Ex Libris

Chapter One

Nonsuch Books was not in the chaos I expected it to be in when I returned home, exhausted, after the arduous journey from Crampton Magna. As Phineas deposited me on London Bridge I caught a glimpse of Monk through one of the polished windows. He was bent over the counter, and behind his bowed head the books were ranged in soldierly ranks along their shelves, the afternoon sunlight lambent on their bindings. Everything was in its proper place-including, at last, me. My exile had ended.

On disembarking from the coach, I stamped my boots on the tiny cobblestones as if ridding them of the dirt and decay of Pontifex Hall. I paused to wipe my brow and inhale several lungfuls of the acrid breeze from the river. It was nearing six o'clock in the afternoon. Crowds were returning from the markets with their suppers, passing over the bridge and into Southwark. Shins of beef, wrapped in brown paper, and silver-finned fishes with wide, sardonic grins protruded from baskets as wives and servants pushed past me along the footway. I stepped forward and opened the green door with a grateful sigh and a promise to myself-soon violated-never to leave London again.

'Sir! Good afternoon!' Monk leapt from his seat like a singed cat, then helped me scrape the trunk across the threshold. 'How was your journey, Mr. Inchbold? Did you enjoy the country?' He was giving the trunk a peculiar look, I suppose because he expected it to be filled to bursting with books, which he rightly supposed were the only possible inducements to my departure. 'Was the weather fine and dry, sir?'

I patiently answered these questions and a half-dozen excited others. By the time I had finished, the bells of St. Magnus-the-Martyr were striking six o'clock, so I raised the awning, fastened the shutters and locked the door. I performed these operations with a certain reluctance, because I was eager to immerse myself in the waters of beautiful routine; to see my regular customers streaming through my door; to have the familiar sight of their faces and sound of their voices dilute the disturbing memories of the past week. Monk saw me spot my mail in a neat pile on the counter. The letter from Monsieur Grimaud, he explained, had at last arrived from Paris.

'Come, Monk.' I was reading the letter as I climbed the turnpike stair. Vignon's edition of Homer had eluded us after all, but not even this disappointment could dampen my reviving spirits, for by now I had caught a reassuring smell of food and heard the familiar clatter of pots and pans in the scullery. 'Shall we see what Margaret has prepared for our supper?'

But of course I knew that, today being Wednesday, a rabbit from the market in Cheapside would, as usual, be roasting on the spit, next to a boiling pot of sweet potatoes purchased in Covent Garden. And, also as usual, Margaret would have uncorked a bottle of Navarre wine, from which I would allow myself three purple inches as I sat in my upholstered armchair and smoked my two bowls of tobacco.

My immediate task, as I then saw it, was to solve the riddle of the cipher. The copy of the manuscript could wait, at least for a day or two. I cannot say why I felt this to be the order of priority. Possibly I thought the two mysterious texts-the one I possessed and the one I sought-were in some way connected, and that the former, unriddled, might lead to a solution for the latter. Since Sir Ambrose was himself a cipher-to me, at least-I reasoned that by decoding the piece of paper I might learn something more about him than the paltry information vouchsafed by Alethea. The opposite would prove the case, of course, for the cipher was not, as I believed, my golden thread, and instead it was to lead me ever outward from the centre of the labyrinth. But I could know nothing of this at the time, and so it was that as I finished my supper I was resolved to take a stab at the cipher, using for my assistance the books on steganography, or 'covered writing', found among my shelves. I had further decided to write a letter to my cousin Erasmus Inchbold, a mathematician at Wadham College in Oxford.

I climbed the steps to my study and lit a tallow candle. By this time Monk had retired to his garret and Margaret to her hovel in Southwark. Outside, the bridge had fallen silent except for the outgoing tide chuckling between its piers. Inside, the last light of the day lit the casement, whose prospect of the river had long ago been blocked by piles of books. The study was a tiny affair, the first of the rooms above the turnpike stair to suffer the encroachments from below. Every horizontal surface was now aswarm with books, a pile of which I had to clear from the bureau before there was room enough for my candlestick.

Before studying the cipher I looked for a moment at the other slip of paper from Pontifex Hall, the one Alethea had given me: The Labyrinth of the World. A Hermetic text? I was more puzzled than ever by my task. Ours was an age of reason and scientific discovery, not of the so-called secret wisdom of the Corpus hermeticum. Nowadays we read Galileo and Descartes instead of wizards such as Hermes Trismegistus and Cornelius Agrippa. We performed blood transfusions and wrote treatises on the composition of Saturn's rings. We admired and sought to imitate the beautiful forms of the ancient marble statues shipped back from Greece by Lord Arundel. We fought wars not for religious reasons but in the interests of trade and commerce. We had founded a university in New England and, in London, a 'Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge'. No longer did we burn witches or perform exorcisms. No longer did we think that an affliction such as a goitre might be cured by the touch of a hanged man's hand, or the pox by prayers to St. Job. We were, above all, a civilised people. And so of what concern to any of us was the obscure learning, the bogus wisdom, of the Corpus hermeticum?

After a minute I set the paper aside and took up the cipher. This was even more mysterious. I held it to the light of the candle to study the watermark. Those imprinted on the pages of Ortelius's Theatrum orbis terrarum had been fool's-caps, the symbol used by the Bohemian papermaker in 1600. However, the cipher was printed on paper whose manufacturer had marked it with the motif of a cornucopia, on either side of which was an initial: a J to the left, a T to the right.

My heart lifted. I recognised the motif, of course, just as I knew the monogram. Both were those of John Thimbleby, a papermaker whose factory stood east along the river, in Shadwell. This meant that the leaf must have been inserted into the Theatrum at a much later date than 1600. But this was my only clue to the paper's identity and probably a useless one at that, since Thimbleby was one of the biggest suppliers of paper in the country and had been in business for more than a quarter of a century. Still, it would be worth paying him a visit to find out which printers he supplied, Royalists or Puritans, and whether he had ever sent any consignments to Dorsetshire.

I turned the leaf over, sniffed at it, then touched it with the tip of my tongue to discover if it had been marked in any other way. I knew that even the most amateur cryptographers had a half-dozen ingenious methods of concealing messages by means of what was called 'sympathetic ink'. Onions, wine, aqua fortis, the distilled juice of insects-it seemed that almost anything could be used. I was surprised that Alethea with her strange concern for secrecy had not resorted to the tactic. But I supposed it was just as well. I had no wish to tinker in my study like an alchemist or an apothecary, fiddling with pans of water and coal-dust from the scuttle. Because that's what it took to decipher one of these secret messages. Letters written in a special ink made, for instance, from dissolved alum-a substance more usually used to stop bleeding, make glue or taw leather-couldn't be read until the paper was submerged in water, which caused crystals to form on the page. Others written in inks made from goat's milk or goose fat were invisible unless the page was first sprinkled with mill-dust, which magically brought the letters back from oblivion. Another devious method was to use an ink distilled from a putrefied willow tree-a kind that was visible only in pitch-black chambers, much like that made from another recipe that involved, I seemed to recall, the juice of the glow-worm. I had even read somewhere of a batch made from a mixture of sal ammoniac and rotten wine. Letters written with this foul-smelling concoction supposedly remained invisible unless the recipient had wits enough to hold the paper to a candle flame.

But I could find no evidence of any such tampering on my scrap of paper, so I set aside the leaf and took up the first of my books on decipherment.

Well, perhaps our age with its scientific spirit was not quite rid of the old trickeries after all. I sold an alarming number of books on decipherment, most of which titles were also on the shelves at Pontifex Hall. Indeed, had not a whole shelf been devoted to the art of steganography? Now, as I sat with a pile of the books spread before me like braces of grouse ready for plucking, I saw that many of them had been reprinted in London during the past twenty years. Yes, ours was evidently an age that prized the preservation-and the revelation-of secrets. And who could blame us, I suppose, after so many years of war and intrigue?

I had discovered on my shelves the Steganographia of Johann von Heidenberg, alias John Trithemius, a Benedictine monk who had supposedly raised the spirit of the dead wife of the Emperor Maximilian I. There was also the Magia naturalis of the occultist Gian Battista della Porta, who had founded an 'Academy of Secrets' in Naples, along with De cifris, written by Leon Alberti, whose greatest invention was a 'cipher disk', two copper wheels, one inside the other, that rotated forwards and backwards. I owned also the work of an English author, John Wilkins, whose wife was Oliver Cromwell's sister. And I had a copy of the most famous cryptographer's manual of all, Blaise de Vigenère's 600-page Traicté des chiffres, ou secretes manières d'escrire, first published in Paris in the year 1586. A copy of this particular work, I recalled, was likewise on the shelves at Pontifex Hall.

For two whole hours I sat hunched over the paper, shaking my head in dismay as I tried to make sense, first of the volumes, then of the cipher, to which I applied their obscure precepts. The concept of a cipher is simple enough. It consists of a series of masqueraders: a number of characters beneath which others, the true characters, hide their faces. The faces of these hidden characters have been changed according to some arbitrary and prearranged convention called a code, the 'language' in which the cipher is written. Like any language, a code consists of a network of connections governed by its own particular rules and conventions. Deciphering therefore involves knowing or else discovering these rules and conventions in order to reveal the true identities of the impostors occupying their places. The problem, naturally, is through what method these masqueraders should be unmasked. Ordinarily the recipient solves the mystery by means of a key, a sort of grammar explaining the language in which it is written. The key might stipulate, for instance, that the true characters are replaced by those two places down the alphabet, thus:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B

In this case-a two-letter shift to the right-the cryptographer simply replaces the letters in the top line with those below, while the decipherer moves two letters backwards instead of two letters forward. This fairly crude system is known as the 'Caesar Alphabet', since it was first used by Julius Caesar in his communications with his troops in Spain and Syria. Such a system may be cracked, the books on my desk explained, by a little guesswork. For example, according to type-founders' bills the most common letter in the English alphabet is E, while the second most common is A, then O, then N, and so forth. The most common word is, of course, the definite article, 'the'. Now, given this small bit of information, the decipherer should first determine whether one particular letter occurs more than the others. Presumably the letter will not be E, because, like the other letters, the E will have been occulted beneath its impostor. Should he find one-the letter X, shall we say-it will become his candidate for the letter E. And should this letter frequently occur in conjunction with two others, he will have reason to suspect the trio together represents the definite article-and he will moreover have solved the identities of two more letters.

Or so he hopes. But he must proceed carefully. Snares may have been laid for him as he blunders along. The word may be spelled backwards or otherwise transposed. Or perhaps nulls-letters of no value-will have been inserted to throw him off the scent. The key might stipulate, for example, that the letter Y is a null and therefore is paired with nothing whatsoever in the plain-text. Or else the key might stipulate that every fifth letter in the cipher should be ignored, or that only the second letter in each line should be accounted. Or perhaps the definite article, or even the letter E itself, will have been omitted from the cipher altogether.

My mind was beginning to spin at the thought of these duplicities, so I turned from the books on covered writing to the cipher itself. By this time the sun had turned bullfinch-orange in the casement and the watchman was passing up and down the carriageway, ringing his bell. The most common letter in the text, I discovered, was K, of which I counted eleven. I made substitutions based on the assumption that K represented E, which meant, therefore, that the cipher alphabet would consist of a six-letter shift to the right of the plain-text alphabet. But after I made these simple changes the cipher was no clearer than before. It appeared that my cryptographer was a subtler creature than Julius Caesar.

I therefore decided that he must have used what was known to cryptographers as le système Vigenère, a more complex method in which a keyword is used to occult and then expose the letters in the plain-text. According to Vigenère, the keyword was the clue to the labyrinth of letters: the golden skein the decipherer unspools as he winds his way backwards and forwards. Its purpose is to explain which cipher alphabets-often as many as six or seven-have been substituted for the plain-text one. Usually it will be a single word, but occasionally two or three, or possibly even an entire phrase. Vigenère himself recommends a phrase, because the longer the keyword, the harder the cipher will be to solve.

Once more I felt daunted by the task confronting me. I had creaked open Vigenère's Traicté and was stumbling through passages of archaic French, trying to make sense of the long columns and tables of letters that filled page after page. Without the keyword it seemed that the cipher would be all but impossible to crack, since as many as a dozen codes might have to be solved in a single cipher.

At length, though, I discovered that le système Vigenère was really not as mysterious as all that, at least not in conception, and as a method of enciphering texts it was ingenious, not to mention dismayingly effective. As I studied the Traicté I came to see the great Vigenère as a wizard or conjuror whose medium was words and letters rather than chemicals or flames-words and letters whose shapes he transformed with the incantation of a spell or the gesture of a wand.

His method consists, like Caesar's, of polyalphabetic substitutions, but substitutions of a more complex variety, ones whereby the plain-text letters can be replaced by those in any one of twenty-five cipher alphabets. The plain-text letter A might be replaced in the cipher alphabet by C, as in the Caesar Alphabet. But it does not therefore follow that plain-text B will then be replaced in the cipher by the letter D: it could be replaced with equal probability by any one of the twenty-four other letters. Neither does it mean that when C reappears in the cipher it will once again represent the plain-text letter A, because A, too, might have changed its value. For in Vigenère's substitution table, any plain-text letter along the horizontal axis may be replaced by any one below it in the vertical or left-hand one, which becomes its cipher:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A

C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B

D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C

E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D

F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E

G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F

H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G

I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H

J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I

K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J

L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K

M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M

O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N

P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O

Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P

R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q

S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R

T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S

U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T

V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U

W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V

X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W

Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X

Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Thus the plain-text letter B in the top, horizontal, line could be replaced by any one of the twenty-five characters arranged vertically beneath it in the twenty-five possible cipher alphabets. The decipherer knows which of these cipher alphabets to choose only by means of the keyword, those few letters whose structure is logical but whose effect is nothing short of magical, like a spell chanted over a base metal which then miraculously transmutes itself into ingots of gold. The spell works when the letters of the keyword are superimposed on those of the cipher in a series of repetitions, so that each letter of the keyword is paired, on each of its repetitions, with one in the cipher-text. Then, the transmutation. The values of the letters in the cipher change according to which alphabet the letters in the keyword instruct the decipherer to employ. What follows is a smooth, steady interchange of letters, a textual metamorphosis in which the hidden inscription crystallises like alum immersed in water, reassembling its structure according to an ordained pattern. The act of decipherment becomes as simple and certain as flipping over playing-cards to read their values, or removing the satin mask to expose the villain's face.

I found something deeply appealing about this idea of a key that can be used to unlock the most complex secrets, this word or phrase that, almost like a divine fiat, turns the random and chaotic into an ordered pattern. Vigenère was not a magician after all. No-his system belonged to our new age, that of Kepler, Galileo and Francis Bacon, one in which outer husks were cast off and the kernel of truth exposed for all to see. His system confirmed my faith in the powers of human reason to penetrate the depths of any mystery. And so was it any wonder that I believed my scrap of paper, combined with a few secret syllables, might penetrate that of Sir Ambrose Plessington?

Except that I did not yet know the keyword. Feeling overwhelmed, I set the books aside as the watchman was calling ten o'clock. My cousin Erasmus still seemed my best policy. Over the years, I had sold him many books on the subject of decipherment and I had even heard a rumour that he had deciphered papers for Cromwell. So I decided that he, of all people, would know what to make of the scrambled letters. But I would tell him nothing of my suspicions that it was a cryptogram devised in order to conceal the location of Sir Ambrose's fortune. 'My dear Erasmus,' I began, surprised by the slight tremor in my hand.

Darkness was complete by the time I finished the letter, and the bells of St. Magnus were announcing eleven o'clock. I would have to hurry, I realised, if I was to catch the night mail-coach. I reached for my coat, struck by a peculiar sense of urgency. But then I was struck, just as suddenly, by something else just as urgent.

There's nothing to fear, Mr. Inchbold. You will be quite safe. I promise…

As I shrugged into my coat and stared at the cipher on the bureau, the tiny crevice of doubt that had opened on the first night at Pontifex Hall now widened, and on a sudden impulse I knelt beside the bureau and prised up two loose floorboards, then tucked the slip of paper between the scantlings. After a moment's thought I added the inventory of missing books and the summons from Alethea, along with my down payment of twelve sovereigns-everything that could connect me with Pontifex Hall. Then I carefully replaced the boards, covered them with two stacks of books, and picked my way around other piles of books to the turnpike stair.

'Sir?'

I was halfway down the steps. Monk's face had appeared at the top, half hidden by his nightcap. He had given me a dreadful start.

'I shall be taking a turn in the street,' I called to him. Even in the gloom I could see his eyebrows rise in surprise. I rarely ventured outside after dark, and then usually only as far as the Jolly Waterman. If London was frightening by day, at night it was, from my limited experience, something else entirely. My resolve nearly deserted me. 'Only a short one,' I added. 'I have a letter to post.'

'Allow me, sir.' He started down the twisting steps. Posting letters was one of his many duties.

'No, no.' I shied a hand at him. 'All that sitting on the coach,' I explained, flexing my legs and patting my rump for his benefit. 'A walk will be just the thing for me. Now, please, Monk, to bed with you.'

The nightcap disappeared. A minute later I was stepping outside and on to the footway. The streets beyond the gate were empty and dark. The intermittent bull's-eye lanterns-a series of yellow haloes against the buildings-barely lit my way. From the distance came the sound of the bellman. I ducked my head and hurried after my shadow, moving as tentatively as if treading on eggshells.

The nearest receiving station to Nonsuch House was in Tower Street, near Botolph Lane. I found it without difficulty and, after dropping the letter through the posting-hole (a strong-box attached to the wall by means of a chain), I hurried back down Fish Street Hill to the sound of the curfew tolling. At its funereal call two sentries had stirred to life and were preparing to scrape shut the gates of the bridge. The portcullis had begun its descent. I scurried beneath in the nick of time, grateful once again to see the black-and-white hulk of Nonsuch House rising against the sky to meet me.

Thirty minutes later the letter was collected from the strong-box and delivered to the Inland Office, which occupied the upper floor of the General Letter Office in Clock Lane. There, by the light of a candle stub, among a litter of labels and hand stamps, the string was cut with a penknife, the wafer seal carefully broken, and the letter copied out word for word by a clerk. The clerk then carried the copy downstairs and into a larger room where a man sat behind a desk, thrumming the fingers of his right hand on its surface. His back was to the door.

'Sir Valentine,' murmured the clerk, whose name was Ottermole.

'What is it?'

'Another letter, sir. From Nonsuch House.'

The leather squeaked as Sir Valentine turned in his chair. The clerk placed the copy on the desk and, after climbing the stairs, folded the letter along its creases and carefully resealed it with a drop of wax. This, too, was delivered downstairs. A half-dozen brass-bound satchels sat by the doorway. By this time Sir Valentine had disappeared. Outside in the small coach-yard a team of horses was being hitched to the waiting mail-coach, due to arrive in Oxford some fifteen hours and five posts later.

Ottermole returned up the staircase to the Inland Office. A new pile of letters, folded and sealed, had been placed on the desk during his short absence. Sighing, he sat down before his candle stub and took up his penknife to cut the strings of another letter. As usual, it was going to be a long night.

Chapter Two

From across the river, hemmed in by a November fog, Prague Castle looked poised and at peace. Snow had fallen heavily during the night. The fountains in the courtyards were still, their tumbling waters frozen solid, and the new snow stood inches deep on the arches and gateways. Beneath the ramparts the outlines of the gardens and their pollarded alleys could just be made out, their patterns broken by irregular clefts of shadow. The fire in the Spanish Rooms had died hours ago, for there was little left in the library to burn, but a ghost of black smoke hung motionless on the air. The entire castle seemed to have slipped into hushed suspension, as if holding its breath in wait. Then it came, the slow roll of gunfire, still far in the distance but drawing steadily closer. It could not be long now, a day at most, before the soldiers crossed the river and breached the gates of the Old Town. Then the Cossacks-the subject of so many frightened rumours-would make their appearance.

Standing on the balcony of the house in the Old Town Square, Emilia eased out a wisp of breath and listened to the clamour welling up from below. The exodus was about to proceed. Small armies of men were struggling to strap panniers to the pack-mules, or to lash sheets of canvas to top-heavy carts and wagons whose wheels had carved chaotic paths through the snow. The men had worked through the night. There were more than fifty vehicles in all, most already loaded and hitched to draught-horses and yellow oxen that were swaying their heads from side to side in sleepy feints. The procession twisted all the way round the square and then lost itself in the mist-skeined streets. Liveried pages were scampering back and forth through the snow, a few outriders cantered alongside the baggage-wagons, cursing in English and German. Across the square, beneath the dock-tower of the town hall, a draught-horse was being shod. The muffled ring of the hammer reached the balcony a split-second after each swing of the blacksmith's arm, making the entire spectacle look false and deranged, like a painting come imperfectly to life.

Gripping the frosted rail, Emilia leaned into the cool air, peering westward across the snow-capped chimneys and wattled rooftops to where the White Mountain, five miles distant, stood lost in its pall of grey mist. The Summer Palace had been taken during the night. Soldiers and courtiers alike had been slain. Her gaze drifted back down the slope of the hill to the Vltava, a rusty blade flashing in odd glimpses between the gaps in the straw-and-plaster houses. She caught sight of a grisly ballet of bodies twisting downstream on the current, arms spread wide and coat-tails fanned like the wings of angels. The Moravian foot-soldiers. Last night they had tried, and failed, to swim across the river to the safety of the Old Town.

Safety? She averted her eyes and stepped back from the railing, wrapping her cloak more tightly about her shoulders. All night there had been rumours, each worse than the last. The Transylvanian soldiers had failed to make their appearance, as had the English troops, and the Magyar horsemen were either dead or had deserted to the Emperor. The first Cossacks were now making their way down the hill towards the bridge, whose gates could not be defended for long. The Catholics had triumphed. Prague was to be sacked, its citizens taken prisoner and tortured-if they weren't put to the sword first, that is, every last one of them, God save their souls.

King Frederick would not be captured, however. Already he had fled to his fortress at Glatz, or so another rumour claimed. But the Queen was here still, inside the house, making preparations of her own. All night Emilia had heard the shrill squawks of her monkey and the banging of doors as her ambassadors and advisers trooped in and out of the chamber. This was the hour when Emilia and the other ladies-in-waiting would be summoned by a page or a bell to participate in the hour-long ritual of draping the royal personage in layers of silk and damask, then fastening buttons, tying ribbons, stringing jewels, curling hair with heated tongs, completing the magical transformation of slight, frail Elizabeth into the Queen of Bohemia. But this morning no page had knocked and no bell had rung. Perhaps she was forgotten? Nor had there been any sign of Vilém, either inside the house or outside in the square, and no smoke rose from the chimneys in Golden Lane. So she stood on the balcony, with nothing to eat and nothing to read, and waited.

A shout rose from the square and she looked down to see Sir Ambrose Plessington tramping about in the snow. He at least was much in evidence. Last night he had escorted her upstairs to her room before disappearing, wordlessly, with the leather-bound parchment still tucked under his arm. This morning there was no sign of the parchment, though he was supervising the loading of crates of books on to one of the wagons, prising up their lids with his scimitar, then hammering them shut. There must have been a hundred crates in all. She wondered for the dozenth time what he had been doing in the library the previous night. Perhaps he was behind Vilém's disappearance? The two must know each other, she reasoned. Possibly Vilém was even part of whatever dark plot had brought the Englishman to Prague. From Vilém she knew, that the library held, among its thousands of books, a secret archive, a locked subterranean chamber where the most valuable and even dangerous books were housed, those listed in the Index librorum prohibitorum, the Vatican's catalogue of forbidden books. Only a handful of men had access to this mysterious sanctum. Each year hundreds of scholars travelled to Prague to study in the library-scholars whose appearance, like swallows or cuckoos, heralded the arrival of spring. But none was ever allowed a glimpse of the books in the secret archive. Not even Vilém, their keeper, was permitted to read them. They included, he once explained, the works of religious reformers such as Huss and Luther, along with tracts by their followers and scores of other heretics besides. There were also works by renowned astronomers. Both Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and Galileo's disquisition on tides were lodged in the archives, as were various treatises on both the comet of 1577 and the new star that had appeared in the constellation Cygnus-works that supposedly contradicted the hallowed wisdom of Aristotle. Vilém had disapproved of such secrecy, especially where the scientific treatises were concerned. How many evenings in Golden Lane had she spent listening to him complain about the Index librorum prohibitorum? Books such as those of Galileo and Copernicus were meant to stir up debates among scholars and astronomers, he insisted, to challenge old prejudices and enlighten the ignorant, to work towards a great instauration of knowledge. Whatever wisdom they might possess became dangerous only when it was hidden away from the rest of the world-hidden away by the secretive few who, like the cardinals in the Holy Office, wished to rule like tyrants over the many.

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'honneur 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 Britain 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.

By two o'clock I had tried a great number of likely-and, increasingly, unlikely-words and phrases, beginning with Sir Ambrose's name and eventually even Alethea's, which I realised with a start must have been derived from alhqeia or a-letheia, the Greek word for truth, a concept which for the Athenian philosophers meant a process of unveiling, of flushing something into the open from where it lies coiled in hidden crevices. Yet even this promising name revealed no hidden truths as far as the cipher was concerned, only further nonsense, and I barely stopped work long enough to contemplate the curious irony of its connotations when applied to Lady Marchamont, who was hardly one to unveil anything. Hour after hour I hunched over the desk, humming and cursing, doodling endless figures, lighting the wick of each new candle from the stump of its predecessor. This was impossible, I kept telling myself, absolutely impossible: all of these hair-pulling labours. The decipherment could take months, and even then the scrap of paper might not have anything intelligible to say.

At last I had leaned back in the chair, exhausted, and watched the latest candle expend itself, hissing and spitting like a kitten. A warm wind was gusting through the window, rattling the shutters and guttering the flame. All at once I felt more tired than ever. I closed my eyes and for an instant, half asleep, glimpsed rising before me the outline of Pontifex Hall framed in its monumental arch, the inscribed keystone above cast in shadow and maculated with moss and lichen, the words barely visible beneath. ITT. LITTE. LITTER…

In retrospect-in the days that were to follow-the keyword would strike me as almost too easy and obvious. After all, it seemed that almost every second stone at Pontifex Hall was carved with Sir Ambrose's peculiar motto, which had also been stamped on to his many thousands of books. But for the moment I was merely disappointed not to have discovered it hours or even days earlier. From that point onward, deciphering the paper became a simple process of filling in the blanks, of finding the intersections between the cipher-text and the keyword and then watching the plain-text-the hidden message-steadily emerge. I took the letters from the motto, that is, and superimposed them on those in the cipher-text, like so:

L I T T E R A S C R I P T A M A N E T L I T T E R A

F V W X V K H W H Z O I K E Q L V I L E P X Z S C D

And so forth, one letter of the epigraph for each one in the cipher-text. Using Vigenère's table, I then substituted the letters in the plain-text alphabets suggested by the legend for those in the cipher-text, converting the values of each of them until a pattern soon emerged-one so tantalising that, after the first few words appeared, I could barely hold my quill steady in order to continue the task:

L I T T E R A S C R I P T A M A N E T L I T T E R A

F V W X V K H W H Z O I K E Q L V I L E P X Z S C D

U N D E R T H E F I G T R E E L I E S T H E G O L D

'Under the fig tree lies the gold.' I stared at the words, incredulous, wondering if there was a fig tree at Pontifex Hall and if perhaps my first instincts had been right after all: that at the start of the Civil War Sir Ambrose had concealed his treasures somewhere on the estate, leaving behind only this piece of paper, carefully coded and hidden, as the indicator to their whereabouts. Well, if there was a fig tree at Pontifex Hall, then Alethea would undoubtedly know something about it.

But as I made further substitutions the clues grew less and less intelligible as a reference to a trove of buried gold. I worked quickly, feeling like Kepler or Tycho Brahe bent over his scribbled calculations, seeking through an endless series of mathematical combinations the universal laws of cosmic harmony. At the end of forty-five minutes the following four lines had appeared:

UNDER THE FIG TREE LIES THE GOLDEN HORN

FABRIC OF MYSTERY AND SHAPES UNBORN

THAT SETS THE MARBLE ON ITS PLINTH

AND UNTWISTS THE WORLDS LABYRINTH

My elation at the discovery of this peculiar verse was diminished only by the fact that-beyond the heart-stopping allusion to The Labyrinth of the World-it made little more sense than the group of scrambled letters from which it had been extracted. The fig tree, the golden horn and the labyrinth obviously constituted another code of sorts: a contextual one for which, alas, the great Vigenère had no methods or answers, and one which referred to the topography of Pontifex Hall, if at all, only in the most elliptical fashion. Before going to bed I spent another hour trying to make sense of the lines. At first I thought they might be from a poem or play and went scrambling for Jaggard's folio edition of Shakespeare and then Ovid's Metamorphoses with its story of the Labyrinth in Crete. I could not recall a golden horn, however, in the story of Theseus and the labyrinth. A golden thread, yes, but a horn? Still, the reference to the labyrinth made me suspect that the message had something to do with Sir Ambrose. The golden horn-the skein that the bizarre verse promised would 'untwist' the labyrinth-also seemed to strike a familiar chord. It appeared to be, like the fig tree, an allusion to some episode in classical history or mythology.

It was only the next morning, as I awoke from three hours of scratchy sleep, that I remembered where I had seen a reference to a golden horn. In a cursory search through various editions of the Hermetic texts I had come upon enough references to Constantinople-that magnificent centre of learning where the monk Michael Psellos had compiled from Syriac fragments most of what we now know as the Corpus hermeticum-to become curious about the city. I had begun rooting about on the shelves devoted to geography and travel, where at last I found what I was looking for, Strabo the Stoic's gargantuan Geography. I had leafed halfway through the enormous volume, as Monk prepared a breakfast of kippers, before I finally found the passage I was looking for. In Book VII, part of which describes the geography of the borderlands between Europe and Asia, Strabo alludes to the 'Horn of the Byzantines', a gulf of water shaped like a stag's horn, one whose topography and location he depicts with reference to another harbour called 'Under the Fig-tree'.

I read and reread the passage for a good five minutes. Surely these references were more than mere coincidence? If so, the horn in the decrypted verse referred to the harbour at Constantinople, to what was now called Istamboul: a harbour also known as the Golden Horn. And it did so especially when one took into account the other, wholly unexpected allusion to the harbour named 'Under the Fig-tree'.

