Ex Libris

by Ross King

  By the time I ate a breakfast of radishes and black bread, then drank a morning draught and spent a quarter-hour perched on the close-stool, I felt somewhat better. I descended to the shop and for another quarter-hour performed the old rituals of the awning and the shutters, the unbarring of the door and the tidying of the counter, all the while stumbling round in a pleasant daze as if surprised to find my shop still standing and myself safely inside it. This morning the resinous scent of walnut and pine-the sweet tang of the forest-spiced the familiar fug of rag-paper and buckram. The shop was better than new, I decided, inspecting the shelving and the hinges of the green door. I felt like a sea captain whose ship has been wrecked and then expertly repaired on a foreign shore from which it is time to sail for home.

  Yes, I was feeling much better. After Monk departed for the General Letter Office I stepped outside the door and loitered for a time on the footpath, feeling the newly minted sun on my skin and gazing blearily up and down the carriageway as if taking my bearings from one of the signboards. And all at once the dream came back to me, stark and horrible.

  Ordinarily I do not set much store by dreams. The few I remember are mundane, vague, illogical and unsatisfying. But the previous night was different. After my return from Wapping I retired to bed with my copy of Don Quixote, in which I reached Chapter 6, the point where the priest and the barber inspect and then burn the contents of poor mad Quixote's library, the source of his fantastic delusions. The episode recycled itself in my dreams, except that it was no longer Quixote's books but my own that burned. I had watched in cringing horror as they were ripped from the shelves and tossed by the armload into a bonfire by a band of taunting culprits who refused to resolve themselves as they darted in and out of the firelight. Soon these figures vanished into the night and I found myself at Pontifex Hall, alone, first inside the library, where the flames were devouring the shelves, then outside in the hedge-maze a few seconds later, watching as ashes and scraps of pages were carried skyward on great tentacles of black smoke, before returning to the ground like the cinders of an exploded volcano. At which point Pontifex Hall metamorphosed into a burning ship and the dream concluded with the thunderous crash of falling timbers. I awoke to discover that Don Quixote had toppled from my belly to the floor.

  Now I wondered what on earth I should make of this disconcerting chain of images. Plato claims that all dreams are prophecies of things to come, visions of the future that the soul receives through the liver, while Hippocrates says that they are portents of disease or even madness. And so on neither account was I especially heartened. I decided I should take instead the advice of Heraclitus, who tells us that all dreams are nonsense and are therefore best ignored.

  I was still standing on the footpath, under the awning, gawping like an imbecile, when Monk returned from Dowgate with the post. Two letters had arrived: one from a bookseller in Antwerp, the other from a superannuated clergyman in Saffron Walden. I followed Monk inside the green door. Another day awaited.

  ***

  An hour later I caught a hack to Seething Lane. I had no intention of revisiting either Silas Cobb or the Navy Office, but rather I hoped to speak with the vestry clerk of St. Olave's. Morning Prayer was in progress as I arrived, so I slipped into a pew at the rear, where I fumbled with a Prayer Book-one of those little volumes that Cromwell and his generals had done their best to burn-and felt self-conscious and oddly guilty. I have never been a church-goer, unlike Arabella, who sometimes attended two services a day. I have no objection to the practice, neither to the Puritans with their riotous conventicles nor the Established Church and its incense, railed-off altars and other quasi-popish rituals. But I am at heart, I suppose, like the Quakers who believe in their so-called inner light that needs no priests or sacraments to kindle it.

