by Ross King
But I was interrupted by a shout from behind us. The Cavaliers and Bunhill Brethren had begun pressing forward to claim their unsavoury acquisitions, and Mr. Skipper, anxious to requite them, was attempting to draw Pickvance aside. The auctioneer muttered something into his cravat, then turned back to me, fishing inside his waistcoat with his dreadful, pilliwinksed fingers.
'Tomorrow,' he whispered to me before a wave of bodies carried him off.
Now, looking down at the card, I realised that when I went to Pulteney House the next evening I would at least have something to report to Alethea-something of importance, if my appointment with Pickvance proved fruitful. I had no idea what, if anything, might be found in one of his catalogues. Lists of buyers and sellers, perhaps, or the name of whoever had put the edition of Agrippa up for auction. Possibly even a reference, a trail of sorts, that would lead to the parchment, or at least back to Sir Ambrose's library and whoever had pillaged it. Because whoever pillaged it might have sold the books-stolen books, after all-through an unscrupulous dealer such as Pickvance.
I started back towards the Golden Horn, into which a few customers were filtering. It was still early, I guessed: not yet five o'clock. With a pang of guilt, not to mention surprise, I realised I didn't want to return to Nonsuch House; not just yet. Perhaps I would walk back to the bridge, a leisurely stroll. It had turned out to be a fine day, even here in Alsatia. The stench of the Fleet Ditch wasn't so bad, I decided, once one got used to it. The wind had strengthened, dispersing the shimmering miasma and the clouds of insects. It had also borne up a few clouds that dragged themselves slowly overhead, bound for points east. Perhaps I would stop in a tavern on the way, I thought, or a coffee-house.
I tucked the Magische Werke back inside my coat-tails and then looked again, as if for guidance, at the slip of paper in my hand. An ordinary tradesman's card incorporating a coat of arms-no doubt fraudulent-and four lines of text, neatly engraved:
Dr. Samuel Pickvance,
Bookseller & Auctioneer,
at the Sign of the Saracen's Head,
Arrowsmith Court, Whitefriars
I would be making at least one more trip into Alsatia; but for the first time the prospect didn't fill me with dread. Nor, I realised, did the prospect of visiting Lincoln's Inn Fields. Alethea's face suddenly rose before me, alarmingly distinct, and I realised also that I was almost looking forward to the appointment. And so as I travelled home along Fleet Street, where I did indeed stop inside a tavern, I wondered what was happening to me. I was becoming bold and unpredictable, a stranger to myself: as if one of Agrippa von Nettesheim's alchemical reactions, some profound and alarming transmutation, had taken place deep inside me.
Chapter Seven
Pulteney House stood on the north side of Lincoln's Inn Fields, halfway along a terrace of six or seven houses, all perfect replicas of one another, that overlooked the field: brick façades, white pilasters, tall windows reflecting a score of suns. I approached it along one of the dozen public footpaths through the overgrowth of pimpernel and cudweed. It was late afternoon, and I was sweating heavily after a long walk. My legs were faltering and my shirt clung to my back. I shaded my eyes from the lowering sun and looked about me.
Lincoln's Inn Fields had once been London's most fashionable quarter, a place where our lords and ladies-members of Charles I's doomed court-had lived in their insolent and audacious luxury. But during the Commonwealth they made haste for Holland or France, and so for the past ten years most of the houses had stood deserted. Now there was no smoke and no light, and as I drew closer I could see their blistered paint, a broken window here or there, the layers of soot on their sills and ovolos. The wrought-iron railings and gates about their gardens-rank with couchgrass-had been uprooted. Turned into Cromwell's muskets and cannons, I supposed.
Pulteney House was, marginally, in the best repair, with a young mulberry standing guard at the door and the polished panes of a window showing oriflammes of sunlight. The heavy fold of a gold-tasselled curtain was barely visible behind them. I didn't recall Alethea saying that either Sir Ambrose or Lord Marchamont had owned a London house, so as I manipulated the ponderous lion's-paw knocker I came to the distressing conclusion that Pulteney House must belong to Sir Richard Overstreet, the man to whom, according to Phineas Greenleaf, Lady Marchamont was betrothed. The 'matters of some importance' no doubt had something to do with plans for the wedding.
