The Book of Secrets

XXXIV

Strassburg

The press stood on a solid table at the front of the room. It consisted of a base which held a slate bed, two upright legs which supported a crossbar, and a wooden board, the platen, suspended between them on an iron screw. It was little different from the presses the paper makers used to squeeze their sheets dry.

There were four of us in the room. I would have preferred it to be only Kaspar and me, but our enterprise had long since outgrown its beginnings. Dunne was there, of course; also Saspach the carpenter to tend the press he had built. Upstairs, I knew Dritzehn the landlord would be crouching by the cellar door, listening at the keyhole, but I had refused point-blank to allow him down. The more gold I spent, the more possessive I became of our secret.

Yet though I had strived so long towards this moment, I felt strangely detached from it. It was not that I had shirked the work. I had boiled the inks with Kaspar; measured timbers with Saspach; pored over copper sheets with Hans Dunne, filing down the sharp edges left by the graving tools. I had written out the text of the indulgence, then spent countless hours staring at it in front of a mirror so that I could translate it in reverse for transfer onto the copper. Most of all, I had paid for it. Yet I did not feel it belonged to me.

Drach took the plate out of a felt bag and rubbed it clean with a cloth. He laid it on the end of the table and poured a pool of black ink onto it from one of the jars. He spread it with the flat of a birch-wood blade until all the copper was black, then scraped it away again with the sharp edge. Finally, he wiped the plate with a stiff cheesecloth. I marvelled at his touch. He could be so careless of some things, often gratuitously rough-handed, but he could also work with the most exquisite precision when he wanted. The cloth bloomed black as it soaked up the ink from the polished surface, yet in the incisions – only a few hairs’ breadths deep – the ink remained untouched.

Drach arranged the plate on the stone bed of the press. I dampened a leaf of paper with a sponge and passed it to him. He laid it over the plate and stepped away.

Hand over hand, Saspach and Dunne turned the bar that drove the screw. It squeaked in its grooves. The wooden platen touched the paper and squeezed. I heard a tiny liquid belch – probably the water I had used to moisten the paper, but in my mind it was the sound of ink being drawn out of the copper into the paper.

Saspach and Dunne screwed down the platen as far as it would go, then spun back the lever to loose it. I stared at the paper, imagining I saw faint shadows on the underside. Drach peeled it away from the copper plate and raised it to show us. I held my breath.

It was hideous. In stark black and white, letters that had looked neat and regular in the engraving were now as wild as a child’s hand. On some of the words the ink had come out thin as cobwebs, on others, thick and heavy as tar. I wanted to weep, but with the other three men looking on I did not dare.

‘Why has this happened?’

‘Copper is like human flesh. The deeper the cut, the more the bleeding.’ Drach traced his finger over a particularly obese A.

‘But your cards – every line was perfect.’ I knew I sounded like a petty child consumed by jealousy. That was how I felt.

‘Yes.’ Drach stroked his chin and affected to contemplate the paper. ‘These are not as good.’

‘It is easier to cut a long line than a short one,’ said Dunne. He had engraved some of the text himself and had to defend himself. ‘Each letter requires so many fine cuts it is inevitable some go too deep or shallow.’

‘Inevitable in the wrong hands,’ Drach muttered.

I pointed to a U, so deformed it looked like a B. ‘And that?’

‘The shape of the letters allows no room for error,’ said Dunne. ‘Any fool can make a picture. Change the shape of a deer’s antler and it is still a deer. Change the shape of an A and it is meaningless. I think perhaps Drach’s art is not suited to this purpose.’

‘Perhaps you are not suited to this purpose,’ said Kaspar. ‘Perhaps the next one will be better.’ Saspach tried to broker peace. His face showed none of the despair I felt, only irritation. For him, this was merely a job that had wasted his talents.

We repeated the procedure. When it was done, Drach took the paper from the press and laid it on a bench beside the first. We leaned over to examine them.

‘The same,’ grunted Dunne. He turned away in disgust. Yet I kept looking. Where he saw confirmation of our failure, I saw a spark of hope. They were the same. The same erratic script, the same malformed letters and drunken lines, the same place on the third sentence where miserere was misspelt misere. In their manifest imperfections, at least, they were perfect copies.

‘The process is fine,’ Drach declared. He thrived on perversity. ‘All we need is to improve it.’