It was late in the afternoon by this point, and I had been four days on the road. The other passengers had disembarked long before. I stood under the dripping awning of a tobacconist-cum-post-office, staring in disbelief at the image, wondering if I was hallucinating, if the fevers had not yet left my body. Was there no escaping the radius of signs and vectors, not even here, in this anonymous hamlet, miles from anywhere?
'Mercury,' explained the driver, a huckle-backed old fellow named Jessop, when he caught me staring at the door. He was hitching the horses to the harness and the harness to the poles. 'Letter-carrier to the gods. The coach was part of the old De Quester fleet,' he added with some pride, thumping the spattered door with a finger-shy hand. 'More than forty years old but still going strong. The Mercury symbol was part of De Quester's coat of arms.'
'De Quester?' Where had I heard the name before? From Biddulph?
'Matthew De Quester,' he replied. 'I purchased the coach from the company when it lost its charter. This was a good many years ago. Well before your time, I shouldn't wonder, sir.'
With an effort he clambered into the coach-box and signalled for me to follow. I climbed aboard, filled with dread and dismay. For the next few hours, as the exhausted horses stumbled hock-deep through the mire, I wondered if I was ever to get to the bottom of these strange matters, if whatever mysterious truth that Alethea harboured was destined always to escape me. All of my investigations seemed to have added up to so much dross. I felt like the alchemist who, after hours of labours, after endless alembications, decoctions and distillations, is left not with the dazzling lump of gold of which he dreams, but rather the caput mortuum, a worthless crust, the residue of burnt chemicals. In the past few days I had begun to doubt my powers of reason. I who considered myself so rational and wise suddenly found that I knew nothing and doubted everything. All comforting certainties seemed to have disintegrated.
'Here at last, sir.'
Jessop's voice startled me from my gloomy reverie. I glanced up to see a church tower looming over a huddle of bleak cottages. Lanterns and voices were approaching.
'Crampton Magna.' He had twisted to the ground with a splash. 'The end of the line.'
It was to be another twelve hours before I reached my destination. At the village inn, the Ploughman's Arms, none of the five taciturn patrons could be persuaded to undertake the journey to Pontifex Hall. I had just resigned myself to a long walk in the rain when I was approached by a newcomer, a young man with a freckled face who pledged to take me in the morning, if I pleased to wait. His father, he explained, was the gardener at Pontifex Hall.
The bartender seemed taken aback by the request for a room, but at closing-time I was ushered up a creaking flight of stairs and into a tiny chamber whose walls were festooned with cobwebs and whose linen had yellowed with age. It looked as if no one had opened the door, let alone slept in the bed, for a good many years. But I toppled gratefully on to the lumpy bolster all the same, then into a series of restless and interconnected dreams from which I awoke hours later, heartburned and unrefreshed. Through a lone window that showed an expanse of dirty thatch and a corner of the church I could see that it was raining still, as hard as ever. I doubted my young driver would appear in such weather. But after I trudged downstairs to eat a substantial breakfast, then took my easement in a foul-smelling jakes, a small two-wheeled chariot forded the flooded stream and approached the inn at a brisk trot. The final leg of my long journey could at last begin.
What would I say to Alethea when I saw her again? For the past few days I had rehearsed in my head any number of accusing speeches, but now as Pontifex Hall drew steadily closer I realised that I had no idea what to say or do. Indeed, I had no idea what I hoped to achieve other than perhaps to cause some dramatic scene that would bring the whole affair to its conclusion. I also realised with a flutter of panic that, in grasping the nettle in so bold a manner, I could well bring myself into danger. I thought of the corpse of Nat Crump in the river and of the men who ransacked my shop and then pursued me to Cambridge. Once again the doubts took hold. Were these really the same men who had murdered Lord Marchamont? Or were they instead, like all else, the inventions of Alethea? Perhaps she, and not Cardinal Mazarin, was their mysterious paymaster, the one who set them on my trail. After all, she had traduced the entire situation, had she not? And she had betrayed me.
After a time the horses slowed and I looked up to see the archway opening its wide piers and the house behind it swivelling slowly to face us. Above the piers loomed the familiar inscription. The ivy had been cut back and the words chiselled afresh on the keystone. I could see that a number of improvements had already been made. The dead lime trees had been hewn down and replaced with saplings, the ivy was cut back, the road freshly gravelled. The hedge-maze also looked more defined: a great swirl of green hedges, seven feet tall, that stretched away in a hieratic geometry. I had the sense of a gradual peeling away or exfoliation, of old things renewed. Pontifex Hall seemed to have changed as much as I had. On the north side of the house a small garden had been planted with eyebright and mouse-ear, along with dozens of other herbs and flowers. All had burst into bloom, their leaves and petals shivering in the wind. I recalled none of them from my previous visit.
'The physic garden, sir,' explained the boy, catching my gaze. 'It hasn't bloomed, say the villagers, in more than a hundred years, not since the monks left. The seeds were buried too deep; at least, that's what my father reckons. Nothing grew until he ploughed the soil in the spring.' For a second he regarded me shyly from under the brim of his hat. 'It's like a miracle, isn't it, sir? As if the monks had returned.'
No, I thought, strangely moved by the sight: it was as if the monks had never truly vanished, as if through the years of exile something of them had persisted and endured, lost but redeemable, like the words of a book that awaits the reader who, by blowing at the dust and opening the cover, will revive the author.
'Shall I wait for you here, sir?'
The chariot had reached the house, whose broken dripstones were slobbering torrents of water. I could hear the eaves gulping overhead. The house, despite the improvements, looked as morose and forbidding as ever. What would become of the underground watercourse, I wondered, with so much rain? I hoped that the engineer from London had arrived to perform his crucial task.
'One moment, please.'
I twisted down from the chariot and looked more carefully about the grounds. There were no signs of occupation or industry. The windows with their broken panes-those, at least, had not been replaced-looked dark. Perhaps the house was deserted? Perhaps I was too late?
But then I smelled it: a wraith of scent on the damp morning air, sweet and pungent, as slight and swift as a hallucination. I looked up again and saw in one of the opened windows-that of the strange little laboratory-the silhouette of a telescope. My stomach gave a languid heave of fear.
'No,' I told the boy, feeling a pulse begin to beat in my throat. 'I shall have no need of you. Not yet.'