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.