Ex Libris

by Ross King

  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.

  Chapter Four

  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.