  As I sat in a sunbeam spilling through the stained glass I was not, however, contemplating spiritual matters. I was thinking about Henry Monboddo and Sir Ambrose Plessington, about what imponderable connection might exist between The Labyrinth of the World and their adventures in Spanish America, between the Corpus hermeticum and a group of Protestant fanatics. These fruitless musings were interrupted as the service ended, at which point I picked my way up the aisle, past the departing congregation, wondering if my habitually dishevelled appearance along with the ill effects of the previous night's drink made me look to the vicar like a repentant sinner coming to beg forgiveness for a profligate life. In any event, he directed me with no apparent qualms to the vestry, where I discovered the clerk and explained to him that I wished to consult the parish records in order to learn something about one of the parishioners-an ancestor of mine, I told him-who was buried in the churchyard. He seemed pleased enough to oblige and, after much truffling in one of the cupboards, presented me with a fat volume, a register-book for the year 1620, bound in cowhide. He bade me sit at his little desk, then disappeared into the church, which now was empty except for an old woman slowly working her way along the flagstones with a mop.

  The register-book was divided into those three staging-posts of life: christening, marriage and death. I riffled quickly to the section on deaths. It made depressing reading in the gloomy environs of the vestry. I knew that before the parish clerks compiled and published the Bills of Mortality, as they do nowadays, register-books often recorded causes of death. But I was quite unprepared for the little biographies of doom that ran next to each name and date, column after column, page after page: apoplexies, dropsies, pleurisies, spotted fevers, bloody fluxes, 'murthers', starvations, plagues, poisonings, suicides-and so forth, an endless catalogue of long-forgotten tragedies. One poor soul had even been 'mauled by a Bear escaped from the Bear-pit in Southwark', another 'eaten by a Crocodile in St. James's Park'. Also recorded were a few deaths of a more imprecise nature, men or women who had been 'found dead in the street' or 'killed in a fall', while 'cause of death unknown' had been inked beside the names of others.

  Silas Cobb's death proved one of these more mysterious varieties. After some thirty minutes I discovered his name near the back of the volume, in the pages dedicated to the month of December, which looked to have been an especially dangerous month for the parishioners of St. Olave's. But the information proved disappointing. A smudged italic hand simply recorded that Silas Cobb had been 'found dead in the river below York House'. Nothing more. No occupation, no address, no next of kin. No clues of any kind to his identity.

  A waste of time, I decided. I closed the register-book and thanked the clerk, and not until I reached the door of the church did I suddenly remember something that Biddulph mentioned a day earlier, that York House had once belonged to Francis Bacon, supposed architect of the Philip Sidney, who eventually sold it to the Duke of Buckingham, who in turn kept his books and paintings inside until his son was forced to sell them, using as his agent (according to Alethea) none other than Henry Monboddo.

  For a few seconds my sideburns prickled with excitement… but soon I decided that I had merely conceived a strange and unstable fantasy. Any connection between Cobb and either Bacon or Buckingham, or between Cobb and Monboddo, must be a distant one at best. Even the connection between Cobb and York House with its hundreds of paintings was probably no more than an odd coincidence, for his corpse might have floated either upstream or downstream on the tide, as much as a mile or two, before being pulled from the waters below York House. He might have fallen into the Thames-or been tossed into it, dead or alive-at almost any point between the Chelsea Reach and London Bridge. The newssheets in those days were full of tales of these little voyages; of despairing men who leapt from the palings of the bridge only to fetch up, days later, three or four miles downstream.

  Before leaving the church I thought to ask the clerk about Cobb's gravestone, which looked so much newer than its neighbours, much newer, I pointed out, than a 1620 vintage. But the clerk only shrugged his shoulders and explained that the practice of erecting a new stone over an old grave was common enough. Not only that, folk who came int
o fortunes often gave themselves more honourable pedigrees by improving the siting of their ancestors' graves-even to the point, he said, of exhuming bones from their obscure plots in the corners of the churchyard and reburying them in more prestigious environs, such as the church's aisles or crypt, where the new resting-place was marked by a marble plaque, even by a bust or statue. So it was, he claimed, that humble watermen and fishmongers sometimes discovered themselves, fifty years after death, in the distinguished company of dukes and admirals, with their effigies proudly displayed in marble or bronze. He informed me that the church kept no official records of such improvements.

  'You may consult with the lapicide or stonemason who carved the stone,' he suggested. 'Ordinarily they inscribe their name or a coat of arms on the rear of the slab.'

