The Book of Secrets

LIV

Strassburg

I examined the paper with the familiar ache of broken hopes. Some of the letters had barely registered; others had pressed so hard that blots of ink drowned the characters. In several places the paper had torn where we had not smoothed the edges of the cast metal forms. The whole sheet had smudged badly when we removed it from the press. Drach had been right: I could press ten thousand copies of this and it would still be ugly.

I picked up a file, resigned to another afternoon of thankless labour. Casting the metal form from the engraved copper plate had been easy, but I had not anticipated the fine accuracy that would be needed. If any letter stood even a hair’s breadth lower than the others it would hardly touch the page. The same amount too high and it would crush the paper with ink. As the letters were created by hammering a steel punch into the copper, it was all but impossible to make them a uniform height except by the most meticulous filing.

‘Where are the forms?’

Kaspar looked up. ‘In the bag?’

I looked in the bag that Kaspar had brought from Dritzehn’s house. Apart from a few lumps of cast-off lead, it was empty.

‘Perhaps you put them on the workbench.’

I rummaged through the debris of paper, tools, copper plates and miscast forms that littered the bench. I could not find them.

‘Are you sure you brought them back?’

He shrugged. ‘I thought so.’

This was when I hated working with Kaspar. If he did not care about something he thought nothing of ignoring it, and no rebuke could reach him.

‘You must have left them in the press.’

‘Perhaps I did,’ he agreed.

‘I told you to bring them back.’ Dritzhen had been on his sickbed a week now, and the house had become a thoroughfare for concerned family, prying friends and creditors who feared they might never see their money again. ‘If anybody sees them our secret is lost.’

‘I locked the door.’

I did not want to quarrel with Kaspar – we had already argued too much that year. I turned my back on him and looked out the barn door, breathing the December air to cool my temper.

A boy was standing in the yard. At first I thought he might be a vagabond or a thief but he did not run away when I stepped out of the barn to challenge him. I looked closer and realised I knew him, an errand boy of Hans Dunne. He looked as though he had run all the way from Strassburg.

‘Did Dunne send you?’ I called out the door.

He nodded. ‘He said to tell you Herr Dritzehn is dead.’

With its bowed-out walls and blunt gable, the house already looked like a coffin. The shutters were closed, and no light emerged from within. We stood on the doorstep a long time before a servant admitted us. Inside it stank of vinegar and resin where they had burned pine dust in the fires.

‘Go downstairs and rescue the forms,’ I told Kaspar. I handed him the key we used to lock the cellar. ‘Take the screws out as well.’ To reduce the effects of a single mistake, our latest innovation with this press was to divide the text into four separately cast strips, one for each paragraph, screwed together to make the plate.

‘Where will you go?’

‘To pay my last respects.’

I took a candle from the wall and climbed the creaking stairs. Shadows flitted across the walls. A dozen pairs of eyes fixed on me as I entered the room: mourners and servants gathered outside the bedroom door. All seemed united in some silent accusation. Most were clustered around a stout woman in a white veil – Dritzehn’s wife, now widow – and the man she clung to, his brother Jörg.

I removed my hat. ‘Frau Dritzehn, I have come to say how sorry-’

The moment she saw me she detached herself from the throng and flew at me.

‘You have done this,’ she shrieked. ‘You and your friend. He was a good man, an honest man, until you seduced him with your magic. If any good can come of this day, it is that you will no longer have a claim on him. When Andreas is buried you will give me back every penny he paid you.’

She rained down blows upon me. Her brother-in-law flung his arms around her and pulled her off me.

‘Go to your husband,’ he ordered her. ‘I will deal with this.’

He almost pushed her into the bedroom. Through the open door, I saw the dim shape of Dritzehn’s body lying flat on his bed under a shroud.

Jörg closed the door and gave me a crafty look. I had met him once or twice before in my visits to that house and never liked him. He was a small, hunched man with swollen cheeks and a stubby chin like a club foot.

‘She is hysterical,’ he said, no trace of sympathy. ‘Understandably. At times like this, business is better left with cooler heads.’

‘Your brother is dead,’ I answered. ‘Business can wait.’

‘I spoke to Andreas before he passed on. He told me of your venture, that his only regret dying now was that he would not live to see the vast riches he knew would come of it. He said that I should have his share of the partnership.’

