by Ross King
'Were,' she said. 'They were his books. Yes, he assembled the collection.' She paused for a second and regarded me gravely. 'No, Mr. Inchbold, I do not wish to sell them. Most definitely not. Ah,' she said, turning, 'here is Bridget. Shall we withdraw to the dining-room? I think I will be able to offer you a seat in there.'
***
A short time later I was sitting before a duck which Mrs. Winter, the cook-maid, had roasted on a bed of green shallots and served on a large plate. In lieu of a dining-table-another casualty of the wars, evidently-the plate was balanced precariously on my lap. I ate self-consciously, without appetite, aware of the penetrating eyes of my hostess, who sat opposite. For a second her frank gaze had taken in my shrunken and inward-turning foot that looks, I have always thought, like the miserable appendage of some villainous dwarf from a German storybook. I felt myself blush with resentment, but by then Lady Marchamont had already glanced away.
'I must apologise for the wine,' she said as she nodded at Bridget to fill my glass for a third time. 'Once upon a time my father grew his own vines. In the valley.' She gestured vaguely in the direction of one of the broken windows. 'On the slopes above the river, sheltered from the wind. They produced some excellent wines, or so I have been told. I was too young to enjoy them at the time, and the vines have since been uprooted.'
'By the soldiers, I suppose?'
She shook her head. 'No, by a different breed of vandal, a more indigenous one. The villagers.'
'The villagers?' I thought of the eerily empty village through which the coach had passed. 'Crampton Magna?'
'There and elsewhere. Yes.'
I shrugged. 'But why would anyone do that?'
She raised her goblet and gazed thoughtfully into the dark liquid. She had already explained, in the boggling and somewhat gratuitous manner that was becoming familiar, how the goblets were manufactured. Her father had been granted some form of patent for the process, which involved mixing gold and quicksilver in a crucible, then evaporating the quicksilver and gilding the glass with a thin film of the extracted gold. He had owned many patents, she explained. A true Daedalus. Now she seemed to be studying the cypher at the bottom of the cup-an entwined 'AP'-which I had myself already noticed.
'Tell me, Mr. Inchbold,' she began after a pause, 'did you by any chance see the excavations on the lawn and carriageway as you approached Pontifex Hall?'
I nodded, remembering the haphazard trenches and the black hillocks of earth beside them. 'I took them for some sort of earthworks.' She shook her great dark nimbus at me. 'Cannon-fire?'
'Nothing as drastic as that. No siege took place here. The immediate area was deemed unimportant by the armies of either side. Fortunately for us, Mr. Inchbold, or I don't expect we should be having this conversation.'
I resisted the urge to ask her why it was the two of us were having this conversation. I still had no idea why I had been summoned here, or why she was offering me a history of her peculiar and, frankly, inhospitable house. Was this another example of the strange ways of aristocrats? If she did not wish me to appraise or auction her books, then what on earth was my task to be? Surely she had no desire-no need-to purchase any more? It would be bringing owls to Athens. All at once I felt more exhausted than ever.
But it seemed I was not to discover my task soon, for she now launched into an account of the recent history of Pontifex Hall. As I clumsily dismembered the duck, she explained how after the regiment of troops departed, having chopped up the orchard and the furniture for firewood and stripped the wrought-iron railings to make their muskets and cannons, the house stood empty for a number of months. The estate had been placed in the hands of a trust which, authorised by an Act of Parliament in 1651, eventually sold it to the local Member of Parliament, a man named Standfast Osborne.
'Lord Marchamont and I were in France at the time, in exile. I moved back to England some two months ago, when the house was restored to me under the terms of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. Osborne has now been gone for almost a year. Fled to Holland. Quite prudent of him, as he was one of the regicides. When I returned from France I did not expect to be welcomed back to Pontifex Hall, because the people of this area supported the Parliamentarians. Nor was I welcomed. Already the good people of Crampton Magna look upon me, I believe, as a witch.' Her half-smile reappeared as her shoulders flexed in an indifferent shrug. 'Yes, strange as it may sound to you, a Londoner, an educated man, but true none the less. In these parts any woman who can read is fancied for a witch. And a woman who lives by herself, in a ruined house, surrounded by books and scientific instruments, without a husband or father or children to guide or control her… well, that is even worse, is it not?'
