Ex Libris

by Ross King

  Yet the events of the past few days had still perplexed me. I could not begin to guess why Crump should have been killed, nor how the various other strands-the break-ins at Nonsuch House, Henry Monboddo and his mysterious client, the Orinoco expedition-were connected to the errant parchment itself, the alpha and omega of the mystery, the Holy Grail that seemed to be receding ever farther beyond my grasp.

  But then suddenly I had realised how I might cut through the Gordian knot after all-how I might get to the bottom of the mystery of Henry Monboddo and Wembish Park… and then, through them, to the identity of whoever lay at the heart of the whole affair. For the villain had not quite covered his tracks. The answer lay not at Wembish Park, I knew, but here in London, in Chancery Lane-in a few lines of text inscribed on a roll of parchment.

  I arrived in the Rolls Chapel that morning, still in disguise, after a fruitless trip to Pulteney House, which had looked dark and deserted. I explained my mission to a clerk seated at a desk by the baptismal font, who informed me with a sneer that what I wanted was impossible, for all of the clerks superintending the Close Rolls were, I must understand, very busy at the minute. No one could requite my desire, he explained, for another few days at least.

  'The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion,' he explained with a shrug of his narrow shoulders.

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'The land settlements,' he said in a tone of derisive hauteur. 'The clerks are researching land entitlements so the estates confiscated by Parliament can be restored to their rightful owners.'

  'But that's why I'm here!'

  'Is it, indeed?' He peered over the edge of his desk, giving me a frank scrutiny from head to toe, quite rightly sceptical, I suppose, that a person of such a humble and even shabby aspect could have any possible connection with an aristocratic estate, confiscated or not. 'Well, you will just have to wait your turn like everyone else.' He nodded at the slumping gallery of Cavaliers. Then slowly his eyes returned to me. 'Unless, that is, of course…'

  The fellow had coughed delicately into his tiny lace-beruffed hand and tossed a furtive glance in the direction of the chancel. With a mental sigh I reached for a shilling. I knew, of course, that greed was essential to a lawyer's craft, but I had not realised that the vice had filtered down to their clerks as well. When the coin was granted only a dubious glance I was forced to add another. Both coins were conjured into thin air. He returned his gaze to the papers on his desk.

  'Be seated over there, please.'

  Then, for a whole hour, nothing. Two suits were heard in the chancel and their plaintiffs dismissed. Clerks and lawyers shuffled to and fro, rootling among the volumes on the pews or in the vestry to my right. The brilliant garden of light crept slowly across the flagstones until it almost reached the toes of my boots, which, as of old, were tapping impatiently at the padded prie-dieu on the floor in front of me. At last I heard my name called and, looking up, saw a clerk, a thin young fellow, standing in the tiny door to the bell-tower.

  'You may see the enrolments now, if you please,' the clerk at the desk informed me. 'Mr. Spicer will show you the way.'

  The climb was a difficult one. There was no hand-rail other than a frayed rope, and so narrow was the stairwell that my shoulder rubbed against the sandstone newel at every step. I twisted round it and ascended in pursuit of the nimble Mr. Spicer, but after a dozen steps I imagined the tons of stone pressing in upon me and felt the same freezing tremors of panic as in my priest-hole a few days earlier. I have always detested enclosed spaces, which remind me, I suppose, of that eternal confinement shortly to claim me. To make matters worse, young Mr. Spicer saw no need for a candle, and so I was forced to wriggle upwards through a musty darkness relieved only by the occasional arrow-slit window.

  Panting heavily, I reached the top at last to find Spicer waiting in a small hexagonal room. I realised at once why he had not lit a candle on the way up, for the room was stacked with sheaves of parchment, some of which had been sewn head to foot and rolled into fat spools several feet in diameter. Scattered about, and so numerous that they took up most of the floor space, were dozens of wooden boxes from which protruded even more parchments, some of them sallowed, others new.

