Ex Libris

by Ross King

  A crowbar flashed, and again Captain Quilter collapsed to his knees. His hand fumbled in his belt for the firelock with which he had armed himself as protection against Rowley's gang, but of course the pistol had disappeared. Now what little remained of his ship and her cargo-what little return he could make for his investors at the Royal Exchange-was vanishing at the hands of these shoreline pirates.

  In the warmth of another bonfire he discovered a handful of his crewmen, blue-lipped and shivering. Three of their number, Pinchbeck included, had died since being dragged ashore in the last hour. Their bodies had been lined up next to the eight other sailors whose soaked carcasses had washed ashore. The pockets of their sodden cloaks and galligaskins were being rifled by those too small or infirm to loot the greater riches of the washed-up chests. Quilter's heart sank at the sight. The looters pushing and shoving over the corpses looked like nothing so much as flapping turkey buzzards, but he was far too numb and weak to chase them away.

  A few of the other scavengers on the beach proved more hospitable, however. Blankets were distributed among the survivors, along with chunks of bread and cheese, and even the odd bottle of brandy, from which the crewmen were helping themselves to feeble swigs. Some fifteen minutes later, one more of the crewmen had expired but Quilter himself was feeling revitalised by the twin blessings of the brandy and the flames, when suddenly there came-no one was quite sure from where at first-the crackle of musket-fire. For a moment Quilter thought the shot was intended for him, but then he saw the looters delving in the crates and among the corpses squawk with surprise and leap for cover. Then a second shot echoed across the beach.

  By this time he was belly-crawling across the mud and wrack to shelter behind a waterlogged cask. The first streaks of dawn had appeared above the wreckage of the Bellerophon, which by now had spread itself across much of the horizon. The rain had thinned to a gentle mist and the Margate Hook was vanishing beneath the flooding tidewaters. Perfect sailing weather, thought Quilter with a pang. He watched part of the keel wash ashore on the heaving waves. Then another shot broke the silence and he lowered his head behind the cask. The bonfire was snapping and crackling in front of him, sending shadows and smoke across the sand. When he raised his head a moment later he was expecting to see Sir Ambrose wading ashore with his sword or pistol flourishing, but what he saw instead, swaying on the horizon, looking like her own ghost, was the Star of Lübeck.

  The Hansa merchantman was barely visible through the spindrift. She was still listing badly and scudding recklessly under bare poles, but, for all that, she was intact and afloat. The crewmen could be seen on her upper decks, hoisting what little canvas was left on to the splintered masts. But the bursts of musket-fire, Quilter realised, were coming from much closer to shore.

  A fourth shot crackled along the strip of beach. The looters cursed among themselves and retreated deeper into the safety of the osiers. Quilter could see them fumbling at their belts for their daggers and old-fashioned matchlock pistols whose tapers were impossible to light because of the drizzle.

  He shifted his gaze to the left, to where a cutter with its sail flapping and swelling had emerged an instant earlier from the smoke and wreckage. After a second he made out a figure in the prow, a man bent on one knee as if paying homage to a superior. Except the man wasn't paying homage to anyone, Quilter immediately realised, he was taking aim with his musket at the few figures left among the pyramids of crates. At a fifth crack one of the figures shrieked like a kite, arched its back, then dropped in the sand. The cutter splashed forward, its prow nodding in the waves.

  Yes, it was Sir Ambrose Plessington after all, Quilter had decided. Trust a rascal like him to survive when good men like poor old Pinchbeck had perished. Two other figures-Sir Ambrose's companions, he supposed-were hunched in the stern, barely visible behind the swollen sail. So they, too, had survived the shipwreck. Now they had come to claim what was left of their precious cargo, the unholy relics that some would say had been responsible for the whole dreadful misadventure.

  He rolled out from behind the barrel and struggled to his feet. The boat was in the shallows now, its sail furled, one of the figures in the thwarts working a pair of oars. Quilter limped into the foaming water, waving his arms like a man in a London street frantically summoning a hackney-carriage.

  'Sir Ambrose!' He took another step forward into the waves. The boat had run aground and the figure from the prow was clambering over the gunwale. 'Sir-'

  Even before the musket-ball whizzed past his shoulder and sent him plunging again for the safety of the barrel he had realised that the man in the prow was not Sir Ambrose, nor the cutter that of the Bellerophon.

