The Book of Secrets

XXVIII

Strassburg, 1434

What can I say about Kaspar Drach? He was the most obscenely talented man I ever met – more so, I believe, than Nicholas Cusanus. While Cusanus tended his thoughts in walled gardens, Drach roamed freely across the earth; where Cusanus pruned, watered, shaped and cropped, Drach sprayed his seed without thought for where it would land. Tangled meadows of bright and fantastical flowers sprouted wherever he walked. Though among their twisted stems, serpents lurked.

None of which I knew that spring evening. I remember his bare feet slapping on the rungs as he descended the ladder. The crooked grin as he saw my surprise. I had expected someone like the goldsmith, wise and venerable, a man who had given his life to attain his new art. Instead, I saw a slight young man with a mop of unruly black curls, younger than me by several years. His skin was the colour of raw honey, his eyes like viscous oil – blue, green, grey or black by the changing whim of the light. A barbarian streak of blue paint creased his forehead.

He plucked the card from my hand and glanced at it. I looked for a sign of recognition, perhaps a glow of paternal pride that his prodigal child had been brought back to him. There was nothing. He handed it back to me.

‘Did you lose?’

‘What?’ I had not been paying attention. His fingers had brushed mine as we exchanged the card. In that moment, I had felt the demon who inhabited me stir, a gust that brings a taste of the storm.

‘The game. Did you lose it?’

I thought of Jacques’ pulverised face, his blood on the stones. ‘No.’

Drach gave me his crooked smile. ‘A bad workman blames his tools. A bad gambler blames the man who made the cards.’

He suddenly turned his back on me and began walking towards the river. I could not tell if it was a dismissal or an invitation. I followed. He squatted on the bank and sluiced water over his palette. Threads of colour streamed off it into the river.

I stood at the top of the embankment and watched. ‘How did you make them?’ I shouted down. My voice seemed unnaturally loud in the evening stillness. ‘How do you make them so perfect?’

He didn’t look round. ‘What is your trade?’

I hesitated. ‘I used to be a goldsmith,’ was the best I could say. ‘And if I came into your shop and asked for the secret of enamelling, or the way to fire gold with copper to bring the engravings to life, would you tell me?’

‘I-’

‘I discovered something which no man ever did before. Do you think I would share that with every stranger who passed me at a crossroads?’ He pulled the wooden palette out of the river, shook the water off and tucked it under his arm. He marched up the riverbank, straight past me.

‘I want to make something perfect,’ I said, and something in my voice – desperation or desolation – must have rung true. Drach turned back.

‘Only God is perfect.’

Written down now it looks a pompous rebuke. But writing cannot capture the way he said it: the overblown solemnity undercut by a twitch at the corner of his mouth, the mischievous cast in his eyes as they met mine in complicity.

‘God – and your playing cards,’ I said.

This answer pleased him very much. He spread his arms and took a bow. Everything was theatre to Drach.

‘Even God could not make two men so exactly alike as my cards.’ He considered this thought while I tried not to show my shock. ‘Except twins. And they are unnatural.’

He looked at the sky. The sun had disappeared; the heavens were darkening to black.

‘Are you hungry?’

We crossed the fields to the village. The path was narrow and broken by the plough; often we collided. I longed to take his hand and walk arm in arm, for I was already besotted, but of course I did not dare. I contented myself with the brush of his sleeve, the occasional bump of his shoulder.

He kept his paint jars in a sack, which tinkled like harness bells wherever he walked. His conversation was the same: flowing chatter that pleased my ear and never grated. He asked my name and where I came from; when I told him Paris, he fixed me with a look that made me think he knew everything.

‘There is a story there,’ he said. ‘Someday I will force it out of you.’

I could not think of anyone I would more happily tell it to. We came to an inn called L’Homme Sauvage, the Wild Man. On the sign, a man whose skin peeled off his body like foliage strummed a lute and looked over his shoulder. It was as if I had entered a different world; everywhere I looked, the cards seemed to come alive. Drach saw my gaze and nodded.

