The Book of Secrets

by Tom Harper

  ‘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.

  LXXVII

  Oberwinter

  A creak sounded from the stair. Nick and Emily froze. Outside, the wind blew snow off the rooftop and rattled the windows in their frames. They waited for the creak to come again, to grow into the tread of mounting footsteps.

  Nothing came.

  ‘Let’s get out of here.’ Nick put the toilet roll back and headed out. He locked the door behind him and didn’t look back. He didn’t want to think about what might have happened in there.

  They tiptoed down the stairs as quickly as they dared. On the first-floor landing, Nick heard the murmur of a voice from below.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ he whispered. ‘They didn’t rip that room apart without the owner noticing.’

  ‘Agreed. But where can we go?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  The owner was in the lobby, leaning on the counter and muttering into the phone. He flapped his hand to wave them down, but between the cigarette in his mouth and the receiver in front of it he couldn’t manage more than a grunt.

  Nick dropped the key on the counter and breezed through the front door.

  ‘We’re just going out to get some dinner. We’ll be back in about an hour.’

  They found a weinstube in a house off the main square, overlooking the river and the railroad tracks. It was a cosy place, with bookshelves on the walls and old wine bottles on the windowsills. The waiter tried to sit them by the front window, but Nick insisted on a table at the back, tucked behind an antique wine press. He wasn’t sure who he thought he was hiding from. It was probably the only place in Oberwinter that was open.

  He hadn’t planned to stay long, but the moment he saw the menu he realised he was starving. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast. They ordered beef stew and spätzle noodles. When the waiter disappeared into the kitchen, Nick pulled the pieces of paper out of his pocket and smoothed them on the tablecloth.

  ‘Is that Gillian’s writing?’

  Nick nodded. His tired mind tried to take in what was written on the creased sheets of notepaper. It was like a replay of his own recent past. Names that would have meant nothing a week ago leaped out at him, jarring memories that had barely had time to form. ‘Vandevelde – B42 ink??? Other MPC images in G. Bible? 08.32 Paris arr. Strasbourg 14.29. Call Simon. Is bear key? ’

  The notes covered three sides of the paper, scrawled at various times and in different-coloured inks, crossed out and circled, connected by arrows that branched out into new questions. A palimpsest of the last three weeks of Gillian’s life.

  On the fourth side they found something different. There was little writing; instead, a sketch that looked like t
he plan of a building. It was roughly pentagonal, with irregular sides and angular projections. A dotted line led to one of the corners, a red X inked heavily where it met the building. Gillian had written ‘Kloster Mariannenbad ’ in the margin beside it, and a brief list below:

  rope

  shovel

  head lamp

  bolt cutters

  gun?

  ‘Kloster means monastery,’ said Nick.

  ‘That would fit with the picture Atheldene sent us.’

  The waiter came out of the kitchen and laid two steaming plates of food on the table. Nick covered the paper with his sleeve.

  ‘Can I get you anything else?’

  Emily tried a smile. Her face was drawn, her mouth tight with exhaustion. ‘We were just talking – we wondered if you knew – have you heard of a place called Kloster Marianenbad near here?’

  ‘In Oberwinter?’

  ‘A monastery.’

  An apologetic shake of his head. ‘I do not know this place.’

  ‘What about castles?’

  He laughed. ‘This is the romantic Rhine. We have here castles every five hundred metres.’

  ‘Any nearby? Any that aren’t on the tourist trail?’

  The waiter thought for a moment. ‘We have the Castle Wolfsschlucht. But this is closed.’

  ‘You mean for the winter?’

  ‘For all of the time. Private. I think it is owned by an American.’

  He put his hands on his hips and scanned the bookshelves over their heads. Nick and Emily waited. Eventually he reached down an old book with a frayed cloth cover and dog-eared pages. Beautiful Oberwinter, said the title.

  ‘If you want to know more, maybe this has something.’ Nick thumbed through the book while Emily wolfed down her food.

  ‘Here we are: “Castle Wolfsschlucht”.’

  In medieval times, the building was a monastery dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Tradition says it was built on the site of a local shrine, though this has never been proved. The monastery was obedient to the Archdiocese of Mainz, with one of the most famous libraries in Germany. Most such foundations were dissolved during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, but the monastery petitioned the Emperor Charles V and was declared reichsfrei, independent of all local authority and answerable directly to the emperor himself. Residents of Oberwinter are still proud of the tradition that the pope himself interceded with the emperor on behalf of their monks, promising Charles support in his war against France in return.

  The monastery was finally dissolved by the Secularisation Law of 1802. The title passed to the Counts of Schoenberg, who converted the buildings into a castle. In fact, the monastery was perfectly suited to this role. It is built on top of a steep rock overlooking the Rhine, surrounded on three sides by the Wolfsschlucht or ‘wolf’s gorge’. When the armies of Napoleon marched through the Rhineland, they did not even attempt to capture it.

  In 1947 the castle was sold to an anonymous benefactor. It is closed to the public, but one can still glimpse it from the river and wonder what history lies behind those ancient walls.

  ‘The last sentence sounds rather plaintive,’ Emily said. ‘As if the author was almost as curious as we are.’

  ‘It is a bad place.’ The waiter had returned with another basket of bread. He lowered his voice, and looked around the empty restaurant for theatrical effect. ‘My grandfather has once told me that in the wartime, the Nazis are going there often. Always in the middle of the night. He said that even maybe the Reichsminister, Joseph Goebbels, has been there.’

  Nick was about to ask him how Goebbels had got in, but at that moment a woman’s voice called the waiter into the kitchen. He excused himself. Nick looked back to the book.

  ‘There’s a picture.’

  He spread the book flat on the table and turned it to face Emily. The image was dark and vivid: a lonely castle perched on an outcrop in a gorge between two mountains. Heavy lines scratched out a brooding sky, while a black river boiled in the foreground.