But these discoveries, like the actual decipherment, led to no immediate answers, nor prompted any further ideas. The reference to ancient Byzantium did not exactly elucidate the four lines, much less untwist the labyrinth; nor did it explain why the Golden Horn-a body of water-was called a 'fabric', as if it were a tapestry or even possibly a building. I could only begin to guess why the intricately coded verse between the pages of an edition of Ortelius appeared to lead to a quotation describing the meeting-point of two continents, a harbour some fifteen hundred miles distant from Pontifex Hall. At the time I had no idea whether Sir Ambrose had travelled as far as Constantinople in his quest for books, though I seemed to remember how one of the patents granted by the Emperor Rudolf-one of the dozens of parchments in the coffin at Pontifex Hall-had been for a voyage into the lands of the Ottoman Sultan.

So, as I ate my kippers, I wondered if the cipher had something to do with Sir Ambrose's library, or even with the missing Hermetic manuscript itself. It was impossible to be certain on so little evidence. But I decided the manuscript might well elucidate the verse, and so before I had finished my breakfast I was resolved to venture outside in search of it.

But my elation soon disappeared, for my quest among the shops and stalls proved as unhelpful and unpleasant as I feared it would. In Smithfield the stench had become so overpowering that as the orphans in Christ's Hospital began their first lesson of the morning the sashes in their classrooms were lowered despite the heat. Beneath the Hospital's east wall the booksellers in Little Britain had draped their windows with curtains soaked in chloride of lime. As I arrived they were holding handkerchiefs to their noses and setting out stalls of books whose covers would have to be dusted of soot three times before the working day was over. But after three hours of poking round in these stacks I had succeeded only in tiring my feet, burning my nose and neck in the sunlight-which was scorchingly hot whenever the coal smoke cleared enough to admit it-and attracting blank stares from disinterested shopkeepers who claimed never to have heard of either a book or a manuscript called The Labyrinth of the World.

A pint of Lambeth ale at lunch revived me, and I caught a hackney-coach to Westminster Hall, where, of course, I had no better luck than in either Little Britain or Paternoster Row. Yet the day was not an utter loss, for I did manage to learn something about the Prague edition of Ortelius's Theatrum orbis terrarum, though nothing that seemed to chime with anything I had so far discovered about either Sir Ambrose Plessington or his missing parchment. All of the booksellers and stallholders stocked copies of the Theatrum, and one even held the rare 1590 edition printed in Antwerp by the great Plantinus. But none had ever heard of the Prague edition, much less sold it. They were as puzzled by the edition as I had been. I therefore decided I must have misread the tailpiece; either that, or the 1600 edition was a forgery. I was about to return home, when I spotted, beneath the arcade of the New Exchange in the Strand, the shop of a map-seller, Molitor & Barnacle. I knew the establishment well. As an apprentice I always found it the most intriguing shop in London, for in those days I still dreamed of travelling the world, not fleeing from it, as I do now. Despatched on an errand by Mr. Smallpace, I sometimes used to duck inside and browse for hours among the maps and metal globes, my task completely forgotten until Mr. Molitor, an indulgent old soul, would chase me from the premises at closing-time.

Now it was almost closing-time as I stepped through the door to see that most of the globes and astrolabes had disappeared, as had the maps of the world, beautifully engraved reproductions of Ptolemy and Mercator that Mr. Molitor would pin to the walls like charts in the cabin of a ship. Eight or nine years must have passed since my last visit. Mr. Molitor, alas, had also disappeared-dead of consumption in '56, I was told by Mr. Barnacle. I was sorry to see that the shop had fallen on hard times and that Mr. Barnacle, now an elderly gentleman, failed to recognise me. Seeing him stooped behind his counter, breathing heavily, I had a chastening vision of myself twenty or thirty years hence.

But Mr. Barnacle knew his business as well as ever. He informed me that he knew of the Prague edition of the Theatrum but had never actually seen a copy. They were, he explained, exceedingly rare and even more valuable than the editions published by Plantinus, for only a very few copies had ever been printed. But this scarcity was not the sole reason for their great value. The edition was the first posthumous one, since Ortelius had died a year or two before its appearance. He was Flemish, suspected of Protestantism, but for a quarter of a century he had been Royal Cosmographer to the King of Spain. After Philip's death in 1598 he travelled to Prague at the invitation of the Emperor Rudolf II, but died before he could take up his post as Imperial Geographer. Mr. Barnacle alluded to a legend among map-makers, thoroughly unsubstantiated, that he had been poisoned. The Prague edition appeared a year or two later. The legend further suggested that it included some sort of variant, though Mr. Barnacle could not say precisely what. But it was for the sake of this new detail that the great cartographer was murdered.

'A variant? What do you mean?'

'I mean that the 1600 edition was different from all of the other editions, including those printed by Plantinus. Mr. Molitor had his own theory about it,' he said in a confidential tone, producing from his shelves a copy of the atlas. When he opened the cover I could see a plan of the Pacific Ocean and, inside a cartouche, the words NOVUS ORBIS. 'It involved the particular method of projection that Ortelius uses for the Prague edition.' He turned round again, suddenly spry, and reached down another text. The scale of latitude and longitude. 'All of the other editions use Mercator's projection. You know about the Mercator projection?'

'A little.' I was watching as he creaked open Mercator's famous atlas-an atlas whose maps I used to study with especial delight during my daydreaming apprenticeship. I am not mathematically inclined; far from it. Words, not numbers, are my métier. But I was able to appreciate a little of Gerardus Mercator's feat in representing a sphere, the earth, on a plane; in flattening the world and putting it in a book, its proportions more or less intact.

'His projection was created for the sake of navigators,' Mr. Barnacle was explaining as he tapped one of the sheets with a cracked yellow fingernail, then readjusted his spectacles-a pair with lenses almost as thick as my own-on the bridge of his nose. 'It was devised in 1569, during the great age of exploration and discovery. His scales of latitude and longitude form a grid of parallel lines and right angles that make it possible for mariners to plot compass courses along straight lines instead of curves. Most helpful, of course, for voyages across the ocean.'

He was tracing a thumbnail diagonally across the sheet, along a thumb-line that stretched like a spider's web across a grid of squares. Then abruptly he pushed both atlases aside and reached for one of the globes, an enormous paste-board model, some four feet in diameter, which he spun on its lacquered pedestal. Blue oceans and mottled land masses flashed past beneath the brass horizon-ring on the equator.

'But a map is not a globe,' he continued, peering at me over the top of the great spinning ball. 'All maps entail distortion. Mercator makes his meridians run parallel to each other, but everyone knows that meridians are not parallels like latitudes are.'

'Of course,' I murmured, made dizzy by the sight of the globe, which was still revolving swiftly, its axle squeaking as seas and continents reeled past. 'Meridians converge at the poles. The distances between them shrink as the lines extend north or south of the equator.'

'But Mercator's meridians never converge.' He was pecking at the map once again. 'They remain parallel to each other, something that distorts east-west distances. So Mercator changes the distances between the latitudes as well, increasing them as they move away from the equator and towards the poles. We therefore speak of his "waxing latitudes". The result of these alterations is a distortion towards the poles. Landmasses in the far north and south are exaggerated in size because the parallels and meridians are distended so that the grid of parallel lines and right angles can be preserved. Mercator's projection is therefore well and good if one is sailing along the equator or in the lower latitudes but not much use to someone exploring the high latitudes.'

'Not much use,' I was nodding eagerly, 'to someone exploring the northwest passage to Cathay.' I was remembering how, as a boy, I used to trace the voyages of Frobisher, Davis and Hudson-those great English heroes-through the ice-ridden Arctic seas and labyrinths of islands represented at the top of Mr. Molitor's globes.

'Or the sea route to the northeast through Archangel and Novaya Zemlya. Yes. Or the southwest passage to the South Seas through the Strait of Magellan or round Cape Horn.'

He was turning the sheets of the atlas and jabbing with a forefinger at the passages. When he raised his head and squinted at me I could smell his decaying teeth along with the fustiness of his threadbare garb. And for a second I thought I saw, reflected in one of his spectacle lenses, a shape in the bow-window behind me: a lone figure leaning forward as if to peer through the glass. But then Mr. Barnacle lowered his head and the reflection was lost.

'You see, all of these new sea routes, if they exist, will be found in the high latitudes, near the poles, places where Mercator's projection is next to useless. For this reason mariners have never discovered them. It's also the reason why the Spaniards and the Dutch have been at work on new and better methods of map projection. In 1616 the Dutch discovered a new route into the Pacific between the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn, the so-called Le Maire Strait'-he was licking his finger and fumbling to unfurl another sheet-'which lies along the fifty-fifth parallel. Their fleets used the new passage to sail into the Pacific and attack the Spaniards at Guayaquil and Acapulco. So such routes were of obvious strategic importance,' he said, 'but a clue was needed to find them, something that would guide navigators through the labyrinths of islands and inlets.'

Such, then, was the legend that had been favoured by Mr. Molitor: mathematicians and cartographers in Seville, in the service of Philip II, had, round about the year 1600, perfected a new method of map projection, one that preserved Mercator's grid while doing away with its distortions, so that navigation became easier in the higher latitudes. New and shorter routes to Cathay and India might thereby be discovered, along with the famous lost continent, Terra australis incognita, which was thought to lie somewhere in the South Seas, in the high latitudes south of the equator.

'And Ortelius?' I was studying the upside-down atlas, hoping to guide him back to the matter at hand. 'He would have known about this new projection?'

Mr. Barnacle nodded vigorously. 'Of course he would have known about it. He was the Royal Cosmographer, after all. He may even have helped devise it. But when Philip died in 1598, Ortelius left Spain for Bohemia. Possibly he hoped to pass the secrets of the new method, for a price, to the Emperor Rudolf, or even to someone else. Prague was filled with fanatical Protestants in those days, enemies of Spain and the Habsburgs. And so perhaps he was murdered by Spanish agents as his reward.' He shrugged and clapped the volume shut. 'The rumour is compelling but impossible to verify as the plates have since disappeared. Some say they were stolen, but that cannot be verified either.' He smiled, thinly and helplessly, then shrugged again. 'Nor do any of the books themselves survive. The few copies ever printed are all thought to have been either lost or destroyed when Prague was pillaged during the Thirty Years War.'

No, I thought, shuffling through his doorway a few minutes later and back into the heat, thinking of the water-damaged volume in the queer little laboratory: not quite all of the copies had vanished. But as I wandered aimlessly back towards Charing Cross I wondered if I had not wasted my time after all. For what connections could exist between Ortelius's Theatrum and the Hermetic text I had been hired to locate? Between a new map of the world and a manuscript of ancient wisdom? But then I recalled what Mr. Barnacle had said about the age of discovery and wondered if I had stumbled upon a connection, however remote, with Sir Ambrose's expedition to Guiana, if in fact the voyage ever took place.

I thrust the thought from my head. I decided that my imagination, like my feet, had taken me too far afield. It was time to return home.

It must have been after six o'clock when I hailed a hackney coach outside the Postman's Horn (in whose tiny garden I had consoled myself with another pint of ale under a mulberry tree) and began making my way back towards London Bridge through the knots and streams of evening traffic. I fell asleep after a few minutes but was roused, somewhere along Fleet Street, by the sound of shouting. The traffic must have been even thicker now, because for minutes on end the hack barely moved. I dozed again but found myself awakened once more, this time by the abrupt, two-toned bleat of a horn. I sat upright and drew back the curtain, expecting to see the Fleet Bridge with Ludgate beyond it. Only we were no longer in Fleet Street.

I thrust my head outside the window and peered up and down the street. We must have taken a wrong turn. I didn't recognise any of the taverns and alehouses overhanging the street, or even the street itself, a narrow, deserted channel darkened by billows of black smoke.

'Driver!' I rapped on the roof of the coach. Had the idiot lost his bearings?

'Sir?'

'Where the devil are you taking us, man?'

He had swivelled round in his seat, a big bear of a fellow with a thick neck and sun-peeled nose. He was grinning uneasily through a set of wooden dentures.

'An accident in Fleet Street. Cart-horse dropped down dead, sir. So I thought that if you pleased-'

I interrupted him. 'Where are we?'

'Whitefriars, sir,' he replied, teeth clicking. 'Alsatia. I thought I'd come back up to the Fleet Bridge from Water Lane, sir, and then-'

'Alsatia-?'

The narrow passage had now assumed a more sinister aspect. I knew of Alsatia's unsavoury reputation. It was a dangerous hinterland beside the noxious sludge of the Fleet River: a dozen-odd streets and God only knew how many back courts and alleyways, all claiming exemption from the jurisdiction of the City's magistrates and justices by right of a charter granted earlier in the century by King James. The result of these privileges was that the quarter now gave sanctuary to criminals and villains of every description. Bailiffs and catchpoles entered at their peril, as did anyone else foolish enough to wander south of Fleet Street. The horn that awakened me must have been, I supposed, a signal from one of their look-outs, a warning to the others that strangers had arrived in their midst. Although the quarter now seemed innocent enough in its faint gilding of antique-gold sunlight, I was taking no chances.

'Take us out of here immediately,' I commanded the driver.

'Yes, sir.'

The hack shunted forward, negotiated a dog's-leg, rounded a bend, then crept through a tight street bordered on either side by decrepit buildings whose window-panes were filmed with grease and soot. The road was cratered with pot-holes, a few of which had been imperfectly repaired with brushwood. No one seemed to be about. The Thames lay to our right, parallaxing into view every now and then across vacant, rubble-littered lots, its front lined by a number of precarious-looking wharves. Black ghosts of coal dust hurried across our path. We kept a course parallel to the river, the hack swaying from side to side as the wooden-toothed Jehu on the box-seat picked our way recklessly round an obstacle course of desquamated roof-tiles, shattered bits of quern-stone and the iron hoops and broken staves of long-emptied kegs of ale. Soon I could smell the mud of the Fleet; then a minute later its bank cut us off, and we turned on to a path that did not, to my eyes, look like leading back up to Fleet Street.

'For God's sake, man!'

'Another minute, sir…'

But after another minute we were still bumping and swaying on the path, downwind of the constipated river, our wheels squelching in the mud. The Fleet's surface was scummed over and clouds of insects hung in the air. I covered my nose with a handkerchief and held my breath.

All at once, however, I caught sight through the window of something that looked familiar, a bit of graffito-the work of a child?-scrawled in chalk across a dead wall, thus:

I craned my neck as we lumbered slowly past. What did this peculiar hieroglyph mean? Was it the caricature of a man? A horned man? Perhaps the devil? I was certain I had seen the figure somewhere before. But where? In a book?

'Damn!'

I swung round and peered up at the box-seat. 'What is it?'

'Apologies, sir.' The hack had stopped moving. 'We seem to have reached a dead end.'

'A dead end-?'

The graffito was forgotten. I flung open the door, stepped outside and immediately sank halfway to my ankles in some sort of ooze. The horses, too, stood fetlock-deep in sludge and the wheels of the hack were buried to their rims. I raised my eyes. I could see ahead of us the bell-tower of Bridewell Prison and the steeple of St. Bride's, but little else other than a cluster of sheds in the gathering shadows. It was later than I had realised, for the sun was dipping behind the irregular serrulations of Whitehall Palace, and here and there among the buildings a few rush-lights had begun to flicker. Alsatia was coming awake.

'Allow me, sir.'

The driver tossed his whip aside and hopped down from his box, giving me an ingratiating smile. He had almost guided me back inside, when I looked up from the mire to see that a light had appeared in the window of the building nearest us: a tavern, from the look of it. Its signboard creaked faintly in the breeze. I squinted at its inscription. I could make out the head of some sort of animal and a wink of gold paint.

'Come along, sir.' The driver's hands pressed my shoulders. 'Sir? Is everything all right?'

'Yes…' I barely heard him. I was pressing a shilling into his palm, not looking at him. 'Here-your money. Take it.' I was already walking towards the tavern. 'Now go.'

I heard his incredulous voice behind me: 'Sir?'

'Go!'

The mud sucked at my boots and I had to wrench them free at each step. But a few seconds later I was on solid ground, a bricked footpath, and the tavern rose before me. The door opened, throwing a triangle of light across the bricks. I was moving forward, squinting at the signboard. And, once again I saw the peeling portrait, clearer now: the head of a buck whose antlers had been painted gold. Above the antlers, three words: THE GOLDEN HORN.

Chapter Four

It was the smell that struck me first, stale pipe and coal smoke mingled with sawdust and vermiculated wood daubed with pitch: the smell of a chamber that had seen neither broom nor beeswax, neither light nor air. Then, as I stepped inside and my pupils adapted to the dim light, I caught what became the most pervasive scent of all: coffee. For the Golden Horn wasn't a tavern after all, but a coffee-house.

The door swung shut behind me and I took a few more steps through the hearth smoke, casting about for a chair. A coffee-house was the last thing I expected to find in the heart of Alsatia, though I shouldn't really have been surprised, because even then, as far back as 1660, it seemed that a coffee-house stood in every street. I had only ever been inside one of them, the Greek's Head, an airy place filled with would-be actors and poets, and its congenial atmosphere could not possibly have prepared me for the smoke and gloom of the Golden Horn.

I found a seat, a three-legged stool, and sat down well away from the fire, which was drawing poorly.

'Your pleasure, sir?'

A short and pot-bellied waiter had appeared beside me, wiping his hands on a grubby apron. Behind him, two unsavoury-looking men sat in grave discussion, while behind them a lone man, the one who had entered a moment earlier, sat with his back to us, paring the calluses on his palms with a knife. As I looked around me at the crude furniture, the tiny hearth, the curled handbills yellowing on the walls, I wondered what tangled thread could possibly connect the Golden Horn to Pontifex Hall. All at once I doubted whether the patterns I was seeing-the cipher, the keyword, the strange verse, Strabo, now the Golden Horn coffee-house-had any significance beyond my own imagination. Was there a meaning behind this series of clues, or only chance and coincidence?

There was only one way to find out. I reached into my pocket and withdrew a penny. 'A dish of coffee, please.'

But no clues or mysterious powers revealed themselves; at least, not yet. By the time I finished the drink-a bitter, sludgy brew-the room had filled with more customers. A dozen-odd men had arrived, singly or in twos, each of them shabbily dressed, with scuffed boots and patched coats. Conversation was sporadic and quiet, punctuated by guttural laughter. The waiter moved back and forth from the counter to the tables, dishes clattering on his tray. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. I had been wrong about the significance of the name; it must have been a coincidence, nothing more. There were probably half a dozen taverns or coffee-houses called The Golden Horn, none of which had any connection with Pontifex Hall, least of all this one.

It was only after a few more minutes that I noticed the cabinet. It stood in the corner of the room, a small cabinet of rarities of the sort used by proprietors to attract custom. But from my seat I could see how this particular case was a sorrier collection than most, a witch's cupboard unlikely to convince even the most gullible patron. But I was curious, if not gullible, so I rose from my chair and crossed the floor.

The corner was darker than elsewhere, and no one else was paying the least bit of attention to the half-hearted display. Misspelled cards inscribed in a shaky hand identified a half-dozen uninspiring objects that seemed to cringe behind the glass. I leaned forward, squinting through my spectacles. A worm-eaten piece of cloth was identified as part of Edward the Confessor's shroud, while, beside it, an unremarkable wooden branch, half rotted, was reported as coming from a tree against which glanced the arrow that killed King William Rufus. According to its label, another even more undistinguished fragment had been chipped from the tomb of Sebert, King of the Saxons.

I almost burst out laughing at the sight of these bogus fragments of history, but then another of the cards caught my eye. Yellowed and curling, propped at the back of the cabinet, it identified a few square inches of frayed canvas as part of the main topsail of the Britomart, one of the ships in Sir Walter Raleigh's Orinoco expedition of 1617. I frowned and leaned forward again. I doubted the scrap was any more authentic than the others, but it reminded me of the patent in the coffin at Pontifex Hall, the one for the construction of the Philip Sidney.

And then I saw the last exhibit in the cabinet, by far the most gruesome. It, too, was at the back of the cabinet and looked like the severed head of a man. I started, then leaned forward again, goggling at this gruesome curio from what must have been some barbaric and heathen cult. It made a horrific sight. Matted brown hair hung over a tallow-coloured brow, beneath which two eyeballs goggled back, one pointed at the ceiling, the other at the floor. The left eyelid drooped, suggesting a wink, while the lips-grotesquely thick and painted red like a harlot's-were twisted into a cynical and knowing grin. But no sooner did I realise that the head was a fake, made of wax and velvet, than I was startled again, this time by the placard propped beneath the protuberant chin and inscribed in the same childish hand as the others:

The Head of an Automaton from

the Kingdom of Bohemia, once Belonging to

His Imperial Majesty, Rudolf II

By the time I crept back to my table, the windows had darkened and hearth smoke was wreathing about the joists. My hand shook as I held the dish to my lips. I wondered whether the grisly head was more authentic than the other objects. Had it somehow found its way here from Pontifex Hall? Via Cromwell's soldiers, perhaps, or some other band of looters?

I sat in the chair for another thirty minutes, feeling ever more exhausted and anxious, throwing the occasional glance at the waxwork skull that seemed to wink back at me, smug and knowing, from behind its pane of glass. The dish of coffee, far from soothing me, as I had hoped, seemed to have set my nerves on edge. When my waiter shuffled past, however, I managed to point at the cabinet and ask how the item had been acquired. But he claimed to know neither how nor when it might have arrived in the Golden Horn. Indeed, it almost seemed from his surprised and then puzzled expression that he had never so much as noticed the cabinet before, let alone its most horrific inhabitant.

I decided to return home, now regretting that I had dismissed my driver so quickly. The journey back to Fleet Street was bound to be dangerous. I would have to travel on foot, I knew, because it was unlikely that a hackney-coach would stray into this street, especially after dark. My mind filled with all sorts of unpleasant encounters, which I tried to thrust aside as I threaded my way to the door.

It was then that I made my last discovery of the evening. As I reached the door I noticed a handbill pasted on the wall beside the jamb. There was nothing unusual about it, because the walls of the coffee-house were papered with all sorts of these notices. From where I sat I had been able to read a score or two of flyblown playbills, tradesmen's cards, obscene ballads printed on fox-marked broadsheets, together with bits of graffiti, also obscene, either carved into the benches and tables or else daubed on to the beams. So I almost passed the handbill without a thought, but as I stood aside to allow others to enter through the doorway, the inscription, a murky copperplate engraving, attracted my eye:

NOTICE OF AN AUCTION

to be held at the GOLDEN HORN, Whitefriars,

on the 19^th Day of July, at Nine o'clock in the Morning,

at which time many diverse and uncommon Books

shall be exposed to View and auctioned

in 300 Lots

by Doctor Samuel Pickvance

I stood staring at the handbill as several customers pushed inside and then several more pushed past me into the night. A book auction? It was as if I had stumbled across an edition of Homer or Virgil in the forests of Guiana. I thought I knew everyone in the London book trade, including all of the auctioneers, but I had never heard of anyone named Pickvance, if that was in fact his real name. I wondered what 'diverse and uncommon' books he would be selling and what sort of collectors might turn up to bid for them. But most of all I wondered why he had chosen to auction them in the Golden Horn. It would be easy enough to find out, though, because the nineteenth, the day of the auction, was only two days hence.

Alsatia seemed almost peaceful as I stepped on to the tessellated path, the evening air cool and pleasant compared with the hellish climate of the Golden Horn. The illusion did not last long. A moment later I smelled the Fleet and was bumped roughly aside as four or five men, all wearing falchions or daggers on their hips, swaggered towards the door of the coffee-house. Other figures were moving about in the shadows. Alsatia had come brutishly to life. I shuddered at the prospect of the journey that now awaited me.

But I would make a return trip in two days. I knew this already as I turned round for a last look at the gold antler and the inscription above, neither more than a shadow in the failed light, but each one now a glinting hieroglyph. For there must be a connection, I was suddenly certain, between the parchment I was seeking and the 'strange and uncommon' books of Dr. Pickvance.

The journey back to Nonsuch House was, in the event, without incident. I followed the wheel tracks down towards the river and found a waterman dozing at his oars alongside one of the coal wharves. For two shillings he agreed to row me downstream on the tide, which was ebbing once more. When he had fitted the oars into the rowlocks and shoved off with a grunt, I lay back in the sculler and watched the thinning spray of lights ashore. Buildings and spires slipped slowly past; a boat overtook us. Our oars dipped and lifted, dipped and lifted, mud from the shallows catching on the blades and dolloping back into the water. The pitched roof of the Golden Horn shrank, dwindled, disappeared. A few minutes later I could see the moon rising above the chimney-pots on London Bridge. I closed my eyes and felt the sculler slip between the stone piers and plunge, weightless, into five feet of roaring darkness and a sudden rush of spray and air.

Emerging on the other side, legs trembling, I disembarked to find a light burning in my corner of Nonsuch House. Monk had retired to bed, but Margaret was in the kitchen, pickling oysters. She scolded me for missing my supper, boiled brawn, which I ate cold, sitting alone in my study, exhausted. Thirty minutes later I, too, had crawled into bed. I lay still for a long while, listening to the tide gurgling through the piers and trying to steady my breathing. I felt for a moment as if I was still falling between the giant legs of the bridge; as if everything beneath me had, like the sculler, given way to empty air and exhilarated suspension. Because as I drifted asleep I was thinking not only of the handbill pasted to the wall of the Golden Horn but also of the letter, imprinted with a familiar seal, that had been propped on my desk, awaiting my return.

Chapter Five

If the journey to the Elbe was arduous, then over the next few days, as the coaches and wagons left Bohemia behind, it grew much worse. Snow began falling from the sullen skies, at first a few aimless and circumspect flakes, then more heavily. The winds gathered in the east and blew across the crescent of the Carpathians, along the Moravian Highlands and into the Giant Mountains, howling among the boulders and snowdrifts through which the caravan fought its way. The few towns it passed through dwindled to villages whose dozen-odd houses clung like swallows' nests to the sides of steep hills. Then the villages shrank to only a few houses and soon disappeared altogether. The road, too, threatened to disappear. In some places it had been made almost impassable by rockslides, in others by snow. To travel in this season, the servants muttered among themselves, was uncivilised. After all, even wars-even Ferdinand, whose Walloons and Irish had stopped in Prague to begin their looting-waited for the spring. Yet each morning, no matter how foul the weather, no matter how steep the roads, no matter how many passengers had fallen ill with fever or how many horses were lamed by wind-galls or split hoofs, the sad journey continued. Soon there were no signs of life in the snowscape except for the wolves that appeared as the roads ascended in dog-legs through the forest. The wolves arrived singly at first, later in packs of ten or twelve, half-hidden among the scarps of granite, following the wagons at a distance. Then they grew bolder, creeping close enough for Emilia to see their yellow eyes and the sharp outlines of their muzzles. Skinny and ill-fed as beggars, they scattered at the muffled report of a harquebus. The sound of the weapon also startled the passengers, for rumours had begun spreading up and down the caravan that the Emperor's mercenaries were in swift pursuit, though it was impossible to imagine how anyone, even the Cossacks, could have sped along roads as treacherous as these.

The first leg of the journey finally reached its end at nightfall on the ninth day. The caravan toiled past a monastery and, after crawling downhill, stopped not at one of the usual inns but before a castle whose lighted arrowslits shone unevenly in the invading darkness. Emilia, huddled in the chariot, her toes frostbitten, fancied she could hear the grumble of a river. Leaning forward, she peered through a crack in the window-curtains and saw a group of men in long coats and wide-brimmed hats hurrying across a courtyard, whose perimeter was rimmed with dozens of coaches of all sizes. The portcullis ground and scraped, then a pair of heavy doors boomed shut behind them. Breslau, someone said. They had reached Silesia.

The exiled court stayed for less than a week in the ancient Piast castle. This was not to be their final destination, merely one more staging-post for the fugitive court. Emilia found herself housed with three other ladies-in-waiting in a chamber that, though it had no windows, was prey to mysterious draughts and dustings of snow. The Queen slept in a chamber somewhere nearby. She had been taken dangerously ill almost as soon as the caravan arrived in Breslau, and so Emilia saw nothing of her. Only the physicians attended her, shuffling in and out of the royal apartments with their faces long and grim. After a day or two, rumours were bruited about the castle that she had died. Then a day later it was her unborn babe who had died-for another rumour, a more reliable one, claimed she was with child. Finally, the pair of them, mother and child, were said to have expired together. Truth became as scarce as firewood and fodder. More snow fell. The Oder froze. Then, on Emilia's fourth day in the castle, Sir Ambrose Plessington paid her a visit.

She was in her chamber at the time, alone, reading a book. When the knock came at her door she didn't rise from the cramped bed because she, like the Queen, was now indisposed. She had felt unwell for the second day in a row. Her monthly pains had arrived a few days earlier, but no monthly flow. Her head ached, as did her teeth, and she was sleeping poorly. Even reading had become a chore. For want of her own books she was reduced to reading ones from the Queen's collection. For the past day she had been reading Sir Walter Raleigh's Discoverie of the large, rich, and beautifull Empire of Guiana, with its blissful descriptions of warm climes and sepulchres filled with treasure. She had been lulled to sleep-her first in more than a day-when the knock on the door startled her awake.

She was surprised to see Sir Ambrose, of course. He had not spoken a word to her for an entire fortnight; indeed, he had not appeared to notice her at all. She, on the other hand, had watched his every move. From the quarter-lights of her chariot or the windows of inns she would watch him supervising the loading or unloading of the crates or riding alongside the Queen's carriage with the scimitar bouncing at his hip. Other times he galloped out of sight, travelling far ahead of the convoy, finding passages through the mountains or scouting for Polish troops, a band of whom he was reputed to have killed and left to the wolves. Three of his mounts were lamed by these antics and had to be destroyed, yet Sir Ambrose himself looked none the worse for wear.

'I do not disturb you, I hope?'

He had stepped nimbly into her chamber, which he, in his swollen boots and beaver hat, almost seemed to fill. Forced to duck his head under the lintel, he looked like a man entering a tent on a battlefield. When he straightened to his full height his appearance was no less martial, for the scimitar hung from one hip, the pistol from the other. But he was also bearing a lantern and, under his arm, a book. After making a bow, he paused, his bustling motions for once arrested. His head was cocked to one side like that of a painter critically examining his subject.

'You were asleep?'

'No, no,' she blurted, finding her voice. She had pushed herself upright on the bed and was holding Raleigh's Discoverie to her breast like a shield. 'No, sir. I was reading, that is all.'

