Ex Libris

by Ross King

  Vilém's post demanded such precision, of course. For the past ten years, with the help of two assistants, Otakar and István, he had been cataloguing and shelving each volume in the Spanish Rooms. The task was immense and doomed to failure, for Rudolf had been an insatiable collector. His books on the occult sciences alone numbered in their thousands. One entire room was stuffed with volumes on 'holy alchemy', another with books on magic, including the Picatrix, which Rudolf had used to cast spells on his enemies. As if these tons of books were not enough, hundreds were still arriving in the library each week, along with scores of maps and other engravings, all of which had to be catalogued and then shelved in one of the overcrowded and interconnecting rooms in which sometimes even Vilém himself got lost. To make matters worse, crates of volumes and other valuable documents were now being shipped to Prague from the Imperial Library in Vienna for safekeeping from both the Turks and the Transylvanians. So it was that the edition of Cornelius Agrippa's Magische Werke sitting on Vilém's desk on his first morning of work in 1610 still sat there ten years later, uncatalogued and unshelved, buried ever deeper beneath growing piles of books.

  Or that, at least, had been the situation in the library until the spring of 1620, when it seemed that a period of respite had arrived. The river of incoming books had slowed to a trickle after the revolt against the Emperor and the coronation of Frederick and Elizabeth. A few of Frederick's crates of books had arrived the previous autumn from Heidelberg, from the great Bibliotheca Palatina, and most of these still had not been unpacked, let alone catalogued or shelved. But the other sources-monasteries, the estates of bankrupt or deceased noblemen-seemed to have dried up altogether. There were even alarming rumours that some of the most valuable manuscripts would be sold off by Frederick to finance the shabby and ill-equipped Bohemian army in what a related rumour claimed was the forthcoming war against the Emperor. Many other books and manuscripts from the Spanish Rooms would be sent for safekeeping either to Heidelberg or, in the event that Heidelberg fell, to London.

  Safekeeping? The three librarians had been baffled by such stories. Safekeeping from what? From whom? They could only shrug at each other and return to work, unable to believe that their quiet routine could be disturbed by events as far-flung and incomprehensible as wars and dethronements. If the world outside was, from the little that Vilém understood of it, disordered and confused, here at least, in these rooms, a beautiful order and harmony prevailed. But in the year 1620 this delicate balance was to be upset for ever, and for Vilém Jirásek, cloistered among his stacks of beloved books, the first hint of the approaching disaster was the reappearance in Prague of the Englishman Sir Ambrose Plessington.

  Sir Ambrose must have returned to Prague Castle, after a long absence, during either the winter or spring of 1620. At the time he, like Vilém, was in his middle thirties, though unlike Vilém he looked not even remotely studious. He was as thick in the middle as a butcher or a blacksmith and stood tall despite a pair of bandy legs that suggested he spent more time sitting in the saddle than at a desk. Both his brow and his beard were dark, and the latter was sculpted into the new V-shape that, like his millstone ruff, had lately come into fashion. Vilém would have known him by reputation since Sir Ambrose was responsible for a good many of the books and artefacts in the Spanish Rooms. Ten years earlier he had been Rudolf's most celebrated agent, criss-crossing every duchy, Erbgut, fiefdom and Reichsfreistadt in the Holy Roman Empire in order to bring back to Prague ever more books, paintings and curiosities for the obsessive and demented Emperor. He had even travelled as far as Constantinople, from which he returned not only with sacks of tulip bulbs (a particular favourite of Rudolf's) but also dozens of ancient manuscripts that were among the greatest prizes in the Spanish Rooms. Quite what brought him back to Bohemia in 1620, however, was no doubt a mystery to the few people in Prague-Vilém among them-who knew of his presence.

  Of course, Sir Ambrose was not the only Englishman who arrived in Prague at this particular time; the city was bursting with them. Elizabeth, the new Queen, was daughter to King James of England, and the Královsky Palace had become home to her cumbersome entourage; to her hordes of hosiers, milliners and physicians, the dozens of deckhands who struggled to keep her afloat from one day to the next. Among these legions were six ladies-in-waiting, and among these ladies-in-waiting was a young woman named Emilia Molyneux, the daughter of an Anglo-Irish nobleman who had been dead for some years. Emilia was twenty-four years old at the time, the same age as her royal mistress. In appearance, too, she resembled the Queen-who was prim, pale and slight-except for a thick mass of black hair and a nearsighted squint.

