'Was the owner. Wembish Park appears to have changed hands since the recent land settlement.'

He was hunched low over the page now, like a jeweller examining stones of rare quality through his lens. From where I sat I could see the columns shrink and swim beneath it. Then he turned the page with a sharp crackle and, laying the glass aside, looked up for the first time in twenty minutes.

'Yes,' he said, 'it's been sold. Quite recently, from the looks of it. The deed was enrolled only a few weeks ago. Though of course it may have been registered in the county with the Clerk of the Peace up to a month before that. We're a little behind in our work-'

'Yes, of course, all of the land settlements…' I was hardly daring to breathe. 'To whom was it sold?'

'Ah. Well.' He indulged himself with a smile. 'That the cartulary does not tell us.'

'But the deed?' I could barely contain my urge to wrench the register from his hands and read the entry for myself. 'You say it's been enrolled?'

'Of course it's been enrolled. It's the law, you understand.'

'Well, in that case, where is it found?'

Spicer seemed to ignore the question. He took up his reading-glass and once again hunched his back, applying himself like a laborious schoolboy to the page. After a few seconds he plucked up one of his quills and with elaborate care trimmed its nib and then copied on to a scrap of paper rummaged from one of the drawers a bristling thicket of numerals that, still leaning forward, I was barely able to decipher: CXXXIIIW. DCCLXXVIII. LVIII.

'There you are,' he said, sliding the cryptic message across the top of the desk towards me with the tip of an index finger. 'This, I believe, is what you wished to learn.'

I took up the paper and held it by the edges, careful not to smear the ink. I frowned and raised my eyes to Spicer. He was watching me with a complacent smile.

'What do you mean? What is this?'

'The crypt, Mr. Inchbold.' The cartulary gave a valedictory flump as its cover was slammed shut. Spicer's smile had disappeared. He replaced the quill in the ink-horn and then slipped the reading-glass into a drawer. 'That is where you'll find what you're seeking. In the crypt.'

The sun had shifted to the west windows by the time I picked my way down the narrow staircase and into the nave. The chapel was even emptier now; I could see only a pair of clerks in hushed conference in the chancel. I sculled along the aisle on my thorn-stick, faint from hunger because I had not eaten since the previous day. But there was no time for food. Bracing myself against a pew I swung my club foot over a stool, holding tightly to the slip of paper. Yes, there was too much to do before I could think about my belly.

The door to the crypt stood at the front of the church, near the chancel beneath which I supposed it extended. It bore the same legend as the one leading to the bell-tower, 'Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum', and creaked open on to a set of steps equally shallow and narrow. There was no light, so far as I could see, except a muted glow at the bottom. I ducked my head beneath the scarred wooden mullion and, taking a deep breath like a diver, began a slow descent.

I was to be met in the crypt by a clerk named Appleyard who would decipher the paper and locate the deed. But I had already guessed that the numerals referred to the shelf mark of the roll in question. As I descended I could see that the shelves and cases in the catacomb below were all numbered, as were the boxes and the scores of rolls bound with ribbons and crammed on to the shelves. Still, it would have been impossible to locate the roll on my own. As my eyes adjusted to the poor light I saw that the crypt was a vast labyrinth extending far beyond the chancel to encompass the area beneath the nave and then, for all I could tell, Chancery Lane and perhaps even a good part of London as well. Narrow corridors barely two feet in width and overhung by the rolls of parchment-some as big around as saucers, others thin as pipe stems-slithered away into darkness on either side, then divided into other, equally cramped tributaries. It was only because I was short and my belly of modest dimensions that I was able to pick my way along the widest of these passageways towards the thin glow of lamplight and, squatted within it, the tiny desk occupied by Mr. Appleyard. The lamp had been trimmed low and Mr. Appleyard was fast asleep.

It took a minute or two to rouse him. He was a frail-looking old man with a coronal of white hair over his ears and a bald dome that had yellowed to the colour of the parchments surrounding him. Twice I shook him gently by the shoulder. On the second occasion, he snorted and coughed, then jerked erect with pale eyes ablink.

'Yes?' His hands were fumbling on the desk. 'What is it? Who's there?'

I slipped the paper on to the desk and explained that I had been sent from the tower by Mr. Spicer. 'I'm searching for a deed,' I explained. 'My name is Inchbold.'

'Inchbold…' His hands froze in mid-air above the blotter. Then he paused for a moment, frowning deeply and tapping the tip of his nose with a forefinger as though lost in some private reverie. 'Of the Inchbolds of Pudney Court? In Somersetshire?'

I was surprised by the question. 'The attachment is a distant one.'

'Of course. But your attachment to Henry Inchbold, I think, is not so distant. Correct? Your voice no less than your name is very like his.'

Now I was quite taken aback. 'You remember my father?'

'Very well indeed. A fine selection of scripts. The ascenders in his court hand were, I recall, most emphatic in their execution.' He shrugged and offered a toothless smile. 'You see, in those days I still enjoyed the pleasures of sight.'

Only then did I realise that Appleyard with his fumbling hands and blinking gaze was as blind as Homer. I felt my heart slip. Was this some joke on the part of Spicer? How would a blind man-even a man with a memory evidently as prodigious as Appleyard's-lead me through the wanderings of the crypt?

'But I take it, Mr. Inchbold, that you have not come to discuss your father.'

'No.'

'Nor Pudney Court either. Or is that perhaps the deed you seek? I remember it as well, you know. A fine example of the floreate charter hand before the so-called reform of penmanship in the thirteenth century. Reform,' he repeated disdainfully. 'An emasculation, I call it.'

'No,' I replied, 'not Pudney Court either. A property in Huntingdonshire.'

'Ah.' His sallowed head was bobbing.

'A house called Wembish Park. I believe it was recently sold.' I retrieved the slip of paper from the desk. 'Mr. Spicer has given me the shelf mark. Shall I read it to you?'

The paper was decoded much as I suspected. The parchment would be found on shelf number CXXXIII, which stood in the west wing of the crypt. Hence the W in the code, Appleyard explained. Roll number DCCLXXVIII was one of those on which deeds for the present year had been enrolled. The deed itself would be the fifty-eighth parchment, which meant that it would have been enrolled roughly halfway along, 'so far as I remember, mind'. He was feeling his way through the corridor in front of me as he spoke, ticking off the shelves as he passed them, moving so swiftly that I had some difficulty keeping pace. I was carrying my stick in one hand, and in the other the lantern, which he had advised me not to drop unless I wished to see its flames engulf four hundred years of legal history.

'Here we are,' he said at last, after burrowing like a mole along a branching series of ever-narrowing aisles. 'Shelf number one-thirty-three. Correct?'

I held the lantern aloft. Its glow lit the legend inscribed on a yellowed and curling paper fixed to the end of the shelf: CXXXIIIW.