Ex Libris

by Ross King

  I stopped beside a grave to peer at the enormous structure rising above the screen of yew trees. Remembering the patent for Sir Ambrose's Orinoco expedition as well as the scrap of canvas in the Golden Horn, the supposed main topsail of the Britomart, I wondered if I should return the following day to make some enquiries. Perhaps the log for the Philip Sidney still existed, or possibly there was someone in the Navy Office who could tell me about his involvement with Sir Walter Raleigh's voyage to Guiana. I wondered idly if it was possible that a connection existed, however tenuous, between Raleigh's voyage and The Labyrinth of the World. After all, Alethea claimed that Monboddo had been the artistic agent for the Duke of Buckingham, and I knew that Buckingham, the Lord High Admiral, had supported Raleigh's enterprise in Guiana. I also remembered that the other books missing from Pontifex Hall-one of which had been Raleigh's Discoverie of the large, rich, and beautifull Empire of Guiana-all dealt in one way or another with the exploration of Spanish America. Or was I clutching at straws?

  Of course, I already knew about Raleigh's ill-starred expedition. As an apprentice in Mr. Smallpace's shop I had gobbled up accounts of the voyages of Raleigh and Drake as if they were adventure stories. I still stocked a number of books about Raleigh's Orinoco expedition, including first-hand narratives written by men who had sailed in the Destiny or in the other ships in the fleet. I had sifted quickly through them in the days after my return from Pontifex Hall, though none mentioned either the Philip Sidney or Sir Ambrose Plessington.

  But what a story Raleigh's voyage makes! A daring sea adventurer spends thirteen years in gaol for conspiring against a crafty old king, who then releases him on condition that he fills the ever-dwindling royal coffers by finding a mythical gold mine across the ocean, thousands of miles distant in the middle of an ill-explored land filled with enemy soldiers. It might have come from the tongue of Homer or the pen of Shakespeare-the flawed hero, the treacherous king, the slippery advisers, the impossible task, the tragic death, all mingled into a wintry world of treachery and greed. I used to think I could glimpse, in Raleigh, the after-image of Jason as he is sent by the usurper Pelias to recover the Golden Fleece, or Bellerophon when he journeys to Lycia to fight the Chimaera after angering the treacherous Proetus-Bellerophon who, like Raleigh with his fatal charter, bears a warrant demanding his death. Who says we no longer live in an age of heroes?

  The main events of Raleigh's sad tale are known well enough. He sailed from London with his fleet in April 1617, leaving behind squabbling factions and powerful enemies. His scheme was supported by King James's new favourite, Sir George Villiers-later to become the Duke of Buckingham-as well as the anti-Spanish faction at court, the so-called War Party led by the Earl of Pembroke and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Pembroke and the Archbishop had thrust forward young Villiers to topple the reigning favourite, Somerset, and to counter the pro-Spanish faction supporting him. Yet not even Villiers's blandishments could tempt the King to forsake his pro-Spanish policy. So while Raleigh's instructions were to locate the gold mine, his charter also stipulated that he must not attack any Spanish ships or settlements. If he violated these conditions, the Spanish ambassador in London, Count Gondomar-the most powerful of his enemies-would claim his head, as provided for in the charter.

  Of course, things immediately went wrong. Two days into the voyage, while Land's End was still in sight, one of the fourteen ships sank in a gale, taking with her a crew of sixty men. When the fleet reached the mouth of the Orinoco, eight miserable months later, after storms and scurvy, Raleigh was too ill to continue and remained with the Destiny in Trinidad. It was then the dry season, a time when the level of the Orinoco falls and navigation becomes more hazardous even than usual. But Raleigh could not wait, and five ships were chosen to ascend the river. It was thought that the mine would be found hundreds of miles inland, near the elusive El Dorado, 'the Golden One', a city that was said to stand in the middle of a lake. The legend of this city and its unfathomable riches had been repeated by all of the Spanish chroniclers, and for seventy years the conquistadores, those knights-errant of the jungle, had navigated the Orinoco and its tributaries in search of it. But neither El Dorado nor its mines of gold had ever been seen except, supposedly, by a man named Juan Martín de Albujar, a fugitive from Maraver de Silva's 1566 expedition, an expedition for which, unusually, no chronicle exists.

