The Book of Secrets

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Cologne, 1420-1

Through the autumn of that year, I made a number of discoveries about Konrad Schmidt.

He was a fair master, but a hard man to impress. I was a more than able apprentice. When he taught us the device for drawing out gold to make wire, my first length came through supple and straight. Pieter spent an afternoon – and a considerable quantity of his father’s gold – producing length after length that stretched and bunched and snapped like wet dough. When we hammered gold between parchment sheets to make leaf, mine emerged airy and gossamer thin; Pieter’s was lumpy as porridge. When Konrad showed us how to fire silver sulphide onto an engraving to make the lines leap out, mine were sharp as glass. Pieter’s looked as if he had left it standing in the grate too long.

Yet Konrad Schmidt resisted my precocity. Whenever I showed him a piece of work, he merely grunted and gave me another task before going back to the laborious task of correcting his son. When I suggested – after many hours’ observation – a way to improve the gold wire puller, he heard me in silence and then dismissed me with a shake of his head. At first I ascribed it to a father’s love for his son – but the more I watched them together, the less plausible that seemed. Konrad rarely criticised Pieter’s work, but beat him for the most minor lapses: leaving a bucket of milk in the sun, forgetting to doff his cap to a customer, putting a hammer in the wrong place in the rack. Eventually I decided that the one was a substitute for the other – that Konrad found so many other faults because he could not admit to himself that his son would not succeed him in his trade. That, I supposed, was why he had had to on take his own son as an apprentice, a practice frowned upon by the guild. And, perhaps, why he resented my skill.

Gerhard resented me too, though that I put down to obvious rivalry. His fat hands were surprisingly fine at working metal – far more than I had credited – but he did not have my instinct for gold. At first he tried to hold me back by giving me lesser tasks, flattering Pieter with responsibility, but this quickly rebounded on him when he had to take responsibility for Pieter’s mistakes. Thereafter he decided it was better to take credit for my work than blame for Pieter’s, and satisfied himself with thrashing me whenever I gifted him an excuse.

There were other things I learned about Konrad Schmidt and his household that year.

I learned that his wife was the third Frau Schmidt. She praised me often and extravagantly – my diligence, my honesty, my artful skill – and I was flattered, until I realised she did it only to humiliate Pieter, who was not her son.

I learned that Gerhard could not afford the gold he needed to produce his master-piece, and therefore could not gain full membership as a master of the guild. Rather than save, he spent what he had drinking out his frustrations in the riverfront taverns.

I learned that Konrad kept the key to his cabinet on a string around his neck and never removed it, except once a month when he visited the bathhouse. When I knew that, I followed him there, and while he bathed took an impression of the key between two wax blocks softened in the steamy air. That evening I cast my own copy in the forge, and after that would creep down at night when Pieter was asleep to fondle and caress the pieces inside.

It was not a happy household, but nor had been my home in Mainz, so I did not mind. I was happy in my work. Once I learned that my skill only fuelled envy and resentment I kept it to myself as much as possible, and took my delights in solitude.

The only person who admired my ability was poor, artless Pieter. Four years younger, he venerated me with the unthinking awe of a brother. It was a new feeling for me, always last and youngest growing up. Though it was sometimes a burden, more often it made me glow with possessive pride. I took to protecting Pieter, slipping him pieces of my work to pass off as his own, neglecting my own tasks to show him again and again how to perform some simple piece of skill. Though it sometimes earned me a beating, I did not care. Each time his knee brushed mine at the workbench, each time I cupped my hand over his to guide his graving tool, the demon inside me thrilled with delight. Of course I suffered agonies and shame – but they were vivid agonies, the sweetest shame, raging like fire in my body. On Sundays in the cathedral I stared up at the cross of Our Saviour and begged for release, but I knew in my heart I did not mean it. At night we lay in our shared bed and I dug my nails into my palms until they bled like Christ’s to resist the wild temptations that assailed me. Some nights, especially in winter, Pieter would burrow against me for warmth, half asleep, and I would have to roll away before my risen lust betrayed itself. Eventually, I reasoned, the demon would see that he could not overcome me and would depart my body for a weaker vessel. Until then I basked in the heat of my lust and the glory of my suffering, quivering in sublime stasis.

