With a self-conscious shrug she stood, pulled her sweater over her head and wriggled out of her jeans. All she was wearing underneath was a thin white camisole and her underwear. She stood there on the carpet in the middle of the room, blushing slightly, like a virgin on her wedding night not certain what to do. Nick tried not to stare.
‘I just want you to hold me.’
Nick nodded. He was too tired to feel awkward. He stripped down to his boxer shorts and clambered into the bed after Emily. He lay down beside her, cupping his knees inside hers, pressing his chest against her shoulder blades. She shivered; he pulled back, but she reached round and pulled his arm firmly around her waist.
‘It’s nice. It’s just it’s been a long time.’ She sighed. ‘Not that. Just… warmth.’
‘I think I know what you mean.’
She nestled back into him. Nick laid his palm flat against her stomach, terrified of touching her where he should not, and at the same time longing to. He remembered lying like this with Gillian, the same confusion, so close and so aware of the distance. Always the distance.
He fell asleep.
LXIV
Mainz
When Fust had gone I wandered through the house. The day was fading; soon it would be too dark to work. For the moment, the labours that were the life and breath of the house continued. When I stepped outside into the yard I could smell the heavy perfume of boiling oil, sharpened by the tang of coal smoke. My father’s kitchen had become our type foundry, and the adjacent scouring house the room where we cooked up our inks. Inside the foundry I could see sparks where the fresh types were ground smooth on a wheel.
I climbed the stairs by an outbuilding and crossed a walkway back to the main house. Here, an outside gallery ran around the internal courtyard. I peered through the barred windows as I walked past. In the room where the die maker had once cut coin moulds for my father, Götz now chiselled letters out of copper squares. In the next room, Father Günther sat at a writing desk and pored over a small Bible. He had a sheet of paper beside him and a pen in his hand, which never stopped moving as he read. For anyone used to watching copyists it was an unnatural motion: the pen danced up and down the page, line to line, apparently at random; it never stayed still enough to form even one letter, but left a trail of dots and dashes like bird prints in snow. If he resembled anything it was not a scribe but a merchant clerk taking inventory of his stock. In fact, he was taking inventory of every letter in every word of the Book of Genesis.
He saw me pass and called through the open door, ‘Did you get what you wanted?’
‘He will give us eight hundred gulden now, and more later.’ It was less than I had asked for, more than I’d expected. ‘The equipment will be its own collateral. In return for exclusive rights to sell what we produce, he has also agreed he will not collect the interest. And he has ordered fifty copies of the Donatus grammar book for delivery in three months’ time.’ I laughed. ‘You should have seen the look on his face. He could not believe such a thing was possible.’
‘So he didn’t notice the grammar book was a fake?’
‘It was flawless.’ Though the indulgence had been genuine, the grammar book I showed Fust was the product of two nights’ desperate work by Father Günther and a quill pen when it became clear we could not produce enough types to set all sixteen pages in time.
‘In three months, it will not matter,’ I told him.
The next room was dark, though as I passed I caught a stale whiff of damp from the moist paper stacked inside. At the end of the gallery, another flight of stairs climbed to the topmost floor. I was about to go up, when a mournful knocking sounded in the twilight. Someone at the front gate.
I paused. No one called at the Gutenberghof, certainly not at this hour. Could it be Fust, rethinking his promises? Or the city watch? It was more than twenty-five years since I had fled from my crime at Konrad Schmidt’s house, but a knock at the door still had the power to chill my blood. I waited.
Beildeck, my servant, answered it. I heard him challenge the visitor, though the replies were so soft I could not make them out. The door creaked as it opened.
I leaned over and stared down. A figure emerged from the deep shadow under the arch into the lesser gloom of the courtyard. He moved slowly, hunched over a stick which rapped on the cobblestones as he walked. He stopped in the centre of the yard. Then, as if he had known I was there all along, he looked straight up at me.
My legs sagged; I groped for the rail.
‘Kaspar?’
A bitter, brittle laugh like the chattering of crows.
‘Hier bin ich.’ Here I am.
LXV
Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
Nick didn’t know when he woke. The dark day and coarse curtains held the room in twilight. He’d been living in that sickly gloom for the last week, the light of railway carriages, street lamps, car headlights and bare bulbs. A fly drowning in amber.
But amber was cold; Nick was warm, radiantly so, wrapped in blankets and sheets and Emily. Her camisole had ridden up in her sleep so that her naked back pressed against his stomach, their bodies locked together in a single curve.
The heat of her body against his filled him with the glow of desire. He parted her hair so he could kiss the back of her neck; he caressed her bare arm where it clamped over the blankets. She turned her head towards him, her lips seeking his. He saw that her eyes were closed and held back, but she put her hand behind his head and brought his mouth down.
Desire billowed into lust. He ran his hand down over her thigh, then clamped his palm over her hip and held her against him, pulsing against her. She gasped; she pulled his hand away and dragged it up her body, so that he could feel her breasts through the tight cotton of her camisole.
She rolled onto her back and pulled him on top of her. He came willingly.
The next time he woke he was alone in the bed. His headache had gone but he was ravenous. Emily had dressed and was sitting by the chest of drawers, which she’d turned into an makeshift desk. She had the stolen library book spread in front of her, together with a poster-sized chart which she was annotating with a pencil.
Nick sat up. A tangle of memories that might be dreams, and dreams he hoped were memories, rushed through him. He blushed.
Emily looked over and gave a shy smile. ‘Sleep well?’
‘Mmm.’ He scanned her face for traces of regret, until he realised she was doing the same to him.
‘I don’t want you to think…’ she began. ‘I know I shouldn’t-’
‘No.’ That sounded wrong. ‘I mean, yes, you should have. Not should…’
‘I don’t want to get between you and Gillian.’
Nick’s tumbling thoughts stopped abruptly. ‘Gillian?’
‘I know what she means to you.’
‘You don’t.’ Nick threw back the covers and stood, naked. Embarrassed, Emily looked away. ‘Do you think when we find her I’m going to sweep her into my arms and ride off into the sunset.’
She jerked her head back and looked him straight in the eye. ‘Then why are you doing this?’
Nick held her gaze and realised he no longer knew the answer.
‘I’m going to take a shower.’
There was no shower; only a bath. He splashed himself in the lukewarm water as best he could, then dressed. When he came out, Emily was sitting cross-legged on the newly made bed, books and papers spread around her.
‘What have you got?’
‘I’m trying to pin down the links between Gutenberg and the Master of the Playing Cards.’
The exchange seemed to cement an unspoken agreement. Emily relaxed; Nick sat himself on the corner of the bed.
‘We have to assume Gillian didn’t see the page we pieced together. She must have followed a different trail.’
‘Right.’ Nick examined the large sheet of paper spread on the bed. It was covered in an irregular grid creased by folds; most of the squares were empty, those that weren’t held cryptic snatches of writing: ‘f.212r Bottom centre, similar.’ Characters from the playing cards in miniature line drawings ran down the left-hand column.