Ex Libris

by Ross King

  Snick-snick-snick…

  The peculiar champing sound outside the window had grown louder. I shivered again and replaced the book, wondering what interest Alethea might have in this masterpiece of Europe's greatest astronomer. The volume seemed strangely out of place in the laboratory, for Galileo had been an enemy of the hocus-pocus and superstition bred by alchemists, occultists and other followers of the ancient shaman Hermes Trismegistus. So what connection could lie between the book and the chemicals ranged about it? Or even between Ortelius and Galileo, between the map-maker and the astronomer?

  I had decided that there was no connection, that their presence in the laboratory was merely adventitious, when suddenly I spotted something else. The breeze from the window, riffling the pages of the Theatrum, exposed a strange insertion, a slip of paper, halfway through the text. The paper seemed to have been imprinted with a meaningless jumble of letters, what appeared to be some barbaric language:

  FUWXU KHW HZO IKEQ LVIL EPX ZSCDWP YWGG

  FMCEMV ZN FRWKEJA RVS LHMPQW NYJHKR KHSV JXXE FHR QTCJEX JIO KKA EEIZTU

  AGO EKXEKHWY VYM QEOADL PTMGKBRKH

  At first I thought the garbled inscription was a drastic mistake of the printer or bookbinder. Yet an error of this magnitude hardly seemed possible.

  I turned the page. The verso was blank, but one of Ortelius's maps-that of the Pacific Ocean and its sprinkling of islands-continued on the following recto. Could it be that the leaf insertion was a deliberate but concealed interruption of the text? No doubt it wasn't part of the original gathering at all but had been stitched inside, for whatever reason, when the book was rebound. And the planed edges of the leaves told me that the book had indeed been rebound. So had it been an accident by the bookbinder? Had a page from another work-a page whose watermark was, I noted, different from the others-found its way into the loose quire and then into the binder's sewing-frame? Tom Monk, who was all thumbs when it came to binding books, often made errors of this sort. But I doubted that incompetence was at work in this case. Some effort had gone into its production, for it seemed no ordinary scrap of paper. I thumbed quickly through the rest of the maps and, finding no more anomalies, turned back to the mysterious leaf.

  If its inclusion was no accident, there was one possible explanation, of course. For the past ten years rumours had abounded about how wealthy Royalist families had concealed their valuables in the grounds of their estates before fleeing into exile, hoping to reclaim them when they returned in happier times. Such rumours were probably the cause of the excavations I had seen beside the carriageway, the ones Alethea blamed on some misguided zeal of the villagers. I put little stock in such stories but now found myself wondering if the letters comprised not a foreign language but some sort of cipher, one that had been inscribed on the page and then hidden in the copy of Ortelius's Theatrum at the start of the Civil War. Perhaps the paper held a clue as to the whereabouts of Sir Ambrose's wealth of paintings and artefacts, all of which, as Alethea claimed, had disappeared. Perhaps the cipher was, like the book's beautiful engravings, a map of some sort.

  I felt as if I had been conducted from one maze-the lengths of corridor-into an even more perplexing one. There seemed no way out… unless, of course, I took the book with me or, better yet, cut out the mysterious page with the penknife I now saw on the table. But was it, under any circumstances, excusable for me, a bibliophile, to mutilate a book?

  The shameful deed was completed in two or three seconds. I pressed on the book's binding with my palm and drew the point of the instrument downwards along the hinge of the leaf, close to the stitching, as if opening the belly of a fish with a gutting knife. The page came away with a soft rip. I folded it twice and, placing it in my breast-pocket, was surprised to discover how swiftly my heart was beating. Then I drew a deep breath and stepped back into the corridor.

  ***

  Snick. Snick. Snick-snick-snick…

  The sound was brisk and penetrating, like the champing of teeth or the cry of some peculiar bird. I turned round, the morning sun warm on my back. No, not a bird. The top half of a man's head, its brow sunburnt, had appeared through a gap in the hedge. I squinted at the curved wall of foliage and caught, below the head, the swift glint of metal.

