Ex Libris

by Ross King

'Sir Richard?' Alethea was standing stock-still and open-mouthed beside me. Was she remembering the murder on the Pont Neuf? Quickly she dropped my hand. 'What are you doing here? What is-?'

  Phineas was the first to respond, scuttling forward to grapple with one of the men. But the contest was unequal, for his opponent produced from his belt a short dagger with which he artfully parried two feeble blows before driving the blade home with a swift and practised gesture. The footman crumpled without a word while his conqueror, a fat man with hooded eyes, wiped the stiletto on his breeches and advanced towards us.

  'Sir Richard?' Alethea took a faltering step across the tiles. Her face had gone white. But Sir Richard directed his gaze not at his shocked affianced but at me.

  'Mr. Inchbold,' he said in a level tone as he removed his hat with a sweep of his arm. 'Well, well, I find I am not misinformed after all. How resourceful you must be. I saw you drown in the river with my own two eyes, though my sources insisted otherwise. I can but hope you were as resourceful in your search.' He unfastened a brass button to expose the pistol tucked in his belt. Water eddied between his boots. 'So where is it, then?' He stepped a few paces towards us. The black-clad trio at his heels eagerly followed suit. 'The Labyrinth of the World,' he said in the same even tone. 'Where is it?'

  But as he took another step, reaching for his weapon, the floor of the atrium shifted like the deck of a foundering ship and the four of them lost their balance. No sooner had they righted themselves than the chandelier broke free from its mooring with a shriek and plunged to the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces between us. Sir Richard staggered backwards, still fumbling for his pistol. I felt glass skittering against my boots and then a pair of hands in the middle of my back.

  'Go!' It was Alethea. 'Run!'

  Chapter Nine

  All four of Jupiter's moons, even Callisto, the largest, are far too dim to be sighted with the naked eye. Galileo first saw them on a winter night in January in the year 1610, using a telescope with a magnitude of 32: four moons that orbit Jupiter in periods of one and a half to sixteen and a half days. Four new worlds that no one, ancient or modern, had ever seen before. He published his discovery in Sidereus nuncius, the 'Messenger of the Stars', and within a year the sightings were confirmed by Jesuit astronomers in Rome as well as by Kepler in Prague. They were also confirmed by a German astronomer, Simon Marius, who gave the moons their names: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

  Even from the beginning the discovery provoked as much controversy as amazement. Not only were the four new satellites incompatible with the Scriptures but they also challenged Aristotle's claim in De caelo that the stars are fixed in the heavens. Worst of all, they opposed the description of the universe given in another hallowed book, Ptolemy's Almagest. Enemies of Copernicus attacked his system by arguing that if the earth is not, as Ptolemy claims, at the centre of the universe, then why should the earth, and the earth alone, possess an orbiting moon? But the revolutions of Jupiter's moons now led Galileo to recognise that the stars could orbit a planet at the same time as the planet itself orbits the sun. Jupiter and its four satellites became, for Galileo, a model for the earth and its own moon. So it was that in 1613 he wrote in the appendix to his letters on sunspots-a work opposing the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Scheiner-that the moons proved beyond all doubt the truth of Copernicanism.

  But for Galileo the moons also had a practical significance that he kept a closer secret even than his Copernicanism. Galileo was a most practical man, of course. He dropped cannon-balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to refute Aristotle's theory of motion, and at the Auditorium Maximum in Padua he lectured students on the best methods of fortifying cities and constructing cannons. Now he realised that Jupiter's moons-and, more specifically, the eclipses occurring when they pass into the planet's shadow-could be used to solve the ancient problem of finding the longitude at sea; a problem for whose solution the King of Spain had offered a prize of 6,000 ducats and the States-General of Holland, not to be outdone, 30,000 florins. The truce between the two nations, signed in 1609, was soon to expire-that is, if it was not shattered by cannon-fire first. A new war would see the Spaniards and the Dutch fighting among the islands of the Pacific as well as on the old battlefields of Europe. Indeed, a few Dutch raids on the presidios of Tierra Firme had already been reported. So it was that Galileo, a devout Catholic, calculated a table of eclipses and approached Philip III through the offices of the Tuscan ambassador in Madrid. These tables-the index of Spanish fortunes in the Pacific-predicted the times and durations of the eclipses of each of the moons: eclipses that, like those of the moon, happen at the same instant anywhere on earth. Unlike lunar eclipses, however, these occur with great frequency, almost daily in the case of Io. Jupiter and its satellites therefore became, for whoever could predict their eclipses, a celestial clock telling the difference in time between any two places on earth.