  Nor was the mine discovered by Raleigh's men. Instead, the fleet blundered upon the humbler town of San Tomás, a Spanish garrison of a hundred bamboo huts, a mud-walled church and a couple of rusty cannons, all clinging to the bank of the Orinoco. Then, disaster struck. Shots were exchanged, men died, the quest was abandoned, the fleet sailed into the Boca de la Sierpe-the 'serpent's mouth'-and rapidly dispersed. Raleigh and his men sailed home in disgrace. Raleigh feigned illness, then madness, then attempted to escape to France. But he was captured and thrown back inside his old rooms in the Bloody Tower. An inquiry into the disastrous affair was undertaken by Sir Francis Bacon. In October 1618, at the behest of Gondomar, Raleigh was beheaded. The official reason was treason against King James.

  But I was uncertain how Sir Ambrose Plessington fitted into this tragic fable. Had the Philip Sidney been one of the ships in Raleigh's doomed fleet? If so, what were the connections between The Labyrinth of the World, Henry Monboddo and a long-ago voyage into the Guianan jungle?

  I squinted at the Navy Office for a while longer, doubtful, all of a sudden, that it would hold an answer. Then I turned round and made my way to the spot where the second mourner had stood. It was a grave with a tiny granite pillar under the sprawling marquee of a cypress whose branches overhung Seething Lane. I had been expecting a fresh mound of earth, strewn with bouquets of flowers, but the stone was cracked, the grave untended and the inscription all but unreadable. A root of the cypress was erupting through the soil, looking eerily like a protrudent knee. I bent warily forward and strained my eyes. The stone seemed to commemorate an infant named Smethwick-the first name was illegible-who had died in the third quarter of the last century. It seemed unlikely that anyone could still be mourning the child, so I decided I was mistaken about the location of the grave-and, no doubt, about the mourner's attentions as well. Besides, had I not been behaving suspiciously, slipping into the churchyard at dusk and then lurching about like a ghoul? All sorts of dreadful things happened in churchyards in those days. He probably took me for a 'resurrection man', one of those grave-robbers who excavates fresh corpses to sell to London's apprentice barber-surgeons and medical students. At least, that was the reassurance I made to myself as I began walking back towards the balefully staring skulls, resisting the urge to run and feeling the pair of talons sinking ever deeper into the quivering flesh of my back.

  ***

  I returned home on foot. Later I would wonder what might have happened if I had hired a hack and arrived back at Nonsuch House five minutes earlier. But there were no hacks to be found, and so I began stumping homeward, reaching the bridge some twenty minutes later. Everything seemed as usual as I approached Nonsuch House, but outside an apothecary's closed-up shop I spotted Monk in the middle of the carriageway, reeling towards me, his face dazed and white. Beyond, the green door to Nonsuch Books stood partly open and was hanging lopsidedly in its frame.

  'Mr. Inchbold-!'

  A number of onlookers were grouped about the front of the shop like the audience for a raree-show, poised between walking and standing, murmuring in subdued speculation in the way they do when a cart-horse kicks a stranger's child or drops dead in the street. Monk had staggered towards me and now began clutching at my sleeve and stuttering something unintelligible.

  I pushed past him and tugged sharply on the doorknob. The door teetered downwards, even more awry now, hinges screaming in pain. The top hinges, that is, for the bottom ones were bent and dangled lopsidedly in the splintered frame. The whole thing threatened to come loose in my hand. But I had widened the aperture a few more inches-enough to step inside, my throat cho
king with fear and anger.

  My feet skidded over something, and when my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw how my books-every last one of them, it seemed-had been stripped from the shelves and scattered across every inch of the floor. Hundreds of them lay clustered together in haphazard cairns as if awaiting a bonfire: bindings snapped, covers awkwardly tented or flung open like wings, exposed pages lop-eared and riffling in the light breeze from the destroyed door. There was the smell of dust, hide, fustiness-of old, outworn things whose familiar, agreeable fug had somehow been strengthened as if through decoction, a pervasive but invisible cloud that swirled like cannon smoke above the delicate ruins.

