His duties at an end, Calfhill turned and began bumping the boat back into the water. He was in a hurry because in that same auberge in Calais he had been approached by a second man besides Fontenay, and now six tods of the finest Cotswold wool were waiting for him in a cove two miles further down the coast. He would be met among the reeds by three men and paid five pistoles to smuggle the wool to the French coast, where he would be paid five more. But now as the keel scraped across the beach he heard a sound behind him. Turning, he saw that one of the three riders was still on the beach, his horse facing the water.

'Yes?' Calfhill straightened and took a few clattering steps over the shingle. 'Forgot something, have you?'

The black-clad rider said nothing. He merely tugged at the reins and swung his horse round towards the hill. Almost as an afterthought, he twisted in his saddle and with a flash of gold brocade produced from the folds of his cloak a firelock pistol.

Calfhill gaped as if at a cunning trick, then took a step backwards. 'What the devil-?'

The man discharged the weapon without ceremony. There was a surprisingly soft explosion and a small puff of smoke. The lead ball struck Calfhill square in the chest. He staggered backwards like a clumsy dancer, then lowered his head and blinked curiously at the wound, from which blood spurted as if from the bung-hole of a wine cask. He raised his hands to staunch it, but the front of his doublet had already darkened and his face was as white as a goose. His mouth opened and closed as if forming one last outraged objection. It never came, for with a smooth, almost balletic manoeuvre he executed a half turn and crumpled into the reeds at the water's edge.

The man tucked the pistol away and, five minutes later, reached his two companions, who were waiting for him beyond the crest of the rise. For a mile the three of them followed one of the sheep tracks on the downlands. Then they swung inland on to a narrow post-road. By this time a half-dozen sand crabs were scuttling across the shingle towards Calfhill's body, over which the tallest osiers were bent like mourners. His corpse would not be discovered for several more days, by which time the trio of riders had entered the gates of London.

Chapter Three

The only way to reach Crampton Magna in those days was to follow the road from London to Plymouth as far as Shaftesbury and then turn south along an ill-defined and seldom-used network of trackways leading towards the distant coast. On its way to Dorchester, one of the most rustic of these passed round the edge of a village of ten or twelve timber-built houses with sooty, moss-dripping thatches, all crouched in a snug fold of low hills. Crampton Magna-for this, at last, was it-also contained a decrepit mill with broken sluices, a single inn, a church with an octagonal spire, and a shrunken, peat-coloured stream that was forded in one spot and crossed in another, some hundred yards below, by a narrow stone bridge.

The sun was declining into the hills when the coach in which I was travelling came in sight of the village and then scraped and jostled across the bridge. Five days had passed since I received my summons. I leaned through the open door-window and looked back at the houses and church. There was a faint smell of woodsmoke on the air, but in the failing light and stretching umber shadows the village appeared unnaturally empty. All day the laneways from Shaftesbury had been deserted except for the occasional herd of black-faced sheep, and I felt by now as if I had arrived on the verge of a desolate precipice.

'Have we much further to go before Pontifex Hall?'

My driver, Phineas Greenleaf, emitted the same low, bovine grunt which had greeted most of my enquiries. I wondered for the dozenth time if he was deaf. He was an old man, lethargic of movement and lugubrious of manner. As we rode I found myself staring not at the passing countryside but, rather, the wen on his neck and the withered left arm that protruded from its foreshortened coat-sleeve. Three days earlier he had been waiting for me, as promised, at the Three Pigeons in High Holborn. The coach had been by far the most impressive vehicle in the tavern's stable-yard, a commodious four-seater with a covered box-seat and a lacquered exterior in which I could see my undulant reflection. A fussy coat of arms was painted on the door. I had been forced to revise my impression of the impecuniosity of my prospective hostess.

'Am I to see Lady Marchamont?' I had asked Greenleaf as we cleared the stable-yard's narrow coachway. I received his noncommittal grunt in reply but, undaunted for the moment, ventured another question: 'Does Lady Marchamont wish to buy some of my books?'

This enquiry had met with better luck. 'Buy your books? No, sir,' he said after a pause, squinting fiercely at the road ahead. His head was thrust forward beneath his shoulders, giving him the appearance of a vulture. 'I should think Lady Marchamont has quite enough books already.'

'So she wishes to sell her books, then?'

'Sell her books?' There was another baffled, ruminative pause. His frown deepened the wrinkles cut like cuneiforms across his brow and cheeks. He removed his hat, a low-crowned beaver, and wiped at his brow, exposing a naked skull that was spotted like a quail's egg. At length, replacing the hat with his shrunken child's hand, he allowed himself a grave chuckle. 'I shouldn't imagine so, sir. Lady Marchamont is most fond of her books.'

That was more or less the extent of our conversation for the next three days. Further questions were either ignored or else answered with the customary grunt. His only other articulations proved to be the sepulchral snores that hindered my sleep on our first night in Bagshot and our second in Shaftesbury.

Our progress had been maddeningly slow. I was a creature of the city-of its smoke and speed, its pushing crowds and whirling iron wheels-and so our leisurely advance through the countryside, across its vacant heaths and through its tiny, nameless villages, was almost more than I could bear. But the saturnine Greenleaf was in no hurry. For mile after mile he sat erect in the box-seat with the reins loose in his hands and the whip dangling between his knees like an angler's rod above a trout stream. And now, after Crampton Magna, the trackway deteriorated badly. The last leg of our journey, though only a mile or two, lasted another hour. No one, it seemed, had passed this way in years. In places the road was overcome by vegetation and all but disappeared; in others the left rut stood at a greater height than the right, or vice versa, or both were littered with sizeable stones. The branches of unpruned trees scored the coach's top, unkempt hedges of beech and quickthorn its doors. We were in constant danger of tipping over. But at long last, after the coach squeezed across another stone bridge, Greenleaf pulled at the reins and laid aside his whip.

'Pontifex Hall,' he growled as if to himself.

I thrust my head through the window and was blinded for a second by the lurid brushstrokes painted across the low shoulder of the sky. At first I saw nothing but a monumental arch and, at its top, a keystone upon which, squinting, I could read a few letters of an inscription: L T E A S RI T M N T.

I raised my right hand to shield my eyes from the sun. Greenleaf clucked his tongue at the horses, who lowered their heads and advanced wearily, tails switching, hoofs crunching the gravel that, a few yards before, had replaced the dirt lane. The carved writing-cast in shadow, pleached with ivy and spotted mustard-and-black with moss-was still illegible but for a few letters: L TTE A S RIPT M NET.

One of the horses snorted and drifted a step sideways, as if refusing the gate, then reared in its traces. Greenleaf jerked at the reins and shouted opprobriously. An enormous house hove suddenly into view as we entered the shadow of the arch. I dropped my hand and thrust my head further through the quarter-light.