  ***

  From a quarter-mile up the beach Emilia was also watching as the three men came ashore. She had landed on the beach almost an hour earlier. As it happened, the Captain was right. She and Vilém had indeed escaped the wreck of the Bellerophon along with Sir Ambrose. They had cut one of the longboats free from its canvas sling and clambered inside barely ten minutes before the hull collapsed. The journey from ship to shore, a distance of no more than a mile, surpassed even the one from Breslau to Hamburg for danger and discomfort. The gunwales of the longboat had been splintered and its paddles had gone missing. After an hour it had shipped so much water through a leak in the hull that Vilém and Sir Ambrose were reduced to bailing water with their hats, Emilia with panels of her skirts. But somehow the vessel remained afloat. For the next ten hours the three of them had drifted back and forth on the current, the bonfires looming as they neared the shore, then fading as they slipped away. Then at last the wind died and the sail, a tattered piece of canvas, was raised. Fifteen minutes later they scraped the boat across the shingle and into the sand.

  Now Vilém and Sir Ambrose were dragging the crates ashore, sliding them across the bladder-wracked shingle, through winkle shells that crackled underfoot. Five crates of books had been pulled aboard. Sir Ambrose had explained that the other crates would have to be raised from the bottom. Fortunately there was a team of salvors in Erith, men who used special diving-bells and even a 'submarine', an ingenious invention by the Dutch magus Cornelius Drebbel, whom Sir Ambrose had met in Prague. Their services were employed by merchants and investors in the Royal Exchange to recover the cargoes of the thirty-odd ships that each year were wrecked on the Goodwin Sands or the other shoals in the mouth of the Thames. The submarine, a marvellous piece of engineering, a vessel made from balsa-wood and Greenland sealskin, featuring fins and inflatable bladders, would do the trick nicely.

  'You must go ahead to London,' Sir Ambrose was saying as he struggled with another crate. 'Immediately. Monboddo will be expecting you. As will Buckingham. I shall send word to the Navy Office as soon as possible.'

  Vilém gripped the other end of the crate and hoisted it from the mud, then together they carried it to the high water line and set it in the sand. The lid had come off, exposing and even spilling a few of its contents. As the two men staggered to the longboat to recover another crate, Emilia replaced the books, the last of which, tented open, badly water-damaged, was a thick volume that she recognised from the Spanish Rooms, one from which Vilém had read to her only a few months earlier, the Anthologia Graeca, a collection of epigrams compiled in Constantinople by a scholar named Cephalas. The original parchment had been discovered among the manuscripts in the Bibliotheca Palatina in Heidelberg, though this translation had been printed in London.

  She turned the volume over, but before closing the sodden cover that smelled like wet shoe-leather she glimpsed a verse in the middle of the opened page, in the muted light of the bonfires:

  Where is thine admired beauty, Dorian Corinth, where thy crown of towers? Where thy treasures of old, where the temples of the immortals, where the halls and where the wives of the Sisyphids, and the tens of thousands of thy people that were? For not even a trace, O most distressful one, is left of thee, and war has swept up together and clean devoured all…

 
Vilém had read the verse to her on a gloomy evening in September when word reached Prague that General Spínola's army had invaded the Palatinate and soon would lay siege to Heidelberg and-in a cycle of violence reeling backwards and forwards across hemispheres and centuries from the ruins of Corinth and Constantinople-what remained of the Bibliotheca Palatina, including the manuscript of the Anthologia Graeca.

  A ragged shout reached her from the other end of the beach. The looters were on their way, stumbling in haste, heels tossing clods of mud and sand. Without knowing why, she slipped the volume into her pocket, then struggled to replace the wooden lid.

  '… in the Strand,' Sir Ambrose was saying. He and Vilém had arrived with another crate. 'York House. Beside the river. I've had dealings with him before.'

  'Yes?'

  'He's one of the best. Paintings, marbles, books. Perfectly respectable, of course. Also kept a good many baubles out of the Earl of Arundel's grasping hands, I can tell you that.'

  Vilém was breathing hard. 'He knows the plan?'

  'Of course he knows it. He's known it from the outset. Not to worry.' The seaweed-draped crate thudded into the sand. 'He's perfectly capable.'

