'Correct,' I replied.

'Well, then, the rest is up to you, Mr. Inchbold. You are conversant in Latin, I trust?'

'Of course.'

'And the law hands? Chancery? Secretary?'

'Most of them.'

'Of course. Your father…' He was struggling with the roll, which I helped him lower from where it had been shelved. It was an awkward bundle, surprisingly heavy, and had been fastened with a red ribbon. 'You must read it here. I regret there is no better place. But this corridor and the next should be long enough.'

'Long enough?'

'You will have to unroll it, of course. Mind the lantern, though. That is all I ask of you.'

With that he shuffled away down the corridor, humming to himself and leaving me to squat on the floor, bones cracking, with the curious prize clutched in my arms. As I untied the ribbon-slowly, like someone unwrapping a precious gift-I could hear the subdued thunder of traffic trundling overhead. So the crypt extended under Chancery Lane. Was that how the old clerk found his way through the corridors? By sound? Or had he been gifted, like the blinded Tiresias, with preternatural powers?

The ribbon came undone, and I slipped it into my pocket for safekeeping. Then, having fixed the tail of the roll against the wall and weighed it down with my thorn-stick, I began carefully to unroll the enormous spool. After a minute I reached the entrance to the corridor, moving on hands and knees, feeling like Theseus crawling through the labyrinth with Ariadne's golden thread unravelling behind him. Then I entered the next corridor, which after a few paces made a dog's-leg at a 120-degree angle. Then the next, dog-legging in the other direction. Shelves crowded to either side of me. The roll grew thinner, its tail longer. What would I discover at its end? A Minotaur? Or a passage out of the labyrinth and into the light of day? The floor declined slightly as I crept forward. 66… 65… 64… 63…

At last I reached it, midway through the roll and midway along the corridor. I caught my breath as it unfurled, even though the fifty-eighth deed on Chancery Roll DCCLXXVIII was utterly indistinguishable, at first glance, from the others: a piece of parchment, perhaps eighteen inches in length, with a seal suspended on a tag at the foot, which had been slit and then stitched to the head of the previous document. Well? What had I been expecting to see? I propped the lantern on the floor and seated myself cross-legged beside it with the parchment spread across my lap.

I had thought as I unrolled the documents that within seconds of reaching the deed I would know the culprit's name. But as I studied it front and back, it must have been a full minute before the import of the document finally struck me. The first thing I noticed were the signatures on the dorse, both illegible. Those of the witnesses, I supposed: law clerks, very likely. I turned the roll over, holding my breath. Still there was no revelation, though immediately I noticed the jagged line at the top of the page. As I ran my forefinger over the crude serration-the parchment was obviously an indenture, cut in two-a memory shot briefly to life, then abruptly faded. I had seen a similar document, an indenture very like this one. But I could not, in that brief second, remember where or when.

Sciant presentes et futuri quod ego Isabella Monboddo…

The first line, inscribed in black ink, leapt from the page. The lettering had been executed by a scrivener whose talents, I decided, fell short of my father's, though it was done in the elegant curves and dagger-sharp strokes of chancery script. So mesmerised was I by the script that it was another few seconds before I realised what exactly I was reading.

Sciant presentes et futuri quod ego Isabella Monboddo quondam uxor Henry Monboddo in mea viduitate dedi concessi et hac presenti carta mea confirmavi Alethea Greatorex…

But then, as the words unravelled from the page, I understood. Yet I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Squinting in the poor light of the cramped corridor I held the document so close to the lantern that its edge touched the casing. My eyes swept across the dense thicket of figures, returning to the top of the page to read it through again:

Let men present and future know that I, Isabella Monboddo, sometime wife of Henry Monboddo, have in my widowhood given, granted, and by this my present charter confirmed, to Alethea Greatorex, Lady Marchamont of Pontifex Hall, Dorsetshire, relict of Henry Greatorex, Baron Marchamont, all lands and tenements, meadows, grazing lands and pasture, with their hedges, banks and ditches, and with all their profits and appurtenances, which I have in Wembish Park, Huntingdonshire…

But I could read no more. The document dropped from my fingers and I slumped against a shelf, numb with shock, still not quite daring to comprehend what I had read. My foot must have struck the roll, for the last thing I remembered was the sight of it tumbling a few feet along the slight decline of the corridor before beginning its long unravelling, gathering its own momentum as one by one the documents unfurled and snaked into the darkness of the next corridor.

Chapter Five

York House stood less than a mile upriver from Billingsgate, where the storehouses and manufactories overhanging the embankment gave way to mansions that pushed themselves like palisades from the Thames. One after another they drifted past, each with an arched gateway framing a riverfront garden and a barge moored below. York House was found at the westernmost edge of the row, near the New Exchange, at the point where the river bent south towards the dingy clutter of Whitehall Palace. The eddies of current heaved and flexed about its stone steps that led to an arched watergate, on either side of which a stone wall encrusted with limpets held back the high tides. Tarred wooden bollards beside the steps made fast a multi-oared barge whose lacquered hull, in the morning sunshine, gave back a warped riverscape. Beyond the gate sprawled the garden: drooping willows, pollarded aspens, a forlorn pomegranate, all throwing spindly shadows across a knot garden filled with the shrivelled husks of last summer's flowers. Sparrows hopped about the box hedge, pecking for seeds and leaving hieroglyphics in frost that the low sun had not yet melted.

As she breasted the stairs, Emilia was surprised to see how the mansion-one of the largest on the river, late home of the Lord High Chancellor-appeared to be in ruins. Empty window sockets and a gap-toothed balustrade looked down on piles of stone blocks littered before the west wing. Baskets of bricks and roof slates stood against the wall of the east wing, halfway up whose crumbling surface a wooden scaffold jutted. Pulleyed ropes hung downward from the platforms like nooses, wagging in the breeze. From inside the house came the sound of hammers.

It was now eight o'clock. The post horn of one of Lord Stanhope's departing mail-coaches was sounding in Charing Cross as Emilia followed Vilém across the garden to the tradesmen's entrance. Her left knee and ribs were aching from her brush with the gunwales of the fishing smack an hour earlier. At the last second Vilém had grasped her arm and pulled her aboard the smack as it knifed past on the current. When it docked at Billingsgate the two of them had disembarked and, limping and dripping, made their way through the fish market to the other side of London Bridge. A scull was waiting. The Cardinal's men seemed to have disappeared into the thicket of masts and sails.

Progress to York House had been a slow one on account of the tide, which had turned by the time the watermen pushed off from the stairs beside the Old Swan Tavern. Vilém had chosen the two burliest specimens and a sleek-looking pair-of-oars, but the journey upriver still took almost an hour. To make matters worse, the watermen had trouble finding the house. Essex Stairs… the Strand Bridge… Somerset Stairs-all had looked exactly the same as the boat slipped past. One of Emilia's hands gripped the wet fustian of Vilém's coat. He had been oblivious, perched in the bows with his head raised as if sniffing the breeze. But at one point, halfway along the row, he nodded at one of the mansions.