She was shocked by the sight of him. He had arrived in Breslau more than a fortnight earlier, before the snows, but he appeared to be the worse for the journey. He looked thinner and more ragged than ever. His breeches and doublet hung in tattered folds about his shoulders and hips like those of a scarecrow. Perhaps he too had been ill? He had a weak constitution, she knew-several evenings in Golden Lane had been spent nursing him through one complaint or another. A booming cough suddenly bent him double.
'Vilém…?'
Their reunion was not what she expected. So busy was he checking the crates for damage, opening them one at a time, inspecting the oilskin-wrapped volumes, fussing and ducking over them before replacing dunnage, that he failed to notice her arrival. She moved quickly through the cellar towards him, weaving her way between empty wine racks and the dozens of crates. Most of the lids had been raised and tiny gilded characters glimmered in the torchlight as she passed. Later it would occur to her that the books had been crated in alphabetical order. Abulafia; Agricola; Agrippa; Artephius; Augurello. Then Bacon; Biringuccio; Böhmen; Borbonius; Bruno. The names meant little to her, as did the titles. De occulta philosophia. De arte cabalistica. Impious pursuits suggested themselves. The Mirror of Alchymy. Occulta occultum occulta. What would the Queen, a sworn enemy of popery and superstition, make of such works? FICINUM, she read on the spine of one of the thickest volumes, PIMANDER MERCURII TRISMEGISTI.
'Vilém!'
He showed no more surprise or delight when finally he saw her than when he discovered certain cherished volumes at the bottoms of the crates through which he kept searching for another twenty minutes. Indeed, over the next few days he would appear more concerned for the welfare of the books than for her. Like Otakar, he had become obsessed with the idea of the collection falling into what he called the wrong hands-being looted, burned or disappearing into the archives of Ferdinand or the cardinals in the Holy Office. Later he would tell her that he had assisted with the transport of the 'first consignment', some fifty crates of books. The second consignment was shipped from Prague by Sir Ambrose himself, for which reason Vilém would not find it odd that the Englishman was alone inside the library. Only when she described that episode-they were sitting on a pair of wine casks at this point-did he show any interest in her plight. Or, rather, he was interested in the leather-bound volume she had seen on his desk. Two times he forced her to describe the events of that evening but then, puzzled, claimed not to recognise her accounts of either the book or the horsemen. But he was especially interested in the elaborate binding. He sprang from the cask, squatted on the floor and rummaged through one of the crates for a minute, muttering to himself and grunting.
'You say it was bound,' he called over his shoulder, 'like one of these.' He swung round, clasping a fat volume to his chest. 'Is that so?'
In the torchlight she could make out the intricate swirls stamped on to the book's leather cover-a series of whorls and curlicues that reminded her, suddenly, of the fanciful lines of Prague Castle's maze garden seen from the upper windows of the Královsky Palace. From its coloured fore-edges the volume looked like one of the Golden Books he had shown her a month earlier. She nodded.
'Exactly like that, yes. The same pattern, I would say.'
'Odd… very odd.' He was twisting a lock of his unkempt beard in his fingers as he studied the tooled leather. 'But you say the pages had not been dyed?' She shook her head. 'Mm,' he said into his stained ruff, frowning, 'how very odd indeed.'
'Did it come from Constantinople, do you think?'
'Oh, it's possible.' His head was bobbing. The idea seemed to excite him. 'Yes, it might have done. One doesn't judge a book by its binding, of course. But what you describe is a Muhammadan decoration known as rebesque or arabesque, which was used by the bookbinders of Istamboul. There were a dozen such books in the library, but this one that you describe, hmmm…'
He had opened the book and was thumbing slowly through its purple leaves, through pages that she remembered him saying had been made from the skins of unborn calves, sometimes as many as fifty per volume. Vellum, it was called. The calves were stunned and carefully bled, then flayed of their delicate hides. A lost art, he had claimed.
'But what could it be?' She was watching his face, wondering if he was telling her everything he knew. 'Was it something of value, do you think?'
He shrugged his narrow shoulders and laid the volume carefully aside. 'Oh, it could be anything-anything at all. And, yes, I should think it was of value. Perhaps of considerable value. Especially if it came from Constantinople. Its libraries and monasteries, you understand, were the world's greatest repositories of ancient wisdom.'
He was at his most pontifical now, plucking at his beard and staring glassily into the middle distance. The thumpings of the dancers in the hall were making themselves known through the groined ceiling, but he seemed not to notice.
'In the past few centuries, more Greek and Roman authors have been discovered in Constantinople than anywhere else. Priceless discoveries, mind! The eleven plays of Aristophanes… the seven of Aeschylus… the poems of Nicander and Musaeus… Hesiod's Works and Days… the writings of Marcus Aurelius… why, even Euclid's Elements, for heaven's sake! Not one of these works would survive today had it not been for the scribes of Constantinople. Every last one of them would have sunk without trace. And how much poorer would the world be for their loss!'
She nodded soberly, faintly amused, however, at his eager recitation, which she had heard before. He felt a strong kinship, she knew, with those humble men whose task it had been to collect and preserve documents that came to them from the burning or besieged libraries of Alexandria or Athens or Rome. A task that he no doubt saw himself re-enacting.
'But the Turks-'
'Oh, yes, yes,' he interrupted, 'the Turks. Quite so. A great disaster! How many other priceless manuscripts were lost when the Sultan invaded in 1453? Or, rather,' he added, 'how many priceless manuscripts have not yet been rediscovered?'
She nodded again, feeling the first twinges of a cramp begin to take hold of her stomach. The vault seemed suddenly airless and confined; she could barely breathe. Caulked with tow and oakum, the crates smelled of pitch-an acrid stink that, like so much else these days, made her nauseous on top of everything else. She was reminded of the hold of a ship, of her voyage from Margate to Holland on the Prince Royal seven years ago. She had been seasick then. Now her head ached and swam in exactly the same way. It seemed to revolve in one direction, her stomach in the other, as if she were indeed aboard a stinking, storm-tossed ship.