  Snick, snick, snick…

  The rhythm gathered pace, each sharp syllable answered a second later by the house's brickwork. The gap in the hedge was widening as I watched. Leaves and branches tumbled away. The hedge, like the parterre, was badly overgrown or, where not overgrown, either uprooted or chopped down-a hopeless tangle of hornbeam, whitethorn, privet and holly. The head ducked and the champing beak vanished from sight.

  'The springs rise over there,' Alethea said, 'to our left. Just past the orangery.'

  I turned my attention from the hedge. The two of us were standing to the west of Pontifex Hall, a few yards beyond the reach of its great quadrangular shadow, which stretched towards us across the sward. Alethea was pointing past a shallow pit, clogged with debris, above which a few miserable spars rose like ancient, idolatrous forms. Heaped about them were shards of old masonry. Beyond, on higher ground, a scattering of rocks had been arranged in broken geometric patterns.

  'You can still see the remains of the dip-well.'

  She nodded in the direction of the concentric rings. Once again her hand had grasped my forearm, this time in a gesture of intimacy. In the fresh light her soiled gown now proved not black after all but a mallard green. The hooded mantle, still draped over her shoulders despite the heat, looked to be embroidered with tiny faded flowers.

  'The springs pour out of the rocks,' she continued, 'and into the dip-well and cress-pond, both devised by my father. From there the water disappears down a drain and runs towards the wings of the hall in a network of channels. The water was tamed and used in fountains and waterfalls. Even a giant waterwheel. It stood over there,' she said, turning to point vaguely to the south of the hall.

  'All built by Sir Ambrose.'

  'Of course. He was granted a number of patents for water pumps and windmills.'

  She fell silent. At times this morning she seemed distracted, absorbed in some private, melancholy reverie that manifested itself in silence and oblique, unfathomable glances. We skirted the devastated orangery and now stood at the edge of the stone-lined cress-pond. It was infested with duckweed, and even at this hour its surface was thick with clouds of gnats.

  When her silence promised to endure, I turned to look back at the gaunt hulk of Pontifex Hall, trying unsuccessfully to imagine the fountains and waterworks in place of the weed-choked sward and overgrown hedge now confronting us. A single magpie was swaggering across it, coming in our direction. A bad omen, my mother would have said: one for sorrow, two for joy. Instinctively I looked for a second bird but, shading my eyes, saw only the leavings of the workmen hired to restore the house, a careless litter of chisels, brick hammers, bullnose planes, handsaws. Several tarpaulins, their corners pinned by bricks, shrouded thick sheets of marble. For the fireplaces, Alethea had explained. A half-finished wooden scaffold clambered awkwardly up the scarred wall of the north wing. Beneath it lounged one of the plasterers, smoking a tobacco-pipe and throwing us the occasional glance.

  By now an hour had passed since I fled the chamber with the torn page tucked in my pocket, next to my original summons. On my second attempt I had negotiated the passages unerringly; the door that originally impeded my progress had proved not to be locked, but merely stiff, and I found my way downstairs in a few minutes. It was as if the alien leaf had been some sort of key or passport-a golden skein-without which I was doomed to endless wanderings above stairs. Phineas had been awaiting my arrival in the breakfast parlour. Lady Marchamont, he explained, had already eaten and was outside in the park. If I would be so good as to take a seat, then Miss Bridget would be pleased to serve me. Then Lady Marchamont was most anxious that I should join her for a walk.

  The paper was crackling softly in my pocket as the two of us returned to t
he house, walking side by side and passing the dozens of stunted, limbless trunks that rose through the overgrowth of what was once an orchard. I had already decided that it was a cipher, some kind of encrypted message. But encrypted by whom?

  The sound of the shears grew louder as we approached the ravaged hedge, and the gardener's disembodied head bobbed and floated along the irregular green parapet. A complex pattern was defining itself as more and more branches fell away. It seemed not just one hedge, but rather a dozen, all interconnected. The lines of the plantation appeared to imitate the angles of bastions, half-moons, scarps, counter-scarps, like the model of a fortress-a series of concentric rings like those of the drip-well. What was the purpose? A puzzle maze? I was shading my eyes, studying the row of unpruned hornbeam; the dark patches of yew, the newly gravelled pathway imperfectly penetrating the wall.

