by Ross King
Now as she watched Sir Ambrose inspect and then nail shut another crate she wondered whether the books from the secret archive had been removed from the library along with all the others. Perhaps the volume she had seen last night was one of them, some book feared and forbidden by Rome? For she knew from what little she understood of the treacherous morass of Bohemian politics that the Englishman was, like Frederick and Elizabeth, a champion of the Protestant religion and an enemy to both the Emperor Ferdinand and his brother-in-law, the King of Spain. Court gossips claimed that three years ago Sir Ambrose had taken part in the expedition of another daring Englishman and Protestant champion whose fleet sailed to Guiana in the hope of capturing a gold mine from the Spanish. Sir Walter Raleigh's voyage had been a disaster, of course. The mythical mine had not been found; nor had the sought-after route through the Orinoco to the South Seas. Nor had the Spaniards been trounced in battle and driven from the shores of Guiana. To cap it all, Sir Walter had lost his head for his troubles. But Sir Ambrose had survived-if, indeed, he took part in the voyage in the first place. Now she wondered whether his unexplained reappearance in Prague was for the same type of mission, yet another strike against the detested Catholics. If so, had the men who pursued them through the streets of the Old Town the previous night been the agents of a cardinal or bishop?
'Mistress…'
The astronomical clock across the square was striking eight. She turned to see the serving-maid framed in the doorway, strangling a lace handkerchief in her hands. She looked as though she had been weeping. From outside in the corridor came the sound of the Queen's voice and from below the lowing of an ox, then Sir Ambrose's angered curse.
'Come,' the girl was whispering. 'A coach has been prepared.'
***
It was another hour before the convoy began its march through the streets of the Old Town, led by a troop of horse. A winding river of horse-carts, baggage-wagons, carriages, pack-mules with baskets and panniers: it was as if the entire contents of Prague Castle had been decanted into the ramshackle caravan. One by one the vehicles inched forward, two abreast, into the narrow streets, moving eastward, the axles ploughing through the snow and the oxen baulking in protest as if headed for the shambles. Thin panes of ice crunched under their hoofs as they were whipped along the street, their traces stiff with frost. Progress was slow and disorderly. For minutes at a stretch the caravan stood at a standstill as the horsemen struggled to clear snow from their path with their boots and the butts of muskets. Then the snow began to melt and the streets became a quagmire and passage even more difficult. In thirty minutes the front of the procession had rolled barely halfway down Celetná Street.
Emilia was squeezed inside one of the smaller coaches at the back of the caravan, riding bodkin between two of the other ladies-in-waiting. She was shivering inside a stable blanket, flexing her fingers, blowing on to them, rubbing her palms together, clapping her hands and then thrusting them deep into her covering of sheepskin in a series of frenetic but futile rituals. She also kept twisting round in the seat to peer through the quarter-light at the square and then up at the castle, not looking for the pursuing Cossacks, like the others, or even for the three black-clad horsemen. But it was too late, she realised, as they rolled past the untidy jumble of empty wooden stalls strung along the walls of the Hussite church. They were leaving Prague. Vilém would not find her now, even if he was still alive.
She clutched the sheepskin more tightly about her knees and turned to see the bleary sun hoisting itself above the steep roof of the Powder Tower, into whose shadow the head of the caravan had crept. Their chariot stuck fast in the mire and had to be jemmied free. The horsemen cursed the delays. Then the tower's gates yawned wide, swung open by soldiers, giving on to snow-covered fields through which the trackway was muddier still, the water in the ruts deeper. But the caravan serpentined forward, shunting and sliding more swiftly over the undulations as if even the mules and oxen knew they were beyond the walls and therefore exposed to enemy guns. Drumfire still sounding from the direction of the castle, enfilades that grew fainter and more irregular as the procession drifted away and the last of the Bohemian rebels were captured or killed.
For the rest of the day the caravan followed the muddy road, passing through a succession of walled towns that looked to Emilia like shrunken versions of Prague, with their spired watch-towers, plague columns, small squares with town halls surmounted by weather-vanes and enormous clocks. Soldiers lurked in the gatehouses above which coats of arms had been inscribed in stone. The procession wound through the streets under the eyes of silent groups of townsfolk, then lurched through another gatehouse at the opposite end. After a few more hours the towns grew wider apart. Forests appeared, then thickened, and the snow on the roadsides deepened. Signs of human infringement disappeared except for a scattering of half-buried waymarks and a few distant castles crouched in valleys or outlined on hilltops against the sky.
