Ex Libris

by Ross King

  The horrid perorations rolled over her. Carthage. Constantinople. Venice. Florence. Cities of beauty and death. Heidelberg. Prague. She had turned to the window and between the glazing-bars caught a glimpse of the river's tawny back with a couple of sails teetering along. The barge and its occupants had disappeared downstream.

  '… And now it has made its journey from Bohemia to London,' Monboddo's Jovian voice was finishing its latest dreadful litany, 'just as the pair of you have done.' His full lips in their fringe of jet beard twisted into an indulgent smile as he set a goblet back inside its straw-filled crate. 'It was a gift to Steenie from King Frederick, an acknowledgement of his support for the Protestant cause in Bohemia. Arrived only a few months ago, one step ahead of yet another battle. But no need to tell you two about that little commotion, is there?'

  His glossy black stare had come to roost on Vilém, who slowly shook his head. All at once Monboddo's features became solemn and formal.

  'Speaking of which…' His eyes now dropped to the cabinet that Vilém was still clutching in his arms. 'I believe we have some business, Herr Jirásek. A matter of some other errant treasures? But let us discuss details over breakfast, shall we? You look worn out, my dears!'

  Chairs were brought, then a table was laid with plates of food-roasted pig's pluck, a peasant's dish for which Monboddo apologised, explaining with a wink how Steenie was fond of such humble fare since his mother had been a maidservant. Neither Vilém nor Emilia managed to eat more than a few bites, but Monboddo's appetite, undaunted by the meanness of the dish, stopped his mouth long enough to allow Vilém to tell his story. Patiently and without faltering he told of the Bellerophon's wreck, of the Star of Lübeck and the liveried pursuers, of the looters on the beach, of Sir Ambrose's plans to hire salvors with diving-bells to raise the crates, and his arrangements for another ship to transport the salvage.

  When Vilém finished, not so much reaching a conclusion as blundering suddenly into a bewildered and anxious silence, the house seemed to have fallen completely still. Through the window there came the distant gong of a church bell and a cool, scentless breeze. As the arras curtains gave a lazy shrug Emilia heard the sound of oars in the water and, seconds later, caught sight of a long barge nosing its way beneath the watergate, a frieze of figures aboard. Carefully she returned her gaze to Monboddo.

  He was leaning back in his silk-upholstered chair, nodding a black boot in the air. It almost seemed that he was flirting with another smirk, even trying hard not to laugh, as if Vilém were telling some involved but amusing story, some ribald anecdote whose comic outcome he already knew. He belched softly and wiped his beard with the back of his hand. His dark eyes rose from the nodding boot and came to roost on Vilém. A scull lisped in the water and the boot ceased its restless motions.

  'Well, well,' he said in a philosophical tone, expelling a sigh from his deep chest, 'a blow to the cause, that much is certain. A tragedy indeed. To escape Ferdinand's armies only to be shipwrecked on the shore of England! Oh, dear me, Steenie will be most upset, I can assure you of that. As of course will the Prince of Wales. Most upset. And I understand from what Steenie tells me of his little plot that Burlamaqui has already come up with most of the money. The Lord only knows where from, or what fantastic tale he might have told to his Italian bankers. But all is not lost, is it? By no means. Diving-bells, you say? A submarine?' He seemed to find the thought richly amusing. 'Well, Sir Ambrose is nothing if not resourceful. And the parchment… well… that at least has survived, has it not?'

  His gaze had dropped to the cabinet that seemed to crouch between Vilém's feet. Vilém was perched on the edge of his chair, straight-backed and anxious.

  'Yes,' he said slowly, 'the parchment. We made certain of it.'

  'Yes, yes. The parchment,' Monboddo repeated. 'The Labyrinth of the World. There is that at least to be thankful for.'

  His voice trailed dreamily away. He was studying the new plasterwork of the ceiling, a pattern of swirls and lobes incorporating Buckingham's coat of arms. Through the window behind his head Emilia could see a pair of green-liveried figures warping the sleek barge along the bottom of the landing-stairs. There were others in the boat now, also in livery. The hull struck one of the bollards with a hollow thud. Then the arras shrugged and the sight abruptly disappeared.

  'Do you have the key, I wonder?' The bass voice was casual.

