The Book of Secrets

by Tom Harper

  ‘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.

  LXV

  Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

  Nick didn’t know when he woke. The dark day and coarse curtains held the room in twilight. He’d been living in that sickly gloom for the last week, the light of railway carriages, street lamps, car headlights and bare bulbs. A fly drowning in amber.

  But amber was cold; Nick was warm, radiantly so, wrapped in blankets and sheets and Emily. Her camisole had ridden up in her sleep so that her naked back pressed against his stomach, their bodies locked together in a single curve.

  The heat of her body against his filled him with the glow of desire. He parted her hair so he could kiss the back of her neck; he caressed her bare arm where it clamped over the blankets. She turned her head towards him, her lips seeking his. He saw that her eyes were closed and held back, but she put her hand behind his head and brought his mouth down.

  Desire billowed into lust. He ran his hand down over her thigh, then clamped his palm over her hip and held her against him, pulsing against her. She gasped; she pulled his hand away and dragged it up her body, so that he could feel her breasts through the tight cotton of her camisole.

  She rolled onto her back and pulled him on top of her. He came willingly.

  The next time he woke he was alone in the bed. His headache had gone but he was ravenous. Emily had dressed and was sitting by the chest of drawers, which she’d turned into an makeshift desk. She had the stolen library book spread in front of her, together with a poster-sized chart which she was annotating with a pencil.

  Nick sat up. A tangle of memories that might be dreams, and dreams he hoped were memories, rushed through him. He blushed.

  Emily looked over and gave a shy smile. ‘Sleep well?’

  ‘Mmm.’ He scanned her face for traces of regret, until he realised she was doing the same to him.

  ‘I don’t want you to think…’ she began. ‘I know I shouldn’t-’

  ‘No.’ That sounded wrong. ‘I mean, yes, you should have. Not should…’

  ‘I don’t want to get between you and Gillian.’

  Nick’s tumbling thoughts stopped abruptly. ‘Gillian?’

  ‘I know what she means to you.’

  ‘You don’t.’ Nick threw back the covers and stood, naked. Embarrassed, Emily looked away. ‘Do you think when we find her I’m going to sweep her into my arms and ride off into the sunset.’

  She jerked her head back and looked him straight in the eye. ‘Then why are you doing this?’

  Nick held her gaze and realised he no longer knew the answer.

  ‘I’m going to take a shower.’

  There was no shower; only a bath. He splashed himself in the lukewarm water as best he could, then dressed. When he came out, Emily was sitting cross-legged on the newly made bed, books and papers spread around her.

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘I’m trying to pin down the links between Gutenberg and the Master of the Playing Cards.’

  The exchange seemed to cement an unspoken agreement. Emily relaxed; Nick sat himself on the corner of the bed.

  ‘We have to assume Gillian didn’t see the page we pieced together. She must have followed a different trail.’

  ‘Right.’ Nick examined the large sheet of paper spread on the bed. It was covered in an irregular grid creased by folds; most of the squares were empty, those that weren’t held cryptic snatches of writing: ‘f.212r Bottom centre, similar.’ Characters from the playing cards in miniature line drawings ran down the left-hand column.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘It’s a chart of books and manuscripts with illustrations that look like the playing cards. It lists which images appear where. One of them’s the Gutenberg Bible from Princeton I told you about.’

  Nick slid off the bed and crossed to a low table by the door which held a kettle and a box of teas. ‘I don’t get it. If the whole point of Gutenberg is that all the copies are the same, shouldn’t they all have the same illustrations?’

  Emily shook her head. ‘Like a lot of revolutionaries, Gutenberg dressed up his invention in very conservative clothes. People distrust change. He wasn’t selling novelty; he was trying to persuade people he had a better way of producing something very familiar. In this case, manuscripts. The same way that the first motorcars looked like horse carts.’

  Nick filled the kettle.

  ‘In the Middle Ages, you didn’t buy a book like you do now. They were all part-works. First you found the text you wanted and got a scribe to copy it. He’d write it out on quires of eight or ten pages, which you’d then take to a bookbinder to have bound together and put between covers. Finally, you got a rubricator to write in the rubric, the chapter headings, in red or blue, and an illuminator to add the pictures. Just black, thanks.’

  Nick took two tea bags out of the box and tossed them into the mugs.

  ‘Some of the early pages of the Gutenberg Bible show that he actually experimented with two-colour printing, so he could include the chapter headings as well as the body text. But he abandoned that very quickly – probably because it was too difficult and time-consuming. Gutenberg didn’t want to change the way books were produced – just the way the text was reproduced.’

  Nick remembered a phrase from the back of the bestiary: ‘a new form of writing’.