He took another step forward, straw rustling under his boots and his dark gaze giving her a careful appraisal. The plume in his hat grazed the hammer-beams. 'You are unwell, Mistress Molyneux?'

'No, no,' she stammered again. She had no wish to tell anyone of her illnesses, least of all Sir Ambrose. 'I am perfectly well, thank you, sir. My habit is to read in bed,' she explained, raising the book and then feeling herself flush.

'Ah,' he was nodding his enormous hat, 'quite so. I am told you are a dedicated reader. Yes, a veritable Donna Quixote.' He smiled briefly to himself, then scratched at his beard with a forefinger. 'And in fact this charming habit of yours, Miss Molyneux, is what brings me to you.' He bent forward with a creak of boot leather and placed the volume on the table beside the door. 'The Queen wishes you to have another book for your pleasure. Along with her good wishes.' He bowed and turned to go.

'Please…' She had swung her legs over the edge of the bed. 'What news is there? Is the Queen unwell, sir?'

'No, no, the Queen is quite well. You must not believe everything you hear.' Pausing on the threshold, he winked. 'Nor should you believe all that you read.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'Sir Walter Raleigh.' His wind-burnt features had broadened into another smile as he nodded the brim of his hat at her book. 'Guiana is not the paradise that Sir Walter describes. I bid you a good day, Miss Molyneux.'

Then he was gone, disappearing down the corridor before she could ask about Vilém or indeed about anything else. But all at once she felt hopeful. He must have learned of her reading habits from Vilém. Or was it from the Queen instead? No, most probably Vilém, she decided. How else would Sir Ambrose have known of her liking for tales of chivalry? She had been careful not to tell the Queen of this passion, for the Queen detested all things Spanish.

A minute later the other ladies-in-waiting had returned to the room. There was to be a church service that night to give thanks for the Queen's recovery, followed by a banquet. For the next twenty minutes the ladies chattered happily together, dressing themselves as of old in their flowing conches, in scarlets and purples, in laces and ribbons, as if Prague or Heidelberg lay outside; as if the past few days had been no more than a night terror from which they had been mercifully roused. Only when they departed did Emilia finally open the book left by Sir Ambrose. It was another tale of chivalry-Francisco de Moraes's Prince Palmerín of England. And only when she opened the cover did she discover the note between the pages, one inscribed in a familiar hand.

She met Vilém that night in the cellars, to which the note had summoned her. By this time the rest of the court was in the midst of an ecstatic and deafening intercourse. The feast had begun. Musicians conscripted from a local tavern were blowing krummhorns, battering tabors and singing lustily in Polish as dancers whirled about the floor of the crumbling hall with reckless fury-a tumult of spinning farthingales and flying elbows. The castle gates must have been flung wide to admit the good people of Breslau, burghers and beggars alike, because Emilia, dodging between them, failed to recognise a single face. She had no idea, either, where the food could have come from. Platters of beef and venison, pheasants and chickens, a roasted boar, dozens of quail, even a peacock still wearing its feathers, together with bowls filled with oysters, cheeses, boiled eggs, sweetmeats, nuts, plums, persimmons, Seville oranges, ices melting under the heat of a dozen blazing torches and even more candles-all were being served up to a band of exiles who only a few days earlier had been freezing to death in the wilderness, eating weevilled bread and frozen chunks of salted goose. But Vilém was nowhere among them. After an hour she managed to slip away and descend the stairs to the vaults, where she found him in an old wine cellar, stooped over a crate of books.

She was shocked by the sight of him. He had arrived in Breslau more than a fortnight earlier, before the snows, but he appeared to be the worse for the journey. He looked thinner and more ragged than ever. His breeches and doublet hung in tattered folds about his shoulders and hips like those of a scarecrow. Perhaps he too had been ill? He had a weak constitution, she knew-several evenings in Golden Lane had been spent nursing him through one complaint or another. A booming cough suddenly bent him double.

'Vilém…?'

Their reunion was not what she expected. So busy was he checking the crates for damage, opening them one at a time, inspecting the oilskin-wrapped volumes, fussing and ducking over them before replacing dunnage, that he failed to notice her arrival. She moved quickly through the cellar towards him, weaving her way between empty wine racks and the dozens of crates. Most of the lids had been raised and tiny gilded characters glimmered in the torchlight as she passed. Later it would occur to her that the books had been crated in alphabetical order. Abulafia; Agricola; Agrippa; Artephius; Augurello. Then Bacon; Biringuccio; Böhmen; Borbonius; Bruno. The names meant little to her, as did the titles. De occulta philosophia. De arte cabalistica. Impious pursuits suggested themselves. The Mirror of Alchymy. Occulta occultum occulta. What would the Queen, a sworn enemy of popery and superstition, make of such works? FICINUM, she read on the spine of one of the thickest volumes, PIMANDER MERCURII TRISMEGISTI.

'Vilém!'

He showed no more surprise or delight when finally he saw her than when he discovered certain cherished volumes at the bottoms of the crates through which he kept searching for another twenty minutes. Indeed, over the next few days he would appear more concerned for the welfare of the books than for her. Like Otakar, he had become obsessed with the idea of the collection falling into what he called the wrong hands-being looted, burned or disappearing into the archives of Ferdinand or the cardinals in the Holy Office. Later he would tell her that he had assisted with the transport of the 'first consignment', some fifty crates of books. The second consignment was shipped from Prague by Sir Ambrose himself, for which reason Vilém would not find it odd that the Englishman was alone inside the library. Only when she described that episode-they were sitting on a pair of wine casks at this point-did he show any interest in her plight. Or, rather, he was interested in the leather-bound volume she had seen on his desk. Two times he forced her to describe the events of that evening but then, puzzled, claimed not to recognise her accounts of either the book or the horsemen. But he was especially interested in the elaborate binding. He sprang from the cask, squatted on the floor and rummaged through one of the crates for a minute, muttering to himself and grunting.

'You say it was bound,' he called over his shoulder, 'like one of these.' He swung round, clasping a fat volume to his chest. 'Is that so?'

In the torchlight she could make out the intricate swirls stamped on to the book's leather cover-a series of whorls and curlicues that reminded her, suddenly, of the fanciful lines of Prague Castle's maze garden seen from the upper windows of the Královsky Palace. From its coloured fore-edges the volume looked like one of the Golden Books he had shown her a month earlier. She nodded.

'Exactly like that, yes. The same pattern, I would say.'

'Odd… very odd.' He was twisting a lock of his unkempt beard in his fingers as he studied the tooled leather. 'But you say the pages had not been dyed?' She shook her head. 'Mm,' he said into his stained ruff, frowning, 'how very odd indeed.'

'Did it come from Constantinople, do you think?'

'Oh, it's possible.' His head was bobbing. The idea seemed to excite him. 'Yes, it might have done. One doesn't judge a book by its binding, of course. But what you describe is a Muhammadan decoration known as rebesque or arabesque, which was used by the bookbinders of Istamboul. There were a dozen such books in the library, but this one that you describe, hmmm…'

He had opened the book and was thumbing slowly through its purple leaves, through pages that she remembered him saying had been made from the skins of unborn calves, sometimes as many as fifty per volume. Vellum, it was called. The calves were stunned and carefully bled, then flayed of their delicate hides. A lost art, he had claimed.

'But what could it be?' She was watching his face, wondering if he was telling her everything he knew. 'Was it something of value, do you think?'

He shrugged his narrow shoulders and laid the volume carefully aside. 'Oh, it could be anything-anything at all. And, yes, I should think it was of value. Perhaps of considerable value. Especially if it came from Constantinople. Its libraries and monasteries, you understand, were the world's greatest repositories of ancient wisdom.'

He was at his most pontifical now, plucking at his beard and staring glassily into the middle distance. The thumpings of the dancers in the hall were making themselves known through the groined ceiling, but he seemed not to notice.

'In the past few centuries, more Greek and Roman authors have been discovered in Constantinople than anywhere else. Priceless discoveries, mind! The eleven plays of Aristophanes… the seven of Aeschylus… the poems of Nicander and Musaeus… Hesiod's Works and Days… the writings of Marcus Aurelius… why, even Euclid's Elements, for heaven's sake! Not one of these works would survive today had it not been for the scribes of Constantinople. Every last one of them would have sunk without trace. And how much poorer would the world be for their loss!'

She nodded soberly, faintly amused, however, at his eager recitation, which she had heard before. He felt a strong kinship, she knew, with those humble men whose task it had been to collect and preserve documents that came to them from the burning or besieged libraries of Alexandria or Athens or Rome. A task that he no doubt saw himself re-enacting.

'But the Turks-'

'Oh, yes, yes,' he interrupted, 'the Turks. Quite so. A great disaster! How many other priceless manuscripts were lost when the Sultan invaded in 1453? Or, rather,' he added, 'how many priceless manuscripts have not yet been rediscovered?'

She nodded again, feeling the first twinges of a cramp begin to take hold of her stomach. The vault seemed suddenly airless and confined; she could barely breathe. Caulked with tow and oakum, the crates smelled of pitch-an acrid stink that, like so much else these days, made her nauseous on top of everything else. She was reminded of the hold of a ship, of her voyage from Margate to Holland on the Prince Royal seven years ago. She had been seasick then. Now her head ached and swam in exactly the same way. It seemed to revolve in one direction, her stomach in the other, as if she were indeed aboard a stinking, storm-tossed ship.

But she took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on what he was saying. She knew the story well, of course-he must have told it a half-dozen times. When the Sultan Mehmet captured Constantinople in 1453 his men had plundered hundreds of precious manuscripts from the churches and monasteries, even from the Imperial Palace itself. Only a few of these works had ever been recovered, by intrepid agents such as Jacopo da Scarperia, Ghiselin de Busbecq and Sir Ambrose himself. Vilém was both tantalised and appalled by the story of their discoveries-of ancient manuscripts rescued scant days before the merchants who owned them planned to rub out the lettering and sell the parchment for reinscription. What other treasures of ancient learning might be so poised on the knife-edge between destruction and discovery, like the lone parchment of the works of Catullus that had been found-so Vilém had claimed-bunging up a wine barrel in a tavern in Verona?

'… the books of Chaeremon. His treatise on the Egyptian hieroglyphs was mentioned by both Michael Psellos and John Tzetzes, but it has not been seen since-not since the sack of Constantinople. And many other books and scrolls might be found too. We know that Aeschylus wrote more than ninety plays, yet only seven survive, while less than half of the Historiae and Annales of Tacitus still exist, only fifteen books out of an original thirty-and half of those are fragments! Or Callimachus-he wrote eight hundred volumes, of which barely a few scraps are known. Possibly there are even other works of Aristotle himself awaiting discovery in Istamboul. His fame among the ancients rested on certain dialogues-the so-called exoteric and hypomnematic writings-but not one of these texts has been seen or read for centuries.' He paused for a second as his gaze slowly returned to her face. 'And so it was books such as these, you understand, that Sir Ambrose hoped to find in Istamboul.'

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.

Before slipping the page back beneath the floorboards I had studied it for a moment, holding it to the light of the candle, looking first at the watermark, then at the close-set lines, the slight impression of the mould-mesh criss-crossing the surface. I thought of Thimbleby's disquisition and wondered what exactly this particular page had been made from. Fishnet? The pages of a book or pamphlet whose ink had been effaced? The winding-sheet from some ancient skeleton? I thought how odd it was that each page, no matter how flawlessly white, no matter what its inscription or watermark, always harboured another text, another identity, beneath its surface, palimpsested and invisible, like a secret ink that can be seen only when rubbed with magic dust or exposed to flame. But what dust or flame, I wondered, might bring Sir Ambrose's message back to the surface, back to life?

I had tucked the cipher between the scantlings, beside another piece of paper, one also, it seemed, of inferior quality and inscribed with a worn goose quill. This was the letter from Alethea, dated five days ago, which Monk had retrieved from the General Letter Office. What secret message, I wondered, was occulted beneath its blotchy ink, behind the politely cryptic words that rose from the page in Lady Marchamont's old-fashioned scrawl?

I had read it through once again, feeling a turmoil in my belly and something insistent and unfamiliar nudging and squirming behind my breastbone.

My good Sir:

Please forgive the intrusion of another letter. I wonder if you might meet me in a week's time, on the 21^st of July, at six o'clock in the evening? You may call for me in London, at Pulteney House, on the north side of Lincoln's Inn Fields. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that matters of some importance have arisen.

I shall look forward to your company. I fear the usual discretion must still apply.

Your most obliging servant,

Alethea

The usual discretions, I thought mirthlessly as, lying in bed an hour later, I remembered the shellac in which her seal-or a counterfeit of it-had been impressed. Alethea was, it seemed, still no more discreet as far as the Post Office was concerned: a puzzling bout of laxity, I thought, in someone otherwise obsessed with secrecy. At first I didn't take her warning too seriously. I even convinced myself, after the first couple of readings, that perhaps I was wrong and the letter had not been opened after all. But as I travelled back and forth from Shadwell the next day I had the impression-the vaguest impression-that I was being followed. Or perhaps only watched. There was nothing specific, only a series of peculiar incidents that I might not have noticed were it not for the letter, which, like so many things these days, had set my nerves on edge. The sculler that pushed off from the quay a bare moment after mine. The image of the figure behind me reflected in the door-window as Thimbleby and I pushed into the Old Ship to eat our dinner. The narrowed pair of eyes watching me through the slim gap in a shelf as I browsed the aisles of a bookshop later that afternoon on the Southwark end of London Bridge. Even Nonsuch House seemed somehow altered. People I failed to recognise entered and, after a few cursory glances along the shelves, departed without a purchase; others simply peered through the window before slipping back into the crowds. And as I stepped outside to raise my awning a man across the carriageway started almost guiltily to life, then sauntered away.

No, no, it was nothing. Nothing at all. Or so I had told myself, sternly, as I set out the next morning for Alsatia. But why, then, was I craning my neck every minute to peer behind us, fearing what I might see framed for a second in the tiny oval of the hack's quarter-light?

But nothing appeared in the window, and I had forgotten my mysterious pursuers-indeed, I had forgotten almost everything else, including Alethea and her 'matters of some importance'-as I pushed past the waiter and stepped through the door of the Golden Horn.

At nine o'clock precisely Dr. Samuel Pickvance stepped forward to a table, rapped its surface sharply with a mallet and cleared his throat for silence. He was in perhaps the fortieth year of his age, a tall, emaciated man with a widow's peak, a conspicuous nose and thin, ascetic lips that seemed to be curled in a moue of contempt. He loomed before us on a raised platform, which he occupied like a magistrate on his bench, or perhaps more like a priest at the altar, wielding his mallet like a sanctus bell or aspergillum. He rapped it a second time, even more sharply, and the room at last fell silent. The ritual was about to begin.

I had slipped into one of the last available seats, in the back row, nearest the door. The Golden Horn was still dark except for its single rush-candle and a smoke-roiling beam of sunlight that fell obliquely across the room like a toppled girder. But Pickvance now produced a lantern, which he lit ceremoniously with a taper produced by his assistant, a young man with reddish hair. Now the row of heads in front of me sharpened into detail, including that of the automaton in the corner. It grinned back at me, smug and clever.

Entering the room a few minutes earlier I had discovered myself in the midst of one of those milling crowds so loved by pickpockets. Most of the assembly had been claiming the forty-odd chairs that were arranged in rows before the platform, on which stood the table and, a minute later, Pickvance and his altar-boy. I had been expecting to recognise someone-one of my clients, perhaps, or another bookseller or two. But I didn't recognise a soul, not even when the lantern was lit. And I was taken aback by what I saw. Pickvance's audience-for so we seemed-did not look especially different from the patrons I had seen here two nights before; indeed, it could have been the same group, for all I could tell. Most were dressed in leather breeches and rucked linen, with broken felt hats jammed low on their brows; a few others wore the black homespun and grim expressions of Quakers or Anabaptists. Curiously enough, a few Cavaliers were also present among them, looking prosperous and wicked, smirking to themselves or winking lewdly at one another, legs crossed, V-shaped beards neatly cultivated. What mysterious enterprise could possibly have banded together such an ill-assorted company?

But when the auction commenced and the first of the lots were cried, I realised why I failed to recognise anyone-why I hadn't seen any of them in my shop and why there were no booksellers among them, or at least none of the reputable booksellers I knew. Dr. Pickvance wasn't so much a priest or a magistrate, I decided, as a mountebank perched at his stall in Bartholomew Fair, hoodwinking a gullible audience. He was either an ignoramus or a cheat, because even from the back of the room I could see that he was embellishing and inflating each of the volumes which his assistant, introduced as Mr. Skipper, held up for viewing. It was an outrage. Books bound in ordinary buckram or even plain canvas were called 'the finest doublure' or 'most excellent crushed levant', while everything else on show was 'hand-tooled', 'repoussé', 'opulent' and 'exquisite', with 'Aldine' this and 'Plantinus' that, bound specially by 'the late King Charles's binder' or even 'the incomparable Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding'.

I was tempted to stand up and expose the grotesque canard, but everyone else seemed to have fallen under Pickvance's spell. He often started bids at a penny or two, but they quickly rose to a shilling, then to a pound, and within a minute or two the mallet would be resounding and our perverse auctioneer shouting in triumph: 'Sold! For thirty shillings! To the gentleman in the second row!'

So appalled was I by this hoax that two or three lots had been sold before I realised what type of volume was being offered. The first ones had been bound collections of political or religious tracts, including pamphlets by such persecuted sects as the Ranters, the Quakers and, most numerous of all, the Bunhill Brethren-works, in other words, that would have run foul of the Blasphemy Act passed by Parliament ten years earlier. No respectable dealer would touch them for this very reason, at least no dealer who wished to remain in business for long, because the Secretary of State regularly sent his searchers into the shops to root out and burn whatever blasphemous or seditious books and pamphlets they might lay their hands on.

So this was the reason, I supposed, why Dr. Pickvance held his auction in the Golden Horn-to escape the eyes of the searchers. For obviously none of his wares had been licensed by the Secretary of State. Yet this lack of sanction failed to deter the bidding one bit. I watched in amazement as the black-garbed sectarians competed for the pamphlets against a couple of smirking, rosecake-scented Cavaliers who appeared to regard even the most lubricious of the Bunhill Brethren's exhortations as some sort of joke. But I supposed the searchers were no more likely to enter Alsatia than were the bailiffs and catchpoles, so we were safe-if that was the word-from the graspings of the law.

Soon the lots grew more shocking, the bidding even fiercer. After thirty minutes the lots began to include hastily executed woodcuts and engraved prints depicting in the most vivid detail unchaste performances by masters with their kitchen-maids, or between ladies and their coachmen and gardeners. Others consisted of slim volumes of decidedly amateur verse describing a series of similar partnerships, along with prose volumes of specious medical authority illustrating inventive but surely impossible sexual postures that guaranteed, to the acrobats who attempted them, delights of a barely credible measure.

As each lot was cried, Dr. Pickvance or Mr. Skipper would wave the prints about for general observation, like frantic puppet-masters. Or else Pickvance would read aloud passages from the books in his high-pitched voice, eyes going glassy as he did so, beads of sweat standing out on his brow as Mr. Skipper stood meekly aside, his own face turning a deep crimson.

I had seen and heard enough. There could be nothing of relevance to my quest in these crude pages. The next ten or twelve lots dealt with the sort of occult literature I had seen at Pontifex Hall, but these were in much poorer repair and bound in inferior leather, mostly calfskin, and the ex-libris of Sir Ambrose Plessington would not, I thought, be found among them. I prepared to leave. But no sooner had I scraped my chair and risen halfway to my feet than I heard Pickvance crying a new lot, one similar, it seemed, to the previous couple of dozen.

'Gentlemen! You see before you Lot 66,' he called in his hectoring cadence, 'from the famous collection of Anton Schwarz von Steiner!'

I started at the name, which I knew I had heard before. I watched the volume flourish in Pickvance's hand, whose fingers looked strangely clawed, as if the digits were malformed. Then I remembered. I had been ascending from the crypt at Pontifex Hall, with Alethea, two steps ahead of me, describing Sir Ambrose's exploits, how he once negotiated for the Holy Roman Emperor the purchase of the entire library of an Austrian nobleman, a renowned collector of occult literature named-I was certain-von Steiner.

Bids on Lot 66 had started at ten shillings. Two men in particular were bidding against each other: one of them in the front row, the other two or three seats to my left. Pickvance was soliciting higher and higher offers. Twenty shillings… thirty… thirty-five…

My spit had dried up and I felt a shiver creep up my backbone like a bead of mercury. I squinted hard at the volume, which Mr. Skipper held aloft as he paraded up and down the platform. What were the chances, given Pickvance's appalling record so far, that it had actually been part of the Schwarz collection, much less in the Emperor's library? But a link, however tenuous, had been forged, something that might connect Sir Ambrose Plessington to the Golden Horn, or at least to Dr. Samuel Pickvance.

I leaned forward in my chair and licked my lips. The room seemed to have gone impossibly silent. The man in my row had ceased bidding. Pickvance raised his mallet.

'Thirty-five shillings, going once… going twice…'

By the time the last of the three hundred lots were sold the bells of St. Bride's had rung four o'clock. I stumbled outside, blinking and squinting in the brilliant sunlight, bumped and pushed on the tide of the departing auction-goers, with whom I now felt, after so many hours together, an unwelcome kinship. To escape them I walked down to the Fleet and stood for a few moments on the bank, watching the water flex and gurgle as the tide pooled slowly inwards. A slick of oil shivered and coalesced on the surface, a perfect spectrum of colour. Then, as the voices finally subsided behind me, I reached into my coat-tails.

Lot 66 was, by the standards of this particular auction, a rather distinguished volume: actual morocco with strong stitching, its rag-paper pages unscathed by either damp or book-lice. It proved to be an edition of Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim's Magische Werke published in Cologne in 1601 and edited by someone named Manfred Schloessinger. I knew little about the work other than that it was a translation into German of De occulta philosophia, a book of spells in which one finds, among other things, the first ever reference to the word 'abracadabra'. It had cost me almost five pounds, which was far too much, of course. I wouldn't be able to sell it for even two pounds, let alone five. But what interested me wasn't the title or the author but the ex-libris pasted to the inside cover. It incorporated a coat of arms, a motto-'Spe Expecto'-and a name engraved beneath in a heavy Gothic script: Anton Schwarz von Steiner.

Of course, the ex-libris may not have been authentic. A bookseller learned to distrust these little tokens of identity. One cannot judge a book either by its cover, as the saying goes, or by its ex-libris. This one, for example, might have been soaked off another book-one that had belonged to von Steiner-and then pasted on to the inside cover of an otherwise undistinguished copy of Agrippa's Magische Werke. Unscrupulous booksellers had been known to resort to such tactics in order to increase the value of a book-something I would not have put past Pickvance. Or else the bookplate might not have been von Steiner's, but a forgery instead. And if this was the case, I wouldn't recognise the fraud unless and until I saw a true example of von Steiner's ex-libris, which didn't seem likely in the near future.

On the other hand, I told myself, it was well known how the contents of the Imperial Library in Prague had been pillaged and dispersed during the Thirty Years War. What was missed by the soldiers looting Prague Castle at the start of the war had been scooped up by Queen Christina of Sweden as it ended three decades later. So it was possible that the ex-libris was authentic and that the volume had found its way to England. It could have been brought over by Sir Ambrose, who would have been acquainted with it through his dealings with the Holy Roman Emperor. Possibly the Englishman had been unscrupulous in his dealings with Rudolf and had kept certain volumes for his own private collection, which in time must almost have rivalled the Emperor's own. But if this was the case, why was the volume not at Pontifex Hall? Why did it not show his ex-libris on the front pastedown? And if it had been pillaged or lost like many of the others, why had Alethea made no mention of it?

As I closed the hide cover, I remembered from somewhere that Agrippa, the so-called 'Prince of Magicians', a friend of both Erasmus and Melancthon, a secretary to the Emperor Maximilian and a physician and astrologer at the court of François I, was said to be the foremost authority in Europe on the Hermetic writings. Even so, the link between his Magische Werke and the Hermetic parchment stolen from Pontifex Hall promised to be a long and tortuous one. Authentic Schwarziana or not, the volume might have no connection whatsoever with either Sir Ambrose or his missing parchment. Had I merely wasted five pounds and an entire day's work?

Perhaps not. I fished in my pocket for the card Pickvance had given me after I had threaded my way to the front of the room to collect my prize. Up close, the auctioneer had been shorter and looked much older. Deep creases criss-crossed his consumptive face, and the whites of his eyes-or, rather, their yellows-were filigreed with red. His long fingers were, as I had noticed, strangely crooked, as if arthritic or even, perhaps, broken by a pilliwinks. I wondered if he had been tortured by one of Cromwell's Secretaries of State, or if his hands had merely been caught in a falling sash-window. As I accepted the copy of Agrippa from these gruesome claws I found myself bold enough to ask who had put the volume up for auction.

'I might be interested in other texts of a similar provenance,' I told him in a low tone. 'Ones from von Steiner's collection.'

Pickvance had seemed startled by the question. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that the volume might have been stolen: yet another reason why he chose to auction his wares in the Golden Horn. Possibly his inventory-those lots that weren't forged-consisted entirely of booty from the libraries of Royalist estates that, like Pontifex Hall, had been pillaged or confiscated. His reply did nothing to alleviate my suspicions. He shrugged and told me that he was 'not at liberty to divulge' his sources. His emaciated face had stretched into an unwholesome grin.

'Trade secrets, after all.'

I caught him by the coat-sleeve as he was turning away to attend to someone else. I suspected the jangle of a few gold sovereigns could easily put paid to what few scruples or discretions he might possess, so I told him in the same hushed tone that my client would be willing to pay a great deal-much more than five pounds-for the right volume. He had paused at that, then turned slowly to face me. For a second I wondered whether I was doing the right thing… and whether Pickvance was anything more than a thief or a charlatan. Whatever, he seemed to set aside his own reservations at once and rise eagerly to the bait.

'Oh, I dare say. Oh, it's possible, yes, that I might have something in that line.' His tone was more respectful now. He was probably inventing plans for more 'Schwarziana' as he spoke, more forged texts. 'Of course, I would have to check my catalogues. But, yes, yes, yes, I may well have-'

Now it had been my turn to leap to the bait. 'You keep catalogues? Records of your sales?'

He seemed insulted by the question. 'Why, yes. Of course I do.'

'Yes, of course.' I pressed on, polite and earnest as ever. Would it be possible, I wonder, for me to consult-'

But I was interrupted by a shout from behind us. The Cavaliers and Bunhill Brethren had begun pressing forward to claim their unsavoury acquisitions, and Mr. Skipper, anxious to requite them, was attempting to draw Pickvance aside. The auctioneer muttered something into his cravat, then turned back to me, fishing inside his waistcoat with his dreadful, pilliwinksed fingers.

'Tomorrow,' he whispered to me before a wave of bodies carried him off.

Now, looking down at the card, I realised that when I went to Pulteney House the next evening I would at least have something to report to Alethea-something of importance, if my appointment with Pickvance proved fruitful. I had no idea what, if anything, might be found in one of his catalogues. Lists of buyers and sellers, perhaps, or the name of whoever had put the edition of Agrippa up for auction. Possibly even a reference, a trail of sorts, that would lead to the parchment, or at least back to Sir Ambrose's library and whoever had pillaged it. Because whoever pillaged it might have sold the books-stolen books, after all-through an unscrupulous dealer such as Pickvance.

I started back towards the Golden Horn, into which a few customers were filtering. It was still early, I guessed: not yet five o'clock. With a pang of guilt, not to mention surprise, I realised I didn't want to return to Nonsuch House; not just yet. Perhaps I would walk back to the bridge, a leisurely stroll. It had turned out to be a fine day, even here in Alsatia. The stench of the Fleet Ditch wasn't so bad, I decided, once one got used to it. The wind had strengthened, dispersing the shimmering miasma and the clouds of insects. It had also borne up a few clouds that dragged themselves slowly overhead, bound for points east. Perhaps I would stop in a tavern on the way, I thought, or a coffee-house.

I tucked the Magische Werke back inside my coat-tails and then looked again, as if for guidance, at the slip of paper in my hand. An ordinary tradesman's card incorporating a coat of arms-no doubt fraudulent-and four lines of text, neatly engraved:

Dr. Samuel Pickvance,

Bookseller & Auctioneer,

at the Sign of the Saracen's Head,

Arrowsmith Court, Whitefriars

I would be making at least one more trip into Alsatia; but for the first time the prospect didn't fill me with dread. Nor, I realised, did the prospect of visiting Lincoln's Inn Fields. Alethea's face suddenly rose before me, alarmingly distinct, and I realised also that I was almost looking forward to the appointment. And so as I travelled home along Fleet Street, where I did indeed stop inside a tavern, I wondered what was happening to me. I was becoming bold and unpredictable, a stranger to myself: as if one of Agrippa von Nettesheim's alchemical reactions, some profound and alarming transmutation, had taken place deep inside me.

Chapter Seven

Pulteney House stood on the north side of Lincoln's Inn Fields, halfway along a terrace of six or seven houses, all perfect replicas of one another, that overlooked the field: brick façades, white pilasters, tall windows reflecting a score of suns. I approached it along one of the dozen public footpaths through the overgrowth of pimpernel and cudweed. It was late afternoon, and I was sweating heavily after a long walk. My legs were faltering and my shirt clung to my back. I shaded my eyes from the lowering sun and looked about me.

Lincoln's Inn Fields had once been London's most fashionable quarter, a place where our lords and ladies-members of Charles I's doomed court-had lived in their insolent and audacious luxury. But during the Commonwealth they made haste for Holland or France, and so for the past ten years most of the houses had stood deserted. Now there was no smoke and no light, and as I drew closer I could see their blistered paint, a broken window here or there, the layers of soot on their sills and ovolos. The wrought-iron railings and gates about their gardens-rank with couchgrass-had been uprooted. Turned into Cromwell's muskets and cannons, I supposed.

Pulteney House was, marginally, in the best repair, with a young mulberry standing guard at the door and the polished panes of a window showing oriflammes of sunlight. The heavy fold of a gold-tasselled curtain was barely visible behind them. I didn't recall Alethea saying that either Sir Ambrose or Lord Marchamont had owned a London house, so as I manipulated the ponderous lion's-paw knocker I came to the distressing conclusion that Pulteney House must belong to Sir Richard Overstreet, the man to whom, according to Phineas Greenleaf, Lady Marchamont was betrothed. The 'matters of some importance' no doubt had something to do with plans for the wedding.