  ‘Is that where we have to go?’

  ‘If that’s where Gillian went.’ Nick laid the sketch map beside it. It was hard to see in the woodcut exactly how the castle was laid out, but there were two turrets that might correspond to the corners of Gillian’s pentagon, and a squat tower rising from the back that could be the keep. He rotated the drawing until it looked right.

  ‘Must be it.’

  ‘It certainly sounds as though the Pope went to a lot of trouble to keep it safe. There must be something in there he didn’t want the Protestant reformers finding.’

  ‘Or the Nazis.’

  Emily studied the plan. ‘So how did she get in?’

  ‘This tower here’ – Nick indicated the X – ‘around the back. Gillian must have found an entrance there.’

  Emily read over Gillian’s list in the margin. ‘Or tunnelled her way in with her spade and her head torch.’

  ‘Maybe we can improvise.’ Nick signalled for the bill. When the waiter came, he said, ‘Our car’s stuck in the snow just outside town. I don’t suppose you have a shovel and a piece of rope we could borrow to get ourselves out?’

  The waiter looked surprised, but he was too polite to question Nick’s priorities. He went outside, and came back a few minutes later with a garden spade, a torch and a length of blue nylon rope.

  ‘Perfect.’

  Nick paid the bill with the last of his euros. He felt bad that he couldn’t leave a better tip. He put on his coat and picked up the spade.

  The waiter held open the door as they left. Snowflakes blew across the floor on a gust of wind; the glasses on the table rattled. The waiter peered out into the dark street.

  ‘Good luck.’

  LXXVIII

  Frankfurt, October 1454

  When we revisit places from our childhood, most reveal themselves to be small and mean compared with the magnificent locations of memory. Frankfurt was different. It seemed that all the world had arrived that year for the Wetterau fair. In one square, the cloth makers’ stalls became a tented city of every colour and weave imaginable: from heavy fustians and gabardines to the lightest Byzantine silks that shimmered like angel wings. From the covered market hall came the warm perfume of unnumbered spices: pepper, sugar, cinnamon, cloves and many more I had never tasted.

  I tended our stall in a corner of the market between the paper makers and parchmenters. It was a lonely spot – for all the hundreds of merchants, we were the only booksellers at the fair – and I struggled to make myself heard above the clamour. After so many fearful years of secrecy, I could hardly bring myself to speak.

  It should have been Fust. He was our salesman, and he had conceived this plan to show off the first fruits of our labour. But he had cried off the day before, complaining of a fever, so I had come in his place. It was good that I did. I had been too much in the Humbrechthof lately. Fust’s deadline was approach ing and the Bibles were still behind schedule. The constant awareness of it – calculating and recalculating schedules, supplies, man hours – had become a weight that hung heavy on my back. I dreaded the journey. I could not imagine myself away from the project, or it without me. But Fust insisted. ‘Peter will come with you. It will do you good,’ he told me.

  After an hour on the road to Frankfurt, I knew he was right. The autumn air pinked my cheeks and cleared my head; the ripe smells of fallen apples and leaves unclogged my senses. Even the clamour of the fore-stallers, who risked the wrath of the authorities by offering goods outside the market, seemed more vibrant than irritant. That night I fell into easy conversation with the other merchants at my inn, staying up far later than I was used to, drinking too much and suffering a sore head next day.

  On the first morning of the fair, a total of three men came to my stall. I almost counted a fourth, but he only wanted directions to the tanners. I had little to do but slap at the fleas who had warmed my bed the night before. My pleasure at leaving Mainz grew faint; in my mind I composed long can
-tankerous complaints to Fust of how this was a fool’s errand. But that afternoon, the flow of visitors quickened. By next morning, I could barely keep pace with them. Many were priests and friars, but they must have reported what they saw favourably. Soon richer hands were picking up the pages, fat rings brushing the vellum. I saw abbots, arch deacons, knights. And, eventually, an unexpected bishop.

  Every half-hour, something like this would happen: I would be standing behind the stall, commending the virtues of my books, when a young man with an ink-stained smock and wild hair would make a commotion, pushing through the crowd until he came to the front. He glanced at the Bible pages, then turned to the crowd and announced loudly, ‘He is a fraud.’

  He held the quire open so everyone could see.

  ‘This man claims his text is perfect, but clearly he has not even read it. There is not a single correction.’

  He fumbled under his smock and unrolled a scrip of parchment. He showed it to the crowd.

  ‘My work, on the other hand, is perfect.’

  The audience, realising what was happening, laughed. Compared with the milk-white pages and velvet-smooth text of the Bible, his parchment was a sorry sight. The edges were tattered, the hide yellowed (we had soaked it in beer the night before), and the words almost invisible under a scruff of amendments.

  ‘Not one error remains,’ he declared.

  ‘Nor here,’ I answered.

  He bent almost double, pointing his buttocks to the audience, and put his nose to the Bible pages.

  ‘I cannot find any fault,’ he admitted grudgingly.

  Murmurs from the audience.

  ‘But any man can get lucky once.’

  I picked up two more of the quires and displayed them. ‘Thrice? And, indeed, if you come to my workshop in Mainz you will find one hundred more available for purchase, all identical in their perfection.’

  Peter Schoeffer (for he was the indignant scribe) puffed out his chest. ‘I could do you as many.’ He flapped his fingers in wild arithmetic. ‘They will be ready in the year 1500.’

  ‘Mine will be ready in June.’ I lifted my voice and addressed the whole crowd. ‘Any man who wishes to buy one, or to see more of this miraculous new form of writing, can visit me until Tuesday at my lodgings at the sign of the wild deer; or thereafter at the Hof zum Gutenberg in Mainz.’