I was startled, therefore, when who should open the door but Phineas Greenleaf himself. He betrayed no signs of recognition, which I found odd given that we had spent six days on the road together and shared a number of humiliatingly intimate bedrooms. He merely widened the aperture enough for me to slip through and then ushered me down a corridor to what seemed like a drawing-room, dark on account of the yew-green curtains.
'If you would wait here, sir.'
I listened as he ascended an invisible staircase and then creaked across the floor above me. Events seemed to be replicating themselves in some disturbing and anticlimactic pattern. That first night in the library at Pontifex Hall he had left me alone, just so, and shuffled up the staircase in search of his mistress. So I was not unduly surprised when I saw that I had not been led into a drawing-room after all. Once again Phineas had left me stranded in the middle of a library. Or in the middle of what in some happier incarnation had been a library. The rows of shelves had been denuded, picked clean of their books, and even a number of shelves were missing. Burned as firewood, I wondered, by a regiment of Cromwell's soldiers? But a few of the house's other furnishings had been spared the holocaust or pillage, for there was a moth-ravaged tapestry on one of the walls and a marble-and-slate fireplace with tongs and firedogs arranged before it. Four padded chairs had been quadrated round a small rosewood table.
Yet the library was not quite empty of books. In the dim light I spied a pile of fat volumes arranged on the table-books that I supposed Alethea must have brought with her in the hope of whiling away the hours on the coach. I creaked open the cover of the one on top, fully expecting to see Sir Ambrose's ex-libris stamped on the pastedown. But straight away I saw that the volume was much newer than any of those at Pontifex Hall, as were its three fellows. I could smell the tawed leather of their bindings.
New books? I was surprised by the discovery. What on earth could the mistress of Pontifex Hall want with yet more books? I was sitting in one of the chairs now, riffling the leaves of the first volume with a mixture of curiosity and guilty pleasure. What choice texts, I wondered, might she have brought with her? Learned tomes like Ficino's translations of Plato or Hermes Trismegistus? Or volumes on witchcraft, or perhaps even necromancy?
But each of them covered more mundane territories, ones hardly preferable, in my opinion, to the company of the dour and surly Phineas Greenleaf. I frowned at the title-pages as I plucked up the volumes and then replaced them. All were on matters pertaining to the business of wills and property law. The names were familiar enough, but never had I troubled myself to open one of them, let alone to read as much as a page. Yet here, with a bookmark fully three-quarters of the way through, was Hobhouse's A Treatise of Testaments and Last Wills, while beneath it sat Blackacre's notoriously dull A Touchstone of Property and Conveyances. Its pages had been cut all the way to the bitter end, as had those in the third volume, Phillimore's gargantuan Equity Law and the Practice of the Court of Chancery. Only the last book seemed in keeping with the Lady Marchamont I thought I knew: a volume entitled The Law's Resolution of Women's Rights. Its pages too had been cut from front to back, while the notes scratched in the margin were composed in a familiar hectic scrawl.
By now a light tread was squeaking across the ceiling overhead. I replaced the last volume and sat back in the chair, aching with exhaustion. I had still not recovered either from my exertions-I had spent most of the morning and a good part of the afternoon in Alsatia-or from the shock of my discovery. I scrubbed my palms across my cheeks and brow, then took a couple of deep gulps as
if drinking the dense, mulled air of the room from a heavy gourd. I fished the copy of Agrippa's Magische Werke carefully from my pocket and placed it on the table next to the other books. Yes, I had come far today. I had learned much.
Closing my eyes, I heard the soft outcry of treads and risers as Alethea descended the staircase. I sat back to await her arrival. How much, I wondered, ought I to tell her?
***
I had left for Alsatia early that morning, this time travelling upriver by sculler. Arrowsmith Court, when I finally found it, proved exactly the kind of place in which I would have expected Pickvance to conduct his unsavoury trade: a small patch of mud-slimed cobbles round three sides of which a number of sooty tenements pressed four and five storeys upwards. A clowder of scrawny cats was busy in a heap of fishbones, while a couple of others groomed themselves in doorways and on window-sills. Last night's rain had collected in turbid pools and already stank like bilgewater. As I picked my way round them a chamber-pot was emptied from one of the upper windows. I leapt sideways in the nick of time. Yes, I thought ruefully: I had come to the right place.
