Boot heels were rasping and echoing on the stairway now, but Emilia ignored the sound. She pushed herself from the cask. The groined ceiling seemed to revolve overhead. 'What are you saying? Where, then, will you go if not to Brandenburg?'

'Ah, yes…' He seemed not to have heard her. He was holding aloft the unswaddled volume like a priest raising an infant at the font. Steam rose in curls from his sweating brow. 'The great Copernicus, I see, has made the journey in excellent condition.'

'Herr Jirásek…'

The bootfalls had stopped. A grubby-looking pageboy, the worse for drink, was performing a clumsy bow. Vilém was bent over another of his crates, once more in a devotional posture. Emilia staggered backwards and fumbled for the cask. She had bitten her lip so hard she could taste blood. Yes: these books were all he cared for. Nothing else.

'Fräulein…' Another clumsy bow. The boy clutched at the rim of one of the casks for support. 'Mein Herr? Your presences are most gratefully'-he captured a belch in his gloved hand-'most gratefully requested upstairs in the banqueting-room. An entertainment,' he said, stumbling over his consonants, 'for our Queen Elizabeth.'

There was a loud crash from above as a game of skittles was improvised with hats and crocks, with Seville oranges that began thumping across the floor of the hall and colliding with the legs of courtiers dancing their frantic quadrilles and gavottes. A wine cask was rolled across the floor-a rumble of thunder-to a roar of cheers. The boy turned waveringly on the steps, almost toppled backwards, then began to climb. Emilia sat down on the cask and gripped its iron hoops for support.

'A deal has been struck,' Vilém said at last. He was speaking softly, though the boy had disappeared. 'A favourable bargain,' he whispered. He added something else, but the words were lost as more thunder rolled across the ceiling and another boisterous cheer drifted down the stairwell.

'A deal?' She was leaning forward, straining to hear him.

'To England,' he repeated. Stooped over the crate, he was speaking as if to himself. 'We shall go to England, that is where.'

Chapter Six

Alsatia in the early morning was calm and quiet, with an air of hushed expectancy. As my hackney-coach paused at the top of Whitefriars Street the rows of buildings looked insubstantial in the dusty light, like canvas flats waiting to be struck by stage-hands and carried back to the scenery store. It was almost possible to see through or beyond them to the first settlement here, centuries earlier-the shaded cloisters, the church tower with its dozen bells, the monks in hair shirts and white hoods padding back and forth from the library or whispering matins and lauds together in the chapel. In the previous century, of course, the priory had been knocked down, much like Pontifex Abbey. There was no library any more, no chapel, no monks in white hoods, only their silent remains-the broken column, the abbreviated wall, a few stubborn bricks overgrown by chickweed and quack-grass. The rest had become a clutch of taverns and alehouses, along with other establishments of more anonymous but no doubt sinister occupation.

'Not through here, sir?'

'Yes, yes-keep going straight.'

I had been giving instructions to the driver, who claimed never to have set foot in Alsatia, a record he seemed anxious to preserve, until I offered the incentive of an extra two shillings. Trying to remember the haphazard course I had taken two nights earlier, I crouched forward, my face outside the window and upturned to the sun. The buildings stood at drunken tilts on either side of us, their doors sagging on their hinges and their windows shuttered. This time I had not heard the bleat of the horn as we entered; perhaps, half asleep those two days before, I had imagined it. Or perhaps there were other, subtler signals, a silent language that pulsed from building to building. I remembered a rumour I had once heard about Alsatia, that all of its taverns were honeycombed with cubby-holes, false floors and hidden passages, scores of secret places where fugitives and smugglers concealed themselves or their booty. Another Alsatia existed depths beneath the soot-rimed surface of timber, stone and thatch, behind a hundred wainscots and boarded entranceways. I twisted round in my seat and, for the dozenth time this morning, peered down the street behind us. Nothing. A minute later I caught sight of the blistered signboard.

I had no idea what I should expect, if anything, from the auction. I had attended only four or five of them by the summer of 1660, not through negligence or indifference, but because book auctions were, like coffee-houses, a recent phenomenon. In fact, the two were related in some ways. Most auctions in those days were held in rooms rented in coffee-houses, in the Greek's Head, for example, where the auctioneer, usually a former bookseller, would preside over the sale of as many as a thousand volumes, the owner of which was either bankrupt or dead. They were usually clamorous, well-attended affairs. The auctioneer advertised the auction in the newssheets and handbills, and catalogues listing the titles were made available in advance. The same people-booksellers or other collectors-always turned up to bid against one another for this edition of Homer, that one of Aristotle.

That, in my brief experience, was how auctions worked. But the one at the Golden Horn promised to be different. For one thing, it had not been advertised in the papers. I had been unable to find any mention of it in the gazettes, despite searching through the issues for the previous two weeks. Nor had I seen any more handbills like the one posted in the Golden Horn, even though I scanned the dead walls, cornerposts, pillories and all the various other spots favoured by the city's fly-posters, including the insides of a couple of taverns and coffee-houses. Nor, finally, had those few customers that I dared to ask-my best-known and most discreet clients-admitted to having heard of either Dr. Pickvance or the Golden Horn coffee-house, much less of the proposed auction. Their looks had grown more dubious when I explained that the Golden Horn was in Alsatia, beside the Fleet River. I might as well have told them I would be travelling among the Patagonians or the Ottawas.

I was anxious for anything I might learn-about the parchment, about the verse, even about the Golden Horn itself-because over the previous days I had not discovered very much at all. I had spent several hours searching through my shelves for information about the Corpus hermeticum. I had no idea where to begin but started by looking at the editions by Lefèvre and Turnebus, which led me backwards to a handful of Greek and Roman writers, who in turn led me forwards along unexpected paths that wove strange and mesmerising patterns. I began to discover how the Hermetic texts were a sort of underground current slithering half-seen through almost two millennia of history. They would bubble up somewhere on the surface-in Alexandria or Constantinople-only to slip away again into invisible channels beneath deserts and mountain ranges and war-ravaged cities… and then suddenly debouch somewhere else, hundreds of years later and thousands of miles away.

It was believed by most early commentators that the books originated in Egypt, at Hermoupolis Magna, which the ancients regarded as the oldest place on earth. The books were said to be the revelations of a priest known to the Egyptians as 'Thoth' and to the Greeks, who followed them, as 'Hermes Trismegistus', or 'Hermes the Thrice-Greatest', whom Boccaccio calls the 'interpres secretorum', or the 'interpreter of secrets'. Thoth was the Egyptian god of writing and wisdom, who, according to Socrates in the Phaedrus, gave the world arithmetic, geometry and letters, and who in his spare time invented games of amusement such as draughts and dice. The wisdom of Thoth was said to have been first carved on to stone tablets before being copied on to papyrus scrolls and, in the third century BC, during the reign of Ptolemy II, brought to the newly founded Library of Alexandria, in which the Ptolemies had hoped to hold a copy of every book-roll ever written. It was here in Alexandria, among the thousands of scrolls and scholars in the great Library, that the revelations of Thoth were translated from hieroglyphics into Greek by a priest named Manetho, the famous historian of Egypt.