Where was the caravan fleeing? All day rumours about their destination flew up and down its meandering length. Some claimed they were heading for Bautzen, though soon afterwards a rider appeared with the glum news that the Elector of Saxony-a boar-hunting drunkard, a Lutheran who hated Calvinists even more than Catholics-had overrun Lusatia and laid siege to the town. A rumour then arose that it would make its way to Brünn… until another rumour claimed that the Moravian Estates had withdrawn from the Bohemian confederacy. Another claimed that letters had been despatched to the Queen's cousin, the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, at one time her suitor, in which permission was asked for refuge in his dominions. But the Duke was dithering ungallantly in his reply, explaining how he must first consult his mother, who unfortunately was absent from Wolfenbüttel. So speculation seized on the cities of the Hansa League, although it was soon recalled how Frederick had borrowed from merchants in Lübeck and Bremen large sums of money, money that he had, alas, neglected to repay. A return to Heidelberg was rumoured next-a desperate choice, because the Palatinate, as everyone knew, was occupied by Spanish troops. Equally implausible was Transylvania, since although its Prince, Bethlen Gábor, was a good Calvinist, the country was perilously close to the lands of the Great Turk, whose janissaries were said to be buckling on their swords at that very minute. So finally Brandenburg reached the top of this shrinking list of possibilities, for Brandenburg's Elector, George William of Hohenzollern, was not only a good Calvinist but also the Queen's brother-in-law, a man who therefore could not possibly refuse her. But Brandenburg lay almost two hundred miles distant on the far side of the Giant Mountains.
At nightfall the caravan straggled into a small, multi-steepled town barely a dozen miles beyond the gates of Prague. It was divided by a river that flowed under fortified walls, then along the backs of a soldier-straight row of merchants' houses, its banks hedged by snow and its shallows paned with ice and covered in white spits. The Elbe, someone said. The procession lumbered as far as a deserted square, where it crowded to a halt, the animals exhausted and lame. Emilia caught sight of the Queen's carriage in the poor light, a massive affair, curtained and upholstered, that had been slung on sets of leather braces. Six powerful horses were required to haul it. The Queen sat inside, swaddled in a fur-lined lap robe and surrounded by bales of clothing and, it appeared, dozens of books. She, like Emilia, never embarked on even the shortest journey without an enormous supply of reading material. But she had almost embarked from Prague without one of the princes, the youngest, Rupert. He had been discovered at the last minute by the King's chamberlain, it was said, and thrust into a carriage. Now the three princes were riding behind their mother, Prince Rupert in the arms of his wet-nurse. As her chariot turned into the square Emilia could also see Sir Ambrose. He was mounted on a big Percheron, from whose back he patrolled the length of the procession like an overlord, barking commands in English and Bohemian as his mount threw up divots of mud and snow.
After much confusion, the ladies-in-waiting were ordered by the demoiselle d'honneu
r to a forlorn-looking inn, the Golden Unicorn, that stood in a bystreet and overlooked a Calvinist church. It was, they agreed, a sad decline from the days when travel with the Queen involved banquets and triumphal arches in every town, audiences with nobles, troops of burghers appearing to doff their hats and bend their knees.
Emilia was placed in a tiny room whose bare floor was littered with rat droppings. She shivered for a long time on the narrow pallet, exhausted but unable to sleep. Someone was weeping next door, a low, choking sound, spasmodic and laborious. From outside in the street came the occasional erratic chime of the church bell and the crunching of feet in the snow. After an hour she rose from the bed, swaddled in blankets, and sat before the begrimed casement. The sky had blown clear and a fat moon arisen. The unpacking of the convoy was not yet finished. She could see Sir Ambrose in the middle of the square, leaning on a riding-stick and giving orders to the soldiers as they distributed fodder among the horses and oxen. She narrowed her eyes and studied his broad form. The man was a riddle. He had not spoken so much as a word to her since leaving Prague. He had offered no explanations either for his presence in the library or for their perilous flight through the streets of the Old Town. There was no sign that anything had passed between them, or even that he remembered her. She wondered if she ought to be offended or relieved.
