Ex Libris

by Ross King

  'Please, Mr. Inchbold. You must listen very closely.' Her voice was more earnest and insistent than the case seemed to demand, with none of the patience and propriety I had so far associated with women. 'I wish to engage you to find one book. One book only. The eleven other volumes, I am happy to say, have been located. But this last, the twelfth book, has not-though not for want of trying.'

  So much fuss, then, for a single book. I sighed inwardly. 'And so it is on account of this one, the twelfth, that you wish to engage me.' I was attempting to keep an edge of resignation from my voice. I had no wish to see her temper ruffle again.

  'Precisely. For, you see, much depends on your finding it.'

  'It seems like a great deal of trouble to bring someone all the way from London for a single book.'

  'A very valuable book.'

  'Even for a valuable one.'

  The vertical line on her dark brow deepened. 'Mr. Inchbold, I wish to emphasise the importance of your task.'

  'And so you have.'

  But there was more, much more, that she had not 'emphasised'; I was certain of that. Everything she told me seemed meticulously selected from a larger, unexposed story, some intrigue at which she only hinted. Her father's enemies, for example, these 'other interests'. Did they, too, wish to claim this mysterious twelfth book? But I wondered also how much of what she said-about her father, about her husband-I should let myself believe.

  I had turned my back to her and for a few calculated seconds glowered blindly through the window, past the shards of glass hanging precariously in their decrepit lead fittings. I cleared my throat softly and asked: 'And if I should refuse?'

  'Then we both shall lose,' she replied evenly. 'Then my situation becomes most unfortunate.'

  'There are other booksellers.'

  'That's as may be. But none, I think, possesses your resources.'

  That was true, or at least I liked to tell myself it was. But appeals to my vanity were no good. Nor was the appeal to my greed that followed.

  'I shall pay you very well.' Her voice was coming from a few feet behind me, chiming with a note I'd not heard before. 'One hundred pounds. Will that be sufficient? Plus expenses, of course. I expect you will be required to travel.'

  'Travel?' The idea appalled me. I had no wish to travel anywhere except back to Nonsuch House. A hundred pounds was a good deal of money, true enough. But what did I want with more money? I was perfectly happy as I was, with my handsome £150 a year; with my tobacco-pipe, my armchair, my books.

  'One hundred pounds, mind you, simply to accept the task,' she was continuing. I could feel her eyes boring into my back. 'Then, should you find the book… as I am certain you will… one hundred more. Two hundred pounds, Mr. Inchbold'-she had adopted a tone whose levity belied the magnitude of the offer-'two hundred pounds simply to hunt down a book. My only condition is, of course, your complete discretion.'

  Two hundred pounds for a book? Removing my spectacles I began polishing their lenses vigorously on the hem of my coat. My curiosity began to wriggle free from the strict tethers with which I had bound it. Two hundred pounds for a single book? Unheard of. Ridiculous. Half my entire stock could be had for that price. What sort of volume could possibly be worth such a sum? Even the Caxton binder's edition of St. Augustine's Confessiones-the edition I had glimpsed last night-could not possibly fetch a price as grand as that.

  I replaced my spectacles and for a moment said nothing. Alethea had remained silent, awaiting my reply. Well… what did I really have to lose? It was possible I wouldn't be required to travel after all. I had all of my factors, of course: good men in Oxford, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt. And Monk could be counted on to scour the bookstalls in Paternoster Row and Westminster Hall, or anywhere else I might see fit to send him. And for all I knew the book might even be on my walnut shelves at this very minute. Well? Stranger things did happen. After all, I knew for a fact that I had a copy on my shelves of Sir Walter Raleigh's Discoverie of the large, rich, and beautifull Empire of Guiana-a fifth title that I had made out on the upside-down page a minute earlier.

  I turned round to face her. Almost despite myself I extended my hand.

  'Well? What, may I ask, is the name of this valuable book?'

  ***

  That afternoon I was slumped back in the seat of the carriage for the return journey to London. For the first time in hours-in days-I felt myself relax. Phineas cracked his whip, the horses plunged forward, the stunted trees flew past the quarter-lights. But then as we approached the archway we came within inches of colliding with a lone horseman riding full pelt towards the house.

