Chapter Three

The countryside in flood. Rain had fallen steadily throughout the night and was still pouring down as the sky above Epping Forest changed shade from charcoal to cinder-grey: so heavily that the fishponds and flint-pits were overflowing their banks. Overnight the mossy woodlands had become a morass. The worst of the storm had passed, but a strong gale was still blowing from the southwest, and still the rain came down. Oak and beech trees stood in the middle of rivers as if stranded; the splintered trunks of others, felled by winds or lightning, lay across the most windswept stretches of the road from London.

In the middle of the forest, near the cottages of its game keepers and vermin-killers, four horses could be seen splashing along the Epping Road, drawing behind them through the mud and water a leather-topped coach. It was a little past seven o'clock in the morning. The horses were bound northward through Essex, staggering and straining, their wet manes flapping like pennants and the wheels of the coach flinging great divots of mud into the air. But at the lowest point in the road, where the water from the flint-pits stood the deepest, the coach halted with a violent lurch. The driver, who had already cleared the trunks of three trees from his path that morning, bawled a curse at the horses and cracked his whip over their rumps. They struggled for a moment, but the coach failed to move.

'What's happening?' I had lifted the leather flap to peer through the window. The droplets spattering my face felt like spindrift on the high seas.

'Stuck in the mud,' complained the driver as he hopped into the road with a splash. His boots squelched and sucked as he nearly lost his balance. He was already soaked to the skin. 'Not to worry, sir,' he growled into his collar as he pulled his hat low on his brow. 'I'll have us out in a tick.'

I sat back and removed an oatcake and a wedge of black cheese from my pocket. We had been on the road for more than an hour, since before first light. I had found the coach-and-four waiting for me as promised in the underground stable-yard of the Three Pigeons, its horses already harnessed. I was expecting to see Phineas again but had not been disappointed to discover that a different driver would transport me to Wembish Park, a burly man who introduced himself as Nat Crump. He was proving a more garrulous companion than Phineas, though one equally ill-tempered. As I sat in the back of the vehicle-different from the one that had carried me to Pontifex Hall-I chewed my breakfast and listened to his curses, cries of encouragement and rueful observations about the inclement weather.

'Should have taken a different road,' he was saying as he thrust a thick branch beneath one of the rear wheels and tried to jemmy it free. He urged the horses forward, their traces taut and creaking. The coach gave a small lunge and the iron-shod wheels groaned mulishly, but we moved only a few inches before settling back into the mud. I was alarmed to see that water had risen as high as our rear axle. Crump and the horses stood knee-deep. 'Should have gone through Puckeridge,' he explained, bracing himself for better leverage. 'Higher ground over that way.'

'Puckeridge?' I was rocking with the motion of the coach. Overhead, elm branches were thrashing wildly. 'Well, why on earth did you not, then?'

'Orders,' he said with an angry grunt of exertion. 'I was ordered not to, wasn't I?' He paused and glanced in my direction. He appeared to regard the whole business as some fault of mine. 'I was told to ride through the forest.'

'Oh? And why was that?'

He had gripped a spoke and the wheel rim and now began forcing the branch with a dripping boot. The foremost horses reared a pace forward at his command but then splashed down foursquare in the mire. This time the wheels hadn't budged so much as an inch. He cursed again as he waded arduously forward.

'Why?' He had begun scraping mud from before the wheels with the end of his stick. 'For the same reason that we're not taking Lord Marchamont's coach, that's why. Because it's safer.'

He laughed mirthlessly but then paused in his labours long enough to swing a thick arm proprietorially at the surrounding woodlands. His hat had fallen into the water and I saw how his thatch of blond hair was flattened to his skull by the rain. Earlier, in the poor light of the stable-yard, I almost thought I recognised him but decided that, as with so many things these days, I could no longer trust my instincts. I also thought he seemed to be surprised by my appearance-by my darkened hair and clipped beard-but supposed it was because I didn't answer my description. Whatever the case, he had taken me aboard without any fuss.

'Through the forest,' he was explaining between gasps and grunts. He had found another branch to use as a fulcrum and then waded to the rear of the coach, where he was working again on the wheel. The coach was rocking back and forth like a boat on the tide. 'Won't be followed if we go this way.'

I raised the leather flap on the rear quarter-light and peered into the bough-canopied lane that twisted away behind us. The morning was still half dark. Through the grey air I could see a couple of fallow deer watching us from the copsewood, a buck and a doe, both poised to bolt. But there was no human life to be seen, not even the poachers for which Epping Forest was notorious. The dreadful weather was keeping the roads empty. We had met only the occasional London-bound wagon or pony-cart since reaching the Epping Road.

'Giddap! Go on!'

One of the branches splintered and snapped with a loud crack, and suddenly the vehicle pitched jerkily forward, almost sprawling me on to the floor. The window-flap had flown open and through it I could see our wheels tossing breakers on to the muddy bank. Crump fought for a handhold on the side of the coach and pulled himself aboard. Then we were on our way again, ploughing north into a dense screen of trees and rain. I settled back for what promised to be a long ride. We did not expect to arrive at Wembish Park until the next afternoon.

Onward we rolled for the rest of the morning, the miles swaying slowly past. I dozed in and out of wakefulness, exhausted because I hadn't arrived back in Alsatia until after midnight and then, because the Half Moon after dark was as noisy as a witch's Sabbath, had slept only in snatches. Feet trod the stairs at all hours, fiddles squealed in the tap room, dancers disported themselves up and down the corridors amid shrieks of laughter. There was peace at last an hour or two before dawn, but all too soon I was roused by a knock on my door and the voice of one of Mrs. Fawkes's chambermaids informing me through the woodwork that my hackney-coach was waiting.

My journey to Wembish Park began under a familiar omen. As the coach approached Chancery Lane I had seen another chalk figure scrawled on a wall-one of the hieroglyphs I now remembered from my Hermetic studies that Marsilio Ficino had called a 'crux Hermetica'. Beneath, also crudely in chalk, faded by the rain, was a single sentence, like a caption: We the Invisible Brethren of the Rose Cross.

I had leaned back in my seat, puzzled, wondering if I had read the legend right. Was it a hoax of some sort? For it seemed far too strange, too cryptic, to be genuine. I had heard of the secret society known as the Brothers of the Rose Cross, of course. I stumbled across their strange story the other day as I was flipping through a few of my treatises on Hermetic philosophy. I was only surprised that Biddulph's narrative with its secretive Protestant conspirators had not included them. From what little I could make of them, the Rosicrucians were a secretive band of Protestant alchemists and mystics who had opposed the Catholic Counter-Reformation earlier in the century. They supported Henry of Navarre as the champion of their faith and then, after Henry's assassination in 1610, Frederick V of the Palatinate. Their graffiti and placards mushroomed on the walls of Heidelberg and Prague in 1616 or 1617, about the time, that is, when Ferdinand of Styria was named king-designate of Bohemia. The Rosicrucians must have regarded Ferdinand, a pupil of the Jesuits, with terror and loathing, but their placards and manifestos were strangely optimistic, prophesying a reformation in politics and religion throughout the Empire. These reforms were to be brought about through magical arts such as those taught by Marsilio Ficino, the first translator into Latin of the Corpus hermeticum. By means of the 'scientific magic' in the Hermetic texts and in Ficino's Libri de Vita, the Rosicrucian Brethren hoped to turn the debased and blackened debris of modern life-the world of religious strife, of wars and persecutions-into a kind of Golden Age or Utopia, in much the same way as they hoped to manufacture gold in their laboratories out of lumps of coal and clay.