The Book of Secrets

XXXVI

Strassburg

A paw was taking shape. Just as the mother bear licks unformed flesh into the shape of her young, the chisel’s tongue rasped against the stone to carve the image. I could already see the curve of a haunch bulging out of the block; a sloping back and a knob that would become an ear or a snout.

The stone carver stood over his bench in the square and chipped it out. Behind him loomed the cathedral, where the animal would eventually graze among pillared glades and vaulted branches.

This is how God forms us all, I thought: raining down blows to draw out shapes from the crude stone of our creation. A tap and a crack, a puff of dust, the rattle of fragments falling on the cobbles. Another piece of our imperfection cut away. The smoothest skin is scar tissue.

‘The curve of the knee is too sharp.’

A shadow fell over the bench. Drach had arrived, stealing up behind me in silence. He glanced at the bear, emerging from the stone as if from a forest, then at the drawing pinned to the tabletop.

The stone carver looked up. He was well-used to Drach’s interruptions. ‘The bear needs to fit the column. I made him crouch lower.’

Drach laughed and swung away. I followed him through the stone yard. It was like a cemetery: a field of stones in every stage of refinement, from boulders fresh out of the quarry to fluted sections of arches that only wanted a keystone to make them stand erect.

‘That is the way to create copies,’ Drach said. ‘I make a picture and he copies it. What could be simpler?’

‘You said yourself it isn’t a true copy.’

‘True enough.’

‘Not for me.’

We sat down on a roughly dressed ashlar. On a stone capital opposite, a bearded man parted foliage like curtains and peered out. I squinted, but it was not one of Kaspar’s.

‘I have found a way we can raise the money,’ he said, without preamble.

A season had passed since our experiment in Dritzehn’s cellar. I had not meant it to, but sometimes time escapes all plan and reason. For three days afterwards I could not raise my spirits to even think about it. When the worst of my melancholy had passed, I no longer cared. I found other things to occupy me; I concentrated my energies on earning my living and maintaining my household. My stays in St Argobast became longer; Drach’s visits less frequent. The passion that had run so full in my veins had eased. Yet when Drach sent a boy to call me to this meeting, it had flooded back unbidden, as high as ever.

‘Tell me.’

‘There is a widow in this town named Ellewibel. She lives by the wine market.’

He paused, playing up the suspense. I humoured him. ‘Do you expect me to marry this widow for her fortune?’

‘No. But she has a daughter, Ennelin. Twenty-five years old and not yet married. If Ellewibel could find a husband to take her, the dowry would be immense. All the money we need to advance our art.’

I stared at him. He smiled, nodding, encouraging me to follow his train of thought.

‘That is the most preposterous idea you have ever suggested.’

‘Why?’

‘You know why.’

We had never spoken of the demon that possessed me. But from the moment we had shared our first drink in the Wild Man, he had surely known. He allowed me to wash his back in the river and watch him dress; when he stayed at my house we slept in the same bed wrapped together like an old married couple. Sometimes he allowed my hand to slide into the hollow of his hips, so I could lie awake and torment myself with possibilities. I never went any further. The demon had wormed itself into my soul so deep it had become a part of me, a tumour I could not remove without also destroying myself. Drach was different. I knew he did not desire me, but encouraged my cravings because he loved perversity, danger, the hair-thin ledge he walked along the cliffs of damnation. Perhaps, I begged God in the solitary hours of the night, because he loved me.

But now he was pitiless. ‘You are a bachelor of thirty-some years. You have an income, a house, a good family behind you. Why should you not marry this girl?’

Because I love you, I wanted to scream. But I understood that to say it would destroy everything.

‘If she is twenty-five with a substantial dowry, why is she still unmarried?’

He stroked my cheek with his finger, taunting me. ‘So uncharitable, Johann. She is probably a rosebud who has not yet opened.’

‘At twenty-five?’

‘Then perhaps she is as ugly as a two-headed mule.’ He shrugged. ‘You shouldn’t mind. When indulgences are pouring out of our press like wine, you can buy one to salve your conscience.’

He slid off the stone and paced around me. ‘If every challenge was overcome at the first attempt, it would never have been a challenge. Do you know how many sheets of paper and copper I ruined to make the playing cards? How many three-legged bears and unicorns that looked like goats?’

‘Your unicorn still looks like a goat.’ I wanted to wound him, but he shrugged it off with rare modesty.

‘Catch me one and I will draw it better.’

‘At least a unicorn would be worth something.’

‘But we are hunting a rarer beast. If – when – we make it right, a more valuable beast.’

He pulled a coin out of his pocket and flipped it towards me. He must have brought it with him precisely for this piece of theatre, for I never otherwise knew him to carry any money. I snatched it out of the air.

‘Imagine that is your bride.’

The image on the coin was a man, John the Baptist, his head framed in a heart-shaped halo. I read the inscription around the border. IOHANNIS ARCHIEPISCOPVS MAGVNTINVS. John, Archbishop of Mainz.

‘I saw Dunne the goldsmith yesterday,’ Drach said. ‘He has been carving a new plate which he says will make the lettering more even. But it takes hours to make. He cannot afford the time without extra payment.’

I was not listening. The lettering on the coin had transported me back to my childhood. Some colleagues of my father from the mint had lived in our house for a time. A die maker had been one. I remembered tiptoeing into his room one afternoon and watching him at work. He took the block of iron that he had engraved with the design, held a steel rod against it and struck it hard with a hammer. Sparks flew; I whimpered in surprise. He heard me and beckoned me over. He let me hold the steel rod and told me it was called a punch. He showed me the end, which had been carved away so that the letter A stood proud on its tip. When he struck it against the die, it left a perfect imprint in the iron. Later it would be filled with gold, and the impression of that letter hammered into the coin. Such was the unceasing cycle of creation and reproduction: punch and form, male and female, stroke and imprint.

Like all obvious ideas, the wonder afterwards is that it took so long to discover. Why had we wasted months trying to carve the words with a graving tool, when Dunne and I both knew that the best way to imprint letters in metal is with a punch-stamp? All I can say is that Drach had engraved his cards, and we were so bent on following his method we did not pause to think.

Drach was watching me impatiently. He hated to be ignored. I met his gaze and smiled. Of course I saw what he was doing. But I could not help myself.

‘How much is Ennelin’s dowry?’