“All are corrupted.” He hears himself too then: the weary, jaded voice of one who’d hoped for more. “I no less than all the rest.”
He should have stayed a scribe, he sometimes thinks; at least that way he would not feel this disappointed. He has his printing works, two of his four sons who have followed him as printers; he has made hundreds of fine books. He’s richer, more upstanding, than the master ever was. But part of him still mourns that touch, the feeling of such closeness to the Lord’s creation. At night sometimes, he’ll reach for his old pouch of quills, and stroke the skin of God’s lamb with the feather of His fowl, praying for some sign.
CHAPTER 5
MAINZ
November 1450
PETER WAS ENSLAVED by duty, and it chafed. If Fust would not release him, he might spend his life in filth and smoke, his spirit shriveling like twigs thrown on the fire. His only hope was to secure a new position that would both set him free and allow his father to save face. He’d thought first that Jakob might help: there wasn’t anyone who loathed the Elders more, and Gutenberg was nothing if not an arrogant, abusive Elder. But then Peter saw himself, cap in hand, groveling before his uncle for some kind of clerkship. Mainz is bankrupt, dunce, Jakob would say. What scraps remain should go to those who pulled their weight. Not that Peter aimed to stay in Mainz; the place was heavy with the venom of that internecine war. For the first time in his life, he thought of purposefully failing—of doing work so foul and torturously slow that Gutenberg would have to cut him loose. He could not bring himself to do it. He had his pride, and pride did have its uses: mixed well with bitterness, it hardened in the backbone. There had to be someone he knew, some former teacher or a fellow who could get him a scribe’s post inside a chancellery, with luck a distant bishop’s or a duke’s.
His suit was buried in a chest beneath the bed: a short dark cloak, a cap pierced by a raven’s plume, a high-collared long white shirt and leggings, and the chamois pouch in which he kept his writing tools. As he unfolded them, he could feel that inky world receding. It seemed a dream, his old Parisian life. Who did she flirt with now, Céline with her russet curls? What did his former fellows say about his sudden disappearance as they gossiped in the morning at their lecterns?
He pulled his old skin on and slipped out after dark one evening from the Haus zur Rosau. The moon was low on the horizon, and the lanes that led to the cathedral were black tunnels, houses clawing toward each other overhead. The market square split open in a sudden pool of light. There was a mist about: November had its foot wedged in the door. Soon it would be the feast day of Saint Martin, the city’s patron saint. What chance was there they’d act the play this year upon the broad cathedral stair? Jakob would scream bloody murder if they tried. The people would not stand for such hypocrisy, he’d rail: the rich man tearing off his cloak and rending it in two to share with some poor lad dressed up to play the beggar.
Peter’s destination was the Schreibhaus at the corner of the painters’ district—the Writing House, belonging to the monks who dwelt outside the city wall at St. Viktor’s. In those days the scriptoria were in full flower all across the empire; in Mainz the finest books were written at the Charterhouse of the Carthusians or at the hilltop monastery of the Augustines of St. Viktor’s. The order’s house inside the wall had served for decades as their city school, and hostel for the lay scribes that they sometimes hired. In recent years he’d heard that it had turned into a meetinghouse for clergy of all kinds, although some scribes still worked in a back room.
He’d never set foot in the place before. It was a fetid den, his uncle said, where Archbishop Dietrich’s priests and abbots schemed—as much despised by guildsmen as the Elders’ tavern at the Tiergarten. The higher-ranking canons of the different orders stopped there when they passed through Mainz, en route from Rome or Aschaffenburg, the Hessian city where Dietrich had his court. Most of them also held high posts in the archbishop’s vast administration or the pope’s, along with parishes they scarcely ever darkened. The Schreibhaus had become a trading hall, except that they no longer bartered manuscripts, wine, and wheat, but pulpits, favors, sinecures, and prebends.
