by Tom Harper
He rested his hands on the table and fixed Nick with an expectant stare. Nick looked at his plate, resisting.
Atheldene sighed. ‘Look – if you’re serious about finding Gill then let me help you. You said she mentioned the cards in her email.’
‘She sent a message for help,’ said Emily. It was the first time she’d spoken since they arrived. ‘A scan of one of the cards was attached to it. The eight of beasts.’
‘The Paris copy or the Dresden?’
‘Paris,’ said Nick. ‘You’re obviously familiar with them.’
‘Your phone call intrigued me. I went to the library and read up on them – even managed to get the curator to show me a few in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Extraordinary things. But nothing, as far as I can see, that connects to what Gill and I were working on. She didn’t say anything else?’
Nick shook his head.
Atheldene leaned back in his chair. ‘Gill’s an extraordinary girl. I’d give a lot to know she’s safe – or, God forbid, to find her if she’s in any sort of trouble.’
XXXII
Strassburg
‘This is too dark.’
‘Nobody to spy on us.’ Drach scooped a cobweb from one of the roof beams. A hapless spider dangled from his hand, its legs spinning silk in mid-air.
I peered around the dusty basement. In front of me, about head height, I could see cartwheels, hooves and feet trudging past through the windows that looked out at the street. Those would need covering with clouded glass to allow in light while leaving passers-by oblivious. It was not the place I would have chosen to produce finely detailed work, but Drach seemed delighted by it.
‘And then there is the expense,’ I cautioned. ‘Why pay more for this basement when the house in St Argobast has all the space we need?’
In truth, the upkeep of my little household by the river was costing me more than I had expected – most of the income from my annuity. Meanwhile, the bulk of the loans had already gone on ingredients for the ink, tools for the workshop, copper sheets, coal, papers… The demands on my purse were bottomless. And now Drach insisted we needed a second workshop for the press – which we still did not have.
‘Where do the leather tanners tan their hides?’ Drach demanded.
‘In the tanners’ field outside the walls.’
‘So the stench does not foul up the city. But where do the leather workers and saddlers manufacture their wares?’
‘Here in Strassburg.’
‘To be closer to their customers. We should do the same.’ He pointed up and left, vaguely describing the direction of the cathedral. ‘Here we are within pissing distance of the heart of the city. And where the heart is, there also will our riches be.’
A creak sounded from the stair. It was the landlord, a large man named Andreas Dritzehn, stooping low to clear the beams. On first acquaintance, other men often deferred to him on account of his size and rank; later they found that he craved nothing more than other people’s good opinion and would endure much to avoid offence. Though judging by the size and solidity of his house, he was not so obliging as to pass up opportunities for profit.
‘Is everything satisfactory?’ He had a growth on his throat which made his voice perpetually husky.
‘Perfect.’ Drach spoke before I could say anything. ‘It suits our business exactly.’
It is too dark, too expensive and redundant for our needs, I wanted to say. At least it might have got us a reduction on the rent. But I could not contradict Drach. I stood there awkwardly and said nothing.
Dritzehn peered at us. ‘What did you say your business was?’
‘Copying,’ I said.
Dritzehn waited, hoping for more. I stared Drach into silence and said nothing.
‘So long as you do not light fires or make too much of a smell.’ Dritzehn flapped his hand in front of his nose. ‘My last tenants here were furriers. They had not dried the skins properly and they stank like the dead.’
Outside, dung spattered onto the street from a passing horse. One of the balls rolled into the gutter, tumbled down through the window and landed on the floor.
We crossed the square to Hans Dunne’s goldsmithing shop. I looked up at the cathedral, rising out of its scaffolding like a woman shedding her dress. I marvelled at it. To my mind, the intricacy of the scaffolding, its perfection in its humble purpose, was almost as beautiful as the stonework it supported. When I suggested this to Kaspar, he scoffed.
‘Ropes and poles and ladders? Beauty comes from life: from lust, folly, laughter, misery.’
