Ex Libris

by Ross King

  Emilia retreated under the awning and peered at the waters ahead. The ox-bow of the next reach with its dangerous currents lay before them. The Greenwich Marshes looked desolate, but moored along the other bank were a half-dozen Indiamen, the lanterns on their taffrails lighting thickets of masts swaying overhead. Behind them lay the East India Company's storehouses. As the barge approached the wharves, moving south now, Emilia turned her head to see the boat behind them lit by a ship's lantern. It had gained several lengths, perhaps more, since Woolwich. Two watermen were perched in the stern, while their passengers-a trio of shadowy figures-were huddled under the tilt. When she turned to Vilém she saw that he was holding something in his palm.

  'Take one.'

  'What?'

  'It's them,' he whispered. 'The Cardinal's men.' He extended his hand a few inches. 'Eight miles. We won't make it…'

  One of the East India warehouses loomed to starboard, its smell of molasses carried to them by the stiffening breeze. In its brief light she could see what he was holding: the leather pouch given to him by Sir Ambrose. Strychnos nux vomitica. Instinctively she shrank against the canvas.

  'And as for the casket…' The light slid away and they were in darkness. A gull screeched overhead as he stooped, still clutching the pouch, and then raised the casket to his lap with a soft grunt. 'It will have to go overboard, I fear. Those are the instructions.'

  'Whose instructions?'

  No answer. He was staring fixedly at the chest. She glanced up. More wharves crowded the banks and mazes of buildings pressed up behind them. The boat slewed sideways and a wave broke over the bows, showering her cheeks and soaking her petticoats. They had gained speed but lost control in the treacherous current. The barge-master cursed and struggled to keep the vessel on a steady course, using the pole as a rudder. Their own wake overcame them as they slowed, and the barge weltered even more. After a moment the current slackened and the waterman wearily began poling again. But their pursuers had gained another few lengths.

  The next hour passed with Emilia perched on the edge of the thwart, swivelling to look astern first and then at the waters ahead. Another sharp ox-bow untwisted before them at Greenwich, along with more fierce currents that set the barge moving from side to side and the barge-master cursing all over again. The sky flushed with a few hints of pink and orange and the tide slowed. Soon the river began to fill with traffic, with dozens of lighters fighting their way to the Legal Quays below the Tower, and with eel-ships and oyster-boats on their way to Billingsgate. Armadas of shallops and pinnaces dodged and feinted among them, sweeping downstream with their sails puffed. Their pursuers closed the gap but then receded after Shadwell as they were slowed in the Lower Pool by the traffic swirling about like flocks of angry birds.

  A few minutes later, straining her eyes, Emilia saw the arches of London Bridge girdling the river. When she turned round she saw the tilt-boat breaking into view again. The barge-master pushed hard, dripping with sweat, but it was no use. When they finally drew even with the crowded quays in front of the custom-house, the boat was only two lengths behind. The Cardinal's men had crawled from under the tilt, and in the awakening sunlight she could see their tanned brows, their jet-black livery with its stripes of gold. All three wore lace ruffs, and one of them-the man crouched over the prow-was clutching a dagger. When she turned to Vilém he was kneeling on the floor of the barge with the casket in his hands.

  'Too late…' He was crawling out from under the tilt and into the bows, where he struggled to raise the casket to the gunwales. 'We won't reach York House,' he grunted. 'We won't even reach Billingsgate!'

  'No!'

  Emilia clambered over the thwarts, barking her shins, then caught him in a clumsy embrace and laid a hand on the casket, before he pushed her backwards. He hoisted the cargo and once more leant over the gunwales with the treasure outstretched in his hands.

  Emilia picked herself up from the boards, but at that moment the barge was bumped in the stern by the tilt-boat. She heard the master curse as the barge slewed sideways and then an instant later broadsided an oncoming skiff. The collision was violent. The last thing she saw as she was thrown to the deck was a pair of boots disappearing over the gunwales.

  'Vilém!'

