He showed me one evening, when I climbed to the attic after the rest of the press crew had gone. Kaspar sat at a sloping desk at the far end of the room. He was writing intently and did not look up as I entered.
I leaned over to see what was on the desk. A single leaf of paper, twice the size of the indulgences, criss-crossed with faint pencil lines and sweeping arcs like the blueprint for a cathedral. A heavier line roughed out a rectangle in the middle of the paper, subdivided into two weighty columns like pillars on the page. Kaspar had shaded them with the flat of the pencil, except on the first line of the first column where he had written in a bold, meticulous hand, ‘In principio creavit deus celi et terram.’ In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
‘This is how it should look,’ Kaspar said. He traced one of the arcs with his finger. ‘The most harmonious proportions. Your perfect book.’
I rested my hand gently on his shoulder, imagining the columns filled with rows of words. ‘It’s beautiful.’
He seemed to be waiting for something more. When I said nothing, he sighed.
‘You see how I have written the letters so they fill the column exactly, edge to edge? No scribe could do that except by luck. It took me a dozen attempts to do it just for this one line. But with your types, you can control the exact position of every word, every letter. Like a god.’
I knew at once that he was right. I could feel the familiar resonance, the echo of angels singing. I had been so busy staring down, getting each letter to print evenly, I had not raised my gaze to consider the broader scheme. We could arrange the words so that each line was as solid as carved stone: massy columns of text supporting the weight of the word of God. Something no human hand could do.
In the fading light, my old eyes blurred. For a second, I focused not on the shaded columns on the page but at the wide, white surrounds. Background and foreground reversed themselves: the blank paper became a window framing the misty darkness beyond its panes. The scribbled pencil marks seemed to swirl like ink drops in water, threading themselves into words that spoke of God.
It was the last, best gift Kaspar gave me.
LXVII
Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
The battered Volkswagen crawled along the street. No one noticed it, except maybe the snowmen standing sentinel on the suburban lawns. If anyone had been watching, they would have been struck by the car’s erratic progress. It nosed forward a few yards, braked suddenly, paused, then lurched into gear again. A few moments later it repeated the manoeuvre. Perhaps the driver was afraid of ice – except that the road had been ploughed and salted only that afternoon. Perhaps he was lost, or drunk. That might explain why the car always stopped in the shadows.
‘In a different neighbourhood we’d be arrested for soliciting,’ Nick complained.
They’d slept through the brief day; now it was evening. Nick advanced the car three more driveways and halted. Emily sat beside him with the laptop open on her knees. The glow of the screen was the only light in the car.
‘Here’s one.’ She tapped the trackpad twice. ‘Oh – encrypted. No good.’
Nick tapped the accelerator again. They’d set out from the motel an hour ago to find an Internet café, but the sleepy commuter town had no provision for tourists. They’d tried the public library, but that was closed. In the end the best they could come up with was trundling down residential streets trying to piggyback an unwitting family’s airwaves.
Nick turned a corner and stopped beside a cluster of snow-covered trash cans. Emily leaned closer to the screen. ‘How about this? “Hauser Family Network – unsecured wireless connection.”’
‘That’s what we want.’
Nick took the laptop from her and clicked the new connection.
CONNECTING TO HOST 190.168.0.1
A green icon shaped like a radio tower appeared. He passed the laptop back to Emily, who opened a web browser and typed in an address. Mottled parchment lit up the screen.
‘Is that it?’
‘The British Library have two Gutenberg Bibles. They’ve scanned both of them and put them online.’
Emily turned the computer so he could see better. Dense text stood in two columns on the page, each as straight as a knife. Time had browned the parchment but the ink remained vividly black, defying the centuries. Despite the Gothic typeface and its obvious age, the design was startlingly clean.
‘I can see why people get excited about it.’
‘Those straight margins were his calling card. Scribes couldn’t get the right-hand margins to line up so cleanly; you can only do it if you have the freedom to move the type around and space it exactly.’
‘Guy must have been a perfectionist.’
Emily extracted the printout of the reassembled page. On the back she’d written a series of letters and numbers next to brief descriptions of the card figures.
‘Read me the page numbers.’
Nick tried – and failed – to find them. Emily pointed to a column.
‘f.117r?’
‘F stands for folio – the physical, double-sided leaf. Medieval books didn’t have page numbering like we do, so historians number from the first leaf. The final letter stands for recto or verso – the front side of the leaf, which appears as the right-hand page when you open the book, or the reverse side. So what we would count as page three would actually be-’
‘f.2r,’ said Nick. ‘Top side of the second leaf. Got it.’
One by one, he read out the page numbers. There were about a dozen of them, starting from f.117r – about page 233, he figured – and ending at f.280r, some 325 pages later. It was a time-consuming process. For each reference, Emily had to find the scanned page, read the Latin text, then work out which book of the Bible it came from. At that point she read it out to Nick, who jotted the reference down next to the page and the description of the image.
But his thoughts were elsewhere. Somehow, the arcane system of page numbering had prompted a thought, an irritation at the back of his mind like a pebble in his shoe. He worried at it while Emily tapped out her searches on the computer.
‘What’s next?’
He consulted the list. ‘f.226r.’
‘Got it.’ She stared at the screen for a moment. ‘The sins I have committed outnumber the sands of the sea. I am not worthy to look up and see the height of Heaven because of the multitude of my iniquities.’
Nick waited for her to read out the chapter and verse. When she didn’t say anything, he glanced across. Emily was staring at the screen.
‘What is it?’
‘What picture goes with that page?’
Nick consulted the chart. ‘A digging bear.’
‘The same one that’s on the card?’
He didn’t even need to check. ‘Why?’
‘That page is the prayer of Manasses.’ She turned, her face glowing with discovery. ‘The prayer that’s supposed to be part of the lost book of the Bible, the Sayings of the Kings of Israel.’
‘He also made another book of beasts using a new art of writing…’
‘… which is hidden in the Sayings of the Kings of Israel. And here it is, with an illustration from the card on that same page.’
They sat there for a moment in silence.
‘I don’t get it,’ Nick said at last. ‘All these clues join up, but they just go round in a circle. The Bible with the illustrations by the Master of the Playing Cards is in Princeton, right? That can’t be what Gillian was after. So there must be another book that connects with the card, with the Bible, and with the bestiary Gillian found in Paris.’
‘Another book of beasts.’