The Book of Secrets

LXIV

Mainz

When Fust had gone I wandered through the house. The day was fading; soon it would be too dark to work. For the moment, the labours that were the life and breath of the house continued. When I stepped outside into the yard I could smell the heavy perfume of boiling oil, sharpened by the tang of coal smoke. My father’s kitchen had become our type foundry, and the adjacent scouring house the room where we cooked up our inks. Inside the foundry I could see sparks where the fresh types were ground smooth on a wheel.

I climbed the stairs by an outbuilding and crossed a walkway back to the main house. Here, an outside gallery ran around the internal courtyard. I peered through the barred windows as I walked past. In the room where the die maker had once cut coin moulds for my father, Götz now chiselled letters out of copper squares. In the next room, Father Günther sat at a writing desk and pored over a small Bible. He had a sheet of paper beside him and a pen in his hand, which never stopped moving as he read. For anyone used to watching copyists it was an unnatural motion: the pen danced up and down the page, line to line, apparently at random; it never stayed still enough to form even one letter, but left a trail of dots and dashes like bird prints in snow. If he resembled anything it was not a scribe but a merchant clerk taking inventory of his stock. In fact, he was taking inventory of every letter in every word of the Book of Genesis.

He saw me pass and called through the open door, ‘Did you get what you wanted?’

‘He will give us eight hundred gulden now, and more later.’ It was less than I had asked for, more than I’d expected. ‘The equipment will be its own collateral. In return for exclusive rights to sell what we produce, he has also agreed he will not collect the interest. And he has ordered fifty copies of the Donatus grammar book for delivery in three months’ time.’ I laughed. ‘You should have seen the look on his face. He could not believe such a thing was possible.’

‘So he didn’t notice the grammar book was a fake?’

‘It was flawless.’ Though the indulgence had been genuine, the grammar book I showed Fust was the product of two nights’ desperate work by Father Günther and a quill pen when it became clear we could not produce enough types to set all sixteen pages in time.

‘In three months, it will not matter,’ I told him.

The next room was dark, though as I passed I caught a stale whiff of damp from the moist paper stacked inside. At the end of the gallery, another flight of stairs climbed to the topmost floor. I was about to go up, when a mournful knocking sounded in the twilight. Someone at the front gate.

I paused. No one called at the Gutenberghof, certainly not at this hour. Could it be Fust, rethinking his promises? Or the city watch? It was more than twenty-five years since I had fled from my crime at Konrad Schmidt’s house, but a knock at the door still had the power to chill my blood. I waited.

Beildeck, my servant, answered it. I heard him challenge the visitor, though the replies were so soft I could not make them out. The door creaked as it opened.

I leaned over and stared down. A figure emerged from the deep shadow under the arch into the lesser gloom of the courtyard. He moved slowly, hunched over a stick which rapped on the cobblestones as he walked. He stopped in the centre of the yard. Then, as if he had known I was there all along, he looked straight up at me.

My legs sagged; I groped for the rail.

‘Kaspar?’

A bitter, brittle laugh like the chattering of crows.

‘Hier bin ich.’ Here I am.