Ross King - Ex Libris

'There's no hope, Captain!' Pinchbeck had straightened and was wiping at his brow with a bloodied handkerchief. 'I say we abandon ship.'

But Quilter had turned away and was watching with dazed detachment the clouds piling up in the east and beginning their fleet journeys inland. His fingers and cheeks were frozen, his feet now half submerged in water. The Margate Hook was even closer now, the beacon winking palely in its ancient timber lighthouse. In a minute at most they would be driven by the waves on to the reef.

'I say we abandon ship!' Pinchbeck repeated, turning to the men on the fo'c'sle when Quilter made no reply. 'Prepare the longboats!'

'There's no time,' muttered Quilter to himself as a couple of hands started aft towards the boats suspended in their hammocks. But before they could take a half-dozen steps they were interrupted by a cry from the waist.

'Captain!' One of the sailors, a topman, was gripping the foremast with one hand and pointing astern with the other. 'Look! A ship! There!'

Quilter squinted into the wind. The vessel had appeared on the starboard quarter, her bowsprit and foremasts missing, the rest of her poles bare or else wrapped in shreds of canvas. She was hopelessly adrift, with her hull riding low in the water and one of her yards pivoting like the sails of a windmill. When Quilter narrowed his eyes he was able to make out a few men on her quarterdeck, another group struggling to lower one of the longboats into the sea leaping about her waist. Even from this distance he could read the name inscribed on her bow. The Star of Lübeck . A second later he saw that the three men on the quarterdeck were dressed in black. Through the mist they looked no more than shadows.

But then the view was lost, for at that moment the hull of the Bellerophon struck the submerged edge of the Margate Hook and began breaking apart. She slid along the reef for half the length of her keel, timbers screaming and masts toppling before she reached a shuddering halt with her stem and bowsprit nosing downwards into the exposed shingle. Then she tipped agonisingly to starboard with the bowsprit snapping and the hull rupturing as its planks bowed and cracked and their treenails popped free like corks. Roiling water crashed across the splintering decks a few seconds later, and Captain Quilter and his crew were flung into the grey jaws of the sea.

The Navy Office was casting an enormous shadow across St. Olave's when I returned to Seething Lane. The building appeared even larger in daylight, a massive structure that with its jettied storeys and tarred timbers looked like a huge frigate that had run aground in the middle of London. This impression was strengthened when I slipped past the porter's lodge and stepped through the heavy oak doors that had been unbattened a moment earlier. Dozens of clerks and messenger boys scurried about the wooden floor like deckhands making ready for a storm, and through the open door of a large office I glimpsed two or three captains conferring over a map whose corners were pinned to a table by anchor-shaped paperweights. The sight of their handsome faces raddled by tropical suns reminded me that, while I stayed home in my shop, other men were sailing to the ends of the earth, exploring new continents and navigating mysterious rivers. I felt hopelessly out of place.

Two days had passed since my shop was sacked. By the middle of the previous afternoon Nonsuch Books had been restored to normal, or nearly so. There is no disaster so great, in my experience, that it cannot be mended with a folding-stick, a gimlet and a sewing-frame. For hours on end the shop had gonged and echoed with the reports of frantic and unremitting industry. A joiner repaired the green door and restored it to its hinges, while a locksmith replaced the lock with an even stronger one. The joiner also measured and hung five new walnut shelves, which I quickly lined with books. Monk and I had collected the remainder of them from the floor and then set about refurbishing the most damaged ones. I estimated that we would be ready for business in a day or two at most.

This morning I left the shop in Monk's care and returned to Seething Lane-not to creep into St. Olave's churchyard but to make enquiries at the Navy Office, which seemed as likely a place as any to investigate Sir Ambrose's voyage to the Empire of Guiana. I had decided that I might learn more about my mysterious antagonists-perhaps even about Henry Monboddo-if I knew more about Sir Ambrose. I was hoping the log book for the Philip Sidney might still exist, or perhaps its collection of sea-cards or some other memorabilia. I also thought it might be possible to lay my hands on a copy of the Lord High Chancellor's report on Raleigh's disastrous expedition of 1617-18.

But after two hours at the Navy Office I found myself none the wiser. I was kept waiting on a bench as the bells of St. Olave's struck nine o'clock, then ten. The captains came and went with the rolled-up maps tucked under their brocaded arms. The clerks squeaked across the floorboards or bent over their desks, quills waggling briskly. It was eleven o'clock by the time I was summoned forward, only to find myself traipsing from one cramped cubby-hole to another. Not one of the clerks claimed to have heard of a captain named Sir Ambrose Plessington; nor could they think where either his ship's log or the Chancellor's report might be found. One of these manikins suggested the office's old quarters in Mincing Lane, while another plumped for the Tower, which he claimed housed some of the Chancery records. A third explained that the Navy Office was in a state of upheaval because Cromwell's old commissioners had been sacked and the new ones appointed by the King were unlikely to locate forty-year-old records, since they had not yet learned how to find their desks without getting lost.

Noon had arrived by the time I left the Navy Office, resolved that it was time to search elsewhere for Sir Ambrose. I threaded my way through the crowds to Tower Wharf, where dozens of lighters and pinnaces were gathered beside the quays like herds of patient livestock. For ten minutes I tramped up and down the wharf, bumping into dockers with their booming casks and cursing under my breath, before I finally found an empty scull and clambered inside.

On the incoming tide it took almost thirty minutes to reach Wapping. The hamlet stood a mile downstream from Tower Wharf and consisted of little more than a row or two of stilted houses that overhung the banks of the Lower Pool. From my turret-room I could sometimes see its timber-yard and the steeple of the church, but never had I set foot there. This morning, however, I hoped to find an old man named Henry Biddulph, who had lived in Wapping for the best part of seventy years. He had been Clerk of the Acts for the Navy until 1642, at which point most of the ships in the fleet had defected to Cromwell, and Biddulph, faithful to King Charles, had lost his job. Since then he had occupied himself by composing a history of the Navy from the time of Henry VIII-a gargantuan work that after eighteen years and three volumes had failed to reach the Spanish Armada of 1588. It had also failed to sell many copies, though I dutifully stocked all three volumes, since over the years Biddulph had become one of my best customers. He visited Nonsuch House several times a month, and I tracked down dozens of books for him. He knew as much about ships, I suspected, as I knew about books, and I was now hoping that he might give me some information in return.

'Captain' Biddulph (as he was known to his neighbours) appeared to be a man of mark in Wapping, though the house to which I was directed from the hamlet's lone tavern was a humble affair, a tiny timber cottage with a prolapsed roof and an overgrown garden. Two windows at the front overlooked the river, two at the rear a timber-yard from which there arose a terrific clamour of hammers and saws. But the noise failed to disturb Biddulph, who was at work on volume number four when I tapped at his door with the tip of my thorn-stick. He recognised me at once and I was quickly invited inside.