The Book of Secrets

LXXVI

Mainz

Devils haunted our house. So many of our crew believed. Over the next autumn and winter, a sullen joylessness overtook our works. They did not speak of their fears in front of me; they knew I did not like it. But I caught snatches in conversations heard through open doors: nervous comments muttered under their breath. I knew some of the men still distrusted the press. They found its power unnatural, felt discomfited by its casual surpassing of human ability. Some ascribed its powers to black magic. I thought these notions must have come from the townsfolk, anxious and ignorant of the goings-on behind our walls, but clearly many who should have known better thought so too.

And – I had to admit – strange things did happen. Sometimes at night I could have sworn I heard the creak and clank of the press in the room below. I thought it must be my cares creeping into my dreams, but gradually I discovered that others heard it too. One night the whole house woke to the sound of a great crash. We rushed to the press and found a fresh ink jar smashed open on the floor. We blamed the cat, or swallows who had come in the window.

Eventually it became something of a joke. When a compositor reached into his case and found an x in place of an e; when a ream of paper was found to be two sheets short; when Götz’s tools went blunt overnight; when a form left in the press was backwards next morning, men crossed themselves and blamed the press devils.

One morning, I found the compositors gathered in a high state of excitement. It was unusual to see them thus: by their nature most were sober and quiet men. They were examining a composing stick filled with type. When they had calmed enough for me to understand, Günther explained that they had found it on the desk when they arrived for work. None knew where it had come from.

I took it through to the proofing room and rubbed ink on the type. I used my thumbs to press a scrap of paper against it. A crude line of text appeared.

tifex is a most curious beast with mouths at

‘That is no verse from the Bible,’ said Günther.

I shot him a cautioning look. I did not want him frightening the others.

‘It’s nonsense – obviously. One of the apprentices must have crept in last night thinking to make himself a compositor.’

‘The room was locked,’ said Günther’s assistant.

‘Then you must have forgotten to take the key out of the door.’

‘Or Kaspar Drach unlocked it.’

I rounded on him in a fury. ‘Drach had nothing to do with this. He is never even in this house.’

‘I saw him skulking by the paper store yesterday afternoon.’

‘You were mistaken.’ I looked for a ruler or a stick to beat him for his insolence, but all I could reach was the composing stick. I overturned it so that the letters scattered over the table. The sentence was broken.

‘You see – gone.’

But I could not scatter my thoughts so easily. When at last they were settled back at their work, I left the house and hurried up the street to the Gutenberghof. I looked in on the press room, where a fresh batch of indulgences were being made, then climbed the stairs to Drach’s attic.

I had not been in there for months. The room was a mess – though, typically for Kaspar, even then there remained something austere about it. All the surfaces, from the floorboards to the desk in the corner, were draped white with sheets of vellum and paper. Some bore snatches of writing; others were painted, or filled with charcoal sketches. Some looked like book pages ready for the binder; some were blank as snow.

I stood in the doorway. ‘Where did all this come from?’

‘Goats,’ said Kaspar. He was wearing the silk smock he used for painting. ‘And rags. You should have knocked.’

He scrambled off his stool and knelt on the floor, gathering the papers to his chest and piling them on the straw mattress in the corner. I stepped around him and crossed to the desk to see what he was working on.

It was a quire from a Bible. For a second my eyes tricked me, convincing me it must be one of mine. Before I could embarrass myself, sense returned. It was enormous – a quarter larger than mine at least, so big that even when folded it overflowed Kaspar’s desk and relegated his paints to the floor. The gall-brown letters were neat enough but – after months of staring at the pressed Bible – crooked as an old man’s teeth. Strange to relate, I looked at it and felt a stir of something like loathing.

‘Not yours,’ said Kaspar. ‘It was commissioned by a curate at the cathedral.’

I admired the illumination. The page was framed by a riotous border of twisting columbines, in whose tendrils lurked the usual creatures who inhabited Kaspar’s world. An affronted stag recoiling as a wild man brandished a forked spear at him; two old lions squatting on a flower stem with mournful expressions, beneath a rose that concealed a demon’s face. A bear crouched in the corner and tried to dig up the roots of the plant.

‘You have surpassed yourself.’

Kaspar stroked the vellum page, supple and soft. ‘If you have your way, there will be no more like it. You know Reissman, the scribe who lives above the Three Crowns? It took him a year and three months to write this. In almost the same time, you can make a hundred times as many, and double again. How will he survive?’

‘Your cards have existed for twenty years now. There is no shortage of artists.’ I shrugged. ‘What difference can one man make in the world?’

I turned away from the desk and scanned the other papers around the room. Most lay bundled under a blanket on Kaspar’s bed, but a few had escaped his sweep. One I noticed showed sketches of an ox with curved back horns; another a serpent with a face like a man.

‘Have you taken any other commissions? Another bestiary, perhaps?’

He didn’t respond.

‘We found a curious fragment of type in the composing room this morning. It looked like words from a bestiary.’ I tried to look in his eyes, but his gaze was slippery as an eel.

‘It must have been the press devil.’ A sly look. ‘Or perhaps Peter Schoeffer. He is an ambitious young man. He does not want to spend his life pressing Bibles. I overheard him the other day in the type foundry: he thinks you should use the second press to begin a new work.’

‘One of the men said he had seen you snooping around the Humbrechthof yesterday,’ I persisted.

Kaspar turned back to the giant Bible on his desk. He picked up a brush. ‘He must have confused me with Herr Fust. How is he, by the way?’

‘He’d be happier if paper didn’t go missing from our stores.’ I stared hard at the piles of paper on the bed. Kaspar, as ever, ignored me.

‘And his daughter Christina?’

I stared at him in astonishment. ‘How should I know? I have only ever met her twice, when Fust had me to dine at his house. She cannot be more than fifteen.’

‘Old enough to marry.’

I laughed: an old man’s laugh awash with bile.

‘Are you still trying to arrange me a marriage? Thank God, I already have Fust’s money. I do not need his daughter’s dowry.’

Kaspar dipped the brush in an oyster shell brimming with pink paint. ‘It was just a thought. Perhaps you should make certain…’

‘I have his money,’ I repeated.

‘… that no one else can get it.’

His brush flicked the page like a serpent’s tongue, filling in the colour on the wild man’s body. Seeing I would get no more sense out of him, I turned to go.

A glint of silver on the wall caught my eye, one of our Aachen mirrors: I had not seen it there before. I peered at my distorted reflection, and wished its holy rays could heal the gulf between us.