Ex Libris

by Ross King

  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 g
unpowder 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 s
prang 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.