The Book of Secrets

LVIII

Near Strassburg

I knelt in the chapel and prayed. Candles burned in every alcove, flickering off the painted ranks of saints and prophets on the walls. In the dome of the apse, above the altar, Christ stared down at me clutching an enormous open book against his chest. I could not look at him without weeping.

Miracles had occurred that night, though more would be needed before dawn. The cattle who trod the path to the river belonged to a monastery whose light I had seen from the river. Somehow in the dark I had staggered across the field to the gates. At first they would not open them: they thought it was an Armagnak ruse – and certainly I must have seemed a wretched, crazed creature to appear before them so late. At last my desperation convinced them. All their cells were full, so they brought me to the chapel.

Incense lingered in the air from the previous night’s vespers. Soon it would be dawn and the monks would return for matins. For now, I was alone.

I prayed. I prayed as I had not prayed since I was a boy, when I still thought I had a soul worth saving. I prayed with every ounce of my being. I emptied my self and made it a vessel for God. I despised every sin I had ever committed. I begged forgiveness. I renounced all evil. Henceforth I would live a blameless life. If only God would rescue Kaspar.

But I was a feeble vessel, cracked and riddled with holes. As hard as I poured in my prayers they spilled out. In the stillness of the chapel, other thoughts seeped in. My past flowed through me.

A blind man in Paris. Do you know what the Stone really is? It is medicine, a tonic for all the diseased matter of this world.

Nicholas, sitting at his desk in a bare room. You do not desert me, but guard me at every turn with the most tender care.

At the front of the church stood a lectern. The panoply of creation was carved into its stem, striving to ascend it: from flowers and beasts at the base, through men to the four angels who supported the great Bible spread open on their shoulders.

I walked around to look at it. Each page was the size of a gravestone, written in an outsized hand that even the blindest monk could read by candlelight. There were few of the ornaments and embellishments that would have delighted Kaspar. This was an austere beauty.

I screwed my eyes shut and touched my finger to a random part of the page. I prayed God would speak to me, show me words of comfort and hope. I looked to see what I had chosen.

‘I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already were kindled.’

The words offered no comfort. But in my despair, what enraged me most was not the cruelty of the words but the error in the text: ‘were already were’. It mocked me. How I could I find solace in God’s perfection, when a mere slip of the scribe’s pen could corrupt it? I stared at the writing, so clean and bold and neat and wrong. I thought of the impressions from my copper plates: messy and ragged, sometimes barely legible, but pure in meaning.

I gazed up at the Christ and wondered what was written in His book. More memories spoke inside me.

The mint master, earnestly trying to impress my father. Each must be exactly the same, or all would be worthless.

Nicholas again: Diversity leads to error, and error to sin.

Kaspar: You were an artist; now you are a moneychanger.

I knew why the mistake in the Bible offended me. It was me. My soul was a book, dictated by God but so corrupted by copyists’ errors as to be meaningless.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

The Word was God; the Word was perfect. I was a miserable creature, as far from the Word as the stars from the sea.

The full compass of my wickedness overwhelmed me. I had never felt so wretched. I felt every one of my sins like hard pustules erupting from my skin. I fell prostrate on the floor. The poison rushed out of me and I vomited; even when my stomach was empty I could not stop, but convulsed with dry heaves until the last drop was squeezed out of my bones.

I lay on the floor, gasping and moaning. Out of the depths I called to God. He answered. In that chapel, with Christ looking down, I comprehended the eternal. My whole body trembled with the resonance. The book of my being broke into the words that formed it; the words into letters; the letters into the impressions of the sharp chisel that first made them. In an instant, I was transported back from the farthest wastes of the world and reconciled to God.

Glowing threads stretched out from the candles and spiralled around me. They wrapped me in bands of light. They whispered warm words in my soul. I was forgiven. The worm, the demon who had inhabited me so long, was banished. His shrivelled corpse lay on the floor amid the bile and poison.

I had always been with God, but in my sin I had not known Him. I had sensed him my whole life, had pursued Him even when I did not know it. The principle of perfection, the unity of all things. One God. One faith. One perfect substance in the universe.

God is perfect form in which all differences are united.

I would take lead and change it. I would melt it, stir it and reshape it. I would coat it with oils and squeeze it out. I would transform it from base metal into the very word of God.

You alloy it with the Stone, so that the seeds imprisoned in the metal blossom, until in the unity of perfection it can take any shape you command.

I would redeem the gross imperfections of my soul.

Not for wealth or riches, but to perfect the universe.