What was his plan? With nothing to read on the journey and little to see through the quarter-lights except expanses of rock and snow, she had had hours to puzzle over the parchment in the library and the three horsemen, even about the imponderable Sir Ambrose himself. Various plots had begun to suggest themselves. Throughout the spring and summer, she knew, dozens of strangers had arrived in Prague Castle. These were not the usual students and scholars, those humble pilgrims who travelled on mail-coaches or mangy mules. No, these had been visitors of a different sort, often liveried or else bearing sealed letters of introduction from dukes and bishops in every corner of the Empire, and from France, Spain and Italy as well. 'Turkey-buzzards', Vilém had called them. Rumours were abuzz, he explained, that in order to finance his armies King Frederick was preparing to sell the treasures of the Spanish Rooms-hundreds of paintings, clocks, cabinets, even the telescopes and astrolabes made by Galileo himself. A 500-page catalogue had been drawn up in secret by the Bohemian nobility and then distributed among the potentates of Europe. Their agents arrived in Prague Castle soon afterwards, one step ahead of their marauding armies.
Of course, a good many books from the library had been included in the enormous catalogue. Frederick was planning to sell them like a costermonger hawking cabbages in the street, Vilém bitterly complained. And naturally there were as many buyers for the books as for everything else, especially for the most valuable ones, including the Golden Books from Constantinople. In Rome, Cardinal Baronius-the man who oversaw the gargantuan task of cataloguing the Vatican Library-was said to have interested the Pope in the collection. It must have been a difficult task, Vilém sneered, for Paul V was a vulgar man, a detestable philistine-the same man who had censored Galileo in 1616 and placed the work of Copernicus on the Index. But apparently His Holiness was now interested in acquiring not only the treasures of Prague but also Frederick's patrimony, the books in the Bibliotheca Palatina-the finest collection of Protestant learning in the world.
And now it seemed that the books in the library had brought someone else to Prague, another agent who was equally mysterious. She shivered in the chill, watching as Sir Ambrose supervised the soldiers, who were now carrying a succession of crates and portmanteaux indoors for the night. The Queen's baggage had already been unloaded and the horses stabled. The remains of the convoy twisted around the square and into a dark side-street, where the oxen were coughing and lowing or else sticking their broad heads into nosebags. The soldiers wove their way among the vehicles, working silently and swiftly, until one of them, struggling to raise a crate from a wagon, stumbled in the snow. The crate tumbled to the ground with the sound of breaking glass.
'Oaf!'
Sir Ambrose struck the prone soldier sharply across the posteriors with the riding-stick, then drew his scimitar and violently prised the lid from the damaged crate. Emilia, still at the window, leaned forward. The crate appeared to be packed with straw and filled, not with books, like so many of the others, but, rather, with dozens of flasks and bottles, several of which had broken and were spilling their contents across the snow. Whatever the liquid, its stench must have been powerful, for the soldiers quickly retreated several steps, gagging and covering their noses. But Sir Ambrose knelt in the snow and carefully inspected the bottles before resealing the lid with a few blows of a mallet.
Emilia was puzzled by the sight. At first she thought the bottles must have come from the royal wine cellar: had Otakar not claimed that Frederick was shipping his wine collection from Prague along with everything else? But the bottles were too small; they looked more like flasks or vials. She decided they must have come instead from one of the castle's numerous laboratories. Prague Castle was honeycombed with such mysterious places; no one lived in Prague for a year without hearing tales about them. The Emperor Rudolf's dozens of alchemists and occultists had practised their secret arts, it was said, in special rooms tucked away in the Mathematics Tower. The library was crammed not only with their published works, Vilém once told her-with copies of Croll's Basilica chymica, Sendivogius's Novum lumen chymicum and Thurneysser's Magna alchemia-but also with their manuscripts, hundreds of documents inscribed in bizarre codes composed of astrological signs and other chicken-scratchings. She wondered if Sir Ambrose was transporting these dubious masterpieces across the snowy wastes along with the powders and potions from their hidden laboratories? Some strange business was afoot, of that she was certain. Perhaps Sir Ambrose had been, on top of all else, an alchemist, yet another of Rudolf's superstitious wizards?