The Saracen's Head stood directly opposite the courtyard's narrow, arched entrance. A swarthy, moustachioed face, its expression fierce and implacable, peered back at me from a signboard above the door. The tavern itself appeared to be closed. A tobacconist's stood to one side of it, a shop of more ambiguous designation on the other, both were also shut tight, their bottle-glass windows bleared with dirt and soot. Beside the tobacconist's door stood another, smaller door, whose tarnished amuel-and-brass sign read: 'Dr. Pickvance-Bookseller Auctioneer'.
After pulling a fraying bell-rope I was admitted with much furtiveness and then conducted up five flights of stairs by Mr. Skipper, who explained that Dr. Pickvance was otherwise engaged, but that he, Mr. Skipper, would be honoured to assist. The 'offices', from what I was allowed to see of them, consisted of a single room furnished with two desks, a pair of chairs, and what looked to be the tools of a bookbinder's trade: a stack of sheepskins and a beating-stone in a far corner, together with an assortment of gimlets, sewing-presses and polishing irons littered across the rest of the room. There was also a printing-press, an enormous mechanical beast to which Mr. Skipper repaired after sitting me at one of the desks. On the desk sat a pile of perhaps two dozen catalogues bound in greasy brown leather.
'Good luck to you,' he murmured with a morose smile, then turned his back, I suppose to begin cobbling together more 'masterpieces' for Pickvance's next auction. I picked up the first of the volumes and opened its cover.
As I read through the catalogues for the next eight hours, nourished only by an unappetising rabbit pie fetched by Mr. Skipper from a cookshop, a few facts about the mysterious Dr. Pickvance gradually began taking shape. I was able to determine that he conducted his auctions roughly twice a year, going back as far as 1651, the year when the Civil War ended and the Blasphemy Act passed through Parliament. All of the auctions must have been as clandestine as the one in the Golden Horn, because all had been conducted in Alsatia, roughly half in the Golden Horn, the others scattered among a handful of nearby taverns and alehouses, including two or three in the Saracen's Head. The works auctioned had been of a piece, it seemed, with those sold in the Golden Horn, and some of the auctions had comprised as many as 500 lots. The catalogues listed each work's author, title, date of impression, style of binding, number of pages and illustrations, general condition, and, finally, provenance. I was encouraged by this last detail. I noticed how Pickvance or some amanuensis had recorded not only the name of whoever put the lot up for auction but also that of whoever had purchased it.
I suspected, however, that many of these names and provenances were as fraudulent as the books themselves, for 1651 was the year that Cromwell sequestrated many Royalist estates, and I guessed that the contents of their libraries-or else volumes featuring their forged ex-librises-had passed through Pickvance's office. I noticed that one of the catalogues for an auction in 1654 advertised 'books once belonging to Sir George VILLIERS, Duke of BUCKINGHAM, removed from his admirable collection at York House in the Strand'. I knew that part of this 'admirable collection'-truly, one of the choicest in Europe-had been looted after the Civil War when York House was confiscated; the other half had been sold at auction a few years later when Buckingham's son, the second Duke, a Royalist, ran short of funds during his exile in Holland. But whether or not Pickvance had been selling bona fide volumes stolen from Buckingham's collection it was impossible, on the evidence of the catalogues, to discern.
My heart lurched as I looked at the dozens of titles in the York House collection. Ours was an age of great discrimination and taste, of aesthetes and collectors such as Buckingham and the late King Charles, but it was also an age of great desecration. How many treasures like those of Buckingham must have been lost to England because of our wars? Because of the Puritans and their superstitious zealotry? For when Cromwell and his cohorts weren't destroying works of art-beheading statues or tossing paintings by Rubens into the Thames-they were selling them two-a-penny to the agents of the King of Spain and Cardinal Mazarin, perhaps even to unscrupulous merchants like Dr. Pickvance. I noticed that a number of lots in Pickvance's catalogues had come from the salerooms of Antwerp, which for the past few decades had been the clearing-house from which plunder from the numerous European wars was sold at starvation prices to the greedy princes of Europe. As I reached for another volume I quailed at the task now confronting me. How on earth was I to find The Labyrinth of the World in such a mountain of other stolen volumes?