‘How can misery be beautiful?’
Kaspar pointed out a cripple begging alms by the cathedral door. He had no legs; his right arm had been lost at the elbow. He sat on a low cart which he pushed along using a forked piece of wood lashed to his stump. A seizure had frozen half his face in a slack mask, while the other half was scratched and scarred where he had tried to shave himself.
‘He’s grotesque. Pitiful, not beautiful.’
Kaspar grabbed my shoulder. ‘But you feel alive. Doesn’t he make every limb in your body sing with gratitude simply for existing. How can that not be beautiful?’
It was the sort of strange, unsettling sentiment that Kaspar occasionally voiced when he wanted to be provocative. I had learned to ignore him, and hide my disquiet as best I could.
When we reached the shop, Kaspar bypassed the counter and let us in by the side door. Bolts and locks meant little to him. He possessed almost nothing except his talent, but treated the world as if all was his. He examined a sapphire ring while we waited for Hans to finish with his customer.
‘I have found a man to build you a press,’ said Dunne when he had completed his sale. ‘Saspach the chest maker. He says it will cost six gulden with a wooden screw, or eight with iron.’
‘It must be iron,’ Kaspar insisted. ‘Must it?’ I asked, with a heavy heart and an ever-lighter purse.
‘You know it must. The greater the pressure, the clearer the image. A wooden screw would grow loose – or snap altogether.’
Before I could argue further, Dunne had reached into his cabinet and pulled out a bundle wrapped in cloth. It was the size of a small book, though when he handed it to me the weight was considerable.
‘This is the first batch.’
I unwrapped it. Insider were a dozen sheets of copper, rolled smooth and no thicker than a sword blade.
Dunne coughed – a polite sound that was becoming all too familiar to me. I sighed.
‘Of course, you will have to be paid.’
XXXIII
Paris
It was dark when Nick woke, though his watch showed half past nine. The jet lag was playing havoc with his body. He lay on the floor for ten minutes failing to get back to sleep, his mind in overdrive, then stood up and almost fell over with fatigue.
Emily emerged from the tiny bathroom, already dressed and made up. There was something feline, unfathomable to Nick, about the way she managed to maintain her privacy in such close quarters. He’d spent the whole night in the same room as her and couldn’t even say what colour her pyjamas were. Now she was wearing a thick cream sweater over a chocolate-brown skirt and black stockings.
Nick pulled off his T-shirt and threw it over a chair. Emily looked alarmed.
‘There’s a café around the corner. I’ll wait for you there.’
A shower, a shave and a clean shirt made Nick feel more human. Half an hour later he braved the cold outside and walked the short distance to the café. Emily was sitting in a heated conservatory with a cup of black coffee, reading Le Monde. Unlike Gillian, who would have been looking around the restaurant, chatting up the waiters, checking the door every ten seconds, she looked completely at peace on her own.
Nick ordered the American breakfast and prayed the coffee would come quickly. Emily put down her paper.
‘You’re not in it.’
Nick didn’t smile. He hadn’t forgotten he was a fugitive. Every siren in the distance an
d traffic cop, every passer-by who stared, every tourist’s camera he walked in front of was like water torture.
Emily gauged his moody silence. ‘So what do we do today?’
‘I don’t know.’ He felt empty. A pack of mopeds roared past the window, their drivers veering and swerving like birds as they raced each other. Regret gnawed at him. It was insanity to have come here. Better to have stayed in New York and let Seth defend him.
‘Gillian left us three bits of information: the playing card, the mobile phone SIM and the library card.’
‘Three cards.’ Nick frowned and wondered if it meant anything. Even now, could it be some kind of bizarre joke on Gillian’s part? Gill’s an extraordinary girl. ‘Two more and we’d have a full house.’
Emily’s eyes narrowed as she puzzled at it for a few moments. ‘We don’t even know if she meant them to be found when she left them there.’
‘But she sent me the code.’
