'The journey was pleasant,' I murmured weakly. Yes: our association was a series of lies, despite what she said. Lies from beginning to end.

'I regret I cannot offer you a place to sit,' she was continuing, gesturing at the library with a sweep of her arm. 'Oliver Cromwell's soldiers burned all of my furniture to cook their dinners and warm their feet.'

I blinked in surprise. 'A regiment was quartered here?'

'Fourteen or fifteen years ago. The estate was forfeited for acts of treason against Parliament. The soldiers even burned my best bed. Twelve feet high, Mr. Inchbold. Four beech-framed posts, with yards and yards of hanging taffeta.' She paused to offer me a wry smile. 'I should think that must have kept them warm for a time, don't you?'

She was standing before me, or nearly so, and I could see her more clearly in the sallow lamp glow. I was to meet her on only three short occasions, and my first impression-it now surprises me to recall-was not especially favourable. She must have been roughly my own age, and though she was pleasing enough, even noble, in appearance, with a flawless brow, a sharp aquiline nose, and a pair of dark eyes that suggested a strong determination of will, these advantages had been eroded by negligence or poverty. Her dark hair was thick and, unlike mine, had not yet begun to grey, but it was worn loose and rose upwards from her crown in an unruly and unbecoming nimbus. Her gown had been made from a good-enough material, but the nap had long since worn off, and it was of an obsolete cut and, even worse, stained like an old sail. She was wearing some sort of calash or hooded mantle, which might have been silk, though it was not one of those pretty bird's-eye hoods such as one sees on the heads of fashionable ladies promenading through St. James's Park, for it was black as jet-stone, like her dress, and in poor repair. She looked, from its lugubrious colour, and from the pair of black gloves that stretched halfway up her forearms, to be in mourning. All of which together served to lend her the same air of distressed splendour, I decided, as Pontifex Hall itself.

'The Puritans burned all of your furnishings?'

'Not all,' she replied. 'No. I presume some of them, the more valuable items, were sold.'

'I'm so sorry.' Suddenly the image of Cromwell's ragtag band of soldiers did not seem quite so amusing after all.

A half smile had appeared on her face. 'Please, Mr. Inchbold. No need to apologise on their behalf. Beds can be replaced, unlike other things.'

'Your husband,' I murmured sympathetically.

'Even husbands can be replaced,' she said. 'Even a man like Lord Marchamont. You knew of him?' I shook my head. 'He was an Irishman,' she said simply. 'He died two years ago in France.'

'He was of the Royal party?'

'Of course.'

She had turned from me and now strode slowly round the room, examining the books and shelves like a steward examining a prize herd or a particularly satisfactory crop of corn. I was already wondering if they belonged to her. It seemed unlikely. Books were not, in my experience, a woman's business. But how, in that case, had she known about Ficino and Lefèvre d'Étaples and Michael Psellos? I felt a wary excitement shudder softly and cautiously engage.

'These are all I have left,' she said as if to herself. She had begun running her gloved fingertips across the spines, much as I had done a few minutes earlier. 'Everything I own. These and the house itself. Though I may not own Pontifex Hall for so very much longer.'

'Was it Lord Marchamont's?'

'No, his estate was in Ireland, and there's also a house in Hertfordshire. Dreadful places. Pontifex Hall was my father's, but after our marriage Lord Marchamont was named heir presumptive. We had no children, and it was entailed upon me in his will. There…' She was pointing to the window, from which the light had all but drained. The parterre outside was lost in shadow and our two reflections. 'Four leather-covered chairs sat there, next to a table and the beautiful old walnut scriptor where my father used to write his letters. And a hand-knotted turkey carpet on the floor, with monkeys and peacocks and all sorts of oriental designs woven into it.' Slowly her gaze returned to me. 'Now I wonder what could possibly have become of that? Sold as booty, I shouldn't wonder.'

I cleared my throat and voiced the thought that had occurred to me a moment earlier. 'Quite a miracle your books have survived.'

'Oh, but they did not survive,' came her swift reply. 'Not all of them. A number were missing when I returned. Others, as you can see, have been badly damaged. But, yes, quite a miracle. The soldiers would have burned the lot of them, and not only because of the cold winters. Some would have been considered popish, or diabolical, or both.' She nodded at the shelf behind me. 'Ficino's translation of the Pimander, for example. Fortunately they were hidden away.'

'What do you mean?'

'By my father. A long story, Mr. Inchbold. All in due time. You see, each one of these books has its own history. Many of them survived a shipwreck.'

'A shipwreck?'

'And others,' she continued, 'are refugees. Do you see these chains?' She was pointing to a group of volumes tethered by their bindings to the shelves. The loops of chain reflected dully in the gloom. I nodded. 'These books were already rescued once before, that time from the colleges in Oxford. From the chain libraries,' she explained, sliding one of them, a folio, from the shelf. She ran a gloved hand over its vellum cover-a loving gesture. The chain rattled thinly in protest. 'That was during the last century.'

'They were rescued from Edward VI?'

'From his commissioners. They were smuggled out of the college libraries and escaped the bonfires.' She had opened the enormous volume and began riffling idly through the pages. 'Quite amazing how determined kings and emperors have been to destroy books. But civilisation is built on such desecration, is it not? Justinian the Great burned all of the Greek scrolls in Constantinople after he codified the Roman law and drove the Ostrogoths from Italy. And Shih Huang Ti, the first Emperor of China, the man who unified the five kingdoms and built the Great Wall, decreed that every book written before he was born should be destroyed.' She clapped the volume shut and replaced it with a firm push. 'These books,' she said, 'my father acquired much later.'

'Ah,' I said, hoping we were at last reaching the heart of the matter. 'So all of these are his books? And you wish to sell them.'

'Were,' she said. 'They were his books. Yes, he assembled the collection.' She paused for a second and regarded me gravely. 'No, Mr. Inchbold, I do not wish to sell them. Most definitely not. Ah,' she said, turning, 'here is Bridget. Shall we withdraw to the dining-room? I think I will be able to offer you a seat in there.'

A short time later I was sitting before a duck which Mrs. Winter, the cook-maid, had roasted on a bed of green shallots and served on a large plate. In lieu of a dining-table-another casualty of the wars, evidently-the plate was balanced precariously on my lap. I ate self-consciously, without appetite, aware of the penetrating eyes of my hostess, who sat opposite. For a second her frank gaze had taken in my shrunken and inward-turning foot that looks, I have always thought, like the miserable appendage of some villainous dwarf from a German storybook. I felt myself blush with resentment, but by then Lady Marchamont had already glanced away.

'I must apologise for the wine,' she said as she nodded at Bridget to fill my glass for a third time. 'Once upon a time my father grew his own vines. In the valley.' She gestured vaguely in the direction of one of the broken windows. 'On the slopes above the river, sheltered from the wind. They produced some excellent wines, or so I have been told. I was too young to enjoy them at the time, and the vines have since been uprooted.'