The Book of Secrets

LXX

Mainz

A sultry day in June. The sun streamed through every crack in the close-packed houses, steaming the limp-hanging laundry and baking the dung on the streets into bricks. Children played in the fountain outside St Christoph’s church, screaming with delight as they splashed each other. Butchers put down their cleavers and wielded horsehair whisks in vain efforts to keep the flies away. The city slumped in a daze, stupefied by the smell and the heat.

I walked down the street from the Gutenberghof towards the Humbrechthof. Behind me, two apprentices hauled a hand cart loaded with small casks. Whatever the neighbours thought we transacted behind the Humbrechthof’s doors and shuttered windows, they knew it was thirsty work. How else to explain all the barrels that rolled down that street?

This was my life’s journey, I thought: a matter of a hundred yards. Past the baker where I had bought sweet pies as a child, the stationer who had sold me my schoolbooks, the sword master who tried to teach me fencing when my father still believed I might become a worthy heir. If I had walked past the Humbrechthof, the same distance would have taken me to the mint where I first glimpsed perfection. I walked more slowly now. The page of my soul bore the imprint of many pressings, some indelible, others written in hard point, invisible to all but the author. The ink was dense, heavy with crossings-out and corrections, new words overwritten on washed-out texts still visible beneath. In places, the nib had nicked tears in the paper. Water had stained it, fire curled the edges.

Today I would start a new page.

In seven months, the Humbrechthof had been transformed. All the walls had been whitewashed against damp. The thatch on the outbuildings had been stripped and replaced with tiles. The weeds in the courtyard had been trampled to dust by the criss-crossing of many feet, and a saw pit dug beside the old pastry kitchen. Stout timbers lay beside it. All the doors brandished new locks, and a heavy block and tackle sprouted from a dormer in the roof. Empty barrels like those that had just arrived stood stacked in a corner waiting to return up the road.

The apprentices unloaded the barrels and prised them open. Inside, large jars of ink lay nestled in straw like eggs. They began to unload, but I gestured them to follow me quickly into the house. Others had seen us arrive and emerged from the outbuildings: the paper shop, the ink store, the tool shed and the refectory. They followed me up the stairs, along the corridor and into the press room.

Everyone was there. Fust, with the haunted look of a soul approaching judgement; Götz, still wearing a leather apron from the forge; Father Günther, whose inky fingers played with the cross around his neck; Saspach, a hammer in his hand ready for any last-minute adjustment; and around them all our assistants and apprentices from both houses, almost twenty men in total. Even Sarum, the ginger cat who kept rats out of the paper store, had wandered in and crouched behind one of the table legs. And in the middle of them all, the press.

It stood like a gate in the centre of the room: two thick uprights, joined at the top and again halfway down by heavy crosspieces. The posts had been nailed into the ceiling and bolted to the floor, so that the whole instrument was knitted into the fabric of the house. A screw descended through the middle and held the platen over a long table that stuck out like an apron between the posts. That supported a flat carriage on runners, which could be slid under the press or pulled out to change the paper and the type. It was far removed from the wobbly device we had first erected in Andreas Dritzehn’s cellar a dozen years earlier.

I stood beside the press and addressed the assembled team. I do not remember what I said, and I doubt they paid much attention. The only words that mattered that day lay set in lead on the press bed. I concluded with a prayer that God would cast his blessing on our humble enterprise, which we offered in His name and to His purpose.

As soon as I was done, Kaspar stepped forward. He did not look at his audience. He had always been capable of great concentration, in starts, but since his injury he had acquired an almost ferocious power to ignore all around him. I suppose he needed armour against the stares and mockery his deformity drew in the streets.

He uncorked two ink bottles, a large one of black and a small of red. First, he dipped a brush in the red and carefully painted it onto the head line, the rubrication. Then he poured the black into a pool on the block beside the press. It came out thick and sticky as naphtha.

He swirled the ink around the slab with a knife until it was evenly spread, then picked up two leather balls on sticks. He dipped one in the ink and rubbed the two together. When the brown leather was a uniform black, he rubbed them on the metal type in the press, using short round motions like kneading dough. A thin film of ink spread across the form.

He stepped back. I breathed a sigh of relief. I had wanted Kaspar to be a part of this moment – because his painter’s hands were more deft than anyone’s with the ink balls, but also because it was right. He was my lodestar, the beginning of all that followed. Yet – as ever – I felt a drift of unease. There was something about an audience that made him unpredictable, that stoked dangerous fires inside him.

Two young men flanked the press, an apprentice called Keffer I had brought from Strassburg, and Peter Schoeffer. Kaspar had complained about Schoeffer being accorded this honour, but I had overruled him. It was politic, with Fust watching – and deserved. Schoeffer had already proved himself the most promising of my apprentices. He had an instinct for books that none other of our crew of goldsmiths, carpenters, priests and painters could feel.

Schoeffer laid a sheet of vellum onto a board hinged to the bed of the press. Six pins held it in place. He folded it back so that the vellum was held suspended over the inked type, then slid the tray back. It slotted home underneath the platen. He and Ruppel took the handle that drove the screw and pushed it around.

I would have liked to pull it myself, but I was an old man and it wanted strength. The screw creaked and popped as it tightened; the platen pushed down. They held it there a moment, then turned the screw back.

Keffer slid out the tray and folded out the flap, revealing the underside of the vellum. He loosed the pins and pulled it free, made to hold it up then handed it to me instead. The knot of men around me tightened as all vied for a view.

Thousands of tiny letters glistened on the page, wet and black as tar.

n the beginning God created heaven and earth. But the earth was void and empty: shadow covered the earth, and the spirit of God swept over the waters.

It was not complete. The initial ‘I’ would be added later with Kaspar’s copper plate. Tomorrow the leaf would be printed on the reverse. Later it would be brought back for the conjugate pages, two more days, then folded, stitched, eventually bound with all the others. But in itself, it was flawless. Every letter of Götz’s new type had imprinted sharp and whole, more even than any mortal scribe could have made.

I looked to Kaspar, wanting to share the triumph with him. He would not catch my eye. He was staring at the vellum, his face screwed up as if he had bitten a sour apple. I knew what he was looking at: the punctuation in the margin. Peter Schoeffer had been right. The image of perfection was greater if the reality was less so. I could not understand why that should be, but it was.

I was about to go over and embrace Kaspar, to remind him that this was his victory as much as mine, when Fust appeared in front of me. His cheeks were flushed; he was holding a glass of wine. He clapped me on the shoulder.

‘You have done it, Johann. We will run every scribe and rubricator in Mainz out of business.’

I forced myself to smile at him. ‘God willing, this is just the first page of the first copy. We still have almost two hundred thousand to go.’

The true test came ten minutes later, when Schoeffer and Keffer put the second sheet of vellum through the press. Schoeffer pulled it out and hung it on a rack beside the first. I stared between one and the other, scanning every letter for the least deviation.

They were indistinguishable. Perfect copies.

Sunlight shone through a bubble in the windowpane, splaying a fan of colour across the opposite wall. A new covenant. I remembered an old man in Paris.

In the moment of perfection it casts a light like a rainbow. That is the sign.

I drank in my moment of perfection and wished it would never end.