This enquiry had met with better luck. 'Buy your books? No, sir,' he said after a pause, squinting fiercely at the road ahead. His head was thrust forward beneath his shoulders, giving him the appearance of a vulture. 'I should think Lady Marchamont has quite enough books already.'

'So she wishes to sell her books, then?'

'Sell her books?' There was another baffled, ruminative pause. His frown deepened the wrinkles cut like cuneiforms across his brow and cheeks. He removed his hat, a low-crowned beaver, and wiped at his brow, exposing a naked skull that was spotted like a quail's egg. At length, replacing the hat with his shrunken child's hand, he allowed himself a grave chuckle. 'I shouldn't imagine so, sir. Lady Marchamont is most fond of her books.'

That was more or less the extent of our conversation for the next three days. Further questions were either ignored or else answered with the customary grunt. His only other articulations proved to be the sepulchral snores that hindered my sleep on our first night in Bagshot and our second in Shaftesbury.

Our progress had been maddeningly slow. I was a creature of the city-of its smoke and speed, its pushing crowds and whirling iron wheels-and so our leisurely advance through the countryside, across its vacant heaths and through its tiny, nameless villages, was almost more than I could bear. But the saturnine Greenleaf was in no hurry. For mile after mile he sat erect in the box-seat with the reins loose in his hands and the whip dangling between his knees like an angler's rod above a trout stream. And now, after Crampton Magna, the trackway deteriorated badly. The last leg of our journey, though only a mile or two, lasted another hour. No one, it seemed, had passed this way in years. In places the road was overcome by vegetation and all but disappeared; in others the left rut stood at a greater height than the right, or vice versa, or both were littered with sizeable stones. The branches of unpruned trees scored the coach's top, unkempt hedges of beech and quickthorn its doors. We were in constant danger of tipping over. But at long last, after the coach squeezed across another stone bridge, Greenleaf pulled at the reins and laid aside his whip.