The Book of Secrets

XLIV

Strassburg

‘I feel honour bound to tell you, madam, that I am no longer as secure a prospect as I was. I have made certain investments which have not returned what I hoped. These have incurred debts which will divert most, if not all, of my income. Under the circumstances, I would not blame you if you preferred to break off my suit of marriage for your daughter.’

Ellewibel’s face never changed as she listened to my rehearsed words.

‘That is very good of you, Herr Gensfleisch. Such honesty does you credit. Indeed, it only confirms the good opinion I have formed of your character. For that reason alone I would never stand in the way of this match. My late husband was a merchant: I know how fortunes may rise and fall. It is faith and character that make a man what he is. In those I know my daughter will not be disappointed.’

I bowed deeply, like a man with a knife shoved in his belly. ‘Thank you.’

I stood at the table in the barn of my house in St Argobast and looked at the wreckage of my endeavours. Kaspar was in Strassburg painting an altar panel; I was alone with my failures. The copper sheet that I had punch-stamped and three of the indulgences that came off it; a few bottles of ink; twenty-six steel rods tipped with the letters of the alphabet; a stack of unused paper weighted down with a stone. I felt an echo of that last morning in Paris. I had sealed all my hopes and labours into that crucible, heated it in the fire seven times. Yet when Tristan smashed it open with his sword the metals had become sludge. Nothing.

Deep in my soul, a familiar urge began to beat – the same instinct that a rabbit feels when it scents a fox, or a traveller when he hears a branch snap in the forest. It was the instinct that had carried me away from Mainz, from Cologne, from Basle, from Paris – wherever danger threatened. But now I was almost forty, and forty is not twenty. I had a house, a position. I could not live the life of a vagrant again. And I could not bear to leave Kaspar, the only friend I ever had.

I was trapped. Not by bars or walls, but by remorseless circumstance. A helpless rage welled inside me. I slammed my fist on the table. Glass and metal rattled; one of the ink bottles tipped over and spilled across the worktop. It lapped against the scattered punches coating the tips black.

I stared. As if in a dream, I lifted one of the punches, upended it and stabbed it onto the tabletop. The table shivered, as if the timber itself understood the import of that moment. I lifted the punch away. A single mark revealed itself, blazed on the wood. The letter A.

I dipped the punch in the pool of ink again and made another, then another. Soon I had dozens of them stamped across the table. Punch and form, male and female. One enters the other and reproduces.

I ran across the yard to the stone shed. The fire had been cold for weeks: I had plenty of coal but no kindling. I went back to the barn, gathered up the remaining indulgences and tore them into strips. I knelt before the hearth and scraped sparks over them with my steel. The edges began to smoulder. I blew, coaxing the fire into life, burning away my failures.

On a shelf by the window I found a bar of lead I had used to blacken the ink. When the fire burned hot, I set the lead over it in an iron bowl. It softened and buckled, melting like butter. I stirred it with a ladle and watched carefully: if it overheated, it would stick too much to the mould.

I laid the copper plate on the bench, among the pestles and vessels we had used for the ink. I dipped the ladle in the liquid lead and scooped a small amount over the copper. Steam hissed as the metals met, the molten lead channelling its way into the grooves cut by the letters. I tapped it to loose the air bubbles.

When the lead had cooled, I worked a knife under it and prised it out of the copper. My hands were trembling; I dared not apply much pressure for fear of bending the soft metal. At last I had it out, a flat slug about the size of my thumb. I carried it back to the barn, dipped it in the ink and pressed it against a fresh sheet of paper with the palm of my hand. I held it there, almost too frightened to see what I had made.

At last I pulled it away.

It was written backwards, for it is the nature of such impressions that the child is the mirror of the parent. But I could read it easily enough. The words shouted into my soul.

I FREE YOU.