She paused, watching me carefully with her intense, close-set eyes, which, in the better light of the dining-room, I saw were a pale grey-blue. I was chewing slowly and awkwardly, a cow with its cud. My foot had been thrust under the chair, out of sight. She turned and motioned for Bridget to fill my cup.
'You may go now,' she said to her when the task was accomplished. Only when the maid's footfalls disappeared, swallowed up by the immense, echoing house, did she continue. 'I experienced great difficulties hiring servants from the area,' she said in a confidential tone. 'That is why I was forced to recruit from among Lord Marchamont's domestics.'
'But why should you have difficulties? Because of Lord Marchamont? Or because of your… politics?'
She shook her head. 'No, because of my father. You may have heard of him-he was famous enough in his day. His name was Sir Ambrose Plessington,' she added after a short pause.
This name, strange as it now seems, then meant nothing to me, nothing at all. But in my recollection the moment now seems accompanied by a ringing silence, a kind of terrible poise in which a long shadow crept forward, darkening the room, throwing its heavy pall slantwise across me. But in fact I only shook my head, wondering to myself how I could not have known of someone capable of amassing such a formidable collection.
'No, I've not heard of him,' I replied. 'Who was he?'
For a moment she said nothing. She was sitting perfectly still, hands folded in her lap. The fish-oil lamp threw her shadow on to the buckling wall behind her. I thought idly of the book on 'sciomancy' in the library and wondered what clues its author might divine in the shifting shadow of Lady Marchamont.
'Drink your wine, Mr. Inchbold,' she said at last. She had leaned forward into the jaundiced light of the lamp, and her eyes were searching my face again, as if looking for signs that I might be trusted. Perhaps I was, at this moment, almost as unfathomable to her as she was to me. 'I have something I wish to show you. Something you may well find of interest.'
In what respect? By now my curiosity was being eclipsed by impatience. But what was there for me to do? I gulped my wine and hastily wiped my hands on my breeches. Then, holding back a half-dozen exasperated questions, I followed her from the dining-room.
Chapter Four
So it was that my first confrontation with Sir Ambrose Plessington took place in a vault or crypt beneath Pontifex Hall.
After leaving the dining-room, we went back down the wide staircase, then took a number of left turns through an interconnecting series of corridors, antechambers and deserted rooms before descending another, much narrower set of steps. Lady Marchamont was holding the fish-oil lamp aloft like a constable of the watch as I flumped along behind her. The inadequate light fell on to a scarred wall across which our shadows loomed in fantastic, threatening postures. Our feet scuffed the steps that proceeded downwards into what looked like some sort of undercroft. Cobwebs tickled my scalp and lips. I brushed them aside and then hastily placed my handkerchief to my mouth and nose. With every step the stink of decay seemed to increase twofold. Lady Marchamont, however, appeared as oblivious of the stench as of the cold and darkness.
'The pantry, the buttery,' she was saying, 'all were down here, along with the footmen's chambers. We had three footmen, I remember. Phineas is the last of them.
He was in my father's service more than forty years ago. It was a godsend that I was able to find him again. Or, rather, that he found me after my return. He is, you understand, very devoted to me…'
As we descended I had been expecting to enter a maze of passageways and chambers reflecting the one above the stairs. But on reaching the bottom at last we found ourselves in a low-ceilinged corridor that ran ahead in a straight line for as far as the lamp's shrunken halo of light extended. We proceeded slowly along it, picking our way over fragments of furniture, the staves of broken casks, and other less identifiable obstructions. The floor didn't seem quite level; we were descending still, proceeding down a gentle slope. Down here the walls dripped, and faint sounds of running water came to us, followed by an acrid smell. The floor seemed to be covered in grit. There was still no end to the passage. Perhaps we were in a labyrinth after all, I thought: some sort of mundus cereris like those the Romans built beneath their cities-all dark vaults and twisting tunnels-in order to converse with the inhabitants of the lower world.
