by Ross King
Or had they? I opened my eyes. The wine and the smoke between them were addling my brain, but now I also remembered Alethea's claim that Sir Ambrose had worked in Heidelberg as an agent for the Elector Palatine. An idea slowly swam towards the surface.
'The books at Pontifex Hall have come from the Bibliotheca Palatina. Is that what you're saying? Cardinal Baronius didn't steal all of them after all. Sir Ambrose rescued them from-'
'No, no, no…' She shied the pipe in an arc through the air. 'Not from the Palatina.'
I waited for her to continue, but the Virginia tobacco seemed to have induced in her a mood of voluptuous repose. She leaned over the edge of the bed and rapped the bowl of the pipe against the hearthstone. I cleared my throat and chose another tack.
'And was it Cardinal Mazarin,' I asked as gently as I could, 'or his agents, who… who…'
'… who murdered Lord Marchamont?' Her voice came thickly from among the nest of pillows. 'Yes. Perhaps. Or so I believed at one time. My husband was murdered in Paris. Have I told you that? We were crossing the Pont Neuf in our coach when we were set upon near the spot where Henry of Navarre was murdered by Ravaillac. He was stabbed in the neck with a poniard,' she continued calmly, 'also like King Henry. There were three assassins, all on horseback, all dressed in black. I shall never forget the sight of them. Black livery with gold trim. It was dark, but I was meant to see them, you understand. I was allowed to see their uniforms, their faces. It was intended as a warning.'
'A warning from whom? From Cardinal Mazarin?'
'I thought as much at one time. But events have changed my mind. I now believe the assassins were hired by Henry Monboddo.'
I licked my lips and drew a careful breath. 'But why should Monboddo have-?'
'The Labyrinth of the World,' came her voice through the muggy darkness. 'That is why, Mr. Inchbold. No other reason. He wanted the parchment. Not the rest of the collection, only the parchment. He was obsessed with it. He had found a buyer who desperately wished to acquire it. Someone who was willing to have my husband murdered. And now it would seem that my husband's worst fear has been realised,' she added after a short pause, her voice once more growing faint. 'If what you say is true, then Monboddo has laid his hands on it at last.'
The tiny flame beside the window leapt and dived. The fields beyond were dark and silent. I could feel my sideburns prickling, the gooseflesh raising itself along my forearms. From somewhere below the stairs came the slow shuffling of Phineas's feet and the arthritic creaking of floorboards. When I looked to the bed I saw that Alethea had raised herself so that she now sat upright beneath the canopy, her arms wrapped round her knees. I could feel her eyes upon me.
'Arrangements have been made,' she said at last.
'Arrangements, my lady?'
'Yes, Mr. Inchbold.' The bed gave a groan as she pushed herself to her feet. Her shadow fell lengthwise across me. 'A visit to Wembish Park seems in order, does it not? The manuscript must be recovered. And we must make haste to reclaim it before Monboddo can sell it to his client. But you must be careful,' she whispered as she led me to the staircase, 'very careful indeed. Take my word for it, Mr. Inchbold: Henry Monboddo is a dangerous man.'
***
An hour later I was back in Nonsuch House, back in my study, nodding off over a tobacco-pipe and Shelton's translation of Don Quixote. I had reached the bridge without incident, without being followed. Or so it seemed, but my senses were dulled and the night black as tar. I dozed off a couple of times, and the driver had to shake me awake when we reached our destination. Now I could neither keep my pipe alight nor concentrate on the pages of Don Quixote, through which I was blundering without managing to glean a scrap of sense.
A visit to Wembish Park seems in order…
Yes: the faint, meandering scent I had been following was stronger now and seemed to direct me, urgently and unambiguously, to Wembish Park and Henry Monboddo. But whatever optimism I had felt earlier in the day, in Alsatia, had now vanished completely. I thought of Lord Marchamont murdered on the Pont Neuf and then of the solitary figures who had shadowed me.
Henry Monboddo is a dangerous man…
I pushed myself upright and then walked to the window. The sky rose black and starless; below it, the city looked lightless except for the wavering lanterns on the poop-rails of a few merchantmen far downstream in the Limehouse Reach. Unfurling their sails, I supposed, and putting to sea on the first of the ebb, which I could hear fluxing with its familiar rush between the piers.
