'Immediately before the estate was seized.'
'Yes. Lord Marchamont had the contents of the library valued before we went into exile. He was planning to sell the entire collection. We were… embarrassed for funds. But no buyer could be found. Not in those days. No one, that is, to whom Lord Marchamont had any wish to sell the collection. So he next considered removing the library to France. He had even arranged for its passage across the Channel from Portsmouth on the Belphoebe, one of the few men-o'-war that hadn't deserted to Cromwell in 1642. But the plan fell through, of course. The Belphoebe went down off the Isle of Wight less than a fortnight before the books were due to be sent from Pontifex Hall. A freak storm. But the shipwreck was fortunate for the collection, as it turns out. I need not tell you what would have happened otherwise.'
Indeed not. A number of libraries that had been transferred to France for safekeeping during the Civil War had become the property of the French Crown, by Droit d'Aubain, upon the deaths of their owners. A fate that Sir Ambrose's books would no doubt have shared when Lord Marchamont died.
'I discovered the inventory in the muniment room,' she was continuing, 'in the bottom of the coffin, one day after you left Pontifex Hall. Otherwise I would most certainly have given it to you then.' She was leaning forward from the bed. 'Quite detailed, as you will see.'
'It mentions the parchment?'
'Of course. But that detail is not the most interesting piece of intelligence. Please, the last page, if you will. There you will see how the collection was inventoried and valued by the person whom Lord Marchamont had engaged to sell it.'
The document was at least fifty pages long, an endless swarm of authors, titles, editions, prices. My head swam. I had already read too many catalogues that day. But the last page was blank, I saw, except for a few words inscribed at the bottom: 'This entire Collection valued at the sum of 47,000 pounds sterling, on this day, the 15th of February 1651, by Henry Monboddo of Wembish Park, Huntingdonshire.'
I felt a tightening in my belly and looked up to find Alethea studying me closely.
'Henry Monboddo,' she murmured thoughtfully. 'A man well known among the Royalist exiles in Holland and France.'
'You knew him, then?'
'I did indeed.' She reached for the inventory and carefully returned it to the portmanteau. 'Or, rather, I met him on one or two occasions. He worked out of Antwerp in those days,' she continued, the bedposts gently creaking as she resumed her seat. 'He was a picture-monger, an art-broker. He sold the contents of many libraries and galleries, including those from York House. You know of the collection?'
I nodded, remembering Pickvance's catalogue for the year 1654, with its description of the items from the 'admirable collection' of the second Duke of Buckingham.
'Those were difficult times for all of us. Buckingham was also embarrassed for funds. York House had been confiscated and many of its treasures, those collected by his father, were pillaged by Cromwell's men. So in 1648, in order to relieve the Duke's finances, Monboddo sold some two hundred of the paintings. He got him a fair price, because the Peace of Westphalia had recently been signed and therefore the supply of plunder was threatening to dry up. Indeed, after Westphalia the stream might well have disappeared altogether had it not been for our commotions here in England.'
'So Monboddo disposed of collections of books and paintings for insolvent exiles? For anyone whose estate was being sequestrated?'
She nodded. 'He found the buyers for their art collections. Dukes and princes who wished to stock their libraries and cabinets. He had connections in courts throughout Christendom. My father dealt with him on a number of occasions when he made purchases for the Emperor Rudolf.'
'You mean to say that Monboddo was known to Sir Ambrose?'
'Yes. Many years earlier, of course. He conducted the negotiations with agents such as my father and took a handsome commission in return.' Her gaze dropped to the copy of Agrippa clutched in my hand. 'I believe he even negotiated with my father over the purchase of the von Steiner collection in Vienna. But there were also rumours about Monboddo's work,' she added. 'He was said to have clients other than Royalists unable to pay the taxes imposed on their estates.'
She paused to withdraw from the folds of her skirts an object that in the poor light I took a moment to recognise as a tobacco-pipe, which she then proceeded to fill, expertly, with tobacco. I expected her to hand it to me but was surprised to see her fit it with equal expertise between her molars. Her face flashed orange as she lit a taper and coaxed the bowl to life.
'Forgive me,' she said, gusting smoke and waving the taper through the air to extinguish its flame. 'Virginia tobacco. The fire-cured leaf of the Nicotiana trigonophylla, a particularly delicious species. Sir Walter Raleigh claims harmful effects for it, but I have always found a postprandial bowl an excellent aid to digestion, especially if smoked in a clay pipe. My father once owned a calumet,' she continued as a cloud of smoke unfurled into the space between us. 'It had a clay bowl and a stem made from a reed plucked from the shore of Chesapeake Bay. It was made a present to him by a Nanticoke chieftain in Virginia.'
'Virginia?' Sir Ambrose Plessington, that Proteus, that decagon with all of his mysterious side-facets, assumed yet another guise. But I was here on other business. 'You were mentioning that Monboddo-'
'Yes, yes, we were speaking of Monboddo, not of my father. Nor of Raleigh.' She had leaned back and was reclining on the bed now, on its half-dozen scattered cushions, her great tangled mane against the headboard. 'Yes, there were stories, I should almost say legends, about Henry Monboddo.'
'Legends of what sort?'
'Well… where shall we begin?' She cupped the bowl in her palm and for a few seconds studied the canopy above her head as if for inspiration. 'For one thing,' she resumed, 'it was said that he negotiated the purchase of the Mantua Collection in the year 1627. In those days he was the artistic agent for King Charles. That much was common knowledge. He was also the agent for the Duke of Buckingham. The first Duke, I mean-Sir George Villiers, the Lord High Admiral. Monboddo scoured the courts and studios of Europe on behalf of the pair of them, bringing back to England all sorts of items. Books, paintings, statues… whatever might have struck the fancy of those two great connoisseurs.' The clay pipe wavered and glowed before me as she took another slow draught of smoke. 'You have heard of the Mantua Collection?'
I nodded. 'Of course.' Who had not? Dozens of paintings by Titian, Raphael, Correggio, Caravaggio, Rubens, Giulio Romano, all purchased by King Charles for the sum of £15,000-a bargain even at that price. The canvases hung in the galleries of Whitehall Palace until Cromwell and his band of philistines sold them off to pay their debts. It was the greatest disgrace, in my opinion, of Cromwell's reign-a despoliation of our entire nation.
'The silk industry in Mantua had collapsed in the 1620s,' she continued, 'and so the Gonzagas were starved for funds. King Charles was also starved for funds, but a detail such as that hardly troubled him where paintings were concerned, especially ones as marvellous and valuable as those in the Mantua Collection. He could scarcely believe his ears when he first heard the report from Mantua. A special tax was levied and Monboddo raised the remainder of the funds along with Sir Philip Burlamaqui, the King's financier. At the same time, of course, Burlamaqui was raising funds to equip a fleet of a hundred ships for Buckingham's expedition to the Île de Ré, where the Protestants of La Rochelle were besieged by the armies of Cardinal Richelieu. An unfortunate coincidence of events,' she murmured. 'The King was forced to choose between his ships and his paintings.'