'The books at Pontifex Hall have come from the Bibliotheca Palatina. Is that what you're saying? Cardinal Baronius didn't steal all of them after all. Sir Ambrose rescued them from-'

'No, no, no…' She shied the pipe in an arc through the air. 'Not from the Palatina.'

I waited for her to continue, but the Virginia tobacco seemed to have induced in her a mood of voluptuous repose. She leaned over the edge of the bed and rapped the bowl of the pipe against the hearthstone. I cleared my throat and chose another tack.

'And was it Cardinal Mazarin,' I asked as gently as I could, 'or his agents, who… who…'

'… who murdered Lord Marchamont?' Her voice came thickly from among the nest of pillows. 'Yes. Perhaps. Or so I believed at one time. My husband was murdered in Paris. Have I told you that? We were crossing the Pont Neuf in our coach when we were set upon near the spot where Henry of Navarre was murdered by Ravaillac. He was stabbed in the neck with a poniard,' she continued calmly, 'also like King Henry. There were three assassins, all on horseback, all dressed in black. I shall never forget the sight of them. Black livery with gold trim. It was dark, but I was meant to see them, you understand. I was allowed to see their uniforms, their faces. It was intended as a warning.'

'A warning from whom? From Cardinal Mazarin?'

'I thought as much at one time. But events have changed my mind. I now believe the assassins were hired by Henry Monboddo.'

I licked my lips and drew a careful breath. 'But why should Monboddo have-?'

'The Labyrinth of the World,' came her voice through the muggy darkness. 'That is why, Mr. Inchbold. No other reason. He wanted the parchment. Not the rest of the collection, only the parchment. He was obsessed with it. He had found a buyer who desperately wished to acquire it. Someone who was willing to have my husband murdered. And now it would seem that my husband's worst fear has been realised,' she added after a short pause, her voice once more growing faint. 'If what you say is true, then Monboddo has laid his hands on it at last.'

The tiny flame beside the window leapt and dived. The fields beyond were dark and silent. I could feel my sideburns prickling, the gooseflesh raising itself along my forearms. From somewhere below the stairs came the slow shuffling of Phineas's feet and the arthritic creaking of floorboards. When I looked to the bed I saw that Alethea had raised herself so that she now sat upright beneath the canopy, her arms wrapped round her knees. I could feel her eyes upon me.

'Arrangements have been made,' she said at last.

'Arrangements, my lady?'

'Yes, Mr. Inchbold.' The bed gave a groan as she pushed herself to her feet. Her shadow fell lengthwise across me. 'A visit to Wembish Park seems in order, does it not? The manuscript must be recovered. And we must make haste to reclaim it before Monboddo can sell it to his client. But you must be careful,' she whispered as she led me to the staircase, 'very careful indeed. Take my word for it, Mr. Inchbold: Henry Monboddo is a dangerous man.'

An hour later I was back in Nonsuch House, back in my study, nodding off over a tobacco-pipe and Shelton's translation of Don Quixote. I had reached the bridge without incident, without being followed. Or so it seemed, but my senses were dulled and the night black as tar. I dozed off a couple of times, and the driver had to shake me awake when we reached our destination. Now I could neither keep my pipe alight nor concentrate on the pages of Don Quixote, through which I was blundering without managing to glean a scrap of sense.

A visit to Wembish Park seems in order…

Yes: the faint, meandering scent I had been following was stronger now and seemed to direct me, urgently and unambiguously, to Wembish Park and Henry Monboddo. But whatever optimism I had felt earlier in the day, in Alsatia, had now vanished completely. I thought of Lord Marchamont murdered on the Pont Neuf and then of the solitary figures who had shadowed me.

Henry Monboddo is a dangerous man…

I pushed myself upright and then walked to the window. The sky rose black and starless; below it, the city looked lightless except for the wavering lanterns on the poop-rails of a few merchantmen far downstream in the Limehouse Reach. Unfurling their sails, I supposed, and putting to sea on the first of the ebb, which I could hear fluxing with its familiar rush between the piers.

I yawned again, clouding the window-panes with my breath. Hearing a faint chime from the floor beside me, I peered down to see a glint on the boards. A key. I turned it over in my hand, speculatively, watching the polished brass shine in the candlelight. Alethea had given it to me as we parted in the darkened atrium of Pulteney House. It unlocked a small strongbox that would be concealed beneath the stone lozenge on top of a grave in the churchyard of St. Olave's, Hart Street, not far from the north end of London Bridge. We would have to use the strongbox for any future communications, she explained, because her post was being opened-a realisation that had come, I thought, a little late in the day. Nor could we meet again at Pulteney House, which she said she might, in any case, soon be departing. She would therefore leave any further letters for me in the churchyard, cached in the grave of a man named Silas Cobb.

I slipped the key back inside my pocket and took up my book. Once more I would be leaving London, I realised, for an unknown destination, somewhere fraught, possibly, with numerous perils. I felt like an old knight in a tale of chivalry: an impoverished hidalgo with his broken lance and dented shield setting off, at the whim of his beloved, into a world of intrigues and enchantments, bent on some impossible task.

But then I reminded myself that Alethea wasn't my beloved, that no enchantments would be waiting for me at Wembish Park, and finally that my task now seemed-on the basis of my discoveries today-far from impossible.

Chapter Eight

Winter's first panes of ice were thickening in Hamburg's canals by the time the Bellerophon, a merchantman of three hundred tons, cast off her lines and started the final leg of her 2,000-mile voyage from Archangel. The ship's log recorded that it was December in the year 1620. Martinmas was past, the start of the most dangerous and unpredictable seas, though the voyage down the Elbe to Cuxhaven began well enough. The Bellerophon was carried swiftly on the ebb, passing the crowded stalls of the St. Pauli Fischmarkt on her starboard side, then the scattering of ropewalks and gabled warehouses opposite. Downstream in deeper waters, creaking at anchor, sat the nimble-looking fluyts of the Hanseatic fleet, each with its hull worried by a half-dozen lighters and bumboats. The Bellerophon cut a fine figure as she swayed past them with her stays taut and whistling in the breeze, her cream-coloured sails snapping and swelling as quickly as they could be unfurled. Though her hold was full with furs from Muscovy her passage was smooth and buoyant. Her hull rode high in the water, and the shadows of her cutched sails swept fleetly over the workmen squatting on quays or thrumming up the planks to the storehouses, humping barrels of Icelandic cod or sacks of English wool. A few crewmen could be spotted on her waist, waving their caps, while high above their heads, tiny against the steel-grey and snow-spitting December sky, the topmen were clambering up and down her ratlines and along her yards, tugging at bull-ropes and lengthening the topsails that gathered the wind in their bunts and swept her ever more rapidly along the brackish tide to the sea.