‘I know that with any new art there will be difficulties. Problems we did not anticipate. But we cannot be complacent. We must respond vigorously, or we store up troubles to come. And there are other considerations.’
While he spoke, we had come to a warehouse set back a little from the quay. It was built like a castle, with slit windows and a crenellated rampart around its roof. He presented a clay tablet to the watchman, who waved us in. Inside, it smelled of sawdust and wine. Bales of cloth, jars of oils and, in one bay, a pile of boxes sealed with wax and painted with the symbol of a bunch of grapes.
Fust took a clasp knife from the pouch on his belt and prised up the lid of the topmost box. He slit open the oilcloth which wrapped the contents. I knew what would be inside: I had opened a dozen myself in the store at the Humbrechthof. A bale of paper, brittle and shiny from the sizing glue.
‘I did not order any more paper,’ I said.
‘I did.’
I counted nine more boxes. Each held two reams, almost a thousand sheets. A quarter as much again as we had already laid in.
‘How much has this cost? Even with the wastage, we have plenty for our needs.’
‘I have been speaking with my customers.’ A reassuring hand on my arm. ‘Discreetly. I have performed some calculations. You said yourself, the greater part of the labour is composing the page. That is a fixed cost – whether we press one copy or one thousand. Once that is done, putting it through the press is comparatively quick. So the more copies we press, the more we spread the costs of composition. The cost of the extra time, paper and ink almost pays for itself.’
‘How many more?’
He pulled me away from the pile of boxes, back to the wharf outside. ‘Thirty copies. All on paper. By my reckoning it will add ninety gulden to our costs – I will pay it – and nine hundred gulden to our profit.’
‘If we sell them,’ I cautioned. ‘And it will put us even further behind our schedule.’
‘We cannot let our deadline slip. The money I have invested in the work of the books is borrowed at interest and it must be repaid in two years.’
‘Debts can be rearranged,’ I said easily. Perhaps too easily. He spun around and fixed me with a hard look.
‘The book will be finished on time. We must redouble our efforts. Perhaps some aspects of the process can be rethought.’
‘What aspects?’
‘The rubrication, for one. I have been in the press room – I have seen how much time we lose inking the form in two different colours. Sometimes I have seen black ink spill over into the red, and then the whole form must be removed, wiped off and inked again.’
‘It is time-consuming,’ I admitted. ‘But we will not be able to charge so much if we sell the books without rubrication.’ In truth, I hated the thought of another man’s hand in my book, marring the unity of the whole.
‘Nonsense. The customers will not know what they are missing. Any one who buys a Bible expects he will have to pay a rubricator, just as he expects to pay the binder and the illuminator.’
‘Not the illuminator. They will have Kaspar’s plates.’
We stopped by the embankment. The river lapped against the wall below; a flock of swans pecked at the weed that trailed from the stones.
‘Those must go too.’
Without looking, Fust must have known the expression on my face.
‘I know he is your dear friend. But we have invested too much in this to allow mere friendship to threaten it.’
Mere friendship. ‘He is more than my friend. He was the root and stem of all that we have done. He had already pressed his cards while I was still copying schoolbooks in Paris.’
‘Then he will understand that a new art requires compromises.’
I doubted that very much.
‘Is there anything else?’ I asked.
‘You should look at the composition of the pages. Peter thinks that you could fit two more lines on every page without changing its appearance. More lines on the page means fewer pages in the book. Less paper and time, more money. That alone would account for almost half the time we spend pressing the extra copies.’
‘I will consider it,’ I said stiffly. For all my age, I felt like a child denied the toy he was promised. I wanted to weep.
Fust slipped a rosary from his wrist. He flipped the beads around in short, precise movements, like counters on an abacus.
‘You cannot do everything, Johann. This book is already a miracle. In two years we will produce more books than one man could in two lifetimes. We must not overreach ourselves.’
‘This was my dream,’ I whispered. ‘God’s word as God intended it.’
‘The words do not change. It is only the ornament. For God’s sake let it go. We have invested too much to fail because of it.’
‘I am not doing this for profit.’
‘No? I saw your face when I told you how much we will earn from the extra copies. But even if you are not – I am. And you are working for me.’
‘A partnership.’
‘If you do not like the terms I am happy to dissolve it.’ He slapped the rosary into his palm and closed his fist around it. ‘I did not mean that. I know how much this means to you. But you, of all men, must be practical.’
He watched me for a moment, then rattled the rosary back over his wrist. He sighed, made to leave, then remembered something.
‘I made an inventory of our vellum stocks yesterday. Three skins were missing.’ He peered at me closely. ‘I heard that you pressed a batch of grammar books in the Gutenberghof last week.’
‘The parchment we were going to use got wet. It would have crumbled like pastry when it dried. I had promised the books would be delivered on time, so I borrowed some from the store at the Humbrechthof. I will replace it as soon as I get a new batch.’
His eyes blazed. ‘Do you remember what I told you? Everything that goes into our venture stays in it. You cannot borrow, like a labourer in the vineyard stuffing his face with his master’s grapes. I will allow it this time, but never let it happen again.’
He left me on the quayside. Out in the stream, the wheels on the mill ships turned on. It suddenly occurred to me that my mother must have stood here, decades earlier, watching her youngest son embark on a barge to Cologne with little more than a clean shirt to his name. Did she weep? Did she feel her life torn away from her: first her husband, then her child? Did she think on what might have been?
Fresh raindrops dashed against my face, mingling with the tears.
LXXIII
River Rhine
Nick stood in the bow of the boat. Spray spattered his cheeks, but he would rather endure that than the suffocating, tobacco-laden fug inside. He felt as if he was sailing into a fairy tale. Not the modern sort, with wisecracking animals and songs written to sound good as ringtones; the old-fashioned kind, tangled tales woven out of the fabric of the land, dark forests and hard mountains. Here, the Rhine flowed through steep-sided valleys covered in snow, under great cliffs where sirens once lured sailors to their doom. Stark castles guarded every hilltop, watching the boat as it crept downriver. Some were tumble-down ruins; others looked as though they only wanted a trumpet call to rouse their defenders to battle.
‘It’s just as well we came by boat.’ Emily pointed a gloved hand to the shore. A single road wound along the riverbank, tucked into the slope. It was almost invisible under the snow. ‘No cars. They must have shut it.’
‘Good,’ said Nick. ‘Harder for anyone to follow us. Unless there’s another ferry?’
‘The bartender said this is the last boat today. He said there might not be any tomorrow either if the ice gets worse.’