I was startled, therefore, when who should open the door but Phineas Greenleaf himself. He betrayed no signs of recognition, which I found odd given that we had spent six days on the road together and shared a number of humiliatingly intimate bedrooms. He merely widened the aperture enough for me to slip through and then ushered me down a corridor to what seemed like a drawing-room, dark on account of the yew-green curtains.

'If you would wait here, sir.'

I listened as he ascended an invisible staircase and then creaked across the floor above me. Events seemed to be replicating themselves in some disturbing and anticlimactic pattern. That first night in the library at Pontifex Hall he had left me alone, just so, and shuffled up the staircase in search of his mistress. So I was not unduly surprised when I saw that I had not been led into a drawing-room after all. Once again Phineas had left me stranded in the middle of a library. Or in the middle of what in some happier incarnation had been a library. The rows of shelves had been denuded, picked clean of their books, and even a number of shelves were missing. Burned as firewood, I wondered, by a regiment of Cromwell's soldiers? But a few of the house's other furnishings had been spared the holocaust or pillage, for there was a moth-ravaged tapestry on one of the walls and a marble-and-slate fireplace with tongs and firedogs arranged before it. Four padded chairs had been quadrated round a small rosewood table.

Yet the library was not quite empty of books. In the dim light I spied a pile of fat volumes arranged on the table-books that I supposed Alethea must have brought with her in the hope of whiling away the hours on the coach. I creaked open the cover of the one on top, fully expecting to see Sir Ambrose's ex-libris stamped on the pastedown. But straight away I saw that the volume was much newer than any of those at Pontifex Hall, as were its three fellows. I could smell the tawed leather of their bindings.

New books? I was surprised by the discovery. What on earth could the mistress of Pontifex Hall want with yet more books? I was sitting in one of the chairs now, riffling the leaves of the first volume with a mixture of curiosity and guilty pleasure. What choice texts, I wondered, might she have brought with her? Learned tomes like Ficino's translations of Plato or Hermes Trismegistus? Or volumes on witchcraft, or perhaps even necromancy?

But each of them covered more mundane territories, ones hardly preferable, in my opinion, to the company of the dour and surly Phineas Greenleaf. I frowned at the title-pages as I plucked up the volumes and then replaced them. All were on matters pertaining to the business of wills and property law. The names were familiar enough, but never had I troubled myself to open one of them, let alone to read as much as a page. Yet here, with a bookmark fully three-quarters of the way through, was Hobhouse's A Treatise of Testaments and Last Wills, while beneath it sat Blackacre's notoriously dull A Touchstone of Property and Conveyances. Its pages had been cut all the way to the bitter end, as had those in the third volume, Phillimore's gargantuan Equity Law and the Practice of the Court of Chancery. Only the last book seemed in keeping with the Lady Marchamont I thought I knew: a volume entitled The Law's Resolution of Women's Rights. Its pages too had been cut from front to back, while the notes scratched in the margin were composed in a familiar hectic scrawl.

By now a light tread was squeaking across the ceiling overhead. I replaced the last volume and sat back in the chair, aching with exhaustion. I had still not recovered either from my exertions-I had spent most of the morning and a good part of the afternoon in Alsatia-or from the shock of my discovery. I scrubbed my palms across my cheeks and brow, then took a couple of deep gulps as if drinking the dense, mulled air of the room from a heavy gourd. I fished the copy of Agrippa's Magische Werke carefully from my pocket and placed it on the table next to the other books. Yes, I had come far today. I had learned much.

Closing my eyes, I heard the soft outcry of treads and risers as Alethea descended the staircase. I sat back to await her arrival. How much, I wondered, ought I to tell her?

I had left for Alsatia early that morning, this time travelling upriver by sculler. Arrowsmith Court, when I finally found it, proved exactly the kind of place in which I would have expected Pickvance to conduct his unsavoury trade: a small patch of mud-slimed cobbles round three sides of which a number of sooty tenements pressed four and five storeys upwards. A clowder of scrawny cats was busy in a heap of fishbones, while a couple of others groomed themselves in doorways and on window-sills. Last night's rain had collected in turbid pools and already stank like bilgewater. As I picked my way round them a chamber-pot was emptied from one of the upper windows. I leapt sideways in the nick of time. Yes, I thought ruefully: I had come to the right place.

The Saracen's Head stood directly opposite the courtyard's narrow, arched entrance. A swarthy, moustachioed face, its expression fierce and implacable, peered back at me from a signboard above the door. The tavern itself appeared to be closed. A tobacconist's stood to one side of it, a shop of more ambiguous designation on the other, both were also shut tight, their bottle-glass windows bleared with dirt and soot. Beside the tobacconist's door stood another, smaller door, whose tarnished amuel-and-brass sign read: 'Dr. Pickvance-Bookseller Auctioneer'.

After pulling a fraying bell-rope I was admitted with much furtiveness and then conducted up five flights of stairs by Mr. Skipper, who explained that Dr. Pickvance was otherwise engaged, but that he, Mr. Skipper, would be honoured to assist. The 'offices', from what I was allowed to see of them, consisted of a single room furnished with two desks, a pair of chairs, and what looked to be the tools of a bookbinder's trade: a stack of sheepskins and a beating-stone in a far corner, together with an assortment of gimlets, sewing-presses and polishing irons littered across the rest of the room. There was also a printing-press, an enormous mechanical beast to which Mr. Skipper repaired after sitting me at one of the desks. On the desk sat a pile of perhaps two dozen catalogues bound in greasy brown leather.

'Good luck to you,' he murmured with a morose smile, then turned his back, I suppose to begin cobbling together more 'masterpieces' for Pickvance's next auction. I picked up the first of the volumes and opened its cover.

As I read through the catalogues for the next eight hours, nourished only by an unappetising rabbit pie fetched by Mr. Skipper from a cookshop, a few facts about the mysterious Dr. Pickvance gradually began taking shape. I was able to determine that he conducted his auctions roughly twice a year, going back as far as 1651, the year when the Civil War ended and the Blasphemy Act passed through Parliament. All of the auctions must have been as clandestine as the one in the Golden Horn, because all had been conducted in Alsatia, roughly half in the Golden Horn, the others scattered among a handful of nearby taverns and alehouses, including two or three in the Saracen's Head. The works auctioned had been of a piece, it seemed, with those sold in the Golden Horn, and some of the auctions had comprised as many as 500 lots. The catalogues listed each work's author, title, date of impression, style of binding, number of pages and illustrations, general condition, and, finally, provenance. I was encouraged by this last detail. I noticed how Pickvance or some amanuensis had recorded not only the name of whoever put the lot up for auction but also that of whoever had purchased it.

I suspected, however, that many of these names and provenances were as fraudulent as the books themselves, for 1651 was the year that Cromwell sequestrated many Royalist estates, and I guessed that the contents of their libraries-or else volumes featuring their forged ex-librises-had passed through Pickvance's office. I noticed that one of the catalogues for an auction in 1654 advertised 'books once belonging to Sir George VILLIERS, Duke of BUCKINGHAM, removed from his admirable collection at York House in the Strand'. I knew that part of this 'admirable collection'-truly, one of the choicest in Europe-had been looted after the Civil War when York House was confiscated; the other half had been sold at auction a few years later when Buckingham's son, the second Duke, a Royalist, ran short of funds during his exile in Holland. But whether or not Pickvance had been selling bona fide volumes stolen from Buckingham's collection it was impossible, on the evidence of the catalogues, to discern.

My heart lurched as I looked at the dozens of titles in the York House collection. Ours was an age of great discrimination and taste, of aesthetes and collectors such as Buckingham and the late King Charles, but it was also an age of great desecration. How many treasures like those of Buckingham must have been lost to England because of our wars? Because of the Puritans and their superstitious zealotry? For when Cromwell and his cohorts weren't destroying works of art-beheading statues or tossing paintings by Rubens into the Thames-they were selling them two-a-penny to the agents of the King of Spain and Cardinal Mazarin, perhaps even to unscrupulous merchants like Dr. Pickvance. I noticed that a number of lots in Pickvance's catalogues had come from the salerooms of Antwerp, which for the past few decades had been the clearing-house from which plunder from the numerous European wars was sold at starvation prices to the greedy princes of Europe. As I reached for another volume I quailed at the task now confronting me. How on earth was I to find The Labyrinth of the World in such a mountain of other stolen volumes?

I discovered the copy of Agrippa, along with my own name, listed in the most recent catalogue, one of the first I inspected. The Magische Werke was recorded as having come from the collection in Vienna of Anton Schwarz von Steiner. But by now its more recent owner, the man who had put it up for sale in Pickvance's auction, was of much more interest to me. It was a man I had never heard of: Henry Monboddo. There was no trace of the volume's journey from von Steiner to Monboddo, so there was no way of knowing how Monboddo had acquired the volume-whether or not it had come to England via Sir Ambrose Plessington and had therefore been stolen from Pontifex Hall. The only clue to Monboddo's identity was an address, a house in Huntingdonshire, that had been pencilled into the catalogue. But there was no indication whether Monboddo was alive or-as was more often the case with the owners of auctioned books-deceased. I copied the name and address on to a piece of paper, then riffled through the rest of the catalogue, searching in vain for anything else he or his heirs might have put up for auction.

But the edition of Agrippa and even the mysterious Henry Monboddo himself were soon secondary to my purpose. I returned to the first of the volumes, that for 1651, and began working my way forward, auction by auction, year by year, wary of missing a familiar name or title that might lead to Pontifex Hall. The hours passed slowly. It was almost four o'clock by the time I reached for the last catalogue but one, that for an auction held some four months earlier:

Catalogus Variorum et insignium Librorum selectissimae Bibliothecae,

or,

A Catalogue containing a variety of ancient and modern English and French Books in Divinity,

History and Philosophy

The auction had been held at the Golden Horn on the 21^st of March, and the wares proved to be much the same as those at all of the others. I traced my finger down the next page, turned it, ran my finger down another. I was almost seeing double by now. So exhausted was I, so addled was my brain, that when I came to the entry-almost at the very back of the catalogue-I registered no shock or surprise, and I had to read it several times before I could absorb its implications:

Labyrinthus mundi, or The Labyrinth of the World. A fragment. A work of occult philosophy attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Latin translation from Greek original. 14 manuscript pages of the finest vellum. Arabesque binding. Excellent condition. Date and provenance unknown.

Through some oversight, or perhaps because of a deliberate omission, the entry failed to record the name of the vendor. But the new owner's name-the name of the man who had purchased it four months earlier-was inscribed clearly in pencil. It was the repetition of Henry Monboddo's name as much as anything else that jolted my brain from its torpor. Studying the entry carefully, I saw that Monboddo had paid fifteen shillings for the fragment-a pittance, I thought, remembering Alethea's insistence about its value and her eagerness to pay any price to retrieve it. But it was the object of my quest, I had no doubt of that. There was no mention of an ex-libris, though the omission was hardly surprising: presumably it had been removed, either by Pickvance or the previous owner, who would not, after all, have wished to advertise the theft from Pontifex Hall.

Still, I was puzzled by the price of fifteen shillings. Had neither Pickvance nor the anonymous owner known its true value? I could not imagine Pickvance selling anything for a penny less than its worth. I therefore decided that Alethea must have been drastically wrong about the fragment. Perhaps, at fifteen shillings, it was no more valuable than anything else that Pickvance put up for sale.

I had not the courage to ask Mr. Skipper what he knew about Henry Monboddo-Alethea had insisted upon discretion, after all-and so after copying down the details of the entry I closed the volume and returned it to the stack. My step grew light as I left the building a few minutes later and began walking through Alsatia. The Gordian knot, I decided, was almost cut in two. I would find Henry Monboddo, make him a generous offer-using Alethea's money-and collect my reward. Then I would be done with the business once and for all, and I would be able to resume my peaceful and sedentary life. It had been a good day, I told myself. I believe I might actually have begun to whistle.

I was in this same mood, exhausted but sanguine, when I heard the footfalls in the corridor growing louder. I pushed myself arduously from the chair. Lady Marchamont had arrived.

Ten minutes later I was seated at an enormous dining-table, listening to Alethea apologise for the dire condition of Pulteney House. She had appeared in the library doorway looking like what Horace calls mentis gratissimus error, 'a most delightful hallucination'. She was dressed exactly as she had been at Pontifex Hall-the leather buskins, the dark calash-despite the warm weather. I had already decided she must have purchased Pulteney House only recently, hence the massive tomes on the table downstairs. After all, as a widow she was now a 'feme sole' according to our laws, no longer a 'feme covert'. She was therefore able to buy and sell property, even to conduct a suit in the Court of Chancery if she wished. But in fact my first suspicions proved correct, because as we climbed the stairs to the dining-room she explained how Pulteney House belonged to her 'neighbour' (as she called him) Sir Richard Overstreet, who had 'kindly' lent it to her. Pontifex Hall was no longer safe, so she had come to London for the time being: for how long she could not say. But she thought that, despite the risks, the two of us should meet to 'exchange information'.

Pontifex Hall no longer safe? I was puzzled by her claim. Why on earth not? Because of the torrents of water from the spring that were supposedly eroding its foundations? Or was there some more menacing reason?

'Of course, no one has inhabited Pulteney House for almost ten years,' she was now saying, 'so it's hardly comfortable. The pipes from the conduit have been plugged or broken, therefore we have no water. Even more inhospitable conditions, I fear, than Pontifex Hall.' She smiled briefly, then her eyes flickered for the dozenth time to the copy of Agrippa's Magische Werke, which was still clutched in my hand. 'Please, Mr. Inchbold.' She was gesturing at the plates of food-venison from one of Sir Richard's deer parks-which Bridget had served a minute earlier. 'Shall we begin? I believe we have much to talk about.'

And so as the candle flame did its fairy-dance between us I told her everything I had learned in the past couple of days; or very nearly everything. I was wondering how much I should reveal. I decided to say nothing of the cipher or my suspicions about being followed. But I told her about the Golden Horn, about the bizarre auction, about Dr. Pickvance, and finally about the enormous pile of catalogues that I had finished inspecting only two hours earlier. Yet she was not as baffled by the name Henry Monboddo, I discovered, as I had been. We were eating our pudding, a syllabub, by this point. I paused for a moment and then asked whether she knew the name.

'Indeed I do,' she replied simply, then fell silent for a spell, contemplating her reflection in the silver cheek of the soup tureen. I could see the reflections of the candle, two perfect flames, in her dilated pupils. At length she set aside her spoon and picked up her napkin to dab carefully at her lips. 'In fact,' she said at last, 'Henry Monboddo is my reason for inviting you to Pulteney House tonight.'

'Oh?'

'Yes.' She was rising from the table, and so I did the same-a little too quickly. My head felt giddy because of the wine. 'Come with me, Mr. Inchbold. There is something I must show you. You see, I too have made a discovery about Henry Monboddo.'

I was led along the corridor, then through a small rotunda and into a bedchamber. It appeared that Sir Richard had at least attempted to make this part of Pulteney House hospitable for his guest, because the walls were newly papered and the room had been furnished with a four-post bed, a chair and a looking-glass whose foxed surface gave back my freakishly foreshortened and hunchbacked reflection as I stumbled into the room. There was also a portmanteau on the floor beside the bed with several garments protruding untidily from its top. I stood inside the door as if frozen, like a tobacconist's wooden Indian.

'Please, Mr. Inchbold.' She pointed to the chair before bending over the portmanteau. The window had been pushed open, and I caught the gentle susurrus of velvet curtains. 'Won't you take a seat?'

I moved to the chair and watched, anxious and alert, as she rummaged in the trunk, first through a layer of the clothing-I caught sight of a series of shifts and smocks writhing beneath her touch-and then in a deeper sediment. At last she found what she was looking for, a sheaf of papers, which she extracted and then handed to me.

'Another inventory,' she explained, seating herself on the edge of the bed.

'Like that at Pontifex Hall?' I remembered the document well: those six wondrous pages, each signed by the four bailies.

'No, not quite the same. This one was compiled almost thirty years later. It includes only books, as you can see. The contents of the library at Pontifex Hall in the year 1651.'

'Immediately before the estate was seized.'

'Yes. Lord Marchamont had the contents of the library valued before we went into exile. He was planning to sell the entire collection. We were… embarrassed for funds. But no buyer could be found. Not in those days. No one, that is, to whom Lord Marchamont had any wish to sell the collection. So he next considered removing the library to France. He had even arranged for its passage across the Channel from Portsmouth on the Belphoebe, one of the few men-o'-war that hadn't deserted to Cromwell in 1642. But the plan fell through, of course. The Belphoebe went down off the Isle of Wight less than a fortnight before the books were due to be sent from Pontifex Hall. A freak storm. But the shipwreck was fortunate for the collection, as it turns out. I need not tell you what would have happened otherwise.'

Indeed not. A number of libraries that had been transferred to France for safekeeping during the Civil War had become the property of the French Crown, by Droit d'Aubain, upon the deaths of their owners. A fate that Sir Ambrose's books would no doubt have shared when Lord Marchamont died.

'I discovered the inventory in the muniment room,' she was continuing, 'in the bottom of the coffin, one day after you left Pontifex Hall. Otherwise I would most certainly have given it to you then.' She was leaning forward from the bed. 'Quite detailed, as you will see.'

'It mentions the parchment?'

'Of course. But that detail is not the most interesting piece of intelligence. Please, the last page, if you will. There you will see how the collection was inventoried and valued by the person whom Lord Marchamont had engaged to sell it.'

The document was at least fifty pages long, an endless swarm of authors, titles, editions, prices. My head swam. I had already read too many catalogues that day. But the last page was blank, I saw, except for a few words inscribed at the bottom: 'This entire Collection valued at the sum of 47,000 pounds sterling, on this day, the 15^th of February 1651, by Henry Monboddo of Wembish Park, Huntingdonshire.'

I felt a tightening in my belly and looked up to find Alethea studying me closely.

'Henry Monboddo,' she murmured thoughtfully. 'A man well known among the Royalist exiles in Holland and France.'

'You knew him, then?'

'I did indeed.' She reached for the inventory and carefully returned it to the portmanteau. 'Or, rather, I met him on one or two occasions. He worked out of Antwerp in those days,' she continued, the bedposts gently creaking as she resumed her seat. 'He was a picture-monger, an art-broker. He sold the contents of many libraries and galleries, including those from York House. You know of the collection?'

I nodded, remembering Pickvance's catalogue for the year 1654, with its description of the items from the 'admirable collection' of the second Duke of Buckingham.

'Those were difficult times for all of us. Buckingham was also embarrassed for funds. York House had been confiscated and many of its treasures, those collected by his father, were pillaged by Cromwell's men. So in 1648, in order to relieve the Duke's finances, Monboddo sold some two hundred of the paintings. He got him a fair price, because the Peace of Westphalia had recently been signed and therefore the supply of plunder was threatening to dry up. Indeed, after Westphalia the stream might well have disappeared altogether had it not been for our commotions here in England.'

'So Monboddo disposed of collections of books and paintings for insolvent exiles? For anyone whose estate was being sequestrated?'

She nodded. 'He found the buyers for their art collections. Dukes and princes who wished to stock their libraries and cabinets. He had connections in courts throughout Christendom. My father dealt with him on a number of occasions when he made purchases for the Emperor Rudolf.'

'You mean to say that Monboddo was known to Sir Ambrose?'

'Yes. Many years earlier, of course. He conducted the negotiations with agents such as my father and took a handsome commission in return.' Her gaze dropped to the copy of Agrippa clutched in my hand. 'I believe he even negotiated with my father over the purchase of the von Steiner collection in Vienna. But there were also rumours about Monboddo's work,' she added. 'He was said to have clients other than Royalists unable to pay the taxes imposed on their estates.'

She paused to withdraw from the folds of her skirts an object that in the poor light I took a moment to recognise as a tobacco-pipe, which she then proceeded to fill, expertly, with tobacco. I expected her to hand it to me but was surprised to see her fit it with equal expertise between her molars. Her face flashed orange as she lit a taper and coaxed the bowl to life.

'Forgive me,' she said, gusting smoke and waving the taper through the air to extinguish its flame. 'Virginia tobacco. The fire-cured leaf of the Nicotiana trigonophylla, a particularly delicious species. Sir Walter Raleigh claims harmful effects for it, but I have always found a postprandial bowl an excellent aid to digestion, especially if smoked in a clay pipe. My father once owned a calumet,' she continued as a cloud of smoke unfurled into the space between us. 'It had a clay bowl and a stem made from a reed plucked from the shore of Chesapeake Bay. It was made a present to him by a Nanticoke chieftain in Virginia.'

'Virginia?' Sir Ambrose Plessington, that Proteus, that decagon with all of his mysterious side-facets, assumed yet another guise. But I was here on other business. 'You were mentioning that Monboddo-'

'Yes, yes, we were speaking of Monboddo, not of my father. Nor of Raleigh.' She had leaned back and was reclining on the bed now, on its half-dozen scattered cushions, her great tangled mane against the headboard. 'Yes, there were stories, I should almost say legends, about Henry Monboddo.'

'Legends of what sort?'

'Well… where shall we begin?' She cupped the bowl in her palm and for a few seconds studied the canopy above her head as if for inspiration. 'For one thing,' she resumed, 'it was said that he negotiated the purchase of the Mantua Collection in the year 1627. In those days he was the artistic agent for King Charles. That much was common knowledge. He was also the agent for the Duke of Buckingham. The first Duke, I mean-Sir George Villiers, the Lord High Admiral. Monboddo scoured the courts and studios of Europe on behalf of the pair of them, bringing back to England all sorts of items. Books, paintings, statues… whatever might have struck the fancy of those two great connoisseurs.' The clay pipe wavered and glowed before me as she took another slow draught of smoke. 'You have heard of the Mantua Collection?'

I nodded. 'Of course.' Who had not? Dozens of paintings by Titian, Raphael, Correggio, Caravaggio, Rubens, Giulio Romano, all purchased by King Charles for the sum of £15,000-a bargain even at that price. The canvases hung in the galleries of Whitehall Palace until Cromwell and his band of philistines sold them off to pay their debts. It was the greatest disgrace, in my opinion, of Cromwell's reign-a despoliation of our entire nation.

'The silk industry in Mantua had collapsed in the 1620s,' she continued, 'and so the Gonzagas were starved for funds. King Charles was also starved for funds, but a detail such as that hardly troubled him where paintings were concerned, especially ones as marvellous and valuable as those in the Mantua Collection. He could scarcely believe his ears when he first heard the report from Mantua. A special tax was levied and Monboddo raised the remainder of the funds along with Sir Philip Burlamaqui, the King's financier. At the same time, of course, Burlamaqui was raising funds to equip a fleet of a hundred ships for Buckingham's expedition to the Île de Ré, where the Protestants of La Rochelle were besieged by the armies of Cardinal Richelieu. An unfortunate coincidence of events,' she murmured. 'The King was forced to choose between his ships and his paintings.'

But he chose the paintings. I knew the story well. He chose the paintings over the lives of his mariners and the Huguenots, beggaring the fleet in order to pay the Mantuans. Five thousand English sailors in their rotting ships starved to death or were slaughtered by French troops, and who knows how many Huguenots died at La Rochelle. The expedition was a disaster, even worse than Buckingham's raid on Cádiz two years earlier. So the paintings from the Mantua Collection-all of those images of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Family-were steeped in Protestant blood, paid for by the lives of Englishmen and the Rochellois.

'This most wonderful collection became the shame of Protestant Europe,' she said, 'as did the treasures assembled by Buckingham at York House. For Buckingham had not only led the failed expedition, he had also arranged King Charles's marriage to the sister of Louis XIII and then loaned to the French navy the ships with which Richelieu proceeded to batter La Rochelle and later the half-starved English fleet. And so is it any wonder that Cromwell should have wished to sell both collections, York House as well as Whitehall Palace?' She paused to draw thoughtfully on the pipe. 'And that, Mr. Inchbold, is where the other rumours begin.'

I was frowning in the darkness, trying to catch the twisted thread, to assemble in my head the cast of characters: Buckingham, Monboddo, King Charles, Richelieu. 'Are you saying that Monboddo was involved in the sale of the Mantua Collection as well as the paintings from York House?'

'So I believe.'

'He was in league with Cromwell, then?'

'No, he was in league with someone else. The rumours claimed that Monboddo was secretly acting as the agent for Cardinal Mazarin, the Chief Minister of France, Richelieu's protégé. It was well known that Mazarin hoped to lay his hands on the treasures that Cromwell was selling. Monboddo covered his tracks very well, of course, as did Mazarin, but my husband came to believe the rumours. For that reason he dismissed Monboddo as his agent and refused to part with a single volume even though in those years we were as poor as tinkers.'

'But why should Lord Marchamont have been so opposed to the sale? The collection would have been lost to England, it's true. It would have been a great pity. But we were no longer at war with the French. In those days they were supposed to be our allies in Cromwell's war against Spain.'

'Yes, but there were principles involved. Other concerns.'

She hesitated as if uncertain whether to continue. But at length, as another cloud of smoke twisted between us, she explained how any such transaction would have violated the letter of her father's will, which stipulated that the collection should be neither broken up nor sold, either whole or in part, to anyone of the Roman faith. Rome with its Index librorum prohibitorum was the enemy of all true knowledge. Sir Ambrose believed that Rome stood not for the dissemination of thought but, rather, its suppression. The works of both Copernicus and Galileo had been proscribed, as had the Cabala and other magical Jewish writings studied by writers like Marsilio Ficino. In 1558 the penalty of death was decreed against anyone who printed or sold condemned books. Hundreds of booksellers fled Rome after the publication of the Index in 1564, followed by thousands of Jews expelled by Pius V, who suspected them of abetting Protestantism. The Hermeticists soon found themselves under the same cloud as the Jews. The editor and translator of the polyglot edition of the Corpus hermeticum was condemned by the Inquisition as a heretic, while the greatest Hermeticist of all, Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake. His crime had been championing the doctrines of Copernicus.

'Oh, I know all of this must sound peculiar to you, Mr. Inchbold, like the ravings of a zealot. But my father was most determined on these points. He believed in the Reformation and the spread of knowledge, in a worldwide community of scholars, a Utopia of learning like the one described by Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis. So it would have been a disaster, in his opinion, for a single book to fall into the hands of someone such as Cardinal Mazarin, a pupil of the Jesuits.' She paused again, then dropped her voice as if fearful of being overheard. 'You see, my father had rescued the books from the bonfires of the Jesuits once already.'

'What do you mean?' I was leaning forward in the chair. 'Rescued how?' I remembered her description of the books, that evening in Pontifex Hall, as 'refugees', along with her claim that some of them had survived a shipwreck. I wondered if she was about to say something about the 'interests' and 'enemies' of which she had spoken.

'From Cardinal Baronius.' The pipe stem clacked quietly between her teeth. 'The keeper of the Vatican Library. Perhaps you know his work? He wrote at length on the Corpus hermeticum. You may read about it in his history of the Roman Church, the Annales ecclesiastici, published in twelve volumes. In his time Cardinal Baronius was one of the world's foremost authorities on the writings of Hermes Trismegistus. He took up his pen in order to refute the work of the Huguenot theologian Duplessis-Mornay. In 1581 Duplessis-Mornay had published a Hermetic treatise entitled De la vérité de la religion chrétienne. He dedicated it to the Protestant champion of Europe, Henry of Navarre, whose counsellor he later became. The work was translated into English by Sir Philip Sidney.'

'Another Protestant champion,' I murmured, remembering how Sidney-that great Elizabethan courtier who died fighting the Spaniards-had been the namesake of the ship built for Sir Ambrose, according to the patent, in 1616.

I closed my eyes and tried to think. The name Baronius was familiar, though not because of either Duplessis-Mornay or the Corpus hermeticum. No: a cardinal of that name was the man responsible for the transportation-the theft-of the Bibliotheca Palatina in 1623, after the Catholic armies invaded the Palatinate. It was one of the most outrageous scandals of the Thirty Years War. Some 196 crates of books from Germany's greatest library, the centre of Protestant learning in Europe, were carted across the Alps by mule-train, with each mule wearing round its neck, on a silver label, the same inscription: fero bibliothecam Principis Palatini. The books and manuscripts had disappeared, one and all, into the Bibliotheca Vaticana.

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 Star 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.

In the end the journey from Breslau was something over three hundred miles as the crow flies, though with the ox-bows in the Elbe, and with the ice and the cold, it seemed much longer, an agonising voyage through sandstone gorges and towns whose buildings cringed behind fortress walls on wooded slopes above the river. Finally the barges reached snowbound and windswept heathlands in which a few sheep-pens and juniper bushes projected themselves from sculpted snowdrifts like ruins. Only after the Elbe widened and cleared of ice, filling with colliers and fishing boats, did the sun appear and the weather improve. A day later the river widened further, its current quickening, its traffic thickening into chaos. A clutch of towers and steeples appeared above the watery Geestlands.

Emilia, rubbing her chilblained fingers together, could not even have begun to guess where they were, or how many days had passed since Breslau. She said nothing as the barge slithered between two others, then bumped into a busy quay. Nor did she say anything as a half-dozen men, led by a tall wharfinger, stumbled down the planks towards them. Though it was past dusk, no lanterns had been lit, and the figures hopping aboard were no more than shadows.

Vilém took her hand and together they disembarked, climbing the slippery embankment to where, at the top, the scene below was cast faint and shadowed in the rush-lights of a waterfront tavern. Behind them the wharfinger was barking instructions in German. The crates were being carried to one of the storehouses that jumbled the riverside. The grip on her wrist tightened.

They stayed for three days in Hamburg, in the Gänge-Viertel of the Altstadt. Emilia spent each night in a different Gasthaus, in rooms of her own, narrow little cells in which she would wake each morning expecting to hear the chime of the Queen's summoning-bell next door. But there was no summoning-bell next door, not since the night when she had been roused from her bed, given two minutes to pack her bags, then escorted down to the Oder on Sir Ambrose's arm. She thought from the panic of the departure, as well as the expression on Vilém's face-for he had been there, lashing one of the crates to the top of a wagon-that the Cossack mercenaries had caught up with them at last. But they were not fleeing the Cossacks, she would later discover, rather, the Queen and her court. For only after the night ended and the sun rose, a dim iceblink on the smudged horizon, did she realise that the Queen's carriage with its piles of books and hat boxes was nowhere in sight. There were only the three of them now, along with a half-dozen workmen, Silesians who spoke neither English nor German.

