by Ross King
And so on a sudden impulse I arranged for an incredulous Monk to tend to the shop while I, like Don Quixote, prepared to leave my shelves of books and venture into the country-into the world that, so far, I had managed to avoid. For the rest of the day I served my usual customers, helping them, as always, to find editions of this work or commentaries on that one. But today the ritual had been altered, because all the while I felt the letter rustling quietly in my pocket with soft, anonymous whispers of conspiracy. As instructed, I showed it to no one, nor did I tell anyone, not even Monk, where I would be travelling or to whom I proposed to pay my visit.
Chapter Two
One day after the receipt of my summons, in the hour before dawn, three horsemen entered London from the east. They came in sight of the spires and chimneystacks as the stars paled and the clouds were mantled here and there with light: a trio of black-clad riders galloping along the riverside towards Ratcliff. Their journey must have been a long one, though little of it is known to me except those few leagues at the end.
They had landed on the Kent coast, in Romney Marsh, two days earlier, after crossing the Channel in a fishing smack. Even with calm weather and a level sea the crossing must have taken a good eight hours, but the landing would have been carefully timed. The boat's master, Calfhill, had been under scrupulous instructions and knew every shoal, cove and customs official along fifty-mile stretches of either coast. They put in to shore in darkness, at high tide, with the prow bouncing in the swell, the sail struck low as Calfhill stood in the bows grasping a long pole. At that hour the customs sheds further along the line of beach would have stood empty, but only for another hour, perhaps less, so they were forced to work quickly. Calfhill dropped anchor and, when the flukes bit, stepped over the gunwales and into the knee-deep water, which must have been icy even at that time of year. They disembarked without a torch or flare and scraped the boat across the shingle to the high-water line, where three black stallions had been tethered among the screen of osiers. The horses, snickering and stamping in the darkness, were already saddled and bridled. The beach was otherwise empty.
For the next few minutes Calfhill hovered, anxious and suspicious, as the men tiptoed back into the waves and scrubbed the pitch from their faces and hands. Overhead a skein of plovers sailed inland. Smells of thyme and pastured sheep blew out to sea. Only a few minutes remained before daylight, but Calfhill's passengers worked as punctiliously as if making their morning toilets. One of them even paused to polish a few of the gold buttons on his coat-some kind of black livery-with a wetted handkerchief, then, stooping, the toes of his boots. His efforts were fastidious.
'For heaven's sake,' Calfhill murmured under his breath. He understood the risks, of course, even if his passengers did not. He was an 'owler', a smuggler whose usual freight was the sacks of wool he shipped to France or the crates of wine and brandy he transported back. Nor was he averse to smuggling passengers-an even more profitable trade. Huguenots and Roman Catholics, like the hogsheads of brandy, came to England, while Royalists went the other way, into France. And now it was the Puritans who were fleeing England, of course; Holland was their destination. In the past six weeks he had smuggled at least a dozen of them out of Dover or the Romney Marsh and across to Zeeland or on to pinks anchored near the North Foreland; a few others he smuggled off the pinks and into England to act as spies against King Charles. It was dangerous work, but he calculated that if all of this distrust and deception held out (as he knew it would, human nature being what it was) he would be able to retire to a sugar plantation in Jamaica within four years.
But this latest assignment was a peculiar one, even for an owler of Calfhill's experience. Two days earlier in Calais, in a tavern in the basse ville where he normally received information about his consignments of brandy, a man named Fontenay approached him, paid half of an agreed sum-ten gold pistoles-and gave him patient instructions. It would be another good night's work. Fontenay had since disappeared, but then, at dusk the previous day, the strangers met him, as promised, in the sheltered reach from which, disguised as a fisherman, he normally set out with his hogsheads and-so far as he could ever determine their identities-the occasional Royalist agent or Romish priest. His new passengers had been puffing heavily as they clambered aboard. He caught a good view of one of them in the moonlight: a corpulent figure, red-faced as an innkeeper's wife, with hooded eyes, a sensuous mouth, and a gross, well-fed belly that would have done credit to a London alderman. Hardly a seafaring man. Would he take ill in the smack, as so many of them did, and retch over the gunwales? Amazingly, he did not. But throughout the ensuing voyage the three men spoke not a word, neither to Calfhill nor to each other, even though Calfhill-something of a linguist, as his trade required-attempted to draw them in English, French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish.