She drew back the moth-eaten curtain a few more inches, pressed her brow against the frosted pane and searched for a last glimpse of Sir Ambrose. But he had already vanished into the darkness with the wooden crate clutched in his arms.
Chapter Three
Eight o'clock. Morning came seeping across London in pale-pink and pearl-grey veins of light. The city had been up for hours already: seething, clattering, belching, chiming, singing, sighing. But a darkness lingered in the sky despite the season. Gnarled strands of smoke rose upwards to filter and tease apart the morning light, like dozens of genies released from flanched bottles scattered from Smithfield to Ratcliff and for as far along the estuary as the eye could see. They returned to settle over the city in a fine black powder, tarnishing, coating and corroding, a steady dredging from which there was no escape. The gammons of bacon hanging in Leadenhall Market were already rimed with black, as was every collar, hat brim, awning and window-sill the city over. And matters would only get worse, because even at this early hour came the promise of heat, and with the heat would come the smell. Beside the Thames the stink of the silt mixed with the sweeter exhalations of the molasses, sugar and rum in the jumble of decrepit storehouses and manufactories that pressed up from the quays, together with the acrid tangs of the sea-wrack and snails exposed by the ebbing tide. The wind came from the east, unusual for that time of year, and guided the foul-smelling cloud upriver, through the endless reticulations of brick streets, sunless courts and alleys, half-opened doorways and windows, into the city's every fold or recess.
The stench was already catching in my throat and stinging my lungs as I crossed under the north gate of London Bridge and headed into Fish Street Hill. From Nonsuch House it would take me some twenty minutes to reach Little Britain, which was to be the first of my stops this morning. From there I would walk south into St. Paul's Churchyard and Paternoster Row. Then, if I still had not found what I sought, I would catch a hackney-coach to Westminster. Not that I really had expectations of finding anything in the clutter of second-hand bookstalls outside Westminster Hall, or even in the bookshops of St. Paul's Churchyard or Little Br
itain for that matter. As I limped forward on my thorn-stick I was frowning into my collar, which I had drawn up over my nose in an unsuccessful attempt to keep out the foul stink. It promised to be a long day.
I had decided over breakfast an hour earlier that it was time to begin my search for Sir Ambrose's parchment. But now, even before I was halfway up Fish Street Hill, I regretted my earlier resolve. Not only were the streets crowded and foul-smelling, but yesterday a search of my shelves and catalogues for editions and copies of the Corpus hermeticum had failed to turn up a single reference to The Labyrinth of the World. Yes, a long day. I ducked my head and hurried past a throng of people gathered to watch a cart-horse wallowing on its back in the middle of the street, hoofs wildly flailing.
Was it any wonder that I generally avoided the streets of London? I pushed along the pavement, through an obstacle course of rickety stalls and market porters struggling under the flayed carcasses of goats. The path was also blocked by old men trundling oyster-carts and others bearing trays heaped with combs and ink-horns. I stepped aside to let a pair of them pass but, pushed from behind, thrust my foot into a fresh heap of turd in the gutter. Scraping my boot on the kerb, I nearly came to grief beneath the hoofs of a lumbering dray-horse. Amid a chorus of rough laughter I cursed aloud and leapt to safety.
Not even these familiar humiliations, however, could quite manage to dampen my spirits. I may even have begun to whistle. For the night before-or, rather, at four o'clock the next morning-I had discovered the keyword and decrypted the mysterious leaf from Ortelius's Theatrum orbis terrarum.
Not having received a reply from my cousin after four days, it occurred to me that he might be on his long vacation, which invariably he spent in the Somersetshire countryside, at Pudney Court, a venerable wreck that served as the ancestral seat of the much-depleted Inchbold clan. So after closing up shop the previous evening I had decided to take the task of decipherment upon myself. Once again I sat in my candlelit study with the copy of Vigenère propped on one side of the desk, the leaf on the other, and a sheaf of paper in between. I had digested enough of the Traicté by the time the sentry was announcing one o'clock to satisfy myself about the operations of the substitution table, but also to appreciate that, ingenious as it was, without the keyword the table would be useless.