‘Afterwards.’ Emily took out a pen and drew a line down the margin of her newspaper. She put a cross-stroke near the top. ‘Gillian went to the chateau in Rambouillet two weeks before Christmas, December the twelfth.’ Another stroke. ‘Two days later she disappeared. December the fourteenth. Then no trace until she turned up online on January the sixth.’ She looked up at Nick. ‘Have you got the list you made of her phone calls?’
Nick produced it. ‘She rang Vandevelde on the afternoon of December the thirteenth. The day before she vanished.’
‘And the day after she’d visited the chateau.’
‘That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,’ Nick cautioned. ‘In Gillian’s line of work she might have found the card anywhere. She could have been sitting on it for months – brought it with her from New York, even.’
Emily rolled her eyes. ‘She found a card that’s been lost for five hundred years, and she spent the day before she vanished in a library full of unknown fifteenth-century manuscripts. I know where I’d start looking.’
‘Atheldene was talking about books. He didn’t say anything about cards.’
‘Most of the cards survived because they were pasted into other books. Often not long after they were printed. The library had been flooded and the books were damp. That would have loosened the glue – the card might have fallen out right into her lap.’
Nick watched the flush that came to her cheeks, the exaggerated hand gestures as she mimed the card falling out of the book. Thought uninhibited her like alcohol.
‘OK. We’ll assume she found the card in the dead guy’s library.’
‘The next day, she rang Vandevelde. She went out to visit him, he analysed the card and found… something.’
‘Except that he says she never went there, and that even if she did there’s nothing to find in the card.’
‘He’s lying.’ Emily said it with sweet certainty. ‘What was the next phone call?’
‘The taxi company. December sixteenth.’
‘And the call to Atheldene?’
‘That was earlier. The night before she disappeared.’
‘But after she found the card.’ Emily stirred the foam on her coffee. ‘Did she tell Atheldene about it?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Nick. ‘He sounded pretty surprised when I asked him about the Master of the Playing Cards on the phone.’
He pushed a piece of waffle around his plate, soaking up the melted butter.
‘We’ve looked at the playing card and the phone records. The one thing we haven’t tried is the library card.’ Emily sipped her coffee. ‘The Bibliothèque Nationale is a research library. I spent some time there when I was doing my thesis. You have to order the books you want to be delivered to you.’
‘So?’
‘The library card logs you in to the catalogue. It keeps a record of what you’ve ordered. We can see what Gillian was reading.’
A bleak and paralysing despair washed over Nick. ‘Would that help?’
‘There isn’t anything else.’
Nick drained the last of his coffee. ‘I’m going to go back and check her home page. Maybe there’s something there.’
Emily looked worried. ‘Do you think it’s safe to split up?’
‘Safer for you than being together. I’m the fugitive, remember.’ He stood. ‘Anyway, hopefully we left all the bad guys in New York.’
XXXIV
Strassburg
The press stood on a solid table at the front of the room. It consisted of a base which held a slate bed, two upright legs which supported a crossbar, and a wooden board, the platen, suspended between them on an iron screw. It was little different from the presses the paper makers used to squeeze their sheets dry.
There were four of us in the room. I would have preferred it to be only Kaspar and me, but our enterprise had long since outgrown its beginnings. Dunne was there, of course; also Saspach the carpenter to tend the press he had built. Upstairs, I knew Dritzehn the landlord would be crouching by the cellar door, listening at the keyhole, but I had refused point-blank to allow him down. The more gold I spent, the more possessive I became of our secret.
Yet though I had strived so long towards this moment, I felt strangely detached from it. It was not that I had shirked the work. I had boiled the inks with Kaspar; measured timbers with Saspach; pored over copper sheets with Hans Dunne, filing down the sharp edges left by the graving tools. I had written out the text of the indulgence, then spent countless hours staring at it in front of a mirror so that I could translate it in reverse for transfer onto the copper. Most of all, I had paid for it. Yet I did not feel it belonged to me.