What deal had been struck? As she watched the crates being borne up from the dock she wondered whether they had merely been stolen, whether Sir Ambrose was nothing more than a thief or pirate. In their fleeting moments together Vilém had claimed to know little of the Englishman's plan other than that they were to be met in London by a man named Henry Monboddo. Monboddo was an art broker, he said, a picture-monger and book dealer who supplied the wealthy lords of England with valuable paintings and manuscripts, as well as whatever other fascinating bric-à-brac he was able to prise loose from the princes and potentates of France, Italy or the Empire. Sir Ambrose had dealt with him many times before, because Monboddo had also prised loose a few odd bits and pieces that found their way into the collections of the Emperor Rudolf. Now it seemed that Monboddo had found a new client. Vilém had no idea who. But on their second night in the Altstadt he confessed what she already suspected. They were being pursued.

The two of them had been sitting at the table in her room, whispering over a chessboard, a single candle burning in an eight-armed candelabrum. He had recited a familiar litany, claiming to know neither who was in pursuit nor whether they had anything to do with the men in black-and-gold livery. Nor did he know whether the men in black-and-gold livery might be in the service of Cardinal Baronius, or the Emperor, or else some other party entirely. But he admitted that among the hundreds of books he and Sir Ambrose had carted from Prague in the ninety-nine wooden crates were those from the library's secret archive-books outlawed as heretical by the Holy Office. Was the parchment one of them? Vilém claimed not to know. But the cardinals of the Inquisition would not take kindly, he said, to the liberation of the books from Prague Castle-nor to their transport to a heretical kingdom such as England. For included among the crates were such controversial treatises as the work of Copernicus that Emilia had seen in the wine cellar at Breslau. That particular volume, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, had been suspended by the Congregation of the Index, he explained, following Galileo's brush with the Inquisition in 1616. Galileo's writings-both published and unpublished-were likewise found in the archives. And Galileo was, in the eyes of Rome, a most dangerous writer.

But still other documents were to be found in the ninety-nine crates. The secret sanctum in the Spanish Rooms had been greatly enlarged in the past few years, and not only because of the zeal of the Congregation of the Index. There were also stacks of lambskin in the archives, Vilém said, that catalogued the multifarious doings of the greatest empire on earth. For, some years earlier, when he was Archduke of Styria, Ferdinand had signed an agreement with his cousin and brother-in-law, the King of Spain. The treaty brought together the two Houses of Habsburg-the one in Austria, the other in Spain-who would henceforth work together to crush the Protestants in their midst. In those days there was much brotherly mixing of blood. Documents in the archives in Seville found their way into the Imperial Library in Vienna, and vice versa. Philip even sent to Vienna a copy of the Padrón Real, the map of his domains in the New World. But Vienna was no longer safe, for both the Turks and the Transylvanians threatened it. So it was that over the past few years many of the documents from the Imperial Library were sent for safekeeping to Prague Castle, to the secret archive in the Spanish Rooms. But then of course everything changed. Ferdinand was deposed from the throne of Bohemia and replaced by a Protestant.

Emilia closed her eyes and felt the room begin to revolve. The King of Spain? The wind outside was howling plaintively in the chimney-pots like the ululation of a wolf pack. The cardinals of the Inquisition? The candle guttered in the draught, drooling icicles of wax. What fatal Pandora's box had been prised open in Prague Castle? Not for the first time she was sensible of the danger-one worse than the biting cold or the ice floes on the Elbe-into which Sir Ambrose had plunged them. And was the Englishman a danger too, someone to be feared as much as their mysterious pursuers?

He entered her room a few minutes later, knocking on her door before entering with a brisk step. He seemed in a cheerful mood. He handed each of them a passport and certificate of health-both forged in false names-then turned to Vilém.

'I regret to say that, if my information is correct, you may also have need of these.' He extended a small calfskin pouch. 'In the event that we should be caught up, you understand. I am told they have several unpleasant methods of persuasion.'

'Persuasion?' Vilém accepted the small calfskin pouch and loosened the drawstring. Emilia, watching from the corner, saw Vilém sprinkle into his palm three or four small seeds.

'Strychnos nux vomitica,' Sir Ambrose explained. 'From a tree in India. Brought back, I believe, from a Jesuit mission. Painless, apparently, and very fast. I've seen one work on a blackbird.' He paused. 'I should think one would do the trick; two to be safe.'

Vilém frowned. 'But how am I to…?'

'To what?'

'To persuade the men to swallow them?'

Sir Ambrose looked perplexed for a second, then burst out laughing. 'My dear fellow!' he exclaimed. He made a terrific show of wiping his cheeks with a handkerchief and suppressing further eruptions of mirth. 'No, no, my dear fellow. They're for you. You are the one who must swallow them, should you have the misfortune to let them catch you. Oh, dear me…'

One night later she was smuggled aboard the Bellerophon, escorted up the cleated gangplank in pitch-blackness, then led down a hatchway to the stale air of the orlop-deck, the lowest inhabited level of the ship. Her tiny cabin-another narrow cell into which she was thrust-smelled of gunpowder and pitch and the poisonous water in the bilges. As the Bellerophon made its way down the Elbe, she watched through a scuttle, alone in her cabin, as the sea turned the colour of a desert and ruffled its skirts along the shore. Then a few leagues out to sea, as the sandstone cliffs of Heligoland swayed into view, she was violently ill, and for what seemed like days on end she lay swaddled in her hammock, feeling the Bellerophon heave and pitch and creak across the immense sea. The ship's doctor visited her cabin and fed her preparations of ginger and German camomile. But even then, of course, she knew her illness was not to be cured by a few herbs; it was something graver and yet more wonderful than mere seasickness.

Chapter Nine

St. Olave's Church stands in Hart Street, near Crutched Friars, in the shadow of the Navy Office and Tower Hill. As I arrived, its front doors were yawning open, exposing a candlelit nave and a flock of departing parishioners. Evensong was letting out. I dodged past the small crowd, rounded a corner, then crept down a flexuous path towards the churchyard, whose gates were surmounted by a pair of stone skulls. The eye-sockets regarded me grimly as I passed on to the edge of the old burial-ground, hoping to look solemn and respectful, as churchyards demand, not like a miscreant bent on some sinister bit of mischief-which, for all I knew, I was.

It was the evening following my trip to Pulteney House, and for the second night in a row I was leaving Tom Monk alone in Nonsuch House. He had begun to suspect me, I believe, of some romantic attachment, a ridiculous suspicion, but one encouraged by the bouquet of flowers I was clutching in my hand. Yet this ritual-the flowers and the churchyard-had been a familiar one. Each Sunday for the past five years I had tiptoed into the outer churchyard of St. Magnus-the-Martyr, holding flowers to my chest and threading my way past the victims of plague and consumption and a score of other misfortunes to a familiar granite tablet surrounded by four tiny lozenges. But I realised with a soft pang of grief and guilt that I had not visited Arabella's grave for some time now, not since my first letter from Alethea and the visit to Pontifex Hall. I squeezed the stems more tightly and stepped uncertainly forward.

I had spent much of the day in Whitehall Palace, in the offices of the Exchequer, examining countless rate-books and poll-tax returns. I was hoping to learn more about Henry Monboddo before I was forced to confront him. Forewarned is forearmed, as my mother used to say. I had considered returning to Alsatia and making enquiries of Samuel Pickvance, but I was wary of raising the auctioneer's suspicions. He and Monboddo might be in league together, after all. So I had settled for the palace instead, to which a waterman conducted me, travelling upriver through the heavy morning traffic.

Whitehall Palace in those days was a haphazard maze of some thirty thatched, timber-framed buildings whose corridors and enclosures were as crowded with people and as filled with coal smoke and rat droppings as everywhere else in London. It was hardly a fit place for a king, I decided, or even his mistresses. I picked my way through a series of sunless courtyards and cramped passages until I reached the nondescript block of tarred buildings devoted to the counting and storing of the royal treasure. From the poll-tax returns, which specified occupations, I hoped to learn something of Monboddo's business dealings, and from the rate-books what properties he might own, if any, apart from Wembish Park. I suppose I must have, if not quite distrusted Alethea, then at least possessed a robust scepticism concerning her claims. But such scepticism was healthy, I assured myself. Trust, after all, is the mother of deceit. I therefore wished to uncover a few objective and independent facts about Henry Monboddo.

The search proved to be a long and difficult one. I looked as far back as 1651 before finding any reference to Monboddo, I assumed because he, like Alethea, had spent the last nine years in exile. What I read in the records accorded with everything Alethea had said. Henry Monboddo was listed as a dealer of fine books and paintings who had been Keeper of the Royal Library in St. James's Palace for five years during the reign of Charles I. There were no clues, however, as to the identity of his client, of whoever was so desperate to get his hands on The Labyrinth of the World. The rate-book for 1651 listed his address as Wembish Park, along with a house in Covent Garden-a house that, when visited two hours later, proved derelict. The records also mentioned an office in Cheapside that had become, I would discover, the premises of a silversmith who claimed never to have heard of anyone named Henry Monboddo.

Before leaving Whitehall Palace I had also searched the records, on a whim, for information regarding Sir Richard Overstreet. He did not rise in my estimation when I discovered that he was listed as a lawyer. But not all lawyers were necessarily scoundrels, I told myself, and Sir Richard did appear to have enjoyed a brilliant and lucrative career before he was forced into exile in 1651. He had practised privately as a conveyancer and then been appointed Solicitor-General in 1644. Later he held posts in both the Navy Office and the Foreign Office, for the latter of which he served as an envoy-extraordinary in Madrid. He had even taken part in a Royalist embassy to Rome.

Hunched over the crinkled documents, I had wondered for a moment whether Sir Richard, like so many of our gentry, was a crypto-Catholic, possibly even a spy for the Pope or the Spaniards. This was wild thinking, but I knew that in 1645 a secret embassy had travelled to Rome with the purpose of securing military assistance against Cromwell in return for the conversion of King Charles and his advisers to Roman Catholicism. Still, I had no clue whether Sir Richard's trip to Rome had been part of the same mission. Nor did these few facts, like those about Henry Monboddo, tell anything of his character, motives, or even his religion. So I had thanked the clerk for his assistance and then made my way back through the decrepit maze to the landing-stairs.

Now, picking my path through the churchyard, I saw two black-garbed mourners among the stones, a man and a woman, one on either side of the ground. The woman was veiled, the man wearing a broad-brimmed hat. I picked my way past a stand of yews to the first row of monuments, feeling conspicuous and also faintly absurd as I scanned the ground. A hundred-odd markers were pressing upwards from their hummocks of earth in odd angles and uneven rows, gapped here and there like a failed crop, their late-afternoon shadows striping the new-mown hay.

I discovered Silas Cobb's grave in the middle of the churchyard, half overgrown by the branches of a yew tree that screened it, partially at least, from the rest of the churchyard: a granite slab topped by a deep-socketed death's-head. By the time I had located it, one of the mourners had disappeared, but the other, I felt, had been watching me, his face half turned to follow my awkward progress. I decided that after he departed I would take a look at the monument before which he was standing. Then I took a deep breath and fumbled in my pocket for the key. As I did so I reread the inscription:

Hic jacet

SILAS COBB

1585-1620

Soli Deo laus et gloria in saecula

A small bouquet of hyacinths and camomile had been propped against the tablet. I was surprised by the sight. Was someone still grieving for Mr. Cobb even after the passage of forty years? His aged widow, perhaps? I was soberly reflecting that no one would be placing flowers on my grave forty years after my death-not even forty days afterwards, for that matter-when I became even more puzzled by the tablet itself. The other granite markers along the row also dated from the 1620s, but while their death's-heads were periwigged with moss and their inscriptions partly eroded, Silas Cobb's tablet looked new and out of place. Certainly the granite did not look forty years old.

I knelt beside the lozenge and, with the yew's soft needles plucking at my hair, placed my own flowers against the tablet. The lozenge was partly overgrown with nettles, which I cleared away with the tip of my thorn-stick before slipping my fingers underneath. The loam beneath was dark and warm and smelled of decayed tubers. A few handfuls had been scooped aside and a strongbox cached inside the hollow. I felt like a schoolboy exhuming a spurious treasure buried the previous autumn. When I fitted the key into the lock the catch sprang open with a startlingly loud report. I held my breath and looked over my shoulder, through the wind-quivering branches of the yew. The second mourner had departed.

I found no message from Alethea inside the box, so left behind a slip of paper confirming my intention to travel to Wembish Park at her convenience, as agreed. Then I locked the strongbox, replaced it, slid the lozenge back into place, and began creeping through the ranks of weathered granite. I was surprised that Alethea with her obsession with secrecy had not insisted upon a code or an invisible ink.

The windows of the church were dark by now, and Hart Street for the moment looked deserted of traffic. I was moving in the opposite direction, diagonally through the churchyard, southeast towards Seething Lane, which also looked deserted. Much as I detest venturing abroad in daylight, amid the crowds and the stink, at night London is even worse. I had an unpleasant sensation between my shoulder-blades, as if some great bird had perched there and was slowly champing its beak and unfolding a pair of sooty wings. There was something sinister and dangerous about the way the houses in Seething Lane, beyond the gate, seemed to crouch together in the darkness. Beside them reared the great dark hulk of the Navy Office.

I stopped beside a grave to peer at the enormous structure rising above the screen of yew trees. Remembering the patent for Sir Ambrose's Orinoco expedition as well as the scrap of canvas in the Golden Horn, the supposed main topsail of the Britomart, I wondered if I should return the following day to make some enquiries. Perhaps the log for the Philip Sidney still existed, or possibly there was someone in the Navy Office who could tell me about his involvement with Sir Walter Raleigh's voyage to Guiana. I wondered idly if it was possible that a connection existed, however tenuous, between Raleigh's voyage and The Labyrinth of the World. After all, Alethea claimed that Monboddo had been the artistic agent for the Duke of Buckingham, and I knew that Buckingham, the Lord High Admiral, had supported Raleigh's enterprise in Guiana. I also remembered that the other books missing from Pontifex Hall-one of which had been Raleigh's Discoverie of the large, rich, and beautifull Empire of Guiana-all dealt in one way or another with the exploration of Spanish America. Or was I clutching at straws?

Of course, I already knew about Raleigh's ill-starred expedition. As an apprentice in Mr. Smallpace's shop I had gobbled up accounts of the voyages of Raleigh and Drake as if they were adventure stories. I still stocked a number of books about Raleigh's Orinoco expedition, including first-hand narratives written by men who had sailed in the Destiny or in the other ships in the fleet. I had sifted quickly through them in the days after my return from Pontifex Hall, though none mentioned either the Philip Sidney or Sir Ambrose Plessington.

But what a story Raleigh's voyage makes! A daring sea adventurer spends thirteen years in gaol for conspiring against a crafty old king, who then releases him on condition that he fills the ever-dwindling royal coffers by finding a mythical gold mine across the ocean, thousands of miles distant in the middle of an ill-explored land filled with enemy soldiers. It might have come from the tongue of Homer or the pen of Shakespeare-the flawed hero, the treacherous king, the slippery advisers, the impossible task, the tragic death, all mingled into a wintry world of treachery and greed. I used to think I could glimpse, in Raleigh, the after-image of Jason as he is sent by the usurper Pelias to recover the Golden Fleece, or Bellerophon when he journeys to Lycia to fight the Chimaera after angering the treacherous Proetus-Bellerophon who, like Raleigh with his fatal charter, bears a warrant demanding his death. Who says we no longer live in an age of heroes?

The main events of Raleigh's sad tale are known well enough. He sailed from London with his fleet in April 1617, leaving behind squabbling factions and powerful enemies. His scheme was supported by King James's new favourite, Sir George Villiers-later to become the Duke of Buckingham-as well as the anti-Spanish faction at court, the so-called War Party led by the Earl of Pembroke and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Pembroke and the Archbishop had thrust forward young Villiers to topple the reigning favourite, Somerset, and to counter the pro-Spanish faction supporting him. Yet not even Villiers's blandishments could tempt the King to forsake his pro-Spanish policy. So while Raleigh's instructions were to locate the gold mine, his charter also stipulated that he must not attack any Spanish ships or settlements. If he violated these conditions, the Spanish ambassador in London, Count Gondomar-the most powerful of his enemies-would claim his head, as provided for in the charter.

Of course, things immediately went wrong. Two days into the voyage, while Land's End was still in sight, one of the fourteen ships sank in a gale, taking with her a crew of sixty men. When the fleet reached the mouth of the Orinoco, eight miserable months later, after storms and scurvy, Raleigh was too ill to continue and remained with the Destiny in Trinidad. It was then the dry season, a time when the level of the Orinoco falls and navigation becomes more hazardous even than usual. But Raleigh could not wait, and five ships were chosen to ascend the river. It was thought that the mine would be found hundreds of miles inland, near the elusive El Dorado, 'the Golden One', a city that was said to stand in the middle of a lake. The legend of this city and its unfathomable riches had been repeated by all of the Spanish chroniclers, and for seventy years the conquistadores, those knights-errant of the jungle, had navigated the Orinoco and its tributaries in search of it. But neither El Dorado nor its mines of gold had ever been seen except, supposedly, by a man named Juan Martín de Albujar, a fugitive from Maraver de Silva's 1566 expedition, an expedition for which, unusually, no chronicle exists.

Nor was the mine discovered by Raleigh's men. Instead, the fleet blundered upon the humbler town of San Tomás, a Spanish garrison of a hundred bamboo huts, a mud-walled church and a couple of rusty cannons, all clinging to the bank of the Orinoco. Then, disaster struck. Shots were exchanged, men died, the quest was abandoned, the fleet sailed into the Boca de la Sierpe-the 'serpent's mouth'-and rapidly dispersed. Raleigh and his men sailed home in disgrace. Raleigh feigned illness, then madness, then attempted to escape to France. But he was captured and thrown back inside his old rooms in the Bloody Tower. An inquiry into the disastrous affair was undertaken by Sir Francis Bacon. In October 1618, at the behest of Gondomar, Raleigh was beheaded. The official reason was treason against King James.

But I was uncertain how Sir Ambrose Plessington fitted into this tragic fable. Had the Philip Sidney been one of the ships in Raleigh's doomed fleet? If so, what were the connections between The Labyrinth of the World, Henry Monboddo and a long-ago voyage into the Guianan jungle?

I squinted at the Navy Office for a while longer, doubtful, all of a sudden, that it would hold an answer. Then I turned round and made my way to the spot where the second mourner had stood. It was a grave with a tiny granite pillar under the sprawling marquee of a cypress whose branches overhung Seething Lane. I had been expecting a fresh mound of earth, strewn with bouquets of flowers, but the stone was cracked, the grave untended and the inscription all but unreadable. A root of the cypress was erupting through the soil, looking eerily like a protrudent knee. I bent warily forward and strained my eyes. The stone seemed to commemorate an infant named Smethwick-the first name was illegible-who had died in the third quarter of the last century. It seemed unlikely that anyone could still be mourning the child, so I decided I was mistaken about the location of the grave-and, no doubt, about the mourner's attentions as well. Besides, had I not been behaving suspiciously, slipping into the churchyard at dusk and then lurching about like a ghoul? All sorts of dreadful things happened in churchyards in those days. He probably took me for a 'resurrection man', one of those grave-robbers who excavates fresh corpses to sell to London's apprentice barber-surgeons and medical students. At least, that was the reassurance I made to myself as I began walking back towards the balefully staring skulls, resisting the urge to run and feeling the pair of talons sinking ever deeper into the quivering flesh of my back.

I returned home on foot. Later I would wonder what might have happened if I had hired a hack and arrived back at Nonsuch House five minutes earlier. But there were no hacks to be found, and so I began stumping homeward, reaching the bridge some twenty minutes later. Everything seemed as usual as I approached Nonsuch House, but outside an apothecary's closed-up shop I spotted Monk in the middle of the carriageway, reeling towards me, his face dazed and white. Beyond, the green door to Nonsuch Books stood partly open and was hanging lopsidedly in its frame.

'Mr. Inchbold-!'

A number of onlookers were grouped about the front of the shop like the audience for a raree-show, poised between walking and standing, murmuring in subdued speculation in the way they do when a cart-horse kicks a stranger's child or drops dead in the street. Monk had staggered towards me and now began clutching at my sleeve and stuttering something unintelligible.

I pushed past him and tugged sharply on the doorknob. The door teetered downwards, even more awry now, hinges screaming in pain. The top hinges, that is, for the bottom ones were bent and dangled lopsidedly in the splintered frame. The whole thing threatened to come loose in my hand. But I had widened the aperture a few more inches-enough to step inside, my throat choking with fear and anger.

My feet skidded over something, and when my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw how my books-every last one of them, it seemed-had been stripped from the shelves and scattered across every inch of the floor. Hundreds of them lay clustered together in haphazard cairns as if awaiting a bonfire: bindings snapped, covers awkwardly tented or flung open like wings, exposed pages lop-eared and riffling in the light breeze from the destroyed door. There was the smell of dust, hide, fustiness-of old, outworn things whose familiar, agreeable fug had somehow been strengthened as if through decoction, a pervasive but invisible cloud that swirled like cannon smoke above the delicate ruins.

I righted myself and staggered ankle-deep towards the counter, stumbling about in a full circle, unable to comprehend the compass of this destruction, let alone its purpose. I sank to my knees in the centre of the shop, only vaguely aware of Monk behind me. My precious refuge, my haven from the turmoil of the world-all of it was gone, destroyed. My chest began to heave like a child's. I remember a pair of hands on my shoulders but not whose they were or what happened next.

Indeed, of the next few hours I remember little: only a kind of dazed underwater progress through the shop, with Monk and I forlornly surveying the damage, picking up books and sorting through them, commiserating over the destruction of a volume or, more rarely, soberly celebrating the unlikely preservation of another. My walnut shelves, I discovered, had also been destroyed-ripped from the walls and flung to the floor, where they lay criss-crossed at rakish angles to one another and splintered like rigging after a tempest. Later I would decide that it must have taken an army to perform such desecrations, but only three men had done it, Monk told me, and it had probably taken them just five minutes. They took to their heels when, after hearing the noise, he crept down the turnpike stair and peered into the shop. They appeared to be looking for something, he said, because they had been snatching each book from the shelf, frantically riffling through it, then tossing it aside before moving on to the next one. But sometimes one of them would stick out an arm and sweep an entire shelf on to the floor, or else rip the shelf itself from its brackets, all without so much as looking at a single one of the books.

'Scared me good and proper,' he finished, eyes bright and nervous at the recollection, 'and I don't mind tellin' you.'

'Who do you suppose they were, Monk? The searchers?'

'The searchers, sir?'

It was close to midnight by this point. We were sitting at the counter, in our usual positions, master and apprentice, as if these familiar poses might bring back something of the shop's shattered equilibrium. Dozens of half-dismembered books still littered the floor, but we had managed to put up some of the shelves and replace the few of their books that would not require rebinding.

'The Secretary of State's henchmen,' I prompted him. 'You remember.'

He looked even more alarmed now. He knew a little about these myrmidons since two years earlier John Thurloe, the Secretary of State at the time, despatched them on their rounds of Little Britain and London Bridge. They paid us a visit only days after a pregnant woman had arrived in Nonsuch Books following what she said was an arduous journey by barge from Oxford. As Monk watched, frightened and incredulous, she gave birth on the counter to triplets-three copies of Sexby's Killing No Murder, a treatise calling for the death of Cromwell. The searchers had come pounding on the door two nights later. Poor Monk had been roused from his bed when a lantern was thrust in his face and a loud voice demanded that he identify himself. He had not forgotten the episode.

'No… not the searchers,' he replied. 'Foreigners.'

'Foreigners?'

'Yes. French. Maybe Turkish. Dark-skinned, they were, sir. The dead spit of pirates, all dressed in black. One of 'em had a gold earring. Another a knife,' he added soberly.

'Did they say anything?'

'Not a word.'

'Did they take anything with them? Any books?'

'No, sir.' He shook his head. 'Not so I saw.'

'No. Nothing seems to be missing, does it?' He shook his head again. So far all of the volumes seemed to be accounted for, though the next day I would double-check my catalogue. 'Which way did they go?'

'Into Southwark. I ran after them, but they was quicker 'n what I am.' He dropped his eyes to the counter. His hands were fidgeting in his lap.

'I understand. Thank you, Monk,' I told him. 'You did well.'

I leaned back in the chair, closing my eyes and trying to think. For a moment I almost allowed myself to believe the desecration had nothing to do with anything else that had happened these past few days. Or perhaps they had been searchers after all. Perhaps the new Secretary of State employed Frenchmen to do his dirty work. But what would they have been looking for? Possibly the new King was going to be as troublesome to booksellers as Cromwell. I decided that tomorrow I would put a few questions about in Little Britain and Paternoster Row. Someone else might have had visitors as well.

I opened my eyes to find Monk watching me closely. I tried to offer a reassuring smile. 'Yes, you did well,' I repeated. 'Very well. But I fear our work tonight is not yet finished.'

'Oh?'

I nodded at the door, which was slumped awkwardly on its hinges. The carriageway was visible beyond. Every few minutes a passer-by would peer curiously inside before quickly retracting his head and hurrying away.

'Tomorrow I shall find us a joiner and a locksmith,' I said. 'But for tonight…'

I reached into the counter and withdrew a pistol. Monk's eyes widened at the sight. It was an evil-looking weapon, heavy and awkward, a huge firelock I had purchased many years earlier from a blind, one-legged Civil War veteran who had taken to begging outside my shop. I had no idea if the flint and frizzen worked, or even how much priming powder to sprinkle into the pan. The old veteran had given me a lesson, but I had never expected to use the thing and had purchased it purely to relieve his misery.

'Tonight we shall take shifts guarding the shop,' I told him. 'Just in case someone should be tempted to avail himself of our stock.' I placed the dreadful instrument on the counter between us. 'Or in case our friends should wish to return.'

Monk's eyes grew even wider at these unpleasant prospects, so I attempted another reassuring smile, which came out as a pained grimace.

'Go to bed,' I told him gently. 'I shall wake you in two hours.'

But in the end I sat up the entire night by myself. I started the task of rebinding a few of the books, though every ten minutes I would leave my sewing-frame and creep to the door to peer on to the carriageway for signs of life, ears cocked to catch the sound of stealthy footsteps hurrying away. But there was no one about now except the watchman, an arthritic old fellow who hardly inspired confidence. He was half blind, I noticed. One of his eyes was filmed over like that of a dead fish, while the other rolled at me like that of the severed head as he advised me to repair my door in case I should offer a temptation too powerful for some poor soul to withstand. Then he shambled away with his lantern swinging.

Only after dawn broke in the east did I abandon my sewing-frame and wake Monk. And only as I trudged upstairs to bed did I allow myself to think about the three black-clad assassins who had murdered Lord Marchamont in Paris. Had they been the same men? It seemed possible-yet it made no sense. If the killers were agents of Henry Monboddo, as Alethea suspected, and if Monboddo now possessed the parchment, as I had discovered, then what could they have been searching for among my shelves? Possibly they were in the employ of someone else, even Cardinal Mazarin himself. I clambered into bed and tried to sleep. There were many things, I told myself, that I had yet to learn.

I lay on my side for several hours, exhausted but sleepless, staring at the wall, listening to the knocking of the death-watch beetles inside it. Suddenly the familiar sound was menacing and portentous, as if the insects were consuming the beams and supports of the modest life I had built for myself. As if Nonsuch House were about to collapse and tumble me head over heels into the current rushing past sixty feet below.

Chapter Ten

From the freshes of the Elbe at Cuxhaven the Bellerophon shaped a course westward along the Frisian Islands, past chains of snow-clad saltings and dykes, past sand-spits and moles projecting like ribs into the grey waters of the sea. She sailed in soundings, ten fathoms of water, for almost a full day until, setting a course southwest by south, she left the Dutch coast at dawn on the second day and, putting on more sail, holding a close wind, turned her bows towards England. Captain Quilter, peering through his spyglass, sighted the coast from the catwalk two hours later. All was going to plan. He lowered the glass and returned it to the pocket of his tarpaulin. In eight more hours, if all went well, they would reach the Nore and, riding at anchor, the Albatross.

But from that point in the voyage nothing would go well. Later, taking stock of the disaster, Captain Quilter would blame not only his own avarice-his greed for the two thousand Reichsthalers-but, even more, the ignorance of his crewmen. Not ignorance of their jobs, because he recruited only the most experienced and capable hands, but the pristine ignorance that bred the worst superstitions in men exposed to the cruelty of the elements. Yes, sailors were a superstitious lot, there was no avoiding the fact. Quilter had seen them at their strange rituals in the Golden Grapes, purchasing gruesome good-luck charms-the cauls of newborn children-from the old crones plying the taverns beside the port. The men believed with some bizarrely misplaced faith that one of these shrivelled membranes (or what Quilter's suspicions told him were in fact the bladders of pigs) would save them from death by drowning. And one day when the Bellerophon was becalmed in Dvina Bay he had caught a furtive party muttering a chant and then tossing a broomstick over the poop-rail, as if an action as petty as this, and not (as every educated man knew) the movement of the stars in the heavens, or the rotation of the earth, or the conjunction of planets, or an eclipse, or the rising of Orion or Arcturus, or a half-dozen other celestial rituals that were beyond the feeble arc of human endeavour, might cause a change in a force as powerful and unpredictable as the wind!

Then, of course, there had been the church bells. Their ghostly peals were heard on the upper deck as the Bellerophon slid past Cuxhaven-a sure sign, supposedly, that the ship and her crew would come to grief, for there was no omen so terrifying to a sailor as the sound of church bells at sea. Within a day the ship's surgeon had clambered up from the cockpit to report that three of the crewmen had come down with a fever. Two turns of the sandglass later came the news that another handful of men had fallen ill, but by then Captain Quilter had more serious dangers to worry about.

What, he later wondered, had caused the wind to blow this time, to twitch the dog-vane at the end of its line on the gunwale as the sun climbed overhead at the end of the morning watch? No notice was paid to it, however, for the sky was bright and clear, the wind steady, and most of the crewmen-those who hadn't yet taken ill-squatted on coiled lanyards in the messes below, peering at one another over hands of cards. But slowly a storm front appeared on the eastern horizon, implacable and bruise-black, and began edging its way across the sky like the shadow of an approaching giant. The deck-beams creaked noisily and water poured through the scuttles. Then the first of the spume broke over the bows and across the fo'c'sle deck, followed by stinging pellets of rain. Seconds later the ladders and decks were resounding with the boots of crewmen rushing to their stations. The midshipmen were already on their hands and knees on the waist, prising open the scuppers, while others who stuck their heads through the hatches were sent scrambling up the flapping ratlines. As they hastily struggled to reef the canvas-Pinchbeck was shouting orders at them from below-the first antlers of lightning split the sky.

