Ex Libris

by Ross King

  Before slipping the page back beneath the floorboards I had studied it for a moment, holding it to the light of the candle, looking first at the watermark, then at the close-set lines, the slight impression of the mould-mesh criss-crossing the surface. I thought of Thimbleby's disquisition and wondered what exactly this particular page had been made from. Fishnet? The pages of a book or pamphlet whose ink had been effaced? The winding-sheet from some ancient skeleton? I thought how odd it was that each page, no matter how flawlessly white, no matter what its inscription or watermark, always harboured another text, another identity, beneath its surface, palimpsested and invisible, like a secret ink that can be seen only when rubbed with magic dust or exposed to flame. But what dust or flame, I wondered, might bring Sir Ambrose's message back to the surface, back to life?

  I had tucked the cipher between the scantlings, beside another piece of paper, one also, it seemed, of inferior quality and inscribed with a worn goose quill. This was the letter from Alethea, dated five days ago, which Monk had retrieved from the General Letter Office. What secret message, I wondered, was occulted beneath its blotchy ink, behind the politely cryptic words that rose from the page in Lady Marchamont's old-fashioned scrawl?

  I had read it through once again, feeling a turmoil in my belly and something insistent and unfamiliar nudging and squirming behind my breastbone.

  My good Sir:

  Please forgive the intrusion of another letter. I wonder if you might meet me in a week's time, on the 21st of July, at six o'clock in the evening? You may call for me in London, at Pulteney House, on the north side of Lincoln's Inn Fields. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that matters of some importance have arisen.

  I shall look forward to your company. I fear the usual discretion must still apply.

  Your most obliging servant,

  Alethea

  The usual discretions, I thought mirthlessly as, lying in bed an hour later, I remembered the shellac in which her seal-or a counterfeit of it-had been impressed. Alethea was, it seemed, still no more discreet as far as the Post Office was concerned: a puzzling bout of laxity, I thought, in someone otherwise obsessed with secrecy. At first I didn't take her warning too seriously. I even convinced myself, after the first couple of readings, that perhaps I was wrong and the letter had not been opened after all. But as I travelled back and forth from Shadwell the next day I had the impression-the vaguest impression-that I was being followed. Or perhaps only watched. There was nothing specific, only a series of peculiar incidents that I might not have noticed were it not for the letter, which, like so many things these days, had set my nerves on edge. The sculler that pushed off from the quay a bare moment after mine. The image of the figure behind me reflected in the door-window as Thimbleby and I pushed into the Old Ship to eat our dinner. The narrowed pair of eyes watching me through the slim gap in a shelf as I browsed the aisles of a bookshop later that afternoon on the Southwark end of London Bridge. Even Nonsuch House seemed somehow altered. People I failed to recognise entered and, after a few cursory glances along the shelves, departed without a purchase; others simply peered through the window before slipping back into the crowds. And as I stepped outside to raise my awning a man across the carriageway started almost guiltily to life, then sauntered away.

  No, no, it was nothing. Nothing at all. Or so I had told myself, sternly, as I set out the next morning for Alsatia. But why, then, was I craning my neck every minute to peer behind us, fearing what I might see framed for a second in the tiny oval of the hack's quarter-light?

  But nothing appeared in the window, and I had forgotten my mysterious pursuers-indeed, I had forgotten almost everything else, including Alethea and her 'matters of some importance'-as I pushed past the waiter and stepped through the door of the Golden Horn.

  ***

  At nine o'clock precisely Dr. Samuel Pickvance stepped forward to a table, rapped its surface sharply with a mallet and cleared his throat for silence. He was in perhaps the fortieth year of his age, a tall, emaciated man with a widow's peak, a conspicuous nose and thin, ascetic lips that seemed to be curled in a moue of contempt. He loomed before us on a raised platform, which he occupied like a magistrate on his bench, or perhaps more like a priest at the altar, wielding his mallet like a sanctus bell or aspergillum. He rapped it a second time, even more sharply, and the room at last fell silent. The ritual was about to begin.