  How Emilia first encountered Vilém is a matter for speculation. It may have been at one of the numerous masques of which the young Queen was so fond, at a late hour when the punctilio of the court was lapsing amid the frenzy of music and drink. Or perhaps the meeting was a more sober affair. The Queen was a dedicated reader-one of her more endearing traits-and therefore might have sent Emilia to the Spanish Rooms to fetch a favourite book. Or possibly Emilia went to the Spanish Rooms on a mission of her own: she had been taught, among her other accomplishments, how to read. Whatever the case, their subsequent meetings would have been kept a secret. Vilém was a Roman Catholic, and the Queen, a devout Calvinist, detested Roman Catholics almost as much as she detested Lutherans. So devout was she, in fact, that she had refused to cross the bridge over the Vltava because of the wooden statue of the Holy Mother at its far end, and at her command all statues and crucifixes were being prised loose from the chapels of the Old Town. Even the curiosities in the Spanish Rooms had been inspected by her chaplain lest any of the shrivelled fragments should prove the bones of saints or other such popish relics. And so for Emilia to be discovered in the company of a Roman Catholic-a Roman Catholic educated by the Jesuits in the Clementinum-would have meant expulsion from Prague and an immediate return to England.

  The two of them would therefore have met in Vilém's house in Golden Lane. On those evenings when her services were not required until late, Emilia would have slipped out of the Královsky Palace at eight o'clock, by the back stairs, and made her way through the courtyards without a torch or lantern, feeling her way along the walls. Golden Lane, a row of lowly cottages, lay on the far side of the castle, and Vilém's house, one of the smallest, was at the far end, cowering under the arches of the castle's north wall. But there was always a light in the window, smoke from the chimney, and Vilém to embrace her.

  And he was always waiting to open the door each time she made her dark excursion, until the cold night in November when she found the window dark and the chimney smokeless. She hurried back to the palace that evening but returned the following night, then the night after that. On the fourth night, when there was still no response, she went to the Spanish Rooms, and there she discovered not Vilém, nor even Otakar or István, but someone else, an immense man in spurred boots whose long shadow, cast by an oil-lamp, was writhing on the floorboards behind him. Later she would remember the evening not so much because that was when she first met Sir Ambrose Plessington, but because that was the night when the war began.

  ***

  It had been a Sunday. There were flakes of snow in the air and a skin of ice on the river. Another winter was arriving. The servants had trudged into churches whose steeples were lost in fog, then afterwards played skittles in the frost-rimed courtyards or chitter-chattered in the corridors and back stairwells. The stables and dung-heaps steamed. A herd of scrawny cows was driven, bells jingling, through the steep streets of the Lesser Town. Faggots of wood and bags of fodder were carted up to the castle along with the casks of alewife and Pilsener unloaded from the barges floating along the river. The ice had crackled against the hulls of the boats, sounding like thunder or, to the more nervous, gunfire.

  Emilia had been dreading another winter in Prague, for the castle was a hard place when the weather turned. The doors in the Královsky Palace shrank in the cold and banged
in the draughts, and snow blew underneath them, silting inches-deep against the furniture. Water in the well-houses froze and had to be broken by soldiers brandishing pikes. At night the wind howled through the courtyards, in reply, it seemed, to the starving wolves on the hills outside. Sometimes the wolves would slink into the Lesser Town and attack the almsfolk foraging for scraps in the middens, and sometimes an almsman would be discovered dead in the snow, half naked and frozen stiff, still clutching his staff, looking like a statue toppled from its pedestal.