I discovered the copy of Agrippa, along with my own name, listed in the most recent catalogue, one of the first I inspected. The Magische Werke was recorded as having come from the collection in Vienna of Anton Schwarz von Steiner. But by now its more recent owner, the man who had put it up for sale in Pickvance's auction, was of much more interest to me. It was a man I had never heard of: Henry Monboddo. There was no trace of the volume's journey from von Steiner to Monboddo, so there was no way of knowing how Monboddo had acquired the volume-whether or not it had come to England via Sir Ambrose Plessington and had therefore been stolen from Pontifex Hall. The only clue to Monboddo's identity was an address, a house in Huntingdonshire, that had been pencilled into the catalogue. But there was no indication whether Monboddo was alive or-as was more often the case with the owners of auctioned books-deceased. I copied the name and address on to a piece of paper, then riffled through the rest of the catalogue, searching in vain for anything else he or his heirs might have put up for auction.
But the edition of Agrippa and even the mysterious Henry Monboddo himself were soon secondary to my purpose. I returned to the first of the volumes, that for 1651, and began working my way forward, auction by auction, year by year, wary of missing a familiar name or title that might lead to Pontifex Hall. The hours passed slowly. It was almost four o'clock by the time I reached for the last catalogue but one, that for an auction held some four months earlier:
Catalogus Variorum et insignium Librorum selectissimae Bibliothecae,
or,
A Catalogue containing a variety of ancient and modern English and French Books in Divinity,
History and Philosophy
The auction had been held at the Golden Horn on the 21st of March, and the wares proved to be much the same as those at all of the others. I traced my finger down the next page, turned it, ran my finger down another. I was almost seeing double by now. So exhausted was I, so addled was my brain, that when I came to the entry-almost at the very back of the catalogue-I registered no shock or surprise, and I had to read it several times before I could absorb its implications:
Labyrinthus mundi, or The Labyrinth of the World. A fragment. A work of occult philosophy attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Latin translation from Greek original. 14 manuscript pages of the finest vellum. Arabesque binding. Excellent condition. Date and provenance unknown.
Through some oversight, or perhaps because of a del
iberate omission, the entry failed to record the name of the vendor. But the new owner's name-the name of the man who had purchased it four months earlier-was inscribed clearly in pencil. It was the repetition of Henry Monboddo's name as much as anything else that jolted my brain from its torpor. Studying the entry carefully, I saw that Monboddo had paid fifteen shillings for the fragment-a pittance, I thought, remembering Alethea's insistence about its value and her eagerness to pay any price to retrieve it. But it was the object of my quest, I had no doubt of that. There was no mention of an ex-libris, though the omission was hardly surprising: presumably it had been removed, either by Pickvance or the previous owner, who would not, after all, have wished to advertise the theft from Pontifex Hall.
Still, I was puzzled by the price of fifteen shillings. Had neither Pickvance nor the anonymous owner known its true value? I could not imagine Pickvance selling anything for a penny less than its worth. I therefore decided that Alethea must have been drastically wrong about the fragment. Perhaps, at fifteen shillings, it was no more valuable than anything else that Pickvance put up for sale.
I had not the courage to ask Mr. Skipper what he knew about Henry Monboddo-Alethea had insisted upon discretion, after all-and so after copying down the details of the entry I closed the volume and returned it to the stack. My step grew light as I left the building a few minutes later and began walking through Alsatia. The Gordian knot, I decided, was almost cut in two. I would find Henry Monboddo, make him a generous offer-using Alethea's money-and collect my reward. Then I would be done with the business once and for all, and I would be able to resume my peaceful and sedentary life. It had been a good day, I told myself. I believe I might actually have begun to whistle.
I was in this same mood, exhausted but sanguine, when I heard the footfalls in the corridor growing louder. I pushed myself arduously from the chair. Lady Marchamont had arrived.