  Vilém seemed to start. He raised his head, looking as if he were sniffing the air for some elusive scent, like a buck in a forest clearing who hears the soft snap of a twig.

  'The key, sir?'

  'Yes. The key to the chest. Has Sir Ambrose entrusted you with it by any chance? A pity,' he said in the same casual tone when Vilém, eyes wide, shook his head with nervous vigour. 'A great pity. It would have saved us a deal of effort.'

  Then with a lazy motion and a creak of his silk-upholstered chair he leaned backwards and grasped in his hairy paw a tool-an iron crowbar-propped on the window-sill.

  'Well, then, what do you think, my dears?' He waggled the tool in the air. 'Dare we open it?'

  'No,' Vilém stammered. 'We must wait for…'

  But Monboddo had already leaned forward and seized the casket in his thick paws. Vilém rose shakily from his chair. There came, from outside and below, the sound of feet crunching through the frost in the garden.

  ***

  The cabinet took several minutes to prise open. It was a sturdy piece, having been fashioned from the wood of a mahogany tree felled on the shores of the Orinoco. It was also very valuable-one of the most valuable of Rudolf's many cabinets in the Spanish Rooms. The jewels encrusting its surface included, diamonds from Arabia, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and emeralds from Egypt, along with 24-carat gold that had been mined in the mountains of Mexico and shipped across the ocean on the Spanish treasure fleet. Yet Monboddo the great connoisseur showed scant respect for either its beauty or its value. He had struck three violent blows across its lid and hinges before Vilém could intervene.

  'Stop this, I say.' He had taken hold of Monboddo's burly arm as it drew back for yet another blow. 'Stop this before-' But he was sent sprawling across the floorboards as the larger man twisted round and gave him a violent push.

  'A man must kill a few hogs,' Monboddo growled into his ruff as he struck the lid another blow, 'if he wishes to make a blood pudding.'

  He was on his haunches beside the cabinet, grunting and red-faced like someone at his close-stool. Beads of sweat had formed in the deep furrows of his brow. He inserted the end of the crowbar under the hasp, then the staple, then the hook of the padlock, trying to force one of them free.

  'Damn!'

  The crowbar slipped and the lock rattled. The lid screeched as if in protest and then gave a dense ring as Monboddo reared back and struck it another furious blow with the iron bar. One of the jewels shattered and its fragments, bright and blue as damselflies, skittered across the floor and into the corner. Vilém, picking himself up from the boards, murmured another protest. Emilia stepped backwards a pace. She could hear, from below, the bang of a door and the sudden, fierce commotion of the hounds.

  'Achille! Anton! No, no, no, no, no!'

  Monboddo was kneeling on the cabinet now, cursing under his breath as he fitted the flat beak of the bar under the hasp and then forced the other end downwards with both hands, using his weight for leverage. His head trembled with the strain. Then the hasp's golden hinges gave another squeak as the metal warped and one of the pins popped free.

  'Ha! We shall have it yet, my dears!'

  The buckhounds were on their way upstairs, thumping and yelping. Emilia thought she could hear behind them, beneath their excited clamour, the sound of spurred boots treading the first of the steps. She looked to Vilém, but he was staring at the cabinet. A second pin had popped free. Monboddo was noisily freeing the bar from the warped hasp, head lowered like a bull, puffing heavily as he readied himself for another try. The cabinet gave a soft rattle as if its contents
were shifting.

  'Auguste! Aimé! No! No!'

  The first of the hounds bounded into the chamber, followed by three companions, one of which knocked over a suit of rusted armour suspended on a wooden rack. A buckler and a visored helmet gonged to the floor, then skidded and spun towards Monboddo. He didn't so much as bat an eye. Four more hounds burst into the chamber, lunging at the scraps of food on the table. A plate was knocked to the floor and shattered. The spurred boots reached the corridor.

  'By God-!'

  With a loud groan the hasp broke free from its hinges. Monboddo gave another crow of triumph. He was still on his thick hams, bent over the cabinet, sweat dripping from his nose; Vilém knelt beside him, his face curiously pale. Emilia squinted in the poor light. She felt frozen, trapped in the eye of this whirlwind of rumbling boots, leaping hounds, clattering plates and armour. The cabinet gave another rattle as Monboddo grasped it between his hairy, looter's paws. Then, slowly, he raised the lid.

