The Book of Secrets

by Tom Harper

  ‘Read me the page numbers.’

  Nick tried – and failed – to find them. Emily pointed to a column.

  ‘f.117r?’

  ‘F stands for folio – the physical, double-sided leaf. Medieval books didn’t have page numbering like we do, so historians number from the first leaf. The final letter stands for recto or verso – the front side of the leaf, which appears as the right-hand page when you open the book, or the reverse side. So what we would count as page three would actually be-’

  ‘f.2r,’ said Nick. ‘Top side of the second leaf. Got it.’

  One by one, he read out the page numbers. There were about a dozen of them, starting from f.117r – about page 233, he figured – and ending at f.280r, some 325 pages later. It was a time-consuming process. For each reference, Emily had to find the scanned page, read the Latin text, then work out which book of the Bible it came from. At that point she read it out to Nick, who jotted the reference down next to the page and the description of the image.

  But his thoughts were elsewhere. Somehow, the arcane system of page numbering had prompted a thought, an irritation at the back of his mind like a pebble in his shoe. He worried at it while Emily tapped out her searches on the computer.

  ‘What’s next?’

  He consulted the list. ‘f.226r.’

  ‘Got it.’ She stared at the screen for a moment. ‘The sins I have committed outnumber the sands of the sea. I am not worthy to look up and see the height of Heaven because of the multitude of my iniquities.’

  Nick waited for her to read out the chapter and verse. When she didn’t say anything, he glanced across. Emily was staring at the screen.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘What picture goes with that page?’

  Nick consulted the chart. ‘A digging bear.’

  ‘The same one that’s on the card?’

  He didn’t even need to check. ‘Why?’

  ‘That page is the prayer of Manasses.’ She turned, her face glowing with discovery. ‘The prayer that’s supposed to be part of the lost book of the Bible, the Sayings of the Kings of Israel.’

  ‘He also made another book of beasts using a new art of writing…’

  ‘… which is hidden in the Sayings of the Kings of Israel. And here it is, with an illustration from the card on that same page.’

  They sat there for a moment in silence.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Nick said at last. ‘All these clues join up, but they just go round in a circle. The Bible with the illustrations by the Master of the Playing Cards is in Princeton, right? That can’t be what Gillian was after. So there must be another book that connects with the card, with the Bible, and with the bestiary Gillian found in Paris.’

  ‘Another book of beasts.’

  ‘So where is it?’

  Emily stared at the windscreen. Condensation made the outside world invisible. It was too apt, Nick thought: stuck in a fogged-up car going nowhere.

  ‘There must be another piece of the jigsaw,’ said Emily.

  ‘Maybe it was on the first page of the bestiary. The one that got cut out.’

  ‘Maybe there’s more here. We haven’t looked at all the Master’s pictures yet.’

  Emily leaned over the computer again and began typing, her keystrokes erratic with nervous haste. Nick glanced at the display. Printed page on web page, the fifteenth-century cowskin rewritten in the liquid crystals of the screen. For all the gulf of technology, it struck him how similar they were in essence: vehicles for information. However you wrote a page number – or for that matter, a biblical chapter and verse – it was nothing more than an address for looking up data.

  Page 233, f.117r, Judges 5:4: ultimately they were all shorthand for (Emily said), ‘The earth trembled and the heavens poured out water.’ The same way that 190.168.0.1 was a convenient equivalence for the Hauser family’s home broadband.

  But what if you reversed it? What if the information pointed back to its number?

  Nick flipped over the piece of paper in his hands. Recto and verso, front and back. He looked at the ox in the fuzzy engraving and thought of a smiling cow standing on a ladder with a paintbrush in its hoof.

  I have a new number: www.jerseypaints.co.nz

  Emily had stopped typing and was staring through the window, lost in thought. Nick grabbed the laptop.

  ‘I haven’t finished,’ she protested.

  ‘I won’t be a minute.’

