He muted the TV, letting the images play out in dumbshow in the background.
‘I went back on Gillian’s web page,’ he said. ‘Someone left a message for her.’
Emily didn’t reply. He looked down and saw that she’d fallen asleep. Her eyes were closed, her pale skin framed by the dark hair fanned out on the pillow. He pulled the blanket at the foot of the bed over her shoulders. She murmured something in her sleep and rolled over, burying herself against his side.
Her body was warm against him. Nick felt the heat spreading through his skin, melting the sheet ice that had been encasing him since Gillian’s message first appeared on his desktop. He knew it was a mistake; that when she woke up she’d be embarrassed and he’d be ashamed. But he didn’t want to disturb her. He’d let her stay, for a while.
He turned his eyes back to the television, reading the captions and watching the silent parade of spokesmen, sportsmen, apologists and starlets on the far side of the glass wall. Not so long ago they’d seemed so important to him, heroes and villains and storylines played out in the media. Now they seemed a world away.
The picture cut back to the news anchor in the studio. A new caption had appeared on screen: DISGRACED JESUIT FOUND MURDERED.
Nick reached for the remote and turned up the volume. Emily stirred at the sudden movement. The anchor disappeared, replaced by a grainy mugshot. Nick stared. The man standing too close to the camera, holding the letter-board…
‘That’s Brother Jerome.’ Emily sat up, brushing the hair back from her face.
The reporter’s voiceover droned on through his shock. ‘Neighbours heard gunshots… Police called to the house… Mafia-style execution… Suspicious car reported early this morning… Brilliant scholar… Sex-abuse scandal…’
Nick looked at Emily. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. He wanted to comfort her but she looked so fragile, like she’d shatter if he touched her.
‘I killed him,’ she whispered.
Back on the television, the story had finished and a new one begun, Brother Jerome’s face replaced with a boatload of shivering refugees. Nick muted it again.
‘You had no way of knowing,’ he murmured.
‘I destroyed him.’
‘I know how you feel,’ Nick tried. ‘It’s like Bret. If it wasn’t for me, he’d be alive. It’s like poison inside me. But you can’t think that way. It’s the guys who killed him who are responsible.’
‘I’m responsible,’ she insisted. ‘He wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for me.’
‘Because he tried to take advantage of you when you were a student?’
Emily gulped back some tears and stared at the bedspread. Then, just when he thought she hadn’t heard, she said very quickly, ‘It wasn’t his fault. Jerome and I – we had – we were lovers. He didn’t just make a pass at me; we had an affair. When the university found out they fired him, and he was expelled from his order. It destroyed him. Academia was his life.’
Nick thought of the old man with his mop of white hair and tried not to imagine his scrawny hands crawling over Emily’s skin. ‘He still should never have touched you.’
‘He should never have touched me,’ she repeated. ‘That’s right. But not the way you think. I fell in love with him. I seduced him, if that’s the right word. I was infatuated, relentless; I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I didn’t realise what I was doing.’ She wiped a tear from her face. ‘Eventually the guilt got too much for him and he broke it off. I was so angry with him, all I wanted was revenge. I reported him out of sheer spite. I destroyed his life. And now this.’
LIV
Strassburg
I examined the paper with the familiar ache of broken hopes. Some of the letters had barely registered; others had pressed so hard that blots of ink drowned the characters. In several places the paper had torn where we had not smoothed the edges of the cast metal forms. The whole sheet had smudged badly when we removed it from the press. Drach had been right: I could press ten thousand copies of this and it would still be ugly.
I picked up a file, resigned to another afternoon of thankless labour. Casting the metal form from the engraved copper plate had been easy, but I had not anticipated the fine accuracy that would be needed. If any letter stood even a hair’s breadth lower than the others it would hardly touch the page. The same amount too high and it would crush the paper with ink. As the letters were created by hammering a steel punch into the copper, it was all but impossible to make them a uniform height except by the most meticulous filing.
‘Where are the forms?’
Kaspar looked up. ‘In the bag?’
I looked in the bag that Kaspar had brought from Dritzehn’s house. Apart from a few lumps of cast-off lead, it was empty.
‘Perhaps you put them on the workbench.’
I rummaged through the debris of paper, tools, copper plates and miscast forms that littered the bench. I could not find them.
‘Are you sure you brought them back?’
He shrugged. ‘I thought so.’
This was when I hated working with Kaspar. If he did not care about something he thought nothing of ignoring it, and no rebuke could reach him.
‘You must have left them in the press.’
‘Perhaps I did,’ he agreed.
‘I told you to bring them back.’ Dritzhen had been on his sickbed a week now, and the house had become a thoroughfare for concerned family, prying friends and creditors who feared they might never see their money again. ‘If anybody sees them our secret is lost.’
‘I locked the door.’
I did not want to quarrel with Kaspar – we had already argued too much that year. I turned my back on him and looked out the barn door, breathing the December air to cool my temper.
A boy was standing in the yard. At first I thought he might be a vagabond or a thief but he did not run away when I stepped out of the barn to challenge him. I looked closer and realised I knew him, an errand boy of Hans Dunne. He looked as though he had run all the way from Strassburg.
‘Did Dunne send you?’ I called out the door.
He nodded. ‘He said to tell you Herr Dritzehn is dead.’
With its bowed-out walls and blunt gable, the house already looked like a coffin. The shutters were closed, and no light emerged from within. We stood on the doorstep a long time before a servant admitted us. Inside it stank of vinegar and resin where they had burned pine dust in the fires.
‘Go downstairs and rescue the forms,’ I told Kaspar. I handed him the key we used to lock the cellar. ‘Take the screws out as well.’ To reduce the effects of a single mistake, our latest innovation with this press was to divide the text into four separately cast strips, one for each paragraph, screwed together to make the plate.
‘Where will you go?’
‘To pay my last respects.’
I took a candle from the wall and climbed the creaking stairs. Shadows flitted across the walls. A dozen pairs of eyes fixed on me as I entered the room: mourners and servants gathered outside the bedroom door. All seemed united in some silent accusation. Most were clustered around a stout woman in a white veil – Dritzehn’s wife, now widow – and the man she clung to, his brother Jörg.
I removed my hat. ‘Frau Dritzehn, I have come to say how sorry-’
The moment she saw me she detached herself from the throng and flew at me.
‘You have done this,’ she shrieked. ‘You and your friend. He was a good man, an honest man, until you seduced him with your magic. If any good can come of this day, it is that you will no longer have a claim on him. When Andreas is buried you will give me back every penny he paid you.’
She rained down blows upon me. Her brother-in-law flung his arms around her and pulled her off me.