  The barge was rocking wildly from side to side by the time she raised herself. They had been boarded. She heard, rather than saw, two of the Cardinal's men scuffling with the barge-master. The poor old devil defended himself valiantly with his pole before the dagger slit his leather jerkin, then his belly. He sank to his knees with a last oath and then tumbled over the stern as the barge was struck again, this time on the starboard quarter by a fishing smack knocked off course by the careering skiff. The Cardinal's men tumbled into one another's arms before sprawling full-length in the stern. The knife clattered to the boards.

  'Emilia!'

  The smack was floating past, drifting upstream with its sail flapping, while the mast crazily pendulated and the master fought hard to keep his balance in the stern. Emilia caught a glimpse of Vilém prone on the teetering deck, tangled in nets and half-buried in an avalanche of silvery fish.

  'Emilia! Jump!'

  The smack was moving more quickly now, skimming past the floundering barge as the wind caught in her half-furled bunts. She stepped hurriedly on to one of the rocking thwarts and was bracing herself to leap, when a hand on her skirts tugged her backwards. But at that point the barge was rammed by the fourth and last boat, a wherry filled with a dozen passengers. Then the hand disappeared and she found herself plunging towards the smack through five feet of spray and air.

  Chapter Three

  The countryside in flood. Rain had fallen steadily throughout the night and was still pouring down as the sky above Epping Forest changed shade from charcoal to cinder-grey: so heavily that the fishponds and flint-pits were overflowing their banks. Overnight the mossy woodlands had become a morass. The worst of the storm had passed, but a strong gale was still blowing from the southwest, and still the rain came down. Oak and beech trees stood in the middle of rivers as if stranded; the splintered trunks of others, felled by winds or lightning, lay across the most windswept stretches of the road from London.

  In the middle of the forest, near the cottages of its game keepers and vermin-killers, four horses could be seen splashing along the Epping Road, drawing behind them through the mud and water a leather-topped coach. It was a little past seven o'clock in the morning. The horses were bound northward through Essex, staggering and straining, their wet manes flapping like pennants and the wheels of the coach flinging great divots of mud into the air. But at the lowest point in the road, where the water from the flint-pits stood the deepest, the coach halted with a violent lurch. The driver, who had already cleared the trunks of three trees from his path that morning, bawled a curse at the horses and cracked his whip over their rumps. They struggled for a moment, but the coach failed to move.

  'What's happening?' I had lifted the leather flap to peer through the window. The droplets spattering my face felt like spindrift on the high seas.

  'Stuck in the mud,' complained the driver as he hopped into the road with a splash. His boots squelched and sucked as he nearly lost his balance. He was already soaked to the skin. 'Not to worry, sir,' he growled into his collar as he pulled his hat low on his brow. 'I'll have us out in a tick.'

  I sat back and removed an oatcake and a wedge of black cheese from my pocket. We had been on the road for more than an hour, since before first light. I had found the coach-and-four waiting for me as promised in the underground stable-yard of the Three Pigeons, its horses already harnessed. I was expecting to see Phineas again but had not been disappointed to discover that a different driver would transport me to Wembish Park, a burly man who introduced himself as Nat Crump. He was proving a more garrulous companion than Phineas, though one equally ill-tempered. As I sat in the back of the vehicle-different from the one that had carried me to Pontifex Hall-I chewed my breakfast and listened to hi
s curses, cries of encouragement and rueful observations about the inclement weather.

  'Should have taken a different road,' he was saying as he thrust a thick branch beneath one of the rear wheels and tried to jemmy it free. He urged the horses forward, their traces taut and creaking. The coach gave a small lunge and the iron-shod wheels groaned mulishly, but we moved only a few inches before settling back into the mud. I was alarmed to see that water had risen as high as our rear axle. Crump and the horses stood knee-deep. 'Should have gone through Puckeridge,' he explained, bracing himself for better leverage. 'Higher ground over that way.'

  'Puckeridge?' I was rocking with the motion of the coach. Overhead, elm branches were thrashing wildly. 'Well, why on earth did you not, then?'

  'Orders,' he said with an angry grunt of exertion. 'I was ordered not to, wasn't I?' He paused and glanced in my direction. He appeared to regard the whole business as some fault of mine. 'I was told to ride through the forest.'