Now, still in silence, they were staggering towards the snorting stallions, the dry osiers crackling underfoot. Calfhill found himself wondering for the dozenth time which country-or which party within which country-they represented. All three seemed to be gentlemen, which was unusual, because in Calfhill's experience spying was not exactly a gentleman's occupation. Most of the men he smuggled were a foul-mouthed bunch of villains-bravos, bungs, cutpurses, nose-slitters, ruffians of every description, all of them recruited in the worst bawdy-houses and taverns of London or Paris and then paid a slave's wages to betray their friends and countries, which most were only too eager to do. But these fellows? They looked too soft for such rough-and-tumble recreations. The palms of the fat one, as he handed over the remaining coins, had been smooth and plump as those of a lady. Before he applied the pitch, a measure at which he baulked at first, his smooth chops had smelled of shaving soap and perfume. And their black livery, their coats, waistcoats, breeches and doublets, all were of a fine cut, even decorated, a bit ostentatiously, with a few gold frogs and ribbons. So what desperate mission could have tumbled them from their wine-cellars and dinner-tables and sent them to venture life and limb in England?
The three of them were now, at long last, ready to depart. The fat one swung clumsily on to the horse at his fourth attempt-he was accustomed to the aid of a mounting-block, Calfhill supposed-and then, without so much as a nod or a wave, guided the Percheron up a steep knoll. He was an abysmally poor rider, Calfhill could see that right away. He swayed from side to side, head bobbing, fat legs limply bouncing at every step. A man more familiar with carriages and sedan-chairs, Calfhill guessed. The unfortunate horse strained towards the cornice of grass, cleared it with a desperate surge, and began making his way inland at a canter.
His duties at an end, Calfhill turned and began bumping the boat back into the water. He was in a hurry because in that same auberge in Calais he had been approached by a second man besides Fontenay, and now six tods of the finest Cotswold wool were waiting for him in a cove two miles further down the coast. He would be met among the reeds by three men and paid five pistoles to smuggle the wool to the French coast, where he would be paid five more. But now as the keel scraped across the beach he heard a sound behind him. Turning, he saw that one of the three riders was still on the beach, his horse facing the water.
'Yes?' Calfhill straightened and took a few clattering steps over the shingle. 'Forgot something, have you?'
The black-clad rider said nothing. He merely tugged at the reins and swung his horse round towards the hill. Almost as an afterthought, he twisted in his saddle and with a flash of gold brocade produced from the folds of his cloak a firelock pistol.
Calfhill gaped as if at a cunning trick, then took a step backwards. 'What the devil-?'
The man discharged the weapon without ceremony. There was a surprisingly soft explosion and a small puff of smoke. The lead ball struck Calfhill square in the chest. He staggered backwards like a clumsy dancer, then lowered his head and blinked curiously at the wound, from which blood spurted as if from the bung-hole of a wine cask. He raised his hands to staunch it, but the front of his doublet had already darkened a
nd his face was as white as a goose. His mouth opened and closed as if forming one last outraged objection. It never came, for with a smooth, almost balletic manoeuvre he executed a half turn and crumpled into the reeds at the water's edge.
The man tucked the pistol away and, five minutes later, reached his two companions, who were waiting for him beyond the crest of the rise. For a mile the three of them followed one of the sheep tracks on the downlands. Then they swung inland on to a narrow post-road. By this time a half-dozen sand crabs were scuttling across the shingle towards Calfhill's body, over which the tallest osiers were bent like mourners. His corpse would not be discovered for several more days, by which time the trio of riders had entered the gates of London.