Drach took the plate out of a felt bag and rubbed it clean with a cloth. He laid it on the end of the table and poured a pool of black ink onto it from one of the jars. He spread it with the flat of a birch-wood blade until all the copper was black, then scraped it away again with the sharp edge. Finally, he wiped the plate with a stiff cheesecloth. I marvelled at his touch. He could be so careless of some things, often gratuitously rough-handed, but he could also work with the most exquisite precision when he wanted. The cloth bloomed black as it soaked up the ink from the polished surface, yet in the incisions – only a few hairs’ breadths deep – the ink remained untouched.
Drach arranged the plate on the stone bed of the press. I dampened a leaf of paper with a sponge and passed it to him. He laid it over the plate and stepped away.
Hand over hand, Saspach and Dunne turned the bar that drove the screw. It squeaked in its grooves. The wooden platen touched the paper and squeezed. I heard a tiny liquid belch – probably the water I had used to moisten the paper, but in my mind it was the sound of ink being drawn out of the copper into the paper.
Saspach and Dunne screwed down the platen as far as it would go, then spun back the lever to loose it. I stared at the paper, imagining I saw faint shadows on the underside. Drach peeled it away from the copper plate and raised it to show us. I held my breath.
It was hideous. In stark black and white, letters that had looked neat and regular in the engraving were now as wild as a child’s hand. On some of the words the ink had come out thin as cobwebs, on others, thick and heavy as tar. I wanted to weep, but with the other three men looking on I did not dare.
‘Why has this happened?’
‘Copper is like human flesh. The deeper the cut, the more the bleeding.’ Drach traced his finger over a particularly obese A.
‘But your cards – every line was perfect.’ I knew I sounded like a petty child consumed by jealousy. That was how I felt.
‘Yes.’ Drach stroked his chin and affected to contemplate the paper. ‘These are not as good.’
‘It is easier to cut a long line than a short one,’ said Dunne. He had engraved some of the text himself and had to defend himself. ‘Each letter requires so many fine cuts it is inevitable some go too deep or shallow.’
‘Inevitable in the wrong hands,’ Drach muttered.
I pointed to a U, so deformed it looked like a B. ‘And that?’
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‘The shape of the letters allows no room for error,’ said Dunne. ‘Any fool can make a picture. Change the shape of a deer’s antler and it is still a deer. Change the shape of an A and it is meaningless. I think perhaps Drach’s art is not suited to this purpose.’
‘Perhaps you are not suited to this purpose,’ said Kaspar. ‘Perhaps the next one will be better.’ Saspach tried to broker peace. His face showed none of the despair I felt, only irritation. For him, this was merely a job that had wasted his talents.
We repeated the procedure. When it was done, Drach took the paper from the press and laid it on a bench beside the first. We leaned over to examine them.
‘The same,’ grunted Dunne. He turned away in disgust. Yet I kept looking. Where he saw confirmation of our failure, I saw a spark of hope. They were the same. The same erratic script, the same malformed letters and drunken lines, the same place on the third sentence where miserere was misspelt misere. In their manifest imperfections, at least, they were perfect copies.
‘The process is fine,’ Drach declared. He thrived on perversity. ‘All we need is to improve it.’
XXXV
Paris
A freezing wind whistled down the Seine. On an embankment above the river, four L-shaped towers jutted towards the grey sky. The architect had meant them to look like open books stood on end, but to Emily they looked more like the corners of a vast glass castle. Except there was no castle to be seen. The space between the towers – a slab of ground the size of several football fields – was empty. It was only when you looked down that you saw the inside-out heart of the complex: a glass pit, a deep rectangle dug sixty feet into the earth, with the different floors of the library looking out over a sunken courtyard. And instead of a castle in the forest, a forest in the castle, for the courtyard was filled with trees, so deep that their uppermost branches only just reached to ground level. It was like no other library Emily had ever seen.