The luck that saved the crew from the Scylla of the Dvina and the Charybdis of the White Sea had, it seemed, now deserted them. Pinchbeck clung with both hands to the mainmast, bellowing himself hoarse, until a heavy wave broke amidships and sent him staggering sideways like a drunken brawler. He righted himself only to be knocked down a second later as the stern plunged sickeningly downward and frigid water cascaded across the poop deck. Bodies scattered aft from the waist, knocked down like skittles. Then the stem dipped, the bowsprit sliced the water, and the bodies tumbled backwards. The familiar rituals turned to panic as a dozen desperate cries followed them across the decks. 'Helm astarboard!' 'Belay there!' 'Left full rudder!' Three men had lashed themselves to the tiller, which was rearing and tossing them about like an unbroken horse, its rope burning their hands and breaking one of their wrists. 'Hard alee!' 'Steady so!' And then, as one of the topmen sped spreadeagled through the air, his scream lost in the gale: 'Man overboard!'

But there was nothing to be done except to strike the sails, and pray. From the leeward side of the lurching quarterdeck, Captain Quilter watched in helpless anger as the sky rapidly unscrolled itself above the heads of the struggling topmen, above the tops of the masts that, as the sheets of rain thickened, were almost lost to view. He regarded the storm as a personal affront, as impertinent and enraging as the attack of a Spanish picaroon. There had been no warnings beforehand, not the treble ring round the moon at sunrise that morning, nor a halo round Venus at sunset the night before, nor even the flocks of petrels circling the ship a half-hour earlier-none of those things that, in Quilter's long experience, always presaged violent turns of weather. The elements were not playing fair.

Now, with the deck awash, he slipped on a board, fell heavily on to his backside, then was struck on the ankle by a rogue bucket. He pulled himself upright and, cursing again, hurled the bucket overboard. A sodden chart wrapped itself round his head before he could claw it away. It flapped over the gunwale like a mad seagull, and through the rain he suddenly glimpsed the coast looming to leeward-a hazard now more than a refuge. To survive the ice of Archangel and Hammerfest, he thought grimly, only to be dashed to pieces on your own shore!

And it appeared that the Bellerophon and her crew would not be the only ones dashed to bits. Two bowshots astern, on their starboard quarter, another ship was wallowing and plunging in the troughs, showing two distress lights in her main topgallant. A minute later she fired off a piece of ordnance, a brief spark and puff of smoke, barely audible above the rain and wind. Her bowsprit and foremast went soon afterwards, the latter struck, Quilter saw, by a bolt of lightning that knocked two of her hands into the sea. He had steadied himself long enough to raise his glass, and now he could see the Star of Lübeck, another merchantman sailing from Hamburg to London. Her ballast had shifted, or else she was hulled and making water-tons of it-for she was listing badly to port, with her masts bent at a low angle to the heaving water. He only hoped she would keep a decent offing and not drift any closer towards the Bellerophon and take both of them down…

For the next two hours the Star of Lübeck faded rather than loomed, however. Only after the worst of the storm had spent itself-at which point, perversely, the sun lowered pillars of light from between a parting in the clouds-did she reappear. By then the Bellerophon was scudding under bare poles and listing badly to starboard. The damage was much worse, Quilter knew, than in the White Sea. The sails were in rags and the tiller was cracked. The mizzen topgallant lay slantwise across on the poop deck, where it had skewered two deckhands and fractured the skull of a third. Who knew how many men had been lost overboard. Worst of all, the keel had dragged across the edge of a sandbar and then struck a rock with a deafening crack. She was probably bilged and filling with water at this very minute, giving them only minutes to plug the leak with a sail or a hawsebag. Something had to be done, he knew, or the rest of them would be lost too, turned into firewood and fishbait along the shore, which was rearing ever closer.

He made his way through the nearest hatch, beneath which, in the main and then the middle deck, the boards were slippery with provisions spilled from their casks and cupboards. The floors tilted at 45-degree angles; it was like balancing on the slope of a pitched roof. Soon the air thickened with a foul stench, and he realised, too late, how the pisspots had evacuated on to the floor. Then on the gundeck the smell grew even worse.

'The bilges, Captain.'

He had been joined by Pinchbeck, who was holding a begrimed handkerchief over his nose. The two of them were picking their way carefully across the littered boards. Water had surged through the gunports, and the floor, a litter of quoins and soaked cartridges, was a half-inch deep. Quilter could hear the cries of the sick men in the cockpit.

'Stirred up like a soup, I should think,' the bo'sun added in a muffled voice.

'Never mind that,' Quilter snapped. 'Get a team of men down to the pumps. And fetch some canvas from the sail locker. Also a hawsebag, if you can lay your hands on one. If there's a leak it'll have to be fothered fast or we're drowned.' The bo'sun shot him an alarmed look. Quilter waved an impatient arm. 'Go on-quickly now! And find every man you can spare,' he called after Pinchbeck's retreating figure, 'and send him to the hold. The cargo will have to be shifted!'

Quilter clambered down the next ladder alone. The steerage and the wardroom both were empty, their jungles of hammocks dangling limply from the beams. When he reached the orlop deck he was surprised to see that it, too, was deserted. He had been expecting to find his three mysterious passengers here-frightened out of their wits, no doubt-but they were nowhere in sight. So far they had kept to themselves; not once had he seen them on the upper decks. Greengills, he had reckoned to himself with some amusement a few hours earlier. But now he saw that their cabins were empty.

Not until he reached the ladder into the hold did he hear any signs of life. The stink from the bilges was stronger now, bile rose in his gullet as he descended the ladder. Voices from below. There seemed to be some sort of dispute in progress. He snatched one of the oil-lamps swaying from a deck-beam and picked his way down the ladder one-handed.

The cargo deck had suffered the worst of all. The trembling light showed Quilter a promiscuous litter of pelts among the scattered dunnage and crates, several of which had been upturned against the bulkheads. Other crates had broken apart and were sliding back and forth with the motions of the ship. He took a few faltering steps, straining to hear the voices at the other end of the hold, not wishing to think about the damage done to his furs. The way was blocked by a couple of crates, out of which a half-dozen books were spilling.

Books? He gave them a kick to clear his path, then hoisted the lantern and picked his way forward, feeling water seep through his shoes. Why should the firm of Crabtree & Crookes have been sending books to England? And why such secrecy about them? He had carried contraband a few times before, but never had a book crossed through his lading-ports. He peered at the scattered volumes in the wavering light. A few had already been damaged by the water, he saw. Their pages, sodden and swollen, looked like the pleats of a lace ruff.

He raised his eyes. Perhaps a dozen shapes were visible at the far end of the hold, their shadows quaking and darting across the dubbed planks.

'You there! What's happening?'

No one turned. He picked his way through the obstacle course towards them. More books. As he searched for footholds on the deck he felt his gut tighten. Was this some mutinous congregation? If so, Quilter had snuffed out more than a few kindle-coals of mutiny in his time aboard the Bellerophon.

'Get to work,' he growled at the motionless shapes. We've been bilged. Do you not hear me? The load must be shifted. The pumps must be rigged. Quickly now! Before we sink!'

Still no one moved. Then he saw a sword glint in the lamplight and heard a voice.

'Stand back, I say!'

It was a moment before Quilter realised that the command was not directed at him. The wall of figures shifted a few steps backwards amid unintelligible murmurs of protest. Quilter was close enough to see their faces in the arc of light: the three strangers had been backed up against the wall by a good ten of his crewmen. One of the strangers, the larger of the two men, had raised his sword. What sort of strange business was this? He took another step forward, gripping the edge of a bulkhead, but then recoiled with a gasp. What in the name of-?

His foot froze in mid-air. Beneath his shoe, spilling from its splintered crate, was what appeared to be an enormous jawbone, one the size of a crossbow, with a dozen teeth glowing wickedly in the lamplight. Quilter lowered the lantern, blinking in confused alarm. Where the devil had that come from? He stepped over it only to recoil again, for beside the jawbone lay an even more startling sight, the corpse of a two-headed goat, complete with four horns. The creature was emerging from the wreckage of a shattered jar whose liquid, puddled on the floor, gave off a worse stench than the bilges. What, in the holy name of God…?

Soon other strange creatures appeared, hideous monsters that his disbelieving memory would construct only much later and then weave into his nightmares for years to come. They spilled from their crates as he lurched towards them, their coils and tentacles askew, their mouths toothsome and horribly leering. Still more were represented not in the flesh but by carvings-grotesque and menacing creatures with two heads and dozens of flailing limbs-or in an enormous book whose pages were riffling back and forth with each heave of the ship. As he passed the spreadeagled volume, Quilter caught sight of a demon with horns the size of a bull's raping a young maiden with its enormous black pizzle. Then, as the ship rolled, a hag with shrivelled breasts biting the neck of a naked figure, a man, prostrate beneath her. He stared at the page, aghast, feeling his nape prickle under his soaked tarpaulin. Another roll. The demon reappeared.

But worst of all these sights by far-the image that Captain Quilter would carry with him through his tormenting dreams and into his grave-was a corpse-like creature that lay supine in one of the boxes nearest the wall, a man with a mask for a face whose stiffened limbs were jerking and thrashing as if the brute were attempting to rise from its coffin. Even the doll-like eyes were rolling frantically and the head was twitching and cocking like that of a curious bird. Several of the midshipmen were staring back with expressions of stupefied wonder, one of them was crossing himself repeatedly as he muttered a prayer under his breath. Quilter stood rooted to the timbers as if spell-cast. Why, even the grinning lips were moving as if the creature were attempting to speak, to deliver some ghastly threat!

'Ah! Captain! You choose to join us at last.'

The voice startled Quilter to life. He raised his eyes from the creature's mad gesticulations to see the man with the sword bow and then, straightening, inscribe a few initials in the air with the point of his weapon. The ring of crewmen edged a skittish step backwards.

'Do please call off your men, won't you, Captain? Otherwise I shall be obliged to cut their throats.'

'Devil,' sneered one of the midshipmen, Rowley, a veteran dockside brawler. He had armed himself, Quilter saw, with a bodkin from the sail-locker. What was happening? Several of the others were also gripping improvised weapons-priming irons, a serpentine, even a couple of broomsticks-that they now raised in menace like a pitchfork army of angry villagers cornering the local vampire. Rowley took a step forward. 'Have you not killed enough men already?'

'I assure you I have done nothing of the sort.'

'Sorcerer!' someone piped up from the back of the pack. The powder-monkey. 'Murderer!'

'How very like a play,' retorted the stranger with a kindly smile, whetting his blade on the fetid air. 'But do you think we might perform it later? In another place? You heard the Captain. Our ship is-'

Rowley interrupted, lunging forward with a guttural cry, bodkin out-thrust. But the ship chose that second to lurch wildly to starboard as more water flooded into the bilges. The crewmen tottered sideways into the crates and the luckless midshipman, unbalanced by his leap, fell to one knee, his bodkin uselessly plying the empty air. When he tried to rise he discovered the tip of the blade at his collarbone.

'Bastard,' he breathed through gritted teeth, leaning backwards on his haunches. The point followed him, pressing deeper, breaking the skin. A bead of dark blood appeared and then scuttled into his collar. 'Devil. Murderer!'

'Rowley!' Quilter was now pushing his way through the throng. 'For God's sake, we've been bilged.' He was trying to push them away from the wall, away from the backed-up trio. What was the matter with everyone? Could they not hear the roar of the water in the bilges? The breach was only a few feet below them, the inrushing sea deafening as rolls of thunder. Any second now the water would surge into the hold and the Bellerophon would sink like a stone. 'Do you not hear me? The cargo must be shifted! Now! Before we sink!'

Still no one moved. Then the ship gave a laborious shudder and heave as the keel scraped over a sandbar and tipped violently to starboard. The crewmen slipped across the cluttered deck and tumbled like lovers into each other's arms. Quilter, too, lost his balance and, before he could right himself, felt someone fall and brush against his leg. He turned to help but, saw a pair of sightless eyes goggling at him from inside a leering mask. The creature, dislodged from its coffin, had rolled to the floor. He kicked it in the belly, sending it into ever more frenzied throes. When he turned round he saw someone else-Rowley-also contorting on the deck.

It had all happened very fast. The midshipman had seized his chance a second earlier, lunging forward with a cry, the bodkin aimed at the stranger's belly. But his enemy was too quick for him. As his two companions dived backwards the man took a half step sideways and then with a few lazy flicks of his wrist inscribed another set of initials, this time in red across the midshipman's Adam's apple. Rowley coughed as if choking on a fishbone, spattering the front of his killer's coat with flecks of blood. Then he dropped the bodkin and toppled to the wet boards, where he lay twitching, pawing feebly at his throat and rolling his glazed eyes-the very twin of the hideous gargoyle thrashing and quivering only a few feet away.

Quilter was picking himself up from the floor, watching as the man stood over Rowley, cleaning the blade of his weapon and frowning at the blood on his coat as if wondering whence it had come. His companions still cowered in his shadow, while Rowley lay motionless, a vermilion puddle enlarging about his head.

'Well? Any other arguments?'

The small crowd had taken a step backwards. The man was fitting the sword carefully into his belt. The sound from below was growing louder, like the growl of a beast clambering up from the bilges, fangs flecked and eyes aglow.

'No? Then I propose that we assist the Captain.'

Quilter was standing shakily erect by now, his incredulous gaze travelling from the weltered corpse to the figure standing over it. For the first time he forgot the in-rushing water, the fact that in less than a quarter of an hour all of them would be crushed to death or drowned.

'Assist-?' He was panting with exertion and rage. 'Who the devil do you-'

But no sooner had he opened his mouth than the deck teetered sideways a third time. Rowley rolled with the motion, flinging one limp arm through the air before flopping on to his back as if he too had been inspired by the malevolent sorcery of the man still straddling him. The bewildered sailors stumbled another pace backwards. Then the first of the water gurgled into the hold.

The precise nature of the dispute below decks Quilter learned only later, though he had guessed much of it already. It seemed that the men, seeing the books and specimens-these devil's relics, as Quilter was to think of them-had blamed Sir Ambrose Plessington (as the man later introduced himself) not only for the storm but also for the sudden attacks of fever. How else could these tragic fluctuations of fortune be explained except as the judgement of the Almighty on the devilish books and monsters in their midst? And how else could they be diverted, and the ship saved, except by tossing the offending crates overboard?

Sir Ambrose had taken exception to this particular line of reasoning. He claimed that the men were looting the crates, though Captain Quilter failed to understand why anyone-even someone who kept in his locker the caul of a newborn child-should wish to avail himself of those grisly treasures. But in the end he supported the claims of his passenger, ordering that the ninety-nine boxes stay in the hold. They would yet provide ballast for the ship if moved-but quickly, quickly-to the port side.

So for the next half an hour, as the noxious water crept steadily across the deck of the hold and collected foot-deep in the corners, a team of men laboured to shift the crates to higher ground. They were resealed after their gruesome contents had been replaced-a horrifying task, one before which even the boldest of sailors queasily shrank-and then carried to the port side, stacked on pallets, lashed tightly together and packed with shattered timbers and other bits of dunnage scavenged from the deck. Another team of men was assigned the task of cutting scuttles through the decks so that a third team with canvas buckets at the ready could begin the job of bailing. But all of these frantic efforts were for naught, Quilter realised soon after he and the other half of the crew had scrambled up the ladders to the fo'c'sle, for the Bellerophon was listing as badly as ever. It was only a matter of time, a few minutes at most, before she went down, cargo and all.

The rain had ceased at last, but the northeaster was blowing as hard as ever. Humpbacked waves were rushing at the ship with their white scythes of foam. Pinchbeck and a handful of men were gathered on the fo'c'sle deck, attempting to stanch a leak in the starboard bow. Two of the hands were plunging a canvas-wrapped basket into the water near the hole, using a long pole, hoping to get the basket close enough to the breach for the rope-yams inside the basket to be shaken loose and drawn inside to plug the leak. Pinchbeck had already tried, without success, to pass a sail under the bows of the ship. Now the canvas was floating helplessly away from the port quarter, an enormous squid billowing its tentacles and returning to its subterranean lair. Three men had been sent to the sail-locker for another, but Quilter could see how hopeless all of it was. He could make out, a short distance away on the leeward side, an enormous sandbar, the Margate Hook, half-exposed by the ebbing tide. There was no hope now, he realised. The ship would break apart on the reef by the time the men returned.

'Not nearly enough water, Captain,' the bo'sun screamed over the howls of the wind as the basket was thrust below the water for the tenth time. 'Low tide! Barely four fathoms! We've run aground! Couldn't get the sail to pass under her! Too much wind!' He paused to point to where the men, their hands red and stiff in the cold, were grappling with the basket. 'The basket neither!'

'Keep trying!'

Quilter held his breath as the basket disappeared from view with a muffled splash. The Bellerophon had tipped further sideways by now, her foremast, bent awry at the top, was almost touching the water. It was impossible to stand on the mountainous slope of the slick fo'c'sle deck without clutching something for support. Already the first waves had begun flooding over the starboard gunwale. The shore wavered and beckoned on the port side, dangerously close. Quilter could hear the call of gulls and thought he smelled the scent of pastureland. So was this where death would claim them, no more than a musket-shot from shore? Within sight of trees and in view of flocks of sheep calmly chewing their cuds? A few seconds later the basket bobbed uselessly to the surface to a chorus of curses.

'There's no hope, Captain!' Pinchbeck had straightened and was wiping at his brow with a bloodied handkerchief. 'I say we abandon ship.'

But Quilter had turned away and was watching with dazed detachment the clouds piling up in the east and beginning their fleet journeys inland. His fingers and cheeks were frozen, his feet now half submerged in water. The Margate Hook was even closer now, the beacon winking palely in its ancient timber lighthouse. In a minute at most they would be driven by the waves on to the reef.

'I say we abandon ship!' Pinchbeck repeated, turning to the men on the fo'c'sle when Quilter made no reply. 'Prepare the longboats!'

'There's no time,' muttered Quilter to himself as a couple of hands started aft towards the boats suspended in their hammocks. But before they could take a half-dozen steps they were interrupted by a cry from the waist.

'Captain!' One of the sailors, a topman, was gripping the foremast with one hand and pointing astern with the other. 'Look! A ship! There!'

Quilter squinted into the wind. The vessel had appeared on the starboard quarter, her bowsprit and foremasts missing, the rest of her poles bare or else wrapped in shreds of canvas. She was hopelessly adrift, with her hull riding low in the water and one of her yards pivoting like the sails of a windmill. When Quilter narrowed his eyes he was able to make out a few men on her quarterdeck, another group struggling to lower one of the longboats into the sea leaping about her waist. Even from this distance he could read the name inscribed on her bow. The Star of Lübeck. A second later he saw that the three men on the quarterdeck were dressed in black. Through the mist they looked no more than shadows.

But then the view was lost, for at that moment the hull of the Bellerophon struck the submerged edge of the Margate Hook and began breaking apart. She slid along the reef for half the length of her keel, timbers screaming and masts toppling before she reached a shuddering halt with her stem and bowsprit nosing downwards into the exposed shingle. Then she tipped agonisingly to starboard with the bowsprit snapping and the hull rupturing as its planks bowed and cracked and their treenails popped free like corks. Roiling water crashed across the splintering decks a few seconds later, and Captain Quilter and his crew were flung into the grey jaws of the sea.

Chapter Eleven

The Navy Office was casting an enormous shadow across St. Olave's when I returned to Seething Lane. The building appeared even larger in daylight, a massive structure that with its jettied storeys and tarred timbers looked like a huge frigate that had run aground in the middle of London. This impression was strengthened when I slipped past the porter's lodge and stepped through the heavy oak doors that had been unbattened a moment earlier. Dozens of clerks and messenger boys scurried about the wooden floor like deckhands making ready for a storm, and through the open door of a large office I glimpsed two or three captains conferring over a map whose corners were pinned to a table by anchor-shaped paperweights. The sight of their handsome faces raddled by tropical suns reminded me that, while I stayed home in my shop, other men were sailing to the ends of the earth, exploring new continents and navigating mysterious rivers. I felt hopelessly out of place.

Two days had passed since my shop was sacked. By the middle of the previous afternoon Nonsuch Books had been restored to normal, or nearly so. There is no disaster so great, in my experience, that it cannot be mended with a folding-stick, a gimlet and a sewing-frame. For hours on end the shop had gonged and echoed with the reports of frantic and unremitting industry. A joiner repaired the green door and restored it to its hinges, while a locksmith replaced the lock with an even stronger one. The joiner also measured and hung five new walnut shelves, which I quickly lined with books. Monk and I had collected the remainder of them from the floor and then set about refurbishing the most damaged ones. I estimated that we would be ready for business in a day or two at most.

This morning I left the shop in Monk's care and returned to Seething Lane-not to creep into St. Olave's churchyard but to make enquiries at the Navy Office, which seemed as likely a place as any to investigate Sir Ambrose's voyage to the Empire of Guiana. I had decided that I might learn more about my mysterious antagonists-perhaps even about Henry Monboddo-if I knew more about Sir Ambrose. I was hoping the log book for the Philip Sidney might still exist, or perhaps its collection of sea-cards or some other memorabilia. I also thought it might be possible to lay my hands on a copy of the Lord High Chancellor's report on Raleigh's disastrous expedition of 1617-18.

But after two hours at the Navy Office I found myself none the wiser. I was kept waiting on a bench as the bells of St. Olave's struck nine o'clock, then ten. The captains came and went with the rolled-up maps tucked under their brocaded arms. The clerks squeaked across the floorboards or bent over their desks, quills waggling briskly. It was eleven o'clock by the time I was summoned forward, only to find myself traipsing from one cramped cubby-hole to another. Not one of the clerks claimed to have heard of a captain named Sir Ambrose Plessington; nor could they think where either his ship's log or the Chancellor's report might be found. One of these manikins suggested the office's old quarters in Mincing Lane, while another plumped for the Tower, which he claimed housed some of the Chancery records. A third explained that the Navy Office was in a state of upheaval because Cromwell's old commissioners had been sacked and the new ones appointed by the King were unlikely to locate forty-year-old records, since they had not yet learned how to find their desks without getting lost.

Noon had arrived by the time I left the Navy Office, resolved that it was time to search elsewhere for Sir Ambrose. I threaded my way through the crowds to Tower Wharf, where dozens of lighters and pinnaces were gathered beside the quays like herds of patient livestock. For ten minutes I tramped up and down the wharf, bumping into dockers with their booming casks and cursing under my breath, before I finally found an empty scull and clambered inside.

On the incoming tide it took almost thirty minutes to reach Wapping. The hamlet stood a mile downstream from Tower Wharf and consisted of little more than a row or two of stilted houses that overhung the banks of the Lower Pool. From my turret-room I could sometimes see its timber-yard and the steeple of the church, but never had I set foot there. This morning, however, I hoped to find an old man named Henry Biddulph, who had lived in Wapping for the best part of seventy years. He had been Clerk of the Acts for the Navy until 1642, at which point most of the ships in the fleet had defected to Cromwell, and Biddulph, faithful to King Charles, had lost his job. Since then he had occupied himself by composing a history of the Navy from the time of Henry VIII-a gargantuan work that after eighteen years and three volumes had failed to reach the Spanish Armada of 1588. It had also failed to sell many copies, though I dutifully stocked all three volumes, since over the years Biddulph had become one of my best customers. He visited Nonsuch House several times a month, and I tracked down dozens of books for him. He knew as much about ships, I suspected, as I knew about books, and I was now hoping that he might give me some information in return.

'Captain' Biddulph (as he was known to his neighbours) appeared to be a man of mark in Wapping, though the house to which I was directed from the hamlet's lone tavern was a humble affair, a tiny timber cottage with a prolapsed roof and an overgrown garden. Two windows at the front overlooked the river, two at the rear a timber-yard from which there arose a terrific clamour of hammers and saws. But the noise failed to disturb Biddulph, who was at work on volume number four when I tapped at his door with the tip of my thorn-stick. He recognised me at once and I was quickly invited inside.

I had always liked Biddulph. He was a spry old man with merry blue eyes and a monkish fringe of white hair that stood erect over his ears like the plumicorns of an owl. And as I surveyed the clutter of his study I was pleased to see that he was a man after my own heart. All of his money appeared to have been spent on either books or shelves to hold them. Indeed, most of the volumes in their morocco bindings looked better attired than their owner, who was wearing a pair of scuffed breeches and a tattered leather jerkin. Having seen him only in Nonsuch House, in my own environs, it was strange to meet him on different ground, here in his own little nest with its yellowed engravings of ships pinned to the wall. As I watched a ginger tomcat crawl through the window and on to his lap I reflected with a pinch of sorrow how poorly I knew even my most faithful customers.

After he served us a dinner of spitchcocked eels cooked on a gridiron, we retreated to his study, where he urged me to sample a new beverage called 'rumbullion', or 'rum' for short. It was a hellish fluid that seemed to scald the gullet and cloud the brain.

'Twice as strong as brandy,' he chuckled merrily, noting my grimace. 'Sailors in the West Indies call it "Kill-Devil". It's distilled from molasses. A captain I know smuggles the odd keg back from Jamaica for me. He drops it in Wapping before his ship docks at the Legal Quays.' He chuckled again, but then his blue gaze turned serious and enquiring. 'But you have not come all the way to Wapping to drink rum, Mr. Inchbold.'

'No, indeed,' I murmured, trying to catch a breath that the drink had pummelled from my chest. 'No, Mr. Biddulph, I've come to enquire about a ship.'

'A ship?' He seemed surprised. 'Well, well. And which one might that be?'

At first neither the Philip Sidney nor her captain meant anything to Biddulph. But as I explained why I believed that the ship had sailed on Raleigh's final voyage, he proceeded to squint at the plumtree timbers overhead and chant softly under his breath, 'Plessington, Plessington,' as if the name were some sort of charm. A moment later he clapped his hands together, startling the ginger tom.

'Yes, yes, yes-now I remember. Of course, of course. Captain Plessington! How could I forget?' He had lodged a quid of tobacco in his cheek and now paused to void a stream of juice into a pot between his feet. 'It's just that these days I live in another century,' he said, pointing at his tiny work-table, on which I glimpsed among the pile of volumes a copy of Fazeby's True Report of the Destruction of the Invincible Armada. So the decisive events of 1588, I realised, had at long last been reached. 'I spend so much of my time in the reign of Queen Bess that sometimes my tired old brain gets fuddled. But Captain Plessington-yes, yes, I remember his ship.' He was nodding his head vigorously. 'Indeed I do, Mr. Inchbold. Very well.' But all at once he ceased his nodding, and his merry blue eyes narrowed once more. 'What is it you wish to know about her?'

'Anything you might tell me,' I said with a shrug. 'I believe Plessington was granted a charter to build her in 1616. I'm curious about her voyage, if in fact it ever took place.'

'Oh, it took place, Mr. Inchbold.' Biddulph was nodding again as he stroked the cat, which had draped itself across his knees. 'And you're in luck, for I can tell you about the charter. That and much more, if you so wish. You see, I was in the Navy Office at the time, assistant to the Clerk of the Acts, so I saw all of the various contracts and bill-books for the Philip Sidney.' He cocked a white eyebrow at me. 'And a strange tale they told, Mr. Inchbold.'

For a moment the woodpeckering in the timber-yard seemed to fade, and I heard the waves slopping at the supports of the house. I tried to sound casual as I fumbled with my cup. 'What strange tale might that be?'

'Well, the entire expedition was a strange one, Mr. Inchbold. As I have no doubt you're aware. But bear with me, please…' He was squinting at the timber-beams again and slowly working the cud in his bulging cheek. 'Old men must take things one step at a time. It's so easy for an old brain to confuse one thing with another.'

'By all means, Mr. Biddulph.' I could feel a pulse beating in my throat now, slowly and thickly. I reclined in the chair and tried another scorching sip of rumbullion.

But Biddulph's old brain was sharp as ever, and details were not long in coming. 'The charter was granted, so far as I remember, in the summer of 1616,' he explained after a short rumination, still studying the cracked beams. 'Just after Raleigh was released from the Tower. Construction on the ship began soon afterwards. She was built at the dockyard at Woolwich, where all of our finest warships have been built. The Harry Grace à Dieu was built there for Henry VIII, and the Royal Sovereign for the late King Charles. God rest his soul,' he added after a short pause.

'And the Philip Sidney?' I prompted when another reflective silence threatened to grow between us.

'Ah, yes. The Philip Sidney. She was built by the master shipwright, Phineas Pett. Quite a task, even for a man of Pett's abilities. Six hundred tons burden with better than a hundred guns on her decks. She was even bigger than the Destiny, which was also built at Woolwich. It was a good eight months from the day the team of horses dragged her keel timbers into place until the night when she lurched down the greased slipways and on to a spring tide. I was at the dockyards that evening. Prince Charles himself performed the honours with a goblet of wine. Scarcely more than a boy at the time. "God bless her and all who sail in her…" Well, that's a wheeze, is it not,' he muttered darkly, 'considering all that happened. I remember thinking that it was a wonder she was ever ready to sail in the first place.'

'Because of her size?'

'Not only that. You see, none of us in the Navy Office expected she would ever be finished. The whole Raleigh expedition looked like folly from the start. Sir Walter was a braggart, everyone knew that. First there was the business of founding colonies in the swamps of Virginia. Then he spent a baker's dozen years in the Tower hatching his crack-brained schemes about discovering some mine in the middle of the Guianan jungle. Sheer folly, I say. After all, the white spar from the Lion's Whelp tested at Goldsmiths' Hall by the Comptroller of the Mint-'

'Excuse me,' I interrupted. 'The Lion's Whelp…?' The name sounded familiar.

He nodded at one of the engraved ships pinned to the wall above his desk. 'Raleigh's ship on his first voyage to Guiana.'

'Ah… yes.' I remembered Raleigh's Discoverie of the large, rich, and beautifull Empire of Guiana, a slim volume that I stocked on my shelves, and one I had seen on Alethea's list of books missing from Pontifex Hall. One that had gone missing along with The Labyrinth of the World. 'Of course.'