In spring, a year after the verdict in Mainz, I made another discovery. It was a warm day in April and there was little work to do, so Konrad decided to teach us a lesson. While Gerhard kept the counter and watched for customers, Konrad brought me and Pieter to the workbench and laid out a bottle, a small piece of paper, a saucer and a spindle of signet rings.

‘All our skill and artifice – where does it come from?’ he asked.

‘From God, Father,’ said Pieter.

At the front of the shop I saw Gerhard smirking. Perhaps he thought – as I did – that God’s glory was hard to discern in Pieter’s craftsmanship.

‘All art comes from God and we learn it as best we may.’ A grimace at Pieter. ‘The greatest tribute we can pay perfection is to perfectly imitate it.’

He took a ring off the spindle and slipped it onto his forefinger, just above the knuckle. Then he did something I had not seen before: he took the bottle, poured a little pool of ink into a dish and touched it with the ring. It came away black and sticky. He wiped a finger across its face, then pushed it hard with his fist into a scrap of paper on the table. When he lifted his hand, the wet image of a running stag was pressed perfectly into the paper. Another touch, another wipe, another impression and a second, identical stag appeared beside the first. Konrad tore the paper in two and handed Pieter and me half each, together with blank rings from the spindle.

‘There is your design. A penny to whoever produces the more perfect copy.’

The penny did not interest me: I knew I would win it. Something about what Konrad did had chimed false, though I did not know what it was. I pondered it while I worked on the ring. First, I took a flimsy piece of parchment that had been soaked to become translucent and traced the image on the paper with a leaded stylus. I washed a thin layer of wax over the face of the ring, and rubbed the back of my parchment with the lead. Then I put the ring in a vice, overlaid the parchment and retraced the image, bearing down hard with the stylus. When I took the parchment away, a light grey stag had appeared on the wax-coated ring.

I reached for the original ring and held up the two to compare. I saw what was wrong at once.

‘Herr Schmidt,’ I called. ‘Which image did you mean us to copy?’

He turned away from his conversation with Gerhard and scowled at me like an idiot. ‘The image on the ring.’

‘It was just that…’ I faltered under his gaze, but gathered strength to carry on. ‘The deer on your ring is facing right, but the deer on the paper is facing left. A truly perfect copy…’ I trailed off.

‘The image on the ring,’ he repeated, and turned away.

Now my mind was hungry with the challenge. I scraped the wax off the ring, erasing the wrong-headed deer, and started again. I took another, bigger ball of wax and worked it on the tabletop until it was flat and smooth. Pieter watched wide-eyed but said nothing; his own effort looked more like a lame dog than a stag.

I retraced the image onto the wax plaque. I carved it out with a burin, then I dipped the wax in the bowl of ink and pressed it out on the paper, as Konrad had done with the ring. When I pulled it away, I had a second copy of the stag, who now stood back to back with the first, facing left. Hot with success, I traced the new image and then transferred it back onto the ring with the stylus.

But the more I examined it, the more dissatisfied I became. The stag was facing the right direction now, but in every other respect he was inferior. His antlers were a muddied tangle. One leg was spindly and another like a ham, while his tail looked like a protrusion of his rump. His nose had completely disappeared.

I studied his lineage, strewn across the table on paper, parchment, wax and gold. The changes were apparent across every generation. With every copy the stag moved further from the perfection I sought, until it became the unrecognisable monstrosity I had on the ring, fit only for the pages of a bestiary.

Across the square the cathedral bell tolled the hour. Customers were beginning to gather at the counter; I knew that soon Konrad would call us away to some other task. There was no time to try again. I carved out the animal as he was, mending his deformities as best I could with the graver. It made him a little more like a deer, but further still from Konrad’s prototype.

When I was finished, I took the ring to my master. He examined it briefly, grunted, and threw a penny to Pieter. Pieter’s face glowed with rare success; my own was red with shame. I struggled to fight back tears. Konrad must have seen it for he told me, gently, ‘True perfection exists only in God.’

But I knew I could do more.