The Book Of Secrets Part 38

Emily threw back the bedspread and sat on the edge of the bed to take off her shoes and socks. She looked at him for a moment, a strange look that Nick didn't understand.

With a self-conscious shrug she stood, pulled her sweater over her head and wriggled out of her jeans. All she was wearing underneath was a thin white camisole and her underwear. She stood there on the carpet in the middle of the room, blushing slightly, like a virgin on her wedding night not certain what to do. Nick tried not to stare.

'I just want you to hold me.'

Nick nodded. He was too tired to feel awkward. He stripped down to his boxer shorts and clambered into the bed after Emily. He lay down beside her, cupping his knees inside hers, pressing his chest against her shoulder blades. She shivered; he pulled back, but she reached round and pulled his arm firmly around her waist.

'It's nice. It's just it's been a long time.' She sighed. 'Not that. Just . . . warmth.'

'I think I know what you mean.'

She nestled back into him. Nick laid his palm flat against her stomach, terrified of touching her where he should not, and at the same time longing to. He remembered lying like this with Gillian, the same confusion, so close and so aware of the distance. Always the distance.

He fell asleep.

LXIV.

Mainz

When Fust had gone I wandered through the house. The day was fading; soon it would be too dark to work. For the moment, the labours that were the life and breath of the house continued. When I stepped outside into the yard I could smell the heavy perfume of boiling oil, sharpened by the tang of coal smoke. My father's kitchen had become our type foundry, and the adjacent scouring house the room where we cooked up our inks. Inside the foundry I could see sparks where the fresh types were ground smooth on a wheel.

I climbed the stairs by an outbuilding and crossed a walkway back to the main house. Here, an outside gallery ran around the internal courtyard. I peered through the barred windows as I walked past. In the room where the die maker had once cut coin moulds for my father, Gotz now chiselled letters out of copper squares. In the next room, Father Gunther sat at a writing desk and pored over a small Bible. He had a sheet of paper beside him and a pen in his hand, which never stopped moving as he read. For anyone used to watching copyists it was an unnatural motion: the pen danced up and down the page, line to line, apparently at random; it never stayed still enough to form even one letter, but left a trail of dots and dashes like bird prints in snow. If he resembled anything it was not a scribe but a merchant clerk taking inventory of his stock. In fact, he was taking inventory of every letter in every word of the Book of Genesis.

He saw me pa.s.s and called through the open door, 'Did you get what you wanted?'

'He will give us eight hundred gulden now, and more later.' It was less than I had asked for, more than I'd expected. 'The equipment will be its own collateral. In return for exclusive rights to sell what we produce, he has also agreed he will not collect the interest. And he has ordered fifty copies of the Donatus grammar book for delivery in three months' time.' I laughed. 'You should have seen the look on his face. He could not believe such a thing was possible.'

'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 Gunther 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 pa.s.sed 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 coa.r.s.e 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 l.u.s.t. 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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. Embarra.s.sed, 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 a.s.sume 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 s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 ma.n.u.scripts with ill.u.s.trations 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 ill.u.s.trations?'

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, ma.n.u.scripts. 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 a.s.sume it's more than coincidence. Gillian must have.'

'Agreed. Which is why I wanted to look at the ill.u.s.trations 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 Stra.s.sburg 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. G.o.d 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 st.i.tching 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.'