  'Oh? And why was that?'

  He had gripped a spoke and the wheel rim and now began forcing the branch with a dripping boot. The foremost horses reared a pace forward at his command but then splashed down foursquare in the mire. This time the wheels hadn't budged so much as an inch. He cursed again as he waded arduously forward.

  'Why?' He had begun scraping mud from before the wheels with the end of his stick. 'For the same reason that we're not taking Lord Marchamont's coach, that's why. Because it's safer.'

  He laughed mirthlessly but then paused in his labours long enough to swing a thick arm proprietorially at the surrounding woodlands. His hat had fallen into the water and I saw how his thatch of blond hair was flattened to his skull by the rain. Earlier, in the poor light of the stable-yard, I almost thought I recognised him but decided that, as with so many things these days, I could no longer trust my instincts. I also thought he seemed to be surprised by my appearance-by my darkened hair and clipped beard-but supposed it was because I didn't answer my description. Whatever the case, he had taken me aboard without any fuss.

  'Through the forest,' he was explaining between gasps and grunts. He had found another branch to use as a fulcrum and then waded to the rear of the coach, where he was working again on the wheel. The coach was rocking back and forth like a boat on the tide. 'Won't be followed if we go this way.'

  I raised the leather flap on the rear quarter-light and peered into the bough-canopied lane that twisted away behind us. The morning was still half dark. Through the grey air I could see a couple of fallow deer watching us from the copsewood, a buck and a doe, both poised to bolt. But there was no human life to be seen, not even the poachers for which Epping Forest was notorious. The dreadful weather was keeping the roads empty. We had met only the occasional London-bound wagon or pony-cart since reaching the Epping Road.

  'Giddap! Go on!'

  One of the branches splintered and snapped with a loud crack, and suddenly the vehicle pitched jerkily forward, almost sprawling me on to the floor. The window-flap had flown open and through it I could see our wheels tossing breakers on to the muddy bank. Crump fought for a handhold on the side of the coach and pulled himself aboard. Then we were on our way again, ploughing north into a dense screen of trees and rain. I settled back for what promised to be a long ride. We did not expect to arrive at Wembish Park until the next afternoon.

  Onward we rolled for the rest of the morning, the miles swaying slowly past. I dozed in and out of wakefulness, exhausted because I hadn't arrived back in Alsatia until after midnight and then, because the Half Moon after dark was as noisy as a witch's Sabbath, had slept only in snatches. Feet trod the stairs at all hours, fiddles squealed in the tap room, dancers disported themselves up and down the corridors amid shrieks of laughter. There was peace at last an hour or two before dawn, but all too soon I was roused by a knock on my door and the voice of one of Mrs. Fawkes's chambermaids informing me through the woodwork that my hackney-coach was waiting.

  My journey to Wembish Park began under a familiar omen. As the coach approached Chancery Lane I had seen another chalk figure scrawled on a wall-one of the hieroglyphs I now remembered from my Hermetic studies that Marsilio Ficino had called a 'crux Hermetica'. Beneath, also crudely in chalk, faded by the rain, was a single sentence, like a caption: We the Invisible Brethren of the Rose Cross.

  I had leaned back in my seat, puzzled, wondering if I had read the legend right. Was it a hoax of some sort? For it seemed far too strange, too cryptic, to be genuine. I had heard of the secret society known as the Brothers of the Rose Cross, of course. I stumbled across their strange story the other day as I was flipping through a few of my treatises on Hermetic philosophy. I was only surprised that Biddulph's narrative with its secretive Protestant conspirators had not included them. From what little I could make of them, the Rosicrucians were a secretive band of Protestant alchemists and mystics who had opposed the Catholic Counter-Reformation earlier in the century. They supported Henry of Navarre as the champion of their faith and then, after Henry's assassination in 1610, Frederick V of the Palatinate. Their graffiti and placards mushroomed on the walls of Heidelberg and Prague in 1616 or 1617, about the time, that is, when Ferdinand of Styria was named king-designate of Bohemia. The Rosicrucians must have regarded Ferdinand, a pupil of the Jesuits, with terror and loathing, but their placards and manifestos were strangely optimistic, prophesying a reformation in politics and religion throughout the Empire. These reforms were to be brought about through magical arts such as those taught by Marsilio Ficino, the first translator into Latin of the Corpus hermeticum. By means of the 'scientific magic' in the Hermetic texts and in Ficino's Libri de Vita, the Rosicrucian Brethren hoped to turn the debased and blackened debris of modern life-the world of religious strife, of wars and persecutions-into a kind of Golden Age or Utopia, in much the same way as they hoped to manufacture gold in their laboratories out of lumps of coal and clay.

