A minute later the other ladies-in-waiting had returned to the room. There was to be a church service that night to give thanks for the Queen's recovery, followed by a banquet. For the next twenty minutes the ladies chattered happily together, dressing themselves as of old in their flowing conches, in scarlets and purples, in laces and ribbons, as if Prague or Heidelberg lay outside; as if the past few days had been no more than a night terror from which they had been mercifully roused. Only when they departed did Emilia finally open the book left by Sir Ambrose. It was another tale of chivalry-Francisco de Moraes's Prince Palmerín of England. And only when she opened the cover did she discover the note between the pages, one inscribed in a familiar hand.

She met Vilém that night in the cellars, to which the note had summoned her. By this time the rest of the court was in the midst of an ecstatic and deafening intercourse. The feast had begun. Musicians conscripted from a local tavern were blowing krummhorns, battering tabors and singing lustily in Polish as dancers whirled about the floor of the crumbling hall with reckless fury-a tumult of spinning farthingales and flying elbows. The castle gates must have been flung wide to admit the good people of Breslau, burghers and beggars alike, because Emilia, dodging between them, failed to recognise a single face. She had no idea, either, where the food could have come from. Platters of beef and venison, pheasants and chickens, a roasted boar, dozens of quail, even a peacock still wearing its feathers, together with bowls filled with oysters, cheeses, boiled eggs, sweetmeats, nuts, plums, persimmons, Seville oranges, ices melting under the heat of a dozen blazing torches and even more candles-all were being served up to a band of exiles who only a few days earlier had been freezing to death in the wilderness, eating weevilled bread and frozen chunks of salted goose. But Vilém was nowhere among them. After an hour she managed to slip away and descend the stairs to the vaults, where she found him in an old wine cellar, stooped over a crate of books.

She was shocked by the sight of him. He had arrived in Breslau more than a fortnight earlier, before the snows, but he appeared to be the worse for the journey. He looked thinner and more ragged than ever. His breeches and doublet hung in tattered folds about his shoulders and hips like those of a scarecrow. Perhaps he too had been ill? He had a weak constitution, she knew-several evenings in Golden Lane had been spent nursing him through one complaint or another. A booming cough suddenly bent him double.

'Vilém…?'

Their reunion was not what she expected. So busy was he checking the crates for damage, opening them one at a time, inspecting the oilskin-wrapped volumes, fussing and ducking over them before replacing dunnage, that he failed to notice her arrival. She moved quickly through the cellar towards him, weaving her way between empty wine racks and the dozens of crates. Most of the lids had been raised and tiny gilded characters glimmered in the torchlight as she passed. Later it would occur to her that the books had been crated in alphabetical order. Abulafia; Agricola; Agrippa; Artephius; Augurello. Then Bacon; Biringuccio; Böhmen; Borbonius; Bruno. The names meant little to her, as did the titles. De occulta philosophia. De arte cabalistica. Impious pursuits suggested themselves. The Mirror of Alchymy. Occulta occultum occulta. What would the Queen, a sworn enemy of popery and superstition, make of such works? FICINUM, she read on the spine of one of the thickest volumes, PIMANDER MERCURII TRISMEGISTI.

'Vilém!'

He showed no more surprise or delight when finally he saw her than when he discovered certain cherished volumes at the bottoms of the crates through which he kept searching for another twenty minutes. Indeed, over the next few days he would appear more concerned for the welfare of the books than for her. Like Otakar, he had become obsessed with the idea of the collection falling into what he called the wrong hands-being looted, burned or disappearing into the archives of Ferdinand or the cardinals in the Holy Office. Later he would tell her that he had assisted with the transport of the 'first consignment', some fifty crates of books. The second consignment was shipped from Prague by Sir Ambrose himself, for which reason Vilém would not find it odd that the Englishman was alone inside the library. Only when she described that episode-they were sitting on a pair of wine casks at this point-did he show any interest in her plight. Or, rather, he was interested in the leather-bound volume she had seen on his desk. Two times he forced her to describe the events of that evening but then, puzzled, claimed not to recognise her accounts of either the book or the horsemen. But he was especially interested in the elaborate binding. He sprang from the cask, squatted on the floor and rummaged through one of the crates for a minute, muttering to himself and grunting.

'You say it was bound,' he called over his shoulder, 'like one of these.' He swung round, clasping a fat volume to his chest. 'Is that so?'

In the torchlight she could make out the intricate swirls stamped on to the book's leather cover-a series of whorls and curlicues that reminded her, suddenly, of the fanciful lines of Prague Castle's maze garden seen from the upper windows of the Královsky Palace. From its coloured fore-edges the volume looked like one of the Golden Books he had shown her a month earlier. She nodded.

'Exactly like that, yes. The same pattern, I would say.'

'Odd… very odd.' He was twisting a lock of his unkempt beard in his fingers as he studied the tooled leather. 'But you say the pages had not been dyed?' She shook her head. 'Mm,' he said into his stained ruff, frowning, 'how very odd indeed.'

'Did it come from Constantinople, do you think?'

'Oh, it's possible.' His head was bobbing. The idea seemed to excite him. 'Yes, it might have done. One doesn't judge a book by its binding, of course. But what you describe is a Muhammadan decoration known as rebesque or arabesque, which was used by the bookbinders of Istamboul. There were a dozen such books in the library, but this one that you describe, hmmm…'

He had opened the book and was thumbing slowly through its purple leaves, through pages that she remembered him saying had been made from the skins of unborn calves, sometimes as many as fifty per volume. Vellum, it was called. The calves were stunned and carefully bled, then flayed of their delicate hides. A lost art, he had claimed.

'But what could it be?' She was watching his face, wondering if he was telling her everything he knew. 'Was it something of value, do you think?'

He shrugged his narrow shoulders and laid the volume carefully aside. 'Oh, it could be anything-anything at all. And, yes, I should think it was of value. Perhaps of considerable value. Especially if it came from Constantinople. Its libraries and monasteries, you understand, were the world's greatest repositories of ancient wisdom.'

He was at his most pontifical now, plucking at his beard and staring glassily into the middle distance. The thumpings of the dancers in the hall were making themselves known through the groined ceiling, but he seemed not to notice.

'In the past few centuries, more Greek and Roman authors have been discovered in Constantinople than anywhere else. Priceless discoveries, mind! The eleven plays of Aristophanes… the seven of Aeschylus… the poems of Nicander and Musaeus… Hesiod's Works and Days… the writings of Marcus Aurelius… why, even Euclid's Elements, for heaven's sake! Not one of these works would survive today had it not been for the scribes of Constantinople. Every last one of them would have sunk without trace. And how much poorer would the world be for their loss!'