I locked the strongbox, but instead of destroying the piece of paper I creased it along the folds and slipped it inside my pocket. But I had already decided I would obey its request and make certain I was aboard the coach the next morning. I didn't relish the thought of showing myself abroad during the daytime, but perhaps Huntingdonshire would be safer for me than London.
Five minutes later I was back in the street, pressing forward through the darkness, pausing briefly at each fork or intersection to peer down narrow, tenement-lined streets in search of an empty hack. None appeared. No one did. So I picked my way through the darkness, through streets as empty as if abandoned after the onset of plague or war.
Only after another twenty minutes did I reach an opening and enter the broad sweep of the Strand. From there it was just a short walk to Alsatia, which, outcast that I was, I had already begun to think of as home.
Chapter Two
The coach's progress through the Chislet Marshes was a slow one. Foxcroft guided the horses through the mud of the coastal road until they reached one of the De Quester posting-inns. There the exhausted Barbs were exchanged and the arduous journey recommenced. White fogs hovered all day in the ditches and over the flooded hopfields, but Foxcroft dared not light a lantern for fear of Lord Stanhope's ruffians. Nor did he light one as dusk arrived. The coach made its way blindly along overgrown cattle droves and paths that slunk through decrepit orchards.
By this time his unexpected passengers had been reduced to two. The only member of the strange trio who had spoken a word, the larger of the men, had disembarked in Herne Bay. Foxcroft's remaining companions were now huddled under a blanket, crouched low among the sacks of mail. A half-dozen times he had tried unsuccessfully to draw them into conversation. He fed them all the same, cheese and black bread from the inns, along with cups of cider. He even offered them swigs from his own wineskin, which were declined with brief shakes of the head. The woman would sometimes turn her head to peer at the road behind, but the man, a thin little fellow, sat perfectly still. Some sort of bejewelled cabinet the size of a large sugar-loaf was clutched to his breast.
'What's that, hmm? A treasure chest?'
Silence from the back. Foxcroft shook the reins and the horses stepped up their pace, tossing their heads and blowing white plumes into the air. In a few minutes they would reach the high road to London, where the dangers increased of Stanhope's ruffians. But if the coach was ambushed the attackers might be appeased, he reckoned, by a prize like the chest. It was for that reason alone that Foxcroft was suffering their presence in his coach. The pair of them might spare him another dented crown.
'Yours, is it?' He had twisted round in his seat. 'I say, very nice.'
Still no reply. In the darkness he could barely make out their two heads, only inches apart. The thin little man stared fixedly at his feet. Perhaps they spoke no English? Foxcroft knew as well as anyone that these days London was full of foreigners, Spaniards for the most part, all of them either spies or priests, often both. The infestation was a sign of the times. The Spanish King and his ambassador lorded over old James. First that modern-day Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, had been sent to the chopping-block for daring to fight the Spaniards on their own ground. Next King James had begun turning priests loose from the gaols and even daring to talk about marrying his son to, of all people, a Spanish princess! And now, worst of all, the old dolt was too niggardly to send an army to help his very own daughter even though her husband's lands in Germany were being invaded by hordes of Spaniards.
Still, he reassured himself, neither of his passengers looked at all Spanish. The woman, from the little he could glimpse of her, looked uncommonly attractive despite her bedraggled appearance. She was also young, scarcely more than a girl. What on earth was she doing with such a milksop, unless it had something to do with the box the fellow was clutching to his scrawny breast?
After another hour the smells of the country gave way to those of the city, silence to intermittent noise. The coach-and-six crossed the high road to London in darkness, then swiftly bore riverwards in the direction of Gravesend. Foxcroft intended to cross the river from Gravesend to Tilbury on a horse ferry, then ride into London along the north shore, where Stanhope's bruisers would scarcely expect to find him. If all went well he would reach the Ald Gate by the time it was creaking open, and from there it would be a short jaunt through the streets to the De Quester offices in Cornhill. What he might do with his other cargo, however, his two mysterious passengers, he had no idea.
He need not have worried himself. When the coach finally reached Gravesend it was obliged to wait almost two hours for the next ferry to Tilbury. He arranged for a new team and then tramped the streets until he found an alehouse that was open, in whose tap room he emptied three pintpots and demolished a pigeon pie, before returning to the posting-inn in time to watch the ferry disgorge its handful of passengers. His own passengers were quite forgotten at this point, and not until he had paid his two shillings and reached the middle of the black waters did he suddenly remember them. When he turned round in the box-seat he was surprised to discover that they had vanished into thin air, along with their glittering cargo.
As it happened, Vilém and Emilia were in a boat of their own at that moment, travelling upstream towards London, which lay some twenty miles to the west. The small barge had pushed off from the dock at Gravesend almost an hour earlier and, after threading its way among the pinks and merchantmen riding at anchor before the custom-house, reached the middle of the swirling current. From there it would be at least three hours to the dock at Billingsgate, the barge-master had informed them, even on a flowing tide. And from Billingsgate it might then take them as much as another hour to reach their final destination.
Emilia shivered and huddled deeper inside the canvas tilt as the water slapped and gurgled against the hull. Four more hours of cold and fear. But at long last she knew where they were going. They were bound, Vilém told her, for York House, a mansion in the Strand, near Charing Cross, where they would be met by Henry Monboddo. Vilém had been instructed to hand over the casket containing the parchment to Monboddo and no one else. Monboddo was experienced in such dealings, Vilém insisted, as the boat wallowed in the current. He was a friend of Prince Charles, and at present he was furnishing the galleries of York House to the extravagant but discriminating tastes of its new owner, George Villiers, the Earl of Buckingham.
Emilia watched the lights of Gravesend dim and disappear as the river turned north. The name was a familiar one. Rumours in Prague had set him to work fitting a fleet of men-o'-war to sail into the Mediterranean to attack Spain. But whether the ships had been fitted, whether or not they ever sailed, the attack never took place.
'So that is who the books are intended for, then? The Earl of Buckingham?'
Vilém shook his head, then raised his eyes from the casket wedged between his boots and glanced in the direction of the barge-master, who was grunting rhythmically as he leaned on his pole. Bewhiskered, wearing a leather jerkin, he had greeted them suspiciously in the barge-room a short time earlier, squinting at the pair of them-and then even more insistently at the casket-in the weak candle-light. Sir Ambrose had warned Vilém that the boatmen on the Thames were in the pay of the Secretary of State or Count Gondomar, the Spanish Ambassador, so to ensure discretion he paid the fellow an extra two shillings. This act only made the grizzled old rogue even more suspicious; as did the request to travel upriver without a lantern.