Alix Christie - Gutenberg's Apprentice

“God’s beard, Johann,” said Gutenberg. “We don’t need this.”

“Don’t tell me what we need.” Now it was Fust who growled, his broad face flat, his eyes reduced to slits. “ You need to get it finished.” He bent his head and dropped his voice. “That man from Avignon has disappeared. But not before he trained some others, I am told.” He looked up toward the workshop window. “You have to speed it up, now, get it moving.”

“What others?” hissed Gutenberg.

“What does it matter? Anybody, damn it, can’t you see how little time we have?” Fust’s voice rose and a flush began to spread up his thick neck. “The longer you drag on, the likelier it is that someone else will get there first.” He turned to Peter. “What is the holdup? Tell me that.”

“There is no holdup,” Peter answered. A man like Fust could never understand the sheer backbreaking labor of it. “I drive them harder than is human.”

“Unless you want to build another press and hire more hands,” said Gutenberg. He glanced at Peter, just the barest flicker that went back and forth between them: Lord, these moneymen . “Which I don’t guess you do. If I were you, Johann, I’d go home and relax.”

“Relax?” Fust’s face contorted. “How should I, when you bleed me dry — with not a blessed thing to show for it? Your bloody needs are endless.”

“We only said that Erfurt is too close,” said Peter.

“You think that I don’t know?” His father turned on him. “I don’t see guilders raining from the heavens, though, now do I?”

“It wouldn’t cost so much if we weren’t forced to pay for all the bleeding widows.” Gutenberg cocked one eyebrow. “You know I never saw the gain from drawing in the guilds.”

“Water under the bridge,” snapped Fust.

“It can’t be run in drips, like piss. We need more, yes — but not like this.”

“You got deposits on a third, or even half.” His father’s eyes blazed. “That isn’t piss.”

Ten guilders down on every paper copy, twenty on the vellum; swiftly Peter reckoned. Deposits on a third of the edition came to seven hundred fifty guilders — if Fust had managed to sell half, they’d banked at least a thousand.

“It goes like shit through a goose. Ink and gullets, coal and candles.” The master lifted up one corner of his mouth. “You still owe me for this last half year, in fact.”

Fust shook his head and muttered to his son instead: “Then show me where we are.”

Peter walked him through the shop and showed him their position on the chart. “Not even halfway,” said his father. His whole body seemed to sag.

“Next time we talk, I want to see your ledgers,” he told his partner as he left.

Sardonically, the master touched a finger to his temple and bowed down.

[31.5 quires of 65]

8 November 1453

AND YET the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

His father had departed one last time before the winter, toward the north; the master too was off “prospecting,” as he called it. The six compositors were seated quietly setting type that wet November afternoon. A paperboy came running down the hall and said there was a dreadful banging. One look at that white face and Peter knew. “It’s Mistress Grede,” the girl gasped. “Hannah says that you’re to fetch the midwife, quick.”

Peter grabbed a boy to send a note. “Her name’s Maria Lambeth, in the lane behind St. John the Baptist. You know it?” The dazed boy nodded. Peter scratched some words on two small sheets. “Then take the other to my aunt, Frau Fust, the Kaisersberg . Hurry! Go!”

Hans told him: “You go, too.”

The terror in his heart erased all sight of the familiar lanes and houses. All Peter saw was that girl’s white, white face — and then the housekeeper’s, all chalky too, her fist against her mouth.

“What is it?” he demanded as he leapt the stairs.

“She’s bleeding, sir.”

The chamber door stood open and the cook was bent above the bed. Grede lay among the bedclothes, skin the same bleached linen white, her eyes glazed wide.

The bed was filled with blood, her body from the hips down wrapped in rags that blotted crimson just as fast as the cook could wind them. Peter raised a hand to shield the sight. Grede reached for it, and he could only clutch her hand the way the terror clutched his heart. Dear God, he prayed. There was so much blood.

“The midwife’s coming,” he said. The cook just nodded, lips compressed.

“I don’t want to die.” Grede’s voice was twisted, trembling, then it dropped, subsiding with her strength. She fell back on the bed.

“Hush, don’t say such things.” He stroked her slick white forehead. “Think of your life. Your strong and healthy babes.”

Her face crumpled, and she turned from him and wept.

“I bathed,” she blurted frantically. “Oh God, dear God.” Her eyes flew open, hard now, bright as flints. “What have I done, why does He punish me?” Her hand flew to her mouth.

The cook wrung out a cloth and placed it on her brow, and gave him a swift warning look. Where was the midwife, where his aunt? Oh, Grede. What did he know of women, or of bearing children? The pains she felt were deeper than a man could guess.

“Don’t take my child,” she begged the Lord as that bright blood ebbed from her womb. And yet the patron saint withdrew her grace that day. There shall not be one fruitless nor barren in thy land . The empty promises of Exodus.

Much later she would say to him that she, and her poor babe, had paid for all the rest of them. Like downy chicks, the first to feel an ill wind’s ill effects. It was the hatred and despair, she said, that swirled like noxious fumes across the empire and the city in those days — if not yet through their workshop.

The women came at last, with herbs and boiling water: Lambeth with her surgeon’s hands and Aunt Elisabeth. Grede squeezed his hand and let her head fall back on to the pillow. “Fetch Johann,” she rasped.

He sent a message with the traders’ fastest rider, and returned to take up vigil on the stairs. He prayed to God, in humbleness, to save her — to keep her life, and take the child’s. As his blood father, in his time — he realized with savage insight — most certainly had done. He bowed his head, beseeching.

What right, what birthright, had a man? What good were his books and tools, the business of his hands? Peter felt his heart cleave as he paced, hearing nothing but the women’s murmurs and the clanking of the pans.

It came to him with certainty: the higher they reached toward heaven’s stars, the farther their feet lifted from God’s earth.

The door swung open finally. The midwife, in a bloody apron, stood a moment to collect herself. She closed her eyes, and opened them, and put a hand out on his arm.

“She’ll live,” she said. “But God has taken back the child.”

He heard his old friend weeping, cries to rend the world, behind the heavy wooden door. He moved to go to her, but when he did, the midwife gripped him all the tighter.

“There’s nothing you can do,” she said, “but leave her to grieve.”

There’d be no public mourning for the unborn babe. Fust held that something few had known should be lamented in the privacy of home. Perhaps he felt too great a show of feeling would diminish him somehow. It was hard to know. All Peter knew was that he’d never heard a woman tear into a man the way Grede did when Fust refused to let her hang the mourning wreaths. She dressed in black from that day on regardless. She knelt for hours at St. Quintin’s in bleakest penance, bludgeoned by the thought of that small, unbaptized soul alone in limbo. The sorrow spread, unnamed, through the timbers of the Haus zur Rosau.