I yawned again, clouding the window-panes with my breath. Hearing a faint chime from the floor beside me, I peered down to see a glint on the boards. A key. I turned it over in my hand, speculatively, watching the polished brass shine in the candlelight. Alethea had given it to me as we parted in the darkened atrium of Pulteney House. It unlocked a small strongbox that would be concealed beneath the stone lozenge on top of a grave in the churchyard of St. Olave's, Hart Street, not far from the north end of London Bridge. We would have to use the strongbox for any future communications, she explained, because her post was being opened-a realisation that had come, I thought, a little late in the day. Nor could we meet again at Pulteney House, which she said she might, in any case, soon be departing. She would therefore leave any further letters for me in the churchyard, cached in the grave of a man named Silas Cobb.
I slipped the key back inside my pocket and took up my book. Once more I would be leaving London, I realised, for an unknown destination, somewhere fraught, possibly, with numerous perils. I felt like an old knight in a tale of chivalry: an impoverished hidalgo with his broken lance and dented shield setting off, at the whim of his beloved, into a world of intrigues and enchantments, bent on some impossible task.
But then I reminded myself that Alethea wasn't my beloved, that no enchantments would be waiting for me at Wembish Park, and finally that my task now seemed-on the basis of my discoveries today-far from impossible.
Chapter Eight
Winter's first panes of ice were thickening in Hamburg's canals by the time the Bellerophon, a merchantman of three hundred tons, cast off her lines and started the final leg of her 2,000-mile voyage from Archangel. The ship's log recorded that it was December in the year 1620. Martinmas was past, the start of the most dangerous and unpredictable seas, though the voyage down the Elbe to Cuxhaven began well enough. The Bellerophon was carried swiftly on the ebb, passing the crowded stalls of the St. Pauli Fischmarkt on her starboard side, then the scattering of ropewalks and gabled warehouses opposite. Downstream in deeper waters, creaking at anchor, sat the nimble-looking fluyts of the Hanseatic fleet, each with its hull worried by a half-dozen lighters and bumboats. The Bellerophon cut a fine figure as she swayed past them with her stays taut and whistling in the breeze, her cream-coloured sails snapping and swelling as quickly as they could be unfurled. Though her hold was full with furs from Muscovy her passage was smooth and buoyant. Her hull rode high in the water, and the shadows of her cutched sails swept fleetly over the workmen squatting on quays or thrumming up the planks to the storehouses, humping barrels of Icelandic cod or sacks of English wool. A few crewmen could be spotted on her waist, waving their caps, while high above their heads, tiny against the steel-grey and snow-spitting December sky, the topmen were clambering up and down her ratlines and along her yards, tugging at bull-ropes and lengthening the topsails that gathered the wind in their bunts and swept her ever more rapidly along the brackish tide to the sea.
Standing on the quarterdeck, letting snowflakes alight and melt on his cheeks as the spire of the Michaeliskirche dwindled and shrank astern, Captain Humphrey Quilter watched his men going about their tasks. The voyage from Archangel had been a difficult one. The Dvina had frozen almost two weeks early, and the Bellerophon and her crew escaped its clutches by no more than a couple of days. Quilter had been trapped in its ice once already, two years ago, when the entrance to the bay was frozen solid in the first week of October. No one who remembered that dreadful
experience had wished to repeat it. Six frostbitten months in the frozen jaws of the Dvina, waiting for the spring thaw, which came three weeks late that year. But it was always a dangerous voyage. This time the ship had escaped the spreading ice only to be battered by fierce gales in the middle of the White Sea. After limping into harbour at Hammerfest for repairs to a cracked mizzenmast, she was lucky to cheat the ice once again, this time by a single tide.
But now, four weeks on, Captain Quilter was able to relax. This last leg of the voyage, from Hamburg to London, would be the easiest, even though December and its unpredictable weather had arrived-and even though this was, as rumour had it, an inauspicious season for voyages. For soon it would be difficult to sail any ship abroad, ice or no ice, fair weather or foul. The ports as well as the sea routes between them would be shut to all vessels except warships, because new battles were looming. The entire continent of Europe was a budge-barrel waiting for a quickmatch that would not be long in coming. And no one, Quilter supposed, would be spared the explosion.
