Ross King - Ex Libris

Yes, I thought, as I followed Phineas up the staircase: I had come a long way. Further, perhaps, than I knew.

I was accommodated for the night in a bedchamber at the top of the stairs, along a broad corridor lined at regular intervals with closed doors. The quarters were large but, as I expected, inadequately furnished. There was a straw pallet, a three-legged stool, an empty fireplace festooned with skeins of dirty cobwebs, and a small table, on which sat a quill, a book, a few other items. I was too exhausted to look at any of them.

For a moment I was also too exhausted to move. I stood in the centre of the room and gazed dully at its emptiness. I reflected that the peasant cottages through which I had passed on the road to Crampton Magna were probably better appointed. I thought for a second of the inventory locked in the tiny room two floors below; of its endless catalogue of carpets, tapestries, long-case clocks, wainscot chairs. In another lifetime this room-the 'Velvet Bedchamber', Alethea had called it-must have been spectacularly furnished; perhaps it was that of Sir Ambrose himself. Even now traces of its former life betrayed themselves, such as the chipped, peeling overmantel or the triangular patch of crimson flock paper high on the wall. Scraps of the glory that once was Pontifex Hall. For half-starved Puritan soldiers in their black homespun it must have made an obscene spectacle. And for someone else, apparently, a motive for murder.

I undressed slowly. Phineas, or someone, had carried my trunk into the room and placed it beside the pallet. I pawed through it for my nightshirt, which I slipped over my head. Then, using my moistened forefinger and thumb, I snuffed the tallow candle that Phineas had placed on the table, and an instant later the bedchamber was flooded through its cracked casement with deep billows of night. I closed my eyes, and sleep, with its heavy die, pressed its seal across their lids.

Prague Castle, seen from a distance, was an irregular diadem that perched on the craggy brow of a rock overlooking the wattled rooftops of the Old Town across the river. At dawn its windows glinted in the morning sun, and at dusk its shadow crept across the river like the hand of a giant, then inched into the narrow streets of the Old Town to gather up the spires and squares. Seen from within, it was even more imposing, a multitude of archways, courtyards, chapels and palaces, even several convents and taverns. All were enclosed within fortified walls whose shape, from above, suggested a coffin. The Cathedral of St. Vitus occupied the castle's centre, and to the south of the cathedral stood the Královsky Palace, which was home in the year 1620 to Frederick and Elizabeth, the new King and Queen of Bohemia. Two hundred yards as the crow flies from the Královsky Palace, but through a succession of courtyards, then past a well-house, a fountain and a garden, stood what in 1620 would have been the newest and most remarkable of the castle's buildings, a set of galleries known as the Spanish Rooms. These rooms were found in the northwest corner, a short distance from where the Mathematics Tower rose above the moat. They had been built some fifteen years earlier to house the thousands of books and copious other treasures of the Emperor Rudolf II, a bronze statue of whom, ruffed and bearded, hook-nosed and melancholic, was erected outside the south front. By 1620 Rudolf had been dead for almost ten years, but his treasures remained. The books and manuscripts, among the most precious in Europe, were housed in the library of the Spanish Rooms, and at that time the castle's librarian was a man named Vilém Jirásek.

Vilém was in his middle thirties, a shy and modest man, ill-shod and unkempt, with a patched coat and a pair of spectacles behind whose lenses his pale eyes flitted and swam. Despite the coaxings of Jirí, his lone servant, he remained indifferent to his humble appearance. He was equally indifferent to the affairs of the world beyond the walls of the Spanish Rooms. Much had happened in Prague during the ten years he had worked in the library, including the rebellion of 1619 in which the Protestant noblemen of Prague had deposed the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand from the throne of Bohemia. Yet no event, however turbulent, had disturbed his scholarly labours. Each morning he shuffled out of his tiny house in Golden Lane and, exactly seventeen minutes later, arrived before his cluttered desk as the hundreds of mechanical clocks in the Spanish Rooms were tolling eight o'clock. Each evening, red-eyed and weary, he began his shuffle back to Golden Lane at the moment when the clocks struck six. In ten years he had never been known to deviate from this orbit by missing a day of work or even arriving so much as a minute late.

