Captain Quilter permitted himself a smile of satisfaction. High above his head the luffs were shivering as the topmen lengthened sail. Cloud shadow swept over the deck, pursued by sunlight. The weather would hold. In two more days the Bellerophon would reach the Thames, or rather the Nore, the anchorage where the mysterious boxes would be offloaded on to a pinnace, and then he, with another thousand Reichsthalers, could forget all about them.
A minute later he was inside his cabin, among its litter of charts and compasses. Soon afterwards, as the Bellerophon nudged into Heligoland Bay, the pealing of church bells, a sign of ill omen, could be heard far in the distance. Yet Captain Quilter thought nothing of it at the time; nor did he give a second thought to the sight through the scuttle of another merchantman, the Star of Lübeck, which appeared a short distance off their port beam. Instead, he bent his head over the dog-eared portolano showing the shoals and sunken ships marking the entrance to the Nore and, beyond it, the Port of London.
The journey to Hamburg from the castle at Breslau lasted more than three weeks. Snow had fallen across Bohemia and the Palatinate as well as in Silesia. For days on end the ravening armies were snowbound, brought to a standstill outside farmhouses or in the midst of puzzled villagers. From Heidelberg in the west to Moravia in the east, the Emperor's soldiers huddled in their billets or stood crotch-deep in the snow, chopping what little fodder could be found for their starving horses. In the courtyards and gardens of the Prague Castle the snow lay three feet deep. Looting had not ended until five days after the gates were finally breached; Otakar's prophecies had fulfilled themselves in the most brutal fashion. The palaces and the Spanish Rooms were sacked one by one, as were the churches and even the sepulchres and churchyards, whose corpses it was rumoured had gold in their teeth. The houses in Golden Lane and the laboratories in the Mathematics Tower were also pillaged, because of further rumours that Frederick's band of Rosicrucian alchemists had discovered ways of turning coal into gold. Whether or not any gold was found, or even any coal, the treasures of the castle and then the Old Town were plentiful enough that not a few marauding soldiers found themselves obliged to hire drudges to carry their sacks of booty.
In Silesia the fugitive court had stayed in Breslau for six days after the long via dolorosa from Prague. On the morning of the seventh the caravan, or part of it, shunted north and then west along the curves of the Oder, looking in the dawn light like a mangy herd of migrating beasts. Delays were constant. After a day the crates were loaded on to seven barges, but first the Oder and then the Elbe froze, and the ice had to be broken by men wielding barge-poles. Even so, one of the barges splintered its hull and had to be towed ashore and abandoned, entailing yet another delay before the journey resumed, as slow as ever. Boundary columns reared and then fell away astern. Friedland. Saxony. Brandenburg. Mecklenburg. The toll stations, each with its guards and cannons, loomed and dwindled. A handsome bribe was paid at each, and not one of the barges was boarded, not one of the crates was prised open.
In the end the journey from Breslau was something over three hundred miles as the crow flies, though with the ox-bows in the Elbe, and with the ice and the cold, it seemed much longer, an agonising voyage through sandstone gorges and towns whose buildings cringed behind fortress walls on wooded slopes above the river. Finally the barges reached snowbound and windswept heathlands in which a few sheep-pens and juniper bushes projected themselves from sculpted snowdrifts like ruins. Only after the Elbe widened and cleared of ice, filling with colliers and fishing boats, did the sun appear and the weather improve. A day later the river widened further, its current quickening, its traffic thickening into chaos. A clutch of towers and steeples appeared above the watery Geestlands.
Emilia, rubbing her chilblained fingers together, could not even have begun to guess where they were, or how many days had passed since Breslau. She said nothing as the barge slithered between two others, then bumped into a busy quay. Nor did she say anything as a half-dozen men, led by a tall wharfinger, stumbled down the planks towards them. Though it was past dusk, no lanterns had been lit, and the figures hopping aboard were no more than shadows.
Vilém took her hand and together they disembarked, climbing the slippery embankment to where, at the top, the scene below was cast faint and shadowed in the rush-lights of a waterfront tavern. Behind them the wharfinger was barking instructions in German. The crates were being carried to one of the storehouses that jumbled the riverside. The grip on her wrist tightened.
They stayed for three days in Hamburg, in the Gänge-Viertel of the Altstadt. Emilia spent each night in a different Gasthaus, in rooms of her own, narrow little cells in which she would wake each morning expecting to hear the chime of the Queen's summoning-bell next door. But there was no summoning-bell next door, not since the night when she had been roused from her bed, given two minutes to pack her bags, then escorted down to the Oder on Sir Ambrose's arm. She thought from the panic of the departure, as well as the expression on Vilém's face-for he had been there, lashing one of the crates to the top of a wagon-that the Cossack mercenaries had caught up with them at last. But they were not fleeing the Cossacks, she would later discover, rather, the Queen and her court. For only after the night ended and the sun rose, a dim iceblink on the smudged horizon, did she realise that the Queen's carriage with its piles of books and hat boxes was nowhere in sight. There were only the three of them now, along with a half-dozen workmen, Silesians who spoke neither English nor German.
What deal had been struck? As she watched the crates being borne up from the dock she wondered whether they had merely been stolen, whether Sir Ambrose was nothing more than a thief or pirate. In their fleeting moments together Vilém had claimed to know little of the Englishman's plan other than that they were to be met in London by a man named Henry Monboddo. Monboddo was an art broker, he said, a picture-monger and book dealer who supplied the wealthy lords of England with valuable paintings and manuscripts, as well as whatever other fascinating bric-à-brac he was able to prise loose from the princes and potentates of France, Italy or the Empire. Sir Ambrose had dealt with him many times before, because Monboddo had also prised loose a few odd bits and pieces that found their way into the collections of the Emperor Rudolf. Now it seemed that Monboddo had found a new client. Vilém had no idea who. But on their second night in the Altstadt he confessed what she already suspected. They were being pursued.
The two of them had been sitting at the table in her room, whispering over a chessboard, a single candle burning in an eight-armed candelabrum. He had recited a familiar litany, claiming to know neither who was in pursuit nor whether they had anything to do with the men in black-and-gold livery. Nor did he know whether the men in black-and-gold livery might be in the service of Cardinal Baronius, or the Emperor, or else some other party entirely. But he admitted that among the hundreds of books he and Sir Ambrose had carted from Prague in the ninety-nine wooden crates were those from the library's secret archive-books outlawed as heretical by the Holy Office. Was the parchment one of them? Vilém claimed not to know. But the cardinals of the Inquisition would not take kindly, he said, to the liberation of the books from Prague Castle-nor to their transport to a heretical kingdom such as England. For included among the crates were such controversial treatises as the work of Copernicus that Emilia had seen in the wine cellar at Breslau. That particular volume, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, had been suspended by the Congregation of the Index, he explained, following Galileo's brush with the Inquisition in 1616. Galileo's writings-both published and unpublished-were likewise found in the archives. And Galileo was, in the eyes of Rome, a most dangerous writer.