Chapter Three
The only way to reach Crampton Magna in those days was to follow the road from London to Plymouth as far as Shaftesbury and then turn south along an ill-defined and seldom-used network of trackways leading towards the distant coast. On its way to Dorchester, one of the most rustic of these passed round the edge of a village of ten or twelve timber-built houses with sooty, moss-dripping thatches, all crouched in a snug fold of low hills. Crampton Magna-for this, at last, was it-also contained a decrepit mill with broken sluices, a single inn, a church with an octagonal spire, and a shrunken, peat-coloured stream that was forded in one spot and crossed in another, some hundred yards below, by a narrow stone bridge.
The sun was declining into the hills when the coach in which I was travelling came in sight of the village and then scraped and jostled across the bridge. Five days had passed since I received my summons. I leaned through the open door-window and looked back at the houses and church. There was a faint smell of woodsmoke on the air, but in the failing light and stretching umber shadows the village appeared unnaturally empty. All day the laneways from Shaftesbury had been deserted except for the occasional herd of black-faced sheep, and I felt by now as if I had arrived on the verge of a desolate precipice.
'Have we much further to go before Pontifex Hall?'
My driver, Phineas Greenleaf, emitted the same low, bovine grunt which had greeted most of my enquiries. I wondered for the dozenth time if he was deaf. He was an old man, lethargic of movement and lugubrious of manner. As we rode I found myself staring not at the passing countryside but, rather, the wen on his neck and the withered left arm that protruded from its foreshortened coat-sleeve. Three days earlier he had been waiting for me, as promised, at the Three Pigeons in High Holborn. The coach had been by far the most impressive vehicle in the tavern's stable-yard, a commodious four-seater with a covered box-seat and a lacquered exterior in which I could see my undulant reflection. A fussy coat of arms was painted on the door. I had been forced to revise my impression of the impecuniosity of my prospective hostess.
'Am I to see Lady Marchamont?' I had asked Greenleaf as we cleared the stable-yard's narrow coachway. I received his noncommittal grunt in reply but, undaunted for the moment, ventured another question: 'Does Lady Marchamont wish to buy some of my books?'
This enquiry had met with better luck. 'Buy your books? No, sir,' he said after a pause, squinting fiercely at the road ahead. His head was thrust forward beneath his shoulders, giving him the appearance of a vulture. 'I should think Lady Marchamont has quite enough books already.'
'So she wishes to sell her books, then?'
'Sell her books?' There was another baffled, ruminative pause. His frown deepened the wrinkles cut like cuneiforms across his brow and cheeks. He removed his hat, a low-crowned beaver, and wiped at his brow, exposing a naked skull that was spotted like a quail's egg. At length, replacing the hat with his shrunken child's hand, he allowed himself a grave chuckle. 'I shouldn't imagine so, sir. Lady Marchamont is most fond of her books.'
That was more or less the extent of our conversation for the next three days. Further questions were either ignored or else answered with the customary grunt. His only other articulations proved to be the sepulchral snores that hindered my sleep on our first night in Bagshot and our second in Shaftesbury.
Our progress had been maddeningly slow. I was a creature of the city-of its smoke and speed, its pushing crowds and whirling iron wheels-and so our leisurely advance through the countryside, across its vacant heaths and through its tiny, nameless villages, was almost more than I could bear. But the saturnine Greenleaf was in no hurry. For mile after mile he sat erect in the box-seat with the reins loose in his hands and the whip dangling between his knees like an angler's rod above a trout stream. And now, after Crampton Magna, the trackway deteriorated badly. The last leg of our journey, though only a mile or two, lasted another hour. No one, it seemed, had passed this way in years. In places the road was overcome by vegetation and all but disappeared; in others the left rut stood at a greater height than the right, or vice versa, or both were littered with sizeable stones. The branches of unpruned trees scored the coach's top, unkempt hedges of beech and quickthorn its doors. We were in constant danger of tipping over. But at long last, after the coach squeezed across another stone bridge, Greenleaf pulled at the reins and laid aside his whip.
'Pontifex Hall,' he growled as if to himself.
I thrust my head through the window and was blinded for a second by the lurid brushstrokes painted across the low shoulder of the sky. At first I saw nothing but a monumental arch and, at its top, a keystone upon which, squinting, I could read a few letters of an inscription: L T E A S RI T M N T.
