The main events of Raleigh's sad tale are known well enough. He sailed from London with his fleet in April 1617, leaving behind squabbling factions and powerful enemies. His scheme was supported by King James's new favourite, Sir George Villiers-later to become the Duke of Buckingham-as well as the anti-Spanish faction at court, the so-called War Party led by the Earl of Pembroke and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Pembroke and the Archbishop had thrust forward young Villiers to topple the reigning favourite, Somerset, and to counter the pro-Spanish faction supporting him. Yet not even Villiers's blandishments could tempt the King to forsake his pro-Spanish policy. So while Raleigh's instructions were to locate the gold mine, his charter also stipulated that he must not attack any Spanish ships or settlements. If he violated these conditions, the Spanish ambassador in London, Count Gondomar-the most powerful of his enemies-would claim his head, as provided for in the charter.

Of course, things immediately went wrong. Two days into the voyage, while Land's End was still in sight, one of the fourteen ships sank in a gale, taking with her a crew of sixty men. When the fleet reached the mouth of the Orinoco, eight miserable months later, after storms and scurvy, Raleigh was too ill to continue and remained with the Destiny in Trinidad. It was then the dry season, a time when the level of the Orinoco falls and navigation becomes more hazardous even than usual. But Raleigh could not wait, and five ships were chosen to ascend the river. It was thought that the mine would be found hundreds of miles inland, near the elusive El Dorado, 'the Golden One', a city that was said to stand in the middle of a lake. The legend of this city and its unfathomable riches had been repeated by all of the Spanish chroniclers, and for seventy years the conquistadores, those knights-errant of the jungle, had navigated the Orinoco and its tributaries in search of it. But neither El Dorado nor its mines of gold had ever been seen except, supposedly, by a man named Juan Martín de Albujar, a fugitive from Maraver de Silva's 1566 expedition, an expedition for which, unusually, no chronicle exists.

Nor was the mine discovered by Raleigh's men. Instead, the fleet blundered upon the humbler town of San Tomás, a Spanish garrison of a hundred bamboo huts, a mud-walled church and a couple of rusty cannons, all clinging to the bank of the Orinoco. Then, disaster struck. Shots were exchanged, men died, the quest was abandoned, the fleet sailed into the Boca de la Sierpe-the 'serpent's mouth'-and rapidly dispersed. Raleigh and his men sailed home in disgrace. Raleigh feigned illness, then madness, then attempted to escape to France. But he was captured and thrown back inside his old rooms in the Bloody Tower. An inquiry into the disastrous affair was undertaken by Sir Francis Bacon. In October 1618, at the behest of Gondomar, Raleigh was beheaded. The official reason was treason against King James.

But I was uncertain how Sir Ambrose Plessington fitted into this tragic fable. Had the Philip Sidney been one of the ships in Raleigh's doomed fleet? If so, what were the connections between The Labyrinth of the World, Henry Monboddo and a long-ago voyage into the Guianan jungle?

I squinted at the Navy Office for a while longer, doubtful, all of a sudden, that it would hold an answer. Then I turned round and made my way to the spot where the second mourner had stood. It was a grave with a tiny granite pillar under the sprawling marquee of a cypress whose branches overhung Seething Lane. I had been expecting a fresh mound of earth, strewn with bouquets of flowers, but the stone was cracked, the grave untended and the inscription all but unreadable. A root of the cypress was erupting through the soil, looking eerily like a protrudent knee. I bent warily forward and strained my eyes. The stone seemed to commemorate an infant named Smethwick-the first name was illegible-who had died in the third quarter of the last century. It seemed unlikely that anyone could still be mourning the child, so I decided I was mistaken about the location of the grave-and, no doubt, about the mourner's attentions as well. Besides, had I not been behaving suspiciously, slipping into the churchyard at dusk and then lurching about like a ghoul? All sorts of dreadful things happened in churchyards in those days. He probably took me for a 'resurrection man', one of those grave-robbers who excavates fresh corpses to sell to London's apprentice barber-surgeons and medical students. At least, that was the reassurance I made to myself as I began walking back towards the balefully staring skulls, resisting the urge to run and feeling the pair of talons sinking ever deeper into the quivering flesh of my back.

I returned home on foot. Later I would wonder what might have happened if I had hired a hack and arrived back at Nonsuch House five minutes earlier. But there were no hacks to be found, and so I began stumping homeward, reaching the bridge some twenty minutes later. Everything seemed as usual as I approached Nonsuch House, but outside an apothecary's closed-up shop I spotted Monk in the middle of the carriageway, reeling towards me, his face dazed and white. Beyond, the green door to Nonsuch Books stood partly open and was hanging lopsidedly in its frame.

'Mr. Inchbold-!'

A number of onlookers were grouped about the front of the shop like the audience for a raree-show, poised between walking and standing, murmuring in subdued speculation in the way they do when a cart-horse kicks a stranger's child or drops dead in the street. Monk had staggered towards me and now began clutching at my sleeve and stuttering something unintelligible.

I pushed past him and tugged sharply on the doorknob. The door teetered downwards, even more awry now, hinges screaming in pain. The top hinges, that is, for the bottom ones were bent and dangled lopsidedly in the splintered frame. The whole thing threatened to come loose in my hand. But I had widened the aperture a few more inches-enough to step inside, my throat choking with fear and anger.

My feet skidded over something, and when my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw how my books-every last one of them, it seemed-had been stripped from the shelves and scattered across every inch of the floor. Hundreds of them lay clustered together in haphazard cairns as if awaiting a bonfire: bindings snapped, covers awkwardly tented or flung open like wings, exposed pages lop-eared and riffling in the light breeze from the destroyed door. There was the smell of dust, hide, fustiness-of old, outworn things whose familiar, agreeable fug had somehow been strengthened as if through decoction, a pervasive but invisible cloud that swirled like cannon smoke above the delicate ruins.

I righted myself and staggered ankle-deep towards the counter, stumbling about in a full circle, unable to comprehend the compass of this destruction, let alone its purpose. I sank to my knees in the centre of the shop, only vaguely aware of Monk behind me. My precious refuge, my haven from the turmoil of the world-all of it was gone, destroyed. My chest began to heave like a child's. I remember a pair of hands on my shoulders but not whose they were or what happened next.

Indeed, of the next few hours I remember little: only a kind of dazed underwater progress through the shop, with Monk and I forlornly surveying the damage, picking up books and sorting through them, commiserating over the destruction of a volume or, more rarely, soberly celebrating the unlikely preservation of another. My walnut shelves, I discovered, had also been destroyed-ripped from the walls and flung to the floor, where they lay criss-crossed at rakish angles to one another and splintered like rigging after a tempest. Later I would decide that it must have taken an army to perform such desecrations, but only three men had done it, Monk told me, and it had probably taken them just five minutes. They took to their heels when, after hearing the noise, he crept down the turnpike stair and peered into the shop. They appeared to be looking for something, he said, because they had been snatching each book from the shelf, frantically riffling through it, then tossing it aside before moving on to the next one. But sometimes one of them would stick out an arm and sweep an entire shelf on to the floor, or else rip the shelf itself from its brackets, all without so much as looking at a single one of the books.