- Possession's seventeenth chapter whisks us away from the 1850s and back into the 1980s again, where James Blackadder is sitting in his office in the British Museum, working away on his edition of Randolph Henry Ash's Complete Poems and Plays.
- As Blackadder writes a footnote to Ash's snarky poem Mummy Possest, we readers learn a little bit more about Ash's strong distrust of nineteenth-century spiritualism.
- As Blackadder works, Fergus Wolff drops by and does his best to stir up trouble between Blackadder and Roland Mitchell.
- The novel's narrator then whisks us away from the British Museum and into Roland and Val's apartment, where we see Fergus paying a visit to Val. Once again, the crafty "wolf" is doing his best to stir up trouble—and to figure out what Roland and Maud Bailey are up to, natch.
- The embittered Val gives Fergus the emergency telephone number that Roland gave her way back in January when he spent a week at Seal Court, and soon we readers get to eavesdrop on a telephone conversation between Fergus and Sir George Bailey.
- Sir George doesn't stay on the phone very long, but he says enough to confirm Fergus's suspicions that Roland and Maud were both there in the winter, and that they were working on something that involved both Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte.
- From there, the narrator takes us back to the dastardly Mortimer Cropper, who has just had lunch with Hildebrand Ash, the descendant of one of Randolph Henry Ash's cousins.
- As Cropper wanders around Soho, he's stopped by Fergus Wolff, who tells him that Roland Mitchell seems to have discovered some kind of connection between Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte.
- Cropper is intrigued, and he and Fergus head toward a café for a little tête-à-tête.