by Ross King
She nodded slowly. Sir Ambrose's journeys to Istamboul were the stuff of legend, for Vilém at least. Many of the works that the Englishman brought back from the lands of the Sultan-works such as Aristotle's treatise on astronomical research, the astrologikh d istoriad, a work mentioned by Diogenes Laertius but never before seen in Europe-were, he claimed, among the greatest treasures of the library.
'He acted as one of Rudolf's agents,' Vilém was saying, 'as early as 1606. That was the year when the long war against the Turks finally ended and travel into the Ottoman lands became safer. But Sir Ambrose had travelled to Istamboul even before that, most likely as a dragoman in one of the English embassies. He was said to be on terms with the Grand Vizier himself, and he first gained access to the Emperor through Mehmet Aga, the Sultan's ambassador in Prague. He presented Rudolf with a manuscript of Heliodorus's Carmina de mystica philosophia, a priceless piece of occult learning-it's here somewhere-that was once owned by Constantine VII. Rudolf then sent him forth on his other missions. He negotiated the purchase of certain parchments from the Sultan. Others he found hidden away in the city's bazaars and mosques. And it was in such places,' he said, raising his voice to be heard over the din from above, 'that he discovered the palimpsests.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'Palimpsests,' he repeated: 'ancient parchments whose original texts were rubbed out and replaced by newer ones. Parchment was often reused, you see. It was always in great demand. But sometimes the original texts were not completely erased, or else they would begin seeping back through the reinscription. Sir Ambrose managed to recover them through alchemical means, by reviving the carbon in the original ink. One of them was Aristotle's work on astronomy, the other a commentary on Homer by Aristophanes of Byzantium.' He gestured at the crates ranged before them. 'They, too, are here somewhere. But as for the volume that you saw…' His narrow shoulders twitched. 'As far as I know, Sir Ambrose has not set foot in the Ottoman lands for some ten years, so I have no idea where the text might have come from. Nor which one it might have been.'
At that he fell silent and, pushing himself from the cask, resumed his work, inspecting each volume to ensure that it was packed neither too tightly nor too loosely. The festivities in the hall had grown louder, insinuating themselves through the stone ceiling in a series of rumbles and thumps. Emilia felt dizzier and more exhausted than ever. She no longer cared about Sir Ambrose or the parchment in the library-or about any of the books over which Vilém was fussing like a mother with her infants. She no longer cared about the Queen either. She merely wanted the journey to end, for the court to cease these arduous wanderings. Brandenburg-that was all she cared about now. Her mind had seized upon it. She had even begun to imagine the pair of them making a life for themselves. She might work as a seamstress, he as a bookseller or perhaps as the tutor to the son of a wealthy Brandenburger. Together they could live in a tiny cottage beneath the walls of its castle.
'Will the court go to Brandenburg, do you think?' she asked at last.
'The Queen may go wherever she wishes,' he grunted, 'to Cüstrin or Spandau or Berlin, wherever they will have her.' He had bent over the crate again. 'But Brandenburg will not provide refuge for long. Nor will anywhere else in the Empire, come to that.'
'Oh?' The seamstress and the tutor fled; their tiny cottage slipped over a precipitous and bloody horizon. 'And why should that be?'
'Because the Brandenburgers are Calvinists, that is why.' He shrugged. 'They will be prey to attacks from the Lutherans next door in Saxony who have already captured Lusatia. To say nothing of the fact that George William has already received an Imperial mandate from Ferdinand.' He had begun unswaddling one of the volumes. 'Have you not heard this latest rumour? The Emperor advises Brandenburg not to suffer the presence of either the King or Queen of Bohemia within his dominions. No, no, no,' he was shaking his head, 'the Queen would not be safe anywhere in Brandenburg for more than a few weeks. And the books would not be safe in Brandenburg either. Or anywhere else in the Empire for that matter,' he added. 'And so I shall not follow her to Brandenburg.'
'Not go to Brandenburg?' She felt her stomach heave with fright. 'But where, then…?'