  My eyes flitted over the rolls and boxes, over the parchment tags with their bright seals of wax hanging down like tassels. It was the world of my father the scrivener. But I was intrigued by the sight for a quite different reason, for I knew that the answer to my persecutor's identity would be here among these documents. How many documents had I studied thus far in search of answers? Rate-books, patents, parish registers, auction catalogues, editions of the Corpus hermeticum and tales of Raleigh's voyage-all of which had led me further and further astray. But now at long last I was about to discover the truth. It would be inscribed here, I knew, somewhere among these parchments.

  'Every last will, patent, writ and charter in the country is enrolled here,' Spicer was explaining with some pride as he caught my transfixed gaze. 'These documents are the overflow from the crypt and vestry. In the crypt there are already more than 75,000 parchments of them on something like a thousand rolls.'

  He picked his way to his desk and stooped to scrape open a deep drawer, from which he removed, with an exaggerated grunt, an enormous folio bound in leather. It must have been a good foot thick.

  'I am a busy man,' he sighed, taking his seat, 'as I hope you will appreciate. So if you wouldn't mind…'

  'Yes, yes. Of course. I shall come straight to the business.' I stepped forward, leaning on my stick. 'I'm in search of a title deed.'

  'You and everyone else,' he muttered under his breath. Then with a creak of leather he opened the cover of the cartulary and took up his magnifying lens. 'Very well. A title deed.' He licked his thumb and riffled through the heavy pages. 'What year was it enrolled? The season would be helpful too, if you can. Summer? Autumn?'

  'Ah, well… now there, I fear, is the rub.' I attempted an ingratiating smile. 'I'm not quite certain when the transaction took place.'

  'Is that so. Well, what is the name of the purchaser, might I ask?'

  'Another rub, I fear.' I hoisted my smile a little higher. 'That is precisely what I'm hoping to find, you see-the name of whoever owns the property.'

  'But you have no date of purchase? Not even a rough guess? No? Well then,' he said through pursed, renunciatory lips as I shook my head, 'you have rather put the cart before the ass, if you don't mind me saying so. You must know one or the other, the name or the date. Surely you can understand that.' The enormous cover, held ajar, creaked again and then fell shut with a gentle thud. 'As I say, Mr. Inchbold, I am a busy man.' He was stooped over again, replacing the cartulary in its drawer. 'I trust you can find your own way down the stairs.'

  'No-wait.' I was not going to be dismissed that easily. 'I have a name for you,' I said. 'Two names, if you please.'

  Yet Spicer was unable to find mention in his book of any property in Huntingdonshire belonging to either Sir Richard Overstreet-the first name I had him search for among the tidy columns that ran up and down the rag-paper pages-or Henry Monboddo. However, he eventually discovered in his cartulary a record for a property in the name of someone named not Henry, but Isabella, Monboddo. Almost an hour had passed by this time. I was leaning forward, trying to read upside-down the print that someone, one of Mr. Spicer's predecessors, had inscribed in a neat chancery hand. The house was a jointure, he explained in a bored monotone, settled on Isabella by her husband who was named-yes, yes-Henry Monboddo. He bent forward with his nose pressed to the reading-glass. A freehold estate named Wembish Park.

  'That's it,' I stammered. 'Yes, that's-'

  'The jointure was granted,' he continued as if oblivious, 'in a will made by Henry Monboddo in the year 1630. Since then it has been compounded by Parliament, later confiscated, then restored to its owner under the terms of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion.'

  'Restored to Isabella Monboddo?'

  'That is correct. She is described as the
relict of Henry Monboddo.'

  'The relict? But when did Monboddo die?'

  'These are not parish records, Mr. Inchbold. The cartulary does not tell us such things.'

  'Of course,' I murmured placatingly. I was trying to make sense of the information. Monboddo dead? Did Alethea not know? I leaned forward even further. 'So… Isabella Monboddo is the owner of the estate?'

  'Was the owner. Wembish Park appears to have changed hands since the recent land settlement.'

  He was hunched low over the page now, like a jeweller examining stones of rare quality through his lens. From where I sat I could see the columns shrink and swim beneath it. Then he turned the page with a sharp crackle and, laying the glass aside, looked up for the first time in twenty minutes.