‘I am always welcome here. They will give us a meal and a bed for the night.’

He said ‘us’ so casually I could not tell if he meant anything by it. To me it was like a button fallen unnoticed off his coat, to be picked up and cherished long after he had forgotten it.

We crossed the stableyard and entered the inn. The candles burned bright after the darkness outside, while the fire in the hearth dispelled the spring chill. Though the village was too close to Strassburg to detain many travellers, there was no shortage of custom. Three men-at-arms in fine cloaks sat in the middle of the room and bragged of their deeds. In a corner, two merchants from Vienna haggled and gossiped.

A girl with flaxen hair braided into pigtails brought wine. Drach drained his almost immediately and called her back for more. I waited for her to leave, trembling with the idea I had been nursing in all the months of my slow journey across France.

At last she left us.

‘I have a proposal for you,’ I said. I had meant to wait, to tease him in with hints and subtlety. But I could not contain myself: the words spilled out of me. ‘You learned how to make perfect copies of your pictures. Did you ever think what else you could copy?’

He cocked an eyebrow, inviting me to go on. I drew a breath. ‘Words.’

He took a moment to understand what I meant. When he did, he laughed. ‘Words? How much will men pay for them? I have illuminated manuscripts and seen how well the scribes were paid for words.’

‘Some words are worth more.’

In my mind, I looked back to my father’s mint, the stream of identical coins flowing into the scales. The principle of perfection had not turned lead into gold in Paris. I was convinced in Strassburg it would hold more sway with paper.

‘The word of God, for example.’

Drach snorted so hard wine blew out of his nose. He gave me a keen look, wondering if he had misjudged me. ‘Bibles?’

‘Indulgences.’

That surprised him. He sat back in his chair and considered it. Even turned inwards in thought his face was more alive than most men’s ever are.

‘Indulgences are receipts,’ he said at last. ‘Chits the Church sells you to prove you have bought remission of your sins. There is no beauty in that.’

‘No beauty in one,’ I agreed. ‘But in a thousand, all exactly the same…’

‘A thousand,’ he repeated, savouring the size of the number.

‘Using your art.’

‘It would be a single page.’

‘A standard text.’

‘We’d leave space for the names and the date.’

‘And the price.’ I was flushed with excitement; I felt like a key that had found its lock. I had never felt such a rush of understanding.

‘God knows we’ll never want for customers.’

‘Though by God’s grace, He will perfect us all some day.’

It was a reflexive comment, inescapable, but it broke the spell and drew another appraising stare from Drach.

‘A perfect world would be a feeble place. And far less profitable.’

‘Of course,’ I stammered. All I wanted was to bring back the light of his countenance. ‘I only meant-’

He cut me off with a gesture to the far corner of the room, where a woman was leaning over to pour a drink, displaying herself to the traders and field hands at the table. Her breasts sagged close to her waist, the neck of her dress almost as far. Thick red powder gave her cheeks the texture of a badly plastered wall.

‘As long as there are women like her – and men like those – we will be rich.’

Still watching the prostitute, I shuddered in revulsion. The contrast with Drach – smooth, quick, aloof – was absolute. I realised he had been watching me, like a priest in confession. I composed my expression and tried to think of a remark that would cover me. Drach shook his head, as if he knew what I was going to say and wanted to keep me from embarrassing myself. He reached across the table and laid his hand over mine.

‘Your secret is safe.’

He laughed at the confusion brimming in my eyes.

‘Your proposal. It is a plan of genius.’

‘The cards-’ I demurred

‘Were only a beginning. I sold them to rich gamblers with taste. They are a limited market. With these indulgences, all mankind is our market, and they will come back for more so long as men sin.’

Our knees brushed under the table. I knew then that as long as Kaspar Drach and I were together, there would be no lack of sin in the world.