  'Achille!'

  Inside was another cabinet, exactly the same in every detail as the first, from its polished mahogany and gold hinges to its brilliant jewels. Monboddo raised it in his hands, holding it to the light and inspecting the ornate sides, brow knit. A nuzzling hound was thrust aside. Vilém was still beside him, head cocked, also looking puzzled. Monboddo lifted the lid of the second box to expose a third, even smaller, then a fourth, smaller still-a series of wooden shells that he tossed aside one by one.

  'What? What's this?' He had reached a fifth casket, which was barely larger than a snuff-box. He swung his bullish head to face Vilém, who had turned even paler. 'What is the meaning of this? A joke? What have you done?' He hurled the tiny casket against the wall, where it shattered to expose a sixth. 'Do you toy with me? The parchment! Where is it, damn you!'

  The spurs had ceased their jingling and now the hounds fell silent. Arduously Monboddo pushed himself upright, his boots crunching broken glass. Emilia, staring at the litter of boxes, felt Vilém recoil beside her.

  'Gentlemen!' Monboddo had turned to face the door. 'Bad news, my good sirs. It would appear that Sir Ambrose and his friends have enjoyed a small joke at our expense.'

  He gestured with his crowbar at the mahogany cabinets. Emilia, raising her head, saw three men in the doorway, the gold on their dark livery lit by the sash-window. Then a board creaked piteously and the first of them stepped into the chamber.

  Chapter Six

  Was there ever a summer when the rains fell so heavily? Whenever I look back on those days it seems that rain is streaming from a leaden sky. The sun disappeared for weeks on end behind sullen scuds of cloud; it might have been October or November instead of July. In London the gutters filled and flowed, feeding the swollen Thames. The window-sills and clothes-lines no longer bore their swags of laundry, for there was never enough sunshine to dry anyone's linen. In the countryside the rivers overflowed their banks, running in torrents across stunted fields, sweeping away roads and bridges. Fasts were observed and days of humiliation observed, because in time it was decided that the incessant rains must be the Lord's angry judgement on the people of England for failing to punish the regicides. Before the year was out the traitors would be hunted down in Holland and hanged at Charing Cross, Standfast Osborne among them. Huge crowds thronged Whitehall and the Strand to watch the spectacle, and a thousand voices cheered as the bodies were cut down and the butchers stepped forward to begin their work. One by one the bellies of the regicides were expertly slit and the dripping lengths of viscera thrown on to bonfires that sizzled and snapped under the bleak October rain. Nothing like it had been seen since the days when Queen Mary martyred Protestants in Smithfield, or Queen Elizabeth Jesuits at Tyburn. Even death was considered a punishment too soft for Cromwell, so his carcass was excavated from its tomb in Westminster Abbey and hauled in a cart to Tyburn, where it was hanged and then beheaded. The rotted corpse was buried under the scaffold while the skull was slathered with pitch and stuck on a pike on Westminster Hall, from where it glowered at the crowds hurrying past the bookstalls and printsellers below. Small boys threw stones at it, others laughed and cheered as the ravens fought over the eye-sockets. Revenge, revenge-everyone in those days was bent on revenge.

  And was I, too, bent on revenge? Was it that which made me embark, feverish and ill, on that final, fateful journey? Was it retribution that I hoped to find as I set out from Alsatia, in the midst of the deluge, in the back of a mail-coach jostling along the Strand and into Charing Cross, heading slowly westward?

  I remember the sodden morning of my departure, in contrast to those preceding it, in vivid detail. It was still only July, but already the scaffolds were being built for our little auto-da-fé. Or perhaps it was the beginning of August. I had lost all track of time. How many delirious days had passed since I had returned to Alsatia from the Rolls Chapel? Four or five? As much as a week? I recalled very little of those intervening days, and nothing at all of my journey back to the Half Moon Tavern from that dark labyrinth under Chancery Lane. How did I return, by hack or by foot? What must the hour have been when at last I found myself, dazed and alarmed, inside my tiny room?

