by Ross King
'I was raised in Pontifex Hall,' Alethea was continuing as though oblivious to the dangers, 'and it was from Sir Ambrose that I learned all that I know. We were like Miranda and Prospero on their island, awaiting the tempest that would bring the usurpers to their shore. In time he even told me of the palimpsest and its history. He wanted it destroyed, as I have said, and I would happily have complied. But my husband and then Sir Richard each dissuaded me. The document was to be sold, you see. I would be paid £10,000. Sir Richard was acting as the agent. I had no idea who the buyer was, nor did I care. I wished to be rid of the palimpsest, that was all. I trusted Sir Richard implicitly. We were to be married. The money would have been used to restore the house. We would have lived here together.' She paused for a second. I could hear shouts coming from behind us. 'But now the usurpers have arrived,' she intoned sadly. 'And now I know what I-'
Her last words were lost to me as the wall beside us buckled and more plaster toppled from the ceiling, striking me a glancing blow on the shoulder. I reeled sideways and fell flat for a second time. When I picked myself up, sodden and gasping, I groped for Alethea's hand; but by then she had already disappeared down the corridor. Somewhere at the end of it, in the laboratory, the dozens of glass vials were ringing their alarum.
And now I know what I must do…
Fear gives us wings, they say. But it is also, as Xenophon claims, stronger than love. I must confess that my thoughts were no longer for the books, or even Alethea, but only for myself as I rushed along the corridor a few seconds later. My frantic claudications echoed against the sodden plasterwork until, skidding wildly, I reached not the laboratory but the top of the staircase, which I realised had been my true destination. I hesitated at the sight of it, surprised to have negotiated my way so easily through the maze of corridors. But the marble steps were treacherously slick, and as I began the descent my dizziness returned. From the top step I could see almost the whole of the atrium, the whole dreadful tableau of death and ruin spread before me. The oval looking-glass in the atrium had been knocked over, its cracked face now reflected the gap in the ceiling where the chandelier had broken free. The chandelier itself lay nearby, in the middle of the floor, a mangled bronze bird. Beyond its wreckage I could see Phineas lying on his belly beside the door, his arms flung wide.
There were no more sounds from the laboratory-no ringing vials and no cries for help. For a moment I wondered if I should return for Alethea, but then, gripping the banister, I continued my cautious descent. I was not prepared to die, I told myself, for the sins of Sir Ambrose Plessington. Through the open door I could see that the rain had finally stopped. The wind had steadied and the sun was threatening to appear. Such is the mockery of fate. As I crossed the atrium, my boots crunched the shattered crystal. I felt palsied and unstable until I realised that the floor was trembling underfoot. The blood had spread outwards from Phineas's prostrate body like the tendrils of a bright, submarine plant. I had just stepped past the gaudy slick when I heard a shout and then saw a lone figure in the library doorway, dressed in black. I caught a last view of the felled shelves and the chaos of the sodden masses on the floor before rushing through the doorway and into the dun-coloured light.
The horses, spooked by the commotions, tossed their heads in alarm and shied backwards as I flung myself towards them. The park, half-waterlogged, wavered before me, reflecting a lurid sky. I thought of boarding the coach and so making my escape, but there was no time. I could hear my pursuer shouting in Spanish, while another figure had appeared from round the side of the house, near the physic garden. So I began to run instead, fleeing in the opposite direction, towards the hedge-maze. Perhaps I had visions of drawing the killers away from Alethea-of fulfilling for one last time the task for which I was hired. Had it not been my rash flight from London that brought them to Pontifex Hall in the first place? It was a foolish, fantastic notion: I with my crippled foot and wheezing lungs was no match for either of my pursuers, the second of whom I saw was Sir Richard Overstreet. But as I approached the maze I risked a second glance over my shoulder and saw a deep furrow open in the ground behind me, a long trench running across the park, from the cress-pond towards the coach-and-four.
In retrospect the crevice seems a cataclysm of near-biblical dimensions, perhaps even a miracle, if miracles can be so reckless and tragic. The rear wheels of the coach were swallowed first. The ground trembling beneath them crumbled and the coach tipped backwards before heeling in the trough, which had widened to more than six feet and filled with water as the subterranean current burst to the surface. The horses' hindquarters shimmied for a second and then disappeared. The first of my pursuers, the man in black, stopped short at the brink and stumbled. He stared across at me, aghast and amazed, as the reddish earth collapsed and the chasm yawned ever wider. Then he, too, disappeared into the gaping jaws.