  'By the middle of 1615 the spies for both the War Party and the States-General were sending back from Madrid reports that Spanish ships in the Pacific had begun making trials using Galileo's tables. These tables were highly secret, of course.' Alethea was two steps ahead of me, leading the way through a darkened corridor whose carpet was an inch deep in water. 'Galileo never published a word of them.'

  'And the Sacra Familia was one of the ships?'

  She nodded her head. 'Sir Ambrose had read all of the reports that came to Lambeth Palace, and so he recognised the name of the ship as soon as he read it on her escutcheon.'

  Pursued by Sir Richard, we had run from the atrium, splashing and sliding, into the library, where so much water had collected on the floor that the books on the bottom shelves were already half submerged, while dozens of those shelved higher had toppled to the floor. Already the pasteboard covers were wrinkling and the rag-paper pages degrading into the cast-off scraps of linen and hemp from which they were fashioned. I was stooping to salvage one of them-a futile gesture-when Alethea ordered me to keep running. We climbed the ladder to the library's gallery, then raised it beyond the reach of our pursuers. Now I could hear their boots on the stairs as we picked our way past the obstacles-collapsed plaster and fallen timbers-that littered the maze of dark corridors on the first floor.

  'So the Sacra Familia had found a method of calculating the longitude at sea?'

  'No,' she said, hurrying forward. 'Galileo's method fails to work at sea. On dry land or in an observatory, yes, it is the best method so far conceived. But at sea it is impossible. It is difficult enough to use a backstaff, let alone a telescope, on a moving ship, especially on a rough swell such as one finds in the Pacific. Jupiter might be spotted for a few seconds, but the slightest motion of the deck makes it impossible to train the lens on the satellites, even with the special binocular lenses that Galileo invented.'

  How much longer before we were captured? From beyond the plaster walls came the sounds of thunder, or perhaps the boots of our pursuers. Or was it the water rupturing its way through the heart of the building? The floor seemed to tremble underfoot. Limping from pain, I stumbled after her. I was wet and exhausted but still curious. I demanded to know what secret it was that, in all likelihood, I was about to die for. 'What did the Sacra Familia discover?'

  'An island of bamboo, sandalwood and gold,' she explained as we rounded a corner. She had taken my hand. 'The Sacra Familia was driven aground on an island somewhere in the southeast Trades that blow to the north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Or rather the island was covered not in gold but white spar, the yellow crystals that the Muhammadan alchemists call markasita, a substance never found anywhere that gold is not. It was the same island, Pinzón knew, as the one portrayed in the Prague edition of the Theatrum orbis terrarum. You see, Pinzón had been past the island once before, in 1595, on Mendaña's last voyage in search of the Islas de Solomón.'

  'Mendaña missed the Solomon Islands and discovered Manoa instead?'

  'Or possibly it was one of the fabled Islas de Solomón themselves. Who c
an say? Mendaña and Pinzón may have regarded the new island, with all of its sandalwood and white spar, as the site of King Solomon's mines. But of course, like the original Islas de Solomón, no one was able to find it again, though it was plotted in the Prague edition of the Theatrum.'

  We rounded another corner and passed chambers whose doors yawned wide to show scriptors, writing boxes and a knee-hole desk. Their floors, too, were under water; the wainscots were warped and streams of water were running down the walls. Then the corridor swung left. Where were we fleeing to?

  'But now the island's longitude could be determined,' Alethea was telling me. 'Galileo's tables revealed the precise time at which each of the eclipses would be seen in Toledo, which is where the Spaniards situate their prime meridian. Pinzón then recorded the exact times of the same eclipses on the island. Then, once the ship was rebuilt with sandalwood, she sailed for Spain, from which a new expedition would be despatched to locate the island, using the proper co-ordinates. But of course the Sacra Familia never reached Cádiz.' I could feel her grip tighten, then as we rounded another corner she added: 'And even had she reached Spain, her information would not have been worth the paper it was written on. In the space of a year it had gone from being one of the most valuable documents in Christendom to a dangerous heresy whose followers were burned at the stake.'

