its history. He wanted it destroyed, as I have said, and I would happily have complied. But my husband and then Sir Richard each dissuaded me. The document was to be sold, you see. I would be paid £10,000. Sir Richard was acting as the agent. I had no idea who the buyer was, nor did I care. I wished to be rid of the palimpsest, that was all. I trusted Sir Richard implicitly. We were to be married. The money would have been used to restore the house. We would have lived here together.' She paused for a second. I could hear shouts coming from behind us. 'But now the usurpers have arrived,' she intoned sadly. 'And now I know what I-'
Her last words were lost to me as the wall beside us buckled and more plaster toppled from the ceiling, striking me a glancing blow on the shoulder. I reeled sideways and fell flat for a second time. When I picked myself up, sodden and gasping, I groped for Alethea's hand; but by then she had already disappeared down the corridor. Somewhere at the end of it, in the laboratory, the dozens of glass vials were ringing their alarum.
And now I know what I must do…
Fear gives us wings, they say. But it is also, as Xenophon claims, stronger than love. I must confess that my thoughts were no longer for the books, or even Alethea, but only for myself as I rushed along the corridor a few seconds later. My frantic claudications echoed against the sodden plasterwork until, skidding wildly, I reached not the laboratory but the top of the staircase, which I realised had been my true destination. I hesitated at the sight of it, surprised to have negotiated my way so easily through the maze of corridors. But the marble steps were treacherously slick, and as I began the descent my dizziness returned. From the top step I could see almost the whole of the atrium, the whole dreadful tableau of death and ruin spread before me. The oval looking-glass in the atrium had been knocked over, its cracked face now reflected the gap in the ceiling where the chandelier had broken free. The chandelier itself lay nearby, in the middle of the floor, a mangled bronze bird. Beyond its wreckage I could see Phineas lying on his belly beside the door, his arms flung wide.
There were no more sounds from the laboratory-no ringing vials and no cries for help. For a moment I wondered if I should return for Alethea, but then, gripping the banister, I continued my cautious descent. I was not prepared to die, I told myself, for the sins of Sir Ambrose Plessington. Through the open door I could see that the rain had finally stopped. The wind had steadied and the sun was threatening to appear. Such is the mockery of fate. As I crossed the atrium, my boots crunched the shattered crystal. I felt palsied and unstable until I realised that the floor was trembling underfoot. The blood had spread outwards from Phineas's prostrate body like the tendrils of a bright, submarine plant. I had just stepped past the gaudy slick when I heard a shout and then saw a lone figure in the library doorway, dressed in black. I caught a last view of the felled shelves and the chaos of the sodden masses on the floor before rushing through the doorway and into the dun-coloured light.
The horses, spooked by the commotions, tossed their heads in alarm and shied backwards as I flung myself towards them. The park, half-waterlogged, wavered before me, reflecting a lurid sky. I thought of boarding the coach and so making my escape, but there was no time. I could hear my pursuer shouting in Spanish, while another figure had appeared from round the side of the house, near the physic garden. So I began to run instead, fleeing in the opposite direction, towards the hedge-maze. Perhaps I had visions of drawing the killers away from Alethea-of fulfilling for one last time the task for which I was hired. Had it not been my rash flight from London that brought them to Pontifex Hall in the first place? It was a foolish, fantastic notion: I with my crippled foot and wheezing lungs was no match for either of my pursuers, the second of whom I saw was Sir Richard Overstreet. But as I approached the maze I risked a second glance over my shoulder and saw a deep furrow open in the ground behind me, a long trench running across the park, from the cress-pond towards the coach-and-four.
In retrospect the crevice seems a cataclysm of near-biblical dimensions, perhaps even a miracle, if miracles can be so reckless and tragic. The rear wheels of the coach were swallowed first. The ground trembling beneath them crumbled and the coach tipped backwards before heeling in the trough, which had widened to more than six feet and filled with water as the subterranean current burst to the surface. The horses' hindquarters shimmied for a second and then disappeared. The first of my pursuers, the man in black, stopped short at the brink and stumbled. He stared across at me, aghast and amazed, as the reddish earth collapsed and the chasm yawned ever wider. Then he, too, disappeared into the gaping jaws.
I whirled and kept running. The air was tart with privet and hedge-mustard, whose overgrown branches clawed at my cheeks and shoulders as I dived into the maze and swung left into an even thicker gauntlet of wet branches and sharp holly leaves. Puddles splashed underfoot. Through a small gap in the hedge I glimpsed Sir Richard, his pistol in hand as he dashed towards the entrance to the maze. Another fork. I turned right, then left, threading my way inside the sinuous passages. At one point I tripped on a root and, raising myself, discovered a pair of hedge-clippers abandoned in the undergrowth. I picked them up-the blades were rusty but still sharp-and again took to my heels.
It must have been another minute or two before I heard the scream. By this point I had reached the centre of the labyrinth, a small, scrubby patch of ground on which had been placed a wooden bench, rotted by the elements. I could hear Sir Richard crashing along the paths and realised he must be following my footprints through the mud. Yet another trail that had betrayed me. He would soon catch me-if the hedge-maze wasn't swallowed first, for the ground was trembling and shaking like a stonemason's yard. When the shriek broke the air I was gripping the handle of the clippers and backing into the pruned branches, preparing for a passage of arms. Looking up I glimpsed, above the parapets of box and hornbeam, a lone figure poised in a first-floor window.
Alethea had reached the laboratory after all. I climbed on to the bench's cracked seat and saw her throw the casement wide and gesture wildly. I glimpsed her for only a second, because no sooner had the panes flashed in the sunlight-for the sun, incredibly, had now appeared-than the south wing of the house began crumbling into the trench. Timbers warped and snapped, then came the landslide of ashlar and stone that exposed the library through a haze of plaster dust before its timbers likewise buckled, shedding scores of books into the great chasm. The first floor overhung the cavity for a few seconds before it began its own ponderous slide. A section of the roof lurched forward, shedding tiles; then the corbels shattered and the last of the roof spilled into the river surging through the foundations.
I was still perched on the bench, frozen with fear as the dreadful spectacle unfolded before me. I heard another scream as the east elevation fissured and collapsed like a rock-face, raising clouds of dust that billowed and swirled like cannon-smoke. The magnificent structure with its exposed compartments-each with its furniture and wallpaper-now looked no more than a doll's house or an architect's model. I could even see the laboratory with its telescope and the shelves of shattered vials. But there was no sign of Alethea, not there or anywhere else. I had leapt from the bench and was moving back through the maze when the floor of the atrium disintegrated and the doll's house crumpled inward, its floors collapsing together with a rumble I could feel in my diaphragm. I thought I heard yet another scream, but I must have been mistaken: it was only the sound of tortured iron and splintering beams, the last fragments of Pontifex Hall tumbling into the voracious water.