  'Sir Richard!'

  'Bloody old fool! Out of my path!'

  'Yes, Sir Richard!'

  Phineas jerked the reins violently sideways. The carriage lurched towards the grassy verge, where the right front wheel jarred over a rock and then slipped into a trench. I was flung forward on to the floor of the box, twisting my hip. The rider spurred his mount, a big chestnut roan, and flew past my window with a rook-like caw.

  By the time I righted myself we had climbed out of the trench and were passing beneath the archway. Grimacing, I twisted round in the seat and raised the leather flap on the tiny oval rear-window. I watched the rider dismount and then bow before Alethea, who curtsied and offered her hand. She had already changed into a riding-habit in expectation of his arrival. Her visitor was a big fellow in an old-fashioned millstone ruff and a high-crowned hat with a purple ribbon that twitched in the breeze. They were framed for a second by the wings of Pontifex Hall, two figures in an oil painting. Then we turned a corner and the painting was riven by a length of broken wall and unkempt hedgerow.

  'Sir Richard Overstreet,' shouted Phineas, for once volunteering some information. 'A neighbour. Betrothed to marry Lady Marchamont.'

  'Is that so?'

  'Before the year is out, I shouldn't wonder. A scoundrel, sir, if you ask me,' he finished with uncharacteristic passion.

  'Oh?'

  But Phineas had said his piece. There were to be no further divulgations. We rode on, for three more days, in gloomy silence.

  But the incident left a strange effect on me. My anger and impatience had drained away to be replaced by something else. For at some point during the previous day a small breach had been prised open. Certain images of Alethea filtered back along the irregular sluices of memory. As I closed my eyes these trickling channels carried past me images of her bent over the volumes, blowing dust from their bindings or tracing her fingertips across their surfaces like someone exploring the curve of a lover's face. Once she had even raised one of the books to her lips and, closing her eyes, sniffed at it as one would at a rose.

  And so as the road twisted before us and untwisted behind I felt the first twinges of a confusing and unexpected distemper, the timid quivering of a stunted and vestigial organ for which, as with an appendix, I no longer had a use; something that, like a tail-bone or wisdom tooth, had been carried over from an extinct life, quiescent and forgotten. All at once I remembered how she looked at me in the crypt, as well as the dozens of books on sorcery crammed on to the shelves of the library, and for a moment I wondered if during my stay she might not have magicked me like a witch or a wisewoman-if some heathen spell was the source of these strange quavers. But before I could contemplate this foolish notion any longer, the leaky flood-hatches had been closed by the pain in my hip. Still, the event was no less worrying for its brevity. I would remain on the alert for further symptoms.

  As my seat tipped back and forth I watched the combes open and dip, the hills and trees rise to meet us, then fall away. A few clouds hung overhead, grey as gun-smoke. Again I felt myself relax. Soon I would see the golden cupolas and brass weathercocks of Nonsuch House rising into the smoke-filled London sky. Soon I would be back inside my thick walls of books, sealed off from the alarming conundrums of the world. The events of the past day would seem nothing but a strange dream from which I had gratefully awakened, unsure of where I h
ad travelled or what might have transpired.

  But I would still possess a memento of my journey, a garbled testament of its strange purpose. As we reached Crampton Magna I withdrew a piece of paper from my pocket and stared hard at the smudged words inscribed in Alethea's old-fashioned secretary hand: Labyrinthus mundi, or The Labyrinth of the World.

  Rattling about in my seat, I frowned at the paper as I had when Alethea first placed it into my hands. The name sounded vaguely familiar, though I was far from certain where I might have heard of it. It was the name of a work quite different from the other errant volumes, those treatises on navigation and remote explorations of the Spanish Americas. It was a parchment that dated, she claimed, from early in the fifteenth century, when it had been copied from a papyrus original-now lost-and translated into Latin by a scribe in Constantinople: a fragment of perhaps ten or twelve vellum leaves in the ornate oriental blind-tooled binding known as rebesque or arabesco. She would say nothing more except that it was a Hermetic text, an obscure one that had never been published. But how such a parchment could be worth two hundred pounds, and how it had become the mysterious index of Lady Marchamont's fortunes, such riddles I did not wish, at this point, to consider.

