The Book of Secrets

XVIII

Paris, 1433

Aeneas once said that a man’s life is a blank page on which God writes what He will. But paper must be formed before it can take the ink. I considered this while I waited in the paper maker’s workshop. The whole room stank of damp and rot, like an apple store at the end of winter. A woman sat at a table with a knife and a pile of sodden rags, cutting them into tiny scraps. These went into a wooden vat, where two apprentices with long paddles beat them into a porridge. When this was ready it would be pushed to the side of the room to fester for a week, then beaten again and again until the original rags were utterly obliterated. Only then would the master paper maker scoop out the paste in a wire form, squeeze it dry in his press, harden it with glue and rub it with pumice to make it smooth beneath the pen. So must a man’s life be dissolved and remade before one drop of God’s purpose can be written on it.

The paper maker brought me a bale of paper bound with string. Behind him, one of the apprentices turned the screw on the press. There was a slurping sound as water oozed out of the wet paper into the interleaved layers of felt. In a moment of whimsy I imagined the water as ink, as if words themselves could be squeezed out of the paper, destiny unwritten.

‘Your master must keep you busy.’ The paper maker took the coins I gave him.

I shrugged. ‘We sell salvation to sinners and knowledge to the ignorant. We never want for customers.’

I carried the paper back to our workshop, across the bridge so thick with houses you never saw the river. The only sign of water was the grumble of the milling wheels in the arches below. I passed under the watchful gazes of the twenty-four kings of Israel carved into the face of Notre-Dame cathedral, and crossed the invisible river again into the warren of streets around the church of St Severin, in the shadow of the university. This was my home. Goose down and parchment shavings drifted in the air like snow; even to breathe was to take in great lungfuls of them. Copyists sat by open doors and windows with books propped open on stands beside them; illuminators called new and fabulous beasts into being in the capitals and margins of their manuscripts, and students in threadbare finery haggled with the stationers, trying to save their coins for the whores across the rue St Jacques.

The shop was about halfway down a lane, with a cloth awning and a few battered books laid out on a table in front. A large poster nailed next to the door advertised the stationer’s many hands: heavy blackletter with ornate initials; fine cursives whose stems twined like a tangled garden; thickset minuscules that only a glass could read. On the corner of the house, the figure of Minerva sat atop a pile of books and peered down at the street.

‘There you are.’

Olivier de Narbonne – stationer, bookbinder, my employer – looked up from the Bible he had been poring over with a customer. I was about to sidle upstairs to begin work on a piece I had promised him that day, but he beckoned me over, steering his customer so that he could introduce us.

‘A countryman of yours. Allow me to present Johann Fust. From Mainz.’

I knew where he came from. I knew where he had lived, where he had attended church and where he had gone to school. I knew he was two years older than me, though with grey already flecking his dark hair it looked more. I had fled the length of Christendom to escape my past, each calamity toppling into the next like dominoes. Yet here in Paris a face from my childhood stood in my shop, smiling curiously.

And he knew me. ‘Henchen Gensfleisch.’ He crossed the room and embraced me awkwardly. I held back, searching his face for any sign of what he knew, trying to hide my panic from Olivier, who was beaming with surprise. After I fled Cologne I never knew what was said about me, how widely my crime was reported. Perhaps Konrad had kept it secret to protect his son. Certainly there was no hint in Fust’s face that he had heard of it – only honest shock at finding an old acquaintance so far from home.

I returned his embrace. ‘It is good to see you.’

We had never been friends. Fust, ambitious and clear-sighted, attached himself to boys of untainted patrician stock, boys who were not descended from shopkeepers on their mother’s side. He must have prospered: his blue coat was of a rich cloth, trimmed with bear fur and golden thread. It was not the fashion of the day, but the sort of coat an older man might wear, the dress of a man impatient with his contemporaries.

‘Why are you in Paris?’ I asked.

He lifted up the little Bible. ‘Buying books to take back to Mainz.’

‘I did not expect to see you as a bookseller.’

He gave a tight-lipped smile. ‘I earn a living here and there. I have several ventures. But what about you? The last I heard you had gone to Cologne to learn goldsmithing.’

‘The wrong craft for me.’ I smiled blankly. ‘I came to Paris to work as a copyist.’

‘There is nowhere better.’ Fust seemed genuinely enthusiastic. ‘So many books, and such quality. I buy everything I can.’ He pointed at the dog cart outside. ‘I will fill that by tonight, and soon come back for more.’

‘And you must take that Bible,’ broke in Olivier. ‘To anyone else I would demand seven gold écus, but as it was copied by your friend I offer it to you for four sous less.’

‘As it was written by my friend I will pay you the seven écus – if the balance goes to the scribe.’

‘Of course. Indeed, he has copied many other works for me. Perhaps I could show you-’

‘Not today.’ Fust closed the book. ‘I must go. I have other appointments before dusk, and tomorrow I set out for Mainz.’ He turned to me. ‘I will be back in the spring.’

‘Perhaps I will see you then.’

‘I hope so. It is always good to see a familiar face.’ He started for the door then paused, remembering something. ‘Forgive me for being slow – I should have said at once. I was so sorry to hear about your mother.’

I was so eager for him to go that I heard the words without the meaning. ‘My mother?’

‘She was a good and Christian woman. There were many mourners at her funeral. God speed her to Heaven.’

I sat at my desk and willed the tears to come. My soul ached, but my body was too numb to answer. I had not seen my mother since the day I went to Cologne, a stiff figure in a grey cloak on the riverbank. I had thought of her in the intervening decade, but not often. If I had not met Fust, I could have lived for years happily believing she was alive. I did not even know if it was her I mourned, or the reminder of a life I had lost long ago. I felt a great well drain inside me.

Too many thoughts crowded my head. I looked back down at the desk, at the parchment, ink and book waiting for me. Work would not heal me, but it would bring the comfort of distraction. I rubbed the parchment with chalk to make it white, then ruled it, scoring heavy lines with my lead to show it had been done with care. I blocked out a box for the first initial and left two lines for the rubric.

I positioned the book on the reading stand. It was a slim volume: it would not take me long. I sharpened my pen, turned to the first page and received my third great shock of the day, another fragment of a long-lost life: a belligerent dwarf and the book of marvels he had sold Konrad Schmidt.

I have opened the Books of the Philosophers, and in them learned their hidden secrets.