Ottermole returned up the staircase to the Inland Office. A new pile of letters, folded and sealed, had been placed on the desk during his short absence. Sighing, he sat down before his candle stub and took up his penknife to cut the strings of another letter. As usual, it was going to be a long night.

Chapter Two

From across the river, hemmed in by a November fog, Prague Castle looked poised and at peace. Snow had fallen heavily during the night. The fountains in the courtyards were still, their tumbling waters frozen solid, and the new snow stood inches deep on the arches and gateways. Beneath the ramparts the outlines of the gardens and their pollarded alleys could just be made out, their patterns broken by irregular clefts of shadow. The fire in the Spanish Rooms had died hours ago, for there was little left in the library to burn, but a ghost of black smoke hung motionless on the air. The entire castle seemed to have slipped into hushed suspension, as if holding its breath in wait. Then it came, the slow roll of gunfire, still far in the distance but drawing steadily closer. It could not be long now, a day at most, before the soldiers crossed the river and breached the gates of the Old Town. Then the Cossacks-the subject of so many frightened rumours-would make their appearance.

Standing on the balcony of the house in the Old Town Square, Emilia eased out a wisp of breath and listened to the clamour welling up from below. The exodus was about to proceed. Small armies of men were struggling to strap panniers to the pack-mules, or to lash sheets of canvas to top-heavy carts and wagons whose wheels had carved chaotic paths through the snow. The men had worked through the night. There were more than fifty vehicles in all, most already loaded and hitched to draught-horses and yellow oxen that were swaying their heads from side to side in sleepy feints. The procession twisted all the way round the square and then lost itself in the mist-skeined streets. Liveried pages were scampering back and forth through the snow, a few outriders cantered alongside the baggage-wagons, cursing in English and German. Across the square, beneath the dock-tower of the town hall, a draught-horse was being shod. The muffled ring of the hammer reached the balcony a split-second after each swing of the blacksmith's arm, making the entire spectacle look false and deranged, like a painting come imperfectly to life.

Gripping the frosted rail, Emilia leaned into the cool air, peering westward across the snow-capped chimneys and wattled rooftops to where the White Mountain, five miles distant, stood lost in its pall of grey mist. The Summer Palace had been taken during the night. Soldiers and courtiers alike had been slain. Her gaze drifted back down the slope of the hill to the Vltava, a rusty blade flashing in odd glimpses between the gaps in the straw-and-plaster houses. She caught sight of a grisly ballet of bodies twisting downstream on the current, arms spread wide and coat-tails fanned like the wings of angels. The Moravian foot-soldiers. Last night they had tried, and failed, to swim across the river to the safety of the Old Town.

Safety? She averted her eyes and stepped back from the railing, wrapping her cloak more tightly about her shoulders. All night there had been rumours, each worse than the last. The Transylvanian soldiers had failed to make their appearance, as had the English troops, and the Magyar horsemen were either dead or had deserted to the Emperor. The first Cossacks were now making their way down the hill towards the bridge, whose gates could not be defended for long. The Catholics had triumphed. Prague was to be sacked, its citizens taken prisoner and tortured-if they weren't put to the sword first, that is, every last one of them, God save their souls.

King Frederick would not be captured, however. Already he had fled to his fortress at Glatz, or so another rumour claimed. But the Queen was here still, inside the house, making preparations of her own. All night Emilia had heard the shrill squawks of her monkey and the banging of doors as her ambassadors and advisers trooped in and out of the chamber. This was the hour when Emilia and the other ladies-in-waiting would be summoned by a page or a bell to participate in the hour-long ritual of draping the royal personage in layers of silk and damask, then fastening buttons, tying ribbons, stringing jewels, curling hair with heated tongs, completing the magical transformation of slight, frail Elizabeth into the Queen of Bohemia. But this morning no page had knocked and no bell had rung. Perhaps she was forgotten? Nor had there been any sign of Vilém, either inside the house or outside in the square, and no smoke rose from the chimneys in Golden Lane. So she stood on the balcony, with nothing to eat and nothing to read, and waited.

A shout rose from the square and she looked down to see Sir Ambrose Plessington tramping about in the snow. He at least was much in evidence. Last night he had escorted her upstairs to her room before disappearing, wordlessly, with the leather-bound parchment still tucked under his arm. This morning there was no sign of the parchment, though he was supervising the loading of crates of books on to one of the wagons, prising up their lids with his scimitar, then hammering them shut. There must have been a hundred crates in all. She wondered for the dozenth time what he had been doing in the library the previous night. Perhaps he was behind Vilém's disappearance? The two must know each other, she reasoned. Possibly Vilém was even part of whatever dark plot had brought the Englishman to Prague. From Vilém she knew, that the library held, among its thousands of books, a secret archive, a locked subterranean chamber where the most valuable and even dangerous books were housed, those listed in the Index librorum prohibitorum, the Vatican's catalogue of forbidden books. Only a handful of men had access to this mysterious sanctum. Each year hundreds of scholars travelled to Prague to study in the library-scholars whose appearance, like swallows or cuckoos, heralded the arrival of spring. But none was ever allowed a glimpse of the books in the secret archive. Not even Vilém, their keeper, was permitted to read them. They included, he once explained, the works of religious reformers such as Huss and Luther, along with tracts by their followers and scores of other heretics besides. There were also works by renowned astronomers. Both Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and Galileo's disquisition on tides were lodged in the archives, as were various treatises on both the comet of 1577 and the new star that had appeared in the constellation Cygnus-works that supposedly contradicted the hallowed wisdom of Aristotle. Vilém had disapproved of such secrecy, especially where the scientific treatises were concerned. How many evenings in Golden Lane had she spent listening to him complain about the Index librorum prohibitorum? Books such as those of Galileo and Copernicus were meant to stir up debates among scholars and astronomers, he insisted, to challenge old prejudices and enlighten the ignorant, to work towards a great instauration of knowledge. Whatever wisdom they might possess became dangerous only when it was hidden away from the rest of the world-hidden away by the secretive few who, like the cardinals in the Holy Office, wished to rule like tyrants over the many.

Now as she watched Sir Ambrose inspect and then nail shut another crate she wondered whether the books from the secret archive had been removed from the library along with all the others. Perhaps the volume she had seen last night was one of them, some book feared and forbidden by Rome? For she knew from what little she understood of the treacherous morass of Bohemian politics that the Englishman was, like Frederick and Elizabeth, a champion of the Protestant religion and an enemy to both the Emperor Ferdinand and his brother-in-law, the King of Spain. Court gossips claimed that three years ago Sir Ambrose had taken part in the expedition of another daring Englishman and Protestant champion whose fleet sailed to Guiana in the hope of capturing a gold mine from the Spanish. Sir Walter Raleigh's voyage had been a disaster, of course. The mythical mine had not been found; nor had the sought-after route through the Orinoco to the South Seas. Nor had the Spaniards been trounced in battle and driven from the shores of Guiana. To cap it all, Sir Walter had lost his head for his troubles. But Sir Ambrose had survived-if, indeed, he took part in the voyage in the first place. Now she wondered whether his unexplained reappearance in Prague was for the same type of mission, yet another strike against the detested Catholics. If so, had the men who pursued them through the streets of the Old Town the previous night been the agents of a cardinal or bishop?