'No, not Buckingham,' he whispered, leaning closer. 'He, like Monboddo, is only an intermediary, an agent for another party, someone even more powerful.'

'Yes?' She too had leaned forward. Someone more powerful than the Lord High Admiral? The canvas awning stretched over their heads smelled of mildew and a glazing of salt. Outside, the cold wind was flapping its stiffened sides. 'Who, then?'

For the wealthiest and most discriminating collector in all of England, that was who. Because Monboddo and Sir Ambrose had furnished not only the libraries of Frederick and Rudolf but also, Vilém explained, that of their own countryman, England's finest connoisseur, the Prince of Wales himself. Young Prince Charles was not an iconoclast like his sister Elizabeth with her Puritan pastors poised at the ready to sniff out any sign of popery or turpitude. No, Charles loved images and other relics as much as his sister despised them. It was well known that he hoped to purchase the great Mantua Collection from the impoverished Gonzagas, but less well known, according to Vilém, was the fact that he was equally determined to lay his hands on the treasures of both the Bibliotheca Palatina and the Spanish Rooms. For these thousands of books, manuscripts and assorted curiosities were not only valuable in themselves, prize additions to the Royal Library in St. James's Palace, but they were also the only means left of keeping the rampaging Spaniards at bay and thereby preserving religious toleration and freedom across half of Europe.

'Oh?' Emilia saw rearing before her eyes the desiccated serpents, the mummified heads with their grotesque grins. 'How might that be?'

Vilém had begun rubbing his palms slowly together. She could sense his excitement. The absence of Sir Ambrose seemed to have done him good: he had not spoken this much in weeks.

'I need not tell you,' he whispered, 'that both collections are in danger of falling into the hands of either the Spaniards or Cardinal Baronius, if the soldiers don't destroy them first, I should say, or the looters in the marshes. But the Prince proposes to purchase the whole lot from his brother-in-law-the complete contents of both libraries, along with the treasures from the Spanish Rooms. At what price I have no idea, but his financier, Burlamaqui, has been raising funds for the past three months. Frederick will then use the money to equip armies and repel the invaders from both Bohemia and the Palatinate.'

She was surprised by this plan, remembering Vilém's alarmed reaction to rumours about secret inventories, about deals struck with bishops and princes-'turkey buzzards', he called them-who had sent their agents and emissaries scuttling to Prague ahead of their armies so they might pick at the carcass of Bohemia while there was still something left of it.

'So the rumours in Prague were true, then? Frederick was seeking to sell the collections after all?'

'Yes, yes-but the strategy is more involved than that,' he replied quickly, 'more complicated than an exchange of books for musket-balls. The collection will remain intact, and the crates of books and manuscripts will themselves become the means by which the Catholics will be forced from both Bohemia and the Palatinate. Or that is the plan, one that Sir Ambrose worked out with Buckingham and the Prince of Wales. But the business must be carried out in the utmost secrecy,' he added solemnly.

She drew the blanket, stolen from the De Quester coach, more tightly round their shoulders. 'Because of the Spaniards.'

He nodded. 'Neither King Philip nor Gondomar must know of the plan, that much is obvious. Burlamaqui is raising the funds in secret because many of them come through his connections with bankers in Italy and Spain. Nor must the plans for the Prince's betrothal to the Infanta go astray. Such double-dealing is distasteful, true enough, but cheap at the price, I think, because the Infanta's hand is worth all of £600,000. Such a sum will buy many books and paintings, will it not? To say nothing of how it will keep a good many soldiers-the best mercenaries in Europe-in powder and shot for years to come. Ingenious, is it not, using the King of Spain's own money to snatch back Bohemia and the Palatinate? To secure the Bibliotheca Palatina as well as the treasures of the Spanish Rooms?'

She followed his gaze as he squinted through the opening in the tilt. Were they alone on the water, or was that another barge in the distance, barely visible in the light of one of the guard-boats? So far the river had been empty except for the odd collier or a convoy of smacks heaped with their catches of mackerel. Each time one of them approached Emilia and Vilém leant back inside the tilt and averted their faces. But for the past ten minutes they had seen no one.

'But there's more to the plan than that,' he resumed after a moment. 'The situation is complicated. Other interests must be considered.'

The arrival in England of the books and other treasures also had to be kept secret from King James himself. The sale could not be completed through what Vilém called the 'normal channels'-a continent-wide network of brokers and financiers-because then it would have been discovered by the numerous agents of the Earl of Arundel, one of England's wealthiest collectors of statues and other artefacts, including books. Arundel was a Howard, a Roman Catholic, a member of the powerful family whose hatred for Buckingham was as well known, he said, as its close ties with the Spanish Ambassador. Neither was it a secret that for the past few years King James had been little more than Gondomar's creature, the plaything of the Spaniards. Did she need reminding that he received an annual pension of 5,000 felipes from the King of Spain? That he sided with Philip over the rebellion in Bohemia? That he lent no support to his daughter and her husband, his own flesh and blood? That he betrayed them to the Catholics just as he had betrayed Raleigh two years earlier? And so the King and most of his courtiers and ministers, including Arundel, were not made privy to the plot. Arundel would have reported it at once to Gondomar, Gondomar would have reported it to King James, and King James-'an old fool in his dotage'-would have regarded it as nothing more than an act of robbery.

'Yes, yes,' he finished, 'and no doubt he would regard a man like Sir Ambrose as nothing more than a common pirate. No doubt Sir Ambrose would meet the same fate as Sir Walter Raleigh…'

The barge nosed round the bend and into the waters of the Long Reach. At Greenhithe a few fishing smacks had left the dock and were heading downstream into the estuary. Emilia watched them riding against the tide with their fore-and-aft sails luminous as ghosts. Vilém had fallen silent. She shifted her weight on the hard thwart, wondering how much of what he said was true and how much an elaborate fiction.

The boat was poled forward on the tide, a length at a time, round another bend and into the Erith Reach with its roadsteads on one side, the bell-foundries and anchorsmiths on the other. Daylight was still more than an hour away, but so too was London even though the wind had swung round to the west. She scented the first traces of its musk and smoke, what smelled like the foul hide of an ancient beast. Spires and the rhombic shapes of warehouses, dark and silent, loomed and fell away, as did the merchantmen against whose monstrous hulls the splashes of the pole were echoing. She turned her head and peered past the barge-master's dark form. Was someone behind them in the river, pulling a pair of oars?

She turned to Vilém, but he seemed to have noticed nothing. He was bent almost double, eyes fixed on the casket.

The casket contained a Hermetic text, fourteen pages of an ancient manuscript bound in arabesque-a text more valuable, he said, than all of the other crates of books put together. It was a copy made two hundred years earlier from an even more ancient document brought to Constantinople by a refugee, a Harranian scribe fleeing the persecutions of the caliph of Baghdad. When Constantinople was invaded by one of the caliph's descendants, Mehmet II, the Ottoman Sultan, it was saved by another scribe who smuggled it from the Monastery of Magnana before the library and scriptorium could be pillaged by the Turks. And now almost two centuries later the parchment was being smuggled to safety yet again, escaping another conflagration, another war of religion, this time in the Kingdom of Bohemia.