The place was dim and stank of rancid food and wine. For an instant Peter mistook all those shrouded forms for sheep: fat woolen humps of black and brown, all lowing underneath dark rafters. Then the room resolved into the black of Benedictines and Augustinians, the brown of Franciscan friars, here and there a white Cistercian lamb. Off to the right, the priests of the cathedral chapter sat like folded exclamations, sharp and black, a band of white at every throat. Peter walked with purpose toward a half door at the back. A silver heller bought a cup out of a monastery cask. He turned, surveyed the room, and wished that he could stopper up his nose. Otherworldly scents mixed with the sweat wrung from the fabric of those unwashed robes: the chalk of cloisters, the bite of oak gall, the aftertaste of thin communion wine.
The faces were all known to him—in the way that any face, in a place as small as Mainz, was known. They didn’t change: the jowls just spread, the noses grew redder and more bulbous. Elders all, patricians from the city or the minor nobles from the land: the clergy was made up of second sons from wealthy families, stashed and suckled by the Mother Church for life. It was amusing to him how their eyes slid over him and then went back to their own business. He had been gone for long enough for his own face to change. He was a stranger, with a stranger’s anonymity, which brought both freedom and a certain risk.
He feigned a spark of recognition and advanced across the room. He did not know what he would do if he fetched up empty-handed at the far wall. He wove around the brothers at their stools and tables, said a prayer when he was spared: a glance, a sandy head in a dark cowl, a low familiar drawl.
“Petrus Opilionus! Do I see right?” The puffy face of Petrus Heilant cracked in a wide smile.
“Your eyes are fine.” Peter could not help but smile as broadly in return, so sweet was it to hear his Latin name. “Peter Shepherd,” Peter Schoeffer had been called.
Heilant stood and embraced him, then looked him over with heavy-lidded eyes. He wore the black St. Viktor’s robe and stood just to Peter’s shoulder, as short and stocky as a well-fed goat. “Good Lord, it’s been an age.” There was a laugh on his full lips. “Where have you got yourself to? Look at you, a proper scribe.”
Two acolytes were sitting at his table wearing white probationary shifts. “Eberhard, Lubertus,” Heilant said. “An old schoolmate, Peter Schoeffer, pen divine.”
“You seem to be the one who’s blessed,” Peter whispered in his ear. “I can’t believe you took your vows.”
Heilant shrugged and smiled; there’d always been a cunning spark hid well beneath that puffy, hibernating look. “I work, I write.” He flipped the rope ends girdling his full waist. “In penitence and patience, waiting for the Lord’s reward.” He tilted his fair head and smirked: “And once a week, I’m paid to take confession from the sisters.”
“At St. Viktor’s?”
“The Altmünster.” His old friend winked. “A little something on the side, to keep myself in drink.”
“I always knew that you’d go far.” Peter laughed, swung his cloak onto the chair, and raised his cup to toast his luck. If any man could get him out of Mainz, that man was Petrus Heilant. He’d never seen much point in aiming low. His name alone explained it: Petrus Heilant von Erbach had been born to wealth, and born to climb. The level of his scholarship was average, and as scribe he had a slapdash style, but he had never shown the slightest doubt that he would rise. He hailed from lands along the river Main, just like his distant kinsman, Archbishop Dietrich, Schenk von Erbach.
They fell to reminiscing, probing the whereabouts of others whom they had studied with. The pimpled youths sat silent for a while, then started making mewling noises: curfew, prior, the long hike. Heilant rolled his eyes as they retreated. “At their age we’d have nursed a drink for hours in hopes of picking up some useful gossip.”
“You, maybe.” Peter laughed.
“You always did think you could make it without dirtying your hands.” Heilant smiled archly.
Lies, all lies, thought Peter Schoeffer. Everything had always come from Fust. He felt, and pushed away, a little needling of guilt inside. “In youth,” he quoted with a bitter laugh, “I saw as through a glass, but darkly.”
“The truth is, you have to make your own way in this world.” Heilant screwed his eyes up, looked intently at the tables at the far end of the room.
“Amen,” said Peter.
“It’s all in who you know.” A little gleam—ambition, and alertness—glimmered in those sleepy yet dissembling eyes. Heilant cocked his head and pitched his voice low. “See those two priests? That’s Volprecht Desch. And Greifenklau.” He singled out the two in habits of the Mainz cathedral. “And back behind that screen”—a heavy hanging, cutting off an alcove—“the men you really need to know: Quelder, Konneke, von Isenberg. A clerk for Rosenberg.”
