Ross King - Ex Libris

At that he fell silent and, pushing himself from the cask, resumed his work, inspecting each volume to ensure that it was packed neither too tightly nor too loosely. The festivities in the hall had grown louder, insinuating themselves through the stone ceiling in a series of rumbles and thumps. Emilia felt dizzier and more exhausted than ever. She no longer cared about Sir Ambrose or the parchment in the library-or about any of the books over which Vilém was fussing like a mother with her infants. She no longer cared about the Queen either. She merely wanted the journey to end, for the court to cease these arduous wanderings. Brandenburg-that was all she cared about now. Her mind had seized upon it. She had even begun to imagine the pair of them making a life for themselves. She might work as a seamstress, he as a bookseller or perhaps as the tutor to the son of a wealthy Brandenburger. Together they could live in a tiny cottage beneath the walls of its castle.

'Will the court go to Brandenburg, do you think?' she asked at last.

'The Queen may go wherever she wishes,' he grunted, 'to Cüstrin or Spandau or Berlin, wherever they will have her.' He had bent over the crate again. 'But Brandenburg will not provide refuge for long. Nor will anywhere else in the Empire, come to that.'

'Oh?' The seamstress and the tutor fled; their tiny cottage slipped over a precipitous and bloody horizon. 'And why should that be?'

'Because the Brandenburgers are Calvinists, that is why.' He shrugged. 'They will be prey to attacks from the Lutherans next door in Saxony who have already captured Lusatia. To say nothing of the fact that George William has already received an Imperial mandate from Ferdinand.' He had begun unswaddling one of the volumes. 'Have you not heard this latest rumour? The Emperor advises Brandenburg not to suffer the presence of either the King or Queen of Bohemia within his dominions. No, no, no,' he was shaking his head, 'the Queen would not be safe anywhere in Brandenburg for more than a few weeks. And the books would not be safe in Brandenburg either. Or anywhere else in the Empire for that matter,' he added. 'And so I shall not follow her to Brandenburg.'

'Not go to Brandenburg?' She felt her stomach heave with fright. 'But where, then…?'

He had explained a few minutes earlier, when she tried to tell him of the terrible battle, of the dead in the river, that he cared nothing for the fate of Bohemia, and even less for its King and Queen, a pair of fools and wastrels who had been so willing to squander their treasures in return for soldiers and cannons. It had been reported that Frederick was offering the Palatinate to the Hansa merchants-the books in the Bibliotheca Palatina included-in return for sanctuary in Lübeck. So what evil bargain might he strike with the priceless volumes of the Spanish Rooms as his security? So Vilém would keep the books safe from King Frederick-and from the marauding Habsburg armies as well.

Boot heels were rasping and echoing on the stairway now, but Emilia ignored the sound. She pushed herself from the cask. The groined ceiling seemed to revolve overhead. 'What are you saying? Where, then, will you go if not to Brandenburg?'

'Ah, yes…' He seemed not to have heard her. He was holding aloft the unswaddled volume like a priest raising an infant at the font. Steam rose in curls from his sweating brow. 'The great Copernicus, I see, has made the journey in excellent condition.'

'Herr Jirásek…'

The bootfalls had stopped. A grubby-looking pageboy, the worse for drink, was performing a clumsy bow. Vilém was bent over another of his crates, once more in a devotional posture. Emilia staggered backwards and fumbled for the cask. She had bitten her lip so hard she could taste blood. Yes: these books were all he cared for. Nothing else.

' Fräulein… ' Another clumsy bow. The boy clutched at the rim of one of the casks for support. ' Mein Herr? Your presences are most gratefully'-he captured a belch in his gloved hand-'most gratefully requested upstairs in the banqueting-room. An entertainment,' he said, stumbling over his consonants, 'for our Queen Elizabeth.'

There was a loud crash from above as a game of skittles was improvised with hats and crocks, with Seville oranges that began thumping across the floor of the hall and colliding with the legs of courtiers dancing their frantic quadrilles and gavottes. A wine cask was rolled across the floor-a rumble of thunder-to a roar of cheers. The boy turned waveringly on the steps, almost toppled backwards, then began to climb. Emilia sat down on the cask and gripped its iron hoops for support.

'A deal has been struck,' Vilém said at last. He was speaking softly, though the boy had disappeared. 'A favourable bargain,' he whispered. He added something else, but the words were lost as more thunder rolled across the ceiling and another boisterous cheer drifted down the stairwell.

'A deal?' She was leaning forward, straining to hear him.

'To England,' he repeated. Stooped over the crate, he was speaking as if to himself. 'We shall go to England, that is where.'

Alsatia in the early morning was calm and quiet, with an air of hushed expectancy. As my hackney-coach paused at the top of Whitefriars Street the rows of buildings looked insubstantial in the dusty light, like canvas flats waiting to be struck by stage-hands and carried back to the scenery store. It was almost possible to see through or beyond them to the first settlement here, centuries earlier-the shaded cloisters, the church tower with its dozen bells, the monks in hair shirts and white hoods padding back and forth from the library or whispering matins and lauds together in the chapel. In the previous century, of course, the priory had been knocked down, much like Pontifex Abbey. There was no library any more, no chapel, no monks in white hoods, only their silent remains-the broken column, the abbreviated wall, a few stubborn bricks overgrown by chickweed and quack-grass. The rest had become a clutch of taverns and alehouses, along with other establishments of more anonymous but no doubt sinister occupation.

'Not through here , sir?'

'Yes, yes-keep going straight.'

I had been giving instructions to the driver, who claimed never to have set foot in Alsatia, a record he seemed anxious to preserve, until I offered the incentive of an extra two shillings. Trying to remember the haphazard course I had taken two nights earlier, I crouched forward, my face outside the window and upturned to the sun. The buildings stood at drunken tilts on either side of us, their doors sagging on their hinges and their windows shuttered. This time I had not heard the bleat of the horn as we entered; perhaps, half asleep those two days before, I had imagined it. Or perhaps there were other, subtler signals, a silent language that pulsed from building to building. I remembered a rumour I had once heard about Alsatia, that all of its taverns were honeycombed with cubby-holes, false floors and hidden passages, scores of secret places where fugitives and smugglers concealed themselves or their booty. Another Alsatia existed depths beneath the soot-rimed surface of timber, stone and thatch, behind a hundred wainscots and boarded entranceways. I twisted round in my seat and, for the dozenth time this morning, peered down the street behind us. Nothing. A minute later I caught sight of the blistered signboard.

I had no idea what I should expect, if anything, from the auction. I had attended only four or five of them by the summer of 1660, not through negligence or indifference, but because book auctions were, like coffee-houses, a recent phenomenon. In fact, the two were related in some ways. Most auctions in those days were held in rooms rented in coffee-houses, in the Greek's Head, for example, where the auctioneer, usually a former bookseller, would preside over the sale of as many as a thousand volumes, the owner of which was either bankrupt or dead. They were usually clamorous, well-attended affairs. The auctioneer advertised the auction in the newssheets and handbills, and catalogues listing the titles were made available in advance. The same people-booksellers or other collectors-always turned up to bid against one another for this edition of Homer, that one of Aristotle.