He braced himself on the creaking deck, legs wide apart, and tasted the breeze turn cooler, saltier. The heathlands and salt marshes with their dykes and wicker fences slid along the port bows. He knew the estuary well, its every sandbar and shoal, and would barely need to glance at the rolled-up sea-cards in his cabin. The ship would reach Cuxhaven by early afternoon and then, with good wind and weather on the North Sea, the coast of England two days later. Still not quick enough, he knew, for his forty-six crewmen, who were eager to return home after five months at sea, though at least they would have money in their pockets, even if the promised load of Wismar beer had gone astray somewhere between Lübeck and Hamburg. Yes, a good haul, well worth their troubles. There would be wages and bonuses for all, not to mention a handsome return for the shareholders in the Royal Exchange. For below decks the Bellerophon was carrying almost five hundred bales of top-quality fur bought from the Lapps and Samoyeds at the English fort in Archangel. She was bringing back to England enough beaver pelts, Quilter reckoned, for several hundred hats, not to mention muskrats and foxes for scores of fine coats, sable and ermine for the gowns of a hundred judges, along with a few dozen bear and reindeer skins, the former complete with claws and mummified heads, the latter with antlers intact, all destined to hang from the walls or cover the floors of various lordly estates. Last winter had been a cold one even by Muscovite standards (or so the Samoyeds had assured him) and therefore the pelts were thicker-even more valuable-than usual.
Then there was as well the other cargo, the more secret one, the one on which Captain Quilter hadn't paid so much as a single thaler in port duties. He shifted his stance and threw a glance in the direction of the hatchway. True enough, the mystery cargo had made a common smuggler of him, but what choice did he have in the matter? The two hundred casks of beer from the merchant in Lübeck had failed to arrive, which meant the Bellerophon would have needed a few dozen lasts of cheap Lüneburg salt to use as ballast. But Lüneburg salt would have been difficult to sell in London, even if there was some to be had at such short notice, which as it happened there was not. There was no woad or pig-iron either, or ballast of any sort, and so Quilter had agreed-with less reluctance than was truly proper-to take on board these mysterious boxes that had not been registered in the tally clerk's port book and, once on English soil, would not be reported at the custom-house either. Or that at least was the plan. Two thousand Reichsthalers he was to earn for his troubles, or almost £400, half of which had been paid already and was safely stowed in his sea-chest. Oh yes, he told himself as the fortress at Glückstadt shifted into view over the starboard bow, a very good haul indeed.
Still, something troubled Quilter about the whole affair. How, for example, had the man in the Golden Grapes known his name? How had he known about the fugitive consignment of Wismar beer? And who were the passengers that, for a few extra thalers, he had been persuaded to take aboard and hide below decks? Perhaps they were spies of the sort with which every port in Europe was supposedly rife these days. But spies for whom? And the stranger from the tavern, John Crookes-had he been a spy as well?
It had been a strange and unnerving business. Quilter listened to the familiar sound of the sheets humming overhead as the sails filled in undulant white billows, drawing the river's strengthening wind. The proposition had come two nights earlier, at a tavern in the Altstadt, on the wharfside, where he was drinking a pot of ale and eating a fried hake in the company of his bo'sun, Pinchbeck, and a half-dozen other crewmen from the Bellerophon who were scattered round the tables with their noses thrust into pint-pots. The night had been about to blur into every other evening spent in Hamburg-drink, cards and perhaps a prostitute from the Königstraße before a stumbling journey back to the waiting gangplank. But then the bells in the tower of the Petrikirche began pealing madly and a man stepped deftly through the door and took a seat at the empty table next to Quilter. Catching Quilter's eye, he introduced himself as an Englishman, John Crookes, of the firm Crabtree & Crookes, importers from the Hansa towns into England. Over a glass of Dutch gin he explained that his firm made use of the Hansa fleet, whose ships would otherwise have sailed to England with empty holds. Only now there was, he whispered, a deal of unpleasantness, the source of which was that the Hamburgers were quarrelling with the Danes, whose King had just built a huge fortress a few miles downriver at Glückstadt. And because King James of England had married the sister of the King of Denmark-this belligerent foe who wished to rule both the Elbe and the Baltic-not a single ship in the whole Hansa fleet was willing to carry the cargo of English merchants. At that point Crookes had withdrawn a pouch from his inside pocket and, without removing his eyes from Quilter's face, slid it in a knight's move across the table.