I raised my right hand to shield my eyes from the sun. Greenleaf clucked his tongue at the horses, who lowered their heads and advanced wearily, tails switching, hoofs crunching the gravel that, a few yards before, had replaced the dirt lane. The carved writing-cast in shadow, pleached with ivy and spotted mustard-and-black with moss-was still illegible but for a few letters: L TTE A S RIPT M NET.
One of the horses snorted and drifted a step sideways, as if refusing the gate, then reared in its traces. Greenleaf jerked at the reins and shouted opprobriously. An enormous house hove suddenly into view as we entered the shadow of the arch. I dropped my hand and thrust my head further through the quarter-light.
For the past few days I had been trying to form a mental picture of Pontifex Hall, but none of my fantasies measured up to the building framed like a painting between the heavy piers of the arch. It was set on a long green sward split by an ochre sweep of carriageway flanked on either side by a row of lime trees. The sward dipped and rose until it reached an enormous façade of rubbed brickwork divided by four giant pilasters and a symmetrical arrangement of eight windows. Above, the low sun picked out a brass weathercock and six circular chimney shafts.
The coach shunted forward a few more paces, traces jingling. As promptly as it appeared, the vision now transformed itself. The sun, all but lost behind the hipped roof, suddenly cast the scene in a different light. The sward, I now saw, was rank and overgrown, pitted here and there, like the carriageway, with old excavations and heaped with pyramids of earth. Many of the lime trees were diseased and leafless, while others had even been reduced to short stumps. The house, whose long shadow stretched towards us, fared no better. Its façade was pockmarked, its mullions splintered, its dripstones snapped off. Some broken window-panes had been replaced in makeshift fashion by straw and strips of cloth; one of them had even been invaded by a thick stem of ivy. A broken sundial, a dry fountain, a stagnant pond, a rank parterre-all completed the portrait of ruin. The weathercock as we trotted forward flashed a minatory glint. My anticipation, roused a moment before, drained abruptly away.
One of the horses whinnied again and shied sideways. Greenleaf jerked the rein sharply and uttered another guttural command. Two more halting steps on the gravelled carriageway; then we were swallowed by the arch. At the last second before it closed over our heads I glanced upwards to the wedge-shaped voussoirs and, above them, the keystone: LITTERA SCRIPTA MANET.
***
Ten minutes later I found myself standing in the middle of an enormous chamber whose only light fell th
rough a single broken window giving on to the scrubby parterre, which in turn gave on to the fractured fountain and sundial.
'If you would be good enough to wait here, sir,' said Greenleaf.
His bootfalls resounded through the cavernous building, up a creaking flight of stairs, then across a floor above my head. I thought I heard the intonation of voices and another, lighter step.
A moment passed. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the dim light. There seemed to be no place to sit. I wondered if I was being slighted or if this strange hospitality-being left alone in a darkened room-was simply the way of noble folk. I had already decided from its dilapidated condition that Pontifex Hall was one of those unfortunate estates overrun by Cromwell's army during the Civil Wars. I had no love of Cromwell and the Puritans-a gang of iconoclasts and book-burners. But I had no special love of our puffed-up noblemen either, so I had been quietly amused by accounts in our newssheets of rampaging London apprentices showering these grand old homes with cannon-balls and grape-shot, then turning their pampered inhabitants into the fields before liberating the wine from their cellars and the gold leaf from the doors of their carriages. The once-stately Pontifex Hall must, I supposed, have suffered this undignified fate along with so many others.
A board creaked under my boot as I turned round. Then the toe of my crippled foot struck something. I looked down and saw a thick folio spreadeagled below me, its pages fluttering in the light breeze from the broken window. Beside it, in similar states of disarray, lay a quadrant, a small telescope in a corroded case, and several other instruments of less discernible function. Scattered among them, badly creased, corners furling, were a half-dozen old maps. In the poor light their coastlines and speculative outlines of continents were unrecognisable.
