Ross King - Ex Libris

I walked all the way back to Crampton Magna, travelling alongside the torrent of water that coiled through the flooded fields with their small islands of trees and half-submerged shocks of corn. The journey must have taken several hours in all. Among the flotsam of Pontifex Hall drifting past I saw a few more books from the demolished library, most so ruinous I could barely read their covers. These too were retrieved before they could slip away. As darkness was falling I trudged into the Ploughman's Arms with the soggy burden bound in my surcoat, then placed the books, seven in all, to dry beside the fire in my room. For hours I lay sleepless on the bolster, feeling like the survivor of a shipwreck who has washed on to a strand of beach where he will lie still among the driftwood and wrack, taking cautious inventories of his limbs and pockets before rising to his feet and making his first forays into the strange new world into which he is cast.

And the world into which I ventured was a strange one indeed. When I finally reached London, four days later, Nonsuch House looked altered and alien, almost unrecognisable. Everything was in its proper place, including Monk, but the shop seemed subtly transformed as if at some atomic level. Even the old rituals were powerless to counteract the enchantment. I found solace, small as it was, among my books. In those first weeks after my return I used to study the volumes salvaged from Pontifex Hall as if seeking in their blurred and stiffened pages some clue to the tragedy. Their inks had faded and the gilt on their covers eroded; even the ex-librises had peeled away. They still sit together on a shelf above my desk, and of all of the volumes in Nonsuch House, these seven alone are not for sale.

Only one volume is of particular significance. It is a copy of the Anthologia Graeca -itself a series of scraps compiled in Constantinople by Cephalas and then discovered, centuries later, among the manuscripts in the Bibliotheca Palatina in Heidelberg. There is no ex-libris, but inscribed on the pastedown are the words 'Emilia Molyneux', and inserted in the centre are a passport and a certificate of health, both in the name of Silas Cobb, both stamped in Prague and dated 1620. None of the names was visible at first. Only with time did they reappear as some mysterious chemical reaction-'ghosting', Alethea had called it-brought the tannins and iron salts leaching back to the surface of the membranes. And it was from these scraps of paper, these few scribbled words in palimpsest, that I began a patient reconstruction of events.

Some parts of the puzzle were more easily assembled than others. There was, after all, a mention of the affair in most of the newssheets, which reported the death of Sir Richard Overstreet, a prominent diplomat and landowner who had recently returned from exile in France. His body was recovered three days later, some five miles from Pontifex Hall. But there was no mention either of Alethea or of the three Spaniards. Their bodies, I assume, were never found; nor was the palimpsest or, for all I know, Sir Ambrose's thousands of volumes.

And of course Sir Ambrose himself remains as great a mystery to me as ever. I have often wondered, since, why he should have betrayed his allies and hidden the palimpsest in Pontifex Hall. But he was an idealist; he believed in the Reformation and the spread of knowledge, in a community of scholars like that described by the Rosicrucians in their manifestos or by Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis , which tells how the natural sciences will return the world to its Golden Age, to that perfect state before the Fall of Man in Eden. On his return to England Sir Ambrose must have been sorely disillusioned. What he discovered among the denizens of the War Party were not enlightened scholars like those in Plato's Academy or Aristotle's Lyceum, but rather thieves and murderers as ignorant and evil as any found in Rome or Madrid. With Europe poised on the brink of the abyss, the study of Nature and the pursuit of Truth had been replaced by a vulgar contest in which Protestants and Catholics each tried to bend the other to their will. Learning was no longer being used for the improvement of the world: it had become instead the handmaid of prejudice and orthodoxy, and prejudice and orthodoxy the handmaids of slaughter. Sir Ambrose would have wanted no part of it. The island and its riches, if they existed, were best left undiscovered, he must have decided, until the day when the world would be worthy of such treasures.

Yet it was not Sir Ambrose and his books-and not even The Labyrinth of the World -that I thought about most of all in those days. For it was Alethea whom I found myself mourning. At times I allowed myself to believe that somehow she had survived the wreck. In later years I would often glimpse through the window of Nonsuch Books a woman with a familiar gait or carriage, or a certain profile or gesture, and suffer for a second an exquisite shock-and then, inevitably, disappointment and regret. Alethea, like Arabella, would retreat once more into the shades of memory, becoming as distant and as much a figment as those lost islands of the Pacific that even now, in the Year of Our Lord 1700, no one has rediscovered. In time even those fleeting remnants vanished from my window, and I see her now, if ever, only in my dreams.