‘What is that?’
‘It’s a chart of books and manuscripts with illustrations 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 illustrations?’
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, manuscripts. 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 assume it’s more than coincidence. Gillian must have.’
‘Agreed. Which is why I wanted to look at the illustrations 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 scraped 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 Strassburg 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. God 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 stitching 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.’
He padded after me down the gallery. I brought him to the press room, where silver shafts of moonlight bathed the machinery in their glow.
‘We set each letter separately,’ I gabbled. I was trembling. ‘You would not believe how true-’
A cold hand gripped my neck and forced me down, squeezing my face against the inky bed of the press. I bent double, gasping for breath. Kaspar held me down with one hand, while the other fumbled with his belt.
‘What are you doing?’ I cried. ‘In Christ’s name, Kaspar…’
He was smothering me, thrusting himself against me from behind. The coffin smell of wet earth was all around me.
‘Do you know what they did to me?’ he hissed in my ear. ‘What I suffered while you were playing with your toys?’
‘I thought you were dead.’
His hands were tearing at my clothes, scratching my skin. ‘Please,’ I begged. ‘Not like this.’
‘What is this?’
Tongues of light flickered around the room. In an instant, Kaspar was away from me. The shadows seemed to draw around him like a cloak. I pushed myself up and looked round.
Father Günther stood in the doorway holding a lamp, straining to see in. ‘Johann?’
I stammered something unintelligible. ‘I heard a scream.’
‘The press squeaked. I was demonstrating it to… to my friend.’
Günther moved the lamp so that Kaspar’s face swam out of the darkness. He gave him a searching stare but said nothing.
‘If all is well…’ he said doubtfully.
‘I will be fine.’
Kaspar had come back, but he was not the same. The darkness in his nature, which I had once accepted as the inevitable shadows of a brilliant sun, had consumed him. After that first, terrible night, he did not talk about what he had suffered; nor, thank God, did he attack me. I forgave him that – what I could not accept were the small changes. The tiny cruelties, the savagery in his eyes. Like a ghost, he could chill a room the moment he entered it. I resisted the idea as long as I could, but in the end I was forced to admit it. I did not love him any more.
Yet his talent remained. Even the demons that ravaged him could not quench his interest in the work of the book. I encouraged it: I hoped it might draw out some of the poison and fix his mind on purer things. I gave him a room at the top of the house: ink, pens, brushes, paper, whatever he needed. And he repaid me.