  ‘I should have realised what it meant much sooner. But the answer to your question is that although the texts of the Gutenberg Bibles are all pretty much identical, every surviving copy is unique. Each was bound and illuminated by different hands.’

  ‘And the Princeton copy was done by the Master of the Playing Cards?’

  ‘Some of the pictures in the Princeton edition are close copies of the figures on the playing cards,’ she corrected him. ‘It could be that an illuminator saw the playing cards and copied them or that both of them drew from yet another source.’

  ‘Except that now we’ve got a piece of paper that puts Gutenberg and the Master on the same page of another book.’ Nick poured steaming water into the mugs. ‘Let’s assume it’s more than coincidence. Gillian must have.’

  ‘Agreed. Which is why I wanted to look at the illustrations from the Princeton copy. Maybe there’s some sort of pattern, a clue Gillian found.’

  ‘Any luck?’

  ‘Not yet. This chart only gives the page numbers. I need to see the text that goes with them.’

  Nick stared at her.
‘I hope you’re not planning on stealing another library book.’

  LXVI

  Mainz

  I took him into the parlour and gave him wine. The evening was cold, but Kaspar kept his distance from the fire, as if the scars from that night in the mill still recoiled from heat. His clothes smelled of damp and mud; dried blood laced his cheek where it had been scraped by brambles or branches.

  ‘The Armagnaken dragged me out of the flames,’ he told me. ‘Half dead – more. I don’t know why. They should have left me to burn. Instead, they took me as their captive. Their plaything.’

  I shuddered. Drach kept perfectly still, so stiff I feared the least movement would snap him.

  ‘They did things to me you would not believe. Could not imagine. Their cruelty was infinitely inventive. The things they taught me…’

  ‘If I had known,’ I said quickly. ‘If I had known you were alive I would have moved heaven and earth to rescue you.’

  ‘You would have been looking in the wrong place.’

  I stared at him in the firelight. He was a dim impression of the man I had loved, sunken where he had once been proud. In the lamplight, the right half of his face resembled one of his copper plates, criss-crossed with scars etched deep into his skin. Fire had burned away half his hair, and the rest was shaved away so that his skull had the mottled look of an animal hide. His eyes, which had shimmered with ever-changing colour when I met him, were fixed black.

  ‘How long…?’

  ‘Months? Years?’ Kaspar shrugged. ‘I didn’t count. At last I escaped. I went to Strassburg but you had gone. I asked after you; I heard you had gone back to Mainz. I have been making my way here ever since.’

  I leaned forward awkwardly and touched his shoulder. ‘I’m glad you came. I pray for you every night.’

  Kaspar curled up in his chair like a coiled serpent. ‘You should have saved your breath. God has no power over the Armagnaken.’

  The ferocity of his gaze terrified me. I said nothing.

  ‘But you’ve prospered.’ In Drach’s rasping voice it sounded like an accusation. ‘A fur collar, gold stitching on your sleeves. A respectable burgher in your father’s house.’

  ‘Still in more debt than I can afford.’

  ‘Still chasing your dreams of perfection?’

  ‘Our dreams.’

  Kaspar clenched and unclenched his hand. The fingers looked hard as talons. ‘I have not dreamed in years.’

  I stood, desperate for a distraction. ‘Let me show you what we are doing.’

  He padded after me down the gallery. I brought him to the press room, where silver shafts of moonlight bathed the machinery in their glow.

  ‘We set each letter separately,’ I gabbled. I was trembling. ‘You would not believe how true-’

  A cold hand gripped my neck and forced me down, squeezing my face against the inky bed of the press. I bent double, gasping for breath. Kaspar held me down with one hand, while the other fumbled with his belt.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I cried. ‘In Christ’s name, Kaspar…’

  He was smothering me, thrusting himself against me from behind. The coffin smell of wet earth was all around me.

  ‘Do you know what they did to me?’ he hissed in my ear. ‘What I suffered while you were playing with your toys?’

  ‘I thought you were dead.’

  His hands were tearing at my clothes, scratching my skin. ‘Please,’ I begged. ‘Not like this.’

  ‘What is this?’

  Tongues of light flickered around the room. In an instant, Kaspar was away from me. The shadows seemed to draw around him like a cloak. I pushed myself up and looked round.

  Father Günther stood in the doorway holding a lamp, straining to see in. ‘Johann?’

  I stammered something unintelligible. ‘I heard a scream.’

  ‘The press squeaked. I was demonstrating it to… to my friend.’

  Günther moved the lamp so that Kaspar’s face swam out of the darkness. He gave him a searching stare but said nothing.

  ‘If all is well…’ he said doubtfully.

  ‘I will be fine.’