'As I say, the white spar brought back from Guiana in 1595 showed as little as twenty ounces of gold per ton of ore. A risible amount, one hardly enough to make digging a mine in England worthwhile, let alone one thousands of miles away in the middle of the jungle. Then there was also the fact that the waters of the Orinoco had never been reliably mapped, not even by the Spaniards, even though the best engineers from the School of Navigation and Cartography in Seville had been tramping through the Guianan forests for decades. As far as the gold mines went, the Spaniards had only the word of a few tortured savages to rely upon, and everyone knows that a victim always tells his torturer whatever fantasies he wishes to hear.' He paused to take another recourse to the spittoon. 'Worst of all, though, was the Spanish Ambassador.'

'Gondomar,' I murmured.

'Precisely. Everyone knew how King James was under his influence. Gondomar ruled over him even more than did Buckingham-plain Sir George Villiers he was in those days, of course. And Gondomar was said to be most unhappy with Raleigh's charter. You see, he considered Raleigh nothing more than a privateer, like Drake. And soon there were rumours that Villiers was no longer so enthusiastic about the venture either. So it was that for eight months we expected to see Pett's carpenters throw down their tools, or else to wake up one morning to find that the Sidney had burnt to cinders on her keel blocks.'

A wind was stirring through the window, bringing with it a stink of brackish tide. I watched a herring-gull swoop past the raised sash, then a rocking mast from a pinnace tacking slowly upstream. Biddulph had fallen silent and the hammers in the timber-yard seemed louder than ever.

'But neither of those things happened,' I prompted him. 'The ship sailed.'

'Indeed she did.' Biddulph shifted the bulge of tobacco to the other cheek and shrugged. 'Greed prevailed over both fear and common sense, as it usually does. The money for fitting out the ship and paying her crew had already been raised through investors in the Royal Exchange, so fear and common sense would have made bankrupts of half of London. Ergo, in June of the year 1617 the Sidney sailed from London to join the rest of the fleet at Plymouth. I watched that too. I saw her cast off her anchors and ride down the Thames from Woolwich. I can still see the name painted in gilt on her escutcheon,' he said reflectively, then added: 'Peculiar name for a ship, is it not? That of a poet.'

'Yes,' I replied. 'Peculiar indeed.' It had already occurred to me that there might be a connection between the ship and one of the books of Hermetic philosophy I had dusted off a few days earlier, Giordano Bruno's Spaccio della bestia trionfante, an esoteric work that glorifies the religion of the ancient Egyptians. Bruno had dedicated his treatise to Sir Philip Sidney, who was not only a poet and courtier, but also a soldier who had died while fighting the Spaniards in the Low Countries.

'As I say, I watched her sail away on her maiden voyage,' Biddulph was continuing. 'But I knew it would be the last time I'd see her. I knew even then that the Sidney would never return to London.'

'Because of Gondomar?' I thought I knew this part of the story. As Raleigh left Plymouth a fleet of Spanish warships was rumoured to be setting sail from La Coruña. 'There were stories that the Spaniards aimed to intercept the fleet.'

'No, there was more than that.' He shifted about in his little chair, from which horsehair stuffing was burgeoning. 'At that time I was in a position to see the contract-books for the ship. I read everything to do not only with the fitting out and provisioning of the Sidney, but with the other ships as well. In those days I was responsible for preparing all contracts and letters to and from the Navy for signature and despatch. These documents had to do mainly with the purchase of stores and timber, with cordage and sails and so forth. A fleet of ships is like a herd of great ravening beasts, you understand. They have to be watered and provisioned, then scrubbed and groomed like prize racehorses and afterwards fitted out in canvas like fine ladies at their milliner's or dressmaker's. I also looked after all of the plans and models made by the shipwrights,' he finished, 'along with the contracts for their services.'

'And what was it that you learned from the contracts for the Philip Sidney?'

His face remained expressionless. 'I learned that her captain had no intention of voyaging up the waters of the Orinoco. You see, Mr. Inchbold, Captain Plessington's ship was different from the others in the fleet.'

I felt myself swallow. The rumbullion and the noise of the hammers were giving me a terrible headache. 'Different in what way?'

'The Sidney was a first-rate,' he explained. 'That meant she could carry a hundred guns or more. The Destiny was fitted with only thirty-six. So with such heavy cannon the Sidney needed a deep keel, of course, like most of our first-rates. That's why our warships are superior to those of the Dutch,' he added in a lower tone, as if fearful that a Dutch spy might be loitering beneath his crumbling eaves. 'That's why Cromwell was able to defeat the Dutch so soundly in '54. Their warships need shallow draughts so they can navigate their own coastal waters, and because they need shallow draughts they can't carry the same heavy cannon that we can. Ergo, we have much more firepower. With a couple of 32-pounders one of our first-rates can scatter their fleets like chaff. The Spaniards and their frigates, however… well, that's another matter entirely,' he added ruefully.

'But the Philip Sidney,' I prompted him again: 'her keel was deep?'

'Oh, indeed it was. She was a wonderful ship for slaughtering Dutchmen but a poor one for exploring rivers in Guiana. With so deep a draught she could never have navigated the waters of the Orinoco. You see, Mr. Inchbold, that was another strange thing about the voyage. I asked myself why Raleigh's fleet was due to arrive in Guiana in December or January, a time when navigation of the river is most difficult. To sail inland on the Orinoco you need a boat that draws only five or six feet of water, and in places you find that only on a flowing tide, even near the estuary. Even in the wet season. So in the month of January…'

'Yes,' I nodded, 'the dry season.' I tried to make sense of this information. 'But what if the guns were merely for protection? And what if the Philip Sidney was never intended to ascend the river in the first place? What if she was only meant to anchor off the coast? Sir Ambrose could easily have navigated the Orinoco in a shallop or another smaller boat.'

'True enough.' He shrugged his shoulders and then paused to void another jet of tobacco juice with the velocity of a Greenland whale spouting water. 'And his ship did indeed have a shallop lashed to her stern. But there were other things she did not have. You see, besides their casks of water and brined pork, the other ships were laden with all manner of digging and essaying equipment. Pickaxes, spades, barrows and trench-carts, quicksilver. The bills and contracts piled up in my office. Added to them were contracts for the soldiers and other crewmen, most of whom, it must be said, were villains who stank of either gaol or the bawdy-house, because the best seamen of London and Plymouth spurned the mission as folly.'

'But the Philip Sidney?'

Well, that was the oddest thing. There was, Biddulph explained, no essaying equipment on board the Philip Sidney, no mining or digging implements-nothing of the sort. Not that had been recorded at the Navy Office anyway. No contracts that had been sealed and stamped by the Assistant Clerk of the Acts. Only soldiers and guns, all arranged in what had seemed to the young Biddulph like the utmost secrecy. Also other items, sheaves of paper with tables and design-though he could not say what for precisely. He claimed to have no expertise in such matters. But all manner of complicated drawings and tables of mathematical calculations were involved in the construction and rigging of the Philip Sidney. A sign of those times, he claimed. Somewhere in the Navy Office was a book called Secret Inventions, Profitable and Necessary in These Days for a Defence of this Island, and withstanding of Strangers, Enemies of God's Truth and Religion. Its author, he explained, was a Scotsman named John Napier.

'You're not likely to find that volume on your shelves or anywhere else, for that matter, Mr. Inchbold. It's a confidential document. Very few copies were ever printed.'

'John Napier? I fear you've lost me. Was he not a mathematician?'

So he was, Biddulph admitted. A man of many parts, Napier was the first mathematician to make use of the decimal point, and in 1614 he made his greatest invention of all: logarithms. In those days, Biddulph explained, whole new worlds were opening up, not just in America and the South Seas, but in mathematics and astronomy as well. Men like Galileo and Kepler explored the heavens just as Magellan and Drake once explored the oceans. Through his telescope Galileo first saw the moons of Jupiter in 1610. By 1612 Kepler had counted 1,001 stars, over 200 more than Tycho Brahe. A few years earlier Kepler, a staunch Protestant, had interrupted his stargazing to calculate for Sir Walter Raleigh the most efficient method of stacking cannon-balls on a gundeck. This new science, Biddulph explained, went hand in glove with exploration and wars over both gold and religion. Mathematicians and astronomers were at the service of kings and emperors. In Scotland, fearful of another Spanish Armada, of a Catholic invasion of the island, Napier had composed complex plans for his 'secret inventions', one of which was a gigantic mirror that would use the heat of the sun to burn enemy ships in the Channel. His logarithms were soon employed as an aid to navigation by Edward Wright, a scholar at Cambridge, the author of Certaine Errors in Navigation detected and corrected.

'War had become a sophisticated art,' Biddulph explained, 'waged through mysterious numbers and complex geometries. As was navigation. Francis Bacon was designing plans for better and larger merchantmen-vessels of 1,100 tons, with keels 115 feet in length and mainsails 75 feet in width. He was also experimenting with new methods of ordering and disposing tiers of sails for quicker trips across the ocean. There were even stories that Bacon himself designed the Sidney, which might have been the case for all I know. Like most people in those days, he grovelled before Villiers. If Villiers wanted a ship, Bacon would certainly have designed one. And he sold Villiers his house in the Strand, York House, when Villiers took a fancy to it. It's where Villiers proposed to keep all of the books and paintings he had begun collecting.'

'So what are you saying?' I managed to interject. 'That the Philip Sidney was armed with… I don't know… with one of Napier's giant mirrors?'

I was beginning to wonder if Biddulph's mind was not perhaps slipping after all. But then I remembered that Edward Wright's Certaine Errors in Navigation had also been on the list of books missing from Pontifex Hall, one of the volumes taken from the library along with The Labyrinth of the World.

'Of course not,' he replied evenly. 'I am merely explaining how the Philip Sidney appeared to have been equipped for tasks other than prospecting for gold along the Orinoco.'

'Which meant…?'

'Which meant nothing much in itself, perhaps. As you say, there were plenty of dangers to be found on the high seas. It would have been folly not to carry as many cannons as possible. But to understand the true purpose of the Sidney's voyage, you must understand how things stood in those days. I mean how things stood in both the Navy Office and the country at large.'

'Her true purpose?'

Biddulph paused. His eyes had closed and for a moment I thought he might have fallen asleep. I could feel myself begin to sweat and wheeze in the close little room. I was about to ask again, but his eyes suddenly opened and with a laborious grunt he pushed himself to his feet. The sleepy cat in the crook of his arm was blinking in the jaundiced beam of sunlight that had drifted round to the window.

'Yes. Her true purpose. But shall we take a short walk, Mr. Inchbold?' He was scratching the cat's ears and peering down at me, squinting in the pillar of light. 'I shall tell you all about it as we stroll. A perambulation, you see, sometimes refreshes a tired old brain.'

The tide had turned by the time we left the cottage, and most of the traffic in the Lower Pool was now bound for points downstream. Oars hissed and slapped in the water, canvas soughed in the breeze. We walked along the wharf in the direction of Shadwell, the sun warm on our shoulders. I had to struggle with my thorn-stick to keep up with Biddulph, who was spry as a goose. He slackened his pace only to pluck primroses from the water's edge, point out the odd landmark, or else to perform gallantries for the ladies of Wapping as they lumbered home from Smithfield Market with their suppers peeping from straw baskets. We walked as far as the Limehouse Stairs, almost a full mile. Only when we were returning to the cottage, squinting into the bright sun, did he resume his story.

The story, as Biddulph told it, seemed like one of the Revenge Plays so popular in the theatres of the time, something by John Webster or Thomas Kyd. There were court intrigues, shifting alliances, plots and counterplots, blood feuds, bribes both sexual and financial, even a poisoning-all performed with grisly relish by a cast of scheming bishops, sycophantic courtiers, Spanish spies and informers, corrupt officials, assassins, and a divorced countess with a spotted reputation.

Yes, I thought as we picked our way past the salt-glazed webs of fishermen's nets spread in the sun to dry: it would have made excellent theatre. On the one side was the War Party, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, a staunch Calvinist spoiling for a war with the hated Spaniards. On the other was the Spanish Party, led by the aristocratic Howards, a family of wealthy crypto-Catholics who held sway over the King by means of their creature, a smooth-cheeked young Scotsman named Robert Carr, who had been created Earl of Somerset. Somerset was a spy for the Spaniards, turning over to Gondomar all correspondence between King James and his ambassadors. But in 1615 he had been disgraced when his new bride, a Howard, was accused of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury, who opposed the marriage of the favourite to a woman whose infamy was remarkable even for those days. At a stroke both Gondomar and the Howards found themselves deprived of influence at court.

And it was at this point that a new character capered on to the stage, Sir George Villiers, another smooth-cheeked young man, who quickly replaced the imprisoned Somerset in the lecherous old King's affections. Villiers had been fostered and promoted by Archbishop Abbott, an inveterate enemy of the Howards. Among his numerous schemes the Archbishop planned to use Villiers to replace the Earl of Nottingham-yet another Howard-as Lord High Admiral. Once the hero of '88, Nottingham was by then a doddering octogenarian, the dupe of both his unscrupulous relatives and corrupt underlings in the Navy Office, to say nothing of the fact that he still received a handsome pension from the King of Spain.

'A new regime would begin with Villiers in the Navy Office,' Biddulph explained. 'No longer would our ships be the tools of the Howards and the Spanish Party. No longer would the Navy Office be a nest of thieves and informers, rotten with corruption from top to bottom. It would have a purpose once more. New and better ships would be built, and the Navy could begin to act as it had acted in the days of King Henry.'

But the situation was urgent, because at this point more characters began appearing on stage, couriers and messengers from all across Europe. All arrived at Lambeth Palace with enciphered papers and smuggled documents that brought dire news for the War Party. Not only had a Catholic League been formed in Germany to counteract the Protestant Union, but the Union itself was falling apart. It looked to the Abbott-Pembroke faction more and more as if the truce between the Dutch and Spaniards was about to be shattered by cannon-fire, as if new wars in the Low Countries were to be fought on the scarred old battlefields where Sidney gave his life thirty years earlier-wars for which England was neither ready nor, under James and the Spanish Party, willing. Worst of all, though, was a new report from Prague, delivered by a courier in red-and-gold De Quester livery, describing how a Habsburg, Ferdinand of Styria, was soon to be elected Holy Roman Emperor with the blessing of his cousin and brother-in-law, the King of Spain. Not only would Ferdinand use Spanish troops to restore Catholic magistracy anywhere in the Empire he might see fit, he would also revoke the Letter of Majesty granted by Rudolf II to the Protestants of Bohemia.

'So to men like Abbott and Pembroke, and also to Villiers, the purpose was clear. Protestantism was wavering as never before, Mr. Inchbold, not only in Europe but in England as well. King James had lost the support of the Puritans, who no longer believed that his reign would bring about a true reformation of the Church. There was a real danger of a schism, of the Church of England breaking apart or collapsing from within-and of Rome seizing the moment of chaos to regain its lost ground. Looking back, I believe that the publication in 1611 of the Authorised Version of the Holy Bible was intended to impose conformity on English congregations, but of course it achieved the opposite effect, because suddenly every coney-cutter and wool-comber in England was convinced that he could preach the word of God. Protestantism began breaking apart, parish by parish, into numerous sects and separatist movements. So what was needed in 1617 was some masterstroke, a triumph, a daring strike at the heart of Spain's empire. Something that would unify the Protestants in their struggle against the twin powers of Rome and Madrid.'

I was stumbling along at his shoulder, attempting to follow these swirling currents and cross-currents as they flowed and receded, as they swept the Philip Sidney down the Thames to her secret destiny halfway round the world, among dense jungles and uncharted rivers, thousands of miles from competing factions and squabbling sectaries of England. I tripped on something, the fluke of a rusty anchor, and, righting myself, looked up to see London Bridge far in the distance, spread across the river behind the chimneystacks of Shadwell.

'The treasure fleet,' I whispered after a second, almost to myself.

'Exactly,' replied Biddulph. He had stopped walking and was gazing across the river towards Rotherhithe. 'Raleigh's ships were going in search of silver, not gold. That's why they were due to arrive in Tierra Firme in the dry season. Not so they could sail up the treacherous Orinoco in search of a gold mine that probably never existed in the first place, but to attack the annual silver fleet that was due to sail from Guayaquil to Seville. The whole fleet was probably worth as much as ten or twelve million pesos. Quite a sum-one that would pay for an army of mercenaries for the Palatinate or the Netherlands, or wherever else they might be needed.'

We had begun walking again, more slowly now, our hat brims pulled low against the sun. I tried to comprehend everything he now began telling me: that Raleigh's fleet was funded by desperate German princes poised on the brink of war, by Prince Maurice of Nassau, by English merchants hoping to expand their trade in Spanish America, as well as by assorted Calvinists in both England and Holland, all dreaming of a war of religion with the Spaniards, of driving Catholics from England, the Low Countries and the Empire in the same way that King Philip had driven hundreds of thousands of Moriscos from Spain only two or three years earlier.

'The capture of the fleet-or even its sinking-would also have sent ripples to every part of the Empire, every corner of the Catholic world. No Spanish fleet had been touched since the capture of the Madre de Dios in 1592. Even Drake'-he had turned round and was gesturing into the distance, across the river, with his stick, to where the Golden Hind sat in her dry-dock at Deptford-'even Drake had failed in his attempt to capture it in '96.'

Such was the bold plan, then. Led by the Philip Sidney, the fleet was to violate Raleigh's charter in the most spectacular fashion by attacking the annual convoy as it sailed from Nombre de Dios. The War Party believed that James would refuse to invoke the death clause in Raleigh's charter, not merely because Villiers and his faction would control the Navy Office as well as the court, nor even because Gondomar's influence would be waning as a result. The clause would not be invoked for the simple reason that-according to another clause in the charter-the greedy old King, the greatest spendthrift in Europe, was due to receive for his personal enjoyment one-fifth of whatever Raleigh might bring back in the holds of his ships: one-fifth of the treasures from the wealthiest convoy on earth.

But things went awry even before the fleet left Plymouth. Biddulph blamed the disaster not on the elements, not on ill fortune or poor planning, but on the Spanish spies and informers who infested Whitehall Palace and the Navy Office. It was known from documents smuggled out of Madrid that one of Gondomar's informers held an important post in the Navy Office, someone codenamed 'El Cid', or 'The Lord', which led Biddulph to believe that it was old Nottingham himself. So perhaps the silver fleet had been alerted to the danger well in advance. Perhaps it remained in Peru, in the harbour at Guayaquil. Or it could have sailed south, round Cape Horn, whose windy straits the Spaniards still controlled despite the recent depredations of the Dutch. Whatever the case, in the end Raleigh's fleet sailed towards the Orinoco instead of the promised riches of Nombre de Dios.

At this point in the voyage Biddulph was seeing Spanish agents and plotters everywhere. The so-called unprovoked attack on San Tomás by Raleigh's men was actually, he claimed, a clever plot aimed at discrediting the voyage in the eyes of King James, a well-planned conspiracy on the part of Gondomar's agents provocateurs, some of them on board Raleigh's ships, others stationed in San Tomás itself. Far from being fearful of an attack on a Spanish settlement in Guiana, Gondomar and the Spanish Party welcomed it, indeed provoked it. There was little for Raleigh to gain in Guiana and everything for him to lose, not least his head. Even more important, Villiers, Abbott and the whole War Party itself would be disgraced by the episode, while the Howards, Gondomar's bien intencionados, would once more be in the command of both the Navy Office and the King of England.

'But what became of the Philip Sidney after the fleet broke up?' I asked, wondering again how much of Biddulph's version-this tale of plots and counterplots-I should let myself believe. 'Captain Plessington wasn't in the party that raided San Tomás. Not that I've been able to discover.'

'And I doubt you will ever discover what Captain Plessington did,' Biddulph replied. 'Not even Bacon's inquiry could sort through all of the details. Nor, I believe, was it intended to,' he added with a sombre chuckle. 'The official story, of course, is that after the raid on San Tomás the fleet dispersed. It's known that Raleigh tried to talk his captains into attacking the Mexican treasure fleet, the one from New Spain that would be sailing from Veracruz. But in the end most of the ships followed the Destiny to Newfoundland, where they took on board cargoes of fish and then returned to England. Can you imagine the looks on the faces of the investors?' Biddulph was shaking his white plumicorns. 'Newfoundland cod instead of Peruvian silver! Imagine the indignation of the dukes and princes of Germany and Holland when they learned how their religion was to be preserved by nothing more than a few crates of salted fish!'

So tragedy mixed with farce as the princes of Europe slid towards the precipice. As the months passed, more and more couriers arrived at Lambeth Palace and the Navy Office. Vienna had been besieged by the Transylvanians; Transylvania had been invaded by the Poles; the Poles had been attacked by the Turks-a deadly cycle of blows and counterblows, a return of evil for evil. Europe had become a fanged beast catching hold of its own tail. Negotiations were repudiated, treaties went unratified. In Prague, two Catholic delegates to a convention of the Bohemian Estates were hurled from a window of the castle but survived because they landed in a dunghill. Their survival was taken by dévots across Europe as a sign from God. Other armies began buckling on their swords. Three comets appeared in the sky and astrologers took them as irrefutable proof that the world was about to end.

'Which was not entirely wrong, was it?' Biddulph gloomily observed. 'Because there then followed thirty years of the worst wars the world has ever known.'

For a moment we walked beside the river in silence. I was still trying to understand it all, to discover a coherent pattern among these bizarre activities, these strange, half-hidden events with their mysterious players-ones that, so far as I could see, bore little relation to what Alethea had told me about Henry Monboddo and The Labyrinth of the World.

Biddulph had now begun describing how, soon, another piece of news was delivered to the Navy Office by a panting courier. This had been in the late autumn of the year 1618, a short time after the comets appeared and Raleigh went to the scaffold specially built for him in Westminster Palace Yard. The report claimed that a Spanish galleon, the Sacra Familia, part of the Mexican fleet, had gone down with all hands near the Spanish port of Santiago de Cuba. That she sank was a fact, though the circumstances surrounding the affair were more mysterious. It was whispered in the Navy Office that the Sacra Familia had been boarded and then sunk by soldiers from the Philip Sidney. For the Sidney had not returned to London. It appeared that, like a few of the other ships in the fleet, she was prowling the Spanish Indies, as the defeated Drake had done in '96. But details were almost impossible to find, even in the Navy Office. Fact and fable were flung hopelessly together.

Soon another report arrived that the Philip Sidney had sunk in the Spanish Indies, followed swiftly by yet another claiming that the Philip Sidney had captured the Sacra Familia, then a third that the Sacra Familia had merely sunk in a violent storm. But one rumour in particular enjoyed a long career-long enough for it to pass from rumour into the more august realms of myth. It thrived for many years in the taverns of Tower Hill and Rotherhithe, or wherever mariners gathered. Like other of the rumours, it claimed that the Philip Sidney had chased the galleon and then, after firing her broadside guns, watched her sink with all hands. Yet this had been a galleon like no other.

'I know the rumour,' Biddulph said, 'because I must have heard it a dozen times. It concerns certain passengers on board the Sacra Familia. Stowaways, you might say. Ones that survived her wreck by clinging to the shards of her hull or else swimming ashore.'

'Who were they?' I was listening intently now. 'Spanish sailors?'

He shook his head. 'No, not Spanish sailors. Not sailors of any sort.' He chuckled to himself for a second before spurting a stream of tobacco juice into the grass. We had almost reached Wapping, and ahead of us a number of watermen were sunning themselves on the New Crane Stairs. 'Rats. That's what the crewmen of the Sidney watched swim ashore while the Sacra Familia sank. Hundreds of rats. The waters churned with them, and some even made their way aboard the Sidney. Oh, I know, what ship is not infested with rats? But these were not just any kind of rat, you must understand. None of the mariners had ever seen their like. They were twice the size of the rats on board the Philip Sidney. Great burly creatures, greyish-red in colour, with short legs and tails.' He paused for a second, chops twitching with an excited smile. 'In sum, Mr. Inchbold, these creatures were nothing other than bamboo rats.'

I had never heard of such things. 'I thought a rat was a rat.'

'Far from it. Jonston in his Natural History of Quadrupeds lists a good half-dozen types, including the rice rat and the cane rat. But this particular species, the bamboo rat, is unique in that it survives on a diet of bamboo shoots.'

'Bamboo? I wasn't aware that there was bamboo in Mexico.'

'Nor was I,' he replied. 'None has ever been sighted. Not anywhere in the Spanish Indies either.'

'So where did the rats come from if not Mexico or the Spanish Indies?'

He shrugged. 'Is it not obvious? They must have come aboard the Sacra Familia from somewhere that bamboo is found. And where is bamboo found but in the islands of the Pacific? In the Spice Islands, for instance. Jonston tells us that the bamboo rat is especially numerous in the Moluccas.'

'So the Sacra Familia had been to the Moluccas?'

'Or to an island elsewhere in the Pacific. Yes. What she was doing there is a conundrum, because Spanish voyages into the Pacific were rare in those years. Mendaña made his final voyage in search of the Solomon Islands in 1595, then Quirós and Tories followed in 1606. After that, though, there is almost nothing. The entire Pacific was fast becoming the domain of Spain's fiercest enemies, the Dutch, who had found a new passage into the South Seas through the Le Maire Strait. Many of the sea routes were now controlled by the ships of the Dutch East India Company.'

'So the Sacra Familia must have found another route,' I said eagerly, remembering the terms of Sir Ambrose's charter with its mission to discover a new passage to the South Seas. 'A route into the Pacific through the headwaters of the Orinoco.'

Biddulph shot me a surprised look. 'The idea has never occurred to me,' he replied, shaking his head. 'Nor was it mentioned in the rumours. Still, I must own that it's an interesting notion. But whatever she might have discovered, or however she might have reached it, the Sacra Familia had sailed in the Pacific, that much seems certain. Only now she was disguised as part of the Mexican treasure fleet. Her travels must have been a great secret, because when she was attacked by the Sidney her crew jettisoned all of her charts and portolanos, the ship's chronicle, the captain's log-everything that might have betrayed her mission. They got rid of everything, I should say, except her smell.'

That was the last and perhaps the most curious part of the story. For the Sacra Familia had possessed, even from the distance, a remarkable smell. It was not the usual smell of a ship at sea-the stink of rotting provisions, of bilgewater, of damp wood and gunpowder, of chamber-pots overturned by storms. On the contrary, it was a beautiful smell that seemed to float across the water towards the Philip Sidney, a delicious scent that reminded the mariners of incense or perfume. It seemed to hang over the water for hours after the burning wreck finally disappeared under the water. The bewitching scent was not, the rumours insisted, that of the cargo-some cargo that might have been loaded in the Moluccas-but of the ship herself, as if the aroma emanated in some mysterious way from her beams and masts.

'I never knew what to make of the stories, of either the rats or the beautiful smell. Only that, if the tales were true, the Sacra Familia was plainly not what she seemed.'

Yes, I thought, intrigued: her voyage was as mysterious as that of the Philip Sidney, to whom her fate was somehow bonded.

'So sorry, Mr. Inchbold,' he said with a gentle smile as he creaked open the door to his house. 'I fear I can tell you no more. Rumour and gossip, that is all I was ever to learn of the episode.'

We stepped back inside the little house, where I was treated to another cup of rumbullion. For the next hour I listened to other theories that Biddulph's leisure allowed him to concoct, including the 'dark matter' (as he called it) of Buckingham's murder in 1628, an act carried out not by a half-mad Puritan fanatic, as history recorded, but by an agent of Cardinal Richelieu cleverly disguised as a half-mad Puritan fanatic. But I was barely listening to Biddulph now. I was thinking instead of how it seemed that Sir Ambrose had once again sailed over the horizon and-for me at least-eluded configuration. I was also remembering the mysterious 1600 edition of Ortelius's Theatrum orbis terrarum, along with the patents in Alethea's muniment room, and thinking of how Sir Ambrose had been in Prague in the year 1620, two years and 6,000 miles from his mysterious adventures in the Spanish Indies. So I wondered if there was some deeper connection between these two doomed ventures, some invisible history that might involve the lost Hermetic text that Henry Monboddo and his mysterious client so desperately desired. Or was I merely becoming infected by Biddulph's curious line of logic in which no two events, however far apart in time or space, were ever unrelated?

And then I remembered what I had intended to ask him an hour or two earlier. I had actually stepped outside at the time and was in the midst of bidding him adieu. The sun had dropped behind the distant silhouette of Nonsuch House, and the waters of the river were grey as a gull's wing. I could feel the rumbullion going about its stealthy work inside me. I had missed my footing on the front step and there was a faint ringing in my ears that seemed to change pitch as we stepped outside. Our two shadows stretched all the way across the tiny garden.

'I was wondering,' I asked after we had clasped hands, 'did you ever meet Captain Plessington? Did he visit the Navy Office?'

'No.' Biddulph shook his head. 'I never met Plessington. Not once. He was far too important to deal with someone like me, you understand. I was only a humble assistant to the Clerk of the Acts in those days. No, I saw him only once, and that was on the night when the Sidney cast off her lines and sailed down the Thames. Plessington was standing on the quarterdeck, and I could see him faintly in the light of the stern-lamp.'

'But all of the preparations for her sailing…?'

'Oh, Plessington had a delegate for details like that. Everything was arranged either through him or the Sidney's purser.'

'A delegate?'

'Yes.' He was squinting at his eaves now, frowning deeply. The wind sighed at our backs and riffled the waves. 'Now… what the devil was his name? It's just that I spend so much time in the reign of Queen Bess that sometimes my old brain gets befuddled by names. No… wait!' Suddenly his little face brightened. 'No, no, I remember his name after all. A strange name it was, too. Monboddo,' he pronounced triumphantly. 'Yes, that was it. Henry Monboddo.'

Chapter Twelve

There is no sight so sublime, the philosopher Lucretius tells us, as a shipwreck at sea. And the wreck of the Bellerophon did indeed make a spectacular sight for the onlookers who left their crofts and cottages to gather on the windy shores of the Chislet Marshes. She broke apart on the Margate Hook at some time after five o'clock in the afternoon. She had already been bilged in the midships, and with her starboard bow forced by the waves against the reef-the largest and most dangerous reef along the entire coast of Kent-it was only a matter of seconds before she shipped a dozen tons of water through her hull and then heeled clumsily on to her beam-ends. Her masts had toppled like ruined steeples and her yards and shrouds were hurled away. The waves foamed white about her hull before bursting in cascades over her fo'c'sle deck. Everyone on the upper decks was swept into the roiling sea, while those still below decks fared no better. The men frantically working the hand-pumps were either drowned as fountains of water thundered into the hold or else crushed to death as casks and puncheons tumbled like rogue oxen across the tilting deck. Others broke their necks or skulls against the stanchions, which themselves were splintering to bits, and still others had the misfortune to be trapped by falling beams and then drowned as the tide of water burst through the hatchways. And so it was that by the time the Bellerophon was smashed to a thousand pieces on the Margate Hook, there was not a single soul left alive inside her.