  How much did I know, at that time, about the so-called Corpus hermeticum? No more, I suppose, than anyone else. I was aware, naturally, of how the manuscripts first appeared in Florence some two hundred years ago, after Cosimo de' Medici sent forth bands of his agents with orders to bring back to his magnificent library whatever parchments they could lay their hands on in every church and monastery that would let them past their doors. And I knew how these explorers-mostly monks from the San Marco in Florence-had recovered scores of lost masterpieces in the fusty libraries and scriptoria of the far-flung monasteries of Monte Cassino, Langres, Corvey and St. Gall, works by such esteemed authors as Cicero, Seneca, Livy and Quintilian, and dozens more besides, all of which were quickly edited, translated and placed for study and safekeeping with the other treasures in the Medici Library. The thought of these scholar-explorers, these intrepid friars on muleback, I had always found appealing. Theirs were the humblest and yet most noble voyages of discovery, dangerous trips made decades before the sailing of Columbus and Cabot, before the mania for navigating the world took over, perilous journeys whose object was not gold or spices or trade routes but ancient manuscripts, a few dried-out animal skins whose secret worlds were brought back to life only after weeks of plodding along overgrown, bandit-infested mountain tracks.

  And I knew, finally, how the greatest of all these discoveries was made in or about the year 1460, less than ten years after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, when one of Cosimo's fearless monks brought back to Florence the first fourteen books of the Corpus hermeticum. The treasure uncovered in Macedonia was as valuable-or so Cosimo believed-as the spices of India or the gold of Peru, and worth all of the other manuscripts in the Medici Library combined. The parchments reached Florence soon after the untranslated dialogues of Plato, which had been brought out of Macedonia by Giovanni Aurispa. But Cosimo ordered Marsilio Ficino, the greatest scholar in Florence, and therefore the greatest scholar in the entire world, to translate the works of Hermes first, because he believed, like everyone else, the great Ficino included, that Plato had received all of his wisdom from none other than the ancient Egyptian priest Hermes Trismegistus. For, after all, had not ancient scholars like Iamblichus of Apamea described how Plato drank down the revered knowledge of Hermes Trismegistus while visiting Egypt? So why should Cosimo read copies by this upstart Plato if he owned their originals, the works of Hermes Trismegistus himself?

  As Ficino busily translated the fourteen books from Greek into Latin there arose in Florence and then throughout the rest of Europe dozens of rumours about the existence of more Hermetic manuscripts, in Macedonia and elsewhere, all still awaiting discovery. Some twenty more parchments were eventually recovered, after much bribing of priests and ransacking of temples, but all were versions or fragments of the same fourteen books, and three more besides, so that the total number of Hermetic texts in existence stood at seventeen. A century after Cosimo's death, the Greek text of the Macedonian parchments was published in Paris, and afterwards both copies of the Corpus hermeticum-the one Latin, the other Greek-went through many editions and emendations, all of which Sir Ambrose had, it seemed, dutifully collected: as many editions and translations as were printed throughout Europe in the past two hundred years.

  Alethea had beckoned me forward to the shelves to show how her father owned the editions prepared by Lefèvre d'Étaples, Turnebus, Flussas, Patrizzi, Rosseli, even Trincavelli's edition of Johannes Stobaeus, a Macedonian pagan who had collected together some of the Hermetic works more than a millennium earlier. But none of these collections, she claimed, contained the eighteenth manuscript, The Labyrinth of the World, the first Hermetic text discovered in almost two hundred years.

  I had watched sceptically as she stood beside the shelf and ticked them off one by one, thinking what a pity it was that, on these volumes at least, Sir Ambrose had wasted so much money. All were handsomely bound, it was true, and I could have sold most of them in a matter of days to any one of a dozen collectors. But fifty years ago the great Isaac Casaubon had demonstrated how the entire Corpus hermeticum-this supposed fountainhead of the world's most ancient magic and wisdom-was nothing more than a fraud, the invention of a handful of Greek scholars living in Alexandria at some time in the century after Christ. So of what possible value or interest for anyone was one more book, one more of these fakes?