  Kaspar had come back, but he was not the same. The darkness in his nature, which I had once accepted as the inevitable shadows of a brilliant sun, had consumed him. After that first, terrible night, he did not talk about what he had suffered; nor, thank God, did he attack me. I forgave him that – what I could not accept were the small changes. The tiny cruelties, the savagery in his eyes. Like a ghost, he could chill a room the moment he entered it. I resisted the idea as long as I could, but in the end I was forced to admit it. I did not love him any more.

  Yet his talent remained. Even the demons that ravaged him could not quench his interest in the work of the book. I encouraged it: I hoped it might draw out some of the poison and fix his mind on purer things. I gave him a room at the top of the house: ink, pens, brushes, paper, whatever he needed. And he repaid me.

  He showed me one evening, when I climbed to the attic after the rest of the press crew had gone. Kaspar sat at a sloping desk at the far end of the room. He was writing intently and did not look up as I entered.

  I leaned over to see what was on the desk. A single leaf of paper, twice the size of the indulgences, criss-crossed with faint pencil lines and sweeping arcs like the blueprint for a cathedral. A heavier line roughed out a rectangle in the middle of the paper, subdivided into two weighty columns like pillars on the page. Kaspar had shaded them with the flat of the pencil, except on the first line of the first column where he had written in a bold, meticulous hand, ‘In principio creavit deus celi et terram.’ In the beginning God created heaven and earth.

  ‘This is how it should look,’ Kaspar said. He traced one of the arcs with his finger. ‘The most harmonious proportions. Your perfect book.’

  I rested my hand gently on his shoulder, imagining the columns filled with rows of words. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  He seemed to be waiting for something more. When I said nothing, he sighed.

  ‘You see how I have written the letters so they fill the column exactly, edge to edge? No scribe could do that except by luck. It took me a dozen attempts to do it just for this one line. But with your types, you can control the exact position of every word, every letter. Like a god.’

  I knew at once that he was right. I could feel the familiar resonance, the echo of angels singing. I had been so busy staring down, getting each letter to print evenly, I had not raised my gaze to consider the broader scheme. We could arrange the words so that each line was as solid as carved stone: massy columns of text supporting the weight of the word of God. Something no human hand could do.

  In the fading light, my old eyes blurred. For a second, I focused not on the shaded columns on the page but at the wide, white surrounds. Background and foreground reversed themselves: the blank paper became a window framing the misty darkness beyond its panes. The scribbled pencil marks seemed to swirl like ink drops in water, threading themselves into words that spoke of God.

  It was the last, best gift Kaspar gave me.

  LXVII

  Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

  The battered Volkswagen crawled along the street. No one noticed it, except maybe the snowmen standing sentinel on the suburban lawns. If anyone had been watching, they would have been struck by the car’s erratic progress. It nosed forward a few yards, braked suddenly, paused, then lurched into gear again. A few moments later it repeated the manoeuvre. Perhaps the driver was afraid of ice – except that the road had been ploughed and salted only that afternoon. Perhaps he was lost, or drunk. That might explain why the car always stopped in the shadows.

  ‘In a different neighbourhood we’d be arrested for soliciting,’ Nick complained.

  They’d slept through the brief day; now it was evening. Nick advanced the car three more driveways and halted. Emily sat beside him with the laptop open on her knees. The glow of the screen was the only light in the car.

  ‘Here�
��s one.’ She tapped the trackpad twice. ‘Oh – encrypted. No good.’

  Nick tapped the accelerator again. They’d set out from the motel an hour ago to find an Internet café, but the sleepy commuter town had no provision for tourists. They’d tried the public library, but that was closed. In the end the best they could come up with was trundling down residential streets trying to piggyback an unwitting family’s airwaves.

  Nick turned a corner and stopped beside a cluster of snow-covered trash cans. Emily leaned closer to the screen. ‘How about this? “Hauser Family Network – unsecured wireless connection.”’

  ‘That’s what we want.’

  Nick took the laptop from her and clicked the new connection.

  CONNECTING TO HOST 190.168.0.1

  A green icon shaped like a radio tower appeared. He passed the laptop back to Emily, who opened a web browser and typed in an address. Mottled parchment lit up the screen.

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘The British Library have two Gutenberg Bibles. They’ve scanned both of them and put them online.’

  Emily turned the computer so he could see better. Dense text stood in two columns on the page, each as straight as a knife. Time had browned the parchment but the ink remained vividly black, defying the centuries. Despite the Gothic typeface and its obvious age, the design was startlingly clean.

  ‘I can see why people get excited about it.’

  ‘Those straight margins were his calling card. Scribes couldn’t get the right-hand margins to line up so cleanly; you can only do it if you have the freedom to move the type around and space it exactly.’

  ‘Guy must have been a perfectionist.’

  Emily extracted the printout of the reassembled page. On the back she’d written a series of letters and numbers next to brief descriptions of the card figures.