The Book of Secrets

XXX

Near Strassburg, 1434

‘Be careful. If you spill even a drop we’ll burn like heretics.’

Drach speared an onion on a sharpened stick and grinned. That frightened me. He only smiled when he was serious.

Perhaps it was Drach’s promise of danger, but all my senses sang at a high pitch that day. The sweetness of coal and the surly smell of flax-seed oil; the bright August sun that made pillars of light in the smoke; the viscous bubbles swelling and popping inside the cauldron that stood between us. I could feel every drop of sweat running down my naked back.

Drach crouched with his skewered onion beside the cauldron. I pulled on a pair of leather gloves and reached for the copper hat that covered the pot. Our eyes met through the oily steam.

‘Remember. Not one drop.’

I was at one with the world. I had never been so happy.

Strange though it seems now, Drach made me respectable again. For that, I forgave him a lot of what came afterwards. St Thomas Aquinas says that all creatures are born to a destiny in the world; fulfilment comes from achieving that purpose. I had always known my purpose, but for twenty years I had blundered about it like a blind bull. With Drach, I began at last to discern my path. Opportunity brought ambition; ambition begat hope; hope began to bring me back to the life I had fled ever since my father died.

I had assumed that that life had been obliterated long ago. Instead I found it had only been sleeping, like a bear waiting for spring. I wrote to my brother Friele at my father’s house in Mainz, and received a guarded reply that welcomed me – cautiously – back into the family. Through Friele, I made several discoveries. First, that he still held certain annuities in my name which paid out a sum of gold every quarter. Being an honest man with a clerk’s sensibilities, Friele could account for every penny that had accrued since my departure. He regretted to tell me that much of it had gone to Konrad Schmidt in Cologne, who had sued for the full value of my broken apprenticeship, but the rest he would transfer to Strassburg.

My brother made no mention of the reason I left Schmidt. From this I deduced a second fact: that Schmidt had preferred to protect his son’s reputation rather than blacken mine, and had kept the scandal of my departure to himself. It was a secret he had now taken to his grave, for my brother reported he had died some years back. I never learned what became of little Pieter.

Friele’s remittance provided me with a small amount of capital and an income to look forward to. By the strange alchemy of credit, whereby those who least need money attract it most, I was able to transmute this modest sum into a larger one by borrowing. It had quickly become obvious that I would be the one to fund our adventures. Drach, for all his genius, was spectacularly careless of money. When he told me how little he had sold the cards for I was appalled; when he admitted he could not make any new copies because he had sold the press to pay a debt, I wondered what nature of man I had yoked my fortunes to.

‘Look at St Francis,’ was all he said when I tried to discuss it. ‘There is nothing more glorious than a life of poverty.’

‘And humility,’ I reminded him. That made him laugh, for vanity ran through his bones and he knew it. He tousled my hair and called me a disputatious old woman. After that, I rarely brought up the subject.

I took a house in St Argobast, the village by the crossroads where I first met Drach. It was a pleasant house: a low cottage with three rooms and a barn, and a stone outbuilding across the yard. A grove of poplars shielded it from the road, while across the water meadow I could watch the river Ill meander towards the city, some three miles distant. There were no neighbours to observe the irregular hours that Drach came and went, to notice the strange smells that often poured out of the stone shed late at night, or to complain of the noise when Drach accidentally set fire to a hen one evening. It was the first house I had ever been master of, and I loved the sensation of freedom it brought. I was thirty-five.

In short, with Drach’s help, in a very brief space of time I hauled myself out of the pit I had inhabited and regained my place in the world.

I pulled back the copper lid, angling it so that the liquid did not boil over into the fire. Drach and I both had rags tied over our faces against the foul vapour that billowed out. He dipped the onion into the bubbling broth. The moment it touched the surface a brown scum erupted from the oil, frothing around the onion and racing up the sides of the cauldron.

‘Don’t let it over the rim!’

Drach pulled the onion away and I clamped the lid back down. ‘Too hot,’ he declared.

With a poker and tongs, I spread the coals beneath the trivet to burn cooler. When the boiling oil seemed less vigorous, we attempted the experiment with the onion again. This time the scum rose more slowly, blistering the skin of the vegetable but not threatening to spill over.

‘Perfect,’ Drach declared. While I held the lid open, he took a bowl of resin dust and sprinkled it over the surface of the oil with a ladle. Each time the dust touched the oil it provoked another belch of scum and foam, which needed rapid stirring to keep it from bubbling over into the fire and setting the whole cauldron ablaze. This was the most precarious part of the operation: not just because of the danger (which was considerable) but because of the way Drach wilfully courted it. Each ladleful of resin he added was more than the one before, prompting the foam to climb ever closer to the rim and me to stir with ever more desperation. Drach seemed to enjoy this hugely, like a child baiting a dog with a stick; I hated it. The fumes and exertion and fear all cloyed together to make me feel ill.

Gradually, the mixture thickened. When it was the consistency of soup and the colour of piss, we ladled it out of the cauldron into glass jars. While we waited for it to cool, we damped the fire and went down to the river.

I stripped off my trousers and dived in, kicking back so that I could watch Kaspar undress on the bank. The oil that had coated me drifted away in a foul-smelling slick; my anger went with it. I felt foolish for having allowed myself to become so irritated by his game.

Kaspar waded in and squatted in the shallows. For all his carelessness with fire, he had a strange fear of water. It was the one arena where I could outpace him, and I spent some minutes splashing about in the current, diving down and holding my breath to make him anxious. When I opened my eyes underwater, the sunlight shining through the reeds reminded me of days dredging gold out of the Rhine. I could not believe that had been my life.

I broke the surface and swam back to the bank. Kaspar had waded out so that the water almost reached his hips; he wore a petulant look that made me laugh with delight. Coquette that I was, I delighted in provoking his envy.

I swam round behind him and stood in the mud, sluicing water over his back and scrubbing away the soot and oil. His skin was taut, his shoulders beautifully firm from long hours of work. When he turned around, I sank beneath the water so he would not see my arousal.

We dressed and went back up to the house. We took the oil into the barn, where a pair of wooden tables had replaced the byres and straw, and spooned it out onto a stone slab. By now, the mixture had cooled to a greasy paste. An oyster shell beside it held a small mound of lamp soot, which we gradually stirred in. I watched the black swirl through the varnish, then dissolve into it.

Drach dipped a fingertip in and wiped it on a scrap of paper beside the slab. A black smear appeared on the paper, though as I watched the ink dry it faded to a duller grey. Despite all the effort we had lavished on it, I felt a grain of disappointment.

‘It should be darker. Stronger. Like real ink.’ I thought back to all my weeks in Tristan’s tower in Paris, chasing every hue of the rainbow. ‘Copper powder burns black if the flame is hot enough. If we mixed that with the lampblack, it might be more vivid. Perhaps red massicot too, to add depth.’

Drach looked peeved. He touched a finger to my lips to silence me. ‘This will do. After all, we do not have a press yet.’