  His fingers skidded on the keyboard in his excitement; he had to type the address three times before he got it right. The rainbow-striped cow grinned from the top of her ladder.

  He pressed a button. The written address resolved itself into a string of digits which he scribbled on the sheet of paper.

  Emily leaned over, still looking cross. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Every web address translates to a number.’ He opened the car door. Fifty yards up the street, a payphone huddled under a blanket of snow. ‘Maybe another kind of number.’

  He ran to the payphone. Fresh snowflakes were beginning to spiral down in the light from street lamps; his fingers almost froze to the metal buttons as he dialled the number and waited.

  The space between each ring felt like an eternity. Every crackle on the line sounded like a receiver being lifted off the hook. Then: ‘Ja?’

  ‘Is that Olaf?’ Nick said in German.

  A pause. ‘Who is calling?’

  ‘It’s about Gillian Lockhart,’

  The man said nothing.

  ‘Have I got the wrong number?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘A friend of hers from America. She’s missing; I’m trying to find her.’

  ‘Ha.’ Another long silence. ‘I don’t know where she is.’

  Nick gripped the receiver tighter. His breath frosted the glass of the phone booth.

  ‘But I know where she was going.’

  Now it was Nick’s turn to keep silent, frozen by the fear that the wrong word would ruin everything.

  ‘Come to Mainz and I will tell you.’

  LXVIII

  Mainz

  I stepped out of the front door, under the carved pilgrim, and turned towards the cathedral and the market square. It was not far, but in that meagre distance the street expanded and contracted many times. Sometimes it was so narrow even a dog cart could barely pass; in other places it spread wide enough to become a small platz, where gossips lingered and hucksters sold pies and hot wine from barrows. It made even the shortest journey a tale of many chapters.

  One of these places where the road opened was outside St Quintin’s church, where women came to gather water from a fountain in the church wall. A tall house stood on the corner opposite. The plaster between its timbers was coloured a lusty red, which had in turn been painted with garlands swagged along the dark timber ribs. Its name was Humbrechthof; it belonged to my third cousin Salman, who had lived there until a committee of guildsmen took over the administration of Mainz some years previously. Thinking these new men meant to beggar the ancient families into bankruptcy, Salman fled to Frankfurt. The house had stood empty since then. I had written to him, giving him to understand that the situation in Mainz was worse than his most outraged imaginings, and declining fast. When I offered to take his empty house off his hands for a token rent, to protect it from the mob who would otherwise surely make it a brothel or a church of the black mass, he could not agree fast enough.

  I entered by a gate, passed through a passage under the main house, and entered the courtyard within. Fust and the others were already there: Saspach, Father Günther, Götz, Kaspar and a young man I did not know. Fust nodded to him.

  ‘My adoped son, Peter Schoeffer.’

  He was a thin, earnest-looking youth, with pimpled skin and fair hair that flapped in the November breeze. I thought him diffident enough, but when he shook my hand it was with a look of extraordinary intensity.

  ‘An honour, Herr Gutenberg.’ His eyes were pale, icy with purpose. ‘Father has to
ld me about your art. You may rely on me absolutely. I thank God I will be part of it.’

  ‘Writing makes his hands sore,’ joked Fust. He stood a little further from his son than affection would have permitted, an old dog wary of his pup.

  ‘So this is where we will make our workshop,’ Götz said. The house suited our purpose well: it was not tall, but wide, with large windows onto the yard. Over time, my cousin Salman and his forebears had closed in what had once been an ample garden, joined the outbuildings together and extended them upwards until they stood almost as high as the house. They enclosed the courtyard completely, like an inn or a trading hall, so that nothing overlooked it.

  I unrolled the sheet of paper I carried and hung it on a nail on the storeroom door. The others gathered around. Most of them had seen some part of it, but only Kaspar had seen it in its entirety.

  ‘This is why we are here.’