  But I was loath to creep back to Cobb's gravestone in broad daylight-almost as loath as I was to enter the noise and dust of a stonemason's yard in both the heat of the day and the aftermath of Biddulph's rumbullion. And so I returned to Nonsuch House, wondering what I should make of the things I had learned; if in fact I had learned anything at all.

  ***

  For the remainder of that day I went about my usual ceremonies among my shelves and customers. Ah, the pleasant balm of routine, what Horace calls laborum dulce lenimen, the 'sweet solace of my toils'. Afterwards I ate a dinner cooked by Margaret, drank two cups of wine and smoked a pipe of tobacco, then retired to bed at ten o'clock, my usual hour, with Wolfram's Parzival-I had decided against Don Quixote that night-propped on my belly. I must have fallen asleep soon after the watchman announced eleven o'clock.

  I have never been a good sleeper. As a child I was a notorious sleepwalker. My strange trances and midnight perambulations regularly alarmed my parents, our neighbours, and finally Mr. Smallpace, who once led me back to Nonsuch House, barefoot and confused, after I wandered as far as the south gate of the bridge. As I grew older, this nocturnal restlessness translated itself into bouts of insomnia that plague me to this day. I will lie awake for hours on end, incessantly checking my watch, plumping and punching my pillow, thrashing and turning on my mattress as if wrestling a foe, before sleep at last whelms over me only to subside a minute later when I am disturbed by the slightest noise or provoked by the jagged shard of an unremembered dream. Over the years I have sought out various apothecaries who have prescribed all manner of remedies for the condition. I have drunk by the pint-pot foul-smelling syrups made from maidenhair and the seeds of poppies (a flower that Ovid tells us blooms beside the Cave of Sleep), or rubbed on to my temples an hour before retiring, as per instructions, other concoctions mixed from lettuce juice, oil of roses and who knows what else. But none of these expensive elixirs has ever managed to hasten my slumbers by so much as a single minute.

  To make matters worse, Nonsuch House is an unfamiliar and even frightening place after dark, especially so, it seemed, after Arabella's death-a vast echo-chamber where floor timbers creaked and groaned, shutters rattled, the chimney keened, the eaves gargled, beetles tapped, rats squeaked and scurried, and the elm pipes shuddered and moaned behind the walls as the water inside them either froze or thawed. I think of myself as a rational man, but in the months after Arabella's death I used to jolt awake several times each night, stark with terror, then hunch beneath the counterpane like a horror-struck child, listening to a platoon of ghosts and demons whispering my name as they went about their stealthy work in my closets and corridors.

  Tonight I was awakened with a start by one of these noises. Jerking upright in the darkness, I fumbled on the bedside table for the firelock. I had considered sleeping with it under my pillow, as I believe people are said to do for fear of housebreakers, but had visions of it discharging itself as I rolled over in my sleep, and anyway it had been far too big and uncomfortable to fit under my tiny goose-down pillow. So I had placed it on the table instead, charged with a ball and powder, though with the barrel pointing away from the head of the bed. The rest of the ammunition was in the drawer, in a bandolier that the one-legged veteran had sold me along with the firelock: thirty balls of lead that looked curiously harmless, like the petrified droppings of a small rodent.

  I found the pistol only after a few seconds of frantic scrabbling, then closed my fingers over the stock and held my breath, listening for the intrusive noise. It had been, I thought, some sort of faint rattling or jingling, like a pair of spurs. But all was silent now. The noise had been a dream, I told myself. Or the watchman with his bell.

  Ka-chink, ka-chink, ka-chink-a…

  I had just fallen asleep when I caught it again, more clearly this time, an unfamiliar sound not in the building's usual repertoire: a faint but insistent jingling, like a small dinner-bell or a set of keys on a chatelaine. Or perhaps like a set of traces, except that it was hours past curfew, the gates would be closed, and no horse-and-carriage was likely to be passing along the carriageway.