  Their desire for reformation was understandable enough, I supposed. What did the Rosicrucian see as they gazed back over the last hundred years of European history but slaughter-benches drenched in Protestant blood? There was the massacre of Huguenots in Paris on the Feast of St. Bartholomew and the bonfires at Smithfield and Oxford during the reign of Queen Mary. There were the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and the Holy Office, along with the wars of the Spaniards in the Low Countries, where Sir Philip Sidney lost his life. There were the Lutheran clergymen expelled from Styria and the bonfire of 10,000 Protestant books in the city of Graz, from which Kepler was banished. There was Copernicus, bullied and silenced, and Galileo, summoned to Rome in 1616 for examination before Robert Bellarmine, one of the cardinals of the Inquisition who had burned the Hermetic philosopher Giordano Bruno in the Campo de' Fiore. There was Tommaso Campanella tortured and imprisoned in Naples. There was William the Silent murdered by Spanish agents and Henry IV stabbed by Ravaillac on the Pont Neuf.

  In the end, though, the Rosicrucians themselves became a part of this tragic litany. They discovered neither the philosopher's stone nor their cherished Golden Age, because in 1620 King Frederick and the Bohemian Protestants were crushed by the armies of the Catholic League. Undoubtedly most Brothers of the Rose Cross were superstitious charlatans and foolish idealists, but I had felt a sorrow for these men who had wished to ward off with their books and chemicals and feeble magic spells what they saw as the evils of the Counter-Reformation, of Spain and the Habsburgs, only to be swallowed up themselves in the horrors of the Thirty Years War.

  But this morning as the coach jolted past Chancery Lane something else about the Rosicrucian Brethren had struck me. I realised that their manifestos had appeared in Prague at roughly the same time that Raleigh's fleet-financed by another band of zealous Protestants-was setting sail for Guiana. Indeed, the most famous of the Rosicrucian tracts, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, a copy of which I discovered on my shelves, was published in Strasbourg in 1616, the same year that Raleigh was released from his cell in the Bloo
dy Tower. So I wondered again if Sir Ambrose with his Hermetic text was some sort of link between these two doomed ventures, the first with Raleigh in Guiana, the second with Frederick in Bohemia. I had no idea; but the other day as I glanced through my copy of The Chemical Wedding I noticed something else about the text, something even more dramatic than its date, for engraved both in its margins and on the title page were tiny Mercury symbols, exact duplicates of these figures scribbled on the walls of London.

  Then the coach had reached Bishopsgate, where the gates were scraped open to admit a flock of geese being driven to market for slaughter. I had pulled the window-curtain and closed my eyes, but as the coach creaked about me I found myself thinking of the dozens of alchemical works at Pontifex Hall, along with its well-stocked laboratory, and I wondered if Alethea's father, a devout Protestant, had been a Rosicrucian too. But at that point my thoughts had been interrupted as the cackling of the jubilant geese fell about my ears-the riotous clamour of creatures oblivious to the fate that lay only a few minutes away.

  ***

  'Hungry, sir?'

  'Mmmn…?' The voice had startled me awake, and for a few seconds I was too disoriented to move or speak.

  'Shall we stop for a meal, sir?'

  I pushed myself upright and peered through the window flap, confused and blinking, feeling the dislocation I always experience when I abandon the city for the country. A flat landscape was slowly reeling past, its fields and wood-lined droves half underwater. Rain was still falling in curtains, drumming across the leather rooftop.

  'How long before Cambridge?'

  'An hour,' replied Crump.

  'No.' I fell back into the seat. 'Carry on.'