  'And trustworthy?'

  'Trustworthy?' Sir Ambrose chuckled, then cocked an eyebrow at him. 'Oh, Monboddo is a true coin, we have no worries on that account. You'll be safe enough, the pair of you. Provided you make it to London,' he added, nodding at the looters slipping and stumbling towards them. Not far behind were the three men who had disembarked from the boat. 'I seem to have lost my pistol, worse luck,' he said in a casual tone. He had begun walking, unhurried, towards the longboat. 'Not to mention my sword. It would appear, my friends, that we find ourselves in yet another spot of trouble.'

  ***

  No coach moved as swiftly over the roads of England in those days as the ones belonging to the De Quester Post Office for Foreign Parts. Each vehicle in the De Quester fleet had been specially designed to cover the seventy-mile journey from London to Margate, or from Margate to London, in less than five hours, even with a few passengers on board and a heavy load of ten mail-bags strapped to the leather roof or bundled inside. Their perches and sway-bars were made from poles of the lightest pine, while the axle-trees were greased with plumbago and the wheels mounted on springs and rimmed with iron. The whole contraption was pulled along the road by teams of Barbary horses bred for the task at a stable in Cambridgeshire. And so as dawn broke over the Chislet Marshes, one of these swift vehicles must have made an unusual sight as it lumbered and jolted through the mire at an even slower pace than the crate-laden donkey-carts creeping along in the opposite direction.

  This was a stretch of road notorious even in these parts for its pot-holes and its tendency to flood at the first sign of rain. The driver of the coach, a man named Foxcroft, was squinting through the drizzle and mist as he huddled inside his tarpaulin and guided the team along the treacherous road. He had left Margate almost six hours earlier and his bags of mail from Hamburg and Amsterdam were already overdue in London. He might have made London on time, storm or no storm, had he taken the main road through Canterbury and Faversham instead of this miserable detour along the windswept coast. But of course he dared not ride along the main road, just as he no longer dared wear the red-and-gold De Quester livery. A dispute was now commencing before the Lords of the Council as to whether the De Quester monopoly infringed the patent of Lord Stanhope, Master of the Posts and Messengers, who had recently begun using agents of his own-bands of ruffians, in Foxcroft's opinion-to carry his letters to Hamburg and Amsterdam. Not a month earlier Foxcroft had been ambushed by a gang of masked men outside the walls of Canterbury; then another driver was set upon two weeks later, in Gad's Hill. Both times the robbers had worn the garb of highwaymen, but everyone knew that Lord Stanhope's ruffians were behind the outrages. And so for the past few weeks Foxcroft had been condemned to this circuitous route-a route so desolate and forsaken that not even the most desperate highwayman would ever think of haunting it, especially not on a December morning as cold and miserable as this one.

  And so it was that Foxcroft could scarcely believe his eyes when he rounded a corner and saw the oncoming convoy of donkeys and, beyond them, some sort of conflagration-fire, smoke, running figures-along the beach. Another of Lord Stanhope's ambushes? He cursed in fright and reined in the horses, but it was too late, the Barbs had whinnied and then reared in their traces at a loud burst of what sounded like musket-fire. Foxcroft teetered out of his balance before righting himself and gripping the reins in one hand, the edge of the seat with the other. In the second before his hat brim slipped over his eyes he made out, far in the distance, what looked like the wreckage of a ship.

  The horses were plunging forward through the muck, muscling past the chain of mules and thundering pell-mell along the narrow road in the direction of the beach and its orange bonfires. The futchels creaked and squealed as the vehicle swung round another corner, tipping on to two wheels and hurling gobbets of mud into the osiers blurring past on both sides. Foxcroft thought he saw a clutch of figures huddled among them. But then one of the wheels struck a stone and he began bouncing in his seat like the village scold on her cucking-stool.

  From the muddy road it took less than a minute for the coach to reach the verge of the even muddier beach. By this time the wheels had struck two more stones and Foxcroft, dislodged, found himself clinging with both hands to the seat as his boots hung a bare inch from the whirling spokes. Two bags of mail had been lost, along with his hat. Then, as the iron-rimmed wheels hit the sand, the coach slowed with a hard jerk and he heard another crack of musket-fire, much closer now. The horses reared again. He braced a foot on the transom and with a desperate lunge raised himself into the seat.