  The next few days-or the next week-had passed horribly. I fell into a nightmarish sleep, from which I awoke now and again, sweating and sore, unable to move, tangled in clammy bed-linen like a panicked beast trapped in a net. At one moment the chamber seemed unbearably hot; the next, it was freezing-cold. I was hungry and thirsty but too weak, when I tried, to rise from the bed. I have vague memories of footfalls along the corridor. At some point after dusk I was aware of a jingling of keys, the sighing of hinges and, in the doorway, the alarmed face of a chambermaid. Mrs. Fawkes must have arrived shortly thereafter. I seem to remember someone else, a man, shuffling about on the squeaking floorboards. He inspected my tongue, whoever he was, and pressed his ear to my chest and the back of his hand to my brow. It seems I was agued; the result, doubtless, of my little excursion in the Cam, along with my exertions, my travels, my lack of food. I have always possessed a weak constitution. My body as much as my mind craves regularity and custom. To cap it all, my asthma had worsened. My chest was making a braying noise that seemed to alarm all concerned. In one of my few lucid moments it occurred to me how my clients would wonder and exclaim at the news that Isaac Inchbold, the respectable bookseller, had died in a brothel.

  Yet Mrs. Fawkes had no wish to let me die; perhaps she was mindful of the reckoning. And so it was that over the next few days I suffered all manner of attentions from a succession of her chambermaids. Every few hours I was spoon-fed broths and gruels, and my aching limbs were rubbed with chamois-leather gloves. I was bled by a barber-surgeon, in whose cup my drained blood looked as bright and volatile as quicksilver. In time I was made to totter down the stairs and into a sweating-house-a hitherto unknown facility-where I bathed in a cistern whose ordinary function (judging from the cavorting pink nymphs painted on the tiles above) was something less salubrious. But the bath seemed to help, as did everything else, and in time I felt better.

  One morning when the rainclouds were prowling the horizon I rose from my sickbed, dressed my shrunken limbs in the Cavalier clothing that someone had thoughtfully laundered and folded, then took hold of my thorn-stick and hobbled down the stairs to pay Mrs. Fawkes for her hospitality. Through the windows of each landing I could see, sinking into the rooftops, steadily shrinking as I descended, the turrets and pennants of Nonsuch House, all looking exact and familiar, but also unreal, as if the building were an apparition or a model of itself, or something glimpsed in a dream. The drawbridge was lifting itself skyward in a languid pantomime. At the last turn, the scene vanished from sight, and all at once, wobbling on my stick, I felt choked with grief, hopelessly cut off from my past.

  'But, Mr. Cobb…' Mrs. Fawkes had seemed startled by the sight of the gold sovereigns I pressed into her palm. 'But… where will you go, sir?'

  'My name is Inchbold,' I told her. I had had enough of lies. 'Isaac Inchb
old.' I had turned and was already halfway to the door. Rain was falling heavily now. I watched a stream of water pulsing along the middle of the street. 'I shall go to Dorsetshire,' I told her, realising for the first time what dark skein my fevered brain had been slowly spooling as I lay sweating and trembling in my bed. 'I have urgent business in Dorsetshire.'

  ***

  Six post roads left London in those days: six roads that radiated like the cords of a great web, at whose centre crouched the Postmaster-General and his superior, Sir Valentine Musgrave, the new Secretary of State. Between the radiation of the new royal monopoly, woven into its meshes, was a finer, almost invisible grid of by-posts and 'common carriers': independently run couriers who served the small market towns and remote areas of the kingdom that the coaches of the Postmaster-General had yet to penetrate. These were woefully primitive and disorganised, but spying and smuggling-and the shipping or receiving of unlicensed books-would have been tricky to accomplish without them. In 1657 Cromwell had tried without success to suppress them, and now I supposed they would become the modus operandi of the new King's numerous enemies, the secret channels for new forms of dissent. I caught the first of what would be a half-dozen of them somewhere to the west of Salisbury: a small, slow vehicle, barely more than a covered wagon, that ran a whimsically irregular route through the countryside, through ten miles of detours, flooded hamlets and forced stops, until it was time to wait three hours for the connecting coach to trundle into town, an even smaller vehicle heaped high with demijohns of Tewkesbury mustard and Hampshire honey. But the last coach I caught-the one that finally delivered me to Crampton Magna-was considerably larger and swifter than the others. It also had a familiar symbol, a crux Hermetica, painted on the door in sun-faded gold, just visible between streaks of mud the colour of mature rust.