Suddenly Lady Marchamont tapped one of the walls with her gloved knuckles. It reverberated like a kettledrum. 'Copper,' she explained. 'Cromwell's men stored their powder down here, so the walls and door were sheathed with copper. Not exactly the driest place in the house, I shouldn't have thought.'
'Gunpowder?'
At once I knew the identity of the acrid smell and the grit beneath my feet. I began to fret about the lamp, which Lady Marchamont was swinging to and fro with little regard. Its light now illuminated a number of sealed doors and smaller recesses on either side. I shuddered again in the cool dankness, wondering if behind these doors the skulls and shinbones of a hundred Plessingtons were heaped promiscuously together in crumbling ossuaries. We hurried along the corridor, whose terminus-if there was one-was lost in blackness.
At last we reached our destination. Lady Marchamont stopped before one of the doors and, after struggling with a set of keys, forced it open. A pair of rusted hinges creaked portentously.
'Please,' she said, turning to me with a smile, 'do step through, Mr. Inchbold. Inside you will find the mortal remains of Sir Ambrose Plessington.'
'Remains…?' I made to retreat, but it was too late for resistance. Lady Marchamont had my wrist and was tugging me across the threshold.
'There…'
She was pointing to a corner of the tiny room, where a battered oak coffin sat on a low trestle-table. I recoiled, trying to free my arm, but then saw to my relief that her father's 'remains' were textual, not corporeal; for the coffin, whose lid had been propped open, was filled not with bones but rather with piles of documents, great sheaves of which threatened to spill over.
'Everything is here.' Her tone was reverential as she picked her way carefully forward. 'Everything about my father. About Pontifex Hall. Rather, very nearly everything…'
She had hung the lamp on a wall sconce and now knelt before the coffin on a bed of rushes that had been strewn across the dirt before the trestle-table. The coffin, I now saw, was caked with dirt. She began withdrawing the documents one by one, riffling through and then replacing them. The mantle hung over her shoulders like a pair of folded wings. Some sort of archive, I supposed, hanging back in the doorway until she beckoned me forward.
'The estate papers,' she explained. 'The inventories, the indentures, the conveyances.' She might have been delving her gloved hands in a trunk filled with moonstones and amethysts instead of these heaps of yellowed documents. 'It was for these that Standfast Osborne purchased the estate, you see.' Her voice echoed harshly against the bare walls. 'For its muniments. He cared nothing for the house, as you can see all too plainly. But the coffin was hidden safely away. Lord Marchamont saw to that.'
The room was airless and cramped, its walls encrusted with what I took to be deposits of saltpetre. The flame, glowing feebly now, lit generations of cobwebs, all of them thick with dirt. I have been troubled all my life with asthma-the upshot of having my lungs kippered by the coal smoke of London. Now, standing in the doorway to this strange vault, I felt a familiar gurgle beneath my breastbone.
'They were kept here, in this room,' I managed to ask, leaning on my thorn-stick, 'for all those years?'
'Of course not.' Her winged back was still turned to me. 'They would have been found in an hour. No, they were buried in a plot in the churchyard at Crampton Magna. In this coffin. Ingenious, no? Beneath a headstone inscribed with the name of one of the footmen. Here…' She turned, extending a single sheet in her gloved hand. 'This is the order that sealed our fate.'