  But if the poor starved in the cold, the rich gorged themselves, for winter was the season when the Queen of Bohemia held her dozens of banquets. At these ceremonies the six ladies-in-waiting were expected to remain on their feet for hours on end, without food or drink, without speaking, without coughing or sneezing, as the Queen and her guests-princes, dukes, margraves, ambassadors-stuffed themselves on steaming plates of peacock or venison or wild boar, all washed down with kegs of Pilsener or bottles of wine. The topics of discussion were always the same. Did the guests support Frederick's claim to the throne of Bohemia? How much money would they send to defend it? How many troops? When might the troops arrive? Only long afterwards, when the royal party had finally eaten its fill, did the ladies-in-waiting fight the cook-maids and footmen for the greasy scraps.

  It was to one of these feasts that, after the churches had emptied, Emilia and the other ladies-in-waiting were summoned. Yet another banquet had been laid in Vladislav Hall, this time in honour of two ambassadors from England. Emilia had been in bed at the time and was roused from her reading by the fierce chiming of the bell suspended on a hook beside her bed. Reading was one of her few pleasures in those years, one she indulged in bed, swaddled in blankets and propped on her pillows with a candle burning on the nightstand and the book held three inches from her nose. She had devoured hundreds of volumes since leaving London for Heidelberg in 1613-mostly tales of Arthurian romance such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, or stories of love and adventure like Torquemada's Olivante de Laura and Lofraso's The Fortune of Love. But she had also read Whetstone's biography of Sir Philip Sidney, and many of Sidney's sonnets she had reread so often that she knew them by heart, as she did those of Shakespeare, whose plays she read in dog-eared quarto editions. So passionate a reader was she that many times over the past seven years she had been chosen to read to the Queen herself-one of the few tasks in the Královsky Palace that she ever enjoyed. As Elizabeth was being put to bed after a banquet or masque, or even confined for one of her pregnancies, Emilia would take her place in a chair at the royal bedside and read a chapter or two of some chosen volume until her royal mistress fell asleep. The Queen asked to hear such soporific fare as The Chronicles of England by Holinshed or sober works of religious faith.

  But her duties today would be nothing quite so agreeable as whiling away an hour or two with a fat volume on her lap. She arrived in Vladislav Hall to find the table heaped with meat and the walls lined with casks of wine. The Queen did not stint herself or her guests even though prices in the market had risen and there was talk of famine. The ambassadors must have heard the rumours, for they gorged themselves on whole chickens and knuckles of pork as if it was to be their last meal. The Queen's pet monkey, a stranger to decorum, leapt from chair to chair, chattering shrilly and accepting hand-outs. Emilia stood still and silent the whole time, barely listening as the ambassadors told their news of King James's bold plans for sending troops to defend Bohemia and rescue his daughter from the clutches of the papists. Only after two hours, growing faint, did she dare nibble at a piece of bread slipped into her pocket by one of the maidservants. The bread had gone greenish-grey with mould. It was the kind of bread she imagined people were reduced to eating during a siege-the kind of bread that, if half of the reports were true, everyone in Prague Castle would soon be eating. The crumbs were thick and pasty in her mouth. It was like chewing birdlime.

  But there would be no siege, the ambassadors were assuring the Queen, nor even a war. Prague was safe. The Imperial Army was still eight miles away and Frederick's troops, all twenty-five thousand of them, were poised to block their advance. English troops were on their way, as were the Dutch, and Buckingham, the Lord High Admiral, was outfitting a fleet of ships to attack the Spaniards. Besides, winter was arriving, one of them observed as he leaned forward on his elbows and picked at his teeth with the tines of a fork. No general would be so uncivilised as to fight a war in winter, especially in Bohemia. Not even the papists, he assured the company, would be so barbaric.

  But of course the ambassadors had been wrong about the Catholic armies, just as they would be wrong about King James and Buckingham's fleet of ships. The dirty plates had not even been cleared from the table and the scraps fought over by the servants before the first cannon-ball soared over the crest of the Summer Palace, just five miles distant, and skidded into the woods. The Imperial artillery had come within range of the White Mountain. The first barrage rattled the frosty air, crackling and bursting like an oncoming storm, startling the horses in their stables and sending the townsfolk scurrying home.

