Ex Libris

Chapter Six

Was there ever a summer when the rains fell so heavily? Whenever I look back on those days it seems that rain is streaming from a leaden sky. The sun disappeared for weeks on end behind sullen scuds of cloud; it might have been October or November instead of July. In London the gutters filled and flowed, feeding the swollen Thames. The window-sills and clothes-lines no longer bore their swags of laundry, for there was never enough sunshine to dry anyone's linen. In the countryside the rivers overflowed their banks, ru

And was I, too, bent on revenge? Was it that which made me embark, feverish and ill, on that final, fateful journey? Was it retribution that I hoped to find as I set out from Alsatia, in the midst of the deluge, in the back of a mail-coach jostling along the Strand and into Charing Cross, heading slowly westward?

I remember the sodden morning of my departure, in contrast to those preceding it, in vivid detail. It was still only July, but already the scaffolds were being built for our little auto-da-fé. Or perhaps it was the begi

The next few days-or the next week-had passed horribly. I fell into a nightmarish sleep, from which I awoke now and again, sweating and sore, unable to move, tangled in clammy bed-linen like a panicked beast trapped in a net. At one moment the chamber seemed unbearably hot; the next, it was freezing-cold. I was hungry and thirsty but too weak, when I tried, to rise from the bed. I have vague memories of footfalls along the corridor. At some point after dusk I was aware of a jingling of keys, the sighing of hinges and, in the doorway, the alarmed face of a chambermaid. Mrs. Fawkes must have arrived shortly thereafter. I seem to remember someone else, a man, shuffling about on the squeaking floorboards. He inspected my tongue, whoever he was, and pressed his ear to my chest and the back of his hand to my brow. It seems I was agued; the result, doubtless, of my little excursion in the Cam, along with my exertions, my travels, my lack of food. I have always possessed a weak constitution. My body as much as my mind craves regularity and custom. To cap it all, my asthma had worsened. My chest was making a braying noise that seemed to alarm all concerned. In one of my few lucid moments it occurred to me how my clients would wonder and exclaim at the news that Isaac Inchbold, the respectable bookseller, had died in a brothel.

Yet Mrs. Fawkes had no wish to let me die; perhaps she was mindful of the reckoning. And so it was that over the next few days I suffered all ma

One morning when the rainclouds were prowling the horizon I rose from my sickbed, dressed my shrunken limbs in the Cavalier clothing that someone had thoughtfully laundered and folded, then took hold of my thorn-stick and hobbled down the stairs to pay Mrs. Fawkes for her hospitality. Through the windows of each landing I could see, sinking into the rooftops, steadily shrinking as I descended, the turrets and pe

'But, Mr. Cobb…' Mrs. Fawkes had seemed startled by the sight of the gold sovereigns I pressed into her palm. 'But… where will you go, sir?'

'My name is Inchbold,' I told her. I had had enough of lies. 'Isaac Inchbold.' I had turned and was already halfway to the door. Rain was falling heavily now. I watched a stream of water pulsing along the middle of the street. 'I shall go to Dorsetshire,' I told her, realising for the first time what dark skein my fevered brain had been slowly spooling as I lay sweating and trembling in my bed. 'I have urgent business in Dorsetshire.'

Six post roads left London in those days: six roads that radiated like the cords of a great web, at whose centre crouched the Postmaster-General and his superior, Sir Valentine Musgrave, the new Secretary of State. Between the radiation of the new royal monopoly, woven into its meshes, was a finer, almost invisible grid of by-posts and 'common carriers': independently run couriers who served the small market towns and remote areas of the kingdom that the coaches of the Postmaster-General had yet to penetrate. These were woefully primitive and disorganised, but spying and smuggling-and the shipping or receiving of unlicensed books-would have been tricky to accomplish without them. In 1657 Cromwell had tried without success to suppress them, and now I supposed they would become the modus operandi of the new King's numerous enemies, the secret cha