The paper was of heavy linen, its edges curling and faintly seared. I took it and, tipping it into the light of the lamp and bringing it to within two inches of my nose, saw the impression of a Parliamentary seal and, below, the inscription, slightly faded, in a thick chancery hand:
Be it therefore enacted, That all the Manors, Lands, Tenements and Hereditaments, with every of their Appurtenances whatsoever, of he the said Henry Greatorex, Baron Marchamont, were seized or possessed of, in Possession, Reversion or Remainder, on the 20th day of May, in the year of our Lord 1651, and all rights of entry into the said Manors, Lands, Tenements or Hereditaments…
'The order for the seizure of the estate,' she explained. She handed me another paper, or, rather, a small sheaf. This gathering, tied with a faded and fraying ribbon, was less obviously official and inscribed in a formal secretary hand which, though I didn't know it at the time, was that of Sir Ambrose Plessington himself, who first appeared to me, therefore, between the lines of a lengthy text, a list of his accoutrements: 'An Inventorie taken of all the Cattelse and Chatteles moveable and unmoveable of Ambrose Plessington, Knt, of Pontifex Hall, in the Parish of St. Peter's, valued and prized in the presence of four Bailies…'
I set my stick aside and untied the ribbon. The remainder, six pages in all, inscribed on both sides, consisted of a formidably long list of Sir Ambrose's possessions, of his furniture, paintings, draperies, silver and plate, along with more esoteric items such as telescopes, quadrants, calipers, compasses and several cabinets whose contents-preserved animals, shells and corals, coins, arrowheads, fragments of urns, objets d'art of all kinds, and even two automata-had been enumerated individually. One of the most valuable of all was a 'Kunstschrank' whose surface was inlaid with diamonds and emeralds, though what might have been inside this glittering ark-valued at an astonishing £10,000-the inventory declined to report. The entire contents of the house were valued on the last page at £155,000; an incredible sum that was enormous enough in 1660, and one that in June of 1622, the date of the inventory, must have been well and truly boggling. Not even the treasures of the late King Charles, that great connoisseur, had fetched so high a price when Cromwell stripped them from the royal palaces and then sold them to the ravening princes of Europe.
Lady Marchamont had caught my astonished gaze. 'Of all of these items,' she said in a quiet voice, 'you can see that almost nothing now remains. All were taken from us or were destroyed by the troops. Only this trunk and these papers bear witness to what Pontifex Hall used to be. To everything my father built.'
'But the library…' I had returned to the front of the list and was now scrolling slowly through it for a second time. 'I see no mention of your father's books.'
'No.' She took the paper from me and, after tying the ribbon, replaced it in the coffin. 'This particular inventory does not include the contents of the library. A separate one was compiled for that.' She turned round and, after further riffling, disinterred a larger sheaf. 'Extremely detailed, as you can see. It contains the price paid for every book, along with the bookseller or agent from whom each was purchased. An interesting record, but there's no time to study it now. For the moment…' She set it aside and delved carefully into the coffin, turning over heavy sediments of paper. 'For the moment, Mr. Inchbold, you must read something else. During his lifetime my father received letters patent in a number of countries, from several kings and emperors. But these ones may
be of particular importance.'
Importance to what? What had my presence at Pontifex Hall to do with this foul subterranean vault and its scraps of old paper? With kings and emperors? Lady Marchamont had already turned round and handed me three or four documents. The first was a parchment and at its foot bore in cracked red wax the impression of an enormous seal whose circumference read, in characters that were barely perceptible,
Romanum Imperatores Rudolphus II
Caesarum Maximus Imp: Rex
SALVTI PUBLICAE
I held the paper closer to the light. Above the seal, inscribed in heavy gothic script, were several paragraphs in German, what my limited knowledge of that language told me amounted to a commission to search for books and manuscripts in the regions of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Glatz. It was dated 1610. For a few seconds I rubbed the cockled edge of the document between my finger and thumb, enjoying the furry texture of the membrane, as soft and smooth as a lady's cheek. Then I turned it over, carefully, with a quiet, satisfying crackle, and jabbed with a thumb at the nose-piece of my spectacles.
The next document, dated a year later and impressed with the same seal, was of similar import but extended the commission beyond the Czech lands to include Austria, Styria, Mainz and both the Upper and the Lower Palatinate, as well as-most remarkable of all-the lands of the Ottoman Sultan. The final three pages granted, respectively, a patent of Imperial nobility, a pension of 500 thalers per annum, and a doctorate in philosophy from the Carolinum. This last document was inscribed in Latin and embossed with a coat of arms. I looked up to see Lady Marchamont's eyebrows knit together as if in close attentiveness to my reaction. The light from the lamp spluttered and, to my alarm, nearly extinguished itself.
'It's in Prague.'