  By that time Emilia had returned to her room on the top floor of the palace and begun tying her hood over her head, preparing for her last desperate foray into Golden Lane. Her thoughts had not been about the Imperial soldiers, those vast armies supposedly on their way to humble Bohemia and reclaim for Ferdinand the throne stolen by Frederick and Elizabeth. She was thinking about Vilém instead, and so it had taken several more explosions before she realised the sound was not that of thunder or ice breaking apart on the Vltava.

  What happened next she was able to watch through the lens of a telescope, an instrument from the Spanish Rooms that Vilém had taught her to use only a fortnight earlier. The battle had begun at the Summer Palace, where the Bohemian soldiers were entrenched behind earthworks. Fog was creeping upwards from the hollows and into the game park so that only one of the palace's outbuildings could be seen, alight with petals of flame. Her hands trembled as she held the instrument to the window. Smoke was lolling upwards through the collapsed roof of the building, an exotic flower coloured mallow and orange with each burst of cannon-fire. Then one of the explosions lit the Bohemian soldiers as they fled downwards, zigzagging through the trees, leaving behind their tumbrels and gun-carriages. Further above, the first of the enemy troops-a squadron of pikemen and musketeers-reached the breastworks.

  She left the palace by the back stairs less than an hour later. On the landings she pushed past clutches of kitchen-maids wailing about the invading Cossacks, then made her way into the courtyard. By this time dusk had fallen and the first of the fleeing Bohemian soldiers reached the gates. From the palace courtyard she heard their angry shouts as they pleaded with the sentries, then the sound of the gates scraping open. Some of the men had discarded their weapons-flails and sickles-others were dragging them like exhausted workers returning from a day in the fields. They were ill-fed and, with their grubby buff coats and dented breastplates, looked more like tinkers than soldiers. She dodged between them as they stumbled in their dozens across the cobbles. Then she hitched up her skirts and ran north towards Golden Lane, her path lit by explosions.

  The houses in Golden Lane were dark at that hour, every last one of them. Their occupants must have fled along with dozens of others from the castle. A few days earlier, when the Imperial Army reached Rakovník, the English and Palatine counsellors had decamped with their families and possessions. Had Vilém fled with them? Had he abandoned her? She knocked again on the door, this time more forcefully, but still there was no reply. Had he even abandoned his books?

  The sky was still on fire a few minutes later when, after she could see no sign even of Jirí, she made her way back towards the Královsky Palace. By this time the gates to the Powder Bridge were swinging shut amid much shouting. The Queen's coach had been summoned and now stood at the ready in the palace courtyard. The drum-fire had drawn closer, and she could hear
the bark of guns as the musketeers gave fire, then fell back in their ranks to reload for another bloody enfilade. Teams of horses were dragging long culverins and stubby mortars across the brow of the mountain, pulling their carriages into place for the next bombardment. She ducked her head and ran towards the Spanish Rooms, frost crunching underfoot.

  The library stood in the line of fire, the windows on its west side overlooking the dark hulk of the White Mountain, which in the twilight resembled a huge crouching beast. The thousands of books were housed in the deepest recesses of the Spanish Rooms, so she first had to pick her way through the labyrinth of galleries devoted to Rudolf's other treasures, dozens of bejewelled, glass-faced cabinets that with their bizarre curiosities-the horns of unicorns, the teeth and jawbones of dragons-looked like the reliquaries of a mad priest. Except that in the past few days most of the rooms had been emptied of their cabinets, or else the cabinets of their contents. Only a few stuffed animals and reptiles could be seen hunched in lifelike postures behind their panes of glass. But the scores of mechanical clocks were missing, as were the priceless scientific instruments-the astrolabes, the pendulums, the telescopes-that Vilém had demonstrated for her a few weeks earlier. As were the paintings, the urns, the suits of armour…

  She was not surprised by this desolation, having tiptoed into the Spanish Rooms two nights earlier and seen the rooms emptied of their contents. There had been no sign of Vilém then either, he seemed to have vanished along with everything else. Only Otakar remained. She had discovered him sitting on a half-filled crate of books, a bottle of wine overturned on the floor beside him. He had been weeping and was so drunk he could barely keep his head erect or his eyes open. Most of the treasures, he explained through his hiccups, were being sent away.