  For if the moons of Jupiter were controversial, then their eclipses were even more so. Galileo did not discover them until 1612, two years after his first sighting of the moons themselves. He had begun calculating their motions by 1611, but he used the Ptolemaic instead of the Copernican tables-accepting the earth, that is, and not the sun as the centre of Jupiter's motions. Only when he refined his calculations by employing the Copernican tables did he discover how the moons were being eclipsed by Jupiter, whose shadow blotted out the light reflected from the sun. Predicting these eclipses was henceforth a simple enough task, but such predictions could not be made using the Ptolemaic tables, which caused errors both in the prediction of the time at which an eclipse begins and the position of the satellite against the stars as it enters and then emerges from the eclipse. Predicting the eclipses-these keys to the secret of the longitude-therefore entailed the acceptance of Copernicanism, a heresy for which Giordano Bruno was burned in Rome only a dozen years earlier.

  What followed was a story that I knew well enough: one of ignorance triumphing over reason, of orthodoxy and prejudice over invention. In 1614 Galileo wrote to Christina of Lorraine a letter attempting to render Copernicanism consistent with the Holy Scripture. The effort was in vain, however, because the letter was laid before the Inquisition, whose dark machinery was set in motion by Pope Paul V. The cardinals in the Palace of the Sant'Uffizio summoned Galileo to Rome and, after examining him, affirmed Copernicanism as a heretical doctrine. This had been in the winter of 1616, shortly after the Sacra Familia set sail on her long voyage into the South Seas. Galileo's method was therefore not only impractical by the time the battered convoy returned to Cádiz: it was also heretical.

  'In another time such a heresy might not have been so catastrophic. Come, Mr. Inchbold.'

  We were moving almost blindly now. I could hear more rats, a whole pack of them, scampering and squealing underfoot.

  'But in 1616 a war between the Catholics and Protestants was looming. Rome could ill afford new threats to its orthodoxies, especially ones propagated by someone as eminent as Galileo. Isaac Casaubon may have demolished the myth of Hermes Trismegistus, but now Hermetic philosophers all across Europe were catching at this new and, in the eyes of the Roman Curia, equally dangerous wisdom. Astronomy had replaced the learning of the Corpus hermeticum as the greatest danger to Church authority. Galileo was censured and his writings placed by the Jesuits on their Index along with the works of occultists such as Agrippa and Paracelsus. His project was dropped by the Spaniards, and the search for the longitude at sea-and for the mysterious island in the Pacific-came to an end.'

  And so that might have been the last of the story, she claimed, had word not reached London that all was not lost when the Sacra Familia was wrecked on the reef. Other copies of her sea-chart existed. At first the reports were as spurious and untrustworthy as those regarding the island itself, though in time they were confirmed by spies in Madrid and Seville. These reports claimed that the Sacra Familia, after sailing from Veracruz, docked with the rest of the Mexican fleet in Havana, where, fearing the dire weather, her captain deposited duplicates of her charts, written in cipher, at the Jesuit mission of San Cristóbal-documents later shipped to Seville for safekeeping in the archives of the House of Trade.

  'But that was not the only place the documents were housed. In March of 1617, just as Raleigh's fleet was preparing to sail for Guiana, Archduke Ferdinand of Styria concluded with the King of Spain a treaty under whose terms Philip recognised Ferdinand as the successor to the Emperor Matthias in return for the German territory of Alsace and two Imperial enclaves in Italy. The treaty brought together the two most powerful families in Europe, the two Houses of Habsburg, one in Spain, the other in Austria. The two great empires would now work together, uniting to share their armies and their knowledge, and in so doing to crush the Protestants of Europe once and for all. Among their most powerful arsenals, of course, were their libraries.'

  A roof slate thundered overhead as it fell. Part of the ceiling had fallen to expose the beams of the garret overhead. Water was cascading through, spilling into our path. I heard a shout from somewhere behind us, then Alethea gripped my hand and pulled me through the cataract.

  'But the arsenal in Vienna was in danger,' I gasped as we emerged on the other side.

  'Yes. In 1617 the Protestant armies of Count Thurn were at the gates of Vienna.'