  'Yes,' he said, 'it's been sold. Quite recently, from the looks of it. The deed was enrolled only a few weeks ago. Though of course it may have been registered in the county with the Clerk of the Peace up to a month before that. We're a little behind in our work-'

  'Yes, of course, all of the land settlements…' I was hardly daring to breathe. 'To whom was it sold?'

  'Ah. Well.' He indulged himself with a smile. 'That the cartulary does not tell us.'

  'But the deed?' I could barely contain my urge to wrench the register from his hands and read the entry for myself. 'You say it's been enrolled?'

  'Of course it's been enrolled. It's the law, you understand.'

  'Well, in that case, where is it found?'

  Spicer seemed to ignore the question. He took up his reading-glass and once again hunched his back, applying himself like a laborious schoolboy to the page. After a few seconds he plucked up one of his quills and with elaborate care trimmed its nib and then copied on to a scrap of paper rummaged from one of the drawers a bristling thicket of numerals that, still leaning forward, I was barely able to decipher: CXXXIIIW. DCCLXXVIII. LVIII.

  'There you are,' he said, sliding the cryptic message across the top of the desk towards me with the tip of an index finger. 'This, I believe, is what you wished to learn.'

  I took up the paper and held it by the edges, careful not to smear the ink. I frowned and raised my eyes to Spicer. He was watching me with a complacent smile.

  'What do you mean? What is this?'

  'The crypt, Mr. Inchbold.' The cartulary gave a valedictory flump as its cover was slammed shut. Spicer's smile had disappeared. He replaced the quill in the ink-horn and then slipped the reading-glass into a drawer. 'That is where you'll find what you're seeking. In the crypt.'

  ***

  The sun had shifted to the west windows by the time I picked my way down the narrow staircase and into the nave. The chapel was even emptier now; I could see only a pair of clerks in hushed conference in the chancel. I sculled along the aisle on my thorn-stick, faint from hunger because I had not eaten since the previous day. But there was no time for food. Bracing myself against a pew I swung my club foot over a stool, holding tightly to the slip of paper. Yes, there was too much to do before I could think about my belly.

  The door to the crypt stood at the front of the church, near the chancel beneath which I supposed it extended. It bore the same legend as the one leading to the bell-tower, 'Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum', and creaked open on to a set of steps equally shallow and narrow. There was no light, so far as I could see, except a muted glow at the bottom. I ducked my head beneath the scarred wooden mullion and, taking a deep breath like a diver, began a slow descent.

  I was to be met in the crypt by a clerk named Appleyard who would decipher the paper and locate the deed. But I had already guessed that the numerals referred to the shelf mark of the roll in question. As I descended I could see that the shelves and cases in the catacomb below were all numbered, as were the boxes and the scores of rolls bound with ribbons and crammed on to the shelves. Still, it would have been impossible to locate the roll on my own. As my eyes adjusted to the poor light I saw that the crypt was a vast labyrinth extending far beyond the chancel to encompass the area beneath the nave and then, for all I could tell, Chancery Lane and perhaps even a good part of London as well. Narrow corridors barely two feet in width and overhung by the rolls of parchment-some as big around as saucers, others thin as pipe stems-slithered away into darkness on either side, then divided into other, equally cramped tributaries. It was only because I was short and my belly of modest dimensions that I was able to pick my way along the widest of these passageways towards the thin glow of lamplight and, squatted within it, the tiny desk occupied by Mr. Appleyard. The lamp had been trimmed low and Mr. Appleyard was fast asleep.

  It took a minute or two to rouse him. He was a frail-looking old man with a coronal of white hair over his ears and a bald dome that had yellowed to the colour of the parchments surrounding him. Twice I shook him gently by the shoulder. On the second occasion, he snorted and coughed, then jerked erect with pale eyes ablink.

  'Yes?' His hands were fumbling on the desk. 'What is it? Who's there?'

  I slipped the paper on to the desk and explained that I had been sent from the tower by Mr. Spicer. 'I'm searching for a deed,' I explained. 'My name is Inchbold.'

  'Inchbold…' His hands froze in mid-air above the blotter. Then he paused for a moment, frowning deeply and tapping the tip of his nose with a forefinger as though lost in some private reverie. 'Of the Inchbolds of Pudney Court? In Somersetshire?'

