Epilogue
Closing time. Darkness has gathered in the windows and fallen over the broad sea-reach of the Thames. The girders of the ancient drawbridge groan as they rise to admit a final passage to the tanned sails of barges and smacks nosing downstream into the grey offing. The last of the afternoon traffic has crunched across the snow-covered carriageway. In a minute there will come a gentle ruffle as the awning is furled, followed by a clapping of shutters. Tom Monk and his three children are astir below, rattling keys and counting coins, while I sit upstairs in my study, here in my last refuge, clasping a goose quill between arthritic fingers and slowly paying out this trail of words behind me. Downstairs the green door opens, and my candle gutters in the breeze. I adjust my spectacles-my eyes have grown even dimmer now-and lean hopefully forward. A lump of coal whistles in the grate. The task, at long last, is almost complete.
There is both much and little left to tell. What happened at Pontifex Hall on that final day I suppose I shall never fully understand, even though I am the only one who lives to tell the story. My survival was a matter of luck or chance, or perhaps the mercy of St. John of God, the patron saint of printers and booksellers. I escaped from Sir Richard Overstreet in the end, or, rather, he escaped from me, rushing back through the maze-garden towards the precipice as the house began its collapse. Whether he hoped to save Alethea or salvage the parchment I was not to learn, because he too was consumed by the torrent. I emerged from the labyrinth to see him borne away on the back of the broad serpent as it rushed heedlessly through the park. By this time the house and all its contents had sunk and been swallowed up, save for part of the crypt. Spread before me was a scene of stark and terrible desolation. Even the obelisk had disappeared. Nor was there any sign of Alethea, though I must have spent more than two hours searching for her, overturning pieces of wreckage and even daring to wade hip-deep into the flooded crypt. A dozen times her frantic cry for help echoed in my head. Yet I found nothing more than a few books, which I carefully salvaged as if convinced that these sodden scraps could either atone for her loss or assuage my guilt.
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.