'Not to mince the matter, Captain Quilter,' he said in a low tone, 'I need a ship. Or part of one. Now…' He tapped the leather pouch with a forefinger. 'I wonder if you, a fellow Englishman, might possibly see your way to providing some assistance?'
The pouch contained a hundred Reichsthalers. The cargo was taken on board one night later, well after dark, without the use of either torches or flares; even the four lanterns mounted on the ship's poop-rail had been extinguished. Ninety-nine crates in all. Bribes were paid to the dockers to ensure prompt loading, also to keep their mouths shut, because the last thing Quilter needed was for one of the riverside gangs that prowled the Legal Quays of London and Gravesend to hear about some valuable cargo stowed in the hold of the Bellerophon. She would be marked down for plunder even before she set sail from Hamburg.
He had watched the activities from above, on the catwalk, gnawing at his lip, then at his knuckles. The crates were grappled through the lading port by the dockers and the grumbling crewmen who were already trying to guess what might be inside them but were unable to foresee what grief the strange cargo would soon bring them. So heavy were the boxes, and so numerous, that for a time Quilter thought they might overload and imbalance the ship. But the fear had proved unfounded; the Bellerophon was now swaying swiftly down the Elbe, perfectly ballasted. By the time the sun teased apart the clouds and appeared over the foreyards, the first slivers of Cuxhaven's steeples hove into view, a familiar and welcoming sight.
Captain Quilter permitted himself a smile of satisfaction. High above his head the luffs were shivering as the topmen lengthened sail. Cloud shadow swept over the deck, pursued by sunlight. The weather would hold. In two more days the Bellerophon would reach the Thames, or rather the Nore, the anchorage where the mysterious boxes would be offloaded on to a pinnace, and then he, with another thousand Reichsthalers, could forget all about them.
A minute later he was inside his cabin, among its litter of charts and compasses. Soon afterwards, as the Bellerophon nudged into Heligoland Bay, the pealing of church bells, a sign of ill omen, could be heard far in the distance. Yet Captain Quilter thought nothing of it at the time; nor did he give a second thought to the sight through the scuttle of another merchantman, the St
ar of Lübeck, which appeared a short distance off their port beam. Instead, he bent his head over the dog-eared portolano showing the shoals and sunken ships marking the entrance to the Nore and, beyond it, the Port of London.
***
The journey to Hamburg from the castle at Breslau lasted more than three weeks. Snow had fallen across Bohemia and the Palatinate as well as in Silesia. For days on end the ravening armies were snowbound, brought to a standstill outside farmhouses or in the midst of puzzled villagers. From Heidelberg in the west to Moravia in the east, the Emperor's soldiers huddled in their billets or stood crotch-deep in the snow, chopping what little fodder could be found for their starving horses. In the courtyards and gardens of the Prague Castle the snow lay three feet deep. Looting had not ended until five days after the gates were finally breached; Otakar's prophecies had fulfilled themselves in the most brutal fashion. The palaces and the Spanish Rooms were sacked one by one, as were the churches and even the sepulchres and churchyards, whose corpses it was rumoured had gold in their teeth. The houses in Golden Lane and the laboratories in the Mathematics Tower were also pillaged, because of further rumours that Frederick's band of Rosicrucian alchemists had discovered ways of turning coal into gold. Whether or not any gold was found, or even any coal, the treasures of the castle and then the Old Town were plentiful enough that not a few marauding soldiers found themselves obliged to hire drudges to carry their sacks of booty.
In Silesia the fugitive court had stayed in Breslau for six days after the long via dolorosa from Prague. On the morning of the seventh the caravan, or part of it, shunted north and then west along the curves of the Oder, looking in the dawn light like a mangy herd of migrating beasts. Delays were constant. After a day the crates were loaded on to seven barges, but first the Oder and then the Elbe froze, and the ice had to be broken by men wielding barge-poles. Even so, one of the barges splintered its hull and had to be towed ashore and abandoned, entailing yet another delay before the journey resumed, as slow as ever. Boundary columns reared and then fell away astern. Friedland. Saxony. Brandenburg. Mecklenburg. The toll stations, each with its guards and cannons, loomed and dwindled. A handsome bribe was paid at each, and not one of the barges was boarded, not one of the crates was prised open.