‘Go to your husband,’ he ordered her. ‘I will deal with this.’
He almost pushed her into the bedroom. Through the open door, I saw the dim shape of Dritzehn’s body lying flat on his bed under a shroud.
Jörg closed the door and gave me a crafty look. I had met him once or twice before in my visits to that house and never liked him. He was a small, hunched man with swollen cheeks and a stubby chin like a club foot.
‘She is hysterical,’ he said, no trace of sympathy. ‘Understandably. At times like this, business is better left with cooler heads.’
‘Your brother is dead,’ I answered. ‘Business can wait.’
‘I spoke to Andreas before he passed on. He told me of your venture, that his only regret dying now was that he would not live to see the vast riches he knew would come of it. He said that I should have his share of the partnership.’
‘If he said that then the disease must already have claimed his mind,’ I said. ‘But we can talk of this another day. I came here to mourn Andreas.’
It was true. I did not deny that I had played on his greed and encouraged him into ventures that would profit me more than him. But Dritzehn had been a merchant: he speculated as he saw fit. How he financed it was his affair. As one man to another, I mourned him.
‘I will go. I did not mean to upset his family in their hour of grief.’
‘You will upset me much more if you do not listen to me,’ Jörg warned. ‘I know how much money Andreas sank into your little scheme, though he could never tell me why you deserved it.’
‘Then you will never know. His money and his secrets stay in the partnership.’
‘Then I must take his place.’
‘I have a contract signed by him that in the event of his death his heirs will receive nothing until the venture is finished. Even then, he died owing me money.’ I could not believe I was having to say this before his corpse was cold.
‘Would you leave his wife destitute?’
‘She is your responsibility, not mine. She will only go destitute if you let her.’
‘Then I will go to the courts.’ Jörg had started shouting. ‘Whatever it is that you and Andreas kept so secret will be exposed to the whole city. You cannot keep me out.’
I met Kaspar outside. ‘Did you get the forms?’
He handed me a heavy bag. ‘I also took the screw out of the press. No one who sees it will guess what it was for.’
‘They may learn anyway. Dritzehn’s brother threatened to drag me through the courts.’
‘Let him. There are only four men alive who know the full secret. Saspach and Dunne will not betray us.’
I took little comfort from that. ‘We must get home. Jörg Dritzehn is wild for our art. I would not be surprised if he broke into our workshop to sniff it out.’
We borrowed a horse for Kaspar and rode back to St Argobast in the dark. All I remember of that ride is cold air and horse sweat. As soon as we arrived I stoked up the fire in the forge and lit all the lamps and candles I could find. With Drach’s help, I scoured the barn for every casting we had ever made: every form, every fragment of lead, any piece of metal with letters cast in it. I gathered them in an iron crucible and set it over the fire. The only ones I spared were the engraved copper plates. I wrapped them in a sack and buried them under a stone in the yard. They were too expensive to waste.
I added coals to the fire and coaxed it to a blazing heat. The forms began to soften. The tiny letters blurred and melted away, running down the face of the metal like tears.
‘Is this the end of our enterprise?’
I looked at Kaspar. Beads of sweat ran down his cheeks from standing too close to the fire. I jabbed a poker into the crucible to break up a stubborn lump of metal.
‘Even if we see off Jörg Dritzehn, what do we have? An art that does not work and a venture that has no capital, only debts. Ennelin, the mirrors, now Dritzehn: everything we attempt ends in disaster.’
I stared into the crucible and watched the last crumbs of metal dissolve into the slurry. I remembered Dritzehn’s widow. You have done this.
I glanced up. Drach was gone.
Panic overwhelmed me. Had he abandoned me? Had I driven him away with my failures? I left the forge and ran to the barn.
Kaspar was there, bending over the press in the corner. I sagged against the door frame in relief. With his back to me, he extracted a copper plate and fixed it in a vice on the bench. He took a fine-toothed metal saw from a rack of tools on the wall.
‘I told you to gather all the plates so I could bury them.’
He didn’t look up. ‘This is not yours.’
I crossed the barn and looked closer. The lamps shone into the grooves cut into the surface, a herd of lions and bears incised in copper.
‘This was the plate for the ten of beasts.’ Drach lined up the saw blade on the edge of the plate and drew it slowly across the metal. Sparks flew.
‘What are you doing? There is no need to destroy these. This is your art.’
The saw bit. A jagged gash appeared in the copper.
‘I am not destroying it; I am remaking it. We will need more money to continue with your art. I can make more cards and sell them. It will not be much, but it may tide us through.’
‘But you told me half the plates were gone. And now you are breaking this one too.’
‘This card is the sum of all the others. He put his palms against the plate so that he masked off different portions of it. ‘Here is one, and two, and three… I can break it into its parts and combine them to make any number I like.’
I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him close to me. His body was warm against mine, a perfect fit. I loved him.
And in that moment, an angel began to sing inside me. What Kaspar had done with the card, I could do with the indulgences.
We would tear it up and start again.
LV
Strasbourg
On the dresser, the television played silent images of war and grief. Nick watched, hypnotised. The shock of Brother Jerome’s death left him numb.
He had to break the spell. He grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. ‘We need to leave.’
There was an unusual firmness in his voice, an urgency he’d never felt before. It snapped Emily out of her daze.
‘Where? There’s nowhere to go.’
‘Let’s start by getting out of here. The TV said the neighbours heard the shots this afternoon. Whoever did it was only a few hours behind us.’
‘Could they have followed us?’
‘Jerome was the one who suggested Strasbourg. He showed us the ex libris, told us the whole story of the Count of Lorraine. He must have guessed we’d come here. If he told them…’
They took the stairs down to the lobby, out into the street. He didn’t notice the black Audi parked opposite the hotel. The snow seemed to be coming down less heavily now, though there were still flakes whirling in the cones of light under the street lamps. Plenty had fallen already. They crunched deep footprints as they walked around the cathedral and down one of the side streets. Nick looked back but saw no one. The shops were shut, the workers gone home.
A few streets away, they found a small bistro that was open for dinner. It was only half full, but after the wintry solitude outside it felt cosy and welcoming, filled with candlelight and smoky smells of herbs, roasted meat and wine. They took a table behind a wooden pillar, hidden from the windows but with a view of the door, and ordered vin chaud and tartiflettes. In other circumstances it would have been a perfect romantic evening: candelight, hot wine, knees bumping under the small table. Now the intimacy just seemed another rebuke, a taunt from a world that had abandoned him.
He swirled his glass and stared at the dregs. ‘Atheldene was right. I don’t know what any of this means but it’s crazy.’
‘It means something to somebody,’ Emily countered. ‘If we weren’t on the right track, they wouldn’t keep trying to stop us.’