  Yes, a hedge-maze: an 'infernal garden' like those I had read about at the castles in Heidelberg and Prague. Through the arched entrance I could see the intricate windings beginning to take shape. The plan, I supposed, had been destroyed or lost, so that now the fractured outlines of the garden formed an impossible, patternless labyrinth. The gardener had bent his head and the shears were snapping furiously. Did a premonition nudge me as we passed, or is it merely the warping eyepiece of memory-the memory of those events that were so shortly to follow-that now gives horrible resonance to the sight of that overgrown maze and the gardener with his murderous blades?

  'The pipes have become blocked.' Roused from her reverie, Alethea was continuing her account. 'They were made of the hollowed trunks of elm trees, which underground have a life expectancy of only twenty-five, perhaps thirty, years. After that, they tend to collapse, or clog or leak. Then the water flows everywhere.' She pulled up short and gazed across at the scaffolded wing of Pontifex Hall. 'The foundations of the house are being undermined, you see. Water is pooling underneath, more of it every day. I am told that in a few months the entire house might collapse.'

  'Collapse?' I had turned from the hedge-maze and was shielding my eyes as I peered up at the tragic spectacle of Pontifex Hall. I thought suddenly of the sounds last night in the crypt, the steady rush of unseen waters. 'Can the waters not be dammed at the source? Or conducted away?'

  'The sources are too numerous for a dam. The springs rise at five or six points at least. Some of them haven't even been found. The whole building is being undermined by an underground river. So, yes, the water must be conducted away. I have an engineer in London working on plans for a new set of pipes.' She gave an exhausted sigh, then tugged my arm as she had at the door to the muniment room. 'Come.'

  As we walked through the grounds Alethea described something more of the house's history. It was a replacement, she said, for one built in the time of Queen Elizabeth, which in turn was a replacement for Pontifex Abbey, an ancient foundation confiscated by Henry VIII from its little band of Carmelite friars after the Act of Dissolution in 1536. The history of the house seemed to be one of growth and destruction, of one building rising from the ashes-sometimes literally-of another, a cycle of oblivion and renewal. She indicated where the vineyard and herb garden of the dissolved abbey had extended; where its confiscated library had stood; where cupolas, bell-towers and turrets once reared high above surrounding crofts and wastes. All were now long vanished except for the odd earthwork or cairn of shattered masonry-so many scars and old bones. I was reminded, suddenly, of what she had said earlier about civilisation being founded by acts of desecration. But how in that case, I wondered, did one tell the difference between them, between acts of civilisation and those of barbarism?

  'The Elizabethan house burned down some fifty years ago, killing its inhabitants, an ancient family named de Courtenay. Quite impoverished, I believe. A year after the fire, my father purchased the freehold from the family's even more impoverished heir, a cheesemonger in Dorchester. Over the course of the next five or so years he raised the current house. He designed it himself, you understand. Every last detail of its construction, both inside and out.'

  So Sir Ambrose himself was the architect, the one obsessed with mazes and symmetries. Yes, a true Daedalus-as Alethea had called him-for was not Daedalus the architect of, among other things, the Labyrinth in Crete? But I was at a loss to explain the fixation with these peculiar repetitions and echoes. Mere vagary, or was there an ulterior consideration? I felt that, despite Alethea's anecdotes and the 'remains' I had seen in the underground vault, I knew almost nothing about Sir Ambrose. The seared leaves and cockled animal skins stacked in the disinterred coffin told some strange and possibly tragic tale, as did his collection of books. But at that point I could not even begin to guess what obscure thread might hold them all together. He seemed to show one face, then another, so that it was impossible to form a picture of this strange chimera. Was he a collector? An inventor? An architect? A sea captain? An alchemist? I resolved that when I returned to London I would make a few enquiries.

  I realised too that I hardly knew more about Alethea. Her every account-of the library, of the house, of her father-seemed to withhold as much as it gave out. I wondered how far I should trust her. As we approached the house I deliberated whether or not I might safely confide in her, if it would be wise to tell her about my experience in the maze of corridors above the stairs, or even to ask about the copy of Ortelius. Or was silence still the most prudent course?

  Before I had made up my mind, she steered me towards the door as one does a blind man.

