And then I saw the last exhibit in the cabinet, by far the most gruesome. It, too, was at the back of the cabinet and looked like the severed head of a man. I started, then leaned forward again, goggling at this gruesome curio from what must have been some barbaric and heathen cult. It made a horrific sight. Matted brown hair hung over a tallow-coloured brow, beneath which two eyeballs goggled back, one pointed at the ceiling, the other at the floor. The left eyelid drooped, suggesting a wink, while the lips-grotesquely thick and painted red like a harlot's-were twisted into a cynical and knowing grin. But no sooner did I realise that the head was a fake, made of wax and velvet, than I was startled again, this time by the placard propped beneath the protuberant chin and inscribed in the same childish hand as the others:
The Head of an Automaton from
the Kingdom of Bohemia, once Belonging to
His Imperial Majesty, Rudolf II
By the time I crept back to my table, the windows had darkened and hearth smoke was wreathing about the joists. My hand shook as I held the dish to my lips. I wondered whether the grisly head was more authentic than the other objects. Had it somehow found its way here from Pontifex Hall? Via Cromwell's soldiers, perhaps, or some other band of looters?
I sat in the chair for another thirty minutes, feeling ever more exhausted and anxious, throwing the occasional glance at the waxwork skull that seemed to wink back at me, smug and knowing, from behind its pane of glass. The dish of coffee, far from soothing me, as I had hoped, seemed to have set my nerves on edge. When my waiter shuffled past, however, I managed to point at the cabinet and ask how the item had been acquired. But he claimed to know neither how nor when it might have arrived in the Golden Horn. Indeed, it almost seemed from his surprised and then puzzled expression that he had never so much as noticed the cabinet before, let alone its most horrific inhabitant.
I decided to return home, now regretting that I had dismissed my driver so quickly. The journey back to Fleet Street was bound to be dangerous. I would have to travel on foot, I knew, because it was unlikely that a hackney-coach would stray into this street, especially after dark. My mind filled with all sorts of unpleasant encounters, which I tried to thrust aside as I threaded my way to the door.
It was then that I made my last discovery of the evening. As I reached the door I noticed a handbill pasted on the wall beside the jamb. There was nothing unusual about it, because the walls of the coffee-house were papered with all sorts of these notices. From where I sat I had been able to read a score or two of flyblown playbills, tradesmen's cards, obscene ballads printed on fox-marked broadsheets, together with bits of graffiti, also obscene, either carved into the benches and tables or else daubed on to the beams. So I almost passed the handbill without a thought, but as I stood aside to allow others to enter through the doorway, the inscription, a murky copperplate engraving, attracted my eye:
NOTICE OF AN AUCTION
to be held at the GOLDEN HORN, Whitefriars,
on the 19th Day of July, at Nine o'clock in the Morning,
at which time many diverse and uncommon Books
shall be exposed to View and auctioned
in 300 Lots
by Doctor Samuel Pickvance
I stood staring at the handbill as several customers pushed inside and then several more pushed past me into the night. A book auction? It was as if I had stumbled across an edition of Homer or Virgil in the forests of Guiana. I thought I knew everyone in the London book trade, including all of the auctioneers, but I had never heard of anyone named Pickvance, if that was in fact his real name. I wondered what 'diverse and uncommon' books he would be selling and what sort of collectors might turn up to bid for them. But most of all I wondered why he had chosen to auction them in the Golden Horn. It would be easy enough to find out, though, because the nineteenth, the day of the auction, was only two days hence.
Alsatia seemed almost peaceful as I stepped on to the tessellated path, the evening air cool and pleasant compared with the hellish climate of the Golden Horn. The illusion did not last long. A moment later I smelled the Fleet and was bumped roughly aside as four or five men, all wearing falchions or daggers on their hips, swaggered towards the door of the coffee-house. Other figures were moving about in the shadows. Alsatia had come brutishly to life. I shuddered at the prospect of the journey that now awaited me.
But I would make a return trip in two days. I knew this already as I turned round for a last look at the gold antler and the inscription above, neither more than a shadow in the failed light, but each one now a glinting hieroglyph. For there must be a connection, I was suddenly certain, between the parchment I was seeking and the 'strange and uncommon' books of Dr. Pickvance.
The journey back to Nonsuch House was, in the event, without incident. I followed the wheel tracks down towards the river and found a waterman dozing at his oars alongside one of the coal wharves. For two shillings he agreed to row me downstream on the tide, which was ebbing once more. When he had fitted the oars into the rowlocks and shoved off with a grunt, I lay back in the sculler and watched the thinning spray of lights ashore. Buildings and spires slipped slowly past; a boat overtook us. Our oars dipped and lifted, dipped and lifted, mud from the shallows catching on the blades and dolloping back into the water. The pitched roof of the Golden Horn shrank, dwindled, disappeared. A few minutes later I could see the moon rising above the chimney-pots on London Bridge. I closed my eyes and felt the sculler slip between the stone piers and plunge, weightless, into five feet of roaring darkness and a sudden rush of spray and air.
Emerging on the other side, legs trembling, I disembarked to find a light burning in my corner of Nonsuch House. Monk had retired to bed, but Margaret was in the kitchen, pickling oysters. She scolded me for missing my supper, boiled brawn, which I ate cold, sitting alone in my study, exhausted. Thirty minutes later I, too, had crawled into bed. I lay still for a long while, listening to the tide gurgling through the piers and trying to steady my breathing. I felt for a moment as if I was still falling between the giant legs of the bridge; as if everything beneath me had, like the sculler, given way to empty air and exhilarated suspension. Because as I drifted asleep I was thinking not only of the handbill pasted to the wall of the Golden Horn but also of the letter, imprinted with a familiar seal, that had been propped on my desk, awaiting my return.