‘So where is it?’
Emily stared at the windscreen. Condensation made the outside world invisible. It was too apt, Nick thought: stuck in a fogged-up car going nowhere.
‘There must be another piece of the jigsaw,’ said Emily.
‘Maybe it was on the first page of the bestiary. The one that got cut out.’
‘Maybe there’s more here. We haven’t looked at all the Master’s pictures yet.’
Emily leaned over the computer again and began typing, her keystrokes erratic with nervous haste. Nick glanced at the display. Printed page on web page, the fifteenth-century cowskin rewritten in the liquid crystals of the screen. For all the gulf of technology, it struck him how similar they were in essence: vehicles for information. However you wrote a page number – or for that matter, a biblical chapter and verse – it was nothing more than an address for looking up data.
Page 233, f.117r, Judges 5:4: ultimately they were all shorthand for (Emily said), ‘The earth trembled and the heavens poured out water.’ The same way that 190.168.0.1 was a convenient equivalence for the Hauser family’s home broadband.
But what if you reversed it? What if the information pointed back to its number?
Nick flipped over the piece of paper in his hands. Recto and verso, front and back. He looked at the ox in the fuzzy engraving and thought of a smiling cow standing on a ladder with a paintbrush in its hoof.
I have a new number: www.jerseypaints.co.nz
Emily had stopped typing and was staring through the window, lost in thought. Nick grabbed the laptop.
‘I haven’t finished,’ she protested.
‘I won’t be a minute.’
His fingers skidded on the keyboard in his excitement; he had to type the address three times before he got it right. The rainbow-striped cow grinned from the top of her ladder.
He pressed a button. The written address resolved itself into a string of digits which he scribbled on the sheet of paper.
Emily leaned over, still looking cross. ‘What’s that?’
‘Every web address translates to a number.’ He opened the car door. Fifty yards up the street, a payphone huddled under a blanket of snow. ‘Maybe another kind of number.’
He ran to the payphone. Fresh snowflakes were beginning to spiral down in the light from street lamps; his fingers almost froze to the metal buttons as he dialled the number and waited.
The space between each ring felt like an eternity. Every crackle on the line sounded like a receiver being lifted off the hook. Then: ‘Ja?’
‘Is that Olaf?’ Nick said in German.
A pause. ‘Who is calling?’
‘It’s about Gillian Lockhart,’
The man said nothing.
‘Have I got the wrong number?’
‘Who are you?’
‘A friend of hers from America. She’s missing; I’m trying to find her.’
‘Ha.’ Another long silence. ‘I don’t know where she is.’
Nick gripped the receiver tighter. His breath frosted the glass of the phone booth.
‘But I know where she was going.’
Now it was Nick’s turn to keep silent, frozen by the fear that the wrong word would ruin everything.
‘Come to Mainz and I will tell you.’
LXVIII
Mainz
I stepped out of the front door, under the carved pilgrim, and turned towards the cathedral and the market square. It was not far, but in that meagre distance the street expanded and contracted many times. Sometimes it was so narrow even a dog cart could barely pass; in other places it spread wide enough to become a small platz, where gossips lingered and hucksters sold pies and hot wine from barrows. It made even the shortest journey a tale of many chapters.
One of these places where the road opened was outside St Quintin’s church, where women came to gather water from a fountain in the church wall. A tall house stood on the corner opposite. The plaster between its timbers was coloured a lusty red, which had in turn been painted with garlands swagged along the dark timber ribs. Its name was Humbrechthof; it belonged to my third cousin Salman, who had lived there until a committee of guildsmen took over the administration of Mainz some years previously. Thinking these new men meant to beggar the ancient families into bankruptcy, Salman fled to Frankfurt. The house had stood empty since then. I had written to him, giving him to understand that the situation in Mainz was worse than his most outraged imaginings, and declining fast. When I offered to take his empty house off his hands for a token rent, to protect it from the mob who would otherwise surely make it a brothel or a church of the black mass, he could not agree fast enough.
I entered by a gate, passed through a passage under the main house, and entered the courtyard within. Fust and the others were already there: Saspach, Father Günther, Götz, Kaspar and a young man I did not know. Fust nodded to him.
‘My adoped son, Peter Schoeffer.’
He was a thin, earnest-looking youth, with pimpled skin and fair hair that flapped in the November breeze. I thought him diffident enough, but when he shook my hand it was with a look of extraordinary intensity.
‘An honour, Herr Gutenberg.’ His eyes were pale, icy with purpose. ‘Father has told me about your art. You may rely on me absolutely. I thank God I will be part of it.’
‘Writing makes his hands sore,’ joked Fust. He stood a little further from his son than affection would have permitted, an old dog wary of his pup.
‘So this is where we will make our workshop,’ Götz said. The house suited our purpose welclass="underline" it was not tall, but wide, with large windows onto the yard. Over time, my cousin Salman and his forebears had closed in what had once been an ample garden, joined the outbuildings together and extended them upwards until they stood almost as high as the house. They enclosed the courtyard completely, like an inn or a trading hall, so that nothing overlooked it.
I unrolled the sheet of paper I carried and hung it on a nail on the storeroom door. The others gathered around. Most of them had seen some part of it, but only Kaspar had seen it in its entirety.
‘This is why we are here.’
Two columns of text ran down the page, perfectly aligned, exactly as Kaspar had sketched them. The grey cloud of pencil shading had become words, painstakingly set and carefully imprinted in the Gutenberghof. The text was black, save for the incipit on the first line, which was written blood red.
here begins the book of Bresith which we call Genesis
A long ‘I’ hung off the next line and dropped down the margin until its stem became a spiral tendril creeping around the edge of the page. ‘In the beginning…’
The page flapped and snapped in the breeze; I had to hold it down for fear it would tear.
‘Everything you see was pressed onto the paper by Saspach’s machine.’ This time it was true: there was no craft or trickery on the page. We had set and reset the text until every line filled its row exactly, stuffing parchment strips between the words to create the exact spacing. We had inked the incipit red and pressed it again. Finally we had run the whole page through another press to add Kaspar’s engraved initial.
Schoeffer was the first to respond. Unless Fust had shown him the indulgence, he had never seen our work before. I had expected he would be awestruck. He stepped forward and examined the page closely.
‘The words look faded.’
‘We used the old types,’ I explained. ‘Some are uneven; others not the exact height. Götz is preparing a new set which will improve the impression.’
‘And the alignment. It is almost perfect.’
‘Better than you could do,’ Kaspar growled from the back.
‘Absolutely perfect,’ I insisted. ‘If you rule a line down the margin, it touches the outer edge of every final character.’ God knew how much wasted paper had fed our fire to achieve it.
‘It is perfect,’ Schoeffer conceded. ‘But it does not seem it.’ He considered it a moment. Despite his youth and his presumption, everybody waited. ‘Some lines end with minor characters – hyphens and commas. They are so small they make the line look shorter than it is.’