  I righted myself and staggered ankle-deep towards the counter, stumbling about in a full circle, unable to comprehend the compass of this destruction, let alone its purpose. I sank to my knees in the centre of the shop, only vaguely aware of Monk behind me. My precious refuge, my haven from the turmoil of the world-all of it was gone, destroyed. My chest began to heave like a child's. I remember a pair of hands on my shoulders but not whose they were or what happened next.

  Indeed, of the next few hours I remember little: only a kind of dazed underwater progress through the shop, with Monk and I forlornly surveying the damage, picking up books and sorting through them, commiserating over the destruction of a volume or, more rarely, soberly celebrating the unlikely preservation of another. My walnut shelves, I discovered, had also been destroyed-ripped from the walls and flung to the floor, where they lay criss-crossed at rakish angles to one another and splintered like rigging after a tempest. Later I would decide that it must have taken an army to perform such desecrations, but only three men had done it, Monk told me, and it had probably taken them just five minutes. They took to their heels when, after hearing the noise, he crept down the turnpike stair and peered into the shop. They appeared to be looking for something, he said, because they had been snatching each book from the shelf, frantically riffling through it, then tossing it aside before moving on to the next one. But sometimes one of them would stick out an arm and sweep an entire shelf on to the floor, or else rip the shelf itself from its brackets, all without so much as looking at a single one of the books.

  'Scared me good and proper,' he finished, eyes bright and nervous at the recollection, 'and I don't mind tellin' you.'

  'Who do you suppose they were, Monk? The searchers?'

  'The searchers, sir?'

  It was close to midnight by this point. We were sitting at the counter, in our usual positions, master and apprentice, as if these familiar poses might bring back something of the shop's shattered equilibrium. Dozens of half-dismembered books still littered the floor, but we had managed to put up some of the shelves and replace the few of their books that would not require rebinding.

  'The Secretary of State's henchmen,' I prompted him. 'You remember.'

  He looked even more alarmed now. He knew a little about these myrmidons since two years earlier John Thurloe, the Secretary of State at the time, despatched them on their rounds of Little Britain and London Bridge. They paid us a visit only days after a pregnant woman had arrived in Nonsuch Books following what she said was an arduous journey by barge from Oxford. As Monk watched, frightened and incredulous, she gave birth on the counter to triplets-three copies of Sexby's Killing No Murder, a treatise calling for the death of Cromwell. The searchers had come pounding on the door two nights later. Poor Monk had been roused from his bed when a lantern was thrust in his face and a loud voice demanded that he identify himself. He had not forgotten the episode.

  'No… not the searchers,' he replied. 'Foreigners.'

  'Foreigners?'

  'Yes. French. Maybe Turkish. Dark-skinned, they were, sir. The dead spit of pirates, all dressed in black. One of 'em had a gold earring. Another a knife,' he added soberly.

  'Did they say anything?'

  'Not a word.'

  'Did they take anything with them? Any books?'

  'No, sir.' He shook his head. 'Not so I saw.'

  'No. Nothing seems to be missing, does it?' He shook his head again. So far all of the volumes seemed to be accounted for, though the next day I would double-check my catalogue. 'Which way did they go?'

  'Into Southwark. I ran after them, but they was quicker 'n what I am.' He dropped his eyes to the counter. His hands were fidgeting in his lap.

  'I understand. Thank you, Monk,' I told him. 'You did well.'

  I leaned back in the chair, closing my eyes and trying to think. For a moment I almost allowed myself to believe the desecration had nothing to do with anything else that had happened these past few days. Or perhaps they had been searchers after all. Perhaps the new Secretary of State employed Frenchmen to do his dirty work. But what would they have been looking for? Possibly the new King was going to be as troublesome to booksellers as Cromwell. I decided that tomorrow I would put a few questions about in Little Britain and Paternoster Row. Someone else might have had visitors as well.

  I opened my eyes to find Monk watching me closely. I tried to offer a reassuring smile. 'Yes, you did well,' I repeated. 'Very well. But I fear our work tonight is not yet finished.'

  'Oh?'

  I nodded at the door, which was slumped awkwardly on its hinges. The carriageway was visible beyond. Every few minutes a passer-by would peer curiously inside before quickly retracting his head and hurrying away.