He had explained a few minutes earlier, when she tried to tell him of the terrible battle, of the dead in the river, that he cared nothing for the fate of Bohemia, and even less for its King and Queen, a pair of fools and wastrels who had been so willing to squander their treasures in return for soldiers and cannons. It had been reported that Frederick was offering the Palatinate to the Hansa merchants-the books in the Bibliotheca Palatina included-in return for sanctuary in Lübeck. So what evil bargain might he strike with the priceless volumes of the Spanish Rooms as his security? So Vilém would keep the books safe from King Frederick-and from the marauding Habsburg armies as well.
Boot heels were rasping and echoing on the stairway now, but Emilia ignored the sound. She pushed herself from the cask. The groined ceiling seemed to revolve overhead. 'What are you saying? Where, then, will you go if not to Brandenburg?'
'Ah, yes…' He seemed not to have heard her. He was holding aloft the unswaddled volume like a priest raising an infant at the font. Steam rose in curls from his sweating brow. 'The great Copernicus, I see, has made the journey in excellent condition.'
'Herr Jirásek…'
The bootfalls had stopped. A grubby-looking pageboy, the worse for drink, was performing a clumsy bow. Vilém was bent over another of his crates, once more in a devotional posture. Emilia staggered backwards and fumbled for the cask. She had bitten her lip so hard she could taste blood. Yes: these books were all he cared for. Nothing else.
'Fräulein…' Another clumsy bow. The boy clutched at the rim of one of the casks for support. 'Mein Herr? Your presences are most gratefully'-he captured a belch in his gloved hand-'most gratefully requested upstairs in the banqueting-room. An entertainment,' he said, stumbling over his consonants, 'for our Queen Elizabeth.'
There was a loud crash from above as a game of skittles was improvised with hats and crocks, with Seville oranges that began thumping across the floor of the hall and colliding with the legs of courtiers dancing their frantic quadrilles and gavottes. A wine cask was rolled across the floor-a rumble of thunder-to a roar of cheers. The boy turned waveringly on the steps, almost toppled backwards, then began to climb. Emilia sat down on the cask and gripped its iron hoops for support.
'A deal has been struck,' Vilém said at last. He was speaking softly, though the boy had disappeared. 'A favourable bargain,' he whispered. He added something else, but the words were lost as more thunder rolled across the ceiling and another boisterous cheer drifted down the stairwell.
'A deal?' She was leaning forward, straining to hear him.
'To England,' he repeated. Stooped over the crate, he was speaking as if to himself. 'We shall go to England, that is where.'
Chapter Six
Alsatia in the early morning was calm and quiet, with an air of hushed expectancy. As my hackney-coach paused at the top of Whitefriars Street the rows of buildings looked insubstantial in the dusty light, like canvas flats waiting to be struck by stage-hands and carried back to the scenery store. It was almost possible to see through or beyond them to the first settlement here, centuries earlier-the shaded cloisters, the church tower with its dozen bells, the monks in hair shirts and white hoods padding back and forth from the library or whispering matins and lauds together in the chapel. In the previous century, of course, the priory had been knocked down, much like Pontifex Abbey. There was no library any more, no chapel, no monks in white hoods, only their silent remains-the broken column, the abbreviated wall, a few stubborn bricks overgrown by chickweed and quack-grass. The rest had become a clutch of taverns and alehouses, along with other establishments of more anonymous but no doubt sinister occupation.
'Not through here, sir?'
'Yes, yes-keep going straight.'
I had been giving instructions to the driver, who claimed never to
have set foot in Alsatia, a record he seemed anxious to preserve, until I offered the incentive of an extra two shillings. Trying to remember the haphazard course I had taken two nights earlier, I crouched forward, my face outside the window and upturned to the sun. The buildings stood at drunken tilts on either side of us, their doors sagging on their hinges and their windows shuttered. This time I had not heard the bleat of the horn as we entered; perhaps, half asleep those two days before, I had imagined it. Or perhaps there were other, subtler signals, a silent language that pulsed from building to building. I remembered a rumour I had once heard about Alsatia, that all of its taverns were honeycombed with cubby-holes, false floors and hidden passages, scores of secret places where fugitives and smugglers concealed themselves or their booty. Another Alsatia existed depths beneath the soot-rimed surface of timber, stone and thatch, behind a hundred wainscots and boarded entranceways. I twisted round in my seat and, for the dozenth time this morning, peered down the street behind us. Nothing. A minute later I caught sight of the blistered signboard.