  Two columns of text ran down the page, perfectly aligned, exactly as Kaspar had sketched them. The grey cloud of pencil shading had become words, painstakingly set and carefully imprinted in the Gutenberghof. The text was black, save for the incipit on the first line, which was written blood red.

  here begins the book of Bresith which we call Genesis

  A long ‘I’ hung off the next line and dropped down the margin until its stem became a spiral tendril creeping around the edge of the page. ‘In the beginning…’

  The page flapped and snapped in the breeze; I had to hold it down for fear it would tear.

  ‘Everything you see was pressed onto the paper by Saspach’s machine.’ This time it was true: there was no craft or trickery on the page. We had set and reset the text until every line filled its row exactly, stuffing parchment strips between the words to create the exact spacing. We had inked the incipit red and pressed it again. Finally we had run the whole page through another press to add Kaspar’s engraved initial.

  Schoeffer was the first to respond. Unless Fust had shown him the indulgence, he had never seen our work before. I had expected he would be awestruck. He stepped forward and examined the page closely.

  ‘The words look faded.’

  ‘We used the old types,’ I explained. ‘Some are uneven; others not the exact height. Götz is preparing a new set which will improve the impression.’

  ‘And the alignment. It is almost perfect.’

  ‘Better than you could do,’ Kaspar growled from the back.

  ‘Absolutely perfect,’ I insisted. ‘If you rule a line down the margin, it touches the outer edge of every final character.’ God knew how much wasted paper had fed our fire to achieve it.

  ‘It is perfect,’ Schoeffer conceded. ‘But it does not seem it.’ He considered it a moment. Despite his youth and his presumption, everybody waited. ‘Some lines end with minor characters – hyphens and commas. They are so small they make the line look shorter than it is.’

  He pointed to a section of text halfway down the page.

  God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered togethere he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

  ‘If you put the hyphen in the margin, the weight of the text will be more evenly spread. More pleasing to the eye.’

  I glanced at Kaspar. The mesh of scars on his face puckered as anger took hold of him. Before he could react, I said, ‘We will have to see. It is not like taking a pen and simply adding a stroke to the end of the line.’

  Kaspar threw the boy a murderous look. Günther the priest prudently changed the subject. ‘How many Bibles will we be making?’

  ‘One hundred and fifty. Thirty on vellum, the rest on paper. I calculate we can manage two pages of the whole edition each day. Less in winter. We will have two presses, which Saspach will build there.’ I pointed across the courtyard, to the first floor of the house. ‘We will put them in the hall and the parlour.’

  ‘We will need to strengthen the floors,’ Saspach noted.

  ‘Brick pillars in the rooms below. We will use these as our paper store. Once you’re done with the presses, you can build a hoist to bring the paper directly up to the press rooms.’

  ‘What about the press in the Gutenberghof?’ Götz asked.

  ‘Too small. We will keep that to produce indulgences, grammar books, whatever else we can sell. There will be plenty of offcuts and scraps from the Bible we can reuse.’

  Fust raised a stern hand. ‘There will not. Whatever is bought for the Bible goes to the Bible.’ He swung his stick in an arc around the courtyard, indicating the house while fixing each man there with a severe look. ‘Do you understand? This is our joint venture. I do not want my investment entering by one door only to steal out through another. I know many of you will often have cause to be at the Gutenberghof; some of you live there. What you do with your own time or your own materials is your concern. But every penny that is paid into this project will stay in it. Not one scrap of paper, not one letter of type, not one drop of ink.’

  ‘Nothing will be taken away from your investment in the project,’ I assured him quickly. ‘Everything will be accounted for, down to the last comma. As surely as they count every coin in the mint.’

  ‘As you know, I would prefer that you concentrated all your energies on this business.’

  ‘I have given you my word that nothing will delay it. But it will be months, God willing, before we are ready even to start pressing here, and a year until we reach full capacity. Even if all goes well, it will need two more years for the Bibles to be complete. Running the Gutenberghof press will provide income through these lean years, and a good place to train new apprentices.’

  I walked across the courtyard to the stairs.

  ‘Let me show you where it will happen.’