I whirled and kept running. The air was tart with privet and hedge-mustard, whose overgrown branches clawed at my cheeks and shoulders as I dived into the maze and swung left into an even thicker gauntlet of wet branches and sharp holly leaves. Puddles splashed underfoot. Through a small gap in the hedge I glimpsed Sir Richard, his pistol in hand as he dashed towards the entrance to the maze. Another fork. I turned right, then left, threading my way inside the sinuous passages. At one point I tripped on a root and, raising myself, discovered a pair of hedge-clippers abandoned in the undergrowth. I picked them up-the blades were rusty but still sharp-and again took to my heels.
It must have been another minute or two before I heard the scream. By this point I had reached the centre of the labyrinth, a small, scrubby patch of ground on which had been placed a wooden bench, rotted by the elements. I could hear Sir Richard crashing along the paths and realised he must be following my footprints through the mud. Yet another trail that had betrayed me. He would soon catch me-if the hedge-maze wasn't swallowed first, for the ground was trembling and shaking like a stonemason's yard. When the shriek broke the air I was gripping the handle of the clippers and backing into the pruned branches, preparing for a passage of arms. Looking up I glimpsed, above the parapets of box and hornbeam, a lone figure poised in a first-floor window.
Alethea had reached the laboratory after all. I climbed on to the bench's cracked seat and saw her throw the casement wide and gesture wildly. I glimpsed her for only a second, because no sooner had the panes flashed in the sunlight-for the sun, incredibly, had now appeared-than the south wing of the house began crumbling into the trench. Timbers warped and snapped, then came the landslide of ashlar and stone that exposed the library through a haze of plaster dust before its timbers likewise buckled, shedding scores of books into the great chasm. The first floor overhung the cavity for a few seconds before it began its own ponderous slide. A section of the roof lurched forward, shedding tiles; then the corbels shattered and the last of the roof spilled into the river surging through the foundations.
I was still perched on the bench, frozen with fear as the dreadful spectacle unfolded before me. I heard another scream as the east elevation fissured and collapsed like a rock-face, raising clouds of dust that billowed and swirled like cannon-smoke. The magnificent structure with its exposed compartments-each with its furniture and wallpaper-now looked no more than a doll's house or an architect's model. I could even see the laboratory with its telescope and the shelves of shattered vials. But there was no sign of Alethea, not there or anywhere else. I had leapt from the bench and was moving back through the maze when the floor of the atrium disintegrated and the doll's house crumpled inward, its floors collapsing together with a rumble I could feel in my diaphragm. I thought I heard yet another scream, but I must have been mistaken: it was only the sound of tortured iron and splintering beams, the last fragments of Pontifex Hall tumbling into the voracious water.
Epilogue
Closing time. Darkness has gathered in the windows and fallen over the broad sea-reach of the Thames. The girders of the ancient drawbridge groan as they rise to admit a fi
nal passage to the tanned sails of barges and smacks nosing downstream into the grey offing. The last of the afternoon traffic has crunched across the snow-covered carriageway. In a minute there will come a gentle ruffle as the awning is furled, followed by a clapping of shutters. Tom Monk and his three children are astir below, rattling keys and counting coins, while I sit upstairs in my study, here in my last refuge, clasping a goose quill between arthritic fingers and slowly paying out this trail of words behind me. Downstairs the green door opens, and my candle gutters in the breeze. I adjust my spectacles-my eyes have grown even dimmer now-and lean hopefully forward. A lump of coal whistles in the grate. The task, at long last, is almost complete.
There is both much and little left to tell. What happened at Pontifex Hall on that final day I suppose I shall never fully understand, even though I am the only one who lives to tell the story. My survival was a matter of luck or chance, or perhaps the mercy of St. John of God, the patron saint of printers and booksellers. I escaped from Sir Richard Overstreet in the end, or, rather, he escaped from me, rushing back through the maze-garden towards the precipice as the house began its collapse. Whether he hoped to save Alethea or salvage the parchment I was not to learn, because he too was consumed by the torrent. I emerged from the labyrinth to see him borne away on the back of the broad serpent as it rushed heedlessly through the park. By this time the house and all its contents had sunk and been swallowed up, save for part of the crypt. Spread before me was a scene of stark and terrible desolation. Even the obelisk had disappeared. Nor was there any sign of Alethea, though I must have spent more than two hours searching for her, overturning pieces of wreckage and even daring to wade hip-deep into the flooded crypt. A dozen times her frantic cry for help echoed in my head. Yet I found nothing more than a few books, which I carefully salvaged as if convinced that these sodden scraps could either atone for her loss or assuage my guilt.
