For the past few days I had been trying to form a mental picture of Pontifex Hall, but none of my fantasies measured up to the building framed like a painting between the heavy piers of the arch. It was set on a long green sward split by an ochre sweep of carriageway flanked on either side by a row of lime trees. The sward dipped and rose until it reached an enormous façade of rubbed brickwork divided by four giant pilasters and a symmetrical arrangement of eight windows. Above, the low sun picked out a brass weathercock and six circular chimney shafts.
The coach shunted forward a few more paces, traces jingling. As promptly as it appeared, the vision now transformed itself. The sun, all but lost behind the hipped roof, suddenly cast the scene in a different light. The sward, I now saw, was rank and overgrown, pitted here and there, like the carriageway, with old excavations and heaped with pyramids of earth. Many of the lime trees were diseased and leafless, while others had even been reduced to short stumps. The house, whose long shadow stretched towards us, fared no better. Its façade was pockmarked, its mullions splintered, its dripstones snapped off. Some broken window-panes had been replaced in makeshift fashion by straw and strips of cloth; one of them had even been invaded by a thick stem of ivy. A broken sundial, a dry fountain, a stagnant pond, a rank parterre-all completed the portrait of ruin. The weathercock as we trotted forward flashed a minatory glint. My anticipation, roused a moment before, drained abruptly away.
One of the horses whinnied again and shied sideways. Greenleaf jerked the rein sharply and uttered another guttural command. Two more halting steps on the gravelled carriageway; then we were swallowed by the arch. At the last second before it closed over our heads I glanced upwards to the wedge-shaped voussoirs and, above them, the keystone: LITTERA SCRIPTA MANET.
Ten minutes later I found myself standing in the middle of an enormous chamber whose only light fell through a single broken window giving on to the scrubby parterre, which in turn gave on to the fractured fountain and sundial.
'If you would be good enough to wait here, sir,' said Greenleaf.
His bootfalls resounded through the cavernous building, up a creaking flight of stairs, then across a floor above my head. I thought I heard the intonation of voices and another, lighter step.
A moment passed. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the dim light. There seemed to be no place to sit. I wondered if I was being slighted or if this strange hospitality-being left alone in a darkened room-was simply the way of noble folk. I had already decided from its dilapidated condition that Pontifex Hall was one of those unfortunate estates overrun by Cromwell's army during the Civil Wars. I had no love of Cromwell and the Puritans-a gang of iconoclasts and book-burners. But I had no special love of our puffed-up noblemen either, so I had been quietly amused by accounts in our newssheets of rampaging London apprentices showering these grand old homes with cannon-balls and grape-shot, then turning their pampered inhabitants into the fields before liberating the wine from their cellars and the gold leaf from the doors of their carriages. The once-stately Pontifex Hall must, I supposed, have suffered this undignified fate along with so many others.
A board creaked under my boot as I turned round. Then the toe of my crippled foot struck something. I looked down and saw a thick folio spreadeagled below me, its pages fluttering in the light breeze from the broken window. Beside it, in similar states of disarray, lay a quadrant, a small telescope in a corroded case, and several other instruments of less discernible function. Scattered among them, badly creased, corners furling, were a half-dozen old maps. In the poor light their coastlines and speculative outlines of continents were unrecognisable.
But then… something familiar. An old smell was permeating the room, I realised: one I knew better, and loved more, than any perfume. I turned round again and, looking up, saw rows of book-lined shelves covering what seemed to be every inch of the walls, which were girdled halfway up by a railed gallery, above which more books pressed upwards to an invisible ceiling.
A library. So, I thought, face upturned: Greenleaf had been right about one thing at least-Lady Marchamont possessed plenty of books. What light there was cast itself across hundreds of shelved volumes of every shape, size and thickness. Some of the volumes I could see were massive, like quarried slabs, and were attached to the shelves by long chains that hung down like necklaces from their wooden bindings, while others, tiny sextodecimos, were no larger than snuff-boxes, small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, their pasteboard covers tied with faded ribbons or locked with tiny clasps. But that was not all. The overspill from the shelves-two hundred volumes or more-had been stacked on the floor or was colonising adjacent corridors and rooms; an overflow that began in soldierly ranks only to scatter, after a few paces, into wild disorder.
I looked about in amazement before stepping over one of the advancing columns and kneeling carefully beside it. Here the smell-of damp and rot, like that of mulch-was not so pleasant. My nostrils were offended, as were my professional instincts. The soft throb and glow roused in my breast by the gilt letters of four or five different languages winking at me from scores of handsomely tooled bindings-the sight of so much knowledge so beautifully presented-swiftly flamed out. It seemed that, like everything else about Pontifex Hall, these books were doomed. This wasn't a library so much as a charnel-house. My sense of outrage mounted.
But so, too, did my curiosity. I picked one of the books at random from its collapsing rank and opened the battered cover. The engraved title-page was barely legible. I turned another crackling page. No better. The rag-paper had cockled so badly because of water damage that, viewed side-on, the pages resembled the gills on the underside of a mushroom. The volume disgraced its owner. I flipped through the stiffened leaves, most of which had been bored through by worms; entire paragraphs were now unintelligible, turned to fluff and powder. I replaced the book in disgust and took up another, then another, both of which were likewise of use to no one but the rag-and-bone man. The next looked as though it had been burned, while a fifth had been faded and jaundiced by the rays of some long-ago sun. I sighed and replaced them, hoping that Lady Marchamont had no expectations of restoring the fortunes of Pontifex Hall by means of a sale of scraps like these.
But not all of the books were in such a sorry state. As I moved towards the shelves I could see that many of the volumes-or their bindings at least-were of considerable value. Here were fine morocco leathers of every colour, some gold-tooled or embroidered, others decorated with jewels and precious metals. A number of the vellums had buckled, it was true, and the morocco had lost a little of its lustre, but there were no defects that a little cedarwood oil and lanolin couldn't mend. And the jewels alone-what looked to my inexpert eye like rubies, moonstones and lapis lazuli-must have been worth a small fortune.
The shelves along the south wall, nearest the window, had been devoted to Greek and Roman authors, with an entire two shelves weighed down by various collections and editions of Plato. The library's owner must have possessed both a scholar's eye and a deep purse, because the best editions and translations had obviously been hunted down. Not only was there the five-volume second edition of Marsilio Ficino's Latin translation of Plato-the great Platonis opera omni printed in Venice and including Ficino's corrections to the first edition commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici-but also the more authoritative translation published in Geneva by Henri Etienne. Aristotle, meanwhile, was represented not only by the two-volume Basel edition of 1539, but by the 1550 edition with its emendations by Victorius and Flacius, and finally by the Aristotelis opera edited by the great Isaac Casaubon and published in Geneva. All were in reasonable condition, give or take the odd nick or scrape, and would fetch a fair price.