Vilém's post demanded such precision, of course. For the past ten years, with the help of two assistants, Otakar and István, he had been cataloguing and shelving each volume in the Spanish Rooms. The task was immense and doomed to failure, for Rudolf had been an insatiable collector. His books on the occult sciences alone numbered in their thousands. One entire room was stuffed with volumes on 'holy alchemy', another with books on magic, including the Picatrix , which Rudolf had used to cast spells on his enemies. As if these tons of books were not enough, hundreds were still arriving in the library each week, along with scores of maps and other engravings, all of which had to be catalogued and then shelved in one of the overcrowded and interconnecting rooms in which sometimes even Vilém himself got lost. To make matters worse, crates of volumes and other valuable documents were now being shipped to Prague from the Imperial Library in Vienna for safekeeping from both the Turks and the Transylvanians. So it was that the edition of Cornelius Agrippa's Magische Werke sitting on Vilém's desk on his first morning of work in 1610 still sat there ten years later, uncatalogued and unshelved, buried ever deeper beneath growing piles of books.

Or that, at least, had been the situation in the library until the spring of 1620, when it seemed that a period of respite had arrived. The river of incoming books had slowed to a trickle after the revolt against the Emperor and the coronation of Frederick and Elizabeth. A few of Frederick's crates of books had arrived the previous autumn from Heidelberg, from the great Bibliotheca Palatina, and most of these still had not been unpacked, let alone catalogued or shelved. But the other sources-monasteries, the estates of bankrupt or deceased noblemen-seemed to have dried up altogether. There were even alarming rumours that some of the most valuable manuscripts would be sold off by Frederick to finance the shabby and ill-equipped Bohemian army in what a related rumour claimed was the forthcoming war against the Emperor. Many other books and manuscripts from the Spanish Rooms would be sent for safekeeping either to Heidelberg or, in the event that Heidelberg fell, to London.

Safekeeping? The three librarians had been baffled by such stories. Safekeeping from what? From whom? They could only shrug at each other and return to work, unable to believe that their quiet routine could be disturbed by events as far-flung and incomprehensible as wars and dethronements. If the world outside was, from the little that Vilém understood of it, disordered and confused, here at least, in these rooms, a beautiful order and harmony prevailed. But in the year 1620 this delicate balance was to be upset for ever, and for Vilém Jirásek, cloistered among his stacks of beloved books, the first hint of the approaching disaster was the reappearance in Prague of the Englishman Sir Ambrose Plessington.

Sir Ambrose must have returned to Prague Castle, after a long absence, during either the winter or spring of 1620. At the time he, like Vilém, was in his middle thirties, though unlike Vilém he looked not even remotely studious. He was as thick in the middle as a butcher or a blacksmith and stood tall despite a pair of bandy legs that suggested he spent more time sitting in the saddle than at a desk. Both his brow and his beard were dark, and the latter was sculpted into the new V-shape that, like his millstone ruff, had lately come into fashion. Vilém would have known him by reputation since Sir Ambrose was responsible for a good many of the books and artefacts in the Spanish Rooms. Ten years earlier he had been Rudolf's most celebrated agent, criss-crossing every duchy, Erbgut , fiefdom and Reichsfreistadt in the Holy Roman Empire in order to bring back to Prague ever more books, paintings and curiosities for the obsessive and demented Emperor. He had even travelled as far as Constantinople, from which he returned not only with sacks of tulip bulbs (a particular favourite of Rudolf's) but also dozens of ancient manuscripts that were among the greatest prizes in the Spanish Rooms. Quite what brought him back to Bohemia in 1620, however, was no doubt a mystery to the few people in Prague-Vilém among them-who knew of his presence.