  LXIX

  Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

  They spent the night in the motel. They’d paid in advance, and their hoard of euros was running out. When bedtime came they undressed and crept under the blankets together without discussion. They slept wrapped around each other, their naked skin the only warmth in the room. At seven, they rose and left.

  A thick fog had come down on the heels of the snow, leaving the world a damp and lonely place. They crossed the Rhine at dawn and barely saw it, then turned north. Emily had the laptop out on her knees but didn’t open it; the white silence seemed to possess her completely. The only cars they passed were ghostly wrecks abandoned at the side of the road.

  ‘Mainz was Gutenberg’s home.’ Emily’s voice was hardly audible over the ineffectual clatter of the heater. ‘I wonder if that’s why Olaf chose it.’

  Olaf had set the meeting for eleven o’clock at St Stephan’s church, a whitewashed building trimmed in red sandstone, capped by a bullet-nosed dome. It stood at the top of the hill behind the city: looking back from the terrace outside, Nick saw a snowy forest of roofs and aerials sloping down into the fog. For a moment he felt a powerful sense of dread, of unseen enemies sniffing for his trail in the snow. He shook it off and went inside.

  It was like stepping into a fish tank. A soft blue light filled the church like water, so thick it was almost tangible. It came from the windows, a nebula of swirling blues speckled with white: birds in a cloudless sky, a starcloth, souls flitting into heaven.

  Only at the back of the church, behind the altar, did the blue become a canvas for more literal illustrations. Nick walked up to examine them. An angel with fairy wings carried up a body that had swooned into its arms. A naked Adam and Eve considered an apple, while a blue serpent twined through the tree. A golden angel reading a book turned somersaults over a lighted menorah.

  ‘The windows are new. The church burned in the war.’

  Nick turned sharply. A straight-backed old man wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket had rolled up behind him in a wheel-chair. His hooded eyes looked old enough to have seen the church’s devastation first hand. His lips curled in and hid whatever teeth he had left, while tufts of grey hair poked from under his battered hat.

  ‘The new windows are by
Chagall,’ the old man continued. His tone was precise, unhurried. Nick guessed he didn’t have much to do other than collar unsuspecting tourists. Nick and Emily might be his only catch that day. ‘We were very proud in Mainz when so great an artist agreed to devote his work to our little church.’

  ‘They’re good.’ Nick tried to steal a glance over the old man’s shoulder. Olaf had refused to say how they would recognise him. Nick was terrified of missing him.

  ‘But I liked the medieval windows too. I saw them in my childhood, before the war. Very beautiful – and so exotic. Stags, lions and bears, birds…’

  ‘Flowers.’ Nick stared at him and tried to remember. ‘Wild men.’

  ‘Indeed. The medieval symbolism, so dense, you know? If you start to look close you never know where you go. ’

  Emily took the plunge. ‘Are you Olaf?’

  The old man coughed loudly. A nun kneeling in the front pew looked up from her prayers and frowned. ‘My name is most certainly not Olaf. But it serves. Let us find somewhere to talk.’

  He waved away Nick’s offer to push him and led them to a pew at the back of the church.

  ‘I’m glad we found you,’ Nick said. ‘It was a clever trick, the way you hid your phone number.’

  Olaf gave him a shrewd look. ‘You mean you are surprised a man of my age can even read email, let alone have heard of an IP address. But I have always sought knowledge. Many ways of finding it have come and gone in my lifetime.’

  He manoeuvred his wheelchair against the end of a pew, leaning forward as if about to launch into prayer. Nick and Emily slid onto the bench beside him. He pointed to the wall, where a mounted photograph showed pyramids of flame leaping out of the burning church. All that could be seen of the building was a row of steep gable ends standing tall and black like witches’ hats.

  ‘God’s beauty is infinite,’ he said inscrutably. ‘Churches can be rebuilt, maybe more beautiful than before. But history. You cannot hire Chagall to restore that.’ He gave a heavy sigh. ‘Are you believers? Christians?’