I had no idea what I should expect, if anything, from the auction. I had attended only four or five of them by the summer of 1660, not through negligence or indifference, but because book auctions were, like coffee-houses, a recent phenomenon. In fact, the two were related in some ways. Most auctions in those days were held in rooms rented in coffee-houses, in the Greek's Head, for example, where the auctioneer, usually a former bookseller, would preside over the sale of as many as a thousand volumes, the owner of which was either bankrupt or dead. They were usually clamorous, well-attended affairs. The auctioneer advertised the auction in the newssheets and handbills, and catalogues listing the titles were made available in advance. The same people-booksellers or other collectors-always turned up to bid against one another for this edition of Homer, that one of Aristotle.
That, in my brief experience, was how auctions worked. But the one at the Golden Horn promised to be different. For one thing, it had not been advertised in the papers. I had been unable to find any mention of it in the gazettes, despite searching through the issues for the previous two weeks. Nor had I seen any more handbills like the one posted in the Golden Horn, even though I scanned the dead walls, cornerposts, pillories and all the various other spots favoured by the city's fly-posters, including the insides of a couple of taverns and coffee-houses. Nor, finally, had those few customers that I dared to ask-my best-known and most discreet clients-admitted to having heard of either Dr. Pickvance or the Golden Horn coffee-house, much less of the proposed auction. Their looks had grown more dubious when I explained that the Golden Horn was in Alsatia, beside the Fleet River. I might as well have told them I would be travelling among the Patagonians or the Ottawas.
I was anxious for anything I might learn-about the parchment, about the verse, even about the Golden Horn itself-because over the previous days I had not discovered very much at all. I had spent several hours searching through my shelves for information about the Corpus hermeticum. I had no idea where to begin but started by looking at the editions by Lefèvre and Turnebus, which led me backwards to a handful of Greek and Roman writers, who in turn led me forwards along unexpected paths that wove strange and mesmerising patterns. I began to discover how the Hermetic texts were a sort of underground current slithering half-seen through almost two millennia of history. They would bubble up somewhere on the surface-in Alexandria or Constantinople-only to slip away again into invisible channels beneath deserts and mountain ranges and war-ravaged cities… and then suddenly debouch somewhere else, hundreds of years later and thousands of miles away.
It was believed by most early commentators that the books originated in Egypt, at Hermoupolis Magna, which the ancients regarded as the oldest place on earth. The books were said to be the revelations of a priest known to the Egyptians as 'Thoth' and to the Greeks, who followed them, as 'Hermes Trismegistus', or 'Hermes the Thrice-Greatest', whom Boccaccio calls the 'interpres secretorum', or the 'interpreter of secrets'. Thoth was the Egyptian god of writing and wisdom, who, according to Socrates in the Phaedrus, gave the world arithmetic, geometry and letters, and who in his spare time invented games of amusement such as draughts and dice. The wisdom of Thoth was said to have been first carved on to stone tablets before being copied on to papyrus scrolls and, in the third century BC, during the reign of Ptolemy II, brought to the newly founded Library of Alexandria, in which the Ptolemies had hoped to hold a copy of every book-roll ever written. It was here in Alexandria, among the thousands of scrolls and scholars in the great Library, that the revelations of Thoth were translated from hieroglyphics into Greek by a priest named Manetho, the famous historian of Egypt.
And it is at this point, in Alexandria, that the stream widens to Nilotic dimensions. From the great Library the texts spread outward to every corner of the ancient world, and for the next seven hundred years no respectable treatise-no matter whether its subject was astrology, history, anatomy or medicine-would be complete without a few choice references to the Egyptian priest whose revelations everyone agreed were the wellsprings of all learning. But then, after so much expansion, the river suddenly contracts. The stream slows, thins, divides and-after the rule of the Emperor Justinian, who closed the Academy in Athens and burned the Greek scrolls in Constantinople-disappears. The Hermetic texts are not heard of again until several hundred years later. At this point, early in the ninth century, copies turn up in the new city of Baghdad, among the Sabians, a sect of non-Muslims who had migrated from northern Mesopotamia. They proclaimed the revelations of Hermes as their Holy Scripture, and their greatest writer and teacher, Thabit ibn Qurra, refers to the Sabian texts as a 'hidden wisdom'. But some of this wisdom must not have been hidden all that well, because it soon made its way into the hands of the Muhammadans. Mention of Hermes Trismegistus can be found shortly after Thabit's time in the Kitab al-uluf by the Muslim astrologer Abu Ma'shar, and a Hermetic text, The Emerald Table, part of a larger work known as The Book of the Secret of Creation, is studied by the alchemist ar-Razi.