  I had slipped into one of the last available seats, in the back row, nearest the door. The Golden Horn was still dark except for its single rush-candle and a smoke-roiling beam of sunlight that fell obliquely across the room like a toppled girder. But Pickvance now produced a lantern, which he lit ceremoniously with a taper produced by his assistant, a young man with reddish hair. Now the row of heads in front of me sharpened into detail, including that of the automaton in the corner. It grinned back at me, smug and clever.

  Entering the room a few minutes earlier I had discovered myself in the midst of one of those milling crowds so loved by pickpockets. Most of the assembly had been claiming the forty-odd chairs that were arranged in rows before the platform, on which stood the table and, a minute later, Pickvance and his altar-boy. I had been expecting to recognise someone-one of my clients, perhaps, or another bookseller or two. But I didn't recognise a soul, not even when the lantern was lit. And I was taken aback by what I saw. Pickvance's audience-for so we seemed-did not look especially different from the patrons I had seen here two nights before; indeed, it could have been the same group, for all I could tell. Most were dressed in leather breeches and rucked linen, with broken felt hats jammed low on their brows; a few others wore the black homespun and grim expressions of Quakers or Anabaptists. Curiously enough, a few Cavaliers were also present among them, looking prosperous and wicked, smirking to themselves or winking lewdly at one another, legs crossed, V-shaped beards neatly cultivated. What mysterious enterprise could possibly have banded together such an ill-assorted company?

  But when the auction commenced and the first of the lots were cried, I realised why I failed to recognise anyone-why I hadn't seen any of them in my shop and why there were no booksellers among them, or at least none of the reputable booksellers I knew. Dr. Pickvance wasn't so much a priest or a magistrate, I decided, as a mountebank perched at his stall in Bartholomew Fair, hoodwinking a gullible audience. He was either an ignoramus or a cheat, because even from the back of the room I could see that he was embellishing and inflating each of the volumes which his assistant, introduced as Mr. Skipper, held up for viewing. It was an outrage. Books bound in ordinary buckram or even plain canvas were called 'the finest doublure' or 'most excellent crushed levant', while everything else on show was 'hand-tooled', 'repoussé', 'opulent' and 'exquisite', with 'Aldine' this and 'Plantinus' that, bound specially by 'the late King Charles's binder' or even 'the incomparable Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding'.

  I was tempted to stand up and expose the grotesque canard, but everyone else seemed to have fallen under Pickvance's spell. He often started bids at a penny or two, but they quickly rose to a shilling, then to a pound, and within a minute or two the mallet would be resounding and our perverse auctioneer shouting in triumph: 'Sold! For thirty shillings! To the gentleman in the second row!'

  So appalled was I by this hoax that two or three lots had been sold before I realised what type of volume was being offered. The first ones had been bound collections of political or religious tracts, including pamphlets by such persecuted sects as the Ranters, the Quakers and, most numerous of all, the Bunhill Brethren-works, in other words, that would have run foul of the Blasphemy Act passed by Parliament ten years earlier. No respectable dealer would touch them for this very reason, at least no dealer who wished to remain in business for long, because the Secretary of State regularly sent his searchers into the shops to root out and burn whatever blasphemous or seditious books and pamphlets they might lay their hands on.

  So this was the reason, I supposed, why Dr. Pickvance held his auction in the Gold
en Horn-to escape the eyes of the searchers. For obviously none of his wares had been licensed by the Secretary of State. Yet this lack of sanction failed to deter the bidding one bit. I watched in amazement as the black-garbed sectarians competed for the pamphlets against a couple of smirking, rosecake-scented Cavaliers who appeared to regard even the most lubricious of the Bunhill Brethren's exhortations as some sort of joke. But I supposed the searchers were no more likely to enter Alsatia than were the bailiffs and catchpoles, so we were safe-if that was the word-from the graspings of the law.

  Soon the lots grew more shocking, the bidding even fiercer. After thirty minutes the lots began to include hastily executed woodcuts and engraved prints depicting in the most vivid detail unchaste performances by masters with their kitchen-maids, or between ladies and their coachmen and gardeners. Others consisted of slim volumes of decidedly amateur verse describing a series of similar partnerships, along with prose volumes of specious medical authority illustrating inventive but surely impossible sexual postures that guaranteed, to the acrobats who attempted them, delights of a barely credible measure.