‘If he said that then the disease must already have claimed his mind,’ I said. ‘But we can talk of this another day. I came here to mourn Andreas.’

It was true. I did not deny that I had played on his greed and encouraged him into ventures that would profit me more than him. But Dritzehn had been a merchant: he speculated as he saw fit. How he financed it was his affair. As one man to another, I mourned him.

‘I will go. I did not mean to upset his family in their hour of grief.’

‘You will upset me much more if you do not listen to me,’ Jörg warned. ‘I know how much money Andreas sank into your little scheme, though he could never tell me why you deserved it.’

‘Then you will never know. His money and his secrets stay in the partnership.’

‘Then I must take his place.’

‘I have a contract signed by him that in the event of his death his heirs will receive nothing until the venture is finished. Even then, he died owing me money.’ I could not believe I was having to say this before his corpse was cold.

‘Would you leave his wife destitute?’

‘She is your responsibility, not mine. She will only go destitute if you let her.’

‘Then I will go to the courts.’ Jörg had started shouting. ‘Whatever it is that you and Andreas kept so secret will be exposed to the whole city. You cannot keep me out.’

I met Kaspar outside. ‘Did you get the forms?’

He handed me a heavy bag. ‘I also took the screw out of the press. No one who sees it will guess what it was for.’

‘They may learn anyway. Dritzehn’s brother threatened to drag me through the courts.’

‘Let him. There are only four men alive who know the full secret. Saspach and Dunne will not betray us.’

I took little comfort from that. ‘We must get home. Jörg Dritzehn is wild for our art. I would not be surprised if he broke into our workshop to sniff it out.’

We borrowed a horse for Kaspar and rode back to St Argobast in the dark. All I remember of that ride is cold air and horse sweat. As soon as we arrived I stoked up the fire in the forge and lit all the lamps and candles I could find. With Drach’s help, I scoured the barn for every casting we had ever made: every form, every fragment of lead, any piece of metal with letters cast in it. I gathered them in an iron crucible and set it over the fire. The only ones I spared were the engraved copper plates. I wrapped them in a sack and buried them under a stone in the yard. They were too expensive to waste.

I added coals to the fire and coaxed it to a blazing heat. The forms began to soften. The tiny letters blurred and melted away, running down the face of the metal like tears.

‘Is this the end of our enterprise?’

I looked at Kaspar. Beads of sweat ran down his cheeks from standing too close to the fire. I jabbed a poker into the crucible to break up a stubborn lump of metal.

‘Even if we see off Jörg Dritzehn, what do we have? An art that does not work and a venture that has no capital, only debts. Ennelin, the mirrors, now Dritzehn: everything we attempt ends in disaster.’

I stared into the crucible and watched the last crumbs of metal dissolve into the slurry. I remembered Dritzehn’s widow. You have done this.

I glanced up. Drach was gone.

Panic overwhelmed me. Had he abandoned me? Had I driven him away with my failures? I left the forge and ran to the barn.

Kaspar was there, bending over the press in the corner. I sagged against the door frame in relief. With his back to me, he extracted a copper plate and fixed it in a vice on the bench. He took a fine-toothed metal saw from a rack of tools on the wall.

‘I told you to gather all the plates so I could bury them.’

He didn’t look up. ‘This is not yours.’

I crossed the barn and looked closer. The lamps shone into the grooves cut into the surface, a herd of lions and bears incised in copper.

‘This was the plate for the ten of beasts.’ Drach lined up the saw blade on the edge of the plate and drew it slowly across the metal. Sparks flew.

‘What are you doing? There is no need to destroy these. This is your art.’

The saw bit. A jagged gash appeared in the copper.

‘I am not destroying it; I am remaking it. We will need more money to continue with your art. I can make more cards and sell them. It will not be much, but it may tide us through.’

‘But you told me half the plates were gone. And now you are breaking this one too.’

‘This card is the sum of all the others. He put his palms against the plate so that he masked off different portions of it. ‘Here is one, and two, and three… I can break it into its parts and combine them to make any number I like.’

I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him close to me. His body was warm against mine, a perfect fit. I loved him.

And in that moment, an angel began to sing inside me. What Kaspar had done with the card, I could do with the indulgences.

We would tear it up and start again.