  I was surprised by the question. 'The attachment is a distant one.'

  'Of course. But your attachment to Henry Inchbold, I think, is not so distant. Correct? Your voice no less than your name is very like his.'

  Now I was quite taken aback. 'You remember my father?'

  'Very well indeed. A fine selection of scripts. The ascenders in his court hand were, I recall, most emphatic in their execution.' He shrugged and offered a toothless smile. 'You see, in those days I still enjoyed the pleasures of sight.'

  Only then did I realise that Appleyard with his fumbling hands and blinking gaze was as blind as Homer. I felt my heart slip. Was this some joke on the part of Spicer? How would a blind man-even a man with a memory evidently as prodigious as Appleyard's-lead me through the wanderings of the crypt?

  'But I take it, Mr. Inchbold, that you have not come to discuss your father.'

  'No.'

  'Nor Pudney Court either. Or is that perhaps the deed you seek? I remember it as well, you know. A fine example of the floreate charter hand before the so-called reform of penmanship in the thirteenth century. Reform,' he repeated disdainfully. 'An emasculation, I call it.'

  'No,' I replied, 'not Pudney Court either. A property in Huntingdonshire.'

  'Ah.' His sallowed head was bobbing.

  'A house called Wembish Park. I believe it was recently sold.' I retrieved the slip of paper from the desk. 'Mr. Spicer has given me the shelf mark. Shall I read it to you?'

  The paper was decoded much as I suspected. The parchment would be found on shelf number CXXXIII, which stood in the west wing of the crypt. Hence the W in the code, Appleyard explained. Roll number DCCLXXVIII was one of those on which deeds for the present year had been enrolled. The deed itself would be the fifty-eighth parchment, which meant that it would have been enrolled roughly halfway along, 'so far as I remember, mind'. He was feeling his way through the corridor in front of me as he spoke, ticking off the shelves as he passed them, moving so swiftly that I had some difficulty keeping pace. I was carrying my stick in one hand, and in the other the lantern, which he had advised me not to drop unless I wished to see its flames engulf four hundred years of legal history.

  'Here we are,' he said at last, after burrowing like a mole along a branching series of ever-narrowing aisles. 'Shelf number one-thirty-three. Correct?'

  I held the lantern aloft. Its glow lit the legend inscribed on a yellowed and curling paper fixed to the end of the shelf: CXXXIIIW.

  'Correct,' I replied.

  'Well, then, the rest is up to you, Mr. Inchbold. You are conversant in Latin, I trust?'

 
; 'Of course.'

  'And the law hands? Chancery? Secretary?'

  'Most of them.'

  'Of course. Your father…' He was struggling with the roll, which I helped him lower from where it had been shelved. It was an awkward bundle, surprisingly heavy, and had been fastened with a red ribbon. 'You must read it here. I regret there is no better place. But this corridor and the next should be long enough.'

  'Long enough?'

  'You will have to unroll it, of course. Mind the lantern, though. That is all I ask of you.'

  With that he shuffled away down the corridor, humming to himself and leaving me to squat on the floor, bones cracking, with the curious prize clutched in my arms. As I untied the ribbon-slowly, like someone unwrapping a precious gift-I could hear the subdued thunder of traffic trundling overhead. So the crypt extended under Chancery Lane. Was that how the old clerk found his way through the corridors? By sound? Or had he been gifted, like the blinded Tiresias, with preternatural powers?

  The ribbon came undone, and I slipped it into my pocket for safekeeping. Then, having fixed the tail of the roll against the wall and weighed it down with my thorn-stick, I began carefully to unroll the enormous spool. After a minute I reached the entrance to the corridor, moving on hands and knees, feeling like Theseus crawling through the labyrinth with Ariadne's golden thread unravelling behind him. Then I entered the next corridor, which after a few paces made a dog's-leg at a 120-degree angle. Then the next, dog-legging in the other direction. Shelves crowded to either side of me. The roll grew thinner, its tail longer. What would I discover at its end? A Minotaur? Or a passage out of the labyrinth and into the light of day? The floor declined slightly as I crept forward. 66… 65… 64… 63…