  As each lot was cried, Dr. Pickvance or Mr. Skipper would wave the prints about for general observation, like frantic puppet-masters. Or else Pickvance would read aloud passages from the books in his high-pitched voice, eyes going glassy as he did so, beads of sweat standing out on his brow as Mr. Skipper stood meekly aside, his own face turning a deep crimson.

  I had seen and heard enough. There could be nothing of relevance to my quest in these crude pages. The next ten or twelve lots dealt with the sort of occult literature I had seen at Pontifex Hall, but these were in much poorer repair and bound in inferior leather, mostly calfskin, and the ex-libris of Sir Ambrose Plessington would not, I thought, be found among them. I prepared to leave. But no sooner had I scraped my chair and risen halfway to my feet than I heard Pickvance crying a new lot, one similar, it seemed, to the previous couple of dozen.

  'Gentlemen! You see before you Lot 66,' he called in his hectoring cadence, 'from the famous collection of Anton Schwarz von Steiner!'

  I started at the name, which I knew I had heard before. I watched the volume flourish in Pickvance's hand, whose fingers looked strangely clawed, as if the digits were malformed. Then I remembered. I had been ascending from the crypt at Pontifex Hall, with Alethea, two steps ahead of me, describing Sir Ambrose's exploits, how he once negotiated for the Holy Roman Emperor the purchase of the entire library of an Austrian nobleman, a renowned collector of occult literature named-I was certain-von Steiner.

  Bids on Lot 66 had started at ten shillings. Two men in particular were bidding against each other: one of them in the front row, the other two or three seats to my left. Pickvance was soliciting higher and higher offers. Twenty shillings… thirty… thirty-five…

  My spit had dried up and I felt a shiver creep up my backbone like a bead of mercury. I squinted hard at the volume, which Mr. Skipper held aloft as he paraded up and down the platform. What were the chances, given Pickvance's appalling record so far, that it had actually been part of the Schwarz collection, much less in the Emperor's library? But a link, however tenuous, had been forged, something that might connect Sir Ambrose Plessington to the Golden Horn, or at least to Dr. Samuel Pickvance.

  I leaned forward in my chair and licked my lips. The room seemed to have gone impossibly silent. The man in my row had ceased bidding. Pickvance raised his mallet.

  'Thirty-five shillings, going once… going twice…'

  ***

  By the time the last of the three hundred lots were sold the bells of St. Bride's had rung four o'clock. I stumbled outside, blinking and squinting in the brilliant sunlight, bumped and pushed on the tide of the departing auction-goers, with whom I now felt, after so many hours together, an unwelcome kinship. To escape them I walked down to the Fleet and stood for a few moments on the bank, watching the water flex and gurgle as the tide pooled slowly inwards. A slick of oil shivered and coalesced on the surface, a perfect spectrum of colour. Then, as the voices finally subsided behind me, I reached into my coat-tails.

  Lot 66 was, by the standards of this particular auction, a rather distinguished volume: actual morocco with strong stitching, its rag-paper pages unscathed by either damp or book-lice. It proved to be an edition of Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim's Magische Werke published in Cologne in 1601 and edited by someone named Manfred Schloessinger. I knew little about the work other than that it was a translation into German of De occulta philosophia, a book of spells in which one finds, among other things, the first ever reference to the word 'abracadabra'. It had cost me almost five pounds, which was far too much, of course. I wouldn't be able to sell it for even two pounds, let alone five. But what interested me wasn't the title or the author but the ex-libris pasted to the inside cover. It incorporated a coat of arms, a motto-'Spe Expecto'-and a name engraved beneath in a heavy Gothic script: Anton Schwarz von Steiner.