  'Tomorrow I shall find us a joiner and a locksmith,' I said. 'But for tonight…'

  I reached into the counter and withdrew a pistol. Monk's eyes widened at the sight. It was an evil-looking weapon, heavy and awkward, a huge firelock I had purchased many years earlier from a blind, one-legged Civil War veteran who had taken to begging outside my shop. I had no idea if the flint and frizzen worked, or even how much priming powder to sprinkle into the pan. The old veteran had given me a lesson, but I had never expected to use the thing and had purchased it purely to relieve his misery.

  'Tonight we shall take shifts guarding the shop,' I told him. 'Just in case someone should be tempted to avail himself of our stock.' I placed the dreadful instrument on the counter between us. 'Or in case our friends should wish to return.'

  Monk's eyes grew even wider at these unpleasant prospects, so I attempted another reassuring smile, which came out as a pained grimace.

  'Go to bed,' I told him gently. 'I shall wake you in two hours.'

  But in the end I sat up the entire night by myself. I started the task of rebinding a few of the books, though every ten minutes I would leave my sewing-frame and creep to the door to peer on to the carriageway for signs of life, ears cocked to catch the sound of stealthy footsteps hurrying away. But there was no one about now except the watchman, an arthritic old fellow who hardly inspired confidence. He was half blind, I noticed. One of his eyes was filmed over like that of a dead fish, while the other rolled at me like that of the severed head as he advised me to repair my door in case I should offer a temptation too powerful for some poor soul to withstand. Then he shambled away with his lantern swinging.

  Only after dawn broke in the east did I abandon my sewing-frame and wake Monk. And only as I trudged upstairs to bed did I allow myself to think about the three black-clad assassins who had murdered Lord Marchamont in Paris. Had they been the same men? It seemed possible-yet it made no sense. If the killers were agents of Henry Monboddo, as Alethea suspected, and if Monboddo now possessed the parchment, as I had discovered, then what could they have been searching for among my shelves? Possibly they were in the employ of someone else, even Cardinal Mazarin himself. I clambered into bed and tried to sleep. There were many things, I told myself, that I had yet to learn.

  I lay on my side for several hours, exhausted but sleepless, staring at the wall, listening to the knocking of the death-watch beetles inside it. Suddenly the familiar sound was menacing and portentous, as if the insects were consuming the beams and supports of the modest life I had built for myself. As if Nonsuch House were about to collapse and tumble me head over heels in
to the current rushing past sixty feet below.

  Chapter Ten

  From the freshes of the Elbe at Cuxhaven the Bellerophon shaped a course westward along the Frisian Islands, past chains of snow-clad saltings and dykes, past sand-spits and moles projecting like ribs into the grey waters of the sea. She sailed in soundings, ten fathoms of water, for almost a full day until, setting a course southwest by south, she left the Dutch coast at dawn on the second day and, putting on more sail, holding a close wind, turned her bows towards England. Captain Quilter, peering through his spyglass, sighted the coast from the catwalk two hours later. All was going to plan. He lowered the glass and returned it to the pocket of his tarpaulin. In eight more hours, if all went well, they would reach the Nore and, riding at anchor, the Albatross.

  But from that point in the voyage nothing would go well. Later, taking stock of the disaster, Captain Quilter would blame not only his own avarice-his greed for the two thousand Reichsthalers-but, even more, the ignorance of his crewmen. Not ignorance of their jobs, because he recruited only the most experienced and capable hands, but the pristine ignorance that bred the worst superstitions in men exposed to the cruelty of the elements. Yes, sailors were a superstitious lot, there was no avoiding the fact. Quilter had seen them at their strange rituals in the Golden Grapes, purchasing gruesome good-luck charms-the cauls of newborn children-from the old crones plying the taverns beside the port. The men believed with some bizarrely misplaced faith that one of these shrivelled membranes (or what Quilter's suspicions told him were in fact the bladders of pigs) would save them from death by drowning. And one day when the Bellerophon was becalmed in Dvina Bay he had caught a furtive party muttering a chant and then tossing a broomstick over the poop-rail, as if an action as petty as this, and not (as every educated man knew) the movement of the stars in the heavens, or the rotation of the earth, or the conjunction of planets, or an eclipse, or the rising of Orion or Arcturus, or a half-dozen other celestial rituals that were beyond the feeble arc of human endeavour, might cause a change in a force as powerful and unpredictable as the wind!