The Book of Secrets

XLII

Strassburg

The screw tightened. The platen wheezed as it pressed the damp paper. We held it a moment then raised it back. Drach peeled the paper away from the plate and draped it over a rope strung between two beams.

‘Twenty-eight.’

Twenty-eight. I let go the handle of the press and walked over to examine it. In a sense there was nothing to see: it was exactly the same as the previous twenty-seven. But to me, that was everything. I gazed on it like a parent on his child. Better than a child, for a son is only an imperfect copy of the father. This was flawless.

It was not beautiful. The text was monotonous, hard to read, for the steel punches had taken me so long to cut that we only had upper-case letters. There was none of the variation of size or weight that a scribe would have applied – except for one flamboyant initial that Kaspar had carved into the copper plate separately. For the twenty-eighth time I looked at it and sighed. My drab rows of words whose chief merit was their discipline, against the vivid curves and wild tendrils of his single letter. It captured something.

Kaspar loaded the next sheet of paper and we took up our positions on opposite sides of the screw handle. These were golden times for me: quiet afternoons locked away in our cellar, the two of us working as one in our common purpose. In these moments I could almost forget how it was paid for.

‘I met an Italian once, a merchant who had travelled as far as Cathay,’ said Kaspar. ‘Do you know what he found there?’

‘Men with the heads of dogs and feet like mushrooms?’ Kaspar didn’t laugh. Like many quick-witted men, he was impatient with others’ humour.

‘Instead of gold and silver, they pay each other in paper.’

I laughed, and nodded to the back of the room. A ream of paper stood baled up on a workbench waiting for the press. ‘We should go to Cathy. We would be rich men. We could use our paper to buy their silver, transport it back here to pay for more paper, use that to buy yet more silver in Cathay…’ I looked at him suspiciously, wondering if this was another of his complicated jokes. ‘Surely if it were that easy every paper merchant in Italy would be rich as the Pope by now.’

‘Perhaps.’ He shrugged. ‘I think that their princes must mark their paper with some symbol, as our kings mint coins.’

‘You can melt a king’s head off the coin and it will still be gold. Scrub it off a piece of paper and it is only paper. Burn it and you have nothing at all.’ I reversed the screw and pulled the sheet off. ‘Twenty-nine. I think your merchant spun you a traveller’s yarn.’

‘Is it so hard to believe? What are we doing here if not the same? We take pieces of paper that cost us a penny a dozen, and sell them for three silver pennies each to the Church. They in turn will sell them for sixpence. Has the nature of the paper changed?’

This was facetious. ‘Men are not paying for the paper. They are buying expiation of their sins. The paper is just a receipt which the Church provides.’

‘Yet without the paper there is no transaction. Do you think that on the last day we will rise up clutching fistfuls of indulgences and present them to St Peter as if we were cashing an annuity?’

‘Only God knows.’

‘If God knows, why does He need a piece of paper to remind Him? Men need the paper because they are credulous fools.’

It always surprised me how Kaspar could speak of men thus, as a species apart from himself.

‘The paper is blessed by the Church.’

‘Because it knows men will pay more if they are given something in return. Even if it is worth no more than the so-called money of Cathay.’ He gave me his peculiar smile, at once conspiratorial and condescending. ‘You know this is true. This is the alchemy you hope will make you rich: taking something worthless and making it valuable.’

‘If it succeeds.’

I turned back to the press. In the time we had been talking, we had run off three more indulgences. I pulled the fresh copy from the press and checked it, still in thrall to its perfection. How many times before I grew tired of it? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?

Yet even as I savoured that delight, I felt it ebbing away. I examined the paper more closely. The letters were all there, each in its proper place. But they looked less defined than before, like stone worn smooth by many feet. I rubbed my eyes, wondering if too many hours in the basement had dulled my sight.

‘What is it?’

I stood under the window. The stippled glass cast wispy shadows over the sheet, but the lettering was clear to see. I was not mistaken. The edges had blurred and spread, thickening each letter. Some had become almost indecipherable blots. Even Drach’s capital flowed less smoothly.

I found the first page we had printed and compared it. Its text was crisp, far more legible than the other. I showed it to Kaspar.

‘Perhaps we did not press hard enough.’

We printed another, then again. By the third attempt we could not doubt it. With each pressing the lines grew subtly less distinct. Eventually this gradual degeneration would render the text illegible.

I looked around the room, at thirty-odd indulgences hanging on ropes or stacked on our table. They taunted me with their illusory perfection.

But I had more urgent concerns. ‘Why has this happened?’

Drach leaned over the press, pushing his fingers into the grooves of the copper plate. ‘Copper is soft; the pressure we need to make the imprint is immense. Each copy we make squeezes the plate and deforms it.’

‘Is there nothing we can do?’

‘Make another plate.’

‘It took Dunne a week to make that.’ I did a rough calculation in my head. ‘I paid him three gulden for the labour and the copper sheet. If a sheet can only produce forty or fifty indulgences for three pennies apiece, we would lose a full gulden on every batch. Even before we count the cost of ink, paper, rent…’

‘You sound like a merchant.’

‘One of us has to.’ I rounded on him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this would happen?’

‘I never printed enough of the cards to find out.’

I slumped down onto the floor. The promise of Ennelin’s dowry had been enough to convince Stoltz the moneylender to extend me more credit, but I had already drawn all that I could. Even when I married her I would need most of the capital simply to repay my current obligations.

I picked up one of the indulgences that had fallen to the floor beside me. Tears blurred the writing to nothing. I had mortgaged my life to pursue this project because I believed I could make something valuable.

Now all I had was paper.