Her wreckage was swiftly scavenged. Almost a hundred onlookers had gathered along the muddy stretch of beach, and three enormous stacks of driftwood were lit. The bonfires' garish light lent an almost festive atmosphere to the scene. The Margate Hook and the havoc it wreaked with the occasional passing ship made one of the few consolations of living on this desolate edge of Kent. Folk were hoping for a repeat of the famous episode three years earlier when the Scythia was cracked open like an oyster on the very same spot, making humble fishermen and winkle-pickers drunk as lords on two hundred butts of Spanish malmsey. So as soon as the sea grew calm enough, a flotilla of a dozen-odd cutters and smacks was launched into the waves. By first light more than a score of crates had been dragged ashore, as had thirteen sopping and dishevelled crewmen.

Among them was Captain Quilter. For more than ten hours he had clung to one of the ninety-nine contraband boxes as it bobbed and wallowed in the heavy swell, sucked back and forth by outgoing and then incoming tides. But as full tide had come a second time the bonfires suddenly loomed before him and the crate washed up with a bump in the shallows. He was exhausted and frozen from his ordeal, but no sooner had his feet touched shingle than three men wading rapidly forward-his saviours, so he thought-shoved him back into the combers. The crate was scraped ashore and stacked with a score of others.

'You people have no right of salvage here.' He had righted himself and was splashing through the mud and sand towards a group of figures gathered round one of the bonfires. More boxes and chests were being dragged from the waters, while a small convoy of donkey-carts laden with others began winding its way into the marshes. 'These crates are flotsam, the legal property of the Bellerophon, and I as her captain-'

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.

By the time I ate a breakfast of radishes and black bread, then drank a morning draught and spent a quarter-hour perched on the close-stool, I felt somewhat better. I descended to the shop and for another quarter-hour performed the old rituals of the awning and the shutters, the unbarring of the door and the tidying of the counter, all the while stumbling round in a pleasant daze as if surprised to find my shop still standing and myself safely inside it. This morning the resinous scent of walnut and pine-the sweet tang of the forest-spiced the familiar fug of rag-paper and buckram. The shop was better than new, I decided, inspecting the shelving and the hinges of the green door. I felt like a sea captain whose ship has been wrecked and then expertly repaired on a foreign shore from which it is time to sail for home.

Yes, I was feeling much better. After Monk departed for the General Letter Office I stepped outside the door and loitered for a time on the footpath, feeling the newly minted sun on my skin and gazing blearily up and down the carriageway as if taking my bearings from one of the signboards. And all at once the dream came back to me, stark and horrible.

Ordinarily I do not set much store by dreams. The few I remember are mundane, vague, illogical and unsatisfying. But the previous night was different. After my return from Wapping I retired to bed with my copy of Don Quixote, in which I reached Chapter 6, the point where the priest and the barber inspect and then burn the contents of poor mad Quixote's library, the source of his fantastic delusions. The episode recycled itself in my dreams, except that it was no longer Quixote's books but my own that burned. I had watched in cringing horror as they were ripped from the shelves and tossed by the armload into a bonfire by a band of taunting culprits who refused to resolve themselves as they darted in and out of the firelight. Soon these figures vanished into the night and I found myself at Pontifex Hall, alone, first inside the library, where the flames were devouring the shelves, then outside in the hedge-maze a few seconds later, watching as ashes and scraps of pages were carried skyward on great tentacles of black smoke, before returning to the ground like the cinders of an exploded volcano. At which point Pontifex Hall metamorphosed into a burning ship and the dream concluded with the thunderous crash of falling timbers. I awoke to discover that Don Quixote had toppled from my belly to the floor.

Now I wondered what on earth I should make of this disconcerting chain of images. Plato claims that all dreams are prophecies of things to come, visions of the future that the soul receives through the liver, while Hippocrates says that they are portents of disease or even madness. And so on neither account was I especially heartened. I decided I should take instead the advice of Heraclitus, who tells us that all dreams are nonsense and are therefore best ignored.

I was still standing on the footpath, under the awning, gawping like an imbecile, when Monk returned from Dowgate with the post. Two letters had arrived: one from a bookseller in Antwerp, the other from a superannuated clergyman in Saffron Walden. I followed Monk inside the green door. Another day awaited.

An hour later I caught a hack to Seething Lane. I had no intention of revisiting either Silas Cobb or the Navy Office, but rather I hoped to speak with the vestry clerk of St. Olave's. Morning Prayer was in progress as I arrived, so I slipped into a pew at the rear, where I fumbled with a Prayer Book-one of those little volumes that Cromwell and his generals had done their best to burn-and felt self-conscious and oddly guilty. I have never been a church-goer, unlike Arabella, who sometimes attended two services a day. I have no objection to the practice, neither to the Puritans with their riotous conventicles nor the Established Church and its incense, railed-off altars and other quasi-popish rituals. But I am at heart, I suppose, like the Quakers who believe in their so-called inner light that needs no priests or sacraments to kindle it.

As I sat in a sunbeam spilling through the stained glass I was not, however, contemplating spiritual matters. I was thinking about Henry Monboddo and Sir Ambrose Plessington, about what imponderable connection might exist between The Labyrinth of the World and their adventures in Spanish America, between the Corpus hermeticum and a group of Protestant fanatics. These fruitless musings were interrupted as the service ended, at which point I picked my way up the aisle, past the departing congregation, wondering if my habitually dishevelled appearance along with the ill effects of the previous night's drink made me look to the vicar like a repentant sinner coming to beg forgiveness for a profligate life. In any event, he directed me with no apparent qualms to the vestry, where I discovered the clerk and explained to him that I wished to consult the parish records in order to learn something about one of the parishioners-an ancestor of mine, I told him-who was buried in the churchyard. He seemed pleased enough to oblige and, after much truffling in one of the cupboards, presented me with a fat volume, a register-book for the year 1620, bound in cowhide. He bade me sit at his little desk, then disappeared into the church, which now was empty except for an old woman slowly working her way along the flagstones with a mop.

The register-book was divided into those three staging-posts of life: christening, marriage and death. I riffled quickly to the section on deaths. It made depressing reading in the gloomy environs of the vestry. I knew that before the parish clerks compiled and published the Bills of Mortality, as they do nowadays, register-books often recorded causes of death. But I was quite unprepared for the little biographies of doom that ran next to each name and date, column after column, page after page: apoplexies, dropsies, pleurisies, spotted fevers, bloody fluxes, 'murthers', starvations, plagues, poisonings, suicides-and so forth, an endless catalogue of long-forgotten tragedies. One poor soul had even been 'mauled by a Bear escaped from the Bear-pit in Southwark', another 'eaten by a Crocodile in St. James's Park'. Also recorded were a few deaths of a more imprecise nature, men or women who had been 'found dead in the street' or 'killed in a fall', while 'cause of death unknown' had been inked beside the names of others.

Silas Cobb's death proved one of these more mysterious varieties. After some thirty minutes I discovered his name near the back of the volume, in the pages dedicated to the month of December, which looked to have been an especially dangerous month for the parishioners of St. Olave's. But the information proved disappointing. A smudged italic hand simply recorded that Silas Cobb had been 'found dead in the river below York House'. Nothing more. No occupation, no address, no next of kin. No clues of any kind to his identity.

A waste of time, I decided. I closed the register-book and thanked the clerk, and not until I reached the door of the church did I suddenly remember something that Biddulph mentioned a day earlier, that York House had once belonged to Francis Bacon, supposed architect of the Philip Sidney, who eventually sold it to the Duke of Buckingham, who in turn kept his books and paintings inside until his son was forced to sell them, using as his agent (according to Alethea) none other than Henry Monboddo.

For a few seconds my sideburns prickled with excitement… but soon I decided that I had merely conceived a strange and unstable fantasy. Any connection between Cobb and either Bacon or Buckingham, or between Cobb and Monboddo, must be a distant one at best. Even the connection between Cobb and York House with its hundreds of paintings was probably no more than an odd coincidence, for his corpse might have floated either upstream or downstream on the tide, as much as a mile or two, before being pulled from the waters below York House. He might have fallen into the Thames-or been tossed into it, dead or alive-at almost any point between the Chelsea Reach and London Bridge. The newssheets in those days were full of tales of these little voyages; of despairing men who leapt from the palings of the bridge only to fetch up, days later, three or four miles downstream.

Before leaving the church I thought to ask the clerk about Cobb's gravestone, which looked so much newer than its neighbours, much newer, I pointed out, than a 1620 vintage. But the clerk only shrugged his shoulders and explained that the practice of erecting a new stone over an old grave was common enough. Not only that, folk who came into fortunes often gave themselves more honourable pedigrees by improving the siting of their ancestors' graves-even to the point, he said, of exhuming bones from their obscure plots in the corners of the churchyard and reburying them in more prestigious environs, such as the church's aisles or crypt, where the new resting-place was marked by a marble plaque, even by a bust or statue. So it was, he claimed, that humble watermen and fishmongers sometimes discovered themselves, fifty years after death, in the distinguished company of dukes and admirals, with their effigies proudly displayed in marble or bronze. He informed me that the church kept no official records of such improvements.

'You may consult with the lapicide or stonemason who carved the stone,' he suggested. 'Ordinarily they inscribe their name or a coat of arms on the rear of the slab.'

But I was loath to creep back to Cobb's gravestone in broad daylight-almost as loath as I was to enter the noise and dust of a stonemason's yard in both the heat of the day and the aftermath of Biddulph's rumbullion. And so I returned to Nonsuch House, wondering what I should make of the things I had learned; if in fact I had learned anything at all.

For the remainder of that day I went about my usual ceremonies among my shelves and customers. Ah, the pleasant balm of routine, what Horace calls laborum dulce lenimen, the 'sweet solace of my toils'. Afterwards I ate a dinner cooked by Margaret, drank two cups of wine and smoked a pipe of tobacco, then retired to bed at ten o'clock, my usual hour, with Wolfram's Parzival-I had decided against Don Quixote that night-propped on my belly. I must have fallen asleep soon after the watchman announced eleven o'clock.

I have never been a good sleeper. As a child I was a notorious sleepwalker. My strange trances and midnight perambulations regularly alarmed my parents, our neighbours, and finally Mr. Smallpace, who once led me back to Nonsuch House, barefoot and confused, after I wandered as far as the south gate of the bridge. As I grew older, this nocturnal restlessness translated itself into bouts of insomnia that plague me to this day. I will lie awake for hours on end, incessantly checking my watch, plumping and punching my pillow, thrashing and turning on my mattress as if wrestling a foe, before sleep at last whelms over me only to subside a minute later when I am disturbed by the slightest noise or provoked by the jagged shard of an unremembered dream. Over the years I have sought out various apothecaries who have prescribed all manner of remedies for the condition. I have drunk by the pint-pot foul-smelling syrups made from maidenhair and the seeds of poppies (a flower that Ovid tells us blooms beside the Cave of Sleep), or rubbed on to my temples an hour before retiring, as per instructions, other concoctions mixed from lettuce juice, oil of roses and who knows what else. But none of these expensive elixirs has ever managed to hasten my slumbers by so much as a single minute.

To make matters worse, Nonsuch House is an unfamiliar and even frightening place after dark, especially so, it seemed, after Arabella's death-a vast echo-chamber where floor timbers creaked and groaned, shutters rattled, the chimney keened, the eaves gargled, beetles tapped, rats squeaked and scurried, and the elm pipes shuddered and moaned behind the walls as the water inside them either froze or thawed. I think of myself as a rational man, but in the months after Arabella's death I used to jolt awake several times each night, stark with terror, then hunch beneath the counterpane like a horror-struck child, listening to a platoon of ghosts and demons whispering my name as they went about their stealthy work in my closets and corridors.

Tonight I was awakened with a start by one of these noises. Jerking upright in the darkness, I fumbled on the bedside table for the firelock. I had considered sleeping with it under my pillow, as I believe people are said to do for fear of housebreakers, but had visions of it discharging itself as I rolled over in my sleep, and anyway it had been far too big and uncomfortable to fit under my tiny goose-down pillow. So I had placed it on the table instead, charged with a ball and powder, though with the barrel pointing away from the head of the bed. The rest of the ammunition was in the drawer, in a bandolier that the one-legged veteran had sold me along with the firelock: thirty balls of lead that looked curiously harmless, like the petrified droppings of a small rodent.

I found the pistol only after a few seconds of frantic scrabbling, then closed my fingers over the stock and held my breath, listening for the intrusive noise. It had been, I thought, some sort of faint rattling or jingling, like a pair of spurs. But all was silent now. The noise had been a dream, I told myself. Or the watchman with his bell.

Ka-chink, ka-chink, ka-chink-a…

I had just fallen asleep when I caught it again, more clearly this time, an unfamiliar sound not in the building's usual repertoire: a faint but insistent jingling, like a small dinner-bell or a set of keys on a chatelaine. Or perhaps like a set of traces, except that it was hours past curfew, the gates would be closed, and no horse-and-carriage was likely to be passing along the carriageway.

I pushed myself upright again, left hand grappling for the pistol. I struck a taper and squinted at my watch, which I also had to fumble for on the bedside table. Past two o'clock. Abruptly the noise stopped, as if the perpetrator had caught himself and swiftly muffled it. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, imagining the instigator hunched against a wall somewhere, breath held and ears trained.

Ka-chink-ka-chink-ka-CHINK!

The noise had grown louder and more insistent by the time I stole along the corridor and then, drawing a deep breath, down the first few steps. I had trouble with my footing in the dark but managed to avoid the third tread from the top, which squeaked, and the fifth from the top, whose riser-in order to trip unwary housebreakers-was four inches higher than the rest. I had no wish to rouse Monk, who would have been frightened to death by the sight of me slinking about the house, pistol in hand. Nor did I wish to alert the intruder who-I was sure of it now-was either inside the shop or else attempting to prise his way through the outer door: for the sound had been caused, I realised, by a ring of picklocks.

Ka-CHINK-a…

My nape prickled with fear. Drawing a shuddering breath I tightened my grip on the weapon and searched with a bare foot for the next tread. The jingling had ceased, but now I heard the catch click and then caught the slow creak of my new hinges as the green door was opened inchmeal. I froze, club foot suspended in mid-air. The floor timbers complained gently as the intruder stole across the shop. I licked my lips and felt blindly for another step.

What happened next was inevitable, I suppose. The steps of the turnpike staircase are steep, shallow and worn, their risers of irregular height; and of course I am a cripple and half blind without my spectacles, which I had left behind in my bedchamber. So when I reached for another step, my club foot skittered over the edge of the next tread and I pitched forward with a yelp to the landing. Worse, I lost my grip on the pistol as I flailed through the darkness. It clattered noisily down the steps ahead of me.

I caught my breath and held it. Dead silence followed. I lay on the landing for a few seconds before cautiously unfolding myself and rising to a crouch. So silent had everything fallen that for a second I almost thought I had been mistaken, that all had been a dream, or the sound of the wind, or the building lurching and creaking with the tide. But then I heard the unmistakable tread of feet and, seconds later, whispering voices.

I felt my body tense, bracing itself to lunge. I might still reach the pistol. But there were at least two intruders, while even if I reached the weapon first I had only one shot. So I remained in a crouch on the landing, too frightened even to breathe.

A few horrible seconds passed before I heard the sharp gasp of a taper. Then a light welled upwards and shadows pivoted across the wall. I sprang into motion, lurching crabwise along the narrow landing, fumbling for the steps above me. But it was too late. Already a pair of boots was squeaking on the treads, only a few feet below now. I heard the soft whoosh of the burning torch, then a loud scrape as the pistol was recovered. Another few seconds and they would reach me.

I spun round and groped blindly at the steps. But no sooner had I found purchase than a cold hand seized the back of my neck.

Nonsuch House was over eighty years old in those days. It had been built in Holland in the year 1577 and then shipped in sections to London, where its carved gables and onion-shaped cupolas were fitted together without the use of nails, piece by piece, like the segments of a giant jigsaw puzzle. It stood halfway along the carriageway, on the north side of a small drawbridge whose wooden-cogged wheels creaked and ground together six times a day. And so six times a day all traffic on the carriageway was forced to halt for twenty minutes while that beneath floated through on the tide: hoys and shallops headed upstream with loads of malt and dried haddock, bumboats and pinnaces going downstream with hogsheads of ale and sugar for the merchantmen at Tower Dock, sometimes even the yacht of the King himself on its way to the races at Greenwich, masts swaying and sails crackling. A hush would descend on the bridge at these moments as the pack-horses and pushing foot-passengers all paused in their tracks before the dreamlike parade of twenty or thirty boats. As an apprentice, I, too, used to stop and watch in wonder as the carriageway rose steeply skyward and the sails sidled past the windows, their bunts filled with wind and bulging like the waistcoats of giants. But then Mr. Smallpace would shout at me from across the shop and I would dutifully return my attentions to the piles of books.

The ritual was impressive and inspiring, but it also wreaked violence on Nonsuch House, especially my corner, which directly abutted the drawbridge and, six times a day, shuddered and groaned under the exertions. As the wheels spun and the girders lifted I could feel timbers quaking under my feet and hear the window-panes thrumming inside their fittings. Books had been known to topple from their shelves, cups and plates from their cupboards, copper pots and joints of meat from their hooks in the pantry. Even worse, soon after Mr. Smallpace's death I discovered how one of the upright beams in the study had shifted so far from the ceiling that one wall now bowed ominously outwards.

Something had to be done. I hired a blacksmith's apprentice to arrest the drift of the rogue upright, but in the midst of the renovations a hole was knocked through the rotting wattle-and-daub, exposing a small cavity. The hole was soon enlarged to reveal a chamber, seven feet high by three feet wide, into which I could squeeze with a little room to spare. Experimental tapping with an iron poker revealed that entry to the chamber had been through a hatch concealed in its ceiling, the boards of which now formed the floor of a tiny boot-cupboard one storey above.

Who had built the secret little compartment I could only guess. I found nothing inside except a wooden platter, a spoon, the tattered remains of what looked like a leather jerkin, and a battered silver candlestick. I had been expecting to find, if anything, a few ancient altar vessels or the scraps of priestly vestments, for I knew that priest-holes had been common features of houses built in the reign of Queen Elizabeth-little hiding-places under staircases or hearthstones to shelter priests of Rome and other victims of our religious persecutions.

That night I had sat inside the chamber with my knees drawn up under my chin and a candle burning in the old candlestick, trying to imagine whoever had hidden here: a Franciscan friar in a hair shirt, possibly even a Jesuit? For a moment I could see him very clearly, a little man kneeling on a rush mat, whispering a miserere, breathing carefully in the cramped darkness as, inches away, the magistrate's searchers called out passwords to one another and sounded the floors and wainscots with the hilts of their swords. I was no papist, but I hoped he had managed to escape, whoever he was, and preserve his secretive life-a hushed, ascetic and almost hermetically sealed existence of the sort for which I suppose I had always longed. So perhaps that was why when I hired a carpenter to fill in the chamber I changed my mind at the last minute, on a sudden impulse, and instructed him to leave the little cavity as it was, but to conceal it behind another wall. This wall was then whitewashed and panelled, and the panelling covered with bookshelves. Once again the chamber was invisible.

I had no expectations of ever using my secret chamber God forbid! I wished to preserve it as a memorial, that was all. Over the following few years I thought very little about it, though after the searchers began paying their little visits I used it to hide a few tracts and pamphlets that would otherwise have been confiscated and burned. No one else knew of its existence but Monk, to whom it had become a place of endless wonder. Often I could hear him thumping about inside, playing what I thought were mysterious little games. But then one day I raised the hatch in the boot-cupboard and peered inside to discover that he had furnished it with odds and ends such as a three-legged stool, candles, a blanket, reading material, even an old chamber-pot scavenged from somewhere. I suspected him of harbouring plans to take up residence. It was, after all, roughly the size of his own little bedchamber and probably no more uncomfortable.

But one evening as I sat in my armchair I heard a fierce banging from behind the wall and rushed upstairs to catch him in the act of driving nails through the soles of three pairs of old boots and into the top of the wooden hatch. Under interrogation he explained he was devising things so that when he opened the trapdoor and slipped inside the chamber-like so-the pairs of boots would remain in place after the lid was closed. The entrance was thereby disguised. Clever, was it not? He had popped out of the hole and was panting heavily. I agreed that it certainly was. There was no need to ask what had prompted his inspiration. Only three nights earlier the searchers had burst through his door and thrust the burning lantern into his face.

'Well done,' I repeated. I had decided to forgive him the boots, which I hardly ever wore. 'Yes, quite ingenious.' But as I peered into the tiny chamber I was reminded of the priest crouching in the darkness, praying for the preservation of his clandestine life and quiet mission. 'But let us hope we never have occasion to test it.'

We closed the door and crawled out of the cupboard. Then for months on end-sometimes much longer-I would think no more about the little cell concealed behind my study wall.

'Mr. Inchbold.' A whisper. The grip on my neck had tightened. 'This way, sir. Up. Follow me…'

We ascended quickly, our shadows vaulting up the steps before us. Past the study and the bedchamber, round another landing, then up another curling flight. From below came flashes of torchlight and a rapid thunder of feet. All stealth had now been abandoned. I heard a voice shouting after us, then a thud and a curse as our pursuers were tripped by the fifth stair from the landing. They picked themselves up, cursed again, renewed their pursuit. I heard a voice shouting my name.

By that time we had reached the top. Monk led the way, scrambling nimbly down the corridor while I staggered a few steps behind, stupefied with fright, looking over my shoulder for the first head to crest the top of the stairs. I had no idea what he was doing, other than running away, until I stumbled into him. He had stopped in front of the boot-cupboard and now held the door open, elegantly, as if we were to board a coach.

'After you, sir.'

I fell to my knees and lowered myself downwards, into the darkness, fingertips clutching the edge of the hatch until my feet found purchase on a stool. A second later Monk dropped lightly beside me, like a cat, then eased shut the camouflaged hatch. We found ourselves in total blackness, without so much as a chink of light from above. I could see no trace of Monk, even though I sensed him only a few inches away, stifling gasps. I turned round, also gasping, but bumped into something. Panic bulged its flimsy membrane inside my gut. The air was so dark it almost seemed material, dense.

I turned again and bumped into another wall. The hole was little bigger than a coffin. I was about to climb out but then felt Monk's hand on my arm and heard boots-what sounded like an army of them-thundering overhead. The intruders had reached the top of the stairs. A voice shouted my name again. I fumbled for a stool, somewhere to sit. I couldn't breathe. More stomping. Doors banging shut. I was going to faint…

But I did not faint. Monk slid a stool towards me, I seated myself, then for the next few hours the two of us listened to the commotions above us, faces upturned to the invisible hatch, frozen in silence as the intruders-three men, possibly four-opened doors and tapped every inch of the house with their swords and sticks. Our guests were very thorough. The staircase, the stone jambs of the fireplace, its mantelpiece and hearthstone, the ceilings and floors, the cupboards, wainscots, beds, curtains, every crumbling brick or worm-holed timber-nothing in the house was left untouched. Three times we heard them directly above us, thumping about in the corridor outside the boot-cupboard, then opening its door and tapping at its walls. But three times the cupboard door slammed shut and the footsteps and tapping receded. A moment later I heard soft blows a few bare inches from my ears as the end of a stick carefully sounded the wall of my study. But the partition was thick, filled with hair-plaster and pug, and the hollow sound, if there was one, must have been deadened. After a moment the tapping stopped. I expelled a sigh of relief and felt Monk's hand squeeze my shoulder.

'All right, sir?'

'Yes,' I stammered, a little too loudly. 'All right.'

I was trembling badly and hoped he couldn't tell, but I supposed it no longer mattered. Throughout our ordeal it seemed as if the roles of master and apprentice had been exchanged. From the first moment of our hasty escape up the staircase he had been patient and courageous, while I, his master, was nothing but terror, confusion and, later, complaints. I chafed terribly under the confinement. After only a few minutes on the stool my back ached; then my legs grew stiff and, a short time later, I realised that my bladder desperately needed relief. Then I couldn't breathe the thickening air. My chest gurgled, my diaphragm twitched and heaved as I stifled my basset-hound coughs, any one of which would have betrayed us. I bit my lip and tried to draw strength and comfort from the thought of the priest who had preceded us inside the cell, perhaps in circumstances like these, a little man kissing his Agnus Dei, telling his beads, reciting the Litanies of the Saints under his breath. But it was all I could do to keep from whimpering.

Yet Monk was in his element in the cramped, pitch-dark cell. It was as if he had long been preparing for this moment, or as if his earlier experiences with intruders had been a sort of crucible, making him patient and wise, no longer my obedient subaltern but an efficient, decisive leader, capable of planning and assessing. He was the one who decided that we could not afford a candle, who found the blanket to cushion my back, who whispered reassurances about our supply of air and chances of escape… and who, after the outside door banged noisily shut and everything fell silent, was able to tell that one man was still inside the house, standing perfectly still, waiting for us to emerge, which I had been only too anxious to do. A few minutes later, of course, we heard a low cough from inside the study. So we waited another couple of hours until he too had departed. Then Monk made a step with his interlaced fingers and hoisted me upwards. I clambered into the boot-cupboard, gasping for air and then emerging into the dawn-lit corridors and chambers like a survivor crawling from the rubble of a disaster.

Only there were no signs of disaster either in the house or the shop below. Certainly nothing like what had happened a few days before. We tiptoed through the rooms in semidarkness, keeping away from the windows-another of Monk's wise recommendations-and looking for any signs of what had happened. But it was as if no one else had been inside the house; as if the past few hours had been nothing but a shared nightmare. I even discovered the firelock on the bottom step, apparently untouched. The only evidence of our visitors was a faint whiff of torch smoke added to the fug of the house.

'Who d'you reckon they was, sir?' Up here, pacing the familiar corridors, Monk had reverted to being my deferential apprentice. 'Same coves as before, d'you think?'

'No, I think not.' We were inside the shop now, poking about with an eye on the green door. 'They weren't after our books, were they? Not like the men the other night.'

He nodded his head, and for a moment we gazed about in silence. No, none of the books had been touched. They still stood in the perfect ranks into which we had assembled them on their shelves only a few hours earlier. Nor had the men come for our money. The lock on the iron chest under my bed was untouched, as was the pouch of coins behind the shop's counter and, more importantly, the store of sovereigns and papers under the floorboards. Not so much as a tin farthing was missing from the house. I became aware that Monk's baffled, querying gaze had come to rest on my face.

'You reckon they came looking for you, then?'

I shrugged, unable to meet his prising glance. I turned round to inspect the lock on the door, which was intact, like everything else. The cracksmen, whoever they were, had known their business.

But just then something beside the door, a smudge of dirt, caught my eye, and I knelt to examine it. A dot of grey powder, a fairy-dust that was gritty to the touch and faintly iridescent in the morning light.

'What is it, sir?' Monk was leaning over my shoulder.

'Coquina,' I told him after a moment's inspection. 'Lime stone.'

'Limestone?' He was scratching his head and breathing audibly. 'From a quarry?'

'No, not a quarry. The sea. See this?' I blew on the powder to expose a tiny fragment, what looked like a bone chip. 'It's made from crushed cockle-shells.'

He ran a finger over the dust. 'Blimey, sir. How'd cockle shells get in here? You reckon they was brought inside by…?'

'I do indeed.' I straightened, still examining the fine chips in my palm. 'Coquina is used in road-making,' I explained. 'Carriageways in front of mansions, that sort of thing. It must have been tracked inside on their boots.'

Monk nodded solemnly as if waiting for me to explain something further, which I didn't. After a minute I brushed the dust from my palms and stood before the shuttered window. It was almost eight o'clock, by now. I watched through the louvres as the morning sunlight striped the floor behind me and etched long shadows on to the carriageway. The bands of light hurt my eyes and sent sharp pains radiating to the back of my skull. But I leaned forward and-just as I had done a half-dozen times in the past two days-peered up and down the lengths of carriageway. It was filling with morning traffic, with its familiar cacophony of shouting voices, ringing horseshoes, the iron clanking of bolts and bars as shops opened along the bridge. Apprentices with broomsticks materialised before them and swept at patches of sunlight.

I felt a painful throb beneath my breastbone as I watched the scene unfurl. This was my favourite moment of the day, the time when I would swing open the shutters, lower the awning, beeswax the counter and bookcases, cleanse the grate, light a fire, then bring a kettle of water to the boil for the first coffee of the morning and retire behind the counter and wait for my first customers to open the green door and step inside. But this morning I suspected the ritual would never be the same again. For who else, I wondered, might appear on the bridge this morning and then push inside the shop? Who else was out there, what evil eminence with his secret powers, hiding in the porches and doorways, watching the green door and waiting for the next time? Because what I hadn't told Monk was that the carriageways and footpaths of Whitehall Palace were covered with coquina-it had crunched under my feet as I wove my way to the offices of the Exchequer.

My glum thoughts were interrupted by a loud shriek, then the window-panes hummed and the timbers of the shop trembled in anticipation beneath my feet. I squinted through the slats and saw the drawbridge rising skywards like a piece of enormous clockwork, casting its arm of shadow across the front of the shop. A familiar hush descended over the carriageway. Carts and wagons grouped outside my shop, while a dozen buff-coloured sails gathered the wind and drifted, rippling, through the gap. A few more minutes and the last of them had sauntered past the window. Then the ropes slipped and strained in their pulleys, the wooden cogs ground together, the floor timbers trembled, and the bridge lowered into place with a few more geriatric groans. The traffic in front of Nonsuch Books came back to life and surged across the cobbles, as it did every day at this hour, with its din of creaks and curses.

Yes, all of the familiar rituals had begun. But I knew, suddenly, that I would not be a part of them this morning, that I would not be opening the shop, that for the first time in my professional life I would be turning my back on my duties. For my little ship was not sailing homeward, as I had thought, but careering wildly off course, into unknown waters, without maps or compasses. As I climbed the turnpike stairway a few moments later, clutching at the wall for support, I knew that Nonsuch House, my refuge for the past twenty years, was no longer safe.