  Of course, the ex-libris may not have been authentic. A bookseller learned to distrust these little tokens of identity. One cannot judge a book either by its cover, as the saying goes, or by its ex-libris. This one, for example, might have been soaked off another book-one that had belonged to von Steiner-and then pasted on to the inside cover of an otherwise undistinguished copy of Agrippa's Magische Werke. Unscrupulous booksellers had been known to resort to such tactics in order to increase the value of a book-something I would not have put past Pickvance. Or else the bookplate might not have been von Steiner's, but a forgery instead. And if this was the case, I wouldn't recognise the fraud unless and until I saw a true example of von Steiner's ex-libris, which didn't seem likely in the near future.

  On the other hand, I told myself, it was well known how the contents of the Imperial Library in Prague had been pillaged and dispersed during the Thirty Years War. What was missed by the soldiers looting Prague Castle at the start of the war had been scooped up by Queen Christina of Sweden as it ended three decades later. So it was possible that the ex-libris was authentic and that the volume had found its way to England. It could have been brought over by Sir Ambrose, who would have been acquainted with it through his dealings with the Holy Roman Emperor. Possibly the Englishman had been unscrupulous in his dealings with Rudolf and had kept certain volumes for his own private collection, which in time must almost have rivalled the Emperor's own. But if this was the case, why was the volume not at Pontifex Hall? Why did it not show his ex-libris on the front pastedown? And if it had been pillaged or lost like many of the others, why had Alethea made no mention of it?

  As I closed the hide cover, I remembered from somewhere that Agrippa, the so-called 'Prince of Magicians', a friend of both Erasmus and Melancthon, a secretary to the Emperor Maximilian and a physician and astrologer at the court of François I, was said to be the foremost authority in Europe on the Hermetic writings. Even so, the link between his Magische Werke and the Hermetic parchment stolen from Pontifex Hall promised to be a long and tortuous one. Authentic Schwarziana or not, the volume might have no connection whatsoever with either Sir Ambrose or his missing parchment. Had I merely wasted five pounds and an entire day's work?

  Perhaps not. I fished in my pocket for the card Pickvance had given me after I had threaded my way to the front of the room to collect my prize. Up close, the auctioneer had been shorter and looked much older. Deep creases criss-crossed his consumptive face, and the whites of his eyes-or, rather, their yellows-were filigreed with red. His long fingers were, as I had noticed, strangely crooked, as if arthritic or even, perhaps, broken by a pilliwinks. I wondered if he had been tortured by one of Cromwell's Secretaries of State, or if his hands had merely been caught in a falling sash-window. As I accepted the copy of Agrippa from these gruesome claws I found myself bold enough to ask who had put the volume up for auction.

  'I might be interested in other texts of a similar provenance,' I told him in a low tone. 'Ones from von Steiner's collection.'

  Pickvance had seemed startled by
the question. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that the volume might have been stolen: yet another reason why he chose to auction his wares in the Golden Horn. Possibly his inventory-those lots that weren't forged-consisted entirely of booty from the libraries of Royalist estates that, like Pontifex Hall, had been pillaged or confiscated. His reply did nothing to alleviate my suspicions. He shrugged and told me that he was 'not at liberty to divulge' his sources. His emaciated face had stretched into an unwholesome grin.

  'Trade secrets, after all.'

  I caught him by the coat-sleeve as he was turning away to attend to someone else. I suspected the jangle of a few gold sovereigns could easily put paid to what few scruples or discretions he might possess, so I told him in the same hushed tone that my client would be willing to pay a great deal-much more than five pounds-for the right volume. He had paused at that, then turned slowly to face me. For a second I wondered whether I was doing the right thing… and whether Pickvance was anything more than a thief or a charlatan. Whatever, he seemed to set aside his own reservations at once and rise eagerly to the bait.

  'Oh, I dare say. Oh, it's possible, yes, that I might have something in that line.' His tone was more respectful now. He was probably inventing plans for more 'Schwarziana' as he spoke, more forged texts. 'Of course, I would have to check my catalogues. But, yes, yes, yes, I may well have-'

  Now it had been my turn to leap to the bait. 'You keep catalogues? Records of your sales?'

  He seemed insulted by the question. 'Why, yes. Of course I do.'

  'Yes, of course.' I pressed on, polite and earnest as ever. Would it be possible, I wonder, for me to consult-'