‘Of course.’ A sharp-toothed smile. I could not wound him so easily.
I read it through. Fust took the contents of the Humbrechthof, the presses and types, the ink and paper, the furniture, down to the last composing stick. He also kept the finished Bibles to sell at his own profit. The Gutenberghof, its press and everything in it remained mine. There was a time when I had burned with the injustice of it; now my anger had cooled. It was past.
I signed my name at the bottom and pressed my seal into the soft wax. Punch and form. Fust did the same.
‘You have a new seal,’ I noticed. A black bird with a yoke around its neck, supporting two black shields blazoned with letters and stars.
‘The Fust and Schoeffer Book Works. Peter designed it. We will stamp it in all our works, a hallmark of our quality. Customers will demand nothing less.’
I did not like it. In its way, it seemed a greater blasphemy than anything Kaspar ever did. To put your mark on a piece of art, to claim it for your own, was to appropriate it from God.
Again, Fust misinterpreted my frown. ‘I am sorry,’ he repeated. He wanted me to believe it. ‘The street between our houses is not so very long. No doubt we will see each other. I hope we can be friends.’
I was old enough that it barely hurt to lie. ‘I hope so. But not now. I am leaving Mainz for a time.’
There was no missing his relief. ‘Where will you go?’
‘I have an errand in Strassburg.’
April sunshine bathed the city. The half-timbered houses and Gothic turrets shone with a warm light; bright colours festooned the square where racks of tea towels, postcards and guidebooks had sprung up like spring flowers. Crowds of tourists milled about, enjoying the Easter holiday, while kings and angels, lions, knights and serpents watched from the stone above.
No one paid any attention to the young couple who walked hand in hand across the square. They entered the cathedral by the west door, under the monumental facade, into the deep twilight that kept perpetual hold on the interior. To their left, on the north wall, a row of stained-glass kings glowed vivid with the light behind them. Nick’s pulse quickened; he squeezed Emily’s hand.
Atheldene was waiting for them about halfway along the nave, just before a side chapel interrupted the procession of kings. A fluorescent vest was draped awkwardly over his suit, and a hard hat perched on his head. At the base of the pillar behind him, a stone mason in overalls stood in a hydraulic scissor lift.
‘I hope you’re right about this. You can’t imagine the paperwork involved in pulling apart one of the masterpieces of Gothic architecture. Especially when the people who want to do it are all personae non gratae with the Church hierarchy. I’ve had to call in a career’s worth of favours and tell the most outrageous fibs.’
Nick took the bestiary out of his bag. The corner of the battered card poked from behind the last page. He tucked it back in. Soon he’d have to surrender both – the card to rejoin the deck at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the book to the British Library in London. It had all been discreetly arranged courtesy of Stevens Mathison. Nick, who had never owned any book older than a Superman #61 Issue, would be sad to let them go.
But the bestiary had one last secret to give up. He opened it to the restored front page, cut out by Gillian but now expertly sewn back in. In the bottom corner was the sketch of the square building standing in the arms of a cross which they’d noticed on the boat to Oberwinter.
It was Emily who had finally deciphered it.
‘It’s not a building with a cross,’ she’d said, one evening back in New York. ‘It’s a building at a crossroads.’
Nick hadn’t been impressed. ‘That narrows it down.’
‘It does if you know anything about Gutenberg’s life.’ An exas perated sigh. ‘Strasbourg – the city of roads. The crossroads of Europe.’
‘And that building…’
‘The cathedral.’
It was a doodle – it could have been any building with an arched door. It didn’t even have much of a tower.
‘It all fits. The crossroads. The kings on the walls and the Sayings of the Kings of Israel. Gutenberg.’
And so they had come back, to the church at the crossroads where two dozen kings of uncertain realms stood entombed in glass.
‘Manasses was the sixteenth King of Israel.’ Emily counted off the kings in the windows, four at a time, until she came to the window opposite where they were standing. ‘Louis the Pious.’
‘Seems appropriate.’
‘Gillian’s going to be kicking herself if we’re right,’ said Atheldene.
Nick went quiet. He’d crossed Europe to find Gillian and, unbelievably, he’d rescued her. He still wasn’t sure what he’d found. He no longer lay awake at night wondering what might have been. He no longer wanted her to hold him and whisper she was sorry for everything, begging him for a second chance. But some questions couldn’t be answered. She would always be the wild woman, untamed and unknowable, dancing in the margins.
Nick and Emily put on yellow vests and hard hats. The lift carried them up the side of the column, high over the heads of the tourists below. One or two looked up, but the sight of reflective clothing seemed to reassure them that nothing interesting was happening. High-visibility camouflage.
‘How could Gutenberg ever have gotten up here?’ Nick wondered.
‘They were still building and rebuilding the cathedral when he was here. There was probably some scaffolding around the pillars.’
The lift eased to a stop. They were almost at head height with the kings now, face to face with the carvings on the pillar. A man’s head pushing through thick foliage. An eagle with a snake in its beak. And…
‘The digging bear.’ Nick had known it would be there: Atheldene had spotted it from the ground and sent a photograph. Even so, he felt a shiver of unexpected awe. This close, he could see how similar it was to the animal on the card. A little squashed, maybe, to fit the space on the pillar: a flatter back, a sharper bend in its knee that made it more purposeful. In the bottom corner, a small hole had been bored in the stone beside its burrowing snout.
Bear is the key.
The mason took out a thin metal hook like a dentist’s pick. ‘If I find any cement, we stop,’ he warned.
But there was no mortar holding it in place – only generations of accumulated grime and soot packed into a treacly black muck. The mason worked it free with his tool. It left a thin crack outlining the stone.
‘Squeaky-bum time,’ said Atheldene. He took the bear by its snout and inched it towards him. It came smoothly, almost eagerly. He and the mason lifted it down onto the floor of the lift. A rectangular hole yawned in the pillar.
‘There’s something in there.’
Emily reached in. Her hands came out holding a rusted metal box, about the size of a biscuit tin. Big enough to hold a book. Hands trembling, Atheldene inserted a blade into the lid and prised it open. All three of them craned to look in.
‘It’s… disintegrated.’
The box contained nothing but a deep layer of scraps, like soap flakes or autumn leaves gathered up for the bonfire. Most bore traces of writing; some flashed gold or red where fragments of illuminations caught light from the stained-glass windows. None was more than an inch across.
‘Water vapour must have got in. If the parchment had been exposed to sunlight at any point previously, moisture would have broken it apart.’
Emily pulled on a latex glove and picked up one of the fragments. Even now, the ink was black and glossy.
‘This is the right typeface for the Liber Bonasi.’
‘Some of it’s different.’ Atheldene pointed to another fragment where the words were in brown ink. Even Nick could see it was handwritten, not printed.