Ex-Libris by Ross King

Author:Ross King [King, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Europe, Historical fiction, Book collectors, Mystery & Detective, Europe - History - 17th century, General, Libraries, Mystery fiction, Historical, Ladies-in-waiting, Hermes - Appreciation, Fiction, Booksellers and bookselling
ISBN: 9780142000809
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2002-05-27T23:00:00+00:00

———«»——————«»——————«»———

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.

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