But soon after the time of these Arab writers the stream had thinned and disappeared from Baghdad, again for political and religious reasons. After the eleventh century a strict Muhammadan orthodoxy was imposed throughout the Empire and no more is heard of the Sabians of Baghdad. However, the Hermetic works reappear almost immediately in Constantinople-the city alluded to in the cipher-where in the year 1050 the scholar and monk Michael Psellos receives a damaged manuscript written in Syriac, the language of the Sabians. And it is one of these manuscripts, copied by a scribe on to parchment, then removed from Constantinople after its capture by the Turks, that is brought to Florence, to the library of Cosimo de' Medici, some four hundred years later.
But where did The Labyrinth of the World fit into this long and complex history? I could find mention of the book neither among the editions nor in the commentaries on them-and not even in the Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria, who lists the names of several dozen sacred works written by Hermes Trismegistus. It seemed that The Labyrinth of the World was even more mysterious and shrouded in secrecy than all of the other books.
Discouraged, I therefore chose a different tack, catching a sculler to Shadwell in order to visit the paper-mill of John Thimbleby. I had done business with Thimbleby for many years, and he proved to be, as I suspected, the 'JT' of the watermark on the interfoliated leaf. But he was unable to tell me either when precisely the mysterious piece of paper was made or where it might have been purchased.
The specimen was, Thimbleby admitted, an inferior effort. Did I see how flimsy the paper was? How it was already yellowing and curling? How it was almost transparent when held against the light? This meant it might have come from a batch made in the 1640s, probably between 1641 and 1647. During those years Thimbleby was mainly but not exclusively supplying Royalist printing-presses, including the King's Printer, who had been trailing the thinning and beleaguered Royalist armies round the country and cranking out their propaganda as
soon as it could be written. The paper was of poor quality in those days, he explained, because demand had drastically outstripped supply.
Thimbleby took me into his workroom, where two men were dipping frames into a giant vat of what looked like porridge. Paper was usually made in this way, he explained as he gestured at the porridge, which a third man was endeavouring to stir: from linen rags, scraps of old books and pamphlets, various other oddments collected by the rag-and-bone men. These were cut into strips, shredded, boiled in a vat, marinated in sour milk, fermented for a few days, then strained, like so, through a wire mould-mesh. But with the shortage of linen scraps came improvisation. Seaweed, straw, old fishing nets, banana skins, hanks of rope, even cow dung and rotted burial shrouds from the skeletons exhumed for burning in the charnel-houses-Thimbleby had been forced to make use of almost anything. The result was paper of a dubious quality, which he nevertheless sent to the Royalist armies. Checking his records, he was able to tell me that large consignments had been shipped to Shrewsbury in 1642, to Worcester and Bristol in 1645, and to Exeter in 1646. But he had manufactured hundreds of reams every year, from any one of which, he told me, the mysterious page might have been taken.
And so I had returned to Nonsuch House that evening with only a vague clue as to when Sir Ambrose might have encrypted the verse. Still, Thimbleby's account was encouraging. If the verse had been encrypted in the 1640s, at the outbreak, or even during, the Civil War, my theory made sense. The cipher must make reference to a treasure, including perhaps the parchment, which had been hidden-at Pontifex Hall or elsewhere-and was meant to be recovered once the Parliamentarians were defeated and it was safe to return to Pontifex Hall. But the treasure had not been recovered. Why not? Because Sir Ambrose had been murdered, as Alethea claimed? But murdered when? I realised I didn't know when Sir Ambrose died. It must have been before the end of the Civil War in 1651, when Pontifex Hall had been expropriated, but I couldn't remember Alethea's having said.