I walked all the way back to Crampton Magna, travelling alongside the torrent of water that coiled through the flooded fields with their small islands of trees and half-submerged shocks of corn. The journey must have taken several hours in all. Among the flotsam of Pontifex Hall drifting past I saw a few more books from the demolished library, most so ruinous I could barely read their covers. These too were retrieved before they could slip away. As darkness was falling I trudged into the Ploughman's Arms with the soggy burden bound in my surcoat, then placed the books, seven in all, to dry beside the fire in my room. For hours I lay sleepless on the bolster, feeling like the survivor of a shipwreck who has washed on to a strand of beach where he will lie still among the driftwood and wrack, taking cautious inventories of his limbs and pockets before rising to his feet and making his first forays into the strange new world into which he is cast.
And the world into which I ventured was a strange one indeed. When I finally reached London, four days later, Nonsuch House looked altered and alien, almost unrecognisable. Everything was in its proper place, including Monk, but the shop seemed subtly transformed as if at some atomic level. Even the old rituals were powerless to counteract the enchantment. I found solace, small as it was, among my books. In those first weeks after my return I used to study the volumes salvaged from Pontifex Hall as if seeking in their blurred and stiffened pages some clue to the tragedy. Their inks had faded and the gilt on their covers eroded; even the ex-librises had peeled away. They still sit together on a shelf above my desk, and of all of the volumes in Nonsuch House, these seven alone are not for sale.
Only one volume is of particular significance. It is a copy of the Anthologia Graeca-itself a series of scraps compiled in Constantinople by Cephalas and then discovered, centuries later, among the manuscripts in the Bibliotheca Palatina in Heidelberg. There is no ex-libris, but inscribed on the pastedown are the words 'Emilia Molyneux', and inserted in the centre are a passport and a certificate of health, both in the name of Silas Cobb, both stamped in Prague and dated 1620. None of the names was visible at first. Only with time did they reappear as some mysterious chemical reaction-'ghosting', Alethea had called it-brought the tannins and iron salts leaching back to the surface of the membranes. And it was from these scraps of paper, these few scribbled words in palimpsest, that I began a patient reconstruction of events.
Some parts of the puzzle were more easily assembled than others. There was, after all, a mention of the affair in most of the newssheets, which reported the death of Sir Richard Overstreet, a prominent diplomat and landowner who had recently returned from exile in France. His body was recovered three days later, some five miles from Pontifex Hall. But there was no mention either of Alethea or of the three Spaniards. Their bodies, I assume, were never found; nor was the palimpsest or, for all I know, Sir Ambrose's thousands of volumes.
And of course Sir Ambrose himself remains as great a mystery to me as ever. I have often wondered, since, why he should have betrayed his allies and hidden the palimpsest in Pontifex Hall. But he was an idealist; he believed in the Reformation and the spread of knowledge, in a community of scholars like that described by the Rosicrucians in their manifestos or by Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis, which tells how the natural sciences will return the world to its Golden Age, to that perfect state before the Fall of Man in Eden. On his return to England Sir Ambrose must have been sorely disillusioned. What he discovered among the denizens of the War Party were not enlightened scholars like those in Plato's Academy or Aristotle's Lyceum, but rather thieves and murderers as ignorant and evil as any found in Rome or Madrid. With Europe poised on the brink of the abyss, the study of Nature and the pursuit of Truth had been replaced by a vulgar contest in which Protestants and Catholics each tried to bend the other to their will. Learning was no longer being used for the improvement of the world: it had become instead the handmaid of prejudice and orthodoxy, and prejudice and orthodoxy the handmaids of slaughter. Sir Ambrose would have wanted no part of it. The island and its riches, if they existed, were best left undiscovered, he must have decided, until the day when the world would be worthy of such treasures.
Yet it was not Sir Ambrose and his books-and not even The Labyrinth of the World-that I thought about most of all in those days. For it was Alethea whom I found myself mourning. At times I allowed myself to believe that somehow she had survived the wreck. In later years I would often glimpse through the window of Nonsuch Books a woman with a familiar gait or carriage, or a certain profile or gesture, and suffer for a second an exquisite shock-and then, inevitably, disappointment and regret. Alethea, like Arabella, would retreat once more into the shades of memory, becoming as distant and as much a figment as those lost islands of the Pacific that even now, in the Year of Our Lord 1700, no one has rediscovered. In time even those fleeting remnants vanished from my window, and I see her now, if ever, only in my dreams.
***
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