The names meant nothing to him, except for the last. “Hermann Rosenberg?” he asked, and Heilant nodded. The vicar general of the Mainz archdiocese, personal confessor to Archbishop Dietrich himself: they’d seen him years ago, officiating at some function at the university.
“This is the place, then,” Peter said softly.
It seemed a stroke of the most unimaginable luck, to be connected with so consummate a climber. The names that Heilant whispered with such awe were not just canon regulars at St. Viktor’s, but men who also held the leading posts in the archdiocese, each with its tidy income every annum. A deacon or a cantor might wear two hats, even three: clerk to the archbishop, envoy to some noble, priest to several parishes, officiant in any of the city’s forty churches. The clergy were all Elders, and the Elders were the clergy; one hand ceaselessly washed the other. That trafficking might once have made Peter sick, but he relished all those contacts now.
“You’d know, then,” Peter said, keeping his voice low, “if any of those chancelleries require a scribe.”
Heilant cocked his head, eyes bright. “I wondered why you graced us with your presence after all this time.”
“You knew I was in Mainz?”
“I know a lot of things.” His schoolmate smiled.
“I need your help. My father dragged me back—you knew I was in Paris, too?” Heilant nodded. “I was about to join the rector’s staff at the Sorbonne.” Peter did not fake the grimace. “He’s forced me into some harebrained scheme to crank out books.”
“Crank out?”
“I can’t say more.”
Heilant’s eyes went wicked, and he licked his lips. “With wood? I’ve seen that tripe.” He flicked his plump right hand. “Carpenters,” he scoffed. “The stuff they chisel isn’t any better than the junk that Lauber and his ilk churn out.”
“Just as I see it. They seem to think they can replace real scribes.” Peter bent close. “I hoped that I might find a post where skills like ours are better valued. But no one—I mean no one—is to know.”
“Where? Here in Mainz?” A little hardness entered Heilant’s voice. Swiftly Peter answered no. It would not do to step on Heilant’s turf.
“Away from here. That’s all I care about.” He pushed away the thought of Fust and Grede, of Jakob or the children.
“That’s good. This place is just too backward for belief.” Heilant ran a hand across his face. “I’ll see who I can show you to. Perhaps sneak you in to chapter mass.”
“Mass?” Peter said, surprised.
“You don’t imagine we would go without it, just because some peasants think that they’re in charge?” Heilant’s smile was barbed. “The ban will soon be lifted anyhow. They’ll take His Grace’s offer and say please and thank you as he rams it down their throats—and all of it in time for Advent.”
“You sound as if you know.” Peter looked at Heilant’s rosy face, the cheeks of one who in his later years would tend to floridness and fat; he scanned the room and took in all those larded monks, and saw as if in shadow all the townsfolk, saying their own prayers in their frigid houses. A feeling of revulsion rose.
“It’s just a question of the price.” Heilant gave a careless shrug. “If they can’t pay, they’ll have to take the terms their bankers—and their betters—dictate.”
Somehow Hans had talked the master into freeing them a few hours every Sabbath afternoon. They were as thick as thieves, that master and his foreman; even Konrad, the big pressman, did not have the right to talk to Gutenberg as the old smith did. Peter spent the cold gray afternoons inside his father’s house, writing out his Cicero to pass the hours.
Grede tucked her feet beneath her as they sat before the fire, and said it felt just like old times. “One of us, at least, is glad to have you home,” she said.
He made a face and kept on writing. “Come, read to me,” Grede said, patting the seat beside her. “From Proverbs, please.”
He wiped his pen, blew on his sheet. Reading was as good as anything; at least that way he didn’t have to speak. “You ought to learn to read,” he said. “You could.”
“I leave that to Tina.” Grede’s eyes were calm. They swiveled to the whirring mantel clock. “She’ll be down shortly.”