  And it was then that he caught his first sight of them, a group of shadows, a clutch of five or six figures, all rushing towards him. Yes-an ambush of some sort. He twisted round and fumbled for his whip, but the whip had disappeared along with his hat and the bags of mail. The horses reared again as he clutched at the reins, and suddenly the coach lurched to a stop, its wheels stuck fast and sinking into the sand.

  'Giddap! Giddap!'

  He reached for the musket behind the seat, but it too had disappeared, as had the bag of shot. He spun round in the seat to face his attackers-more of them even than in Canterbury. The horses reared, then dug in, though with its perch and axle-trees ploughing through the sand the coach shifted no more than a couple of inches. Then the horses lunged again and it slid forward with a creak of leather as the wheels found purchase on the shingle.

  But it was too late, Foxcroft realised. His lordship's bravos-a good half-dozen of them-were almost upon him.

  'Holy mother of God,' he whispered, bracing himself to leap.

  ***

  Captain Quilter was watching the stranded coach-and-six from his shelter behind a cask of alewife thrown overboard from the Star of Lübeck. By now the barrel had been punctured by a musket-ball and brine was spurting through the splintered staves and into the sand. He had heard a shout from among the osiers and, turning his head, glimpsed the coach careering towards the water as it strewed a couple of sacks in its muddy wake.

  Gripping one of the barrel's hoops, he raised himself a few inches higher. The sand was as soft and deep as a hassock under his knees. Another shout, this time from the opposite end of the beach. He turned his head to see a group of figures rushing the coach. The vehicle had stopped by now, run aground in the muck and sand at the edge of the beach. The horses reared and kicked in their traces as the lone figure in the coach-box struggled to free the reins from where they were tangled in the futchels.

  Quilter was on his feet now, staring through the screen of drizzle at the strange scene unfolding before him. Three of the figures had reached the coach by the time the reins were loosened and the coach jerked violently forward. The other three, one of them wielding the musket, were only a few paces behind and closing quickly.

  'Giddap
!'

  'Get on board!' It was Sir Ambrose, raising one of his companions, the lady, into the box-seat. 'Yes! Go!'

  One of the pursuers had dropped to his knee. His musket flashed and gave a cough followed by a puff of smoke. But the coach was rolling again, tipping from side to side like a bark in a heavy sea. A second person, a man, thin and hatless, had also leapt aboard. He was clinging to the wooden boot while Sir Ambrose ran alongside, raising something aloft, a chest of some sort. The man in livery was reloading the musket while the one in the boot strained his slender body, arm outstretched.

  But at that second Quilter's attention was caught by something else. One of the lanterns or fireboxes from the messes of the Bellerophon must have ignited a spilled budge-barrel or spirit cask, for suddenly a deafening explosion shook the sky. As Quilter fell to his knees and looked into the offing he saw a fountain of orange fire, a spectacular display of pyrotechnics that dwarfed the bonfires and even the new sun shying behind the clouds. The streaks of fire were still raining into the sea by the time he thought to turn his head and look for the coach. But neither the coach nor its passengers was anywhere in sight. Peering along the strand of beach he saw only their pursuers, the three men whose black-and-gold cloaks had been bathed in copper by the thousand cascading fragments of his ship.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I awoke the next morning feeling slightly unwell. There seemed to be a strange taste, faint and sweet, on the roof of my mouth, and my tongue was parched. When I rose from the bed, waveringly, clutching a bedpost, limbs strangely enervated, I realised how slick I was with sweat, how my bed-linen was soaked as if I were feverish, or as if my slumbers had been hard work. Panicked, for a few seconds I thought I was falling ill with an ague or worse (I have been something of a hypochondriac ever since Arabella's death), but then with a pang of relief I remembered Biddulph's rumbullion. The evening came back to me-Wapping, Orinoco, Villiers, Monboddo-in a steady accretion of detail. With a soft groan I sank into a chair and listened for a few minutes as the herring-gulls squawked heartlessly below the window, feeding and flapping in the mud. I seemed to remember a dream, something violent and frightening. Another alarming effect of last night's rumbullion, I supposed.