  The coach forded the thin stream, its wheels tossing curtains of water to either side. The down payment gold sovereigns-an even dozen of them-chimed softly in my pockets. I closed my eyes and didn't open them, for all I remember, until we reached the smoke of London, which I swear had never smelled so good.

  Chapter Eight

  The battle for Prague lasted less than an hour. Frederick's soldiers and their feeble earthworks were no match for the Imperial hordes with their 24-pound cannon-balls and flintlock muskets. The artillery ripped apart the trenches in front of the Summer Palace, then the musketeers went to work, balancing their weapons on forked rests and firing on the Bohemian infantry skidding and tumbling down the hillside. Those who escaped the musket-balls were cut down by the sabres of the cavalry who came sweeping through the game park on their war-horses a few minutes later. Those who escaped the cavalry spilled through the gates and into the castle or, failing that, leapt into the Vltava. They tried to swim the river at its bend, hoping to reach the Jewish Quarter or the Old Town, to put water between themselves and the rampaging enemy.

  Others too were trying to escape across the Vltava. A convoy of overloaded coaches drawn by mules and dray-horses was jostling three abreast on the bridge, stretching all the way across the river and filling Charles Street as it wound its narrow channel through the rows of houses and towards the Old Town Square. The Queen herself was in the middle of the turbid flow, her bags hastily packed and then piled atop the roof like those of a gypsy or a tinker. A few minutes earlier she had been wrapped in a furred cape and bundled into the royal coach. Now the brocaded window-curtains did a sad shuffle as the coach teetered along the bridge, its wheels grinding against those of tumbrels and handcarts pulled or pushed by her fleeing subjects. The statues of saints wavered slowly past. They had been decapitated on her orders a few months earlier and now made an eerie sight. Then the wooden statue of the Virgin lurched into view, another wavering ghost. But the driver shouted and showed the whip to his horses. The Queen would cross into the Old Town after all, Holy Mother or not.

  Emilia was also crossing into the Old Town. She had fled through the Spanish Rooms with Sir Ambrose, then through the castle; which was empty by then except for a few servants who were trundling hand-barrows piled with furs and casks of wine across the courtyards, claiming what they could before the Imperial troops breached the gates and the looting began in earnest. There would be litt
le enough for them in the library, though. Two of its rooms were ablaze; the flames had filled the corridors with clouds of black smoke and then cast a gaudy, flickering light across the bastion garden and the onion-shaped dome of the cathedral. The cannon-ball had been heated on a brazier and so flames leapt through the wreckage of the wall seconds after it struck. Sir Ambrose had flailed at them with his cape, his enormous shadow vaulting on the wall behind him, but he was beaten back as the flames rose upwards, blackening the plastered ceiling, then the air itself. Spinning round, he had thrust out a black-gloved hand.

  'Come! This way!'

  In the courtyard outside he had caught the reins of a riderless horse, then leapt astride and pulled her up behind him. It was an old hackney horse, a beast more used to carts than riders, but Sir Ambrose rode it hard, spurring it down the steep descent into the Lesser Town. Emilia clung to the hind-bow of the saddle as they scrabbled along the steps, horseshoes sparking.

  Before them lay the Lesser Town Square, where the river of mule-carts split into two arms at the plague column, then merged together, thicker than ever. Already she could see the pinnacled bridge tower shifting against the irregular ground of spires and vanes crowded together in the Old Town.

  Where were they headed? Sir Ambrose had said little since leaving the library, merely issuing terse commands to follow him, to hold tight, to duck her head as the horse passed under each keystone. He had not even bothered to introduce himself-he had the manners of a Turk, she would discover, even at the best of times. But already she could guess who he was. She knew that the tall Englishman was the agent who had brought the Golden Books to Prague along with dozens of other parchments from Constantinople-those ancient works that Vilém claimed had not seen the light of day since the Sultan Mehmet captured the city in the year 1453. But Vilém had told her nothing of the Englishman's return to Bohemia. Evidently his visit was sub rosa, or 'under the rose', as the ambassadors termed it. She knew of his presence only because gossip in the Královsky Palace claimed he had come to Prague not to buy books for the Spanish Rooms, as of old, but to sell them, to trade them for soldiers and musket-balls.