  'The library awaits us, Mr. Inchbold. The time arrives for you to learn your task.'

  Chapter Seven

  My task, it transpired, was to be, at least on first impression, relatively straightforward, if not exactly easy.

  It had to do with Sir Ambrose's books. What else? After leading me back inside the library-which was even more spectacularly voluminous lit by the band of light streaming through its casement window-Alethea produced a list of books, a dozen in all. It had been discovered on her return, she said, that these particular volumes were missing from the library. And since she wished to complete the collection and restore the library to the condition in which Sir Ambrose had left it at his death, it was imperative that all of them be found.

  'So you wish me to find replacement copies…' I was trying to read the upside-down names inscribed on the page. I felt relief-mingled, perhaps, with disappointment-that at last everything was becoming clear. Such an enormous fuss for twelve books. Craning my neck slightly I was able to make out one of the titles: Girolamo Benzoli's Historia del Mondo Nuovo. 'I see. Very well. I should be able to find copies-'

  I was interrupted by Alethea, who seemed strangely nettled at my assumption.

  'No, Mr. Inchbold. You do not understand. I said it was imperative that these books were returned to the library.' She rapped her finger smartly against the page, which rattled like stage thunder. 'These copies exactly, the originals. Each is identified by its ex-libris, which shows my father's arms. Here…'

  Pulling a book at random from the shelf, she opened it to the inside cover, on which a black-and-white shield had been embossed. She then handed me the volume, an edition of Leonzio Pilato's Latin translation of the Iliad, whose insignia I studied more closely for fear of disturbing her temper further. The shield, I saw, was divided by a chevron and adorned at its base by a single charge, an open book with two seals and two clasps. Very appropriate, I thought. I noticed further that the device also betrayed Sir Ambrose's peculiar fondness for symmetries, because the left side of the shield-the sinister half-perfectly matched the dexter. Rather, they matched perfectly except for their colours, since the shield had been counterchanged: the sinister half was white wherever the dexter was black, and vice versa, so that the left half of the chevron was black and the right half white, while the left half of the charge was white and the right black, and so forth. The effect was a peculiar one of both reflection and contrast, of symmetry together with variation or difference. The only exception to the regime was
the scroll unfurling beneath, on which was inscribed Sir Ambrose's now-familiar motto: Littera Scripta Manet. 'The written word abides.' It was a motto that seemed at once a promise and a threat.

  I closed the book and looked up to find Alethea studying me with a strangely nervous empressement. Gone were the melancholy reveries of a few moments earlier; she was now alert and anxious. I handed back the book, which she carefully replaced on the shelf, before returning her attention to me.

  'You wish me to find twelve books owned by your father,' I ventured. 'Twelve books with his ex-libris.' I was giving the upside-down list a dubious frown. By now I could make out several more of the titles. One appeared to be the Elegías de varones ilustres de las Indias of Juan de Castellanos, and another was Pedro de Léon's Primera parte de la crónica del Peru-both of them, like the edition of Benzoli, chronicles of the Spanish explorations of the New World. 'But that may be difficult,' I added, adopting my most professional tone, 'even impossible. A thousand things might have become of them. They could be anywhere. Or nowhere. What if they were burned by the troops in the garrison?'

  A vertical line appeared between the two dark arches of her eyebrows. She shook her head and gave me the hopeless, wearied look of one forced to explain recondite matters to a difficult child. I felt myself flush-from anger, but also from something more subtle, for I noticed how the change in her appearance went beyond her obvious frustration with me. This morning her face had been powdered, her lips lightly painted, and the great crop of hair subdued, partially at least, by a coif of black lace. She was still Junoesque in both stature and demeanour-I might even say Amazonian-but none the less she looked… well… rather beguiling. I even thought I smelled some kind of sweet oil that reminded me, with dreadful incongruity, of Arabella's orange-flower perfume. Still, Alethea's charms were so contrary to those of Arabella-my quiet, modest Arabella-that I found them difficult to recognise and appreciate, face powder and crimson paint or not. I swiftly averted my gaze, catching a glimpse as I did so of a fourth title inscribed on the page: Edward Wright's Certaine Errors in Navigation.