The other classical authors were done equal justice. Standing on tiptoe or squatting on my haunches, I removed volume after volume from the shelf and inspected each one before carefully replacing it. Here was Plamerius's edition of Pliny's Naturalis historia, bound in red calfskin, and the Aldine edition of Livy, along with the Historiarum of Tacitus, edited by Vindelinus and wrapped in a delicate chemise. There was also the Basel edition of Cicero's De natura deorum, bound in olive morocco with a pretty repoussé design… Dionysus Lambinus's edition of De rerum natura… and, most amazing of all, a copy of the Confessiones of St. Augustine in the blind-tooled brown calfskin I recognised as that of the Caxton binder. There were, besides, dozens of thinner volumes, commentaries and expositions such as Porphyry on Horace, Ficino on Plotinus, Donatus on Virgil, Proclus on Plato's Republic…
I was walking and gazing now, my errant hostess completely forgotten. Not only was the wisdom of the ancients represented, but so were the advancements in learning made earlier in our century. There were books on navigation, agriculture, architecture, medicine, horticulture, theology, education, natural philosophy, astronomy, astrology, mathematics, geometry and steganography or 'secret writing'. There were even quite a number of volumes containing poetry, plays and nouvelles. English, French, Italian, German, Bohemian, Persian, it didn't seem to matter. The authors and titles scrolled past, a roll-call of fame. I stopped and ran my fingers across a shelf of quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays; nineteen of them in all, bound in buckram. But there was not, I noticed, a collection of the folio edition of his plays that, as any bookseller knew, William Jaggard had printed in 1623. This struck me as out of keeping with the exhaustive urge for assimilation, for completeness, elsewhere so evident. Nor did there appear to be anything else printed after 1620. In the large collection of herbals, for example, there were copies of De historia plantarum by Theophrastos, Agricola's Medicinae herbaria, and Gerard's Generall Historie of Plants, but not any of the more recent works such as Culpeper's Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, Langham's Garden of Health, or even Thomas Johnson's enlarged and far superior 1633 edition of Gerard. What did this mean? That the collector had died before 1620, his ambitious dreams unfulfilled? That for forty years or more the magnificent collection had lain undisturbed, unsupplemented, unread?
By now I was standing before the north wall, and here the collection grew even more remarkable. I reached up to touch a few of the wobbly bindings. The light from the window was fading quickly. A large section on the left appeared to be devoted to the art of metallurgy. At first there were the sort of works I would have expected to see, such as Biringuccio's Pirotechnia and Ercker's Beschreibung allerfürnemisten Mineralischen Ertzt, bound in pigskin and featuring beautiful woodcuts. A little out-of-date, but respectable books none the less. But what was I to make of many of the others interspersed among them-Jakob Böhme's Metallurgia, Isaac of Holland's Mineralia opera, a translation of Denis Zachaire's True Natural Philosophy of Metals-books that were almost manuals of devilry, the products of inferior and superstitious minds?
Other inferior and superstitious minds were found further along the shelf. The wisdom and good taste governing the selection now deteriorated into an indiscriminate and omnivorous consumption of authors of scurrilous reputation, men who placed their faith too readily-and somewhat impiously-in the occult operations of nature. The faded ribbon-pulls protruded from the gilt backs like impudent pink tongues. Squinting in the poor light, I pulled down a French translation of the works of Artephius. Next to it was Alain de Lisle's commentary on the prophecies of Merlin. Soon matters grew even worse. Roger Bacon's Mirror of Alchymy, George Ripley's Compound of Alchymy, Cornelius Agrippa's De occulta philosophia, Paul Skalich's Occulta occultum occulta… All of these volumes were the work of jugglers, charlatans and mystery-men who had nothing to do, as far as I could see, with the pursuit of true knowledge. On the shelves below were dozens of books on various forms of divination. Piromancy. Chiromancy. Astromancy. Sciomancy.
Sciomancy? I propped my thorn-stick against a shelf and reached for the book. Ah, 'divination by shadows'. I clapped it shut. Such nonsense seemed wholly out of place in a library otherwise dedicated to more noble subjects of learning. I replaced the book and, without looking at it, drew down another by its ribbon-pull. Too bad the worms hadn't feasted themselves on these pages, I thought as I opened it. But before I could read the title-page, a voice from behind suddenly interrupted me.
'Lefèvre's edition of Ficino's translation of the Pimander. An excellent edition, Mr. Inchbold. No doubt you own a copy yourself?'
I started and, looking up, saw two dark shapes in the doorway to the library. I had the uneasy impression, all of a sudden, that I had been watched for some time. One of the shapes, that of a lady, had advanced a few steps and now, turning round, lit the wick of a fish-oil lamp perched on one of the shelves. Her shadow feinted towards me.
'Allow me to apologise.' I was hastily restoring the book to its place. 'I should not have presumed-'
'Lefèvre's edition,' she continued as she turned round and blew out the taper-stick, 'marks the first time the Corpus hermeticum was gathered together between two covers since it was collected in Constantinople by Michael Psellos. It even contains the Asclepius, of which Ficino possessed no manuscript copy so was unable to include it in the edition prepared for Cosimo de' Medici.' She paused for only the briefest of moments. 'Will you take some wine, Mr. Inchbold?'
'No-I mean, yes,' I replied, making an awkward bow. 'I mean… wine would be-'
'And some food? Phineas tells me you've not eaten tonight. Bridget?' She turned to the other figure, a serving-maid still hovering in the doorway.
'Yes, Lady Marchamont?'
'Fetch the goblets, will you.'
'Yes, m'lady.'
'The Hungarian wine, I think. And tell Mary to prepare a meal for Mr. Inchbold.'
'Yes, m'lady.'
'Quickly now, Bridget. Mr. Inchbold has made a long journey.'
'Yes, m'lady,' murmured the girl before scurrying away.
'Bridget is new to Pontifex Hall,' Lady Marchamont explained in an oddly confidential tone, slowly crossing the library with the lantern squeaking on its hinges and turning her eye-sockets to dark hollows. She seemed disinclined to perform introductions, as if she had known me for ages and considered it perfectly ordinary to discover me crouched in the darkness like a housebreaker, thumbing greedily through these shelves of books. Was this, too, the way of aristocrats? 'One of the servants,' she added, 'from the family of my late husband.'
I fumbled for a reply, failed, and instead watched in stupefied silence as she approached in her muted flourish of lamplight, the thin drift of taper smoke rising ceilingward behind her. Oh, how precisely I remember this moment! For this is how, and where, everything began… and where it would end such a short time later. Through the broken panes of window had come the sounds of a watch of nightingales in the overgrown garden and the scratching of a dead branch at one of the mullions. The library itself was silent but for her slow footfalls-she was wearing a pair of leather buskins-and then a loud slap as one of the books piled on the floor toppled from its rank, knocked sideways by her skirts.