Ross King - Ex Libris

'I must apologise for the wine,' she said as she nodded at Bridget to fill my glass for a third time. 'Once upon a time my father grew his own vines. In the valley.' She gestured vaguely in the direction of one of the broken windows. 'On the slopes above the river, sheltered from the wind. They produced some excellent wines, or so I have been told. I was too young to enjoy them at the time, and the vines have since been uprooted.'

'By the soldiers, I suppose?'

She shook her head. 'No, by a different breed of vandal, a more indigenous one. The villagers.'

'The villagers?' I thought of the eerily empty village through which the coach had passed. 'Crampton Magna?'

'There and elsewhere. Yes.'

I shrugged. 'But why would anyone do that?'

She raised her goblet and gazed thoughtfully into the dark liquid. She had already explained, in the boggling and somewhat gratuitous manner that was becoming familiar, how the goblets were manufactured. Her father had been granted some form of patent for the process, which involved mixing gold and quicksilver in a crucible, then evaporating the quicksilver and gilding the glass with a thin film of the extracted gold. He had owned many patents, she explained. A true Daedalus. Now she seemed to be studying the cypher at the bottom of the cup-an entwined 'AP'-which I had myself already noticed.

'Tell me, Mr. Inchbold,' she began after a pause, 'did you by any chance see the excavations on the lawn and carriageway as you approached Pontifex Hall?'

I nodded, remembering the haphazard trenches and the black hillocks of earth beside them. 'I took them for some sort of earthworks.' She shook her great dark nimbus at me. 'Cannon-fire?'

'Nothing as drastic as that. No siege took place here. The immediate area was deemed unimportant by the armies of either side. Fortunately for us, Mr. Inchbold, or I don't expect we should be having this conversation.'

I resisted the urge to ask her why it was the two of us were having this conversation. I still had no idea why I had been summoned here, or why she was offering me a history of her peculiar and, frankly, inhospitable house. Was this another example of the strange ways of aristocrats? If she did not wish me to appraise or auction her books, then what on earth was my task to be? Surely she had no desire-no need-to purchase any more? It would be bringing owls to Athens. All at once I felt more exhausted than ever.

But it seemed I was not to discover my task soon, for she now launched into an account of the recent history of Pontifex Hall. As I clumsily dismembered the duck, she explained how after the regiment of troops departed, having chopped up the orchard and the furniture for firewood and stripped the wrought-iron railings to make their muskets and cannons, the house stood empty for a number of months. The estate had been placed in the hands of a trust which, authorised by an Act of Parliament in 1651, eventually sold it to the local Member of Parliament, a man named Standfast Osborne.

'Lord Marchamont and I were in France at the time, in exile. I moved back to England some two months ago, when the house was restored to me under the terms of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. Osborne has now been gone for almost a year. Fled to Holland. Quite prudent of him, as he was one of the regicides. When I returned from France I did not expect to be welcomed back to Pontifex Hall, because the people of this area supported the Parliamentarians. Nor was I welcomed. Already the good people of Crampton Magna look upon me, I believe, as a witch.' Her half-smile reappeared as her shoulders flexed in an indifferent shrug. 'Yes, strange as it may sound to you, a Londoner, an educated man, but true none the less. In these parts any woman who can read is fancied for a witch. And a woman who lives by herself, in a ruined house, surrounded by books and scientific instruments, without a husband or father or children to guide or control her… well, that is even worse, is it not?'

She paused, watching me carefully with her intense, close-set eyes, which, in the better light of the dining-room, I saw were a pale grey-blue. I was chewing slowly and awkwardly, a cow with its cud. My foot had been thrust under the chair, out of sight. She turned and motioned for Bridget to fill my cup.

'You may go now,' she said to her when the task was accomplished. Only when the maid's footfalls disappeared, swallowed up by the immense, echoing house, did she continue. 'I experienced great difficulties hiring servants from the area,' she said in a confidential tone. 'That is why I was forced to recruit from among Lord Marchamont's domestics.'

'But why should you have difficulties? Because of Lord Marchamont? Or because of your… politics?'

She shook her head. 'No, because of my father. You may have heard of him-he was famous enough in his day. His name was Sir Ambrose Plessington,' she added after a short pause.

This name, strange as it now seems, then meant nothing to me, nothing at all. But in my recollection the moment now seems accompanied by a ringing silence, a kind of terrible poise in which a long shadow crept forward, darkening the room, throwing its heavy pall slantwise across me. But in fact I only shook my head, wondering to myself how I could not have known of someone capable of amassing such a formidable collection.

'No, I've not heard of him,' I replied. 'Who was he?'

For a moment she said nothing. She was sitting perfectly still, hands folded in her lap. The fish-oil lamp threw her shadow on to the buckling wall behind her. I thought idly of the book on 'sciomancy' in the library and wondered what clues its author might divine in the shifting shadow of Lady Marchamont.

'Drink your wine, Mr. Inchbold,' she said at last. She had leaned forward into the jaundiced light of the lamp, and her eyes were searching my face again, as if looking for signs that I might be trusted. Perhaps I was, at this moment, almost as unfathomable to her as she was to me. 'I have something I wish to show you. Something you may well find of interest.'

In what respect? By now my curiosity was being eclipsed by impatience. But what was there for me to do? I gulped my wine and hastily wiped my hands on my breeches. Then, holding back a half-dozen exasperated questions, I followed her from the dining-room.

So it was that my first confrontation with Sir Ambrose Plessington took place in a vault or crypt beneath Pontifex Hall.

After leaving the dining-room, we went back down the wide staircase, then took a number of left turns through an interconnecting series of corridors, antechambers and deserted rooms before descending another, much narrower set of steps. Lady Marchamont was holding the fish-oil lamp aloft like a constable of the watch as I flumped along behind her. The inadequate light fell on to a scarred wall across which our shadows loomed in fantastic, threatening postures. Our feet scuffed the steps that proceeded downwards into what looked like some sort of undercroft. Cobwebs tickled my scalp and lips. I brushed them aside and then hastily placed my handkerchief to my mouth and nose. With every step the stink of decay seemed to increase twofold. Lady Marchamont, however, appeared as oblivious of the stench as of the cold and darkness.

'The pantry, the buttery,' she was saying, 'all were down here, along with the footmen's chambers. We had three footmen, I remember. Phineas is the last of them. He was in my father's service more than forty years ago. It was a godsend that I was able to find him again. Or, rather, that he found me after my return. He is, you understand, very devoted to me…'

As we descended I had been expecting to enter a maze of passageways and chambers reflecting the one above the stairs. But on reaching the bottom at last we found ourselves in a low-ceilinged corridor that ran ahead in a straight line for as far as the lamp's shrunken halo of light extended. We proceeded slowly along it, picking our way over fragments of furniture, the staves of broken casks, and other less identifiable obstructions. The floor didn't seem quite level; we were descending still, proceeding down a gentle slope. Down here the walls dripped, and faint sounds of running water came to us, followed by an acrid smell. The floor seemed to be covered in grit. There was still no end to the passage. Perhaps we were in a labyrinth after all, I thought: some sort of mundus cereris like those the Romans built beneath their cities-all dark vaults and twisting tunnels-in order to converse with the inhabitants of the lower world.