Ross King - Ex Libris

But then I reminded myself that Alethea wasn't my beloved, that no enchantments would be waiting for me at Wembish Park, and finally that my task now seemed-on the basis of my discoveries today-far from impossible.

Winter's first panes of ice were thickening in Hamburg's canals by the time the Bellerophon , a merchantman of three hundred tons, cast off her lines and started the final leg of her 2,000-mile voyage from Archangel. The ship's log recorded that it was December in the year 1620. Martinmas was past, the start of the most dangerous and unpredictable seas, though the voyage down the Elbe to Cuxhaven began well enough. The Bellerophon was carried swiftly on the ebb, passing the crowded stalls of the St. Pauli Fischmarkt on her starboard side, then the scattering of ropewalks and gabled warehouses opposite. Downstream in deeper waters, creaking at anchor, sat the nimble-looking fluyts of the Hanseatic fleet, each with its hull worried by a half-dozen lighters and bumboats. The Bellerophon cut a fine figure as she swayed past them with her stays taut and whistling in the breeze, her cream-coloured sails snapping and swelling as quickly as they could be unfurled. Though her hold was full with furs from Muscovy her passage was smooth and buoyant. Her hull rode high in the water, and the shadows of her cutched sails swept fleetly over the workmen squatting on quays or thrumming up the planks to the storehouses, humping barrels of Icelandic cod or sacks of English wool. A few crewmen could be spotted on her waist, waving their caps, while high above their heads, tiny against the steel-grey and snow-spitting December sky, the topmen were clambering up and down her ratlines and along her yards, tugging at bull-ropes and lengthening the topsails that gathered the wind in their bunts and swept her ever more rapidly along the brackish tide to the sea.

Standing on the quarterdeck, letting snowflakes alight and melt on his cheeks as the spire of the Michaeliskirche dwindled and shrank astern, Captain Humphrey Quilter watched his men going about their tasks. The voyage from Archangel had been a difficult one. The Dvina had frozen almost two weeks early, and the Bellerophon and her crew escaped its clutches by no more than a couple of days. Quilter had been trapped in its ice once already, two years ago, when the entrance to the bay was frozen solid in the first week of October. No one who remembered that dreadful experience had wished to repeat it. Six frostbitten months in the frozen jaws of the Dvina, waiting for the spring thaw, which came three weeks late that year. But it was always a dangerous voyage. This time the ship had escaped the spreading ice only to be battered by fierce gales in the middle of the White Sea. After limping into harbour at Hammerfest for repairs to a cracked mizzenmast, she was lucky to cheat the ice once again, this time by a single tide.

But now, four weeks on, Captain Quilter was able to relax. This last leg of the voyage, from Hamburg to London, would be the easiest, even though December and its unpredictable weather had arrived-and even though this was, as rumour had it, an inauspicious season for voyages. For soon it would be difficult to sail any ship abroad, ice or no ice, fair weather or foul. The ports as well as the sea routes between them would be shut to all vessels except warships, because new battles were looming. The entire continent of Europe was a budge-barrel waiting for a quickmatch that would not be long in coming. And no one, Quilter supposed, would be spared the explosion.

He braced himself on the creaking deck, legs wide apart, and tasted the breeze turn cooler, saltier. The heathlands and salt marshes with their dykes and wicker fences slid along the port bows. He knew the estuary well, its every sandbar and shoal, and would barely need to glance at the rolled-up sea-cards in his cabin. The ship would reach Cuxhaven by early afternoon and then, with good wind and weather on the North Sea, the coast of England two days later. Still not quick enough, he knew, for his forty-six crewmen, who were eager to return home after five months at sea, though at least they would have money in their pockets, even if the promised load of Wismar beer had gone astray somewhere between Lübeck and Hamburg. Yes, a good haul, well worth their troubles. There would be wages and bonuses for all, not to mention a handsome return for the shareholders in the Royal Exchange. For below decks the Bellerophon was carrying almost five hundred bales of top-quality fur bought from the Lapps and Samoyeds at the English fort in Archangel. She was bringing back to England enough beaver pelts, Quilter reckoned, for several hundred hats, not to mention muskrats and foxes for scores of fine coats, sable and ermine for the gowns of a hundred judges, along with a few dozen bear and reindeer skins, the former complete with claws and mummified heads, the latter with antlers intact, all destined to hang from the walls or cover the floors of various lordly estates. Last winter had been a cold one even by Muscovite standards (or so the Samoyeds had assured him) and therefore the pelts were thicker-even more valuable-than usual.

Then there was as well the other cargo, the more secret one, the one on which Captain Quilter hadn't paid so much as a single thaler in port duties. He shifted his stance and threw a glance in the direction of the hatchway. True enough, the mystery cargo had made a common smuggler of him, but what choice did he have in the matter? The two hundred casks of beer from the merchant in Lübeck had failed to arrive, which meant the Bellerophon would have needed a few dozen lasts of cheap Lüneburg salt to use as ballast. But Lüneburg salt would have been difficult to sell in London, even if there was some to be had at such short notice, which as it happened there was not. There was no woad or pig-iron either, or ballast of any sort, and so Quilter had agreed-with less reluctance than was truly proper-to take on board these mysterious boxes that had not been registered in the tally clerk's port book and, once on English soil, would not be reported at the custom-house either. Or that at least was the plan. Two thousand Reichsthalers he was to earn for his troubles, or almost £400, half of which had been paid already and was safely stowed in his sea-chest. Oh yes, he told himself as the fortress at Glückstadt shifted into view over the starboard bow, a very good haul indeed.

Still, something troubled Quilter about the whole affair. How, for example, had the man in the Golden Grapes known his name? How had he known about the fugitive consignment of Wismar beer? And who were the passengers that, for a few extra thalers, he had been persuaded to take aboard and hide below decks? Perhaps they were spies of the sort with which every port in Europe was supposedly rife these days. But spies for whom? And the stranger from the tavern, John Crookes-had he been a spy as well?

It had been a strange and unnerving business. Quilter listened to the familiar sound of the sheets humming overhead as the sails filled in undulant white billows, drawing the river's strengthening wind. The proposition had come two nights earlier, at a tavern in the Altstadt, on the wharfside, where he was drinking a pot of ale and eating a fried hake in the company of his bo'sun, Pinchbeck, and a half-dozen other crewmen from the Bellerophon who were scattered round the tables with their noses thrust into pint-pots. The night had been about to blur into every other evening spent in Hamburg-drink, cards and perhaps a prostitute from the Königstraße before a stumbling journey back to the waiting gangplank. But then the bells in the tower of the Petrikirche began pealing madly and a man stepped deftly through the door and took a seat at the empty table next to Quilter. Catching Quilter's eye, he introduced himself as an Englishman, John Crookes, of the firm Crabtree & Crookes, importers from the Hansa towns into England. Over a glass of Dutch gin he explained that his firm made use of the Hansa fleet, whose ships would otherwise have sailed to England with empty holds. Only now there was, he whispered, a deal of unpleasantness, the source of which was that the Hamburgers were quarrelling with the Danes, whose King had just built a huge fortress a few miles downriver at Glückstadt. And because King James of England had married the sister of the King of Denmark-this belligerent foe who wished to rule both the Elbe and the Baltic-not a single ship in the whole Hansa fleet was willing to carry the cargo of English merchants. At that point Crookes had withdrawn a pouch from his inside pocket and, without removing his eyes from Quilter's face, slid it in a knight's move across the table.