  I pushed myself upright again, left hand grappling for the pistol. I struck a taper and squinted at my watch, which I also had to fumble for on the bedside table. Past two o'clock. Abruptly the noise stopped, as if the perpetrator had caught himself and swiftly muffled it. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, imagining the instigator hunched against a wall somewhere, breath held and ears trained.

  Ka-chink-ka-chink-ka-CHINK!

  The noise had grown louder and more insistent by the time I stole along the corridor and then, drawing a deep breath, down the first few steps. I had trouble with my footing in the dark but managed to avoid the third tread from the top, which squeaked, and the fifth from the top, whose riser-in order to trip unwary housebreakers-was four inches higher than the rest. I had no wish to rouse Monk, who would have been frightened to death by the sight of me slinking about the house, pistol in hand. Nor did I wish to alert the intruder who-I was sure of it now-was either inside the shop or else attempting to prise his way through the outer door: for the sound had been caused, I realised, by a ring of picklocks.

  Ka-CHINK-a…

  My nape prickled with fear. Drawing a shuddering breath I tightened my grip on the weapon and searched with a bare foot for the next tread. The jingling had ceased, but now I heard the catch click and then caught the slow creak of my new hinges as the green door was opened inchmeal. I froze, club foot suspended in mid-air. The floor timbers complained gently as the intruder stole across the shop. I licked my lips and felt blindly for another step.

  What happened next was inevitable, I suppose. The steps of the turnpike staircase are steep, shallow and worn, their risers of irregular height; and of course I am a cripple and half blind without my spectacles, which I had left behind in my bedchamber. So when I reached for another step, my club foot skittered over the edge of the next tread and I pitched forward with a yelp to the landing. Worse, I lost my grip on the pistol as I flailed through the darkness. It clattered noisily down the steps ahead of me.

  I caught my breath and held it. Dead silence followed. I lay on the landing for a few seconds before cautiously unfolding myself and rising to a crouch. So silent had everything fallen that for a second I almost thought I had been mistaken, that all had been a dream, or the sound of the wind, or the building lurching and creaking with the tide. But then I heard the unmistakable tread of feet and, seconds later, whispering voices.

  I felt my body tense, bracing itself to lunge. I might still reach the pistol. But there were at least two intruders, while even if I reached the weapon first I had only one shot. So I remained in a crouch on the landing, too frightened even to breathe.

  A few horrible seconds passed before I heard the sharp gasp of a taper. Then a light welled upwards and shadows pivoted across the wall. I sprang into motion, lurching crabwise along the narrow landing, fumbling for the steps above me. But it was too late. Already a pair of boots was squeaking on the treads, only a few feet below now. I heard the soft whoosh of the burning torch, then a loud scrape as the pistol was recovered. Another few seconds and they would reach me.

&nb
sp; I spun round and groped blindly at the steps. But no sooner had I found purchase than a cold hand seized the back of my neck.

  ***

  Nonsuch House was over eighty years old in those days. It had been built in Holland in the year 1577 and then shipped in sections to London, where its carved gables and onion-shaped cupolas were fitted together without the use of nails, piece by piece, like the segments of a giant jigsaw puzzle. It stood halfway along the carriageway, on the north side of a small drawbridge whose wooden-cogged wheels creaked and ground together six times a day. And so six times a day all traffic on the carriageway was forced to halt for twenty minutes while that beneath floated through on the tide: hoys and shallops headed upstream with loads of malt and dried haddock, bumboats and pinnaces going downstream with hogsheads of ale and sugar for the merchantmen at Tower Dock, sometimes even the yacht of the King himself on its way to the races at Greenwich, masts swaying and sails crackling. A hush would descend on the bridge at these moments as the pack-horses and pushing foot-passengers all paused in their tracks before the dreamlike parade of twenty or thirty boats. As an apprentice, I, too, used to stop and watch in wonder as the carriageway rose steeply skyward and the sails sidled past the windows, their bunts filled with wind and bulging like the waistcoats of giants. But then Mr. Smallpace would shout at me from across the shop and I would dutifully return my attentions to the piles of books.