She’d roped him into teaching Tina’s chubby hands to form her letters in a tray of wax. No child of mine, Grede said, will grow in darkness as I have. How Peter had always admired her: the way she steered that older, slightly pompous husband with the gentlest of touches, her calm persistence covering the steel beneath. He felt a twinge at hiding so much from her now. Once they had been so close, conspirators in youth and their own unexpected freedom. They’d kicked their shoes off, eaten with their fingers, thrown snowballs at each other when her husband was away. Like brother and sister they had always been, determined to make life obey.
“For just a while, but then I must be off.”
“Not on the Sabbath? Shame.” Grede raised one dark, arched eyebrow.
“I only meant to take a walk.” His tone was sharper than intended. He took the small handwritten Bible from the shelf. When he sat down, he felt her eyes reproach him.
“What should I say?” His voice was querulous, but he was powerless to change it—powerless, in fact, in every way. “Everything I do here is at someone else’s pleasure.”
“I wouldn’t have asked a favor then, if I had known.”
“I should have thought that it was obvious.” He flipped the pages, lifted up the crimson band of silk.
Grede frowned and, shaking her head, restrained him with a hand. “Stop fighting everything and place your trust in God.”
“How long? Tell me. You must know—if he shares more with you than just his bed.”
He regretted it the instant it was out. She flushed and drew back.
“How you have changed,” she said.
How could he not have, once he’d tasted freedom and felt his destiny begin to beat inside? Could none of them see this? He felt it in him, greatness—he had practiced all his life, done everything they’d asked of him. In his mind’s eye the archdiocese of Mainz rolled out across the valleys either side of the great Rhine. He saw the tiny, jeweled cloisters in their swales, the columned porticoes of law courts, chancelleries, where talents such as his might finally be recognized.
“How long?” he repeated.
“He has not spoken to you?”
His head jerked up. “Of what?”
She looked into the fire. “He’d like to see you stay. And settle down.”
“Settle. You mean marry. Say it.”
“Marry, then.” Her lips compressed. “For heaven’s sake, what did you think? That you could lark about your whole life long?”
Your wander years are done.
Grede picked her needlework up again and shifted slightly, turned her body half away. “I wonder sometimes what goes on inside your mind.”
“I’d rather die.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m sure that
can be arranged.”
“Which of those horse-faced hags does Father have in mind?” He slapped the Bible shut. “Kumoff’s? With her breath like shit? Sadler’s? Kraemer’s, maybe, for her sacks of fat?” His voice was cold and low and hard. “No—Windecke’s, now there’s a match: mute, or maybe just too stupid to pronounce a word.”
Grede sat looking up at him, a glinting needle pinched between her lips. Her face was grim. “You do yourself no favors, Peter, with your pride.” Remember where we come from, said her look. “You think that you can see the path ahead, but it’s not ours to chart.”
Gutenberg kept their small crew concealed as much as he was able. By day they slaved; by night he bought their silence with his wine. That first autumn he ordained that they would spend their evenings at his fire, to keep their mouths out of the alehouse. He had Lorenz roll in a cask and left them to their own devices. Gutenberg himself went off before they’d even finished wiping down the press from printing all those cursed grammars. The master had the luck, said Keffer darkly, to drink among his peers at their own tavern. Peter wondered how he knew this, though the fact itself was not in doubt: the master drank, prodigiously—the proof was in his morning breath.
Peter set himself to writing every evening in a corner of the master’s study in hopes of penning his own transit out. He’d need some samples while he waited for a word from Heilant. He did not mind the work; it was a graceful way to keep himself from Fust’s house and Grede’s eyes. The only irritation was the way that Hans regarded him when he pulled out his quills. The old smith might have salved his damaged hand, but was no warmer in his manner. Doubtless they thought him cheeky, Peter thought as he unfolded his clean parchments and installed himself at Gutenberg’s own desk. He didn’t care.
The others huddled together, playing tablemen or carving; Keffer piped from time to time upon a flute. Peter rolled his shoulders and shook out his arms; he bent and emptied out his mind. Across the page he wrote line by line—across and back and then across again, the way a farmer plows a field. It gave him some small consolation to see that he remembered all the hands that he had learned. He pushed the thought of Fust into the furthest corner of his mind. He would not tell a soul until his bag was packed—he’d leave, and never look behind. It grieved him, but he saw no other route.
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