  'And so the chart was taken to Bohemia?'

  'Along with dozens of other treasures from the Imperial Library in Vienna. It was placed in the archives of the Spanish Rooms, which already held reams of Tycho Brahe's astronomical data as well as forbidden books by Galileo, Copernicus and other heretics.'

  And so it was that the new plot unfolded in London: one that sent Sir Ambrose to Prague Castle in the entourage of the Elector Palatine. He was given the task of recovering as many of the volumes from the library of the Spanish Rooms as possible, but in particular he was charged with finding the sea-chart and bringing it to England. The decisive coup de main would be struck after all-albeit belatedly-against the King of Spain.

  'But the plan miscarried,' I said. 'The palimpsest was never delivered to Lambeth Palace.'

  'No,' Alethea replied. 'At the last moment Sir Ambrose betrayed the War Party.'

  'Betrayed them?' We had stopped before a closed door, which Alethea was attempting to force with her shoulder. 'But why? Are you saying Sir Ambrose was a Spanish agent?'

  'No, not Sir Ambrose. But both the Navy Office and Lambeth Palace had been infiltrated. Word of the palimpsest had already reached both Rome and Madrid.'

  She was pressing with her shoulder at the door, which refused to budge. I heard a long-case clock chime from somewhere behind us, and then the sound of distant voices.

  'Ven acquí!'

  'Vayamos por otro lado!'

  The door groaned and gave an inch. It was the same door, I realised, that had impeded my progress that long-ago morning. I lunged forward to help push. It creaked open another inch, then I felt a breeze and heard more frantic chiming: not spurs, as I thought at first, but the vials and cuvettes on their shelves in the laboratory.

  'The fact that the palimpsest survived at all is a miracle,' Alethea said as we burst through a second later, then righted ourselves in another darkened corridor. 'In the end Sir Ambrose wanted it destroyed. Although he had risked his life to save it; his final wish was that it should burn.'

  A chunk of plaster fell with a violent splash ahead of us, and the timbers above our head were creaking under an immense strain. We picked our way more cautiously through the corridor. Some more plaster collapsed, less than ten fe
et ahead of us.

  'The Puritans wanted the chart,' I said. 'Standfast Osborne-'

  'Yes,' she replied. 'As do the Spaniards. And now it appears that the new Secretary of State has also learned of its existence. Sir Ambrose claimed it was cursed, and he was right, because ten years ago he was poisoned by Spanish agents. They feared he would sell it to Cromwell, for in those years we were short of money and the Puritans were preparing for their holy war against the King of Spain. By then, of course, I knew that Sir Ambrose was not my true father,' she added in an undertone. 'That's who these men are, of course: Spanish agents. The same men who murdered Lord Marchamont.'

  For a second I wondered if I had heard her aright. 'Sir Ambrose was not your father? But-'

  'Yes,' she replied. 'That is my last deception. My real father was also murdered by Spanish agents-by Henry Monboddo, as a matter of fact. This was many years earlier. You see, Henry Monboddo was not only an art broker but also a Spanish agent. He learned of the palimpsest through the spies in Prague. But Sir Ambrose already knew of his treachery because of the failure of the Orinoco expedition, and he therefore used my father as a decoy. My mother, who had travelled from Prague with my father, died in childbirth shortly afterwards-'

  'Your mother?'

  '-and I was raised by Sir Ambrose as his daughter. I believe he regarded it as his duty, perhaps even as a form of penance, for betraying my father along with the greedy dukes and bishops in the War Party. My father was a Bohemian, a gentle man devoted to books and learning. But Sir Ambrose felt he could not trust him because he was a Roman Catholic.'

  Voices echoed in the maze of corridors behind us. Alethea was moving more quickly now. We stepped over a fallen tapestry and passed a chamber whose window flashed with lightning. Through it I could see the lime trees stretching into the distance.

  'Caray!'

  'Por Dios! Las aquas han subido!'

  The corridor turned to the left and we found ourselves splashing through a wide but empty saloon. I thought I heard a pistol shot from behind, followed by the shriek of splintering timber. Halfway through, my club foot slipped on the tiles and I sprawled headlong into the water. Within seconds I was back on my feet, hurrying, I was certain, to a horrible death.